• 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

Romanticism to Realism
an online course by Brian Johnston

WEEK XIII: The Plays of the Last Group

Extended accounts of the last four plays can be found as follows:

The Master Builder, in The Ibsen Cycle, 289-352

Little Eyolf  in this Ibsen Course, Week XII

John Gabriel Borkman in Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama, 235-78

When We Dead Awaken, in The Ibsen Cycle, 171-86

         The last four plays begins with The Master Builder that depicts, in the opening scene, the same condition of intolerable confinement as Hedda Gabler; the action taking place at the same time of year, the Fall (at the autumnal equinox). Unlike the earlier play, its action will be one of a progressive opening up of vistas and a liberation from confinement.  The Cycle has reached a drastically new phase:confirmed by all the plays in this final group.

          The Master Builder opens in a windowless inner room each of whose inhabitants is described as in some way enfeebled.   The first words spoken are "No, I can't go on much longer..."  In the action that follows, when masterbuilder Solness comes onto the stage, we hear of failing powers, of fear of youth, of the mind divided against itself and others almost to the point of madness.  But this play inaugurates a sequence of plays in which more and more of the landscape is opened up to the theater audience; in which, in the sequence of last acts of the four plays, we ascend higher and higher in this landscape, and from Evening, through Night, to the Dawn (cf. The Ibsen Cycle p.160.)

         Solness, as his name implies (sol = sun) is more than a middle-aged Norwegian architect of the nineteenth century.  To account for him, we have to account for his name, and how it is linked to the action and imagery of the play.  However 'far out' our investigation takes us, so long as we track down all the play's details as there in the text, our interpretation can claim credibility.  (A defective interpretation is one that finds itself having to ignore much of the textual details to make its claims).  These last four plays have in common the following characteristics:

1. Vastly expanded recollective actions.  The Past now  overwhelms the Present: it is what the Present is all about.  ‘Action’ is subordinated to thought, reflection.  Action usually is a ‘breaking free’.
2. The expansion of  temporal perspectives is accompanied by expansion of spatial perspectives - Nature.
3. In consequence, the characters of these plays take on larger than life aspects.  They are locked in direct archetypal conflict.  Such characters as Hilde Wangel; the Rat Wife; the Borkman family and its history; Irene the walking statue, belong more to a mythic than a real world.

The consciousness of these last plays speaks a visionary imagery directly evoking spiritual forces.:

         In The Master Builder: The supra-realistic elements include invisible helpers and servers, a direct challenge to God on the top of a tower; the skin torn from Solness's wounded chest, like Prometheus's torment; the dead wife chained to the living husband; Hilde as bird of prey; the complicated  architectural symbology, and the sun and light imagery throughout.

         In Little Eyolf a mysterious Rat Virgin (Rat Wife) who has drowned her lover, who lures hordes of rats to their death in the sea, comes and takes away the child Eyolf, who follows her, mesmerized.  And the imagery of the play is of Death as a travelling Companion; of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, of the sea, the stars, the great silence, and so on.  It is a play of powerful and mysterious spirits of Nature.

John Gabriel Borkman is a play about the magic power of the earth's minerals, how the miner's son, Borkman, was  lured by these minerals to commit a crime, who has suffered imprisonment and disgrace and ostracism for years, and who will die seeing his great mineral kingdom come to life as he utters a hymn of love to it.  All through the play is a metallic imagery(the play opens with the sound of metal sleigh bells) and the imagery of almost godlike characters and their conflicts.                    

       When We Dead Awaken, the 'Epilogue'’" completes the Cycle and makes an entity of it".(Ibsen)
In this play, set entirely in the open air, an old sculptor encounters what is in effect a dead woman or a walking statue, Irene: while thesculptor's new wife, Maia, encounters, and runs off with a hunter of bears, Ulfheim . The play is an Act by Act ascent, from ground level, to the mountains, ending on a peak and with an avalanche.]          

Obviously Ibsen, to paraphrase Rilke, is a quite different artist from what one hears.  Not the social reformer, the psychiatrist, the writer of riddling autobiographies, but a very audacious theater poet who is taking his medium as far as it can go.  The Master Builder,  Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, When We Dead Awaken each has its own dominant imagery; tracing this imagery will help us see what the plays are doing..   We will find the dramatic structure gradually reveals another, poetic and imaginative structure. 

