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Ibsen's
Cycle as Tragedy
by Brian Johnston
The Realist Cycle as an Archetype-filled Tragic Space
The Modern World as a Defective Work of Art; The Theme of Alienation
Addressing the Scale of Modern Alienation; Archetypal Recollection
II. The Realist Cycle as an Archetype-filled Tragic Space
In The Ibsen Cycle I argued that the twelve plays constituted a single tripartite Cycle whose subject was modern humanity undergoing (in Hegelian terms) a great journey of spiritual recollection.[5] On this audacious journey, the modern scenes, characters, and actions recall archetypal forces and presences from the cultural/historical past of the race - at least, of the Western tradition of that race. The whole sequence of such actions is dialectical, each play uncovering the fatal contradictions inhering in each stage of the journey and thus tragically self-destructing, so that there can be no going back in the evolutionary winding stairway of despair performed by the Cycle as a whole. And each play in itself is such a dialectical action: the Nora Helmer of A Doll House, act 2, for example, can not return to the condition of consciousness of act 1; nor, after act 3 to the condition of act 2, and so on, through play after play in the Cycle, up to the "Epilogue." The "mini-Nora" at the opening of A Doll House will discover the "super-Nora" awaiting her at the close of act 3 And this is true not only of Nora but also, to a lesser though still notable extent, of the other accompanying characters in the play whose actions and speeches similarly evolve with the evolving dialectic. In the beginning of Ghosts, the confident joyful self-justifying Helene Alving is ineluctably journeying towards the distraught and horrified tragic figure of the final curtain in a play as dialectically relentless as Oedipus Tyrannos. Yet the devastating action also is a tragically transfiguring one, as archetypes from Greek drama and other spiritual streams (åndelige strømninger) crowd back onto the modern stage and provide a more adequate, even if a more desolating, agon of the human condition. In the Cycle, Ibsen created a space in which his a imagination crammed with cultural and historical content, could find room to explore fully.
This program of the Cycle resembles similarly audacious projects for the redemption of our modern identity by such post-Romantic contemporaries of Ibsen as Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche - a program continued by modernists like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Joyce's lifelong admiration for Ibsen, I claimed, was due to a similarity of purpose in the two artists. The tragic agon that Ibsen invented for modern drama includes: (a) the dialectical subversion of modernity's claim to adequacy as human identity; (b) the archetypal recollection, beneath the images of modernity, of more adequate, though suppressed or evaded, forces and ghosts of the past-like a collective seance of modern consciousness. His archetypes are vehicles of the inherited and unresolved spiritual conflicts within the Western mind which have gone into the formation of our modern identity. Such archetypal presences within the plays, as in the work of Joyce and Eliot, gives them the spiritual dimensions necessary for a modern tragic argument, transcending the immediate problems of the present - as those problems usually are envisioned.
Tragedy, on this scale and in this sense, is not serviceable to any pragmatic agenda. It does not proclaim we would be better off if men were forced to be more accommodating, women more empowered, politicians made honest, or social injustices ended, admirable though these nostrums are. Tragedy has the more awkward intention of transporting our imaginations, if and when we dead awaken, into more liberating but also more desolate dimensions. The tragic experience is supremely inutile - which is why, in the utilitarian Enlightenment culture of the eighteenth century, the almost universally accepted Horatian formula - that the purpose of drama was "to please and instruct"-proved so fatal to the tragic genre. This nostrum gave us both moralizing and laughter-defying "weeping comedy" (comedie larmoyante), and such frigid exercises in tragic attitudinizing as Addison's Cato, the only British tragedy allowed by Voltaire to have achieved aesthetic adequacy.[6]
Utilitarian attitudes to art (Enlightenment, Liberal, Marxist) are anti-tragic, are, indeed, deeply discomfited by the premises of tragedy. For Enlightenment thinkers, who discerned the clear obligations artists had towards the improvement of society, tragedy signally failed to serve a useful social purpose, as Beaumarchais insisted:
the inevitable blows of fate do not offer the mind any moral lesson. When one can only shudder and be silent, is not the act of reflection the worst thing one might do? If a morality were extracted from this genre of play, it would be a dreadful one which might lead many souls toward crime, since its fatalistic vision would provide them with a justification; it would discourage many from following the ways of virtue, and all such efforts, according to this system, would be for naught. If there is no virtue without sacrifice, so too there is no sacrifice without hope of reward. Any belief in fatalism degrades man by depriving him of the freedom without which his actions reveal no sense of morality to him.[7]
Marxism inherited from the Enlightenment, along with much else, its insistence on the social utility of art and, along with it, Enlightenment's hostility to tragedy:
