Does Ibsen Still Matter?

I have a long-standing relation with Ibsen. The first playwright I remember reading in school was Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, of course); then came Ibsen (Enemy of the People). My mother's sister married a second-generation Norwegian. When he died, I inherited his collection of Ibsen's plays. That collection got lost back in 2010, when I was arrested. When I came home when my first year at Ball State, I got sick. Ibsen is not a person to read when one is ill. In prison, I got back to reading Ibsen. I will be the first one to admit he is grim. Until recently, I thought he had never left Norway - which in his plays seems a place of narrow minds, syphilis, and little warmth - and I could understand the grimness - chilly weather, most people living in fjords, a diet of herring. No, he left Norway for decades. What happened is that Norway never left him. And if I understand the Adler essay I quote from below, it is the middle class that never left him.

My third playwright that I got attached to was George Bernard Shaw. Shaw brought Ibsen to England is how I understand the history. He replaced Norwegian grimness with Irish wit, that has its own darkness. 

My regret is never having seen Ibsen or Shaw on the stage. Time and style says it is unlikely I will ever see them performed, and performance is the thing.

I know of Adler. Reading her essay puts much of Ibsen into sharper focus for me. She also pounds on a problem that is lately troubling me - cultural stagnation. See my To The Boondocks of Hendricks County - Cultural Stagnation - And Back, for a start. What Adler adds to my thinking is that Ibsen attacked his own particularized cultural stagnation.

Stella Adler: “Ibsen the Prisoner” (The Yale Review)

In the plays that preceded Ibsen, one always knew who the hero was and could identify with him. It was difficult to do tragedy without the hero and the villain. But Ibsen did something different. Contemporary theater started with Ibsen.

Ibsen changed the world of literature. He opened up drama, which was the most forceful way of making a statement that had to be made. It was time to find a more powerful way, and Ibsen was the one who found it.

You have to understand what he accomplished. There is no important writer after Ibsen who does not use his sense of craft and his ability to analyze the human character. The human character is what you find in Ibsen’s plays.

***

Henrik Ibsen is Greece for you. Ibsen’s world might as well be Greece, for all you know. It is the world in which the modern theater was born. It produced a form that has lasted longer than the Elizabethan or Restoration or any other form of theater. The Elizabethan style lasted forty to fifty years, no longer. Other styles changed or died out even faster. Ibsen’s formula is the only one that has lasted more than a century.

The creation of the modern theater took a genius like Ibsen. His formulation goes on and on, stated and restated in creative ways that are profoundly startling. You will be aghast at what is revealed in Ibsen. Every play after him is influenced by him. Miller and Odets and Inge and O’Neill and Williams and Shaw swallowed the whole of him. You cannot escape the influence. Whenever you start a class on a modern playwright, you have to begin with Ibsen because he is the seed. The fertilizer of the egg Like Mozart in music, and the long line of composers who have taken what Mozart the seminal genius did and creatively restated it in a thousand ways.

Ibsen was the pioneer. To our ears, “pioneer” sounds like somebody who climbed in a covered wagon and went West. I think it may be the wrong word, so I will change it: Ibsen was a revolutionary, an anarchist, a nihilist. He broke apart everything in order to get at what he wanted to say. What did he want to say? He wanted to say the truth of what he saw. The truth was difficult to find because until Ibsen came along the forms were romanticized, melodramatized. Too many things “happened” to the truth along the way.

***

In Ibsen, the hero is in conflict with the social and moral system that he lives under. In the theater of the Greeks and the Elizabethans, man deals with God and society is ordered. If a person broke a law, it was a sin. The aim was always to restore order. Ibsen felt that contemporary writers must see through things and that their insights must be viewed through the characters in a contemporary human situation.

Ibsen wrote for and about the middle class; he did not speak about the upper class, the aristocracy, or royalty. A playwright writes in his own time, and Ibsen’s was from 1860 on. Do not always think in terms of you and the end of the twentieth century. The middle class came along long before you did. You must know whether it is the middle class of 1860 or 1990. There are many changes. It’s the largest class in the Western world and the one we are always in connection with.

