Six Plays Page 2
On second thought, however, Ibsen’s politics, just as his attitude toward dramatic forms, become more ambiguous. He had little but contempt for democracy, seeing in it the rule of the mediocre majority over the more advanced minority. He even went on record as admiring Russia for its lack of a parliament, the emblem of debasing majority rule. And while A Doll’s House was championed as a quintessentially feminist text and Nora’s final speech as a great feminist manifesto, Ibsen denied an allegiance to feminism as a movement on several occasions. What he shared with socialism and feminism was only their objects of critique—the bourgeois family and its morality—but he differed with most reformers and revolutionaries as to the alternatives. While they agitated on behalf of some new collective or group, all Ibsen cared for was the freedom of the individual. But, one might ask, where does this attack on the state and this advocacy of the individual leave society, the social world that mediates between these two?
The mediation or struggle between the individual and the group is the subject matter of Ibsen’s plays; it is the proper subject matter of drama more generally. While lyric poetry is concerned with the individual voice and epic with the mythology or history of a tribe or nation, drama is situated between the two, depicting always more than one person and fewer than all, a limited set of human beings in social interaction. For Ibsen, this interaction is always violent, the place where the clash between individual and collective occurs. In keeping with this distinction, his lyrical plays, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), place more emphasis on the individual: Brand and Gynt are larger-than-life figures whose story is their battle against society. Ibsen’s later prose plays emphasize the failure of the individual—Hedda Gabler and the Master Builder die more tragically—but what they all share is this struggle against the collective, the society, the majority. The play that addresses this struggle most directly, if not most subtly, is Enemy of the People (1882), the first play Ibsen wrote after turning from the lyrical plays toward a more realistic prose style (this play found an early translator in Eleanor Marx, youngest daughter of Karl Marx). Enemy of the People exposes the “quicksand” of lies underneath the pillars of society or community (the Norwegian samfunde has both meanings); the deceptive and pompous business baron is saved in the end only through an improbable turn of events and through his cleansing confession. However redeemed this character might emerge from the play, his moralizing talk about society, community, and its pillars is utterly unmasked and exposed as hypocrisy.
Those who wanted to turn Ibsen into a spokesperson for their radical causes continued to be frustrated by his insistence on the individual—and also by his addiction to medals, honors, and titles. For some, this individualism was even a sign that he had not really broken with the ideology he sought to demolish, namely the morality of the bourgeoisie, based as it is on individual rights that obscure the existence of classes and exploitation. This sentiment is perhaps best summed up by Robert Brustein, who reports Bertolt Brecht’s remark about Ibsen: “Very good—for [his] own time and [his] own class” (quoted in Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt, p. 42; see “For Further Reading”). Ibsen may have been an enemy of bourgeois morality, but he was not able to imagine a true alternative to the bourgeois world.
The scandals Ibsen caused were due not only to the content of his plays, but also to their form. Indeed, if Shaw was the champion of Ibsen’s radical content, William Archer was the champion of his radical form, what he considered to be Ibsen’s path-breaking realism. Archer’s claim that Ibsen’s realism was the beginning of what was then called New Drama is surprising on several counts. Realism arose first as a description of the contemporary novel in the 1840s and ’50s. Authors such as Balzac, Dickens, and Eliot were writing novels that depicted, with unheard-of detail, common or even low subjects such as city slums, worlds that had previously not been deemed fit for serious literature. The modernist novel, however, does not begin with these English and French realists of the mid-century, but rather with the subsequent generation that critiqued them. Conrad, Gide, Joyce, and Woolf all established themselves through an explicit critique of realism. Why then greet realism in drama as the beginning of something altogether new, radical, and modern?
One reason must be sought in the sorry state of the European theaters from the mid-century to the 1870s and 1880s. While the novel was gaining immense popularity and attracted many of the most gifted writers, the theaters were flooded with so-called “well-made plays”—a translation from the French expression pièce bien-fait—dramas that obeyed a set of techniques and formulas combining fast-moving action and a limited number of types. The naive husband, the trusted friend, the plotting wife—these figures were arranged in plots driven by a repertoire of devices such as intercepted letters, unforeseen confrontations, sudden revelations, and poisonous cups passing from hand to hand to end up invariably on the wrong lips. These techniques were not new—indeed, they can be found everywhere, including in Greek tragedy—but by the middle of the nineteenth century they had long become an empty shell, a set of cookbook recipes that were used in play after play, leaving little room for anything else. These plays may have been well made, but at the price of having become utterly predictable and repetitive. The most well-known writers of such well-made plays, Victorien Sardou and Augustine-Eugène Scribe, can be credited with ingenuity in finding ever-new combinations of these devices, but they were imitated zealously throughout Europe by less capable writers and with less witty results. So strong was the hold of the well-made play on the theater that its rules became identified with the requirements of the theater as such. It was left to novelists, such as Émile Zola, to demand a new drama that would be the equivalent of the realist or naturalist novel. But the machinery of the well-made play was so deeply engrained in the theater industry that producers, managers, critics, and audiences held on to these plays with determination. It was only belatedly and against their massive opposition that a realist drama and theater could finally emerge.
