home
lectures/booking
translations
criticism
productions
articles
e-texts:
•Ibsen's
Cycle as Tragedy•
biography
site map
contact
Ibsen's
Cycle as Tragedy
by Brian Johnston
The Conditions for the Game of Modern Tragedy
The Modern World as a Defective Work of Art; The Theme of Alienation
Addressing the Scale of Modern Alienation; Archetypal Recollection
III. The Conditions for the Game of Modern Tragedy
Ibsen's tragic vision is inseparable from an equally unsettling comic one, as Ghosts, for one, attests. Audiences often are surprised to discover how deliberately funny much of the play is, and many productions, convinced that an Ibsen play must be pervasively solemn, especially one with such a title, seem uncertain how to handle the comedy - especially as Ibsen's comedy springs from the same essentially anarchic vision as his tragedy. Tragedy and comedy, at their purest, are equally uncompromising and equally discomforting; in fact, comedy often is the crueler genre. The story of Oedipus Tyrannos, of the young hero who leaves home, encounters and defeats a violent opponent, and then outwits a monster by answering a riddle - for which he is given the hand of the princess and made king - is really a comedic-fabulous archetype which would usually end with "and they lived happily ever after." The plot that then follows, the devastation of the triumphant hero, unfolded with supreme irony, is a cosmic joke from the divine perspective which Sophocles allows us to share disquietingly. Shaw observed of Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth: "The plays in which these characters appear could be turned into comedies without altering a hair of their beards."[9]At the same time there clearly are tragic perspectives in comedies like The Misanthrope or Peer Gynt. It might be that, at their most authentic, both tragedy and comedy takes in the other's perspective and survives it, as in King Lear and John Gabriel Borkman. In tragi-comedies like The Wild Duck and the work of Samuel Beckett the distinction between tragic and comic evaporates without lessening the bleakness of the result.
Events that get a tragic rhythm going can usually be set right pragmatically in everyday life. A more adequate provision for superannuated monarchs might prevent the conflict of King Lear, and Ghosts might be only a condom away from happiness. But once the tragic rhythm takes over, usually by stubbornly disregarding everyday common sense, the audience finds itself submitting to this rhythm, and disregarding pragmatist objections - those, for instance, Thomas Rymer very sensibly made against the plot of Othello. We play the tragedian's game, forgiving sleights of hand if they work into the action another kind of logic, the thematic logic of tragedy, creating that conviction of the necessity of the events that Aristotle commended. The medical causes of Osvald Alving's collapse become totally subordinate to the metaphysical logic of devastation his situation sets in motion - its larger, metaphoric argument. We expect tragedy to validate, by the exploration it undertakes, such bleak music as, "best of all is not to have been born"; "Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither;/ Ripeness is all"; "I almost believe we are ghosts, all of us . . ."; "You're on earth; there's no cure for that!" These are painfully earned moments or stages in the progress of the tragic agon.
We recognize the rules of the game of tragedy and expect them to be obeyed. Any dramatic performance is a meeting ground where author, performers, and audience sort out what kind of game is being offered. If it is tragedy, we don't ask the play to provide the satisfactions of another genre - a drama of warm human sympathy, or engaged proselytizing or moralizing, for example. For though tragedy may contain these elements, it must override them. We recognize the attainment of the genre, whatever the style,when it (relatively rarely) occurs. If a tragedy's great effects come from language worked up to high levels of poetic and rhetorical force - as in the eloquent aria - like monologues and soliloquies of Elizabethan drama, or the tirades of French neoclassical tragedy - or from a thematic plotting in the linkage of themes and imagery, we are likely to forgive realistic implausibilities in the plots. Thomas Rymer, refusing to go along with the game Shakespeare was offering, condemned the plot of Othello as "a bloody farce" (Voltaire was even more dismissive of Shakespeare: "his monstrous farces that are called tragedies").[10]
For a realist tragedy in modern dress (the immensely difficult game Ibsen is playing) Elizabethan or neoclassical rhetoric would be out of place; and the art will shift instead to careful analytic plotting, a method of revealing immense implications beneath the frugal-seeming terms of a modern realism. In Ibsen's analytic method, the thematic and realistic plots are closely linked; and it is this rhetorical frugality that has led some to deny the plays a tragic status. To compare a rhetorical passage from Shakespeare with a "prosaic" passage from Ibsen and then to declare the latter lacking in tragic heft is to fail to see the new terms under which, alone, tragic pity and terror can be achieved in a modern drama. (Enlightenment bourgeois tragedies fail by preserving the rhetorical force of verse in a new overwrought prose.) The tragic rhythm has to reveal itself through an art of plausible factuality; through a theatric semiotics that indicates modern minds in conflict or under duress: through pauses, sudden accelerations or amplifications of everyday speech, half finished sentences, and a subtle pattern of submerged imagery and ambiguity. What we lose in amplitude of emotional rhetoric we gain in the precision and alarming closeness of tragic analysis.
9. Shaw, The Quintessence of lbsenism, 179.
10. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy, cited in Dukore, 351; voltaire, "Sur la tragedie," in Lettres Philosophiques, trans. William D. Howarth, in French Theatre in the Neoclassical Era, 1550-1789: Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 592.
