To be a poet, most of all, to see.
Ibsen
It is one of those happy accidents of literary history that Henrik Ibsen’s career as a dramatist neatly coincides with the latter half of the nineteenth century, from Catiline (1850) to When We Dead Awaken (1899). Master builder that he was, one fleetingly suspects him of planning it that way, before filing the observation away as no more than a useful mnemonic. If, however, we withhold our impatient cataloging to delve a bit further in chronology, we may begin to wonder if Ibsen was not, in this respect, curiously accident-prone, with all the implications of an underlying pattern that the phrase connotes. For it also is a striking fact that there is a definite division at the center of that fifty-year career, the plays of the first twenty-five years sharing one group of properties, and those of the final twenty-five sharing another. Emperor and Galilean, the last play of the first series, appeared in 1873; Pillars of Society, the first play of the second series, appeared in 1877—which places a hypothetical dividing line, again neatly, right where it ought to be, in 1875.
The nature of the properties apportioned by these various boundary lines can perhaps best be brought out in terms of a metaphor, one that Ibsen himself introduces in possibly the most autobiographical of the later plays, the metaphor of architecture. Imagine Ibsen, not simply as the master builder, but as an errant town planner, proceeding down the main street of his life, raising the edifices of his plays as inner necessity and occasion dictate. The resulting town, like Budapest, has two parts: an Old Quarter and a New. If we traverse this town from beginning to end, observing, as the planner desired we should, not merely the individual architectural details, but the total order and interrelation of the buildings, its two sections come clearly into view. The salient feature of the Old Quarter, we soon decide, is its diversity of styles; we pass first a Roman villa, then several gnarled stave churches, moated towers and archaic guildhalls in the Viking manner, interspersed with a ruined cabaret, a rustic summerhouse and a wittily ornamented honeymoon hotel. Indifferent as the construction sometimes is, the variety gluts the eye; and there are more imposing works to come: two large ducal palaces, one austere and forbidding, but impressively powerful in conception, the other baroque and spaciously fantastic, with pennants flying; beyond these a small clapboard civic information booth; then a vast Romanesque cathedral with, like Chartres, two contrasting, unequal spires. Next we cross a brief arid open space, the width of a couple of vacant lots, and suddenly arrive in what appears to be a model town of virtually identical row houses that extend to the city line. The dimensions, the basic floor plans, the somber coloring of the facades in this New Quarter seem hardly to vary from structure to structure; they look uniformly respectable and restrained. Only on closer acquaintance does one notice faint carvings of coiled serpents on the lintels, or ghosts that seem to materialize at the windows, or, on entrance, that the cellars are dark and swarming with secret life, and the attics are filled with long-forgotten things that nevertheless maintain their mysterious hold on the occupants below as they move restlessly about from room to meticulously furnished room.
With a writer as reticent as Ibsen, one can never really know what inner compulsions brought about the change from the milieu of St. John’s Eve, The Vikings at Helgeland and Love’s Comedy to that of A Doll House, The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler. Many explanations have been offered, and a combination of many is certainly in order. It is the undue emphasis on one or another exclusively that has given rise to those still current oversimplifications, those convenient labels, that misrepresent the stylistic unity of the later plays.
There is, for example, the conversion-to-naturalism theory that finds supporting evidence in Ibsen’s angry response to the critical reception of Peer Gynt: “My book is poetry. And if it is not, then it shall be. The conception of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall be made to conform to my boo.… If it is to be war, then let it be war! If I am no poet, then I have nothing to lose. I shall try my luck as a photographer.” From this perspective, the later plays are a series of naturalistic photographs, literal and exact exposures of the social lies and corruptions of the time, leading to Yeats’ dismissal of Ibsen as a writer for clever journalists. But it is difficult to believe that a born poet, having persisted against odds for forty years, in a momentary pique at his critics, decides to turn the theater with all its possibilities into a living tabloid. The Ibsen of the later plays is not the Scandinavian Zola of Thérèse Raquin—though one still can find him categorized in text books under the heading of Naturalism.
Another theory proposes that Ibsen, in his lifelong search for his true vocation as a writer, had it precipitated for him by the Danish critic Georg Brandes, in his famous dictum that “what is alive in modern literature shows in its capacity to submit problems to debate.” Brandes’ Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature (Part 1, 1872) obviously had a catalytic effect on Ibsen’s creative development, as witness the fact, noted by Brian Downs, that “all Ibsen’s poetry after 1875 could be written on a single sheet of notepaper.” Its attack on the cultural nostalgia and idealizing aestheticism of the dominant romantic school reinforced Ibsen’s own evolving thought, which already had accepted Kierkegaard’s position that, of the three stages on life’s way, the purely aesthetic was the lowest and least defensible. And yet if the romantic milieu of the early verse plays and historical dramas no longer seemed artistically habitable, Ibsen’s rich imagination could not move on to a theater dedicated simply to ideas and utilitarian realism. Unlike Bernard Shaw, he was not by temperament a debater, a dialectician of the platform—and his inability to find satisfaction in this role marks one of the differences between their dramatic worlds: Shaw, in his plays, is interested in human beings insofar as they express ideas, whereas Ibsen is interested in ideas insofar as they are expressions of human beings.
Ibsen’s dilemma was acute; he had, on the one hand, an outmoded technique, or array of techniques, which he could no longer employ with conviction, and, on the other, a restrictive blueprint for future writing which offered no freedom to his expansive imagination. According to the second of our theoretic simplifications, wherein the shift from poetry to prose is more like turning off a faucet than a painful diminishment of being, Ibsen himself shot the lyric Pegasus that had served him so well in Brand and Peer Gynt and became the pedestrian Social Dramatist. It is this approach that has given rise to the mistaken impression that Ibsen devoted his later years to writing a series of problem plays. Leaving aside the question of whether the problem play is a legitimate genre—it would seem to be more a function of content than of form—it is precisely the fact that Ibsen did not write problem plays that gives his drama its lasting fascination. It was rather his disciples who wrote the problem plays, about such matters as slum landlords or prison conditions or war profiteering—and their work soon exhausts our interest; whereas Ibsen concerned himself with writing plays that, among other things, pose problems, just as he explored social dimensions of existence without becoming a Social Dramatist and adapted naturalistic innovations without becoming a Naturalist.
