• 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 XIII: John Gabriel Borkman

      John Gabriel Borkman demonstrates the essential Ibsen method: the small cast of characters (seven plus the maid) each of whom is in direct conflict with each of the others.  Borkman will be directly worked upon and affected by Frida, her father, Mrs. Wilton, Erhart, Gunnhild, Ella and they in turn will be directly affected by each other.  It is a very intricate lattice of urgent interrelationships.  Behind the conflict itself stands a collision of forces, of ideas of life.  The characters take on larger-than-life archetypal force, dividing into two groups of three older and three younger figures.  Both trios consists of two women 'flanking' a male figure. .

       As usual, there is a struggle to establish the dominant language of the play.  In earlier plays such as Pillars of Society and A Doll House, the metaphoric language of an alternative spiritual dimension’ combats the values of the material world so that a Nora Helmer must be shaken into perceiving imperitives beyond the material values of the dream house.  Beginning by celebrating the material world: Christmas, the gifts, the tree, the feasting, the new job and new salary, the macaroons; the play reveals this material world to be more and more illusory while another world, of the spirit, emerges to shatter the doll house altogether.

      With the last four plays of the Cycle the spiritual dimension increasingly dominates the action.  John Gabriel Borkman in the past attempted to possess the material world; to control its wealth, its material resources, to transform the material world.: This past story of the play, now revisited by a radically transformed consciousness, closely resembles the story of Bernick in The Pillars of Society.  Having failed and lost this material world utterly Borkman concludes by at last grasping its spiritual essence in his declaration of love to that lost world.  Similarly, the other, older characters have lost the worldly objects of their dreams and ambitions: social honor and glory for Gunhild; passion and love for Ella; literary fame for Foldal.  By linking these to Borkman and his materialist project, they have lost them utterly in ‘reality’ but now possess them even more fiercely in the spirit, as ideas that still violently animate them. 

         The plot of the play is linear, driving logically forward and resurrecting a past with distinctly archetypal overtones. Details include the contest of the twin sisters for Borkman; Borkman's sacrificing love (Ella) for power over the spirits of the minerals in the earth; betrayal of Borkman by his friend, (Hinkel), his long confinement, release and withdrawal from the word: and the younger generation breaking free from the ghostly but lethally cold dialectic of the elders (a ‘dance of death’) and fleeing South to warmth and life.   The youthful trajectory is ‘horizontal’ from the cold space of the North to the south to life and sensuality. This“younger trio’- Mrs. Wilton, Frida and Erhart, a very flexible ménage a trois - enter and explore the natural world not to possess and dominate it as Borkman attempted but to experience and enjoy the world on is own fluid terms. .The elder trio's trajectory is vertical, ascending to death or renunciation. (These are the dulal trajectories of all these final plays).  

     To these events a cluster of mythic details is joined: of a man making a pact with underworld powers, of magic treasures hidden in the earth imploring release, of the earth suffering from Borkman's betrayal of Ella's love: and behind the human figures can be glimpsed figures from Scandinavian mythology: Odin, who sacrificed love for gold;  Alberich (Hinkel) who betrayed him; of the young god (Erhart-Baldr) who will 'redeem' the world (in Gunnhild's manic imagination); and the strange 'earth-goddess' quality of Mrs. Wilton whose entry momentarily introduces a ‘green world’ to the bleak set..  [Note the subtle detail of the lamp placed in the garden-room on her entrance: the stage is suddenly suffused with green - an effect only apparent in production.]

       Indicating these enlarging dimensions in Ibsen's work is a tricky but worthwhile problem to solve.  John Gabriel Borkman draws upon details of the same story as Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle;  however, Wagner sets his gods, goddesses, giants, dwarfs and heroes and heroines directly into his huge mythic pantomine.  Ibsen 'infiltrates' his similarly huge archetypal drama into his realistic text.  Ibsen’s characters  inhabit plausible living rooms with functional furniture; they wear contemporary clothes as they sit down or stand; speak to each other unaware of an audience; do not launch into soliloquies or ‘asides’; act under the restraints of realist mimesis. We have to discover the poetry of this art. There is a distinct imagery to John Gabriel Borkman both verbal and visual.  At the end of the play for example, when the younger trio ‘escapes  to the south to ‘'life' their action brings to life the faded pastoral scene of Borkman’s study: an action anticipated in Mrs. Wilton's summoning of the green world with her entrance in Act One.. 

