Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 1 Number 2, July 2000

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Ibsen, our Contemporary

 by

 Stefán Snævarr

  

In his well known book, Shakespeare our, Contemporary, Jan Kott maintained that there was something distinctly modern about William Shakespeare. His plays were the films of his day, his Globe theatre the Elizabethan Hollywood. And even more interestingly, the bard anticipated modern analyses of totalitarianism in his magnificent Macbeth.

 

            Shakespeare certainly is a writer for all seasons. But what about his colleague Henrik Ibsen? Is he our contemporary, is he still alive and kicking? At first glance his plays seem pretty dated. Can one really claim that his gloomy world of consuls and fanatical priests holds a mirror for our age? Can we really learn anything from his homo Victoriaenisis ? His moralistic Victorians speak in proverbs, their manner of speaking seems a far cry from the way characters in modern plays discourse. Ibsen’s mingling together of the aesthetic and the ethical stands in a heavy contrast to the modern differentiation between art and morality. He wanted to convey truths through his plays and believed that beauty is a function of truth. Truth is beauty, but not the converse!

 

            How far away from modernism and its battle cry "beyond truth and beauty!". And can anything be less modern than the Ibsenian "ghost in the machine", the all-powerful writer who uses the characters as vehicles for his ideas? Compare this to the polyphonic writings of modernism. Consider for instance William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury where the same story is told from three different points of view and it is up to the reader to judge the veracity of the tales.

 

            We have still to consider Ibsen’s ideas. One of them was patriotism of the kind that played an important part in European letters of his time and seems dated now. In his play The Pretenders, he makes thirteen century Norwegian king Hákon Hákonarson a nationalistic hero, who fights the enemy of Norwegian unity. Can anything be less modern than this complete lack of hermeneutic sensitivity, of historical distance? Ibsen does not seem to understand that the people of the thirteenth century did not even employ the concept of nationalism. The great king Hákon certainly would not have regarded himself as a champion of nationalism! Of course Ibsen might be defended on the grounds that literary works do not have to be historically accurate. Be it as is, judging from the way European intellectuals thought in his time, we have reasons to believe that he really thought that people in the middle ages had modern, nationalistic feelings.

 

            Another non-modern feature of his play is his emphasis upon the spoken word, the almighty logos of the West. Nowadays, inspired by Oriental traditions, the avant-garde theatre rebels against this veneration of the word: "Out with the orators, send in the clowns !". And even those of the modern playwrights, who retain the text in their plays, deconstruct ordinary meaning. Beckett is a case in point, compare the mumblings of his characters with the clear-cut statements of Ibsen.

 

            Nevertheless, Ibsen’s plays are staged around the world, year after year. Feminists praise or blame his Doll’s House; the enemies of religious fanaticism find inspiration in Brand; Norwegians justly regard Peer Gynt as a national monument. Two factors seem to explain why Ibsen has retained his position as a classical author. In the first place, his plays are eminently stageable because of their tight structure. Secondly, there seems to be a core in his thinking, which transcends its original Victorian background. Ibsen is first and foremost the thinking person’s playwright; actually some of his plays have the qualities of Platonic dialogues. They are the battlegrounds of ideas, not tools for emotional expression. It is not by chance that we can hear echoes from Plato’s "fable of the cave" in the scene where Peer Gynt visits the palace of the trolls. The "palace" is actually a cave in the mountains, and the trolls live in a world of illusions, just like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave.

 

            It has been said that Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato’s work. And surely, the phenomenon which Paul Ricoeur calls "the hermeneutics of suspicion" has deep roots in the thinking of the great Greek philosopher. Ricoeur calls Marx, Nietzsche and Freud "the masters of suspicion". The threesome did not take the apparent meaning of texts for granted. They suspected that the meaning is distorted by the will to power, economic interests or the impulses of the id, just like Plato thought that our desires prevented us from discovering truth. Marx tried to find the distorting economic factors by searching for contradiction in the apparent harmonious surface of society. And the only way to find an explanation for these contradictions is by descending into a shadowy world of abstractions.

 

            No one can accuse Ibsen of staging empty abstractions. However, there is an interesting similarity between the structure of his plays and the dialectics of Marx. Take for instance Nora’s apparently harmonious "doll’s house". All of a sudden that harmony is destroyed when Nora’s nemesis, her old creditor, appears. So we see a contradiction in the harmonious surface, Nora is both a virtuous housewife and a person with a questionable economic disposition, a contradiction in Victorian terms. The true nature of the doll’s house is revealed by the contradiction, and it is doomed just like capitalism. In the last scene, the patriarchal lie upon which the doll’s house rests, is revealed, just as the lie of the just exchange relations in a market society is revealed in Marx’ thought. The latter revelation has as its precondition a discovery of contradictions in the market place. The existence of crises in capitalist societies is an anomaly, something that contradicts the apparent perfection of free competition. And this contradiction makes it mandatory to look beyond the surface of capitalism. Then one will see that crises originate in exploitation, so the exchange relations are not just, Marx tells us.

