• 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 VIII: Secrets and Lies in Ghosts:
Condensed Summary of ‘Archetypal Repetition in Ghosts’ from The Ibsen Cycle (pp. 189-236)

          Ibsen's Realist method is a strategy of deconstructing false appearance through denying the validity of what passes for everyday reality.  It is a realist method that denies the reality it is presenting.  'Truth’ is the dialectical process itself: the activity of consciousness corroding the fabric of falsehood claiming to be truth.  The dialectic was launched with Pillars of Society, continued through A Doll House and now fastens on the world of Ghosts.  One strategy is the exposure of given reality’s claim to adequacy: the self-deceptions sustained by a way of conceiving the world.   Another is the summoning of more adequate archetypal forces behind the deceptively realistic characters, actions and scenes.  This clears the way for a more adequate reality, hinted at by the ghosts infiltrating the modern space.   It is a realism in continual dissolution, self-negation.

         Everyday reality already is a bad work of art; it is not 'natural' because throughout history we have disfigured and distorted nature both 'externally’ by our actions upon the world and society and 'internally' – by having stunted our own psyches through self-repressions we have assented to.   We have distorted our natural heritage which has distorted us in turn rendering us the disfigured inhabitants of a disfigured world.    This dynamic interplay between evolving characters in an evolving world makes the Ibsen stage such an unsettling place. The ‘Ibsen character’ is an internal unsteady state inhabiting an external unsteady state, each undergoing dissolution..  At the end of Ghosts, as the indifferent Sun rises over glaciers, all human relations have been devastated.  Ibsen presents us with a familiar-seeming image of our reality: a drawing room, characters dressed and acting like the people we know, moving among objects with which we are familiar. Then the dialectic begins 'estranging' this reality, gradually getting us to see its unreality, its false claim to be the adequate truth of our condition. Through the local devastation we might glimpse a larger human conflict:

     The opening action of Ghosts is Engstrand’s entrance, limping, swearing, trying to get into the living room, and setting up a struggle with Regina to possess that stage space.  The scene, characters, action, dialogue, props of this drama, we soon realize, are not selected because they are ‘just like everyday life' but because they are unlike everyday life: they carry  'archetypal' connotations, bigger than an everyday conflict.  The stage, however, implies a 'real space’: of doors leading to the garden; of stairs to upstairs bedrooms and the downstairs cellar; and beyond, of the distant town with its watchful inhabitants,.  The children's home, when it burns, is visible through the rear garden room window.  The isolated Alving estate, Rosenvold, is distant from the town.  Pastor Manders arrives by steamer across the fjord.  There are mountain peaks over the fjord and these will appear in the final moments of the play.  

Therefore, we are in:

1. realistically localized social space
2. metaphoric space including symbolic Nature (darkness-light; rain-sun)
3. carefully controlled stage space.

     The action of the play, with its temporal sleight-of-hand, combines the logic of the realistic and the symbolic spaces.  The localized social space and its history contains the gossiping town that Helene and Manders fear.   It includes the Alving estate and its past, its haunted present and its children's home and Engstrand's 'sailors' home' for the future.  The ‘facts’ of the past are: the early relationship between Manders and Helene; the loveless marriage of Alving and Helene; Alving's seduction of Johanna; Helene Alving paying Engstrand to hush up the affair; Regine's birth; Engstrand’s laming; Manders’ marrying Engstrand to Johanna, and so on.  It is a world of stifling closeness where everyone watches everyone - a world of secrets and lies, that conceals its truths and that we as audience must learn to detect and infer as we watch and listen, learning what to believe and what to distrust.  

