Lecture Notes
Europe and the new nationalism

Cultural Nationalism

Romantic cultural nationalism proclaimed that a people only arrived at its true identity when it was able to achieve self-determination, not only by throwing off foreign rule or occupation, but also by digging deep into its own cultural-spiritual ‘roots’. Instead of the earlier Enlightenment emphasis on rational, universal values there emerged an insistence on national, racial and cultural distinctions that called for a nationalist art: music, folk-song, folklore, history, the revival of a whole people's unique past, accompanied the nationalist struggles from Ireland to Eastern Europe. Previously, most artists did not think of their art in nationalist terms. A poet, musician or painter, from the renaissance to the 18th century, looked outward to other countries to learn the principles of his or her art. Especially they turned to Italy and to the classics of Rome and Greece. French neoclassicism became a universal model throughout Europe and especially in Germany whose theatre in its early period reformed itself on French neoclassical principles. It was in Germany, however, that the cultural-nationalist reaction was to be felt most strongly. An early version of this was Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy with its rejection of Neoclassical principles and its call for an art more suitable to the nature of German culture and its needs. To this end, also, the brothers Grimm published their Teutonic Mythology (1835) with its exhaustive exploration of the legends, cults, beliefs of the Germanic people.

Other European peoples living under cultural domination sought to break free, to achieve independence and to recreate their own cultural heritage. This included reviving old customs, dress, language forms; resurrecting old pagan gods and goddesses. In Ibsen's day the capital of Norway was Christiania. But when Norway broke free from Sweden it restored the capital’s former pagan name, Oslo. Ibsen named his son after the pagan Viking hero, Sigurd - the same hero after whom Richard Wagner named his son, Siegfried. Much Romantic nationalism sought to raise the dead, to bring back national traditions and customs wrongly banished by Christianity. The nineteenth century was the time of a global séance: a raising of the ghosts of the cultural past. This is the moment when the rationalist ideas of Tom Paine synthesize with Edmund Burke’s idea of the living presence of the past. It was the period of Karl Marx and also of Madame Blavatsky..

To serve the cause of nationalism, artists sought out their own cultural roots. Peer Gynt is a hero of folk-tale resurrected by Ibsen.. Nationalism encouraged the creation of National Theaters all over Europe, including Norway. A statue of Ibsen stands outside the Norwegian National Theater in Oslo. Drama and opera, along with the other arts, were created to sustain the national identities of peoples. Plays and operas put on in these theaters often were historical costume dramas that had to compete with fashionable well-made-plays from Paris. Ibsen, directing well-made plays as artistic director of the Christiania National Theater complained his job resembled performing daily abortions. His historical and 'national' dramas were explorations of deeper layers of his audience's collective identity than the Parisian imports permitted. They were less a means of ingratiation with his public (which preferred the Parisian fare) than an 'archaeological' exploration of the Norwegian psyche's evolution. From the renaissance-period Lady Inger of Østraat through the medieval The Feast at Solhoug down to the 'culltural bedrock' of The Vikings at Helgeland these were formally awkward exercises in historical and cultural identity, aesthetic analyses of the Norwegian consciousness through its formative stages.

Reaching back into the national past greatly expanded and deepened the dramatist's subject matter. Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungs is a huge resurrection of the ghosts of German mythology, making the heroic dead walk again on his operatic stage. Cultural revival was a constant theme of the Celtic Twilight in Ireland. Not surprisingly, theaters at this time became concerned with historical accuracy: not only in sets and costumes, but in forms of speech, manners and customs. The aim was to confront the modern audience with a convincing image of its own past identity. One message was the reproach: “you were heroic once, and should be again;"” - a running theme of Ibsen’s Love’s Comedy which, however, is much qualified by that play's highly satiric account of its modern characters. Heroic posing on stage offered a form of escapism from the banality of modern everyday life and Love's Comedy sets out the uncomfortable collision of past and present that is Ibsen's master theme.

Ibsen and Nationalism

As he got older Ibsen seems to have come to a dyspeptic view of the human race and its pretensions. He started out as a revolutionary and his first works were poems in support of the revolutions of 1848. He commented on the suppression of the communards in Paris in 1871, and, like Gustave Flaubert had no love for the new, bourgeois, middle-class culture for which Scribe, Dumas fils, Sardou and Rostand wrote. In 1864,at 36, Ibsen left Norway bankrupt, and a failure. His possessions were publicly auctioned off to pay his debts. He took his wife and son to Italy, where he lived in poverty although he already had written plays that made him Norway's finest dramatist His first work written in exile was the play Brand (1866) is an indictment of modern civilization’s spirit of compromise with its professed spiritual heritage. It was an immense success in Scandinavia (the young Strindberg was bowled over by it) and Ibsen became famous overnight. But he did not return to live in Norway until 1891. For most of the time when he wrote the plays that made him famous throughout the world, Ibsen lived in exile.

Hegel and the philosophy of self-determination.

In Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit the mind(Geist= spirit) evolves via a dialectical process whereby it gradually acquires ever more adequate levels of self-consciousness, each level a 'higher' state of inadequacy as it dialectically proceeds. The work is a 'Science of the Experience of Conciousness'. We continually get a better grip on reality by being progressively forced (often painfully) to adjust our developing concepts to our experience. Experience consists only of concepts,(Begriffen) which are ways the mind grasps (greifen) reality. As we do so, we are simultaneously evolving both our own 'minds' (our ‘selves’) and our knowledge of the ‘world out there' - a mutual evolution. So the increasingly known world, reality, is mind, spirit: it exists for us only as it is rationally grasped. This journey of consciously 'grasping' ever-increasing reality is a dialectical journey that has taken place by means of human history but which each individual must recapitulate in him or herself. Hegel was much influenced by Greek tragedy, and an early version of the dialectic in action can be found in, e.g. Aeschylus’s The Oresteia in which the concept of justice, divine and human, evolves in the trilogy as the human actors (and their gods?)suffer progressively higher agons, recognizing that “through suffering we learn"” (pathei mathon). The drama of heroic and royal families in Aeschylus was transferred, in The Eumenides, to every Athenian man and woman who inherited this cultural history: a heritage they needed to relive and whose process must be grasped. The Phenomenology is a philosophic world-historical succession of dialectical dramas of the intellect. Each one of us is a world-spirit, in which this whole historical-cultural process has taken place as our communal heritage and is ‘there’ to be recovered by each one of us individual. Just as we contain all the earlier phases of our biological evolution, so our earlier cultural history is built into our modern identities.

By knowing more and more of the world 'out there' we liberate latent aspects of ourselves waiting to emerge. By doing so, we also gain freedom and knowledge within the world. We can become the free and fully 'realized' inhabitants of a free and fully realized world. The dimensions of this liberation are individual, social, historical, natural, metaphysical. The extension of Reason into the world is the realization of our human identity. Hegel launches the human spirit into the world, filled with a desire to fulfill itself through self-determination.

Hegel endorsed Edmund Burke’s insistence upon tradition, the living presence of the Past; yet he endorses as emphatically, Thomas Paine’s championship of of every human’s right to free self-determination. Making the world "out there" conform to its unrealized, true identity is to create the conditions for determining one's own free identity. Not genuinely to embark on this journey is to remain in limbo, humanly unrealized. In Peer Gynt it is the Troll condition.

Dialectical drama: Ibsen to Genet

Reality is already a completed project, waiting for us to discover it and ourselves through reason. We are nothing but this striving and evolving spiritual activity. However, 'given reality may fail to realize its 'concept'. This is the ‘revolutionary’ element in Hegel: a society, like an individual, may exist in incomplete form, failing to realize its Concept, its true identity . We can see how close this is to Schiller's assertion: “Culture is to set man free and help him to be equal to his Concept."”
.Dialectical reason discovers, and overcomes, inadequacies and errors in human ideas about the world and about ourselves.
We achieve self-determination by bringing our world and ourselves into accord with truth and freedom. Until then we are not free.
As Individuals, we must 'recover' and claim our adequate human identity both as it has been revealed through history and as it is established by Reason.

The radical implication of this idea is that both my own human identity and the world 'out there' are 'projects' to be realized; that nothing should stand in the way of their adequate realization. This idea profoundly revolutionized dramatic art: its concepts of Scene, Character, Action, Dialogue. A new form of drama emerged of creating dynamically restless individuals aware of the inadequacies both of their own identities and of their environments. True identity is now seen to require ‘overcoming ‘alienation’ - that whole false structure of reality that frustrates our self-determination. Scenes of authority such as palaces, props such as thrones, no longer were sites of Order but of repression. Opposing this repression made a dramatic character a rebel, a revolutionary or a criminal. The earlier dramatic convention of the rhetorical affirmation of absolutes now changed to a radical questioning of traditional values. Such questioning of every aspect of the human condition, of rendering all reality fundamentally uncertain, led to an analytic form of dramatic dialog: of hesitations, pauses; of probing, unfinished sentences, silences: all the now familiar armory of modern dramatic dialog.

A clue to the new dramatic method ushered in by Romantic drama can be seen in the contrast in the design of costume: between the almost immobilizing, ornate neo-classical costumes that enforced the static declamatory stance required for the actors in e.g. Phedre: and the more ‘natural’, looser, freer costumes of Romantic actors suitable to the indecorous, physically violent actions, for example, of Don Carlos. This brought about a whole new kind of acting and theatrical presentation: a new dynamics of modern acting that was to evolve into the naturalistic methods of the modern stage. The rejection of an unquestionable Order from which deviation could only be an aberration, made possible a dramaturgy of evolution within characters during the two or three hours on the stage. Acting Ibsen required actors to reveal a process of continuous change of consciousness they are undergoing in the course of the play. The trajectory of Nora Helmer in A Doll House is a clear example of this process and the acting method it requires.

Two 19th. century developments:

(a) National -cultural self-determination; the Self extended as a national or ethnic self: This is the age of nationalism in politics and the arts - with the creation of National Theatres all over Europe and the origin of contemporary ideas of national ‘self-determination’.
(b) Individual self-determination. To reject everything in the world that stands in the way of one's self-determination, as Brand explicitly avows in Act II of Brand. This means not narrowing down one's idea of one's identity, but opening it up. Brand could be a dramatic illustration of Jean-Paul Sartre's definition of existentialism:

Not only is man what he conceives himself to be:but he is also only what he wills himself to be, after this first thrust towards existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.