|
|
Play
It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot
VI. Contrast between the Drama and the Novel To dwell upon the story of e.g. Rosmersholm, piecing together and re-organizing its details as a biographical structure, is to treat the play as if it were a case-history, not a play. . "If we resurrect Rebecca's past," writes Sigmund Freud in his famous study of Rebecca West, "expanding and filling in the author's hints, we may feel sure that she cannot have been without some inkling of the intimate relation between her mother and Dr. West...."[5]. He ingeniously unearths from the story the Oedipal coherence he himself already buried there, disregarding how the elements of the story are assembled by the plot, piece by piece, into the coherence of an aesthetic structure . 'Real life' individuals can be the subjects of case books compiled from the mutual interrogations of analyst and analysand: but fictive characters have no existence outside an artwork and patently have no psyches to be analysed. The inability to make this distinction is responsible for a mass of irrelevant Ibsen commentary indifferent to Ibsen's artistry. By ignoring the play's plot structure, piecing together the 'author's hints' from a hypothetical past outside the plot, we may come up with an endless realm of conjecture on all the characters in the play, including no doubt, the childhood of Mrs. Helseth. The necessarily incomplete histories a playwright supplies his or her characters are not meant to lure us towards "filling in the author's hints'" and away from attention to the unfolding action of the plot but to serve, thematically, the plot emerging before our eyes. There is only so much fictional detail a dramatist can supply. Simply launching a story into the world renders it vulnerable to infinite speculative daydreaming on the part of those indifferent to aesthetic values. There always will be those who will fuss over "how many children had Lady Macbeth?" Reading the plays, we should imagine, not 'real life' events but an ideal theatric performance. Nor, contrary to what George Lukacs believed, in his study The Historical Novel is Ibsen creating, in the form of drama, what better would fit a novel. Lukacs takes the scene in Rosmersholm, Act III where Rebecca West describes to Rosmer and Kroll the nature of her step-by-step actions that led to Beate's suicide. Lukacs pays Ibsen the very back-handed compliment of establishing, through his "unflinching honesty" that a play such as Rosmersholm "could not become a real drama." The reason for this, he claims, is that "at the decisive moment" of Rebecca's confession, "we see that the actual drama, namely Rebecca West's struggle, tragic collision and conversion, is, as far as subject-matter, structure, action and psychology are concerned, really a novel, the last chapter of which Ibsen has clothed in the outward form of drama.[6]". Lukacs reads Ibsen's plays in the way A.C. Bradley read Shakespeare's tragedies: as skeletal Victorian novels where the reader is asked to supply the flesh of psychology and past motive that Shakespeare only implied. Instead of seeing the drama Ibsen has written, Lukacs laments the absence of the "actual drama" he believes the retrospective method is substituting for. His objections could apply as cogently to Oedipus tyrannos. In Rosmersholm, Ibsen is interested less in the violent story from the past than in the subtler movement of Rebecca's evolving consciousness, now, as the plot brings her, for the first time, to interrogate that past through the alienating perspective of her newly evolved identity. The somewhat lurid, 'Gothic' story is the material which the austere dialectic of the 'classic' plot works upon, reliving the past as a new dialectic of evolving consciousness in which the audience is made to participate. The past emerges as an estranging dimension of the protagonists' present identity. It negotiates the stages whereby tragic acknowledgement of this alien past is reached: a process that requires the alerted attention of the audience through each move within the taut dialectic of the performance. Michael Goldman describes the strategy of Ibsen's retrospective plotting in similar terms:
Certain facts from the story are recalled at certain moments by the plot, because only at these precise moments in the sequence do they gain their significance for the evolving dialectic. Goldman admonishes:
He praises Ibsen's method for the unique formal or histrionic pressure the plot places on the actors, the escalating artistic demands for responsiveness their exchanges call for: a "dramaturgy of fear" - of confrontations, engineered by the plots, that do not permit evasion. The plots are not a means by which the stories get told: they are the essence of the plays, the primary reason for their being. In their ultimate, painfully arrived at identities, Rosmer and Rebecca achieve in the present the union that eluded them in the past. Rosmer's heritage of law, order, tradition and repression of the instincts is made to confront Rebecca's past of anarchic origins and a later history involving the transgressions of incest, adultery, and murderous action. Ibsen described the dialectic as a collision between the 'acquisitive instinct' that "hurries from conquest to conquest: and "the moral consciousness" that "has its roots deep in traditions and in the past generally."[9] Rosmer and Rebecca, ambushed by their pasts, give up an anticipated future of liberated action in the political world for the demands of an ancient, evaded, punitive justice The plot renders this outcome of the story inevitable.
5.
Sigmund Freud, "Some Character Types Met With In Psychoanalytic
Work" in Henrik Ibsen, Penguin Critical Anthologies, (p. 397) |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
