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Ibsen Volume I: Four Major Plays |
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Available for purchase through: Ghosts |
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| Ghosts caused the greatest outcry of horror of any play in the history of drama and was actually banned from public performance in England for over thirty years. It's action, concluding in the annihilation of all our cultural comforts and illusions as the indifferent sun rises over a human devastation, can still be an unnerving experience for the modern reader or theatergoer. | |||||
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In
Ghosts, 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 he immediately
begins 'estranging' this reality with the entry of Engstrand, limping,
swearing, and trying to get into the garden room. At once we see that
the scene, characters, action, dialogue, props of this drama are not
selected because they are like 'everyday life' but because, unlike everyday
life, they carry 'archetypal' reality: that what is 'going on' is something
bigger than an everyday conflict. In the words of James Joyce, writing
on Ibsen, "the naked drama....the perception of a great truth,
or the opening up of a great question, or of a great conflict which
is almost independent of the conflicting actors, and has been and is
of far-raching importance - this is what primarily rivets our attention."
A character earns his/her place in Ibsen's Cycle when he or she carries
archetypal meaning.
From
the opening, we are on haunted ground. Mrs. Alving's speech "I
think we are all ghosts....." is only the most sustained passage
in a play where the visual and verbal imagery continually evokes the
presence of all previous history, cultural and biological that breaks
through the reduced image of modern nineteenth century reality. These
are the moments, the 'epiphanies', when we dead 'awaken'.