Ibsen as an artist. Talk given at THE NANSEN SCHOOL Lillehammer, Norway.

The ghosts in "Ghosts'

Ibsen as an Artist.

Talk given at THE NANSEN SCHOOL Lillehammer, Norway.

Ibsen the artist.

Recently in Pittsburgh my university (Carnegie Mellon)put on a production of Ghosts (Gengangere). I was called in as an 'Ibsen expert' to speak to the audience about the play. This is an American tradition: for the performers and director to have a discussion with the audience after the performance so that they can be assured they used their time to good effect. Someone in the audience asked me why, in the 21st century, we should want to perform this 19th. Century play. The questioner probably was expecting me to describe some uplifting lesson that Ibsen was delivering: e.g. that we should live our lives courageously, liberating ourselves to express our full humanity and so on.

Instead, I replied “because Ghosts is such a beautiful example of dramatic art.” Like a fine symphony or painting its value is in the intelligence and depth and skill the artist asks us to appreciate. When we come to any work of art we should ask not what it ‘means’ but what it does. Gengangere shows us Ibsen the artist employing his imagination brilliantly, under the difficult discipline and rules he sets himself.

In some sports there is something known as the ‘degree of difficulty’ by which performances are judged.. People who do not know about the degree of difficulty involved will find it hard to understand why one performance in e.g. diving, gymnastics, ski-jumping, or playwriting is better than another. To really enjoy a performance – or a reading – of Gengangere (Ghosts) you have to see the degree of difficulty Ibsen has set himself; the rules of the game he is playing and then see what he does with these chosen restrictions.

Learning to like Ibsen
When I was a student I had a rather negative idea of Ibsen. The critics and scholars I read did not make him seem very interesting. The literature that interested me in those days included strange, difficult and challenging works by Modernists like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot; Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett. (This was a long time ago!) These writers, like the modernist painters and musicians, were doing radically new things with their art forms so that while we watched, listened or read, we found ourselves entering new territories of the imagination.

Ibsen, I was told, was a writer of ‘problem plays’ – these were solid realistic works examining the social, moral and psychological problems of modern life. His plays were written to help us all lead better and more honest lives. He did not seem to be an artist to get excited about. He was not doing anything very imaginative, strange or difficult with his art form – the drama. Unfortunately, this is still a prejudice abetted by those who claim to interpret Ibsen: those for whom ideological agendas dictate their approach to the arts.

Then, sometime after graduating, I was asked to teach an Ibsen course for an adult education class in Cambridge. I rather reluctantly agreed (I needed the money) and it was while preparing a class discussion on Gengangere that I had my Epiphany or Revelation. While reading the play I kept saying to myself “this is not realism!” Like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke I was beginning to see that Ibsen was "misunderstood in the midst of fame. Someone quite different from what one hears.” Rilke wrote this way back in 1906, after seeing a production of Vildanden (The Wild Duck)in Paris. And his words are still true: Ibsen interpretation is almost uniformly mediocre. The misunderstanding of Ibsen as a social reformer (something Ibsen protested against) has prevented us seeing the audacity and strangeness of what he has created as an imaginative artist. Ibsen has been made to conform to our
unremarkable vision instead of our engaging with his estranging art.

The Strangeness of Ibsen’s Art
The first hint that something strange was going on in Gengangere was the time scheme of the play – which was impossible! The play begins in the morning before lunch and ends with sunrise the next day. That must be passage of at least sixteen hours. Yet the action of the play, which is interrupted only by lunch, is just two hours. Even in the most laid back households in Norway, lunches don’t go on for 14 hours! In a performance of Gengangere audiences are not aware of the impossible timing of the action because the events follow each other on stage with a relentless logic. When we watch the play we enter the imaginative time of the story which is not realistic time. The play, it seems, might not be copying everyday life. If the passage of time on the stage in Gengangere is not realistic, maybe the play is doing other, non-realistic things. When I started looking again the play it began to remind me of other plays I had studied. What was happening on Ibsen’s stage seemed to have happened before.
Greek parallels

The swift, concentrated time scheme of the play resembles the relentless logic of Greek drama. In Sophokles’ Oedipus tyrannos (Kong Oidipus) for example, once the dramatic situation is set up (the terrible plague in the city) the action leads logically and swiftly to the catastrophe. Within just two hours Oedipus' entire past and present life is revealed as horrifyingly unknown. He discovers he is the criminal he set out to identify. Like Helene Alving in Gengangere, he starts his terrifying journey believing he is the innocent judge and in just two hours to discovers he is the guilty criminal as his world is destroyed.