If so many of the standard clichés about the later Ibsen dramas turn out to be superficial and inadequate, what then, we may ask, is the common substratum of these works? Considerations of intent, though tantalizing, soon lose their focus in the minutiae of biography and prove unproductive. We know, for instance, that shortly before the crucial dividing line in Ibsen’s literary development, he evinced a strong determination to make himself over, that he altered his manner of dress, his appearance, even his handwriting from what previously had been casual and bohemian to what now became formal, elegant and correct, as if hoping that a revision in the outer man would evoke an inner transformation—but any attempt to locate an overriding motive behind these changes results at best in a study of the psychology of creativity, rather than a clearer understanding of the works themselves.
It is not the question why the stylistic shift, but how it was brought about, that leads to the unity of structure and texture that binds these twelve plays into one cycle. Before an artist can transcend the limitations of his present self, he has to figure out how, technically, he is going to accomplish his growth; until that quite specific, practical discovery is made, he is dealing with nothing more than his insubstantial aspirations. It is in Ibsen’s workshop, hidden in the weeds of those apparently vacant lots between the two dissimilar milieus of style, that one can perhaps find the kernel of growth, the clue to a pattern of twenty-five years.
In July 1874, after a decade abroad during which the decisive battles of his artistic life had been fought and won, Ibsen returned for a visit to Norway. Accepted and welcomed now as a great national dramatist, he nevertheless experienced his return chiefly as a bitter reminder of the toll the long years of struggle had taken, an exacerbation of scarred emotions from old defeats that had brought him to the verge of despair and self-destruction. From the hour he sailed up the Christiania Fjord, he wrote, “I felt a weight settling down on my chest, a feeling of actual physical oppression. And this feeling lasted all the while I was at home” —except for one day he might have added. On September 10, a delegation of students marched with flags and music to his lodgings to give him a testimony of their admiration and affection. A song specially composed in his honor was sung. The occasion touched him deeply, and for once he dropped the gruff and ironic public mask to open his innermost feelings, so much so that his brief response has been gratefully raided by commentators ever since—and not least the remarks defining his chosen vocation. “What is it,” he said, “to be a poet? It was a long time before I realized that to be a poet is, most of all, to see; but mark well, to see in such a way that what is seen is perceived by his audience just as the poet saw it.”
To be a poet is to see. One can easily imagine, with the evidence at hand of the plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen himself seeing, gaining a glimpse, a germinal hint, at about this time, of the solution to the dilemma facing him after his enormous and exhausting effort toward “that positive philosophy of life which the critics have demanded of me” monumentalized in Emperor and Galilean. If indeed the poetry of conventional verse drama—the rich legacy of Shakespeare depleted to a near bankrupt romanticism—now had to be sacrificed to the plain truth that realism sought, as Brandes’ strictures implied, perhaps another poetry was waiting to be discovered underground, under the surfaces of ordinary life. Already, in his youthful poem, “The Miner,” Ibsen had seemingly anticipated a quest into the depths: “Downward I must break my way till I hear the ore-stones ring…in the deep is peace, peace and desolation from eternity; break me the way, my heavy hammer, to the hidden mystery’s heart.” In the hidden laws and interrelationships within life itself was an inexhaustible source of poetry in the theater, with respect to which rhyme and meter could be considered as merely the outward, collateral evidence; the essential problem was to see these truths and then find the means, dramaturgically, to project them in concrete instances, exemplary cases, so that the audience could not fail, proportionate to their capacity for insight, to see the same.
As he elaborated the act of seeing into a practical dramatic technique, Ibsen, it would seem, came to recognize it under three main aspects, which—when fused into one effective instrument and modified to the needs of each consecutive project—produced that unity of structure and texture which has been the object of our search. In this threefold method, to see, first of all, is to visualize. The most valuable description of this phase of composition was given by Ibsen to the Munich editor Georg Conrad, after it had proved itself in practice several times: “Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul. I always proceed from the individual; the stage setting, the dramatic ensemble, all that comes naturally and does not cause me any worry, as soon as I am certain of the individual in every aspect of his humanity. But I have to have his exterior in mind also, down to the last button, how he stands and walks, how he conducts himself, what his voice sounds like. Then I do not let him go until his fate is fulfilled.”
Ibsen was capable of exercising this power of evoking the physical presence of his characters with an intensity that verged at times on hallucination; he once told his wife that Nora had appeared to him that morning, wearing a blue dress, and at other occasions would give periodic reports on her changes of apparel. Such insistence on realizing general truths through the most scrupulously detailed particulars, “down to the last button,” is no surprise to anyone who has seen examples of the costume designs meticulously rendered by Ibsen when he was stage manager for the Bergen theater. These, along with other reproductions of his art works, have been assembled by Otto Lous Mohr in an illuminating volume titled Henrik Ibsen as a Painter. Here we learn that, until approximately his thirty-fifth year, Ibsen had considerable ambitions as a painter, that he worked fairly consistently in a variety of media, and that it was only the repeated and strenuous urging of his wife that turned the balance and concentrated his energies in the field of dramatic writing. His extensive, if curtailed, experience in the graphic arts was hardly wasted, however, as the wealth of carefully selected, thematically significant visual detail in the later plays amply demonstrates. In fact, it is exactly this use of apt visual suggestion that became one of Ibsen’s chief means of reintroducing the poetic richness of implication eliminated, in large measure, from the verbal text, as has been persuasively argued by John Northam in his indispensable study, Ibsen’s Dramatic Method. (Northam’s discussion of method and Maurice Valency’s of the meaning of the subject matter serve the same essential function in clarifying the scope of Ibsen’s dramatic art as, comparably, G. Wilson Knight’s investigation of Shakespeare’s method of compressing his thought into the modulating tensions between key archetypal images, or Theodore Spencer’s and E. M. W. Tillyard’s documentation of how Shakespeare’s apparent awareness of the crumbling triple order of the Elizabethan world-picture stretched his tragic heroes on a cosmic rack.)
On a primary level, then, the Ibsen play can be regarded as a structure of successive visualizations, derived out of an intimate knowledge of the individual seen in all the concrete immediacy and humanity of his being. But this individual, this basic self on which so much depends, could never become theatrically interesting, dynamically motivated, enmeshed in a complex action, were it not for another, a second aspect of seeing: namely, that to see is to perceive relationships. It is here, in composition, that the individual—Nora, for example, or Hedda, or Solness—inevitably acquired a context, a place in a dramatic ensemble, a suitable stage setting; and also here, in interpretation, that the audience is called upon to follow a much more involved order of perceptions. They must perceive, first, through the translucent glass of the dialogue, the stress of relationships, tensions, dissonances within the self, described by Ibsen at one point as “the struggle which all serious-minded human beings have to wage with themselves to bring their lives into harmony with their convictions. For the different spiritual functions do not develop evenly and abreast of each other in any one human being…hence the conflict within the individual.” Not only are there the spiritual conflicts, those matters that trouble the conscience, the stored furnishings of the attic in our earlier figure, but there is also—by virtue of what has often been remarked in Ibsen’s work: his extraordinary, pre-Freudian sensitivity to unconscious pressures behind the conscious mind—the relationship of motives and conflicts bred in the troll-dark cellar, with all its swarming, secret, importunate life.