Ibsen’s career reflects this state of the theater with astonishing precision. In his early twenties, after having escaped from a dreary apprenticeship with a pharmacist and after a few years as a student, he landed a job at the new and very improvised Norwegian Theater of Bergen. There and at his subsequent post at a theater in the capital, Christiania (now Oslo), Ibsen got to know the theater—and this means that he got to know the well-made play—inside out. Although officially a dramatic author, Ibsen fulfilled every function in the production process, from director and stage manager to acting coach; the only thing he did not do was to appear on stage himself. The mid-century was the time when Norway, which was culturally still under the strong influence of its longtime colonizer, Denmark, sought to establish its own national theater. Even the literary language of Norway, the language in which Ibsen wrote, resembled Danish much more than modern Norwegian, which is closer to Swedish. It was in response to this Danish colonialism that Ibsen and his generation tried to build a Norwegian theater, to signal that Norway had not only gained political independence, but cultural independence as well.
Independence, however, did not lead to the emergence of a new Norwegian drama right away. At the time when Ibsen occupied his post, the Norwegian theaters of Bergen and Christiania were putting on the same well-made plays presented by the Danish theaters—only with Norwegian actors. Even the plays Ibsen wrote during these times—they are now forgotten and almost never performed—show his dependence on the well-made plays of Scribe and his Scandinavian imitators, even though they also manifest an incipient desire to go beyond this narrowly confined form. Ibsen simply did not know how to invent a new dramatic language and form. The theater seemed to require the rules dictated by this tradition, no matter whether they were implemented in French, Danish, or Norwegian.
And so Ibsen made three related and radical decisions: to stop working in the theater, to leave Norway, and to stop writing for the stage altogether. After significant periods of time he would return to all of these earlier
modes and places: He would begin writing for the theater again; he would take part in productions; and eventually, at the end of his life, he even returned to Norway. But for the time being, the break with all three—Norway, theater, and drama—was the decision that, we can say in hindsight, laid the foundation for his new drama.
Ibsen moved to Rome in 1864 and there wrote in rapid succession two texts that would make him famous and that some still consider his most compelling works: Brand and Peer Gynt. Ibsen had stopped writing for the stage, but this does not mean that he had abandoned the dramatic form. Both plays are centered on the protagonist after whom they are named. These two protagonists make it their purpose to defy the limitations imposed on them by the social world, Brand to preach what he calls an “all-or-nothing” religion that demands absolute sacrifice of everything earthly, and Peer Gynt to treat the world as his oyster without having to pay for it. That they both fail in the end, that they both die, does not mean that their quest, their rebellion against the reality principle, is futile or in vain. Rather, it shows their determination to go to the limit, to follow their path to the bitter end.
Ibsen called both Brand and Peer Gynt dramatic poems; they belong to the category of the poetic reading or closet drama, a drama not to be staged. The break with the stage was salutary because in these two plays the oppressive machinery of the well-made play is gone without a trace. Relieved of the actual or presumed limitations of the theater, these two plays move with ease from place to place, crowd to crowd, fantastic scene to fantastic scene. No devices or tricks are needed to get people on and off the stage at the right moments to assure near misses or perfectly timed confrontations. It is never clear when Brand and Gynt are making things up, arranging the world to fit their grandiose plans, and when they understand that they are up against realities they cannot change. On the actual stage, a director would have to decide each time what is real and what is not: Do the trolls Gynt encounters look ugly or pretty; are they real or figments of his imagination? Ibsen did not have to worry about any of this because he had decided to write these plays as reading or closet dramas. Only this condition guaranteed that he could write freely, without taking into account the alleged limitations of the theater that served to justify the strict rules of the well-made play.
That Ibsen would achieve his breakthrough by breaking with the theater is, like so much in his career, representative of modern drama at large. Many of its most important figures, including Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Stein, Yeats, Brecht, Artaud, and Beckett, launched their reforms and revolutions of drama and theater against the theater by variously withdrawing from it and attacking it on principle. For them, as for Ibsen, what needed to be opposed was not this or that theatrical style, but the theater as such. Many of them ended up writing closet dramas, while others turned their opposition to the theater into stunning new theatrical styles that seemed to go against everything anyone had ever seen on the stage. It was only gradually, often after many decades, that these modernist plays found their place in the repertory of established theaters, and only after these theaters had utterly changed the way in which they understood performance.