I began to see to see other Greek patterns in this play. As I looked more closely, the modern surface of the play started to dissolve and reveal Greek ghosts from more than two thousand years ago.

The Greek qualities of Gengangere were recognized as soon as it was published, (1881). When Ibsen was ferociously attacked on all sides, a lecturer on Greek philosophy at Christiana University, Peter Schøtt wrote: “Of all the modern dramas we have read, Gengangere comes closest to Greek tragedy.”

I began to see that Gengangere not only comes closest to Greek tragedy in its structure and its tragic logic: it also resurrects characters and actions of three major Greek tragic plots: The Oresteia (Orestien) by Aeschylus; Kong Oidipus by Sophokles; and The Bacchae (Bakanninine) by Euripides). The very title of the play Gengangere ('those that walk again) as well as its plot, recalls the phrase in The Libation Bearers that "the dead are killing the living."

Greek Ghosts that haunt Ibsen’s play.
1] In Aeschylus’ Oresteia the military leader, Agamemnon, returns from the Trojan War and is killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, the twin sister of Helen. In the second play of this trilogy, the Choephori - (Sonofferet) Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, returns home from a long exile at the moment his mother is arranging a fraudulent ritual at his father’s grave. Orestes joins with his sister, Elektra, and avenges his father by killing his mother. After this action he invokes the Sun and then suffers a mental breakdown.

In Gengangere Lt. Alving’s son, Osvald, returns home from a long exile at the moment his mother, Helene, is arranging a fraudulent memorial service to his dead military father, Captain Alving. Thiis memorial action, conceals Helene’s actual hostility towards her dead husband. Osvald does not kill his mother but her punishment is as terrible as Cltytemnestra’s. Her crime against her husband is resurrected in Osvald. She is faced with killing her husband a second time in the one person she loves above all – her son. She condemns herself, and her life is destroyed. Through Osvald, therefore, the father is avenged.. As he suffers his mental breakdown, Osvald, like Orestes, calls on the Sun.

2. In Sophokles’ Oedipus Tyrannos (Kong Oidipus) Oedipus defies the warning of his priest, Tiresias, and embarks on a quest to discover the truth that will end in the devastating knowledge that he is the guilty destroyer of his own family.

In Gengangere Helene Alving defies her priest, Pastor Manders and embarks on a journey towards a truth that ends in the devastating knowledge that she is the guilty destroyer of her family.

3 In Euripides’ The Bacchae (Bakaninnene)) Dionysos, the god of wine and joy of life (livsgleden) avenges himself against the house of Cadmus that denied he was a god. Dionysos destroys both the young man, Penthéus and his mother, Agavé. At the end of the play Agavé must witness the dismembered body of her son whom she destroyed

The gods of tragedy are Dionysos the god of wine and livsgleden, and Apollo, god of the arts, whose symbol is the Sun. Are these gods present behind the action of Gengangere?. The house of Alving had offended the values of joy of life livsgleden. Wine is repeatedly emphasized in this play: Osvald flirts with Regina as they open the wine bottles for lunch: and champagne is repeatedly brought up from the cellar. The wine rouses Osvald, the artist, to declare to his mother his craving both for livsgleden and for the Sun. The Sun appears at the end of the play. Its light floods the stage as Helene, like Agavé watches the destruction of her son.

These ghosts from the ancient Greek world shape the drama just as powerfully as does the equally powerful modern story of the collapse of the House of Alving. Even if audiences do not see the ghosts they probably subliminally respond to them because they are built into our cultural consciousness.

