II. Modernity as a Defective Work of Art

The cultural past Ibsen explored comprised an alternative, imaginative 'occult' world inhabited by the presences and forces of world culture - the Weltgeist.  It set up a dialectic interrogationof the immediate, everyday world. There is actually nothing unusual about this. Our culture is permeated with the past, from its religious beliefs and rituals, its commemorative observances and ceremonies, its liturgical calendars,and its sense of cultural 'heritage'.   It uses history and tradition for positive reinforcement of its current political or cultural agendas, making history the servant of the present.  This idea of the past Edmund Burke invoked against Thomas Paine: a repository of national/cultural identity and a safeguard against innovations that threatened to erase that identity.  In a dialectical move by the cunning of Reason, however, the past invoked by Burke to defend conventional culture evolves as a major resource to attack conventional modernity.  Revolutionary thinkers invoked not only a utopian future but also the historical past that had been misappropriated by conventional culture.  Both 'left' and 'right' modernists now contested for the authority to interpret the culture's Supertext in support of their opposing agendas.

Present consciousness is a battlefield where the culture's ghosts assemble for a kulterkampf.  Thomas Paine implied that the cultural past should be erased from cultural memory: the strategy of most radical thinkers, however, was to rescue the past and re-create it nearer to the heart's desire. This was the program claimed by Friedrich Nietzsche:

     I taught them to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been.

    To redeem what is past in man and to re-create all "it was" until the will says "Thus I

    willed it!" - this I call redemption and this alone I taught them to call redemption.

    (Thus Spake Zarathustra: tr. Walter Kaufmann)

The alternative imaginative world recreated from the past developed a counter discourse - independent of and hostile to conventional modernity.  This was the subversive strategy of Romanticism and its offshoot, Modernism. The past is invoked as a repository of values, liberties, dimensions of existence the dominant culture suppresses.    Ibsen's son, Sigurd Ibsen, wrote "Art gives liberty of action to forces and possibilities to which life does not grant the chance of coming into their rights." The 'rights' of these forces and possibilities set up the conditions of a culture war between past and present. This shapes the dialectic of Ibsen's Realist Cycle.  Behind the appearance of a modern world on the stage lies an alternative world of reproachful ghosts claiming their right to repossess modern consciousness.  There is a deep ambiguity in Ibsen's account of the past in the present: it is both the baleful influence of dead beliefs tjhwarting the mspirit's struggle towards the light perceived by Mrs. Alving in Ghosts; but also, within that play, the suppressed "forces and possibilities" that could work for our liberation.

Ronald Barthes observed of Greek drama that the total corpus of myths upon which it drew made up “a second order semiotic system.”  Ibsen's program of imaginative emancipation repeats what Barthes observes of the very origins of drama in Greece: 

"Associated with the “loosening” of work time, the theater installed another time, a time of myth and of consciousness, which could be experienced not as leisure but as another life. For this suspended time, by its very duration, became a saturated time." 18

In classical Athens, this infiltration into everyday reality of a myth-saturated consciousness, (the theater of Dionysus filled with the ghosts of the cultural past and of previous performances within that theater space) was one the whole community shared.  In the modern world, however, no such cultural consensus exists. Theater shares the modern world's division between conventional and unconventional, mainstream and minority cultures – facing each other in often mutual hostility or bafflement.

By extending his imagination into the supertextual heritage of his culture, Ibsen would experience greater alienation from one-dimensional modernity.   He fashioned out of the cultural past an imaginative alternative to modernity and, more startlingly, a method of transforming the people, events and things of the modern world back into mythic people, events and things.  His drama infiltrated the disfigured and inadequate scene of modernity with its archetypal heritage.    James Joyce, in Ulysses, similarly infiltrated archetypes of Western culture into the seemingly intractable banalities of everyday Dublin life:

