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
Creating the Dimensions of a Modern Tragic Drama
The Modern World as a Defective Work of Art; The Theme of Alienation
Addressing the Scale of Modern Alienation; Archetypal Recollection
VI. Creating the Dimensions of a Modern Tragic Drama
Not every play in the Cycle is tragic, any more than in a Greek tetralogy,[15]but the Cycle as a whole creates a space in which tragic forces and a great tragic argument can come into being and from which elements of everyday life irrelevant to that argument are cleared away. The Cycle sets out to be (a) modern and (b) tragic - a combination more intractable than might be supposed. To be tragic Ibsen's cycle must be the imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and possessing magnitude: to be modern, it would need to set into tragic motion an adequate representation of our modern identity. After the mid-nineteenth century this identity was understood as having evolved over long biological and cultural time and to have accumulated the results, including the conflicts, of this history. An adequate, modern, tragic drama would have to encompass this. To take up a limited area of modern reality and then to offer an impassioned but partisan and partial account of it is the way the discourse of the world is conducted; but such partiality has to be discarded for tragedy, which requires more of a doomsday account, a Judgment Day upon the soul, as Ibsen said of his poetic vocation.[16]Ibsen's is a judgment on the psyche of our modern humanity itself, filled with all the dimensions of its cultural past, in which the dramatist is as involved as his creatures; for each one of us, Ibsen said, shares the guilt of his/her people. There is no such thing as a guiltless class, race or gender - another currently unpopular idea.
Nineteenth-century middle class humanity was an ideal tragic subject: it was the class in power and a deeply guilty class. Its supremacy rested on a betrayal of the principles of the French Revolution and of almost every universal value earlier proclaimed when the bourgeoisie was seeking to end the oppressive hegemonies of the old order of monarchy, church, and aristocracy. In that Rousseauist dawn it may have been bliss to be alive: but by Ibsen's time that same middle class, empowered, had set up hideous industrial cities with their proletarian slums; had dispossessed and annihilated the native Americans; had supported the colonial seizures, massacres and exploitations in Africa, the middle east, and Asia, and had lost all sight of its living spiritual heritage through a cynical materialist exploitation of the world - all this was cloaked in a conveniently indulgent religiosity and celebrated, conventionally and opulently, in non-subversive, visionless art.
Even before it sought the séance or the psychoanalytic couch, this was a class deeply uneasy about itself, attacked from the right for its crass materialist values and tastes and from the left for its gross injustices. This however made it an extremely interesting class; its tortuous complexities were good fictional and dramatic material. The proletariat has not been able to rival it in interest, however much it might surpass it in virtue.[17]This guilt-ridden class whose passing the Cycle seems to envisage, also carried, if only unconsciously, a huge cargo of archetypal memory, the reproachful ghosts that erupt continually to the surface of the psyche and extend the scale of the modern drama. As each individual, in Hegel's formulation is a "world soul" containing these immensities, tragedy no longer is the prerogative of a prince but a possible fate for anyone, regardless of social station. Ibsen's most imposing tragic protagonist, Brand, is a peasant's son. Another aspect of a modern tragedy, then, is that it is classless: a universal tragic action can be enacted as plausibly in a bourgeois drawing room as in the antechamber of a monarch.
To be tragic in this modern - or modernist - drama, the individual must be awakened into becoming a vehicle for the ghosts on which the modern world for the most part, has turned its back. Ibsen's plays, in fact, have as much the nature of seances as of psychoanalyses. The awakened individual becomes the medium through which the banished powers speak. This makes the Ibsen scene haunted ground where inadvertent actions can trigger off the archetypal drama. Ibsen's son Sigurd wrote of art that it "gives liberty of action to forces and possibilities to which life does not grant the chance of coming into their rights.[18]Being vehicles of forces essential to our human wholeness (rather than to our happiness) they exist in a context beyond our usual moral categories. Ibsen's major characters, it must be admitted, behave extravagantly, alarmingly, often unpleasantly. It is in the nature of tragic individuals to be uningratiating; even, I have argued elsewhere, to be immature and irresponsible (a frequent charge of psychologizing critics):
An Antigone, well adjusted to her family history and to the new polity of Creon, happily marrying Haemon (and this, it seems, was the mythic story that lay to Sophocles' hand) was of no use to Sophocles' tragic purpose. An Antigone such as Sophocles reinvented her, obsessed with a corpse and the world of the dead, rating brothers higher than husbands, though abnormal and even pathological from the moralizing, psychoanalytic point of view, was perfect for Sophocles' purpose of demonstrating a heroic norm from which we, in our daily pusillanimity, have fallen. . . . The passionate Achilles, the hot-tempered Ajax, the stubborn Philoctetes, the extravagant Lear, and the malcontent Hamlet... all do much and say much that mature and responsible middle-class citizens would not and could not say and do - and are all the more impressive for it. . . . The concern that the cosmos should conform to our moral predilections is an attitude antithetical to tragedy.[19]
Much commentary on Ibsen's plays still seems less interested in the plays as carefully shaped and extended metaphors realized only in stage time and space than as real-life case histories. It is a better critical discipline to see the plays as realizing and extending the requirements, thematic and formal, inherent in the genre. They perform the difficult and delicate task of keeping all dimensions of the dialectical action in play while advancing the plausible modern story. Thematically, the plays are dramatized concepts about the human condition, guiding the argument of each drama to a new level of awareness; aesthetically, they are beautifully controlled and shaped movements, as in contrapuntal music, moving, in each act in each play, to their powerfully prepared moments of peripeteia and anagnorisis, and attended by an imagery that gives them their poetic resonance; imaginatively, the characters in these plays, their fates and their worlds, take hold of our minds and emotions as they are gradually realized in formal terms. To ignore this considerable aesthetic achievement and engage in moralistic judgment or partisan partiality - as if the characters were presented, with their histories, in a police line-up or a psychoanalyst's casebook, and not in shaped dramatic structures-is to be operating altogether in the wrong area of interest.
15. It is my conviction that the twelve-play cycle consists of three tetralogies, with the fourth play as a comedy or satyr play, making the Cycle an intellectualized (i.e. modernist) festival of Dionysos.
16. "Writing means summoning oneself/ To court and playing the judge's part." Ibsen to Ludwig Passarge, Munich, 16 June 1880, Ibsen: Letters and Speeches, ed. Evert Sprinchorn (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 187.
17. Brecht's proletarian or peasant figures are what William Empson would have called "versions of pastoral" devoid of potentially tragic (guilty) motivation, and so denied a fully adult identity.
18. Sigurd Ibsen, Human Quintessence (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1911; Books for Libraries Press, 1972), 93.
19. Brian Johnston, Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 62-3.