This was not the first time the Greek gods and their stories entered Ibsen’s drama. In his huge drama, Keiser og Galilaeer the hero Julian, worships them and defends the pagan gods against his Christian opponents just as Osvald passionately defends pagan livsgleden against Pastor Manders. To see the many perspectives of Ibsen’s strange imagination it is essential to know Keiser og Galilaeer
Ibsen as a Modernist

I was by now getting very interested in Ibsen. Gengangere, was looking more like 20th century Modernism instead of 19th century realism. For example, in T. S. Eliot’s play, The Family Re-union, the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes is retold and replayed as a modern family in an English country house in the 20th century. Critics have admired the way Eliot blended together Greek, Christian and modern layers of consciousness in his drama. But I now could see that Ibsen had done the same - and, I think, he did it better!

Then I started finding ghosts and archetypes (forbilde?) in the other plays: Antigone in Et dukkehjem; Sokrates and the sons of Oedipus in En folkefiende; the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in Vildanden. These ancient ghosts seemed to be invading the plays’ 19th century scenes, along with their ancient actions and stories. Ibsen’s ‘modern’ characters and dramatic actions were turning out to be both modern and hundreds and even thousands of years old. We are filled with ghosts, in other words. Physicists remind us we are even made of “star-stuff” from the original big bang billions of years ago!

I began ’researching’ to find out how Ibsen could have developed a Modernist method so far ahead of his time. And I discovered that these ‘Modernist’ ideas long ago had been developed in 19th century Europe - and especially in Germany. Finally, my researches led me back to the philosopher Hegel who had been the most influential philosopher in Scandinavia in Ibsen's time. Ibsen's own early critical writings are expressed in thoroughly Hegelian terminology. He had expressed amazement that there were thinkers who wrote on philosophy without knowing Hegel. Therefore, I felt obliged to read the philosopher. This led me to The Phenomenology of Spirit (Åndens fenomenologi )

The Hegelian Connection
This was not a joyful confrontation! As I soon found out, Hegel’s texts are fiendishly difficult (forferdelig vanskelig) to understand. However, as I struggled through The Phenomenology I began to find what I was looking for. Hegel’s text, like Ibsen’s, is filled with ghosts from the past. At the stage where Hegel describes the birth of the Western spirit, the origin of our modern identities from which our theater itself derives, the spirits of Antigone, Oidipus, Orestes, and of the Greek gods, are resurrected in his text.

Åndens fenomenologi acts out, stage by stage, the evolution of human consciousness – exploring the process of how we became what we are in the world we inhabit today. To know who we are we need to go back and relive the dramas and conflicts out of which our modern humanity evolved. Hegel’s text is about how, as a species, we have gone through a long and often violent spiritual and cultural evolution. The Phenomenology shows how our modern identities, down the centuries, evolved out of a struggle between earlier forms of consciousness and how these earlier forms were vanquished and 'sublated' (superseded) by new ones better adapted to survive. Our modern consciousnesses, therefore, still contains past cultural stages just as our bodies contain the record of our biological evolution.

In Hegel’s Fenomenologi each phase of the dialectical sequence is a totally different form of consciousness or way of seeing the world, than the previous phase. In the same way, each new play in Ibsen’s Cycle of twelve plays has its own unique nature. Each is a distinct world brought into being with its own themes, action, cast of characters, ambience, and imagery that makes it distinct from any other play in the Cycle. For example, Nora or Torvald Helmer of Et dukkehjem could not walk onto the stage of Gengangere nor could Osvald and Helene Alving inhabit the worlds of En folkefiende Vildanden, or Hedda Gabler. (Hilde Wangel, from Fruen fra Havet, is the exception tht proves the rule - and her transfer is to the totally different world of Bygmester Solness.)

When you look over the whole Cycle, from Når Vi Døde Vågner back to Samfundets Støtter you will see what an amazingly rich universe Ibsen has created.