        In this last group of plays the metaphoric and the realist texts are more closely integrated than before: the characters directly speak metaphorically.  Ibsen is lifting the Realist theatre and it mimetic terms into a new poetry.  In The Wild Duck for example, Gregers, who spoke in parables about being a clever dog diving to the sea depths to rescue wild ducks, and so on, seemed an oddball: someone inserting his metaphoric dimension into a more ordinary reality.   In the earlier plays, the symbolic intrudes into a realistic setting and realistic characters.  The last four plays increasingly create a symbolic world.  Solness, Aline and Hilde are as much symbolic presences as realistic characters.

            In The Lady from the Sea the Stranger is always an outsider, a challenge to an otherwise realistic world, intruding like Gregers Werle only more so.  So we had something like a 'Close Encounter' situation: of an alien intrusion that Ellida responded to and then rejected.   In the last plays, however, the main characters, Hilde and Solness, and the four characters in When We Dead Awaken, all talk a directly metaphoric language and act out metaphoric actions.. In the last play, especially, they act mythically, they do as well as say, non-realistic things. The actors cannot subtilize these situations psychologically: they have to establish their mythic dimensions directly, as in Shakespeare's late plays, or in Greek drama.

          Ibsen, then, reclaims 'mythic' dimensions for the modern theater while not going over wholly to the Symbolist method that was emerging at this time in e.g.  Maeterlinck, Strindberg, and, later, the Expressionist dramatists, deriving from Strindberg and When We Dead Awaken.

            We might see When We Dead Awaken as a turning point in European drama: the point at which it major talents abandon Realism, which Ibsen really exhausted  After this play, except for Shaw, the most significant non-mainstream drama will also be non-realistic: Franz Wedekind, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Peter Handke and Heiner Müller. 

            In the United  States, there was  a strong counter-movement to the predominance of realism: e.e. cummings (Him), the experiments of O'Neill, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard. and above all, the the experimental theater here" Mabou Mines, the Wooster Group,Squat, Bread and Puppet, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson.   When We Dead Awaken is the signal, by the greatest of realists, that the realist revolution is over: and that significant drama will have to devise other methods.  Ibsen himself said that anything he wrote after this play "would be in another context: perhaps in another style".

THEMES AND ACTIONS OF THE LAST FOUR PLAYS

            The last four plays center on the difficulties and guilt of male creativity, on imposing shape on life, of sacrificing life for this creativity.  This causes suffering in the central male character and in his 'victims'.  But this is not the guilt only of artist, only.  The human spirit in the world, we have seen, is a kind of artist: changing both the natural world and our natural selves through history. .Each of the last four plays tries for 'transcendence' over its own terms of consciousness, of reality; tries to push these to some ultimate affirmation beyond their own limitations to reach to where words must fail in an aporia: what Ulfheim calls a 'sticking place' where there is no going forward or back

THE VERTICAL VS. HORIZONTAL aspects of these plays. 

            They all involve horizontal journeys (by visitors from the past) to a place and then a vertical ascent.  The horizontal involves escape from a guilt-ridden Past and a future for an escaping, usually younger generation; the vertical movement involves a 'suicidal' summing up, then a collecting together of identity for a fatal-triumphant aspiration.  All four main characters of When We Dead Awaken travel to the place where they will separate and re-group, and the 'spiritual pair will make the fatal ascent, the other pair inherit the world below.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE PLAYS

           In The Master Builder Solness and Hilde employ a strange 'affirmative' imagery of sun, light, trolls, castles in the air, vikings, helpers and servers, fair and dark devils, the 'impossible', climbing to a height and so on, and these affirmative images are set against the 'constricting' and imprisoning imagery of guilt, retribution, the dead Aline, the dead twins, the wound Solness suffers from, the jealous God, Solness's victims, the bands of youth "knocking at the door" to claim that the master builder's time is up, and so on.
There is the same struggle between the two languages in W.W.D.A. Was the past union of Rubek and Irene an achievement or a crime, love or betrayal, a Resurrection Day or a descent into the grave?  Once again, when the affirmative language wins out, there follows the fatal ascent.  While we might find ourselves baffled by the imagery of these two languages, we can at least clearly see how they struggle against each other.
 