Beyond the self, too, there is a network of relationships to be perceived and appraised: the shifting pattern of the various characters’ reactions to each other. In a letter to Sophie Reimers, an actress preparing for a production of Rosmersholm, Ibsen emphasized the need to see the individual as decipherable not solely by himself, but also in a social context: “the only piece of advice I can give you is to read the whole play over and over again and carefully observe what the other persons say about Rebecca. In earlier times our actors often committed the great mistake of studying their parts in isolation, without paying sufficient regard to the character’s position in and connection with the whole work.” The characters, in other words, must be construed as viewing each other through varying degrees of subjective distortion, while at the same time making certain valid discernments; and it is out of this amalgam of truth and illusion, which we are invited to evaluate, that they act and react.
Equally important in this passage of advice is the premise which gives us our final set of significant relationships, the assumption that, on this second level of seeing, the unit of measure is no longer the individual, but the whole play. Thus the self, as its nature is explored and its destiny fulfilled, is related, not merely to its own inner traits and pressures, or to those embodied in the characters around it, but to the total environment realized in the given work—that image of the inanimate world defined by the properties, the décor of the various stage settings, even those reflections of a larger world evoked within the frame of the action. In this last regard, Francis Fergusson has observed that beyond the cramped and gaslit parlor on which the curtain rises, there often seems to be, in an Ibsen play, a sense of the immense void of the primeval European wilderness. For all their self-preoccupying, civilized, middle-class concerns, the characters are never very far from some quickening reminder of the green pine forests of the mountain uplands, the black waters of the fjords, or the silent, drifting depths of the sea. Modern man, though he has shut himself snugly up in four-walled urban or suburban insulation, is still in the midst of nature; it is around him and in him; and no matter how he may try to ignore it, this marrow of his physical being stirs in his consciousness as intimations of an older, fiercer life of sagalike simplicity.
But that facet of the inanimate world which soon strikes one as Ibsen’s special province, made by him into a distinctive contribution to dramatic technique, is comprehended in the relationship of the individual character to his “personal props.” Hedda’s pistols, for instance, or Nora’s macaroons, have a more active role than they might in, say, a Chekhov play, where each would serve as the exact, cohering particular at the hub of a multitude of general impressions, as the fragmented mind of Chebutykin is mirrored in the clock he shatters. Ibsen’s objects have, of course, this value; but beyond it, they seem to liberate and implement the personalities and vital energies of the characters, even to the point of acquiring a kind of latent force, a mana of their own. What exhibits power in the theater frequently proves to have deep, primordial roots, so that one can find both relevant and enlightening here a statement made in another connection by Theodore Gaster in his notes for The New Golden Bough: “What is really involved would seem to be the primitive notion of what we may call the extended self. The primitive believes that the self, or identity, of a person is not limited to his physical being, but embraces also everything associated with it and everything that can evoke his presence in another person’s mind.” Some intuitive grasp on Ibsen’s part of this notion of the extended self, of the individual as a field of force entering into and appropriating certain personally expressive objects to fulfill its ends, appears to be the principle underlying much of the use of symbols in the plays. A similar intuitive grasp of the same principle ought to give the reader or the playgoer a livelier sense of the degree to which Ibsen has succeeded in transforming the apparently neutral trappings of the realistic stage into highly charged ingredients in a spiritual action, to which no element of the mise en scène is finally unrelated.
Such a sense is crucial to an understanding of these plays, for it is this transformation which gave Ibsen the solution to his dilemma regarding the place of poetry in the realistic theater. Just as visual suggestion provided the counterpart of imagery, so it was his discovery that, without manifestly violating the realistic convention, he could turn the contents of the stage itself, and all their intricate relationships, into large-scale metaphors for psychological states and spiritual conditions. Thus the costumes, properties, lighting and décor became the diction of a new kind of dramatic poetry, the vocabulary of a vision of the human situation whose full dimensions could bear comparison with Shakespeare’s traditional medieval system of correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm, the little world of the individual and the majestic moral order of the cosmos.
As a sensitive observer of the iconoclastic latter nineteenth century, the era of Darwin, Huxley, Marx, Hartmann and Nietzsche, lbsen did not find available to him even such sparse reference to a reassuring, all-containing cosmic order as Goethe could still make at the start of the century in the Prologue to Faust. Intellectual and scientific innovations and displacements had come too thick and fast to sustain even the remnants of that traditional belief in the universe as an intelligible structure of ascending hierarchies in which every entity had its place and divinely ordained purpose, that total synthesis of material fact and moral value which was the greatest achievement and bequest of the medieval mind, articulated in all its clarity and sublimity in the magnificent architectonics of Dante’s Divine Comedy. If the stability of that order had, either apparently or in reality, vanished, then the ultimate ground of meaning—that ground which furnished the support of any poetry that was more than a mindless celebration of the obvious—was profoundly called in question. At times the somber coloring of the later plays seems wholly a product of this feeling that the foundations of a whole civilization have dissolved, and humanity is adrift. As Ibsen put it in a note for one of his plays, catching both sides of the imbalance: “The keynote is to be: The prolific growth of our intellectual life, in literature, arts, etc.—and in contrast to this: all of mankind gone astray.”
At other times, however, it appeared to him that the ground of meaning persisted in another form: not in the immutable cosmic order out of which the old absolutes had come, but within what was flowing, changing, relative — namely, history. To an aspiring young writer, he wrote in 1879 that “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 and actions, except in the most incomplete and superficial manner.” Both the theories of Darwin and the conversion of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution into the spectacular advances of nineteenth-century technology suggested that ultimate meaning was an evolving order, a process, not a timeless system. In The Birth of Tragedy a few years previous, Nietzsche had accused the villain of the piece, Socrates, of murdering the ecstatic Dionysian spirit of tragedy with the cool, clear, rational, optimistic unfolding of his dialectic. Ostensibly the setting was Periclean Athens; actually it was nineteenth-century Europe, the villain was positivistic science, and the culture hero who would bring back the ancient grandeur was to be Wagner, tragedy reborn from the spirit of music. Ibsen now offered another alternative: tragedy reborn from the spirit of history. By what means? Through cultivation of the third, last and most important mode of seeing, whereby the poet becomes the seer, and to see means to prophesy.