the Marxists do not like the tragic, hence not tragedy either, as long as it shows human failure as an eternal category - human existence. It is their firm belief that mankind has introduced the tragic into the world and that human effort can, therefore, remove it as well. So they see the tragic as a historical category of the condition humaine rather than an existential one. . . Thus tragedy appears to be unresolved alienation. Tragedy makes man enter the "realm of necessity" consciously for the first time.[8]
Enlightened social and political causes are unquestionably worth fighting for: economic justice, feminism, hominism, gay rights, ecological sanity, the strictest gun laws, the abolition not only of capital punishment but of the barbarism of prisons and of all punitive law - together with many other attempts to improve and prolong our brief existence in the cosmos. It is good that playwrights effectively address these issues in the theater and bring home to us the urgency of reforms. Some of the best and most acclaimed plays of our time do just this. Many of his interpreters insist that concerns of this nature are the major purpose of Ibsen's art and that, in fact, this is where his real strength lies. They see him inheriting and continuing the unfinished agenda of the Enlightenment theater: of Lillo, Moore, and the drames of Beaumarchais Diderot, Mercer and Lessing. This would not be a bad job for a playwright. But Ibsen, as a tragic dramatist, is not furthering this agenda which, from his tragic perspective, merely is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Ark before his torpedo hits. In his major work, which includes the Realist Cycle, he is performing the odder and less alluring task of rendering a tragic portrait of modern humanity, of getting his contemporaries to see themselves through a tragic perspective. Without such a perspective, our vision is not adequately, or authentically, human.
Getting us to take in the tragic perspective might be one way of snatching a shred of utility from the devastation of tragedy, but it is a fairly tough-minded concession. In Ghosts, tragedy is the privilege of only Osvald and Helene Alving, spiritual aristocrats who refuse the wary ethical myopia of Manders, Engstrand and Regina, and are transfigured but devastated in consequence. Tragedy is something one would never wish on one's friends, but which one demands for one's most admired dramatic characters. No one wants Antigone to give in to Creon and avert the calamity that comes down on her and upon so many others; nor do we side with Tiresias, Jocasta and the old shepherd, wanting Oedipus to stop his investigation even as we see, and reluctantly admire, the infernal machine that is being so superbly assembled against him. We go along with the obstinate suffering of these figures, and even with those of Euripides - who clearly seem more sinned against than sinning - because of the way such suffering opens up a clarifying, if bleak, perspective on the human condition.
Ghosts, a bigger play than A Doll House, is less often anthologized because, like Rosmersholm or John Gabriel Borkman, it is more difficult to misread as meliorist and therefore as intrinsically optimistic. The optimists, in fact, once declared the play redundant, from a utilitarian point of view, because of the discovery of penicillin - though a rescue operation now is being mounted for its new relevance to the AIDS crisis. The path Ibsen is taking us down in Ghosts, however, is a metaphysical, not a medical one. The grim game the tragedy is tremendously playing demonstrates that modern reality, under imaginative and rigorous analysis, reveals a tragic structure, an inescapable clash of irreconcilable imperatives. In Ghosts, I have suggested, the Cycle recollects and re-enacts our Hellenic heritage, whose supreme artwork was tragedy. The horror and execration with which the play was received shows how unprepared the nineteenth century was for the Greek tragic vision when stripped of classicizing costume and applied directly to the texture of the modern world. But that near-hysterical reaction to the play on its appearance in Europe - especially to the notorious performance at the Independent Theatre in London on Friday the 13th of March, 1891 - showed a better sense of what it actually was about than current respectful attitudes that see it as a worthy classic somewhat dated by medical progress. In Ghosts, more starkly perhaps than in the rest of the Cycle, Ibsen presents our humanity as an inchoate identity made up of an uncertainly recollected and conflicted past voyaging to a problematic future within a cosmos we still cannot comprehend; one by one the sustaining fictions we have constructed as faith, morality, truth, are stripped away. The sun that rises at the end of the play illuminates a total multiperspectival devastation.
5. Brian Johnston, The Ibsen Cycle: The Design of the Plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken, rev. ed. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
6. Voltaire, Appel a toutes les nations ,in Oeuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland (Paris: Gamier Freres, 1983), 24.201.
7. Beaumarchais (Pierre Augustan Caron), Essai Sur Le Genre Dramatique Serteux, trans. Thomas B. Markus, in Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski, ed. Bernard F. Dukore (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 300.
8. Ernst Schumacher, "Again: The Marxists arid Tragedy," Theater Three 8 (Spring 1990): 7. Marxism's aversion to tragedy may explain why Bertolt Brecht so stubbornly denied any tragic perspective to such plays as Mother Courage and Her Children or The Life of Galileo.