            The time is winter: in the landscape and in the psyches of the characters, where passions are long preserved in a long hibernation of the emotions; of a snow covered landscape, a dead tree and distant snow peaks in the moonlight.  (Edvard Munch called it the best painting of winter: he made designs for the play: and painted a famous work, ‘Starry Night’ deriving from the play) . In Act One there is driving snow in the background while the sisters battle it out over the possession of young Erhart, resuming the quarrel that was fought over Erhart’s father. This is a metallic play: of the iron ore buried in the earth and brought into the light by Borkman;  Other metallic referenceds include: the opejning and closing act sleigh bells, the hammers on piano wires; the secret metallic music Borkman hears coming from the mines.  These are reminiscent of the metallic sounds from Alberiich’s realm in Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold - an opera that very closely resembles Ibsen’s play; (as characters and themes of Die Walküre resemble The MasterBuilder)  Sleigh bells open the play and, at the end, announce the departure of Mrs. Wilton, Erhart and Frida for the south.

     Apart from powerful ‘light-darkness stage metaphors, especially in Acts II and IV.the dialogue is notably rich with imagery which continually allows the supertext to infiltrate the spoken text..  One such example of is the following declaration by Gunhild:

            Erhart must - above all else - see that he will come to shine so high and so widely, that no-one in this land will ever glimpse the shadow his father cast over me - and over my son.

            (Erhart får først og fremst se til at han komme til å lyse så høyt og så vidt utover at ikke noe menneske i landet lenger skimtet den skyggen som hans far kastet over meg - og over min sønn.)

            To paraphrase this in ‘normally motivated speech, Gunhild would have said: “Erhart has a duty to restore the name of Borkman which his father disgraced.” The fact that Ibsen does not write this signifies he wants his characters to have the language of more than normal, everyday identities.  Gunhild’s speech describes Erhart as if he were a young god of light, like Baldr, who will ‘shine’ and dispel the darkness and shadows cast  all over the land by his father. All the major characters speak in this way: and we either have to decide they are all megalomaniacs with bizarre speech habits or that Ibsen is creating a drama of more than everyday realism. 

We should let the imagery of the dialogue work for us instead of eliminating it to give the characters contemporary colloquiality.  If you do the latter, the play looks stagy because Ibsen created a scaffolding to carry this weight of meaning.  What we need is a performing style that can render this heightened reallism.  Just as one cannot ‘perform Greek or Elizabethan drama as if it were modern slice of life so Ibsen requires us to find an appropriate performative method.  The characters in John Gabriel Borkman have to carry more metaphoric weight than in most ‘realistic’ drama and it is all the better if this makes them seem ‘strange’; it provides an inbuilt alienation effect – which is most likely what Ibsen is after. To the person objecting this is not like his or her experience of life George Shaw observed that a horse to make the same objection.

     The ‘rhythm’ of the play is built around a classic four-act structure where the conflicts of each act arrive at an anagnorisis, a peripety and an emphatic curtain’  Each act, therefore, is an entity with its own shape and rhythm.  The play also is based on two intersecting dramatic ‘arcs: (a) the older trio, Ella, Gunhild, Borkman, and (b) the younger trio, Mrs. Wilton. Frida and Erhart.   Each has its own ‘agenda., Erhart serving as the mediating role.  In a production, each trio is important.  Erhart, for example, must be someone three women plausibly are fighting over, while a fourth is waiting for her turn.   Dim Erharts who do not “shine so brightly”will not do.   Mrs. Wilton is a magnetic, sensual counter-weight to the three elders, her presence evoking a southern earth deity.  Recalling the Act II tapestries, even Frida Foldal with her music resembles an attendant nymph to Mrs. Wilton.

    John Gabriel Borkman is rooted in the structure handed down from Greek drama where we encounter these dimensions of action:

1. The individual and his or her ‘life principle’ or reason for being.
2. The relation of the sexes: man-woman; lovers; husband wife
3. The family: parents, children, siblings
4. Social realm: social, political identities;  law, finance; social morality, crime and punishment
5. Historical realm (e.g. late 19th. century industrial capitalism controlling natural realm; archetypes from the past life of our species.
6. The natural realm: above and beneath the earth; seasons, times of day and night.
7. The ‘metaphysical’, dimensions of the realism.

           The play enacts conflicts on all these levels in which the agons and emotions of individual characters’ urge larger dimensions of significance into expression.  The characters are created to embody these larger meanings so that we look ‘beyond’ the individuals and their conflicts to the larger, universal, shadows they cast. As in Greek drama, the characters live intensively and extensively n the dimension of Time, of the presence of a living, past determining actions in the present.  .  John Gabriel Borkman carries a huge cultural cargo made up of our human past 

THE PLAY ACT BY ACT

ACT I.