     Ibsen does not clear up certain puzzles:  Osvald's symptoms do not seem to be those of tertiary syphilis which he would have inherited from his mother not his father.  What was Osvald’s lifestyle in Paris that he can accept he is responsible for his own illness?  Why does Regine seem to be uninfected?  (We can't be sure she is, by the way: but she has a different mother)  Did Manders really cause the fiery destruction of the children's home or was this Engstrand’s trap?   Focusing overmuch on details that belong to the world outside the delimited logic of the mimetic space prevents the metaphoric level of the plot from operating.  It is the 'How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth' syndrome that afflicts much Ibsen commentary.   Nor are we watching a detective story.  All these 'facts' also are metaphors, just as the whole play is an extended metaphor of our human history.  We need to detect the ‘imagery’ behind the realistic facts; to see through the facts to what they signify.  This means, whenever reading an Ibsen play, to see the metaphoric within the realistic dimension..

        Ghosts has been much admired for one major Greek aspect: that, like Oedipus tyrannos, the little forward movement of about two hours is at the same time a gradual recovery of the huge past: the whole lifetime, in fact, of Helene Alving, from her upbringing as a child to her present moment as anguished mother to Osvald.  The play moves forward and backward at the same time.   As in Oedipus tyrannos, while the past gradually is resurrected, it destroys more and more of the present. What is all the time evident to the audience is a repressed world or lifestyle that has not been allowed to come into existence; not just the ‘cries and whispers’ of past secret transgressions in the house but a lost or thwarted world of ‘joy-of-life that tried to manifest itself in the past and that should be reclaimed for in the future.  And this is bound up in the figure of the most important person in the play – who is omnipresent but who never appears onstage: - the younger lieutenant Alving.   The Alving identity starts out as a dissolute figure of drunkenness and lechery whose truth must be concealed from public knowledge by a fraudulent memorial.   However, he ends up remembered as the joyful, life-craving young man whom Helene helped to destroy and whose suppressed truth must now be rescued and revealed to the world.  The wrongdoer turns out to be the victim:  This major dialectic reversal is brought about, not by any new ‘fact’, as in a whodunit, but by a change in consciousness of the ‘known’ facts.  “      

          The present circumstances, when the play opens, are what Helene Alving believes she controls.  It is she who has arranged everything: the 'Memorial ceremony' which, as a fraudulent ritual, is supposed to get rid of Alving for ever - just as Clytemnestra offered a fraudulent ritual at her dead husband’s grave on the day his son came home to avenge him.   Helene now feels confident she can "speak out" and tell Manders the ‘truth’ about the past.  Her speech is full of the consciousness of her suffering - of Alving’s crime against her. In the play’s action Helene will undergo a devastation from confident self-justification to conscience-stricken self-condemnation when Helene at last is able to see, and articulate, her crime against her dead husband.   Her speech pattern changes from the resentful  “I had to..I had to…” to the compassionate  "he had to...he had to..." as she relates how she helped destroy the joy-of-life in her husband by leaguing with the forces of repression (duty) in her community. 

         The reversal is brought about because she now sees her husband in her son: and in loving Osvald, she now loves her husband: can see life from his point of view and now must kill him in this new incarnation as her son!     In Ibsen’s dialectics, characters and their situations are forced into their opposites as the consciousness of the characters (and of the audience) changes. Nothing has reality in itself: it has only the reality our evolving consciousness gives it.   Hegel’s phenomenology has been described as “how things appear but are not” and this aspect of Ibsen’s drama probably most unnerved and outraged the first audiences and critics.

          The central character of the play is Helene Alving and the actress must portray the most extreme trajectory of emotional evolution: from self-confidence, humor, joy, self-justification at the beginning of the play when Helene is completely in command of all levels of her language as well as of her world, past and present; to greater and greater distress and disintegration - until ultimate terror and anguish where she will have no language except to scream the broken monosyllables, "No, no, no - Yes! - No, no!"

