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It Again•
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Play
It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot
by Brian Johnston
VII. The
Plot as Aesthetic Structuring
The
re-organizing terms of the plot allow the archetypal elements that may
be dormant or lost sight of within the stories, to be released, or to
reveal themselves more adequately and powerfully, as in the Oedipus
tyrannos. Certain facts are recalled, such as those of 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
dynamic of the 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 give the plays their 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 which it will be the job of the plot fatefully to regather
and re-organize into a tragic dialectic of anagnorisis and peripeteia.
While the stories in Ibsen's Cycle consequentially reveal a wide variety
of modern situations, the plots by contrast return again and again to
the same dual action:
(a) the dialectical subversion
of modernity's status as the truth of our human identity.
(b) the recovery of archetypes and forces more adequate to that identity.
One might see this abiding plot
structure as waiting to ambush the stories that approach its lair. This
recalls how, in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit, the cultural
past, in sequence, is recovered and replayed as dialectical philosophy.
The plays' stories set out the historical and cultural sources of the
modern malaise that the plot structures will transfigure. Rosmersholm
and The Master Builder
provide contrasting examples of plots that are not only recollections,
but also condensed re-enactments of the past revealed through the story.
The plot seems to gather up once again the elements of the past story
for a more fatefully conscious recreation of events earlier more arbitrarily
and thoughtlessly performed. This re-enactment of the earlier events by
the plot also is a form of redemption of the past, an assertion of freedom
by the protagonists over the inexorably completed past. What had been
suffered or lost in the material world of action now can be recovered,
in its essence, as spiritual freedom. In Sophokles' play, Oedipus could
not change the events that condemned him but he was free, like Rosmer
and Rebekka, to discover and acknowledge their tragic truth and to pass
judgment upon himself. The world that John Gabriel Borkman lost as compromised
material wealth and power, is regained, as spiritual aspiration, in his
last dying speech. 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 in
full consciousness of their subversive implications.
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