• 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 VII: Introduction to the Cycle (The Ibsen Cycle: pp.98-186) Also:      "Ibsen's Cycle as Hegelian Tragedy"

          As a young boy, Ibsen created a puppet theater and performed conjuring shows to which neighbors were invited.  It is said that he performed magic tricks that amazed the spectators who did not know that Ibsen had paid his brother to hide in a chest to make the appropriate magic responses.  Ibsen’s theater always remained an occult space where the powers are made manifest.  His problem, in the Realists Cycle, was how, in an action plausibly of our modern world, to get the right powers into the right space at the right time.  The plays have more the aspect of séances than of ‘polemics: they are more concerned to search out powers buried into our consciousnesses than to call for reformist action in society.

  Ibsen was particularly unimpressed by John Stuart Mill.  He wrote to Georg Brandes in 1871: "I shall never agree to making liberty synonymous with political liberty.  What you call liberty I call liberties; and what I call the struggle for liberty is nothing but the constant, living assimilation of the idea of freedom."  Implied, here, is the Hegelian theme of the expanding concept of freedom as it dialectically evolves, stage by stage; where  each play in the Cycle 'inherits' the exploration and conclusion of its predecessor. 

     To effect an authentic shift in the audience's consciousness each play must convincingly impel to its limits the rigor of the play's realist dialectic.    The dialectic must be worked through as rigorously as a philosophic argument.  This prevents the dramatist from breaking through the fourth wall of the performance and directly addressing the audience. That would require another aesthetic altogether, more suited to didactic performance such as Bertolt Brecht was to devise.   The plays of the Cycle, therefore, share the strictly delimited, autonomous nature of classic tragic drama.

        In Dialectic of Enlightenment  Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer write:

          The work of art still has something in common with
          enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area which
          is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and
          in which special laws apply.  Just as the ceremony of the 
          magician first of all marked out the limits of the area where
          the sacred powers were to come into play, so every work of
          art describes its own circumference which closes it off from
          actuality.  This very renunciation of influence, which
          distinguishes art from magical sympathy, retains the magic
          heritage all the more securely.... It is in the nature of the work
          of art, or aesthetic semblance, to be what the new terrifying
          occurrence became in the primitive's magic: the appearance of
          the whole in the particular.  In the work of art that duplication
          still occurs by which the thing appeared as spiritual, as the
          expression of mana.  This constitutes its aura.  As an expression
          of totality, art lays claim to the absolute.

            The plays that Ibsen wrote for reading: Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, are fundamentally different from the plays of the Realist Cycle created for performance on stage.  The readers' plays are expansive, loosely constructed, with diversely located scenes as in real life, encompassing many years and with large and extremely various casts of characters. Though we imaginatively 'see' the events as we read, we do not imagine them as 'theatre' under the restrictions of dramatic performance, but as real life.  If the texts are transposed to the stage they have to be translated into performative texts where we submit to the self-enclosed, controlled terms of the stage.   These rearrangements of the texts usually are successful as theatre but a totally new dimension, radically changing our consciousness of  the texts, now has taken place.

     The method Ibsen devised for the Realist Cycle is not ‘realistic’ in the manner of the readers' plays. Even if we are reading the texts and not seeing them performed we now read them as ideal performances - their imagined reality is the theatre stage.  Ibsen's realist stage space is self-enclosed, occult ground in the way Adorno and Horkheimer described..  Behind the proscenium arch, separated from the audience within that space, the presences are manifested beneath the surface appearances.  The actors are engaged in an artistic ritual quite unlike the reproduction of everyday reality. 

Imagine a production of e.g. Ghosts that began with 'warm up' exercises by the actors in front of the audience as the set is being assembled, the actors perhaps trying out with each other some of the big speeches or exchanges from all the acts.   So far, they are sharing in‘our’ reality of time and space.  Then, black-out and the performance begins.  The audience now experiences the difference between the arbitrary, unshaped time of the warm up and the strictly controlled aesthetic time of the piece once it commences.  Concert audiences experience this when the orchestra 'tunes up' before the performance.  When the tuning stops the audience tensely waits for the silence to be broken and the piece to take off, bringing into being a totally different, self-enclosed sequence of time.  We have entered a consequential shaping of time demanding a different order of attention.  We all have experienced having that attention momentarily disturbed [these days by impertinent pagers and cellphones] and then trying to get our attention back into the closed temporal structure of the musical piece.

