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Cycle as Tragedy•
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Ibsen's
Cycle as Tragedy
by Brian Johnston
The Inutility of Tragedy
The Modern World as a Defective Work of Art; The Theme of Alienation
Addressing the Scale of Modern Alienation; Archetypal Recollection
I. Inutility of Tragedy
Tragedy, in the modern theater, is a genre more honored in repute than in performance, and Ibsen, inasmuch as he is admired, is not admired generally as a tragedian. In college courses tragedy, in various guises, is taught respectfully; and having a "tragic vision" is always considered an impressive cachet for a dramatist to possess. But the creation of a full scale, multidimensional tragic argument about the modem world (of Aristotelian "magnitude") does not appeal to theater-goers, (still less to film-goers) nor to modem playwrights. It goes against the thrust of current actor training, too, which is to keep the actor reassuringly close to the same level of experience as audiences, to get audiences to find themselves on familiar ground with the actor and the world of the play and not to establish the undemocratic aesthetic distance that the scale of action and the expanding perspectives necessary to tragedy insist upon. Revivals of Greek tragedy, like those of Serban, Suzuki, Sellars or Mnouchkine[1], reveal the power of ancient tragedy to speak effectively through specially devised new theatric conventions: but the exoticism of these productions keeps the details of our own contemporary world unrealized from tragic perspectives. The same goes for Elizabethan revivals: even in modem dress, the terms of these tragedies are not those of our modem world so that the experience of the tragic becomes part of an exotic excursion into foreign, and so safer, territory. As George Bernard Shaw remarked, "Shakespeare has put ourselves on the stage, but not our situations. . . . Ibsen supplies the want left by Shakespeare. He gives us not only ourselves, but ourselves in our situations."[2] Or, rather, our situations transfigured by tragic perspectives.
The arena of contemporary cultural conflict attracts adherents of many social agendas who believe drama is doing its best work when advancing one or another of these agendas. It clearly is extremely desirable that we should be conscious of, for example, the failure of our social systems and the injustices suffered by one or another group through the insensitivities of the culture at large. To what better task can serious drama address itself, it might be asked, than to make the public more conscious of these shortcomings and eager to do something about them? To counter with the argument that the purpose of a tragic art is to be adequately tragic - convincingly, devastatingly tragic - might seem a copout from the urgent demands of the culture. This is what proponents of Enlightenment "serious drama" (drames) - Diderot, Beaumarchais, Mercer, Marmontel - believed; it is what George Bernard Shaw proclaimed in The Quintessence of Ibsenism - a brilliant handbook for the practical application of Ibsen's plays.
Shaw's is still the prevalent view in interpreting the Ibsen who, we are asked to believe, gave up the huge mythopoetic, metaphysical, and tragic perspectives of his middle-period plays, Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, to address instead "the problems of the present." His plays, from this view, are utilitarian: ferreting out shortcomings in the bourgeoisie to guide that troubled class towards leading freer, less problematic lives - which is as far from the hazards of the tragic vision as it is possible to go. Even comedy, in its strictest form, plays a more unsettling game than this, leaving as insolubly problematic the fate of its misfits: Socrates, Shylock, Malvolio, Alceste, Tartuffe.
In the poem, "To My Friend Who Talks of Revolutions" (1870) Ibsen described the Flood as the only revolution "that was not scamped half-heartedly" - except for the deplorable survival of Noah and his family! He calls for a replay of the botched event in which he would be around to set a torpedo under the Ark.[3] This is the Ibsen who has been transmogrified by his interpreters from a grimly tragic skald to a basically benignant scold, reconstituted as the operator of a moralizing (and psychologizmg) gladiatorial peepshow who casts variously defective specimens of humanity into his theatric arena to be doomed or reprieved according to our moral predilections. Viewing or reading Ibsen's twelve-play Cycle thus has come to resemble visits to Bedlam by the fashionable sane in eighteenth-century London: edifying excursions into the realm of the Deplorable or Unfortunate Other. The gatherings of modern Ibsenists all too often resembles a pharisaic festival for vaunting one's morally or politically correct credentials - what Oscar Wilde called simply washing one's clean linen in public.[4]
This also is a teachable Ibsen, easily assignable in anthologies of modern drama as "the father of modern realism," to be followed by his more or less similarly sober progeny. In the US this practically ensures that the only texts to appear in repertory and in college anthologies, with dreary regularity, are A Doll House and Hedda Gabler, on which the seal of at least partial political correctness has been stamped. In Europe, true, Ibsen is appreciated and performed more variedly and more adequately -though the twelve realist dramas beginning with Pillars of Society and ending with the "dramatic epilogue" When We Dead Awaken, still are not recognized as a great, interconnected tragic Cycle. There has been no attempt to take up Ibsen's injunction, seconded by Shaw, to read or perform the plays in the order in which they were written, to discover what Ibsen insisted were the mutual connections between the plays. Ibsen, on such a scale, still proves difficult for the modern theater - or modern scholarship - to accommodate.
1. See Marianne McDonald, Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), for an account of the adaptations of Greek drama by Peter Sellars arid Suzuki Tadashi. Mnouchkine's Les Atrides was first performed in Paris in 1990 and subsequently visited New York and Montreal.
2. George Bernard Shaw, "The Technical Novelty in Ibsen's Plays," in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 3d ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 182.
3. Cited in Michael Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography New York: Doubleday, 1971), 329-30
4. The recent Cambridge Companion to Ibsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) reveals, in most of its critical essays, only too drearily how academic Ibsen interpretation actually has regressed from the early days when first-rate imaginations such as Henry James, Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hoflinanstahl and their peers responded to his plays. On washing clean linen, see Algernon Moncrieff in Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 1.244.