From his earliest years, Ibsen was apparently drawn to identify his life with the prophet’s role. Of the sixty or more of his art works that survive, there is only one having a religious subject. Painted in 1845 when Ibsen was a solitary, seventeen-year-old apothecary’s apprentice in the town of Grimstad, it depicts, in rather crude and cloudy outline, a winged angel descending from a brightly illuminated sky toward a bearded man, kneeling or sitting, almost swallowed and lost in a dark, enveloping landscape; the painting is titled, “The Prophet Elijah under a juniper tree in the wilderness, I Kings, 19,5.” The text referred to reads: “And he lay down and slept under a juniper tree; and behold, an angel touched him, and said to him, ‘Arise and eat.’ ” What is there in this passage, we wonder, that Ibsen should want to paint it? Enigmatic by itself, it can be at least partially resolved in context. Elijah, earliest of the prophets and the model of his type, is likewise a solitary man. In a fury of wrath, when “the hand of the Lord” is on him, he slays a multitude of the false prophets of Baal; yet shortly after, when Jezebel, the queen, sends a message threatening his life, he is terrified and takes flight. Thus Elijah exemplifies an ambivalence that constantly recurs among the biblical prophets: in his natural person, he is lonely, introspective, timid, an outcast—like Ibsen in Grimstad—but gripped by his larger purpose, he has the courage of lions to accomplish works of might. The verse immediately preceding the one in question describes the prophet in the former attitude, that of abasement: “But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree; and he asked that he might die, saying, ’It is enough now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am no better than my fathers.’ ” For Ibsen, it was less than a year afterwards, in 1846, that a liaison which became one of the crises of his life resulted in his illegitimate child, born to a servant girl ten years his senior; he contributed to the support of this child through fifteen years of his harshest struggles. One could well argue that this experience of abasement returns to haunt the later plays in multiple guises, in motifs of the suppressed and guilty secret (as in The Wild Duck), the traumatic awakening (in A Doll House), the lost or abandoned child (in Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder)—and, by so arguing, again risk losing focus in the merely biographical. Or, reviewing the premonitory painting, one could speculate: was it an accident—or part of a pattern? For the painted scene now emerges as a prototypal moment of restoration and renewal, the descent of inspiration, strength and purpose to the figure of the poet as seer, almost obliterated in his personal wilderness. It is after this turning point, in the biblical account, that Elijah journeys on to a cave, the entrance to the hidden mystery’s heart; and from here the word of the Lord guides him to an understanding of the true nature of divine being, not as tempest, earthquake or fire, but as a still small voice. It is no surprise, then, that after twenty-five years of varied experiments in the theater, Ibsen concentrates the whole of his knowledge, the sum of his art, on a cycle of works that, in one way or another, are all plays of the still small voice, tracing the destinies of rebels and outcasts, radical protestants, defenders and martyrs of conscience, probers for truth, broken pioneers of a new faith evolving out of the unfinished life of the spirit.
The figure of the prophet finds repeated incarnations throughout the various dramas. There is the satiric scorn reserved for the false prophet in Peer Gynt, who uses his presumed powers of insight merely to exploit; Eilert Løvborg can be thought of as another variant of the role. The most portentous of these embodiments of prophecy, however, is that of Maximus in Emperor and Galilean. It is Maximus who gives the young Julian that vision of the future for which, in time, as the Apostate, he will die. Ibsen’s ten-act, two-part play bears the subtitle, “a world-historical drama"; it is, as Wilson Knight observes, the one great dramatic statement we have of the central conflict in Western civilization; “all history is before us, turning on the one, axial, problem.” As Maximus envisions that conflict, there are, in the West, two worlds that are dying and one as yet powerless to be born. Just as there are in the Athens of Julian’s time two roads, one which leads to the university and one to the church, and a third road which leads out from town toward Eleusis, toward the great mystery, so there are two empires, the first founded on the tree of knowledge, the second on the tree of the cross—and the third empire to come, “the empire of the great mystery, the empire which shall be founded on the tree of knowledge and the tree of the cross together, because it hates and loves them both…” In other words, there is the empire of Greco-Roman paganism with its worship of philosophy and/or sensuous beauty, and the empire of Christianity, with its worship of the Saviour, the pale Galilean—and the empire of those for whom “the time is near,” those who will “not need to die to live as gods on earth,” the “twin-natured” ones who, by willing the new synthesis through self-realization, will comprehend and pass beyond the values of both Emperor and Galilean, as the child is lost in the youth and the youth is lost in the man, “but neither the child nor the youth is lost.” It is this toward which the history of man is tending, and this for which his true heroes are born. As Maximus declares: “There is one who always returns at certain intervals in the life of the human race. He is like a rider breaking in a wild horse in the enclosure. Time and again it throws him. Soon the rider is in the saddle again, each time more confident, more skilled; but down he had to come in his various forms up to this very day.…Who knows how often he has walked among us, unrecognized by any man?”
“From the cross on which you pin your hopes, I will build a ladder for him you do not know,” says Julian later, alluding to this prophetically revealed, perennially dying and reborn hero who is the vehicle of humanity-to-come. Climbing the rungs of that ladder, he intimates, the pioneers of the race will leave behind the child and the youth, the warring pagan humanistic and Christian theocentric dispensations and enter a realm that values, not hedonism, but a compassionate joy; not suffering, but a seasoned fulfillment; a realm in which the divine principle worthy of worship will be found within the self. The actual ladder that Ibsen built, however—the rungs of which were his later plays—was of a different order. It could never have been fashioned without this vision; but it was, by prior necessity, a ladder downwards. It descended into the darkness for which Ibsen had such a strong and gifted affinity—the darkness of those unacknowledged mixed motives and ambiguous feelings, those human corruptions, lies and self-evasions, that would first have to be clearly seen and eradicated before the Third Empire could come about.
Georg Brandes, in the literary study that affected Ibsen so deeply, had written that, “looked at from the historical point of view, a book, even though it may be a perfect, complete work of art, is only a piece cut out of an endlessly continuous web.” The largest unit of measure, then, in the ranks of seeing is the world-spirit working itself out through the innumerable, apparently chaotic currents and crosscurrents of history. Once this is intuited as the background of the plays, then the tightly controlled, intensive dramatic actions, the skirmishes by which small plots of ground are lost or won, disclose their full implication of meaning. Thus it is, for instance, as Maurice Valency notes, that the domestic clash in A Doll House comes to imply “the correspondence of the family quarrel with the dialectic of history on every plane of the social structure down to the individual soul.” It is in this dimension of relationships as well that the play represents “a kind of dramatic metaphor, a play of symbols, a conceit. The opposition of irreconcilable viewpoints which brings about the dissolution of this union is then seen to be a reflection of the vast conflict which is bringing about a readjustment of social relations on every level. The only possible reconciliation of spiritual entities which are here displayed in opposition must be, accordingly, in terms of that synthesis which will, in its largest aspect, result in the Third Empire.” What is true of A Doll House also applies in kind to the subsequent plays; all the dead and wounded on this many-sectored battleground of values lie stretched in one direction, like shattered signposts pointing toward the world to be.