            The 12-play Cycle creates both a version (not a facsimile) of our contemporary world and at the same time a gathering place for the ghosts of our cultural past.  This idea of ghosts repossessing the present is as old as literature and as new as modernism.  It is found in Homer’s The Odyssey (the ‘Book of the Dead’) The Greek tragedians recycled the old myths, heroes and gods, summoning them to appear on the stage in their contemporary festival of Dionysos, creating a 'mutual interrogation' between mythic past and political present.   The medieval Mystery Plays recycled biblical archetypes within the images of the contemporary medieval world.

The Church’s liturgical year made the past an ever-recurring present.  In Western art, biblical and pagan mythological subjects and figures are shown in the dress and scenes of the artist’s own place and time.  The archetypal recollection I claim for Ibsen, therefore, is a method central toWestern art – and most likely to all art. .Hegel, suggested the modern poet was now liberated to use all the forms of the past that once followed each other sequentially through history.  By liberating himself from past systems of thought, the modern artist can call on them all with equal freedom, no longer bound by their particular perspectives. [Cf.The Ibsen Cycle. P.65)   The modernisms of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound followed Ibsen’s example.

Characters and their Worlds in the Cycle

          Romanticism’s consciousness of the instability of identity replaced the problem of Integrity – the dilemma of classic tragedy - with that of Authenticity. Both Romantic drama and the dramas of Ibsen are plays of self-annihilation. “To be yourself is to slay yourself”" the Button Molder tells Peer Gynt.  The negative dialectics of the plays requires a gradual dissolution of the old, inauthentic self and a birth of the new.  In A Doll House, to ciote the most well-known case, Nora Helmer embarks on a journey that gradually undermines both her identity and that of the world she inhabits as the necessary stages towards a new identity, still awaiting her at the play's end. The 'slaying' of her old self is the death, also, of the world view the Helmer home epitomized.  Hegel describes the dialectic process that undermines an entire cultural order iby means of a sstriking metaphor::

    Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms.  The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change.  The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.

                A Doll House, it is true, speeds up this dialectic process: that is what happens when dialectics takes on the form of dramatic art.  As the dialectic works its way play by play through the Cycle one world-view after another crumbles and collapses and with each collapse there is no going back.  The world-view of A Doll House can not be revisited by the characters of the next play, Ghosts.  Furthermore, the Nora of Act II cannot return to the condition of Act I and is moving irrevocably to the irreversible condition of Act III.  The dynamic of the Cycle is a continuously corrosive one, simultaneously destroying the reality it is in the process of presenting..  The negative dialectics of the Cycle is unusual in drama. In Chekhovian realism, for example, circumstances may change around the characters, but the characters do not fundamentally change nor do the assumptions that produced those circumstances. It is not impossible to imagine characters of The Cherry Orchard inhabiting the same stage as those of the Three Sisters or of Uncle Vanya. 

But the characters of The Wild Duck or Rosmersholm or The Lady from the Sea could not inhabit each others’ worlds nor the worlds of Ghosts or A Doll House.  Each is enclosed in his or her dissolving world.  The restless ‘spirit’ that creates each of those worlds then moves on to create another, altogether different one. Each Ibsen play has its own distinct milieu, imagery and vocabulary, for each is a differently imagined world.  On a retrospective glance back from the ‘Epilogue’,When We Dead Awaken (which opens with an account of the stations on a long train journey) we can see what an extraordinarily sequence of worlds have been brought into being by the journey.

            In The Ibsen Cycle I claim that the sequence of twelve plays divides into three groups of four: three tetralogies, in fact, as at the festival of Dionysos in classical Athens. . Ibsen’s own immersion in classical culture (evident in Emperor and Galilean) should allow us to consider this parallel as intended.  Though I claim the model for Ibsen’s project in the Cycle is Hegel’s procedure in the Phenomenology, Ibsen adapts that procedure for his own aesthetic purposes.  The parallels between the Cycle’s sequence of plays and the dialectical sequence of the Phenomenology seem to me to be unarguable.[cf. The Ibsen Cycle pp.38-41]. 

