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Cycle as Tragedy•
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Ibsen's
Cycle as Tragedy
by Brian Johnston
The Modern World as a Defective Work of Art; The Theme of Alienation
Addressing the Scale of Modern Alienation; Archetypal Recollection
VII. The Modern World a Defective Work of Art
The Theme of Alienation. Everyday modern life is not a natural truth the artist is obliged to imitate: it is always, already, itself a bad work of art, an artifice, a distortion of our humanity, created over time by our alienated, bungling consciousness and not in itself worth imitating. It becomes the artist's worthwhile subject only if its inadequacy is the starting point for exploring the extent of the error and loss entailed by human history. We receive a disfigured and corrupted inheritance as our human identity and we disfigure and corrupt it further. There is a moment in When We Dead Awaken when the artist Arnold Rubek tells how his work, under the guise of contemporary human portraits, has smuggled into it the "dear domestic zoo. . . .All the animals which man has distorted (forkvaklet) into his own image. And which have distorted him in return."[20]Against this ongoing cultural corruption Rubek set up, in statue form, the image of a naked young woman "awakening to light and glory with nothing ugly or tainted to shed" - but he is speaking of this to the former model of that image, a woman whose subsequent history in the world, in her own manic account, has been one of self-annihilation, madness, and multiple murders. The gulf between the image and the irreparably damaged human model seems to encapsulate that between a potentially free humanity and its actual contemporary existence - the ground, I would claim, of Ibsen's tragic vision.
The world, its institutions and its history, is to a humanity seeking authenticity and freedom a hostile, alien space, as Schiller insisted in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind; the individual, the product of this alien space, is therefore self-alienated and must undergo a crisis that reveals both the repressing and inhibiting environment it takes for reality, and the falsity of the self that has, at the cost of its own truth, adapted to that so-called reality.
He comes to himself out of his sensuous slumber, recognizes himself as Man, looks around and finds himself-in the State. An unavoidable exigency had thrown him there before he could freely choose his station; need ordained it through mere natural laws before he could do so by the laws of reason.[21]
This confrontation, where a human identity seeks to realize its authenticity within an environment whose very values, loyalties and virtues are lethal impediments to self-determination, sets up the terms of an Hegelian tragic action of the greatest seriousness and magnitude, especially when carried out on the scale of a twelve-play cycle. The modern mind's fateful encounter with its ghosts, with its suppressed, evaded, or forgotten identity, is just the action and imagery to sustain a dialectic on such a scale. This would be the Zeitgeist's interrogation by the Weltgeist, of particular culture by universal history - and vice versa. As an account of the human condition, this was a somber corrective to the nineteenth century's optimistic faith in Progress, its confidence that modern reason, through legislation and technology, could liberate humanity. In a group of notes to Ghosts Ibsen contrasted "the luxuriant growth of our culture, in literature, art, etc. - and by way of contrast: the whole of mankind on the wrong track. . . . The fault lies in the fact that the whole of mankind is a failure. If a man demands to live and develop as a man should, then that is megalomania. . ."[22] These are not considered and well-honed apothegms in the Nietzschean manner; but their perspectives are Nietzschean. In the same spirit the Greek tragedians, especially Sophocles, confronted their confident, rationalist democracy with the challenging ghosts of a distant, heroic, aristocratic, and decidedly non-democratic past. Oedipus, the supreme rationalist who yet unconsciously confirms the mantic prophecy of Tires ias, is the classic emblem of this confrontation. Roland Barthes wrote that the Greek theater
is always a triple spectacle: of a present (we are watching the transformation of a past into a future), of a freedom (what is to be done?), and of a meaning (the answer of gods and men). . . . Already mythology had been the imposition of a vast semantic system upon nature. The Greek theater seizes upon the mythological answer and makes use of it as a reservoir of new questions: for to interrogate mythology is to interrogate what had been in its time a fulfilled answer. Itself an interrogation, the Greek theater thus takes place between two other interrogations: one, religious, is mythology; the other, secular, is philosophy.[23]
In Ibsen's Cycle the spectacle undertaken by the plot of each play takes place between the interrogation of a mythology constructed out of cultural history, and the interrogation of a modern, scientific/technological materialism. The opening play of the Cycle sets this out forcefully: Bernick's bid for supremacy in his society is to happen by means of the materialist-technological enterprise of the railway and attendant projects he wishes to bring about and control; but this is disrupted by the emergence from the past of the semi-mythological Lona (her name deriving from Apollonia, follower of Apollo) arriving with a Dionysian circus and music to inaugurate another enterprise altogether-the beginning of the modern spirit's tragic journey to spiritual authenticity which the rest of the Cycle will undertake.