 

            Just as Ulysses had to go down to Hades to obtain wisdom, Marx and Ibsen descend into a shadowy world to gain knowledge. And the suspicious hermenuticians surface, like the cave dweller who escaped from the cave. The ideologies are unmasked, the carnival of illusions is over! But there is an important difference between the hermeneutic suspicion of Marx on the one hand, Ibsen on the other. To cut a long story short, Ibsen in contradiction to Marx is suspicious of suspicion. And nowhere is this "meta-suspicion" more obvious than in The Wild Duck. Apparently, the "exchange relations" between the characters of the play are “just”. Old Ekdal was punished for his law-breaking activities. Sad, but just. And the poverty of the Ekdals also is a sad, but just result of old Ekdal’s unlawful acts. But aided with Gregers Werle’s hermeneutics of suspicion, we start to discover potential contradictions in this harmonious surface. Was Ekdal really the only law-breaker, or was old Werle, Gregers’ father, guilty as well? Was the marriage of Gina and Hjalmar Ekdal actually a love-match or did old Werle simply arrange it in order to get rid of an old mistress? And last, but not least, is Hjalmar really Hedvig’s father?

           

            Old Werle wants to slaughter a calf for his prodigal son, make him a partner in the family firm. But Gregers refuses, and accuses his father of using other people as toys. He moves out of his father’s house and rents a room in the Ekdal’s home. His mission: to create a true marriage, help the Ekdal’s to face the truth about their relationship. Ever since he was a young man, Gregers has been an idealist, preaching the necessity of making "the ideal demand". He says that he wants to be like the hound, which dives after the wounded duck in order to rescue. He wants, in other words, to descend into the dark realm in the dialectical way. However, his descend has practical purposes. He wants to realise the dialectical dream of uniting theory and practice.

 

            So Gregers is a revolutionary. and just like his colleagues, a rebel against his bourgeois background. And as most revolutionaries, he suffers, in dr. Relling’s words, from "fever of justice" and "delirium of worship". His object of worship is Hjalmar Ekdal, an ordinary, vainglorious man. Just as Marx and Lenin, the worshippers of the working class, believed it to be an instrument of change, Gregers believes in Hjalmar’s ability to change himself and his surroundings. And like other revolutionaries, Gregers in his heart of hearts thinks that he knows what is in the best interest of his object of worship. Just as Lenin manipulated his followers, Gregers manipulates Hjalmar into a denial of his daughter. And the result? Death and destruction, sorrow and grief!

 

            The communist love of a true society destroyed the lives of millions, Gregers’ love of a true marriage and his ideal demand drives Hedvig into suicide. The well-meaning hound kills the wounded duck while trying to rescue it. "We destroyed the town in order to save it" an American bomber pilot said during the Vietnam War. The Gregers of this world certainly get around !

 

            In one of his brighter moments, Marx said that the educators must be educated. Gregers and the communists are uneducated educators, people without self-criticism. But hearken to dr. Relling’s words, ye uncritical lovers of truth: "If you take the illusions away from the average man, you take away his happiness". There are "sacred illusions", Icelandic poet Jóhann Sigurjónsson tells us. And dr. Relling is indeed a creator of such illusions. With Relling’s aid, Molvik gets a flattering image of himself as being demonic. Further, he gets Hjalmar to believe that he is a gifted inventor.

 

            But wait a second! Am I really implying that Relling, the master manipulator, is the one who demasks totalitarian idealism? The good doctor seems rather like a disciple of another great master of suspicion, namely Nietzsche. Relling’s word can interpreted as meaning that only the superman can live in truth, not the common herd. So if Gregers is a virtual commie, who believes in the perfectibility of mankind, then Relling must be a fascist, who thinks that the superman has the right to manipulate the average man. But Relling can also be regarded as a realistic liberal, who knows that equality is nothing but a chimera. It is better to allow some inequality of, say, insight into truth, than risking that the spokesmen of truth and equality destroy freedom.

 

            Now the question arises whether it is not absurd to give an existential play like The Wild Duck such a political reading. It is generally accepted by Ibsen-scholars that it was written after Ibsen’s "political phase". It has usually been understood as a psychological play. The attic where the wild duck lives has been thought to symbolise the unconscious. But the obvious answer is that any great piece of literature has many dimensions and that there is no such thing as the correct reading of it. In this essay, I have tried to demonstrate that The Wild Duck can be given an anti-totalitarian reading, just like Jan Kott tried to show that Macbeth could be read in that way. At least there is no doubt that Ibsen would have taken a staunch anti-totalitarian stand, had he lived through the dark ages of Stalin and Hitler.

 

            Ibsen’s self-critical criticism survives, while Marxism lies on its deathbed and Freud has become an object of academic ridicule. Marx is dead, Freud is dead, but Ibsen, our contemporary, is still alive and kicking.