       Whether or not he employs the Hegelian sequence for Hegelian purposes is something that might be important for a student of philosophy: it is less important for the student of literature and drama. Ibsen lived at a later period of world history than Hegel and very likely judged the sequence of phases of the cultural past differently, using the same examples to arrive at different conclusions for each phase. My main focus is on Ibsen’s plays as works of theatric art. If we follow Ibsen’s own injunction to see the plays as a Cycle, with mutual connections between the plays – something Ibsen interpreters have been reluctant to do – we already will be making a radical departure from established Ibsen interpretation.   Knowing the Hegelian parallels can clarify much of the Cycle’s structure and dialectical procedure.    It will help us to see a rational basis for the Ibsen's twin strategies of dialectical subversion and archetypal recollection that, I claim, the plays are performing.  It will not substitute for close and imaginative reading of the plays themselves.

     Hegel’s sequence of dialectical ‘dramas’ divides into three major sections: the Hellenic-Roman world,  Christian and post-Christian Europe, and the modern ‘Germanic’ world.  The Cycle reflects the same triadic structure.(cf. The Ibsen Cycle, 38-40). Greek themes and details haunt the first four plays’; Christian themes shape the next four; Germanic-Scandinavian’ myth and legend textures the final group.  Each of the three groups opens with a startling and consequential visitor: the ‘Hellenic’ Lona Hessel; the ‘Christian’ Gregers Werle; the Nordic’ Hilde Wangel. [These startling claims will be explored in the analyses of the plays].   The Realist Cycle, then, as well as being a rich and complexly detailed portrait of the modern world, is a great gathering of the ghosts of the past.  Whether the Cycle faithfully accords with Hegel’s intentions is something I am primarily concerned with..   

         Unexpected visitors from the past occur in many plays in the Cycle, instigating the dialectical actions.  By far the most consequential, however, are the alarming visitors from the past that invade the oppening plays of each group.  Lona Hessel, in Pillars of Society, launches the Hellenic forces that evolve through A Doll House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People.   Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck introduces the Christian and post-Christian themes of the second group that concludes with Hedda Gabler; Hilda Wangel in The Master Builder, signals the arrival of the ‘Germanic’ themes and myths buried in the third group.   These three visitors most drastically disrupt given reality and transform it.   Lona Hessel’s arrival is perhaps the most far-reaching of all because it initiates the spiritual dialectic of the whole Cycle.  Her name, ‘Lona’ according t the scholar Einar Haugen, “is short for Abelone from Greek Apollonia, i.e. the divine, the one who belongs to the god Apollo (cf. Bernt Stølen,– Norske Døbenavne - Norwegian Baptismal Names)  This Apolline Lonsa arrives accompanied by a Dionysian circus with its animals and indecorous music. The Cycle’s multilayered Realism, therefore, is launched with the blessing of the two gods of theater proclaimed by Friedrich Nietzsche four years earlier in The Birth of Tragedy. (1872)

         Lona Hessel’s outrageous circus entry into the stuffy sewing circle for the Morally Fallen, reminds us that Ibsen’s Cycle is full of vitality and comic high spirits as well as tragic depth.  As we travel the landscape and the townscapes of the Cycle, entering the various houses waiting to explode their suppressed secrets and lies, aspirations or simmering discontents, we encounter one of the richest assemblies of humanity in all drama.  This variegated pilgrimage concludes on the heights of When We Dead Awaken.  Retrospectively, we can see that it proceeded in a sequence with its inner drive and logic, but at the ‘existential’ moment of each play neither its characters nor the audience could be aware of this. 

EXAMPLE OF INTERPRETIVE PROCEDURE(Cf. The Ibsen Cycle: 98-122)
     Pillars of Society, A Doll House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People form the first group of the Cycle.  What evidence is there that these four plays form a distinct group?  Interpretation must demonstrate that any claim made can point to some detail that another, rational person can agree is 'there’ in the text.  The only valid objection would be to show it is not ‘there’.  After establishing that such a detail does exist we can argue as to what it means in itself and when seen in conjunction with other details that are provably ‘there’ in the text.    This is only a beginning but it is a foundation on which we can build later claims. 