          To get something of the swift retributive logic of Greek drama, Ibsen makes the enacted time on stage actually impossible as the time of the events.  The action opens before lunch and closes with the dawn and the rising sun: a sequence of at least twelve hours.  Yet what we watch are only two hours of uninterrupted stage time, as in the Agammenon or Oedipus tyrannos.  The only break is the lunch/dinner, which cannot be more than one hour’s duration.  As in Greek drama, we do not notice the incongruity until it is pointed out.  This is the only time that Ibsen employs this device: of sustaining a thematic, not a realistic tempo and it has the ‘Greek’ effect of inexorable tragic logic

            Act I is built around the clash between Helene and Manders, with Alving as the perceived source of 'evil'   In her speech of self-justification to her priest, Helene vindicates herself in terms of Manders’ moralism because she still assumes his moral world even though she is a 'freethinker' within it.  The play opens on her day of triumph, when, she insists, the past will be disposed of forever. Osvald will inherit nothing of his father: not even his physical appearance, she insists, when she denies he resembles his father. .  Ironically, what he has inherited is already present, invisibly working its destruction inside him.

            In Act I when she justifies her life - the great wrong done to her by her husband - Helene believes she is telling the unhappy truth.   At the end of the play she will come to see that she was the great wrong done to her husband.   The Memorial she built to hide the scandalous truth of her husband from the world has actually served to hide her own guilt; therefore, in the play’s metaphoric logic, the fraudulent memorial will burn up to be replaced by true memory. Helene will recover the real truth of Alving’s identity when he was young and full of “joy of life” before she helped to destroy him.

           The process whereby she comes to this realization is also a process whereby Ibsen shows something wrong with our

whole culture, something going back not just a generation or so, but far back in history.  One of Ibsen's notes to the play goes:  "The keynote is to be: - The prolific growth of our intellectual life, in literature, art, etc., - and in contrast to this; the whole of mankind on the wrong track."   As the play progresses, therefore, its dialectic widens and deepens beyond the local scene, beyond Norway, to a fault line in Western culture itself.  Helene’s well-known speech in Act II sees the world of the present as not only haunted, but enmeshed by the living dead:

                I almost believe we are ghosts, all of us.  It's not just what we inherit
    from our fathers and mothers that walk again in us - it's all sorts of dead old
    ideas and dead beliefs and things like that.  They don't exactly live in us,
    but there they are, all the same and we can't get rid of them. All I have to do is
    pick up a newspaper and I see ghosts  lurking between the lines.  I think there are ghosts  
   everywhere you turn in this country- as many as there are grains of sand – and then there
    we all are, so abysmally afraid of the light.

                Helene;s speech depicts an entire humanity willingly giving up its spiritual freedom, terrified of that freedom, afraid to move forward from the paralyzing past, preferring to live a troll underworld existence in darkness.  The idea goes back to Plato's image in The Republic of the prisoners in the Cave, chained and unfree, believing the shadow-world before them to be reality.  The Cucle, in fact, opened on this image with the group shutting itself off from the active world in Pillars of Socieety.   If anyone should try to free them, Socrates says, the prisoners will turn on him, attack him, even try to kill him for trying to lead them up to the light.  This action will be taken up in the next play, An Enemy of the People.   Karl Marx's judged nineteenth century Europe in terms very close to Helene’s words:  In the opening chapter of The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Bonaparte (1852)  Marx described a ghost: “The Spectre of Communism" haunting Europe, and he declares, "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living": and, Marx continues, just when Europeans seem about to "engage in revolutionizing themselves...they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past.

     In Ghosts it is the light, not the darkness that terrifies.  Ibsen reverses the situation of the usual horror story where we humans are afraid of the ghosts that come out of the darkness.  Instead, we are the ghosts terrified of the light.  The play that closes the Cycle is When we Dead Awaken. The dreadful truth Osvald brings to the terrified Helene is accompanied by the rising sun shining pitilessly on the wreckage of Helene's whole life. As in Greek drama, the little 'domestic' action expands to a cosmic one. .  In Greek drama the gods are working, unseen, on human life, shaping the events; it is only after the catastrophe that the suffering humans discover "there is nothing here that was not Zeus". In Ibsen's realist method, the Dialectic serves the role of the controlling gods.