Ibsen had not only fled the theater, he had also fled Norway. He would move back and forth between Italy and Germany until 1891, with very few visits back. This self-imposed exile indicates not only his extreme dissatisfaction with the state of the theater in Norway, but also his aspiration to be more than a Norwegian writer, to be a European writer as well. Indeed, his exile may have helped him achieve this goal, in particular his remarkable successes on the German stage. But one factor played an even greater role, namely that he was able to attract ardent supporters, such as Shaw and Archer. The latter did more than defend Ibsen against the unending attacks. Having partly grown up in Norway, Archer was bilingual and translated a majority of Ibsen’s plays into English. Even when Ibsen had resumed writing for the theater and his plays received performances everywhere, his European triumph was due to the translation of his plays as much as to stage performances.
Archer’s translations err on the side of the literal, and subsequent translators have made Ibsen easier to speak on the stage. But his translations were not only significant for what they did for Ibsen at the time—their role in what is called the Ibsen campaign—they are also successful renderings of Ibsen for the reader today. That they seem at times old-fashioned is an advantage, reminding us that Ibsen’s plays are more than 120 years old and not written in a present-day colloquial style. This is more the case in the original, for Ibsen’s Danish-influenced Norwegian is quite difficult to understand, even for Norwegians. Archer’s translations avoid the trap of suggesting a false familiarity and force us to approach Ibsen’s plays as the historical documents that they are. It is for this reason that we decided to use these translations for the present volume, returning this monumental translation work back to print.
The circulation of Ibsen’s plays in Archer’s translations and editions corresponds to another pattern of modern drama. Because modern drama continued to have a vexed relation to the theater industry, much of it reached the public in the form of print. Shaw spent a great deal of time editing his plays for their publication, adding lengthy prefaces and stage directions addressed to readers and not only to potential producers and actors. Oscar Wilde got Beardsley to create remarkable etchings for an elaborate deluxe edition of Salomé, which, like some of Shaw’s plays, had been prevented from public performance because of censorship. Stein, Joyce, Yeats, Artaud, and many others likewise took great care to have their plays appear as literary texts because they either could not or did not want to have them put on stage. While in previous centuries contemporary playwrights were often excluded from the canon of printed literature, the history of modern drama since Ibsen is also the history of drama as reading matter.
It was only after the breakthrough with Brand and Peer Gynt that Ibsen dared to return to the theater, to write plays for the stage once more. The first plays that followed proved the necessity of his previous abstinence, for despite the years of writing closet dramas, this return to the theater also signified his return to Scribe and the well-made play. Even after Ibsen had broken with the theater industry, his mind somehow still seemed to align the demands of the stage with the demands of the well-made play. The resurgence of Scribe is particularly visible in Ibsen’s most notorious play from this period, A Doll’s House. A Doll’s House has among other Scribean elements a fateful letter waiting in a mailbox to be opened, a family friend who suddenly declares his love to the wife, a desperate husband trying to save his good name, a helpless wife in the hands of a blackmailer, an act of selfless sacrifice poorly rewarded—all this is the stuff from which the well-made play is crafted. If Ibsen had managed to get rid of this bag of tricks when he withdrew from the stage, he felt the need to rely on it once more when he returned.
Scribe resurfaced, but he resurfaced with a difference. Ibsen’s plays can be seen as so many attempts to rework and undo Scribe, to use his devices but to detach them from the empty machinery of his plots. The most obvious strategy for such an undoing can be found again in A Doll’s House, which suddenly, at the end, interrupts the workings of the intrigue and blackmail plot with a turn that astonished almost all audiences and that turned A Doll’s House into one of Ibsen’s scandals. The play does not end with a reconciliation but with a speech by Nora in which she denounces her husband and the society that produced him (and her). After this speech, she turns around and leaves her husband and her children by smashing the door; “that door slammed by Nora shook Europe,” one critic observed (Lucas, The Drama of Ibsen and Strindberg, p. 149). This speech and the act that followed it was unusual because it violated the well-made play, it violated the bourgeois sense of responsibility of a mother and wife, and it put words and thoughts in the mouth of a female character who, throughout most of the play, seemed incapable of them. In other words, it violated the dramatic form, the moral consensus, and the internal plausibility of the character. For
Ibsen, however, these were not so much flaws as first attempts to establish some distance from the well-made play, to signal unmistakably that he was doing something entirely different from what the audience had come to expect from a play set in a bourgeois drawing room.
Some of Ibsen’s other plays use (or abuse) Scribean devices more sparingly than A Doll’s House, and they detach them even more thoroughly—and not just at the end—from their supporting structure. It is important to recognize, however, that the continued visibility of these older elements does not challenge Ibsen’s claim to being a modern dramatist. On the contrary, it embeds him in a larger tradition of modernism that has often been described as a reworking of older forms. Henry James and Eugene O’Neill used elements of melodrama that are endlessly reworked, while Virginia Woolf and James Joyce took realist plots and estranged them through various experiments and strategies. The complete break with predecessors may be a defining feature of modern drama and modernist art, but only as a self-created myth. If you scratch the surface of many modernist texts you find older forms hidden underneath. Ibsen was no exception to this rule—indeed, he can be quoted as one of its primary examples.