         Pillars of Society is a play in which ‘society’ is present on stage in the form of group scenes and the confrontation of a principal character with the group representing a townspeople or community.  This principal character is male, and the action shows a decisive change in the relation between him and the community.  We find these details also apply to another play An Enemy of the People.  With this established, we may rationally proceed to see a significance in the contrast of the titles of the two plays: Samfundets støtter;(Pillars of Society) En folkefiende (An Enemy of the People)  One title emphasizes a conformist communal identity; the other, an individual rebel identity.  We can keep these details in the back of our minds for a later account of the group as a whole.  These two plays also are notably comedic: serious actions that, however, do not have tragic conclusions

         The two other (inner) plays are predominantly domestic in theme and setting and the principal characters are female.  Society, or the community, is not negligible, but it inhabits the backgrounds of the two actions.  These plays are Et dukkehjem, (A Doll House) and Gengangere (Ghosts)  We might see a significance in the fact the two heroines’ names, Nora and Helene are derived from the same (Greek) root – Helen – but that is a detail we can take up later.  We can, however, note here that these two plays have conclusions that can be termed tragic. A pattern {ABBA) emerges that might be completely fortuitous.  Before we claim these four plays form a distinct group with two ‘outer’ and two ‘inner’ plays, and with mutual connections between them, we will need to do more close reading on the details of the individual plays and their mutual connections and, we hope, establish a coherent intention behind any emerging pattern.  This is where I attempt to show in the analyses that follow in the course and as set out in The Ibsen Cycle and Text and Supertext in Ibsen’s Drama.

HEGEL AND IBSEN 

     The Ibsen Cycle develops the thesis that Ibsen employed Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit as a source and model for his own hugely ambitious Realist Cycle, from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken.   I believe the evidence for the claim when honestly faced, is irrefutable..  The claim is not that Ibsen is replicating Hegel’s philosophy in dramatic/aesthetic form; it is possible, even likely, he disagrees with Hegel’s conclusions. Neverthless he follows the audacious structure of The Phenomenology for his own enterprise. This is how artists make use of philosophy, taking from it what serves their own artistic agendas.  Hegel’s philosophy has influenced many writers and artists and knowing about it will serve as a good guide into the nature of Ibsen’s Realist Cycle.

Seven Aspects of Hegel’s and Ibsen’s Procedures”
[Based on Merold Westphal; Hegel’s Epistemology  (Hackett 2003)] pp. (12-13)

Hegel’s Method, and the sequence of dialectical actions in the Phenomenology of Spirit seem to be the model for Ibsen’s procedure in the Cycle.  Ibsen’s procedure is shown in italics.

1. Hegel’s method shows and uses internal self-criticism in a narratively constructed figure or character. 
   In each of Ibsen’s plays  the leading characters are dialectically led to self critical awareness of their motives and their ‘worlds’
2. This self-criticism uncovers the problems with the character’s favored views
   The drama’s action reveals the false assumptions from which the leading character(s) acted. 
3. These critical problems emerge through the character’s key ‘principled’ actions
   Key words and phrases express principles that are proved by events to be inadequate.
4. These results refute the principles and claims of the action
   The characters are forced to abandon their ideas of the world they believe they inhabit.
5. The graphic results are there for the audience to see
   The action of the play leads the audience through the dialectical conflict on stage.
6. These results justify introducing a more sophisticated successor view.
   With each play's dialectic completed, the Cycle moves to a succeeding phase of  consciousness for the audience that has undergone this phase and is ready for the next.
7. The successor view incorporates insights and remedies the oversights of the refuted view
   In the evolution of the Cycle, there can be no going back to the consciousness of the previous play.  The succeeding play inherits dialectical conclusion of the former.
   

     A Doll House assumes a world and its actions, character types and forms of expression  that are left behind by the succeedinbg world of Ghosts, which in turn is succeeded by the equally different world of An Enemy of the People, and so on, to When We Dead Awaken.  The later plays and their characters are not ‘better’ than those of the earlier ones but they involve the audience in a later evolutionary phase of the Cycle’s evolving consciousness.  This is the procedure of the Cycle for the audience.  The characters of the next, self-enclosed play can not be aware of the previous phase but the audience can..   None of the characters of a succeeding play could regress to inhabit the world of the former.  ‘We’, however, have moved on. Dialectic is built into the Cycle as a continuous process. I believe this is unique to Ibsen’s theater .In most drama, a character’s circumstances may change drastically but neither the play’s world nor its character’s concept of identity is thereby refuted as something irretrievably abandoned for a more adequate consciousness. 