  . At first, the scene is of tense waiting.  The elders are shown waiting for some desired appearance which is  frustrated. Gunhild, in Act One, waits in agony for Erhart and, after joyfully believing he has aarrived only encounters Mrs. Wilton.     Borkman, in Act II, waits for the penitent ‘delegation’arriving to reinstate him, only to encounter Foldal.  Ella, Gunhild and Borkman wait for Erhart's decision in Act Three, only to be rejected for Mrs. Wilton.  In Act One, there will be sounds of footsteps above, though probably very ‘muted’ until they are startlingly referred to, reminding the audience they have been hearing this all the time .  The first sound we register, probably, is the metallic sound of sleighbells.  Ibsen immediately sets up a mystery for the audience:  Who is the mysterious visitor whom Gunhild seems surprised to know is arriving?  When the mysterious lady arrives, the same age as Gunhild, she greets Gunhild by name and we soon guess they are sisters.  Yet their hostility is palpable: they circle round each otherlike two angry tigresses. It obviously is a long-standing hatred that does not even need explaining.  We, the audience, are made into fascinated spectators, feeling the tension, the mystery and the conflict

            It is quickly apparent their conflict is an ancient one: over John Gabriel Borkman. Gunhild seems to have lived in the same house as Borkman for eight years without once setting eyes on him: something she seems to think quite normal.  She is similar to the implacably unforgiving  Miss Havisham from Dickens’ Great Expectations.   Through Ella's astonishment we see how manic this is. The ‘great man’ is still their obsession, and we learn how he brought disgrace and ruin to his family and to countless others.  Much of the act is a passionate retrospection of this tragic past and its effect on the two women whose fifferent reactionsclearly distinguish their natures. At one point, in a brilliant theatrical stroke, Ella refers to the sound of footsteps above.  The audience, as we mentioned, suddenly is ‘reminded’ of a sound they have been hearing and probably had dismissed. Gunhild reveals it is the ‘sick wolf’ Borkman, pacing up and down endlessly above - as he would have learned to have done in his long years in jail. The sisters then transfer their quarrel to another male, Borkman’s son, Erhart:.  Each woman has a different claim on him, a different agenda for him.  The situation for Erhart seems particularly bleak if these are to control his destiny. 

     But then there is a thematically astonishing interruption: a knock on the door and Mrs. Wilton enters: young, seductive, playful and mischievous: another dimension of life altogether. And on her entrance a lamp is placed in the garden room.  There is no practical or plot reason for this but there is a powerful metaphoric one; now the stage suddenly reveals a whole ‘green world’ behind the gray sitting room. Mrs. Wilton exudes the aura of Nature, sexuality, life; the polar opposite of the Borkman world.  She is followed by Erhart, young, full of energy and joy-of life.  These two are the future contrasting with the elders trapped in the tragic past.  Like  southern deity Mrs. Wilton  suggests magic, spells, witchcraft.    She predicts she will cast a spell on Erhart, that he will grab his hat and follow her - and he so does so, as if under her spell.  It is passed off as ‘playful’ but, in the theatre the mythic suggestion sticks.    When Mrs. Wilton leaves the twin sisters resume their sterile quarrel over Erhart and each anounces her project of controlling his destiny, bringing him into their dance of death.  .

ACT II

       The faded pastoral tapestries on the walls of hunting scenes, ‘shepherds and shepherdesses,’ evoke a lost, sensuously richer world of the south.  The concealed tapestry door is waiting for a remarkable ‘epiphany’ later. The ‘Empire Style furniture supplies a ‘Napoleonic' implication suitable to Borkman's imperious, dignified exile from the society he sought to dominate. His dialogue expresses an inner vision: of the mines, the music of the metals longing to be liberated, which he attempts to impress upn three characters: Frida, Vilhelm and Ella in succession.  The imagery progressively deepens and expands, incrementally filled with his vision but also more and more filled with his guilt, his actions against others.  To Frida he related a more or less ‘innocent’ version; the miner’s son hearing the music of the metal ores that yearned to be ‘liberated’.When Frida leaves, Borkman stands in lonely, silent solitude, and, at the knock on the door, strikes an impressive Napoleonic pose which he promptly drops when he sees it is ‘only’ Foldal.

