I. Creating a National Theater

In this country, it is only the mountains that give an echo, not the people. (Ibsen, working note to WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN)

Ibsen adopted the theater as his medium under the aegis of Ole Bull's Norwegian (Norske) Theatre in Bergen. At a fundraiser for this theater held in Christiania in 1851 Ibsen wrote a verse Prologue whose themes are proclaimed with the uncritical ardor suitable for the fundraising occasion. The Prologue claimed dramatic art would awaken the Norwegian people's spirit from a long winter's sleep in which it had forgotten its glorious Viking heritage. Viking life had been a 'poem' of 'sword and shield,' which later was sublimated into the art of the skald and minstrel. But an "awesome winter fell over the north," and the noble skald fell silent, "dedicated to death like one bewitched who has forgotten the word with which he can be released from his enchantment. " However, there remained a "harp of longing" within the people who could never be satisfied by alien customs and arts. Only a native art could interpret the longing of the people and its forgotten music, and this art would sing both about the past and the re-awakened life of the present.

Later that year, more soberly defending Frederik Paludan-Müller's poems against the strictures of another poet, Johan Welhaven, Ibsen argues strongly for the continued use of ancient myths in modern literature. The life of these myths, he insists, continues into the present - and constitutes the cultuiral heritage poets should draw upon.   It is a theme that will undergo a richer, more complex and darker development (as the ghosts that cling to the living) in Ibsen's later art. In this essay, the cause of establishing a Norwegian theatre as a means for the modern Norwegian consciousness to be awakened into awareness of the living Past, are firmly linked at the beginning of Ibsen's career as a dramatic poet. It will become Ibsen's major dramatic subject to the end.

One impetus behind this theatrical venture was a belief in the Norwegian people's desire to free itself from cultural dependence on Denmark, whose theater in Copenhagen was one of the most accomplished in Europe. In the words of Bjønstjerne Bjørnson, also in 1851, a Norwegian theater would permit Norway "to enjoy its own language and its own poetry on its own stage" - conditions essential if Norway is "to join the ranks of other nations." Or, in the words of M. J. Monrad in 1854, the desire for such a theater originated in "the deep national significance of theaters, the necessity of a truly national theater as a part of the self-revelation and development of nationality."   It is evident that the 'self' to be revealed and developed, here, is an objective, collective (national) one so that a poet's own self-determination would require a mutual exploration with his public of this shared collective identity.

The youthful Ibsen endorsed these nationalist aspirations, though later he was to view them more critically. We can see their appeal: a domain of national identity would be something the poet shared with his public: the exploration of this identity in the form of historical dramas would be the poet and public's mutual self-discovery. It would provide the poet with a larger, more ambitious subject for his art than the immediate social scene.  The portrait of the present, in turn, would be richly layered with the cultural past.   And, of course, it would better justify the founding of a Norwegian theater.

Cultural nationalism's advantage for the dramatic poet lay in extending the audience's imagination beyond immediate events recorded in the daily newspapers into dimensions represented by myth, folklore, history and culture. It adds an alternative temporal dimension - the historial-cultural past - to that of the everyday present. A still living but repressed spiritual past, seeking to assert its presence on the stage of his theater and reclaiming its place in modern consciousness informs Ibsen's drama from the earliest plays up to the last, When We Dead Awaken .

  Cultural recovery of the living past was the program of the Romantic Zeitgeist and of many major artists and thinkers from Friedrich Schiller and Hegel to Richard Wagner, W. B. Yeats and such Modenists as Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.  Ibsen's early nationalism was no attempt to ingratiate himself with the Norwegian public, which preferred the Parisian confections of Scribe & Co.   Nationalism, by evoking myth, legend and cultural history, required from its audiences an effort of the imagination. It allowed the poet a more liberating imaginative space to operate within. A major writer's main concern is with the adequacy of his or her art. Once the ambitious cultural territory was mapped out could be extended and enriched. It was a metaphoric realm Ibsen never relinquished.