To summarize the main lines of our inquiry, then: as a dramatic poet intent on remaining himself, in possession of the poet’s fluid range of reference, while managing to function under the restrictive conditions of the modern realistic stage, Ibsen decided, at about the midpoint of his career, to concentrate his work around a way of seeing, deceptively photographic on the surface, actually a complex fusion of perspectives, which then became his dramatic method. The practical success and productive versatility of this method led to what emerged as the typical pattern of the later Ibsen drama, which could be described as a meticulously concrete visualization of individuals realized within a contemporary setting which the audience is induced to see and see into until its manifold relationships become an expansive dramatic metaphor that conveys, at its ultimate extension, the total situation of these individuals within, spatially, the primal immensity of nature, largely closed out and offstage, and, temporally, a changing, evolving historical context with a latent inner core of meaning, against which the fates of the characters are etched like prophecies.
After this brief survey of the master builder’s working methods, it remains only to appreciate and enjoy the landmarks of his art at firsthand. That suggests an approach, both in reading and viewing, somewhere between the strain of trying to encompass all the meanings at once—and the impoverishment of ignoring or denying their presence. For the meanings assuredly are present and have to be reckoned with—much to the irritation of those skeptics who fail to recognize that the complexity and subtlety of a first-rate mind in the arts can be equivalent to the same complexity and subtlety when expressed in quantum mechanics or set theory; and that part of the subtlety of that mind in the art of the theater consists in disguising its musings as forthright speech. Henry James, a comparable artist who tried repeatedly but never could manage that theatrical feat, caught the ulterior quality of Ibsen’s accomplishment in describing his appeal to actors: “The opportunity that he gives them is almost always to do the deep and delicate thing—the sort of chance that, in proportion as they are intelligent, they are most on the look out for.” The deep and delicate thing—rightly it can only be appreciated, as Ibsen has indicated, by experiencing the play over and over again. A major play, like a great symphony or string quartet, needs several exposures under varied interpretations before it begins to release its secrets. And ultimately its stature, like beauty, will depend wholly on the eye and mind of the beholder, on the degree of that self-realization in the audience that Ibsen sought so ardently and resourcefully to develop through the challenge of his demanding art. With this central purpose of the dramatist in mind, of raising questions rather than giving answers, I would leave the plays to present their own issues in terms of the method described above, were it not for the interference of a few venerable misreadings that, by sufferance in each instance, have almost become traditions themselves.
When the troubled applause died away, and the first audience for Ibsen’s A Doll House rose to their somewhat unsteady feet and filed up the aisles, no one among them could have known that he had participated, four days before Christmas of 1879, in the birth of modern drama. The long view is a privilege reserved for posterity, whereas the shaken spectators in Copenhagen’s Royal Theater, still reverberating with the slam of that historic door, had other, more immediate concerns to cope with.
They had been held, for one thing, by a sequence of vivid dramatic images that had drawn them insidiously, moment by moment, scene by scene, to an abrupt, intolerable conclusion. Their heroine had gone from her lilting entrance, a slender, vulnerable creature of macaroons and Christmas toys, to her final departure, a remorselessly independent figure wreathed in a funereal shawl. All that occurred in between remained to tease the mind with questions. How could she do such a thing, leave home and husband and children after eight years of marriage? Was she justified? Would she return the next day? How could her character change so suddenly? And what was that character, to start with? Had they been deceived in their assumptions? Were they perhaps deceived in reality, right now? As they went their many separate ways back to homes grown appreciably more perilous, the audience was induced to ponder the matrix of causes that had shaped the heroine’s past and the network of involvements that wove about her present. And, as they pondered and discussed and argued and brooded, it seemed increasingly apparent to them—in Scandinavia and Germany and England and France and throughout Europe and America—that something incalculable had shifted, had altered, never to be the same again, that, as Bernard Shaw put it, “Nora’s revolt is the end of a chapter in human history.”
As this reconstruction of the widening circles of contemporary response implies, it is with A Doll House that Ibsen’s dramatic method comes into its own and its practical success is assured. But Shaw’s highly vocal part in that response makes clear where the emphasis has fallen and where attention has been too narrowly directed. If there is one cliché I could choose to wish away—as I could with each of these four dramas—one stereotype worth shattering to help liberate the living play from the revered Dramatic Classic, it would be the tired notion that this is a feminist play, and that we have done our duty as playgoers when we have followed gallant Nora through her struggle for her rights.
Perhaps the fault lies in the title. There is certainly no sound justification for perpetuating the awkward and blindly traditional misnomer of A Doll’s House: the house is not Nora’s, as the possessive implies; the familiar children’s toy is called a doll house; and one can make a reasonable supposition that Ibsen, intending an ironic modern contrast to the heroic ring of the house of Atreus or Cadmus, at least partially includes Torvald with Nora in the original title, Et Dukkehjem, for the two of them at the play’s opening are still posing like the little marzipan bride and groom atop the wedding cake.
In the preliminary notes to what he first subtitled “A Modern Tragedy,” Ibsen makes clear from the start his assumption that the fall of the house of Helmer desolates both parties. “There are two kinds of spiritual law,” he writes, “two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other.…” The superstructure of Torvald’s conscience, his sense of right and wrong, is founded on the formulation: “the most important thing is that I be a success; all else will follow from that.” Nora’s moral sense, on the other hand, is that “the most important thing is that we live in, and out of, the truth of our feelings; all else will follow from that.” What is at stake is nothing less than the respective definitions that the society allows of a man and a woman. And because Ibsen lives in a universe where essences are no longer given a priori, out of a fixed, eternal order, out of some Platonic idea of man and woman, but rather in a flowing process where selves are chiefly defined by the choices they make, the unenlightened struggle of Torvald and Nora to define themselves along separate paths inevitably brings them into conflict. It is crucial, however, to note that whereas the play begins with Nora, and in time Torvald appears, after the action has run its course Nora withdraws, and the play ends with Torvald. The balance is significant. Moreover, the situation of Torvald at the conclusion is, if anything, more pathetic; his bland, commonsensical, self-righteous attempt to establish his authority has failed, and, although Nora has been strengthened by facing up to at least a glimpse of the truth, Torvald has had love pulled from under his feet while, by the nature of his conventional code, he has hardly an inkling of what he can possibly have done that was wrong.