The action of the play

      The play opens with Regina and Engstrand engaged in a struggle for territorial possession: whether or not he can be allowed to enter the living room from the garden room.   The struggle concludes with Engstrand's 'victory' - he enters the room despite Regine's objection.  Like a Sophoclean Prologue, it is a synopsis of the main drama, prefiguring his later victory over Manders and Regine when they will be conspirators of his ‘sailors home’.   The stage set with its few functioning props is both a plausible realistic place and a metaphoric space.    The rear glass wall is an 'actor' and will show the continuing rain, the fire at the Chidrens's Home and the sun over the peaks and glaciers at the end.   The thematic props of flowers, rain, books, Orphanage documents, lamp, champagne, are all brought, one by one, to that centrally placed round table.   All are visual aspects of the play's argument.  When the play opens, Helene already has advanced beyond Manders’ world-view as those books attest: but she is only 'intellectually' emancipated &ndash.  For tragic insight she will need to be emotionally devastated.   This is the journey the play will take her on.

     The dialogue of Act I exposes the inability of Manders’ dogmatic moralism to comprehend "the facts of life." and dramatizes his complete moral defeat. He progressively becomes irrelevant to the play's tragic action and, through his spiritual cowardice, will decline into a comic-melodramatic figure doomed to be unscrupulously manipulated by Engstrand and Regine.  The Manders-Engstrand-Regine melodrama contrasts with the Osvald-Helene-Alving tragedy.  Because they cannily never face up to inconvenient truth, this trio of survivors is incapable of the dialectic the mother and son will embark upon.  The closing scene of Act I has  'shaken' Helene and prepares her for her journey to tragedy in which she must discard one comforting certainty after another until, at the close, her mind is a kind of horrified openness, ready for any possibility, including killing her own son.  To embark on this journey, she must be separated from her false self, built up over a lifetime.  "To be oneself is to slay oneself" the Button Molder told Peer Gynt.  This tragic vision is the Hellenic dimension to the play.  It involves Osvald's defense of , the instincts, art, the intellect and that joy of life  (livsgleden) whose emblem will be the rising sun: a creative, cosmic power that devastates the little human and moral order Helene lived by. Helene's struggle, to authenticity, to truth and courage, under Osvald's relentless prompting, recovers the Hellenic (and Alving) values she violated through her life-denying attachment to the values of Duty inculcated by Manders and his community.  As in The Bakkhae the offended god punishes mother and son.

        Osvald’s tragic character is revealed,in Act III, in his grim motive for returning home: to seek out someone mentally strong enough to kill him.    Regine had seemed capable: hence his obsession with her.  His final choice of his mother grimly reverses the Orestes -Clytemnestra situation.   Helene must kill her husband, now seen incarnated in her son, just when she has come to love him.  Osvald's attachment to Regine is less from erotic infatuation than from his recognition of her ruthlessness in being prepared to finish him off if necessary!    

     The agenda of the play requires the removal of Manders as a force in the tragic dialectic.  His leaguing with Engstrand in Act III measures his full degradation.  After he is finished off, ethically, in Act I, he has no role except to demonstrate the futility and irrelevance of his orientation to the world:  So he retreats to a comic role in the background, to be duped by Engstrand and Regine.    Manders and Engstrand leave the tragic scene to  travel "by the same boat" together to set up Engstrand’s brothel.  Manders' Christianity requires an anti-tragic symbiosis of good and evil.. . These concepts are dialectically linked together.   Without Engstrand, Manders’ identity is jeopardized!   Aeschylus, in The Oresteia set out the pagan version of this symbiosis: without crime there would be no law; without the murderous history of the Agamemnon there would be no tragic evolution to the democracy of Athens.   The three plays of the trilgy were stages of tragic learning – pathei mathos  As T.S. Eliot wrote:(in Gerontion):

                                                                        Unnatural vices
                            Are fathered by our heroism.  Virtues
                           Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
                                                                    
 Greek tragedy is about the clash of Good vs. Good:  Antigone vs. Creon, Oedipus vs. Apollo.  There are no villains in Greek tragedy.  Nor does the cosmos conform to human morality. Tragedy emerges from human error, not cosmic evil..

