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Play
It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot
VII. The Plot as Aesthetic Structuring The terms of the plot, revisiting and re-organizing the material of the story, allow the archetypal elements that may be dormant, or have been lost sight of, to be released and reveal themselves adequately and powerfully, as in the procedure Oedipus tyrannos where Apollo's early prediction of the events is fulfilled. In Rosmersholm, certain facts are recalled, such as those emerging through Rebecca West's confession, only at certain moments in the play because it is only at these moments in the performance that, through the organizing plot, they gain their meaning and significance. The story brings into the drama dimensions of the modern world in all its free-ranging and unorganized multiplicity. A great variety of stories taken from the texture of the modern world might be chosen as serviceable to Ibsen's dramatic plotting. These provide his plays their particular contemporary characteristics and relevance and give to the Cycle as a whole a wealth of human detail. The details of the modern story generate metaphors and archetypes the plot fatefully to gathers and re-organizes into a tragic dialectic. The stories in Ibsen's Cycle, therefore, reveal a wide variety of modern situations but the plots by contrast return again and again to the same dialectical action; the exposure of fatal contradictions within the 'given' situation at the opening of the play and the recollection and re-enactment of the evaded past. What is recollected is not only the personal histories of fictive individuals but, through a procedure of 'archetypal recovery', major formative phases of our cultural history.
Rosmersholm and The Master Builder provide contrasting examples of plots that gradually return to a past story for a more fatefully conscious recreation of events performed earlier more arbitrarily and thoughtlessly. The past history is revisited by consciousnesses (Rosmer and Rebekka) now brought to understand their nature and consequences for the first time. Ibsen declared his lifework was to wrestle with the trolls that infest the mind and heart and hold a Judgment Day over the soul. His dramatic method of devising a plot structure that revisits past events through a newly awakened consciousness, is the artistic expression of this resolve. This is the essence of his entire drama, the 'Ibsen Secret' - and his plays cannot be understood unless we grasp this procedure. It is the dialectical procedure, also, of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind. In Hegel, the enlightened philosophic mind or spirit (the reader) returns to and re-enacts the essential stages of its evoluting consciousness. It is both mistaken actor and critical observer of its actions, watching itself undergoing the tragic-comedy of errors of its old, deeply held but now superseded convictions. The goal is to re-experience and understand how we become what we are as modern humans.
This re-enactment of the earlier events also is a
redemption of the past, an assertion of freedom over the past by the
protagonists . What had been ignorantly suffered or lost in the past
now can be recovered and transcended freely, even though painfully,
by the enlightened consciousness. The audience, from its privileged
position as spectator, follows the trajectory of the protagonists' experience.
There is no 'message' to be gained from this: only the experience
of a human situation explored in adequate depth through a superb artistry.
Similarly, Sophokles beautifully constructed a tragedy
in which Oedipus could not change the events that condemned him but
he was free to discover and acknowledge their tragic truth and to pass
judgment upon himself. In their finally purified identities, Rosmer
and Rebecca achieve the marriage that eluded them in the world of compromised
action; and in The Master Builder, under Hilde's ambiguous promptings,
Solness recreates his earlier Lysanger ascent and rebellion but now
freely conscious of its subversive implications. |
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