Conclusion

          The sequence of parallels between Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit and Ibsen’s 12-play Cycle strongly suggest Ibsen models his Cycle on the structure set out in Hegel’s text. Ibsen also draws upon the wealth of cultural and historical material that fills this text, as well as other sources. This claim must not be misunderstood to mean that the Cycle endorses Hegel’s own judgment on the cultural ‘evolution’ it sets out.  As always, Ibsen employs the structure and cultural cargo of The Phenomenology as a scaffolding for his own, independently imaginative project.  All we need to show is that the stages of the two journeys, Hegel’s ‘ladder of Reason’ and Ibsen’s sequence of plays, form parallel structures and this, I think cannot be denied.  This, already, is a revolutionary way of understanding Ibsen’s work. I believe Ibsen saw the Hegelian model as a way of organizing his own, independent agenda. Ibsen draws upon other sources (e.g. Nietzsche) from his own time that do not conform to Hegelian judgments. 

             Ibsen was an artist, not a philosopher.  However, 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.  The two major elements of the Cycle, its dialectical and archetypal procedure, derive directly from Hegel.  Ibsen also seems to have agreed with Hegel on the cultural cargo carried by the modern mind; in fact, most of his contemporaries would have agreed on this.  Hegel, therefore, is an indispensable guide to our interpretation of Ibsen’s Cycle.  But the 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.

     Ibsen used his sources as they fitted his artistic enterprise, not making his artistic enterprise fit his sources. To show, for instance, that at any stage in the parallel structures of the Phenomenology and the Realist Cycle, Ibsen may come to radically different interpretation than Hegel on the nature of a situation or feature does not alter the essential fact that the two writers are looking at the same phenomena at this stage of their parallel journeys.  Ibsen, living at a later time than Hegel, inhabited a different world and knew of events and ideas not known to Hegel and these post-Hegelian things and thoughts are in the Realist Cycle.  But 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, I focus on the form and texture of the play, its ‘doing’ or ‘being’, not  its ‘meaning.’ Does Rosmersholm (as it should in the parallel sequences of the two 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, which are not to be found in Hegel, 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 a immensely interesting and valuable: however, it is not something I am qualified to do.  It is Ibsen’s dramatic art I offer to explore.

     To summarize: What can we confidently say is Hegelian and essential to understand and Ibsen’s Realist Cycle?

1. The sequence of dialectical dramas in The Phenomenology of Spirit is paralleled, in the same sequence, in the Cycle: mathematical logic makes it impossible this is a coincidence.
2. The dramas follow Hegel’s main logical-historical procedure for each play: that is, the ‘abstract’ argument (e.g. ‘The Struggle between Reason and Superstition’ animates Rosmersholm; the ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ phase that follows is behind the action of the next play, The Lady from the Sea­ - and so on from the first play, Pillars of Society to the last, When We Dead Awaken.
3. Hegel’s action of recovering appropriate actions and figures from the past to analyze the analysis of the present also is Ibsen’s method throughout.  Often these are the same actions and figures but Ibsen draws upon his independent storehouse of archetypal and historical figures and events.

                  Ibsen has his own considerable cargo of sources, ideas, independent cultural and personal references and experiences, including events in the world he lived in and to which he reacted to intensely. Ibsen clearly was influenced by other thinkers: Voltaire,  Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Niezsche: and that ‘German scholarship’ he praised in a letter to Georg Brandes. Brandes himself was an influence – as were many thinkers and poets from Homer on.  Emperor and Galilean acknowledged to be Hegelian by many scholars, testifies to the extensiveness of Ibsen’s learning.  Ibsen did not perform some cultural lobotomy upon his imagination when he came to create the Realist Cycle.  He now could look at the modern world and, like his admirer James Joyce, see it refracted through a multi-perspectival cultural prism..