     As Manders retires from the center of the play, Osvald takes his place.  That is, melodramatic Christian themes give way to tragic Hellenic ones.  So the plot moves Osvald to the foreground of the play. The themes of joy of life, of artistic creativity, of Eros, of human fulfillment on earth, not in heaven, and the pagan courage to end life if it proves unacceptable are notably pagan themes that displace Manders' themes of living only to do one's Duty with no right to happiness.  Osvald's values of "ligvsgleden" (joy of life) will be seen more and more to belong to the dead and disgraced father, now emerging as the one greatly wronged. . The conflict extends beyond the human figures and becomes a battle of imagery struggling to possess the stage.

      The gradual destruction of Helene's world-view, therefore, is articulated not only through verbal argument but also through stage images that forcefully amplify the verbal battle.     Act I created a fairly easy demolition of the whole conventional world of Manders and Helene as a preparation for the true tragic journey of Acts II and III.  Livsgleden is first sounded in At II as the description of a lamentably excludedworld: Paris, the life of young artists, the human creativity that Manders abhors.  As so often in Ibsen, what is absent from the stage becomes vividly present as an imaginatively perceived world.

        Under the emotional pressure of her love for Osvald Helene begins to see her husband reincarnated in her son (the final ghost of the play). In Act I she quickly dismissed this ghost when Manders suggested Osvald resembled his father. In Act II Helene suddenly "sees it all" and the value of Alving is about to reclaim the stage, to be resurrected.  At this moment the false world of the past (the asylum) burns up.  All it represented is seen as a phantom without truth, and is removed forever from the world of the play.     A resurrected Hellenism is recovered as a militant, but creative force in life.  Helene condemns herself and rehabilitates her husband.  Joy of life, associated with the Sun, now comes into its rights as a value and a force. As in e.g. the Bakkhae. the offended power punishes its human opponents for their hubris in trying to remake the cosmos in Christian-moral terms.  The Manders world-view is seen as 'against Nature' which cannot be permitted.   Osvald raises the Hellenic spirit at its most challenging: if he cannot pursue a fully human life he insists on a fully human death: that pagan choice of suicide the Christian world condemned.  

     Major actions and themes of Greek drama now are swiftly recapitulated. Like Orestes, Osvald pursues his mother, dragging her back for a final, terrible confrontation.  At the same time, Helene's journey of devastating, retrospective self-knowledge recalls that of Oedipus.   The son, as victim of his mother’s refusal to acknowledge the god of livsgleden repeats the tragic conclusion of The Bakkhae).    Helene's whole world is destroyed and with it the whole idea of the world represented by Manders, the pietistic community and Helene's former self. 

        Helene’s transgression had been against against Eros and, in the form of hereditary syphilis, Eros strikes back.   Engstrand's brothel for wandering sailors will survive with the priest's help and with Captain Alving's name on the institution.   Joy-of-life or livsgleden is rescued and rehabilitated by the play in spite of the major project of the chief protagonist, Helene to eradicate its whole existence.    Her original project had been the exact opposite: by means of the fraudulent memorial to destroy and obliterate every shred of the memory of Alving and all he stood for and to exonerate her own life dedicated to the Duty instilled in her by Manders’ Church and Society.   

       Ibsen takes the dialectic of this first group from the 'unexamined' social world of Pillars of Society, through the domestic world of modern marriage in A Doll House, then to the very generation of families through both infected biological and cultural streams, stretching back to our origins as a species.  In the next play we return to the social scene and its male protagonist, Thomas Stockmann, who will exemplify that joy-of-life tragically suppressed in Ghosts.  The metaphor of 'pollution' now will broaden from disease in Dr.Rank and Osvald to that of infected streams contaminating a whole society, in An Enemy of the People.