When Ibsen took up the realist method, it was not faithfully to imitate a modernity for which he expressed little regard, but to reverse modernity's betrayal of its heritage, to negate the negation.   His myth-saturated imagination made his dramas a 'counter-discourse to the world's inadequate discourse. To take only the last four plays: an imaginative stage scene where Valkyrie-like Hilde Wangel descends from the mountains in response to Solness's fearful summons; in which a Rat Wife and her black dog emerge from the sea to lure to his death an unwanted child; in which Borkman can address the dormant spirits of his mountain kingdom; and in which the white-clad Irene can emerge from her tomb to confront her artist-betrayer, is a world responsive to occult dimensions to which everyday modern life is oblivious.  Ibsen's art refashioned the modern world into a more adequate representation.In 1871, Ibsen advised his friend Georg Brandes:

"What I recommend for you is a thoroughgoing, full-blooded egoism, which will force you for a time to regard yourself and your work as the only things of consequence in this world, and everything else as simply non-existent. … There are actually moments when the whole history of the world reminds one of a sinking shop; the only thing to do is to save oneself". 19

Romantic and post-Romantic thought is aware of how much the vocabulary employed by a materialist culture is repressively limited; how what is essential to an adequate human identity has been sacrificed in order to further modernity's projects – religious, political, social, financial, academic, domestic and so on. 

Details of action, character, dialogue, scene in the everyday world in Ibsen's Realist Cycle are selected only insofar as they can take on the archetypal identity and action each play unfolds.  There is a continuous interplay between the mythopoeic realm and the modern reality that partly permits, partly frustrates its manifestation.   This dialectic gives to modern reality a shape and significance that the despiritualized consciousness of the modern world evades.  Art offers to the arbitrary.inchoate futility of history the coherence and significance of mythic and archetypal identity.  

This is a major function of religion and ideology. A believer's experience of modernity is transfigured by perspectives that transform the world's past and present. Artists who forsook the certitudes of orthodoxy sought to construct imaginative equivalents.  The everyday world is not intrinsically natural nor true but made by the blundering human consciousness spoiling and falsifying the material bequeathed by the Past. . At the end of his long life's work, in When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen has the artist Rubek comment on his portraits that really were of “alle de kaere husdyr” – all the dear domestic animals – and continues: “all the animals that humanity [menneskene] has distorted [forkvaklet] in its own image. And have distorted humanity in return.” 22

The images of a distorted animalic humanity stand in contrast to Rubek's masterpiece, “Resurrection Day,” the naked young Irene, uncorrupted by the world and its unhappy history, “awakening to light and glory with nothing ugly or unclean to cast from her.” 23 This also reminds us of Brand's vision of a regenerate humanity arising from our disastrously fragmented human identity

                               ....from all these stumps of Soul,
                                           Torsos of amputated Mind,
                                           These separated heads and hands,
                                           A hero strong and whole shall rise

                                          In whom God finds his greatest work

                                           His heir, his Adam, young and free

Both the naked Irene and this Michaelangelesque Adam are metaphors for the Romantic ideal of uncorrupted humanity which we can only glimpse behind the unhappy portraiture of our distorted (forkvaklet) humanity that experienced the Fall into Time. Ibsen's realism depicts this Fall but also indicates more adequate dimensions of our identity; just as Rubek could not be content with the figure of Irene but had to surround it with images of animal-faced humans swarming up from the earth crust.

An image of our lost and of our potential humanity is glimpsed through the archetypal presences that take over Ibsen's realistic stage.  Assembled like the broken torsos and limbs of Brand's vision, they hint at the scale and power of our potential identity as well as at the extent of our loss.  The everyday world is an inferior or bungled work of art because it does not know itself, does no know what it has sacrificed of itself and maimed. Familiarity has hidden from us the monstrous strangeness of what we have settled for as 'life'  Ibsen wishes to estrange us from this familiar unreality, to 'negate the negation' and make us see it as riddled with contradiction and filled with neglected spiritual presence. This is his version of the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt - more radical because it does not take comfort in utopian ideology.

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