                   What in the Cycle, is not derived from Hegel?  Everything that makes Ibsen a great dramatic artist.  All the brilliant specifics of his art: its scenes, actions, characters, dialogues, metaphors, imagery, the time and pacing of his unfolding dialectic on stage.  Like the plays of Sophokles or Shakespeare, Ibsen's become independent from their source material.  To bring a whole world and its history to vivid stage life in play after play from the highly arcane and abstract ‘dramas of consciousness’ of the Phenomenology; and then to sustain this successfully through a 12-play Cycle could be cited as the most ambitious of all dramatic enterprises.  The artistry of the enterprise is available to all students of dramatic art without recourse to Hegel.  The Phenomenology shows us what model influenced Ibsen’s conception of his artistic project: it does not explain his achievement..  In this, Ibsen joins company with many major creative artists.  Dante and James Joyce offer perhaps the closest parallels.

     Ibsen often is dubbed “the father of modern realism'”and included as such in anthologies of modern drama – in the U.S. usually by only two plays, A Doll House and  Hedda Gabler.  It often is suggested he wanted to reproduce the experience of ‘everyday reality’ in his plays; but that his theatrical conventions weren’t quite up to the job. This assumes that a playwright is most successful when his work is least ‘theatrical’ and “just like our own experience of life: that any trace of artifice detracts from this ideal of art.  This is the basis of much actor-training.  Cinematic and T.V. realism with their relative indifference to aesthetic structure, further encourages facsimile skills that can flesh out even the most feeble scripts or political and commercial messages..  Hours of rehearsal and retakes go into a scenario in which an actress playing a housewife undergoes distressing pain and then blessed epiphany after ingesting a pharmaceutical product.  The effect sought for is ‘sincerity’. These same skills can be adapted to any mimetic situation whose purpose is to convince us of its ‘actuality’ and to deny its artifice.  Any creative tension between aesthetic constraints and expressive possibilities is discarded for a flabby facsimile art devised for a public willing to be duped.

     Ibsen’s Realist art, however, insists everyday reality is neither reality nor truth   He wishes us to see the monstrous strangeness of what we take to be reality: so that we must unlearn everything we have learned about the world.  Hegel wrote that “the known, just because it is the known, is the unknown”   That is, our immersion in the world, all our assumptions about it, prevent us from seeing it’s strangeness and unreality.  This first principle of philosophy, taught by Socrates, is the principle of such dialectical dramatists as Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht, Genet.   The theatric devices and conventions Ibsen evolved were to set up a ‘counter-discourse’ to the world’s false discourse;’ to reshape our idea of reality to reveal forces and patterns everyday reality tries to suppress.  Ibsen’s method employs, as much as Bertolt Brecht’s, an ‘alienation technique’ in which our ideas of reality are revealed to be totally false and are successively demolished throughout the Cycle    To prove the unreality of everyday reality Ibsen first must present it plausibly so that its ultimate demolition will be convincing  .  This is the paradox of his ‘realism’ which lures many to misconceive his art.  The everyday reality his stage presents undergoes corrosive and continuous self-destruction from the moment the curtain rises.

       Ibsen called his plays ‘poems’.    Even the most ‘prosaic-seeming’ of the plays, Pillars of Society is poetically conceived.   It is not just the ‘coffin ships’ or the gathering and clearing storm in that play that are metaphors: the whole play is metaphoric.  The opening scene reveals a group of women and politically ineffectual males, those who are excluded from power in the society, in retreat and shutting out the life of the street outside.  Their dialogue, which purports to be exposition, actually is a tangle of falsehoods that the play will unravel. Lke Plato’s prisoners of the Cave this group believes a world of shadows to be truth.  Into this cave of prisoners will erupt a figure, Lona Hessel, opening this society to light and truth and better self-knowledge. ”Her Apollonian arrival is accompanied by a Dionysian circus and its indecorous music.  In other words, Ibsen’s ‘realism’ is totally metaphoric – concerned, not with offering a facsimile of ‘everyday reality’  but a method of turning the modern world into a metaphor.   Scenes, characters, actions, dialogue and props are all chosen for their metaphoric and archetypal value.  This is the antithesis of what we think of as ‘realism’to faithfully render our everyday reality.  Ibsen  believes our everyday reality is a sham - a bad work of art deforming both our natural world and, from centuries of blundering history, our potential human identity.  This is the ‘Romantic’ basis of his realism.