Although the earlier forms of human consciousness have been supplanted like earlier species they are not like the fossils we look at in a natural history museum. Instead, they remain inside us, as Helene Alving, tells Pastor Manders:

"It is not just what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that walks in us again (som gaar igen i os). It’s all kinds of dead ideas and dead beliefs and things like that. They are not living in us: but there they sit, all the same and we can’t get rid of them."

Reading Hegel often made my head ache - but there was one great consolation. When I saw ancient ghosts walking through Gengangere and the other modern plays, I was not going mad. Hegel reassured me this was a rational account of our human condition. In each Ibsen play, once the modern action begins, the spirits from the distant past are roused into life to walk again on the modern scene.
The theme of the living dead

The theme of the living dead is found, not just in Hegel but in pop culture in the form of ghost stories or vampire movies. I live in Pittsburgh. For a few years this was the home of the American Ibsen Theater. It was also the home of George A.Romero’s horror movies, like The Night of the Living Dead - which could be the title of Gengangere. Unfortunately the American Ibsen Theater never attracted the crowds that have seen Romero’s movies.

Most great dramas have melodramatic elements. Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins with a ghost. The past haunts the present in philosophy and in horror movies. In Gengangere Ibsen lifts the melodramatic up to the truly tragic. He also found in Hegel’s very abstract text the possibilities for a deeply moving human drama. What makes the Cycle of twelve realist plays such a tremendous work of art is not Hegel’s philosophy but Hegel’s philosophy what Ibsen did with it. The deep and moving modern story of the house of Alving and its agitated characters is Ibsen’s own invention and so is the brilliant art of the play. These are not found in Hegel and they are what make Gengangere a great drama.
Why did Ibsen make use of Hegel?

Many ambitious artists make use of imaginative and intellectual structures that allow them to expand their own artistic horizons. The Greeks used their myths. European artists used the Christian idea of the world to create huge works like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings or Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’. Modern artists have used Marxism or Eastern philosophies or the mythology of many cultures. These help to expand the horizons of their work. In Ibsen’s time, especially after Charles Darwin, the Christian account of the world no longer explained the reality opened up by new knowledge. Hegel’s philosophy came before Darwin, but it could be adapted to the post-Darwinian imagination. Did Ibsen believe Hegel’s system was true? I believe he would have asked not whether it was true but whether it was adequate - as the basis for organizing a great dramatic Cycle.

What he then created: - a sequence of brilliant, humanly moving and fascinating works of dramatic art, with each play superbly shaped and plotted, is something very different from Hegel’s text. Hegel was the intellectual guide, the historicla/philosophical map of the territory that Ibsen recreated, in his own imagination, as a completely new country and its extraordinary inhabitants. This country was not the Norway he exiled himself from so many years, but a Norway re-imagined as a myth-filled and ghost-haunted space.

I do not believe Ibsen was a write of ‘problem plays’ that contained messages on how we should better organize our middle-class lives. Ibsen’s attitude to our human species is not a comforting one. He once wrote a poem regretting he was not around at the time of Noah’s Ark with a torpedo! Ibsen once said the purpose of his art was to make his nation “think greatly” (Å tenke stort”) The best artists seek to liberate our ways of seeing the world. The radical English poet, William Blake said he wrote “to open the doors of perception.” To do this the artist must first make us see the unreality of the world we believe to be real. This is what Ibsen’s theater does.

Hegel wrote.

“The known, just because it is the known, is the unknown
Negating false reality

Familiarity with our world prevents us seeing, how unreal its ‘reality’ is: even what a monstrous thing we have made of it over our long history. This is what Ibsen wants us to see. The moment the curtain goes up on an Ibsen play, the action is like an acid, corroding the image of reality it seems to be offering. It is, in fact, an anti-realism. The world the play presents to us is unstable from the beginning, filled with contradictions, secrets and lies - so that its claim to Truth dissolve before our eyes. By the end of Gengangere, what seemed to be the known world turns out to be the totally unknown. It has been devastated as if struck by an asteroid: or by Ibsen’s torpedo.