In 1857, in an essay on the heroic ballad, Ibsen contrasted the state of mind of fashionable theatergoers with the actual spirit of the Norwegian people. Fashionable audiences "visit the theater only when offered the opportunity of being titillated by some novel situation or excited by some novel intrigue" The 'people', on the other hand, are less interested in fashionable novelty than in recognizing elements of their identity stretching far back into the past.  He continues:

"If the new is to appeal to the people, it must also in a certain sense be old; it must not be invented, but rediscovered...it must not appear as something strange and incongruous in the conceptual range inherited by the peoples from their ancestors, and in which our national strength mainly resides."

The "conceptual range inherited by the people" is richer and deeper than the 'modernity' of the fashionable theatergoers. Within the popular imagination, the old, pre Christian religion and its figures "continue to live until our own day." It is evident the young Ibsen, (like Richard Wagner and the dramatists of the Celtic twilight) hoped to transform his theater into one that could address a people's consciousness attuned to a rich spiritual past.

The belief that the people possessed a rich vein of spiritual ore for the poet to mine (an image Ibsen uses in a later poem, The Miner) accorded with the nineteenth century Zeitgeist.  Like other believers in the treasures buried within the folk-consciousness, Ibsen later would undergo the disenchantment of discovering the 'people' were far from eager to claim its full cultural heritage. Then, as now, the everyday business of modernity and not the mythology and lore of the ancient sagas, proved more alluring. "In this country, it is only the mountains that give an echo, not the people" Ibsen recorded in a note to When We Dead Awaken.

In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said described the similar situation of W. B. Yeats in Ireland. Citing Seamus Deane, Said argued that Yeats, in order to escape the degraded modernity of a colonized Ireland, invented a mythopoeic Ireland "amendable to his imagination" - one that he shared with an imagined people, only to find this Irish people indifferent to his arcane reconstruction of their identity. Unable to ignore modern history, notes Said, Yeats tended to render actual historical events into occult events. Ibsen pursued a similar course in his 12-play Realist Cycle: recreating modern Norway as an occult and archetype-crammed space.

If the people as custodians of a consciousness rich with the past were to form an alliance with the dramatic poet, this would redeem both society and its art from the degradation of an alienating modernity. Richard Wagner, similarly, attempted to bypass alienated modernity in his music-dramas; to return to what he hailed as "that native, nameless poem of the folk." In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche, then his disciple (later scourge) turned in revulsion from a modernity that comprised only of:

          "abstract man stripped of myth, abstract education, abstract mores, abstract law, abstract government;

           the random vagaries of the artistic imagination unchannelled by any native myth......Man today,. stripped

           of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most

           remote antiquities."

Antedating Wagner and Nietzsche, Ibsen similarly deplored the imaginative vacuity of modernity "stripped of myth", indicating a tradition of hostility to modernity we find, also, in James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and other modernists. Eliot hailed Joyce's use of "the mythic method" in Ulysses for making possible for art "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." In Cosmos and History Mircea Eliade noted how modernists like Joyce and Eliot sought to return to archaic, archetypal thinking; for example, to the concept of the 'eternal return'. In Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, the intellectual martyr-hero, Thomas, and the 'folk' Chorus of the Women of Canterbury, bond in an imaginative-poetic union from which the Knights, with their 'modern' twentieth century sensibilities and modes of discourse are excluded. Eliot, like Wagner and many Romantic artists believed a lifeline to a rich spiritual past lay in the uncorrupted conceptual range of the people, undistracted by superficial modernity. This optimistic union of poet and people was bound to become more than tenuous as the work of scholars and poets who set about recreating this mythic past became more and more esoteric and removed from the 'conceptual range of the people'.  

Two programs come into conflict in this recollection of things past. The first is a form of Platonic or Hegelian anamnesis or 'unforgetting' - a resurrection of spiritual life with which the modern soul in its alienated condition has lost contact. Artists then attempt to bring the 'living past' into the present by means of compelling and imaginative art works. The second program is the modern scholar and archaeologist's methodical investigation and reproduction of the past in sober and meticulous detail. The imaginative and the scholarly recreations of the past interacted and came into conflict; momentously, as with the famous quarrel between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz-Moellendorf over the spirit and the letter of Greek tragedy.

