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Cycle as Tragedy•
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Ibsen's
Cycle as Tragedy
by Brian Johnston
Ibsen's Invented Norway: a Metaphoric Stage Space
The Modern World as a Defective Work of Art; The Theme of Alienation
Addressing the Scale of Modern Alienation; Archetypal Recollection
V. Ibsen's Invented Norway: a Metaphoric Stage Space
Ibsen's dramatic artistry is not the attempted accurate recreation of everyday reality onstage: everyday reality, on the contrary, is ruthlessly rifled by him only insofar as it helps his art to come into perfected being. Like all major artists, he reorganizes appearances - his experience of the world - into aesthetic significance. For someone concerned mainly with drawing faithfully the lineaments of his country's contemporary society, Ibsen went to extraordinary lengths to keep away from it, spending all but the last few years of his major creative life in self-imposed exile from Norway. It is obvious that in the Realist Cycle, as in Brand and Peer Gynt, Ibsen did not imitate his Norway, he invented it - as an adequately metaphoric space for his tragic vision.
This metaphoric space extends into a metaphysical landscape from "the depths of the sea" which will claim certain characters, to earth-transcending heights "towards the mountains. Towards the stars. And the great silence" (the invocation in Little Eyolf) towards which other characters yearn. This vertical external landscape is echoed, or mirrored, as an internal landscape within characters, as in the Romantic art and literature that Ibsen inherited and adapted. The light and darkness, seasons, sunrises and sunsets, storms and avalanches, undertows, and planetary pulls of this landscape operate on cue with movements within the internal landscapes of the characters.
The human habitations within this landscape, like the houses of Greek drama, gather together a crux of conflicts containing fateful histories and memories; or they evolve, in the course of the dramatic action, into alien, constraining environments, peopled by watchful, constricting communities. The only characters allowed to enter that metaphoric space are those who earn their right to be there - by carrying a cargo of archetypal identity under their modern appearance; and this larger identity is released, imagistically, in multilayered speeches and actions that gradually build up and sustain the dramatic dialectic - of the "magnitude" necessary for tragic significance. Unlike real life characters, they perform only those actions and speak only those lines which advance the tragic argument that moves, in each act, to its prepared crisis of anagnorisis and peripeteia. That this is an accurate imitation of the rhythms and texture of everyday Norwegian life is as preposterous a notion as that the characters and actions of Greek tragedy are faithful representations of the everyday domestic and civic life of fifth century BCE Athens.
The difference between Punch and Judy and Rosmer and Rebekka West is not that one pair is artificial and the other "real life": the second pair is equally as much a construct of art, but conceived with a greater degree of aesthetic complexity. The protagonists are designed to bring out a more elaborate argument and aesthetic structure than a Punch and Judy show (itself capable of different levels of complexity) - a structure whose model ultimately is Greek tragedy. Jan Kott, for one, noted the resemblance between Ibsen's dramatis personae and those of the Greek tragedians:
Into the houses of Ibsen's imagination descend the ghosts of Oedipus, Electra, Orestes and Iphigenia.. .. The summoning of Greek shadows reveals.. . parallels between Ibsen and Freud.[13]
There are more than Greek ghosts in the Hegelian recollection, or temps retrouve, undertaken by the Cycle, however, as Ibsen sets in tragic motion our entire human identity as it has revealed itself in the past as well as in the present. This is modern tragedy as a hugely recollective art where, in a resurgence of the repressed, archetypes of our human history and culture repopulate the stage. Such a recollective art, in fact, is the major achievement of Modernism.
The archetypal identity of an Ibsen character emerges from its interaction with other, similarly conceived identities in the ensemble of each play. Each character study, while interesting in itself, gains its full metaphoric stature only when juxtaposed with and put in action with others, marking out the lean logic of Ibsen's realism from the realism of others in the modern theater. Beyond individual identity, gender, and generation, characters onstage establish cultural, historical, ideological and archetypal dimensions. (See my schematic below.) Osvald Alvirig in Ghosts is the vehicle for a cluster of active metaphoric associations: sexuality, Parisian joy of life, artistic creativity, Greek paganism (his Orestean elements), Dionysian wine Appollonian light, the sun (Julian's Helios in Emperor and Galilean) - bring him in conflict with Pastor Mander' s equally multilayered hostility to all of these and to the intellectually inquiring and significantly named Helene.
Beyond the multilayered and human and cultural conflict, dispersing the rain shrouding the metaphysical landscape, rises the sun, mentioned throughout, an emblem of so many levels of the conflict; at the same time the sun is the reminder of an indifferent, cosmic perspective on the tragic human scene. This powerful juxtaposition of metaphoric characters, action, and scene creates a form of symbolist shorthand allowing the confined space and time of the stage to contain, in each play and in the Cycle as a whole, the same vistas as the three middle-period plays, Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean. The conflict widens and transcends the particulars of individual persons and place, an aspect of Ibsen's art commented on by the young James Joyce:
Ibsen's plays do not depend for their interest on the action, or on the incidents. Even the characters, faultlessly drawn though they be, are not the first thing in his plays. But the naked drama - either the perception of a great truth, or the opening up of a great question, or a great conflict which is almost independent of the conflicting actors, and has been and is of far-reaching importance - this is what primarily rivets our attention.[14]
The great conflicts of the plays require a selective dramatic method less minutely detailed and less casual than that of many realists not concerned to keep Ibsen's tragic and multiple perspectives in view. Not to see these perspectives is to compare Ibsen disadvantageously with writers not engaged with his artistic difficulties. A contrast of any passage in the Cycle with any passage from a realistic dramatist (for example, Harley Granville-Barker), will reveal the same differences as that between, say, Edouard Manet and the meticulously rendered realism of a conventional salon painter. lbsen's thematic selectivity must impose distortions, economies, on the appearances and rhythms of everyday life much in the way Manet must do. Reality is rendered only as it serves the austere thematic requirements of the dialectic art. The metaphoric time of Ghosts, for example, requires that an action occurring between mid-day and sunrise the next day be encapsulated in less than three hours of almost uninterrupted realistic action. The change in the set from gloom to starkly brilliant light, like the lamp and champagne brought in for the joy-of-life dialogues, or the carefully calibrated collapse of Osvald precisely at sunrise and at the conclusion of the thematic/dramatic argument, is set to a metaphoric, not a realistic, clock - the same accelerating clock, in fact, that Greek tragedy kept time to. The metaphoric-tragic imperative driving the action of Ghosts is so compelling that few audiences notice the temporal sleight-of-hand that Ibsen is practicing on them.
13. Jan Kott, "Ibsen Read Anew," in The Theatre of Essence and Other Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1984), 58-9.
14. James Joyce, "Ibsen's New Drama," in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard ElImann (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 63.