An Ibsen play involves two main actions:

1].The dialectic: the process of gradually exposing the unreality of the real until the world of the play is demolished.

2] The resurrection of ghosts and archetypes from the past that reveal their presences within modern reality.
The Contrapuntal Method.
The best way to approach a play is the way a conductor approaches a musical score: to explore its major themes, its structure, polyphony, tonalities and rhythms: to let yourself respond intuitively to the many levels of your consciousness the play is activating. This is what good art does: it opens up perceptions on many levels. It does not matter that after the experience you can’t say what it ‘means’. This is an important difference between art and philosophy. You do not need to understand a work of art – you need to experience it. To experience it adequately, you need to see what it is doing.

There used to be a beer advertisement in Britain that promised: “This beer reaches parts of you that other beers do not.”

Ibsen plays reach parts of you that other plays do not. Not only our emotional guts but also our intellects.

In music there is a method called ‘counterpoint’ when one melodic line is crossed and interwoven with other, different melodic lines. Ibsen’s plays employ a form of dramatic counterpoint: While the main story is being told, other stories, and other characters, from another dimension of time and place, - some from over 2,000 years ago, - interweave with the realistic story we are watching, like a séance, summoning ghosts from the distant past to walk in our world again.

The art of the play
As in Kong Oidipus, the play’s forward movement of about two hours is at the same time gradually recovers a huge past: the whole lifet, in fact, of Helene Alving, from her upbringing as a child to her present moment as anguished mother to Osvald.The past reveals the Unknown: whose consequences are working their destruction in the body of the child, Osvald. The Known world that Helene Alving so confidently controlled at the beginning of the play is now shattered by an Unknown world that has emerged and expanded beyond her control.

As is usual in Ibsen’s plays, everything turns into its opposite. The confident woman of the opening of the play, planning to dispose of the past completely so that the memory of her husband will be eliminated forever, ends up as his victim, helplessly crying out as her vocabulary is reduced to the terrified monosyllables “Nej; nei; nei; - Jo! – nei; nei!. The play began with Helene bitterly describing Alving as a dissolute figure of drunkenness and debauchery: the great wrong done to her, whose true nature must be concealed from public knowledge by a fraudulent memorial. But by the end, through one shock after another, she has journeyed so far in spirit that she remembers him as the joyful, life-craving young man whom she once helped to destroy. The suppressed truth of Alving is the Unknown that must now be rescued and revealed to the world. Just at the moment Helene Alving finally sees this, her fraudulent Memorial burns down.

As in the Greek plays, the dead prove more powerful than the living.
The Scale of the Tragedy

The play fits Hegel’s description of Greek Tragedy, which is not a conflict between right and wrong but between right and right – between opposing principles that fight to the death, like Antigone and Creon.. The marriage between the joyful young Lieutenant Alving and Helene, brought up by her society to put duty before livsgleden, was fated to bring them into conflict. On the surface, the past that is resurrected is the history of the marriage of Alving and Helene in a little town on the west coast of Norway. By inking this domestic tragedy so many themes and ghosts from Greek tragedy Ibsen allows us to experience, in modern terms, the classical Greek way of imagining the world. The dialectical logic of Gengangere reveals the gods as the directors behind the human scene. All the actions of the characters lead inevitably to what they desperately plotted to avoid. Within its single limited stage space and just two hours of time, however, the cast of five living and two dead characters resurrect huge themes and ghosts from the historical origins of Western civilization. The perspectives of the past increase enormously.

The beauty of Gengangere lies in its doing something so tremendous with such economical means; Ibsen set himself the greatest degree of difficulty and then did it so economically and so elegantly.
The Play as Comedy

Despite the tragic qualities of the play Gengangere contains a great deal of satiric comedy. I have had to convince directors that the name ‘Ibsen’ does not doom us to an evening of relentless gloom. Ibsen has a great sense of comedy, even if it can be a little grim. These directors are then surprised – and delighted – to find audiences responding to the comic elements of the play. Gengangere is often very funny! Engstrand, Manders and Regine, are totally incapable of entering the tragic dimensions of the play. They will cunningly survive. Tragedy is for the spiritual heroic, like Osvald and Helene, who will follow Truth even to the utmost desolation.