         There has alwlays a struggle for mastery by two kinds of language in the Cycle, but in the plays of the last group this struggle is intensified  The plays embarki on actions that ‘activate’ directly .metaphysical conflict with the presented reality.  Is Hilde an agent of retribution, youth knocking at the door, or an agent of affirmation? 
Is the Rat Wife in LITTLE EYOLF meant to be a plausible inhabitant of the real world?

            LITTLE EYOLF is filled with a rich Pantheist imagery of animals, plants and the elements of earth air, fire, water. and with the characters invocations of these elements, from the depths of the sea to the stars..  The time of year is Spring, or the early summer.

            We Dead Awaken is set in summer and is totally outdoors.  Irene a lunatic on parole,  a spirit of revenge or a form of salvation?  Or all at once?  , In all these plays, the plausible realism of the stories takes second place to the need for the adequacy of the language to convey metaphysicalmeaning .  The play itself is seeking out how far within the confines of realism this metaphoric language, both of affirmation and guilt, can push, to make the struggle an adequately authentic one.

            In the play all the major (elderly) characters act and speak in a semi-mythic way of almost manic metaphysical confrontation .  The play is set in Winter and both the outer cold weather and an inner coldness of heart are emphasized. So is the theme of metals: of the ores of metal in the earth; of the bank vault and its gold. Of the harsh metallic values of capitalism and its violation of human love.

W.W.D.A.     Cf.THE IBSEN CYCLE, pp.171-186)
When We Dead Awaken is designated by Ibsen as an ‘Epilogue’ to the whole Cycle, so we should 'read it' in these terms, as a final summing up of the theme or 'argument' of the Cycle as a whole
.
Two striking images in the play are: the long train journey, stopping at all the stations on the way; and the gallery of petrified shapes around the walls of Rubek’s ‘castle. 
Both these images occur in Hegel’s account of the nature of The Phenolmenolgy of Mind  as a post by post journey and as a “gallery of pictures”’

These twol images describe first, the pprogress in time of the way the Cycle unfolded, play by play:  and the nature of the completed Cycle, where the journey is completed and all the plays are ‘there’, side by side, finished and ultimately deathly, immobile, ghosts whose agonized lives are over, finished.  The play ends before the sunrise: So we don’t know if some rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

NATURE VS. CULTURE dialectic in the play

CHARACTER

            Highly schematic.
            Rubek and Irene =  Spirit; Culture
            Ulfheim and Maja = Body; Nature
            Inspector of Baths, ministers to sick bodies
            Deaconness, ministers to sick mind.

   Ulfheim, the bear hunter compares his own work with that of Rubek, the sculptor. Both Ulfheim and Rubek agree on this analogy of their occupations.
 As hunter, Ulfheim is at the earliest stage of human culture, working on the animalic world and impressing human hegemony over it.( and achieving human and the abstract (sculptor).  Like the first hunters, or like Herakles in Greek mythology, he makes possible the humanization of the world.

Rubek, the artist, like the thinker, establishes, through time, the spiritual dimension and its history in the world.  This is the non-natural realm of human culture, of Civilization and its Discontents.
Rubek is aware of the animal identity of humanity (his doubled or Janus faced portraits.
But his masterpiece, Resurrectrion Day, is spiritual.
He resembles the guilt-ormentd Solness.
This is its initial ambition but, as with human culture, this ideal is surrounded and compromised by the non-spiritual, animalic origins of civilization.
Ulfheim is at the beginning of this evolutionary process, therefore, as Rubek is at its end. (Cf.THE IBSEN CYCLE, pp.171-186)

Maja and Irene:  Nature and Culture
The two women share the characteristics of the Ulfheim and Rubek.
 Maia (Spring; Veil of Maya) represents the Natural World.  She shares Ulfheim’s hatred of art: of turning from Life to ‘Art, Ideas’; with Rubek she feels like a caged bird.  She somewhat resembles Hilda in The Master Builder but trapped.

