Lecture Notes
Europe and the new nationalism

Cultural Nationalism

Cultural nationalism insisted a people arrived at its true identity when it was able to achieve self-determination by throwing off foreign rule or occupation and by digging deep into its own cultural-spiritual ‘roots’. Enlightenment's emphasis, earlier, on rational, universal values was replaced by a pursuit of national, racial distinctions in cultural history: in art, music, folk-song, folklore. The urge to revive a 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. From the renaissance to the 18th century, a poet, musician or painter looked to other cultures 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 the universal model throughout Europe; especially in Germany whose theatre reformed itself on French 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 rules 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.

European peoples living under foreign domination sought to achieve cultural independence and to recreate their own cultural heritage. This included reviving old customs, dress, language forms and even resurrecting old pagan heroes and gods. In Ibsen's day the capital of Norway was Christiania but when Norway became independent from Sweden it restored the capital’s former pagan name, Oslo. Ibsen named his son after the Viking hero, Sigurd just as Richard Wagner named his son Siegfried. Much Romantic nationalism sought to raise the dead, to bring back national traditions and customs banished by Christianity. Europe in the nineteenth century conducted a global séance: a raising of the ghosts of the cultural past. At this time the rationalist ideas of Tom Paine synthesize with the antithetical belief of Edmund Burke’ in the living presence of the past.

Nationalism required artists to search into their cultural roots. It encouraged the creation of national theaters throughout Europe. A statue of Ibsen (along with Bjørnson) stands outside the Norwegian National Theater in Oslo. Drama and opera, with the other arts, were created to sustain the national identities of peoples. In the theaters, nationalist-historical plays and operas had to compete with fashionable well-made-plays from Paris. Ibsen, directing Parisian well-made plays as artistic director of the Christiania National Theater complained his job resembled performing daily abortions. His own, unsuccessful, historical dramas were explorations of layers of his audience's collective identity; an 'archaeology' of the Norwegian psyche's cultural evolution. At this time, Ibsen wrote reviews and essays defending the use of ancient myth in modern literature and of the continuation of the cultural/spiritual past from origins to the present day. From the renaissance period dramatized in Lady Inger of Østraat through the medieval period of The Feast at Solhoug down to the Viking 'bedrock' of The Vikings at Helgeland, these plays are exercises in historical and cultural identity; analyses of the Norwegian consciousness through its formative stages. It remained Ibsen's subject to the end of his career.

Reaching back into the national past greatly expanded and deepened a 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 an aesthetically convincing image of its own past identity. One message was the reproach: “You were heroic once, and should be again;"” - a theme of Ibsen’s Love’s Comedy, much qualified by that play's highly satiric account of its modern characters capacity for resurrecting its heroic heritage.Heroic posing on stage offered a form of escapism from the banality of modern everyday life; Love's Comedy sets out the 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. His first poems were 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 he wrote the plays that made him famous throughout the world, Ibsen lived in exile.

Hegel and the philosophy of self-determination.

Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit/ Mind (Geist) describes a process whereby modern consciousness over time gradually acquired ever more adequate levels of self-consciousness as it dialectically proceeded from origins to the present. 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 reality. As we do so, we simultaneously evolve our own 'minds' (our ‘selves’) and our knowledge of the ‘world out there' - a mutual evolution. 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 collective human history but which each individual must recapitulate individually.

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 divine and human justice evolves in the trilogy as the human actors (and their gods?)suffer progressively higher agons, recognizing that “through suffering we learn"” (pathei mathon). In the third play, The Eumenides the drama of heroic and royal families in Aeschylus was transferred, as collective consciouisness, to every Athenian man and woman: a heritage each 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-spiritin which this whole historical-cultural process has taken place as our communal heritage. It is ‘there’ to be recovered by each one of us individually. 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 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 evolution 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's philosophy endorses Edmund Burke’s insistence upon tradition, the living presence of the Past; but 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 creates the conditions for one's own free identity. Not 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 Concept waiting for us to discover
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.. We 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 uncovers and overcomes inadequacies in human ideas about the world and ourselves. The motive behind this effort is the urge to truth and freedom.
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 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 and that nothing should stand in the way of their adequate realization. This idea revolutionizes dramatic art: its concepts of scene, character, action, dialogue. A new drama emerged, preceding Hegel, with Friedrich Schiller, 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 false structure of reality that frustrates our self-determination. Scenes of authority such as palaces and thrones no longer are sites of Order but of repression. Opposing this repression makes a dramatic character a rebel, revolutionary or criminal. The rhetorical affirmation of absolutes now changes to radical questioning.. Every aspect of the human condition is rendered fundamentally uncertain. This leads to a new, analytic form of dramatic dialog: of hesitations, pauses; of probing, unfinished sentences, silence -: all the now familiar armory of modern drama.

The new dramatic method ushered in by Romantic drama can be seen in the contrast in the design of sets and costumes. Compare the single location and the ornate neo-classical costumes that enforced a static declamatory stance required for the actors in e.g. Phèdre: with the multiple scenes and more ‘natural’, looser, freer costumes of Romantic actors. These are required for the indecorous, physically violent actions of, for example, Don Carlos. This reflects the new dynamics of 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, for example, required actors to reveal a process of continuous change of consciousness they are undergoing in the course of the play.

Two 19th. century developments:

(a) National -cultural self-determination; the self is extended as a historical/cultural self and the origin of contemporary ideas of national ‘self-determination’. This is the age of nationalism in politics and the arts - with the creation of national theatres throughout Europe.

(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 the 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.