• IBSEN COURSE •
Course Syllabus
Required Reading
Week I Material
Week II Material
Week III Material
Week IV Material
Week V Material
Week VI Material
Week VII Material
Week VIII Material
Week IX Material
Week X Material
Week XI Material
Week XII Material
Week XIII Material

WEEK I: INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSE

      This valedictory graduate course closes twenty years at Carnegie Mellon University teaching drama from Classical Greece to contemporary international drama in a two-year ‘Colloquium’ sequence.   This has always been too large a territory for any single individual to command but I’ve enjoyed my reign and will be putting many of my Colloquium class notes on my website at some time in the near future.  This year’s website addition is ‘Romanticism to Realism’ - a course on the plays of Henrik Ibsen.  The other Courses will be linked to this site.

      The depth and scale of Ibsen's imagination has never been sufficiently appreciated even after a century of academic scholarship and interpretive commentary.   The lament of every scholar is that his or her subject is insufficiently regarded by the world.  The estimation the world gives to our subject compared with the value we give, fires us with zeal to right the wrong.  As university teachers, we have captive audiences of students on whom to discharge our obsession and attempt to recruit to our cause.  We usually have to submit our convictions to an audience of peers at conferences, in publications and in tenure reviews, which usually moderate our wilder claims. I make large claims for Ibsen’s art but the student can be assured they have been discussed, debated, accepted or contested and refined in that arena where such things are considered important.    It is a small and eccentric arena in which to be seriously engaged compared with the world's crises, dangers, injustices and sufferings.  But getting minor things right is good practice for engaging with the major ones.

      Ibsen’s plays have a double life.  One is that of the collected volumes on the shelf created over a lifetime and, I claim, conceived as a single, ambitious entity.  This large and varied work generates an international industry of academic commentary.   In anthologies of drama and consequently in the staging of his work, Ibsen too often is presented as “the father of modern realism'”and usually represented (in the U.S. at least) by only two plays, A Doll House and  Hedda Gabler.   Ibsen, on his seventieth birthday, asked that all the plays be read in the order in which they were written, so that the reader would become “aware of the mutual connections between the plays.’  He concluded, “I therefore appeal to the reader that he not put any play aside, and not to skip anything, but that he absorb the plays by reading himself into them and by experiencing them intimately – in the order in which I wrote them."”   He also described the twelve realist plays as a ‘Cycle’ concluding in an ‘Epilogue’. .

      However, each play has another life, independent of its position in the 12-play Cycle: as a first-night production by actors new to Ibsen’s work and before an audience that may be seeing an Ibsen play for the first time.  Neither can be expected to bring to the experience much awareness of the author and his life and times.  Ideally, there should be an Ibsen theater somewhere performing all the plays, as George Bernard Shaw pleaded, “like Wagner’s Ring, in cycles"” and attended with the devotion Wagnerites attend Bayreuth.  But it is good that each play also has to stand on its own in competition with the classic repertory and with the latest contemporary drama, to prove its theatrical vitality with audiences.  In good productions they’ve shown they stand the test superbly. What gets a work recognized as a classic is that when it is given a good production, we discover just what good drama can deliver.  

Hegelian dialectic and archetypal repetition in The Cycle

      The sequence of parallels between Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (notably Chapters VI and VII) and Ibsen’s 12-play Cycle reveals that Ibsen definitely models his Cycle on the structure set out in Hegel’s text.  This once controversial contention on my part gradually is being conceded.   Ibsen also draws on a wealth of other cultural and historical material that fills his text.  The Cycle follows Hegel's 'map' of how our human identity evolved through time; but Ibsen employs the structure and cultural cargo of The Phenomenology as a scaffolding for his own, independently imaginative project.  All we need show is that the stages of the two sequences form parallel structures. This, I think, cannot be denied.  I believe Ibsen saw the Hegelian 'psychoanalysis' of the stages by whiich we became modern humanity as one way of organizing his own, independent agenda. From the beginning of his career the action of the past upon the present has been his subject.   It is the 'masterpot. of all his plays, which, in the Cycle, he expanded to the universal drama of humanity. 
      Ibsen was an artist more than a philosopher, but the artistic project he conceived: a tripartite, twelve play cycle, could not have occurred to him without the example of Hegel’s Phenomenology -  as far as I know, there was no similar philosophic structure available.  Two major elements of the plays, their dialectical actions and their procedure of archetypal recovery, derive directly from Hegel.  Ibsen also seems to have agreed with Hegel on the major ingredients of the cultural cargo carried by the modern mind; in fact, most of his contemporaries would have been in agreement on this.  However, the Realist Cycle, as I wrote in the Preface to The Ibsen Cycle, is not ‘dramatized Hegel’. 

          The Hegelian underpinning to the Cycle…is not a mechanical strategy
          on Ibsen’s part, but the starting point for the most boldly imaginative
          creativity, in which the artist is at no time subservient to the
          philosophical system.

      My concern is with Ibsen’s complex art, not his ‘thought.’ Like all artists, Ibsen used his sources because they suited his artistic enterprise. The Phenomenology, as a tragi-comedy of errors, requires the modern spirit to relive intensely the stages of its evolution - to discover how we became who we are.  Whether or not Ibsen accepted Hegel's conclusions, the Cycle parallels Hegel's 'map' of Spirit's evolution..  Living later than Hegel, Ibsen inhabited a different world and absorbed into his art events and ideas not known to Hegel and these are to be found in the Realist Cycle. However, what Ibsen did find in Hegel was truly liberating for him as an artist: a way of giving structure and method (dialectic and archetypal recollection) to his own rich cultural imagination.  

      When I come to an individual play, it is its aesthetic nature, the form and texture of the play, its ‘doing’ not its ‘meaning’ that I focus on.  Where the parallels with the Phenomenology are, I think incontrovertible, it is still the play I am concerned to interpret, not the parallel Hegelian text. Iif Ibsen’s text at any palce seems to offer an opposing judgment to Hegel’s on the material, that does not concern me.  Does Rosmersholm (as it should in the sequence of parallel texts) depict a ‘Struggle Between Enlightenment and Superstition?   I can’t see how this can be denied.  Does Ibsen agree with Hegel’s judgment on the outcome of this phase of European culture?  I do not know.  It is what he does, as a dramatist, with this dialectic, the richly fascinating world and its characters he creates for it, not to be found in Hegel, that I am concerned to explore.  We must keep this in mind for each play in the Cycle.  Someone, one day, may work out the agreements or disagreements between Hegel and Ibsen as thinkers.  That will be immensely interesting and valuable.  It is not something I am qualified to do.  It is Ibsen’s dramatic art that I offer to explore.