The use of cultural history as "a reservoir of new questions" was begun by Friedrich Schiller, who lamented the modern dramatist's lack of mythological sources such as the Greek dramatists could employ: in his plays he set about converting history and its prominent individuals and events into a new mythological system, a mythology of service to the post-Romantic, post-Revolutionary spirit. Don Carlos, King Philip, Posa, the blind Grand Inquisitor, the Duke of Alba, Wallenstein, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth, Demetrius and so on, are made, with a liberal rendering of historical facts, into metaphysical agents of freedom and repression, light and darkness, truth-bringers and truth-deniers, whose victories and defeats (in tragic drama it is the positive forces who are defeated) help us understand the structure of our inherited spiritual reality. With Don Carlos, Schiller inaugurated the supertext of modern dialectical drama. In the dialectical tradition continued by Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht, Genet, these archetypal agents of progress or regression, light and darkness, take on innumerable modern guises.
What was new about this Romantic/post-Romantic supertext or mythological system was that, unlike the Greek, it was from the start militantly subversive of the mainstream orthodoxy. It emerged at the point where the modern world divides between mainstream and minority cultures (and theaters). It is at this moment that the tragic hero (of minority literature and theater) emerges as the wanderer, outsider, outcast, rebel - even criminal - and where the old tragic concern with Integrity, (adherence to conventional heroic norms) now gives way to concern with Authenticity (rejecting conventional norms as inauthentic). The Byronic criminal-outcasts such as Cain or Manfred; Schiller's "interestingly guilty" Mary Stuart, Wallenstein, or Demetrius; Ibsen's Brand, Peer Gynt, Julian, Rebekka West, Hedda Gabler, Halvard Solness, or John Gabriel Borkman; Dostoevsky's, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov; Shaw's St. Joan; Kafka's alienated K; the Outsider and Caligula of Camus; Jean Genet's Blacks or the Said of The Screens, (and Genet himself - to name only a few - are all examples of the variously subversive alienated consciousness of modern tragic literature.
The Romantics made Prometheus their hero and rehabilitated Milton's Satan. These and more realistically localized alienated characters become vehicles that better can express the nature and extent of our spiritual malaise than "the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality" described by R. D. Laing in The Politics of Experience.[24] This cultural divide, clearly perceived by Schiller, created the terms of all subsequent dialectical drama from Byron, through Ibsen, to Jean Genet.[25]
20. Ibsen Volume I: Four Major Plays, trans. Brian Johnston (Lyme: H. H. Smith and Kraus,1995), 195.
21. Friedrich Schiller, On The Aesthetic Education of Mankind In A Series of Letters, trans. Reginald Snell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954; New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1965), 28.
22. "Draft Manuscripts: Preliminary Notes," in The Oxford Ibsen, trans. and ed. James Walter MeFarlane (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 5.468.
23. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 68.
24. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 144.
25. The terms of this dialectic are clearly set out in the quarrel between Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Tom Paine's The Rights of Man. Both writers draw on imagery of the theater, Burke on the old theater of Garrick and Siddons, Paine unconsciously creating a new imagery of the revolutionary theater. This dialectic and its images are taken up, after Schiller, by Shaw, Hauptmann, Gorky, Brecht, and culminate in Genet. Cf. Brian Johnston, "Revolution and the Romantic Theater," Theater Three 4 (Spring 1988): 5-20.
