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Art and Argument in Hedda Gabler
Ibsen Chronology
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"Though Ibsen's plays challenge our notions of naturalist theater
they have proved their success with the public. They are invitations
to imaginative exploration, mysterious and exhilarating voyages
to destinations our theater still has to discover."with Brian Johnston
Ibsen is the creator of superb aesthetic structures - works of dramatic art that are fulfilled in theatric performance. In The Ibsen Cycle, I claim the twelve Realist plays (from Pillars Of Society to When We Dead Awaken) form a single tri-partite Cycle – a sequence with, in Ibsen's words, "mutual connections between the plays," best experienced in the order in which they were written. . George Bernard Shaw long ago pleaded: "The plays should, like Wagner's Ring, be performed in cycles." This could be a project for an Ibsen theatre: maybe with four plays each year from each of the Cycle's three groups, like the classic Athenian tetralogies, the Shakespeare History Cycles or Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle. It could prove fascinating to see how the Cycle's repertory of actors evolves with its evolving dialectic: how characters, scenes, actions and images repeat themselves like variations on musical themes. Establishing the scale and complexity of this achievement should be a primary goal of Ibsen interpreters and a great source of pleasure for Ibsen aficionados. Above all, it will bequeath to the theatre a rich and magnificent art work for endless exploration.
An Ibsen on this scale initially might be dismaying
to many who prefer an artist amenable to more modest theatric and academic
agendas. But if no attempt is made to grasp Ibsen's overall intention
we will be unable to fathom what he intends by the individual elements
of his artistry. The whole is not only the sum of its parts: the
parts cannot fully be understood without seeing their purpose in
the whole design. We have Ibsen's own insistence on this in 1898,
at the end of his career. "Only by grasping and comprehending
my entire production as a continuous and coherent whole will the reader
be able to receive the precise impression I sought to onvey in the individual
parts of it."
This must be among the most disregarded authorial directives in all literature.
It is dispiriting to what extent those who claim to interpret Ibsen ignore this injunction. Every major artist or thinker is doomed to become the hunting ground for innumerable personal academic hobbies, ideologies and special interests according to the interpreter's own agenda. This is the often informative - and sometimes entertaining - procedure of academic commentary: but until we establish the nature and scale of Ibsen's work these fragmentary raids upon the whole structure prevent our seeing it adequately by seeing it whole. I believe the Realist Cycle needs to be seen on just the scale Ibsen is claiming, as the most ambitious of Modernist projects. Once this is established, his work will sustain at least the same profusion of commentary but provide a better idea of his achievement.
Establishing an awareness of the twelve-play structure as, in Ibsen's own words "a Cycle" with "mutual connection between the plays" that should be experienced "in the order in which they were written" requires a collaborative effort. I believe there is a rich and wide-ranging 'Supertext' of cultural reference on which the plays draw, providing the source of their audacious metaphors, which scholarship needs to bring to light. Exploring this supertext and its metamorphoses in the individual plays, offers Ibsen's admirers one of the most rewarding and adventurous imaginative voyages on which interpretation can embark.
