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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
VIII. Addressing the Scale of Modern Alienation Archetypal Recollection
Ibsen's tragic drama is one in which archetypal forces erupt into, transfigure, and devastate, modern (nineteenth-century) identity. This idea of his tragic subject was explored by Ibsen in his three great middle-period plays, Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean. Since these plays were not written for theatrical performance he was free to extend to their limits the temporal and spatial metaphors of his argument. (I am not claiming all this was a conscious program: artists mostly discover such a pattern or program while at work on it.) These three plays, I would claim, shape Ibsen's dramatic cosmos; afterwards he would devise the means of staging it as a tragic, recollective drama of modern, urban, bourgeois humanity. The result was to be a portrait of humanity in nineteenth-century costume as compelling as any in the history of drama. The humdrum identities of modern urban life (ourselves and our situations) are enlarged and galvanized by archetypal forces that extend the dimensions of human identity through individual, familial, communal, national, historical, cultural, natural, and supernatural circumferences of meaning (see my schematic below).
If, as Nietzsche claimed, it is only as aesthetic phenomena, as works of art, that we are finally justified, and if, as he further claimed, tragedy is the highest form of art, then Ibsen has offered a magnificent justification of nineteenth-century life. The portrait that emerges is of a humanity whose contemporary agitations and conflicts awaken and stir into life dormant and primordial layers of our identity; a "mine" containing "an infinite host of images of the past slumber[ing] . . . lying hidden in the dark depths of our inner being," as Hegel describes the Unconscious in The Philosophy of Mind.[26] When we recognize that the hero/ine of the Cycle is the human spirit itself made up of the wonderfully varied myriad of individual characters, major and minor, we will see there was no drawing in of artistic ambitions between the plays of the great middle period and the inauguration of the Cycle with Pillars of Society.
In Brand and Peer Gynt Ibsen had placed his alternate "galilean" and "emperor" identities within a metaphorically charged vertical landscape. This landscape changed with the changing terms of the protagonists' drama, serving as a responsive mirror that extended the hero's action into the cosmos. From the recidivist trolls in the depths of the sea in Brand, or the depths of the earth in Peer Gynt, to the lethal Ice Church and mountain peaks, the landscape of the two plays clearly is a symbolic as well as a natural terrain. This same vertical, symbolic-natural-metaphysical landscape would be explored in the Cycle, from sea-depths and mine-depths to mountain peaks and beyond.
The humanity inhabiting this landscape is extended in time as well as in space. In Emperor and Galilean these temporal perspectives are gathered around the collision within fourth-century Byzantium between a declining Hellenism and a triumphant, but corrupted, Christianity. Similar forces might have been summoned by other cultural situations. They would have taken on different ideological aspects but they would express the same recurring collision of worldly and other-worldly, life-affirming and life-denying, free and dogmatic forces, within humanity. Julian's failure to undo the Christian revolution or to impel the human spirit beyond this conflict into a new synthesis, is, I believe, an emblem rather than the cause of the spiritual malaise pervading the Cycle. Nevertheless, characters, situations, and imagery from the middle period plays, especially from Emperor and Galilean, reappear throughout the Cycle. Such an ironic, blase production as Hedda Gabler, for example, re-enacts in miniature, within the drawing room of the Falk mansion, the whole huge spiritual conflict of Ibsen's world-historical drama.
Each play in the Cycle enacts a resurrection day. The ghosts are summoned for an exorcism as well as for a recovery of the repressed, in much the same way - if not with the same intention - as in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Ibsen's Faustian role vis-a-vis his society can be seen to resemble that of Ibsen's own Maximos, the magus of "the third empire" in Emperor and Galilean . The Cycle traverses a long night of the soul-in the last four plays literally, in the last act sequence, evening, late evening, night, dawn before the sunrise[27]-while ascending in higher stages, sequentially, to "the peak of Promise" of the last. Like Maximos, the cycle cannot deliver the liberation it envisages (Ibsen insisted his work represented a closure), only the sacrifice and suffering necessary to prepare for it. Without this sacrifice and suffering, however, the prospect of liberation could not be adequately - that is tragically - affirmed.
26. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 205.
27. Cf. Brian Johnston, The Ibsen Cycle, 160.