When the house of Alving falls the funds from the fraudulent Orphanage, together with Captain Alving’s name, will now be transferred to Engstrand's ‘home for wandering sailors’. This means the pious , respectable and hypocritical Memorial will be replaced by a riotous brothel set up with the help and blessing of Pastor Manders. Regine, Alving’s bastard daughter, will join them to get her hands on some of her father’s money.

It is hard to say which is the more shocking – the tragic ending or the satiric joke emerging from the tragedy. The tragic action of the play has an afterlife as farce and the ghost of Captain Alving is laughing in his grave, as James Joyce noted in his poem on the play. When it was pubished in 1881, Gengangere was felt to be highly offensive not just in Norway, but across the world. It created the greatest scandal in the history of the modern theater. When the play was performed in London on Friday the 13th March, 1891 the British press went into hysterics, calling it “an open sewer…a dirty deed done in public”..and so on and the critics called on the police to stop the play and arrest the actors: The play was banned from public performance in Britain for over twenty years and the ban was lifted only when the King and Queen of NORWAY arrived in Britain for a visit in 1914. (The British will always make allowances for Royalty.

It is not essential to know Hegel’s Phenomenology to see what Ibsen’s art is doing but Hegel’s text of is of immense value by providing us with a rational as well as imaginative guide for exploring Ibsen’s visionary landscape.

A question, often asked by anguished students is: “Even if we accept Ibsen intended all these dimensions to his art, how can the average playgoer b e expected to see them” The answer is that every major artist is more concerned with the ADEQUACY of his or her art than with the reader or playgoer's mental comfort. As with any major work, you are not going to experience all it offers at a single viewing.

Outside the theater, Ibsen is a classic to be studied and enjoyed like other classics where we have time to continue to make discoveries about his art. That is what makes a classic!

In 1879, the year he published Et dukkehjem Ibsen advised the young writer, John Paulsen, “You ought to make a thorough study of the history of civilization, of literature and of art…An extensive knowledge of history is indispensable to a modern author, for without it he is incapable of judging his age, his contemporaries and their motives except in the most incomplete and superficial manner .”

This means that without an extensive knowledge of history, of literature and of art we will be incapable of judging Ibsen’s plays except in the most incomplete and superficial manner. This happens to every major artist, of course. Life is short and Art is long and most of us don’t have time to go into great depth exploring every art work of art or literature from the Cave paintings of Lascaux to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. But we can expect our critics and interpreters to do this hard work for us to let us see what the artists are doing.

An artist is not a philosopher nor a teacher: his or her goal is to take up a medium and through it create a space in which we can expand our imaginations and our intelligence.

Ibsen takes tremendous care with his plots, making sure they are watertight, with every entrance and exit plausibly motivated, with each act leading to its crisis of reversal and revelation.. This integrity is his guarantee we can trust his art, that he has thought it through, thoroughly. For this reason his plays have what the supermarkets call a long shelf life – they have lasted while other plays that once created a greater sensation, have disappeared from memory.

The poet T.S. Eliot, like Ibsen was a Modernist. He described how he secretly smuggled his larger intentions into his plays while making them seem audience-friendly. He wrote to his fellow Modernist, Ezra Pound: “IF you can keep the bloody audience's attention engaged, then you can perform any monkey tricks you like when they aren't lookin, and its what you do behind the audience's back so to speak that makes yr play IMMORTAL for a while.” Ibsen was a master at keeping the bloody audience’s attention engaged; quietly pursuing his own huge project while the audiences, missing the big picture, became agitated, furious and sometimes even hysterical at each play’s appearance.

What I find so admirable is Ibsen’s respect for our intelligence. He does not loudly proclaim his big themes but pays us the compliment of waiting for us to discover them once we liberate our imaginations to see and appreciate the many dimensions of his wonderfully difficult art.
difficult art.