The importance of being Henrik
Paul Binding
HENRIK IBSEN AND THE BIRTH OF MODERNISM by Toril Moi OUP, £25, pp. 396, ISBN 0199295875 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The celebrations and theatreproductions for this centenary year of Ibsen’s death certainly attest to the continuing vitality of his work. At August’s Ibsen conference in Oslo I heard delegates from China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Latvia, Mexico speak both of the plays’ intrinsic fascinations and of their relevance to specific contemporary societies. Likewise scholars and critics of many orientations showed what satisfying harvests, say, Ghosts or The Wild Duck yield when looked at from this or that perspective. What we have lacked, however, has been a full-scale English-language study of the relationship of this impressive oeuvre to the western culture of which it provably is so firm and illustrious a part. Ibsen has been widely saluted for the modernity of his subject-matter — double standards for the sexes outside and inside marriage, tensions between individual rights and social institutions, but far less decidedly for the modernity of his actual art. The eminent feminist literary critic, Toril Moi (herself Norwegian), has now splendidly and substantially righted this situation. Ibsen, so radical in his attitude to men and women and to the forces that animate them, was radical also in his approaches to his art and in his ongoing practice. Nor was this a matter of trial and error. Autodidact he may have been, but he gave lifelong devotion to the question of how the arts (he was interested in them all, though less in music than the others) could most intensely express the complexities of personality when faced with the ever-expanding demands of experience. And he himself came to see his corpus as an organic unity, stretching a full half-century from Catiline (1850) to When We Dead Awaken (1899).
Toril Moi sets Ibsen against two dominating 19th-century movements, by no means, she insists, coterminous but sometimes crisscrossing: Idealism and Romanticism. Idealism, with its roots in Schiller and Hegel, insists that art give us spiritual uplift, that, to quote Moi, ‘[its}task ... is to ennoble us, to help us overcome the split between nature and freedom, so that the whole of human nature can find full and free expression’. This very Utopianism, which does indeed accord with important aspects of Ibsen’s thinking, can turn only too easily against confrontations of the disturbing, the hidden, the suppressed; hence all those hands wrung publicly in horror over the revelations in Ghosts. Romanticism, as the younger Ibsen encountered it, though more individualistic, was intricately involved with nationalism, stressing the importance of nature, kin and inheritance, with particular appeal to Norwegians then debating their country’s identity. Here again Ibsen had to insist on his own vision of what was true, on his own ears and eyes. Therefore the realism of the great prose-plays beginning with Pillars of Society (1877), about which Moi writes with a percipience rarely granted it, a realism for which he has successively been both extolled and censored, should be seen as a modernist advance on two cultural tendencies increasingly morally and artistically bankrupt. Ibsen’s was never the utilitarian blue-book type of realism anyway, just as his discussion of moral issues was never the preacher’s. His plays more and more admitted the interplay of unconscious and conscious, each one a new adventure in form because a new investigation into human nature, right up to his perplexing, wonderful ‘epilogue’ When We Dead Awaken. Ibsen’s battle against stale literary conventions and for imaginative innovation gained much, on Moi’s showing, from his belonging to a lively but then comparatively peripheral European country, and also from his long self-exile from it, forcing him to use himself as principal arbiter.
In order to show how Ibsen arrived at modernism Moi examines not just his early work and its relationship to contemporaneous artistic achievements, but two works which she sees as crucibles through which Ibsen’s art had to pass: Love’s Comedy (1863) with its heartfelt recognition of woman as autonomous universe and his vast two-part world-drama Emperor and Galilean (1873) dealing with Julian the Apostate. Only through his own personal struggle to depict a real historical struggle — between ideology with its commands and taboos and our rightful condition of being ‘first and foremost a human being’, our natural ‘finitude’ — could Ibsen attain the passionate ambiguities of his subsequent better-known dramas. Moi’s examination of this work which Ibsen called his hovedverk (pivotal creation) makes the best conductor possible into the arguments of her last section, where she brilliantly analyses A Doll’s House, Rosmersholm and the still undervalued Lady from the Sea to show how abundantly they contain attributes fundamental to all later modernism: the liberation of the feminine to establish a more sanely inclusive vision of existence; the deliberate accentuation of the medium being used (here the theatre) as tribute to its human significance. This is an indispensable book, as illuminating of the painting and literature of the times as of Ibsen himself.
Previous page
