III. The Reproachful Ghosts of Ibsen's Realism

  In The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks described how the early melodrama of France created the imagery and vocabulary of a new “moral-occult” universe to replace that sanctioned by pre-revolutionary culture and its theater. This melodrama was “a drama of emblems,” of violently opposed typological characters and actions, of astonishing manifestations from a natural world engaged in a conflict of Good and Evil.  Storms, earthquakes, fires, floods were elements of an extravagant and thrilling theatrical code, “an architecture of pure signifiers” within which the morally stereotypical characters menaced or were menaced. Miraculous “signs” could reveal the presence of good or evil and of providential intervention.  In contrast to this melodramatic semiotics, Brooks notes how “in a novel by Dickens or a play by Ibsen” there is a “movement of the plot toward discovery of identity, and the moral anagnorisis that accompanies it” that is contrary to the melodrama's dynamic interplay of bipolar, competitive signs. In the more Gothic versions of this melodrama the spirit-world mostly was demonic. Menacing the moral-human world (also bipolar in terms of good and evil) it had to be defeated by heroes and heroines of a reassuring conventionality. Every encounter with the demonic was almost always a triumphant reinforcement of the human community's conventional values and assumptions. The same formula is seen in most Mystery or Horror fictions: Sherlock Holmes confronts the fiendish machinations of Moriarty with all the moral rectitude and indignation of the most reactionary pillar of society.  The world that Dracula menaces is of a stultifying conventionality that only his demonic presence can make interesting.  Both the criminal and the occult realms are those which, along with the rebel and the revolutionary, menace the commonplace assumptions of  'normal' society.  This accounts for our guilty attraction to the villain, from Lord Byron to Hannibal Lector.  When the depiction of the conventional world is emptied of subversive thought and action, the transgressors acquire the fascination of the forbidden.When the attraction is openly acknowedged, melodrama disappears.

Reversing the dynamics of the melodramatic encounter with the occult, Ibsen takes the side of the reproachful and importunate ghosts, the archetypes that wish to possess, awaken and devastate us.  It is the conventional world that his drama recoils from as alien.  He creates a drama of occult presences, of the interplay of human, natural and supernatural forces, recovering for 'high' culture much of the power of the popular melodrama. In his drama an occult text engages with a realistic text for possession of the play's dominant language.  The combat often proves to be a mortal one.  The conditions of the everyday world frustrate the emergence of a potential human identity that demands existence, the “forces and possibilities” that, by coming into their rights, transform the terms of our existence. By means of this dialectic, Ibsen's was made plausible for modern drama a metaphysical landscape of the modern spirit. His middle-period plays Brand, Peer Gynt and Emperor and Galilean, mapped out a space (nature)and time (history)  later explored within the modern scene of the Realist Cycle.   Ibsen's wrote of “the trolls that infest the mind and heart” and he made his theater a battlefield whose ghostly combats beneath the realistic surface are fought to prevent the triumph of one-dimensional humanity.

This is an unfamiliar idea of 'realism' especially to the 'Anglo-Saxon' pragmatist tradition. It is, instead, heir to the dialectical tradition of  the Schillerian-Hegelian way of thinking in which "the known, just because it is the known, is the unknown."  This tradition goes back to the Greeks; to their theater and philosophy in which, for an Oedipus or Pentheus, the familiar world, "the known", can reveal itself as a treacherous illusion ("the unknown") as it is for a Nora Helmer or a Helene Alving.  An occult dimension to Ibsen's art is that of a reproachful, unrealized dsimensioln the given world conspires to prevent but that still haunts it.  John Gabriel Borkman's lament that the treasure-filled kingdom he sought to bring into being now lies leaderless, given over to the pillage of mediocre and visionless plunderers, could reflect the lament of the poet himself at seeing the heritage of the spiritual past as recklessly and as fatally disfigured as the natural world we have inherited.

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