|
|
Emperor and Galilean
|
|
| Available
for purchase through: " Ibsen's seldom-produced,
gargantuan masterpiece is worth reading, and Johnston's clear, contemporary
translation makes it all the more so. The vast play focuses on Roman
emperor Julian's rise to power and his misbegotten attempts to roll
back the clock and return the increasingly Christian eastern half of
the empire to its former pagan glory. But the Christians were inspired,
determined, and driven. The pagans were not. As Ibsen demonstrates,
Julian's motives were pure, and his critique of the early Christians,
especially their hypocrisy and contentiousness over every small point
of dogma, was sound… Johnston's beautiful English rendering of
it compels our attention today". The Character of Julian The portrait of the tortured intellectual, Julian the Apostate Emperor, opposing the tide of history with pen and sword, stands out strikingly from the portrait gallery of historical figures in earlier drama. He is the most complex of such characters, both in situation and in his own personality. As a thinker, Hamlet is a freshman beside him, never venturing beyond Elizabethan commonplaces. His closest competitors in intellectual audacity might be Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Goethe’s Faust; but neither, unlike Julian, is a serious agent of world power able to act decisively upon human history. Ibsen’s Julian simply sets out to remake our humanity; to undo the historical ‘error’ of Christianity and to return our humanity to its pagan origins. This dual aspect of Julian, as serious thinker and as wielder of world power, is his wholly modern aspect. An adequate modern world leader – a Lenin, Mao, or even a Hitler, must try to understand his or her world ‘theoretically’ as well as practically; must not only act, but also act so that the actions undertaken are those the nature of reality requires. The volumes of theoretical writings left by Lenin and Mao, the fierce ideological controversies entered into by rival revolutionary leaders, would have astonished such earlier world-shapers as Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon. Julian, searching for a new spiritual direction for the world while ascending to supreme imperial power might well be the first such portrait in modern drama. But Julian, who wishes to emulate the Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius, too often relapses into Nero, the Emperor as would-be Artist. His painfully self-conscious ceremonies and sacrifices, meant to awaken the sleeping spirit of paganism, degenerate into desperately histrionic staging. As director of each show, he constantly is being let down by the ludicrously shabby materials he is forced to work with: sycophants and flatterers instead of courageous comrades, half-hearted and venal yes-men instead of true believers. Even his enemies do not allow him the dignity of ennobling combat; as fanatic zealots with no sense of beauty, reason, nobility nor any of the values he seeks to establish, they drag Julian down to their own level: a situation repeated in Rosmersholm where the apostate, Rosmer, is horrified by the barbarity his mission arouses. Puritanical, abstemious,
chaste, he pedantically travesties the roles of priest of Venus (Aphrodite),
goddess of sexual love, and of Dionysos, god of ecstasy, wine and savage
unreason. Julian’s bacchanals degenerate into charades pursued
by charlatans and pedants. No one was less equipped, despite his poignant
integrity, to inspire a revival of Hellenic life-values, the “joy-of-life”
craved in Ghosts. Yet something of the beauty and the courage of Julian’s
quest, like that of Hedda in Hedda
Gabler, survives its ludicrous defeat. We sense the beauty, in lyric
moments when his yearning for a numinous world repeatedly rises above
the most disheartening of his reversals; we sense the courage, as he
doggedly pursues his lonely, desolate and often terrifying path into
the heart of darkness. Ibsen maintains our sympathy, interest and even
admiration for this figure even at his most ludicrous or most repellant
moments. These qualities make Emperor and Galilean a unique
form of tragedy: a tragedy of the intellect and a subtle portrait of
a baffled mind. |
||
 |
|
A
world