Ibsen had two strong impulses. The first was to escape from his conventional, stuffy, unproductive middle-class surroundings (nevertheless, the environment he wrote about). The second impulse was for freedom—a great desire to exist under his own self-control, not the government, the church, and other institutions. His idea of liberty was the freedom not to be imposed on by other people’s ideas. To understand him, we must sketch his life and how it lent itself to modern theater.

***

You must honor your father and mother. You must love your brother. You must love your husband. You must love your wife. Ibsen says all this is nonsense. You do not have to love your husband or your mother, and your mother does not have to love you. It is not your own idea; it was handed down. He attacks all institutions that are handed down—and built up.

***

People do one thing at work and another thing at home, and they are not necessarily the things they think or say they do. Ibsen makes you see that you are a function not of what you say but of what you do—and of what society, in many ways, makes you do.

***

The discussion concerns an issue about which the audience has already formulated an opinion, so they leave the theater arguing their opinions and perhaps continue to do so at home. A playwright who knows how to touch that in an audience is a powerful, successful playwright. These playwrights know that if they can involve you in that way, they have the power to teach you something.

***

The discussion concerns an issue about which the audience has already formulated an opinion, so they leave the theater arguing their opinions and perhaps continue to do so at home. A playwright who knows how to touch that in an audience is a powerful, successful playwright. These playwrights know that if they can involve you in that way, they have the power to teach you something.

***

The villainous character, for example, is just as conscientious as the heroic one, or—if anything—more so. He is just as “true” and as firm in the belief that he is right. Ibsen says, “In the good there is bad, and in the bad there is good.” There lies a more profound characterization: How can a character be wrong if there is so much right about him? More important (and more interesting) is who the hero and the villain are. Ibsen aims to trap you. He introduces you to a man who is good and you side with him. But in the second act you recognize that he isn’t as good as you thought he was. Ibsen catches you up by making the character both right and wrong. He makes you like or respect something that the discussion may reveal to be hateful and dishonorable. He misleads you so much that, in the end, you are truly uncertain where your opinion lies. Perhaps, then, you go home with some other or ambiguous idea that belongs exclusively to you, to solve it for yourself. Ibsen seldom solves it for you.

The one thing you can hang on to is that an Ibsen play deals with ideas and that they are discussed in front of you. Ibsen changed theater by including this “discussive element” within the play. Discussion was a new concept in drama—something that makes the play both modern and intellectual. It does not necessarily lead anywhere.

***

Ibsen always has two points of view on the stage in his characters. One says, “I believe this,” and the other says, “I believe that.” The audience partakes of and listens to both sides, but there is usually no way to resolve an Ibsen idea.

If you have two opposite opinions and both contain some truth and the audience listens to both, then the one thing you are not going to get anymore is a hero. That is finished. There are no “pure” heroes in literature after Ibsen. Before Ibsen, everybody knew who was good and who was bad, who was right and wrong. We didn’t have to think about it. From Ibsen on, you have to make up your mind as you leave the theater.

Ibsen never says which character is wrong or right. That is absolutely new. Before, everybody could recognize the hero was and the villain. You always knew, right from the beginning: lago is the villain. But Ibsen never says anyone is wrong. The characters all have a right to live, a right to their own way. And if nobody is right, you have no hero.

***

In fashioning and infusing his plays with this argumentative element, Ibsen created not just a whole new form of drama but—arguably—a new way of life. Something more real or at least more realistic: realism. 

I like trying to write plays, It is a form I am still trying to understand, and I see a thing here that I never saw clearly before - the argumentative element. Well, I never put a name to it, for all I tried to make a play where characters engage in dialog over an idea. 

Adler writing about the persistence of Ibsen's influence made me consider the other playwrights I grew up with, the ones making a sensation when I came of age: Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet. Yes, I can see his influence - the lack of heroes, the criticism of the middle class, the cry for freedom.

Now, to get to work - or is is back to the work Ibsen started?

sch 11/08