Cultural 'archaeology' that resurrected the immense past was as important a factor in nineteenth-century culture as the extraordinary scientific-industrial and social transformation of the modern world. Schliemann's famous excavations at Troy is one instance of the modern age literally digging "frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities." Ibsen's career from Catiline to Emperor and Galilean reflects this 'archaeological' agenda: almost twice as many plays are set in a distant past as in the contemporary world. These are not escapist costume drama in the manner of Victor Hugo's Hernani . They are serious attempts to recover for the modern theater past phases of cultural life in terms of a modern aesthetic sensibility. In his essay on the heroic ballad Ibsen insists upon an unbroken chain of consciousness from the earliest times to the present in which the old mythopoeic forces continue their life. This substratum of cultural consciousness should be the poet's subject matter.

The mythopoetic and the scholarly recreations of the past made for an uneasy cultural alliance; their agendas were bound to clash. Ibsen seems satirically to stage this unhappy alliance in Hedda Gabler, in the wonderfully incongruous marriage between Hedda and Tesman.  Like Julian with his precessionals of drunkards and whores, Hedda seeks to live mythically through her desperate designation of the alcoholic Løvborg as a resurrected, Hellenic Dionysus with vine leaves in his hair; whereas Tesman, soberly urging into pedantic life the domestic crafts of Christian, medieval Brabant, wishes only to bury himself among the archives of insignificant history.

Emperor and Galilean, where Ibsen explores far beyond the conceptual range of most Norwegian - or European - imaginations, uneasily combines, like Flaubert's Salammbô, both the imaginative and the scholarly enterprises. Emperor and Galilean offers a compelling account of Julian the Apostate's attempt to recover the life of the Hellenic spiritual past against the inertia, mendacity and pedantry of a Christian age that has become spiritually sterile and confused. It is not surprising that actions, characters, imagery and themes from Emperor and Galilean re-emerge, marvellouslyt miniaturized, in Hedda Gabler.

A clear continuity exists between Ibsen's early historical and later modernist work - an evolution of themes and forces in which, however, the relation of past and present will become reversed. In the earlier plays up to Emperor and Galilean Ibsen explores the past from the standpoint of his contemporary world and its cultural needs; in the later plays (specifically the Realist Cycle) he surveys his contemporary world from the reproachful perspectives of a past now betrayed by the present. The later Ibsen has enlisted in the ranks of the past's reproachful ghosts. By this manoeuver, Ibsen, I believe, entered into the Modernist agenda.

In a series of historical plays, from Lady Inger of Østråt (1855) to The Vikings at Helgeland (1858), Ibsen attempts, in a reverse chronological sequence - from renaissance to medieval to Viking time - an aesthetic/theatric archaeology of the Norwegian past.  Like Peer Gynt removing layer after layer of the onion, this represents an uncovering of layers of previous cultural identity. This historically reversed cultural chronology of the four plays also is an exploration of the literary styles or phases, appropriate to the historical/aesthetic consciousness each play and period. These plays are the youthful poet's attempt simultaneously to master both his art form, drama and his subject: Norwegian consciousness as it has evolved in cultural history. Exploring this evolution would be essential for adequately understanding modern consciousness itself.  Describing his procedure in Lady Inger, Ibsen stated: "I tried as far as possible to live myself into the ways and customs of that period, into their patterns of thought and modes of expression."

In its arts and philosophy, its cultural activities and artifacts, more than in actual historical events, a people grasps its essential reality and thereby make it available for later generations to repossess. Whatever the status of this Hegelian idea today, in his own day Ibsen could claim that by resurrecting past modes of cultural expression he was incorporating past phases of the people's spiritual heritage into the consciousness of his own modern art. How else could the past live again unless it was recovered imaginatively within modern consciousness which is the only medium in which the past exists.

The conceptual range of such an archetypal art ideally would both reflect and awaken forces and values buried within our modern psyches. The layered past would make up a conflict-filled continuum 'realized' through the medium of dramatic art. In its imaginative cultural space the poet could discover metaphors more adequate as a portrait both of his individual and his collective identity.  However, as the dramatist more deeply and widely explores this cultural past and imaginatively lives within it - a past now extending beyond Scandinavian culture -it starts taking on the nature of an alternative world - a world of presences, characters, forces containing as much attractive power for the poet as anything the modern scene can offer. The archetypal and symbolic vocabulary (the Supertext) of this alternative world sets up terms even hostile to the contemporary scene.

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