Irene, by contrast, as the Statue, Resurrection Day, not only represents Art – she had been transformed into Art in a reversal of the Pygmalion Myth.  Now, like the Pygmalion myth, she comes to life again.   She resembles ALINE in The Master Builder.   Ulfheim and Maia seem to stand at the innocent beginning of the dialectical journey where Rubek and Irene have reached its terminus

ACTION

            The play depicts an almost absurdly simple action, much like that of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

1. A world-famous sculptor and his much younger wife, after a long train journey come to a health resort. Their relationship is strained.
2. Each meets another partner: the sculptor encounters the woman who modeled for his masterpiece, Resurrection Day. The young wife teams up with a bear hunter.
3. The married couple separates and each goes off with the new partner, the sculptor to die with his partner on the mountain peak, the young woman to find 'freedom' with her bear hunter, below.  So one couple ascends, the other descends.
4. The play shows an Act by Act ascent and a separation.
5. It is undoubtedly the most simple and schematic of all of Ibsen's actions..  And, in fact, so simple is the realistic story that it never gets in the way of the symbolic story: it never claims to be attended to for its own sake.

SCENE

            The three scenes:  all are open air, for the first time in the Cycle.  The human drama is played off against a natural background not fashioned by human consciousness.  This makes the dialogue (especially in Act II) seem all the more interior, convoluted, for there is not the world of touchable props and things, human artefacts, to extend the human drama into the familiar and knowable: like Solness's buildings, drawings, domestic environment.  This was the kind of bare, unsustaining landscape of the last Acts of Brand and Peer Gynt.
            It forces our attention onto the battle of the two languages.

ARGUMENT

            In Rubek and Irene, in contrast to the others, the dialectict tries to locate the insoluble dilemma of the artist that Marcuse mentioned.  The core of art, its desire for expression, its 'inspiration' is a desire to 'see' human liberation, freedom, behind the distortion of its cultural form. In the human figure, the young nude, male or female, since the time of the Greeks, has been an image of this beauty and potential.  Yet, for a modern art to be adequate it has honestly to 'record' our human experience in conditions of unfreedom: and these conditions themselves become 'interesting' (e.g. Hedda Gabler) and take us further and further away from the original vision of freedom.  Greek humanity, or Elizabethan humanity, or nineteenth century bourgeois humanity, are all fascinating distortions of our unconditioned, immediate, free humanity before the contamination of culture. (The naked Irene).

            All the main characters find themselves trapped. Rubek's art, after Resurrection Day has reached a terminus in which h he not longer can create masterpieces but only a series of portraits of humanity, half-human, half-animal,that are riddles that only he can see. His marriage with Maja is a compromise for she lacks the ‘key’ to the visionary inspiration represented by Irene.  The couple has come to the end of a railway journey and to a sanatorium

        Maja describes herself as 'bought' by Rubek and then trapped in a cold, clammy castle with petrified sculptures all round the walls, a realm of dead forms.   Just as Irene, as petrified Resurrection Day, is in a museum with other petrified statues.  Interpreters have seen this as a metaphor for Ibsen’s own art.

            Maia is the realism of the Cycle, the long train journey and Irene is poetic drama, like Brand and Peer Gynt.  Maia’s name, we suggested, implies both Spring (May) and the “veil of Maya” – the everyday reality that obscures t spiritual reality.
‘Irene”, in Greek, means ‘Peace’ and her companion, the Deaconness, prounounces the last words of the play, Pax vobiscum, Peace be with you.)

            Maja finds her liberation in the satanic-faunlike, Dionysian, and animalic Ulfheim: who hates works of art: -  that is, with Ulfheim, she renounces the spirit for the flesh and descends the mountain to live.

            Rubek and Irene talk of consummating their love but at the cost of renouncing their lives.  Once again, we should  try to get all the images and actions of the play assembled, without missing out any major ones, before we start to interpret it.

            Ibsen had seen a performance of Brand soon before writing When We Dead Awaken and he clearly recreates major features of the earlier play: the ascent through a mountainous landscape ending in an avalanche that kills the two characters, Gerd and Brand, Irene and Rubek.  In an earlier draft of the play Rubek and Irene did not die but celebrated their re-union at the mountain top.