Once we realize that the crux of the play is not primarily an individual, but a relationship—the modern middle-class conception of marriage—we are in a position to see both why Ibsen did, then, concentrate on the character of Nora and also the skill with which he uses the other relationships of the play to develop and amplify her situation. His interest centers on Nora because, in her own terms, she internalizes the conflict, which Ibsen designates in his notes as “natural feeling on the one hand and belief in authority on the other.” Authority, she believes, is something located outside herself, first in her father, then in Torvald, little realizing that Torvald is likewise and more subtly the puppet of others’ expectations, namely of his co-workers at the bank and, in a larger sense, of public opinion, of what they will think. Both are dolls—a doll being a thing in a human shape without the hard-won, distinctively human attributes.
In the marvelous design of the action, Ibsen shows Nora painfully acquiring those attributes, in effect recapitulating the development of the race as she moves from, metaphorically, the role of a little animal, a lark, a squirrel, to a newborn human self with something of the tragic sense of life. In the parallel relationship with Krogstad, she discovers a visible embodiment of the horror of degradation ahead of her, since it was “nothing more and nothing worse” that he did which poisoned his home and caused Torvald and society in general to reject him; and simultaneously in the relationship with Rank, crippled in body as she sees herself crippled in conscience, she finds the strength to die alone, if necessary. And, in a carefully modulated antithesis, Krogstad and Mrs. Linde, the two who have known the darkness outside, move into the light, the warmth of the home, together, at the same time that Torvald and Nora move apart, out of the “sunlit happiness” of their union into the harsh instruction of that same darkness. Structurally, the play is a wonder; and thematically, far from being dated, it is only beginning to communicate its relevance.
The stereotype that interferes probably more than any other with an appreciation of The Wild Duck may also be an oblique consequence of the title. Since the play, unlike most of the Ibsen dramas, lacks any one single character that dominates attention and stirs conjecture, the audience’s curiosity passes by default to the meaning of the wild duck itself, which then becomes one of those Ibsen symbols that have a way, in discussion, of detaching themselves from the text and flying around like ectoplasm. Who is the wild duck? Hjalmar? Old Ekdal? Both? Hedvig? The entire Ekdal family? All the characters? Modern civilized man? And in each connection, in what sense? These are legitimate questions; the action invites them; yet one can soon reach Gina’s point of exasperation with all the fuss made over that sacred duck —or else lose in riddles the primary emotional response that James Joyce honored when he wrote of the play that “one can only brood upon it as upon a personal woe.”
Ibsen takes no sides on Gina’s being right or wrong. Life is prosaic and matter-of-fact, exacting of us only a simple and responsible effort toward some understanding of each other, and, at the same time, something mysterious and haunting beyond anything we ever dreamed: it is part of the greatness of the play that it maintains both perspectives. Both are converged in the prismatic symbol of life that crowns the play, the once wounded, now rather pampered, reacclimated household pet and, as Hedvig observes, the creature of unknown origin whom nobody really knows. A crown, however, is only the emblem of power; and to locate the peculiar force of the play, the audience might do better by examining its substantial underpinnings in, particularly, the use of the settings. Act I, in Werle’s study, presents us with a view of those on top in society, those who, through clear-sighted, tough-minded realism, manipulate their way into control, along with their retainers and sycophants. The remaining four acts are devoted to those on the bottom, those who are the manipulated and controlled. And yet the actual setting is elevated, a garret studio under a skylight. In this ambiguous play of illusion and reality, it is the fantasies of the poor that exalt them in the only victories they know, and if those compensating fantasies are left alone, who is to declare for sure the losers from the winners? Right from the start, moreover, in that most contemplative room in Werle’s house where Hjalmar and Gregers reencounter each other, the keynote is struck, as Northam observes, in the fact that the prevailing light cast by the lampshades is green, the green of nature, the green of the cut forests that take revenge, the green of the depths of the sea. And now we can understand why no single character dominates our attention; none of them, individually, is strong enough to. All the characters that reside in the divided setting of the last four acts, with its practical foreground for eating, arguing and doing business, suggestive of the conscious mind, and its more remote, cavernous inner room full of diminished remnants of the natural world, like the unconscious mind—all have gone down, like the wounded wild duck, into the undertow of life. The Wild Duck is a drowned world; once we grasp this basic metaphor of the play and enter into it imaginatively, we can freely explore the channels of the deep, where the lost voyagers rest suspended, nearly weightless, beyond salvage, in their timeless dream.
In the case of Hedda Gabler there is no problem regarding the lack of a commanding personality to arouse curiosity and speculation. The vivid, anguished, dangerous character of Hedda has long impressed actresses and audiences alike as tinder enough to ignite the play—so much so that she constantly threatens to become her own stereotype. Too often in the theater, and perhaps in the reader’s mind’s eye, there are Heddas that pace like caged tigresses, Heddas that glide like hooded cobras, Aztec Heddas made to cut out hearts—that would immediately have sent George Tesman fleeing into breathless, terrorstricken exile in the stacks of the Bibliothèque nationale.
Such conceptions are false to the text in two ways: they violate the deep and delicate art of Ibsen’s portraiture of the individual, and, by magnifying Hedda, they distort the balanced ensemble of the whole play which composes its ultimate meaning. Like the play itself, Hedda is one of the most complex creations Ibsen ever shaped. Far from being simply a vampire, a belle dame sans merci, she is, as James noted, “infinitely perverse,” but also, as on reconsideration he was prompted to add, “various and sinuous and graceful, complicated and natural; she suffers, she struggles, she is human, and by that fact exposed to a dozen interpretations.” Or as Valency describes her, she is “neither good nor evil…both creative and destructive, idealistic and selfish, noble and despicable…a bundle of unresolved tendencies, a human being in process of development, conditioned by heredity, limited by environment, capable of anything, and striking out blindly in search of fulfillment.” She is the woman, Shaw stated, that most men of any experience have at some time encountered, whose temperament may have fascinated and challenged them, and whom they have been fortunate enough, through some inner check, not to marry. Unlike the wily, overcalculating Brack or the unstable Løvborg, however, George Tesman, bluff, good-natured, unseeing, is the fool who rushes in to claim this dubious prize—perhaps, with her inflated expectations, the one match she should hope to aspire to if, like the wild duck, she could once acclimatize herself. But under the icy exterior, a rage burns too strongly in Hedda, shown visually by her many associations with the stove and with fire, climaxing in the burning of the manuscript—a rage not, like that more moderate desire in the counterbalancing portrait of Nora, to live her own life, but rather to live someone else’s life vicariously, to form it, control it, use it as both a means of self-fulfillment and a weapon for striking back.
