Archetype and
Archetypal Repetition

a representative character, action or form that is a model or pattern that recurs in human history.  e.g. Creon; Antigone; ( tyrant; rebel); Orestes (sacrificial victim); Don Juan

In this course, the situation in which a given ‘reality’ (thesis) contains contradictions that critical thought or activity reveals to be false (negates)  forcing an opposing idea of reality (antithesis).to emerge.  Out of the struggle of these, a new reality or concept (synthesis) can emerge. A Doll House is the clearest of this procedure all through the Ibsen’s work.  It is a complex ‘living’, not a mechanical, dramatic procedure.

The assumptions, themes, ideas, discourse implicit in the cultural world inhabited by the artist that his or her art reflects, accepts or contests consciously and unconsciously.  ‘Elizabethan, neo-classicism, Romanticism, Modernism, all possess a storehouse of such implicit and identifiable assumptions that inform individual works of literature and art.  Ibsen’s ‘realism’ is a method of revealing this supertext of archetypes, themes within the texture of modern reality.

‘Realistic’ is the method of rendering aspects of reality convincingly and plausibly in art.  In painting, the rendering of e.g. landscapes, figures and objects meticulously in religious and secular works (e.g. an Annunciation, a portrait of Venus, clothes, the fur of an animal).  The    ‘realistic’ in present in all periods of art. Realist is a nineteenth century aesthetic (e.g. Impressionism) in which the everyday real world is rendered newly significant by the unique ‘method’ of the artist.  It is not realistic in a photographic way: the artist’s ‘vision’ might seem to violate and distort reality as we ordinarily perceive it.  This Realist aesthetic is Ibsen’s procedure in the Cycle: not to give us back the world as we have been indoctrinated to see it but to alert us to the unreality of our normal perceptions to alienate and ‘estrange’ this normality and bring back the reality it has suppressed and excluded.

The conviction that the social world we inhabit is a false, distorting structure whose institutions were created by a violent historical process of injustice, oppression, ignorance and superstition, which now denies the development of our true humanity.  Also, that this history has alienated each individual from his or her potential true self.  In Romantic and post-Romantic thought we are self-alientated creatures inhabiting an alienating world.  Individuals must attempt to discover authentic being and  acting in a world that itself must be made authentic.  This is the agenda of Ibsen;s major characters: to recognize their inauthentic condition and overcome it by self-determination. Authenticity replaces Integrity as the tragic virtue.