     Foldal is a superb theatrical foil to Borkman, functioning somewhat like the Fool in King Lear - a comic-pathetic parody of Borkman’s tragedy. Foldal most endangers Borkman’s tragic status, a fascinating absurdist ‘ dimension Ibsen inserts into his play.  Llike Ulrik Brendel in Rosmersholm) this comic figure counterpoints the situation of the tragic characters.  With Foldal the story of Borkman’s past now takes on grimmer themes: of the betrayal of friendship by Hinkel, of being ruined in the public eye and sent to prison.  And the cause, we learn, was over a woman.  Repeating itself as farce, a quarrel over Woman now causes Borkman and Foldal violently to clash over the idea of a ‘pure Woman’as Borkman imperiously banishes Foldal from his life.

     When Foldal leaves, Borkman turns down the lamp and the room is in semi-darkness.  Presumably, after losing Foldal, Borkman is now doomed to total solitude until death. But there is another knock and this time the hidden tapestry door opens for the first time and Ella emerges from the faded pastoral landscape with its shepherd and shepherdesses. She carries a candle and so would at first seem to be a moving light in the darkness, like something emerging out of Borkman’s own memory.  The stage direction is startling: in the darkened room, a space suddenly opens up and a light appears, illuminating a figure that seems to emerge from the landscape.  Those background tapestries now reveal their meaning of lost innocence and love as Ella accuses Borkman, of killing the capacity for love in her by his betrayal.'   Her language, like that of the other characters, is filled with metaphors that imply larger than everyday life events to describe a global devastation, as if Ella were some force of Nature that has been destroyed.  The ‘reach’ and ‘heft’ of the language forces us to see the drama in these archetypal terms and to see Borkman’s crime as enormous, even cosmic:

ELLA:  You are the one that sinned.  You caused the death of all my human joy…
all my joy as a woman.  Since that time, when your image began to fade for me,
I’ve lived my life as if I were under a total eclipse of the sun.  Year after year it became harder – and finally it was impossible – for me to love any living creature.
Not human, nor animals, nor plants….

     Ella, however, prompts Borkman to declare the perverse love he feels for the metals and the mines. He describes his fatal venture (embezzlement)  as a form of aerial journey, a balloon voyaging over uncharted oceans recalling the boldest events of the age – the audacious balloon voyages of the nineteenth century.  Ella and Borkman recreate what might have been: her capacity for love, his for power.  The effect on the audience is of contemplating a huge desolation.  Gunhild suddenly erupts into the scene from below and departs impelling Borkman for the first time in eight years to descend to her realm.

            The play, in fact, is built around a sequence of unprecedented actions since Borkman’s disgrace: Ella's’ first ever visit to Gunhild; her first ever visit to Borkman; Gunhild’s first ever invasion of Borkman’s salon; his first ever descent and venture outside for the ascent up the hillside.  And the younger trio, Mrs. Wilton, Frida and Erhart will make their unprecedented exit from this world.  The effect is a whirl of movement generated from a condition of stasis.

            ACT III is built around two major actions.  The first is Borkman’s exoneration of himself against Gunhild’s onslaught: the second, the attempt of all three ghostly figures and their duel with Erhart and Mrs Wilton; between the magnetic pull of the life force of Mrs. Wilton on one side, and the deadly ‘spiritual’ allegiances urged by the older trio, Ella, Gunhild and Borkman.  It is set up as a struggle for Erhart’s body and soul, and the elder trio are somewhat like vampires craving the life-blood of the living young man.  Their deadly temptations are to filial Love (Ella) to family Honor (Gunhild) and to future Power, (Borkman).  When Erhart rejects all three and chooses Mrs. Wilton, the conflict of the play is virtually over. 

     Act Four, therefore, is a magnificent Epilogue, a departure by the major characters into the snow filled landscape, one group to the south and warmth, to a future of pure, unprincipled joy of life; the other, elderly group to the cold height and a final reckoning with the past..  John Gabriel breaks free of his material prison, the house, and affirms the spiritual core of his earlier materialist ambitions.  The stage set now changes, astonishingly (the only such on-stage mid-act scene change in the Cycle) as the house front gives way to a “wilder and wider” landscape which Ella and Borkman climb to return to the scene of their past dreams and ambitions: now signified by a dead tree and a landscape buried under snow.  We now glimpse Borkman at its best. His large-spirited but kindly amusement at the comic Foldal is able to take in the ironies of that man’s situation (Foldal himself does not see them) in a kind of final expansive vision of the scheme of things. He and Ella now speak an almost totally spiritual language (as Irene and Rubk will in W.W.D.A.).  They become virtually the voices of the Will to Power (Borkman) and of violated Nature and Love, (Ella).   Borkman’s farewell speech to the spirits of the mines the mines, too have now dematerialized into spirit) is a magnificent summation of Borkman's perverse career on whose tragic consequences Ella passes judgement and forgiveness.