Again Ibsen employs the tested device of the significantly divided stage—but this time the inner room is cramped and confined, dominated by the painting of the late General Gabler, just as Hedda is dominated by her father, not her husband, as the play’s title makes clear: still Hedda Gabler, not Tesman. Into this room, her sanctuary, she brings her piano, her connection with the Dionysian energies she longs toward, the expressive instrument of the wild dance she merely plays rather than enacts, like her stronger, healthier counterpart, Nora. With her covert fixation on vine leaves and orgies, it is the Dionysian spirit Hedda wants to bring out in Løvborg, who ironically has already known it to excess in the company of the “chaste” goddess, Mlle. Diana. Thus Hedda is attempting what Julian failed in: escape from the constraints of the pale Galilean by turning back into an illusion of pagan freedom.
But Hedda’s doomed enterprise takes on full meaning only if her milieu is completely conveyed in both its human density and limitation. Like most of Ibsen’s later masterpieces, the play is chamber music, calling for virtuosi in every part. As Halvdan Koht has noted, two well-delineated worlds are brought here into conflict, with a spectrum of individuals to represent each: on one side of Hedda, the solid, respectable, bourgeois establishment, warmhearted, decent, complacent, dull—Mrs. Elvsted and the whole house of Tesman; and to the other side of Hedda, a world of spiritual unrest, morally unstable, full of ambivalent potentialities, whose alternatives are embodied in Løvborg and Brack. And of these, inseparable from Hedda in the overall meaning, is Løvborg; for with the Swiss watch workmanship of this masterful play, Ibsen shifts the focus of his dramatic concern. Man’s ills—moral, psychological, spiritual—are no longer diagnosed toward the Third Empire to come; instead he embarks on a series of explorations-in-depth of thwarted genius, of exceptionally gifted men, in other words, of what mankind is capable of, not in some remote synthesis, but now.
Eilert Løvborg stands in the shadow of his nemesis, Hedda; but the second of these exceptional individuals, Halvard Solness, stands boldly in the foreground of his play, The Master Builder. Here, once again, Ibsen’s thought shows its tendency to develop through mutually correcting antitheses. Just as Hedda’s character and situation offered several wry contrasts to Nora’s, so in this play we find what seem to be a number of inverse analogies to The Wild Duck. The earlier work was a study of lack of ambition, whereas here we have ambition to excess; thus the former was appropriately a play of the submarine depths, while the latter is a play of vertiginous heights, of mountains, towers and the spirit world. The theme is made visible from the very start: as the servants in The Wild Duck were shown masking the direct light in the study with the soothing and flattering obscurity of the green shades, so The Master Builder begins with an exhausted man gasping for breath, for oxygen, because he cannot drive himself to work any longer. Later we learn, of other characters, that Dr. Herdal met Hilda first at a mountain lodge; that, in turn, Hilda has met Mrs. Solness before at a sanatorium, also presumably high in the mountains; and that her initial, indelible image of Solness is of him wreathing the top of a church tower. Throughout the play, as Herdal remarks, Hilda is dressed for mountain climbing. Thus everything here is altitude and the outreaching of the self, culminating in the sense that Solness is, or believes he is, in touch with superhuman powers, occult beings, the helpers and servers, the troll within, the god he speaks to from the pinnacle of his achievement.
The last of these traditional stereotypes that need to be broken, then, is the idea that we are still on the level terrain of what are frequently, but never quite accurately, described as the “social dramas.” The action looms larger than professional or marital ethics; and Solness cannot be imagined or impersonated—as he sometimes is—as if he were as clipped and tidy as an eighteenth-century deist or an Ivy League lawyer. On the contrary, this is a man who is smoldering, elemental, hypnotic—and only if he is seen as such are his genius and his accomplishment credible. Kaja thinks of him as a god and goes down on her knees before him in rapt adoration. She has much in her of the masochistic slave, but what she sees is not all distortion. Her seeming idolatry is in the nature of a defining tribute to one who, more and more as the drama progresses, takes on the immemorial role of the sacred king whose fate it is to undergo ritual sacrifice at the height of his powers on a marked day—here at the autumnal equinox—so that the energies of the tribe may find release and renewal, an impression that is strikingly reinforced when, in the last act, the young king, Ragnar, brings to the old king, Solness, that ambiguous symbol of victory and death, the ribboned wreath.
Again Ibsen uses setting to give heightened feeling and dimension to what might otherwise too easily pass as no more than a foolish infatuation of September with May. In the three acts of the drama we move progressively from the master builder’s workroom, with its inner near-duplicate augmenting the impression of a confined, lifelong dedication to conceiving, planning and constructing architectural possibilities for the lives of others; through the domestic setting of the builder’s own living room, ironically blighted now and uninhabitable, hopefully to be exchanged for a new dwelling free from ghosts of the past; to the final setting where that hope is dashed, and yet where, in the presence of the community and the openness of nature, of the glowing sunset sky and the tranquil air where castles were never meant to rise, death is transfigured into something larger than itself, bitter, yet inevitable and strangely right. In this play Ibsen perhaps came closest to writing the modern tragedy, inexorable, emotionally moving and possessed of a true catharsis.
There is so much more to say about the play—or perhaps leave unsaid and simply appreciate. One could speak of those brief emanations of insight, so frequent in Ibsen’s late plays, that body forth in a few lines of dialogue some truth from the hidden recesses of the mind or the outer limits of perception, turning luminescently under the surface of the text, then disappearing. Or of the remarkable characterization of Hilda, so mercurially alive, so aggressively enchanting, Eve before the apple. Or even the vexed question of the autobiographical content of the play—though here it is well to avoid that literalminded misunderstanding of the imagination that believes that an author writes his life in his works; rather he writes exaggerated tendencies of that life, extensions of it, apprehensions and potentialities within which he trues his course.
Still, Ibsen would not want any of these questions left unraised. Not the denial nor the simplification of experience, but the seeing into it from every angle of perspective, was his goal. The word often used to characterize his formal, elegant and correct demeanor after the midpoint of his career applies as well to that manner of seeing: circumspection became both his way of life and his mode of vision. And this circumspection he set to a purpose: not to lull—nor merely shock—the bourgeoisie, not to lecture the proletariat, but to instigate human beings into existence, to dare each individual to think, to feel, to question, to live, to inherit the best of himself in his own time and place. And to realize that purpose, he chose the ancient and everchanging art form of the drama, where the complexity of life perpetually happens now before one’s eyes and where its laws and possibilities can always be probed and reproduced in fresh combinations that become, in their greatest triumphs, the poet’s truth.