            Hegel described us as simultaneously creating our minds and our worlds in a mutual, dialectically evolving sequence.
The human spirit, from its primitive beginnings (Ulfheim) was like a self-discovering artist, working upon 'the world' and being transformed, in turn, by the world it was transforming: thereby producing the procession of cultural ‘forms’ that is cultural history.  Our  modern world itself is just the latest stage of this process, containing all the previous stages within it. – like a Russian doll.with all the previous dolls inside.

            Behind this immense endeavour is the seemingly endlessly elusive goal  of reaching full, free and adequate human identity.  To adapt Schiller’s words, the aim of culture is to set humankind free and help it to be equal to its Concept. To both know and to live adequately (in Art or other means) is a commitment to a lifetime's discipline and study that gets in the way ofliving full, free life.  Ulfheim and Rubek, and Maia and Irene are like Schiller’s ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental’ consciousnesses

            If one attempts to live without  the effort of knowing, one cannot be free. Maia’s song at the end of the play, “I am free” is ignorant of the journey it, too, will have to undertake.  The naïve, 'unexamined' life is not only not worth living, as Socrates famously proclaimed: it cannot be consciously be lived..

            However,  against the example of our contemporary world with all its accumulated sicknesses and corruptions one must keep 'in mind' an image of free, uncorrupted and undistorted life to play off against the distorted (forkvaklet)  'forms' human identity has successively made of itself and its world, Each play in the Cycle was both an analysis of the distorted form and a struggle to be free of it and approach the naked, undistorted spirit (Ressurrection Day).

            Each play in the Cycle, then, was a 'world form' or gestalt, one of the distortions or  forms, perhaps, that Rubek created round the naked figure of Irene.  Ibsen once wrote that it was the struggle for freedom, not the attainment of it,that was the thing to work for.  One never could attain it: it is the naked Irene that could be envisaged but never possessed.  In each play Ibsen depicted a form of spiritual imprisonment, constriction, against which the free spirit struggled for liberation. 

            However, there is a cruel paradox: the only way we glimpse this idea of freedom is through its struggle against its imprisonment.  We cannot see it "in itself' for to show this we ourselves would have to be free of all cultural definition: and that is impossible.  The rebel is defined by the world he or she rebels against and thus becomes another, incomplete part, only, of the unattained Whole.

In The Ibsen Cycle, in a footnote (p. 176)  I quote Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization." 
            Marcuse describes the dilemma of the artist that, I think, sums up the situation of When We Dead Awaken:

Art aestheticallyt shapes the memory "of the liberation that failed, of the promise that was betrayed.  Under the rules ofthe performance principle, art opposes to institutionalizedrepression the 'image of man as a free subject,' but in a state of unfreedom art can sustain the image of freedom only in the negation of unfreedom.  Since the awakening of the consciousness of freedom, there is no genuine work of art that does not reveal the archetypal content: the negation of unfreedom.  As aesthetic phenomenon, the critical function of art to form vitiates the negation of unfreedom in art.  Aristotle's proposition of the cathartic effect of art epitomizes the dual function of art: both to oppose and to reconcile, both to indict and acquit: both to recall the repressed and to repress it again - purified.

            The honest adequate artist, then, has to betray the image of a free humanity because she or he can let us be aware of it only through its struggle against unfreedom (in each of the plays in the Cycle).  That is, a play written about the totally free, unconditioned human spirit cannot yet, if ever, be written. 

            In this play the dialogue circles round and round this dilemma: of the inevitable betrayal, by art, of the ideal of absolute freedom.  Yet the artist is one of the few who also is faithful to this ideal, who tries to reveal it in a form of spiritual strip-tease.  In each play of the Cycle, the only way we could glimpse this freedom was by seeing the demolition of a form of unfreedom.

            I mentioned in the last class how, in these last four plays, there is dramatized a struggle within human language itself: a struggle to establish the dominant language, pragmatic or mythopoetic of the plays.  This is the equivalent of struggling to make our human reality also a ‘numinous’ one, filled with spirit as well as with material fact.
This leads to a dramatic method that puts the language of pragmatic factuality under considerable strain.  Inj When We Dead Awaken this strain is relieved by tilting the language, the characters and the vertical action of the play more decisively over to metaphor and symbol.  This has been the intended terminus of the Cycle from the beginning: and When We Dead Awaken gains credibility with us because of the great imaginative and conscientious journey that has brought us, station by station, to this place.