In writing to a would-be American translator of his plays, Ibsen stipulated that “I consider it most important that the dialogue in the translations be kept as close to ordinary, everyday speech as possible. All turns of speech and inflections that belong only in books must be very carefully avoided in plays, especially in plays like mine, which aim at making the reader or spectator feel that during the reading or performance he is actually experiencing a piece of real life.…” And elsewhere, as a more general observation on the subject: “I believe that a translator should employ the style which the original author would have used if he had written in the language of those who are to read him in translation.”
In spite of these clear directives, Ibsen translation, even down to the present day, has too frequently suffered from a stiff and hobbled diction—or, certainly no better, a cavalier freedom that has cut or padded the text. William Archer is probably the wrong foot on which all this error started out. Everyone stands in his debt for the yeoman service he rendered in first bringing Ibsen over complete into English, yet he had an uncommonly dull ear for verbal nuance and the spare, biblical simplicity of Ibsen’s prose rhythms. For instance, there are no verb contractions in the Dano-Norwegian of the original, a native characteristic of the language; brought over literally into English, this trait results in such constructions as “I had not better return with you to the croft then, Nils, had I?"—a kind of artificial patois, a stage-Norwegian dialect distinctive enough to merit being dubbed “Old High Ibsenese.” This, while Henry James, Ibsen’s contemporary, was writing dialogue full of contractions, much of which has the fluidity of good modern conversation.
As to violations of the original on the side of liberty-become license, it seems to me no part of the translator’s business to cut set descriptions, stage directions, and certainly not dialogue. What a director may choose to alter or ignore is at his own responsibility and risk; it is the translator’s job to convey, to the best of his ability, the text, the whole text and nothing but the text. Occasionally he is forced to make small changes that give him an inward wrench, but this is merely facing the fact that it is sometimes preferable to reach for, hopefully, an inspired equivalent drawn from the background of his own culture than to render an expression or allusion verbatim out of misguided scholarship.
Similarly, when one encounters speeches in an Ibsen translation that run half again as long, or longer, than their counterparts in the original, one suspects that the translator has again overstepped his rather closely drawn circle of freedom. Otto Jespersen’s classic example of the English “First come, first served” for the Danish “Den der kommer først til mølle, faar først malet”—four words for nine—probably marks an extremity of contrast; but it lies in the nature of the languages that an English translation will regularly run shorter and more concise than the text in Norwegian or Danish.
One technical point: in a letter to the Swedish director, August Lindberg, Ibsen emphasized that the description of the stage picture and the actors’ entrances and exits were “arranged from the point of view of the audience and not from that of the actor. I arrange everything as I visualize it while writing it down.” In order that the reader may more easily follow that visualization, as Ibsen hoped he would, I have not changed his directions to the stage left, stage right orientation standard in American plays; but the reversal should be made in production.
ROLF FJELDE
Over the sizable span of years since these translations first appeared in print, they have enjoyed hundreds of productions at all levels of the American theater, from Broadway and regional repertory to college and high school, as well as television and radio. These productions comprise a living testimony that Henrik Ibsen, the leading playwright of the nineteenth century, retains a tenacious hold on the imaginations and sensibilities of contemporary audiences. Among the many sources of his major plays’ perennial appeal, characters as centrally vital as Nora and Torvald Helmer, Hjalmar Ekdal and Gregers Werle, Hedda Gabler and Eilert Løovborg, Hilda Wangel and Halvard Solness, will continue to challenge gifted actors, directors, and designers to realize their distinctive passions, unfolding psychologies, and prophetic fates in vivid theatrical terms.
A translator of classic drama whose author has wide currency is doubly fortunate. First, he has ample opportunity to study and restudy the works themselves on stage in differing interpretations and changing cultural contexts. Secondly, his words are regularly put to the acid test of public scrutiny. If he has prepared his text properly, nearly the entirety feels and reads right, and represents the very best he can do. There remain, however, those occasional lapses which afflict him as he follows the score of his solutions against the actuality of performance: the optimal wording that stubbornly resisted him before, the tardily discovered typo, the inadvertently dropped minor stage direction, the rare but galling gaffe in interpreting the original. As a result, he starts keeping a conscience-file of revisions toward the day that a new edition will, he fondly hopes, Finally Get It Right.
Improvements stem in good part from a sum of inner artistic discernments, but also from a medley of authoritative sources without, and appropriately so: the translator’s fictive world, unlike most writing, is not his own to shape. An event from family history, a chanced-on critical article, a post-rehearsal conversation, a question raised by a university guest lecturer may isolate and clarify what needs to be reworked. The Wild Duck and A Doll House, in that order, were the plays in which I first sought to express Ibsen’s subtle, dramatically charged prose-poetry in the medium of American common speech. I received several fruitful suggestions, and was especially grateful for two sets of close queries, one from John Bettenbender and Thomas Van Laan for a production of The Wild Duck at the Douglass College Little Theater at Rutgers, and the other from Bernard Dukore for a staging of A Doll House at the Kennedy Theater in Hawaii. And lately, for this revision, Prof. Einar Haugen of Harvard and his wife Eva, distinguished Scandinavicists both, fine-combed all four plays line by line for any significant discrepancies between the Norwegian and English, further enhancing this volume.
Ibsen’s presence in the theater, an amalgam of all the presences of his individually defined and crafted characters, is as unique and indispensable today as ever. It blends an evocative surface of particularized facts and recognizable behaviors with a substrate of the most profound and universal human concerns. The more a searching mind is devoted to the understanding of Ibsen’s complexly intermeshed art, the more that art responds, opening depth upon depth to reward it.
The poet Rilke, addressing Ibsen in his imagination, caught the essence of the plays when he observed: “Your blood drove you, not to form, not to speak, but to reveal.” Every one of Ibsen’s major plays strives, through the life struggles of its protagonists, to reveal a healing wholeness. The sole road toward that revelation, in action after dramatic action, is the quest for and progressive engagement with truth in all its forms: its varied amplitude, its necessary pain, its dismantling of illusion and repression, its recovery of unclouded insight, its liberating strength.
For my part, I can only trust that this quartet of masterpieces, now newly emended to approach still closer the wholeness of their respective truths, will help introduce countless more to the master spirit behind them. Ibsen’s art and thought have so much yet to convey to us.
ROLF FJELDE
New York City
July 1991