by Henrik Ibsen
In the next two acts the characters probe their past, struggle with guilt and recrimination and wonder how to continue to live. We learn that Eyolf’s leg was crippled when he fell off a table while his parents were having rip-roaring sex. We also learn that, when they were much younger, Asta and Allmers used to play a game in which she dressed up as a boy in his old clothes, and he called her his ‘little Eyolf’. When Allmers declares that the only human relationship not subject to the ‘law of change’ is that between brother and sister, Asta tells him that some old letters from her mother prove that they aren’t related at all.35
The structure of Little Eyolf is quite unusual: the first act ends with the uncanny, almost unreal, death of a child. In the second act, the experience of despair and meaninglessness after Eyolf’s death leads to key revelations concerning sex and sexuality, and an impending divorce. The last act contains both a marriage and a re-marriage of sorts and ends on a somewhat uncertain decision to embark on a philanthropic project.
Many critics have thought that Ibsen was wrong to place the death of Eyolf at the end of the first act, since it made the rest of the play undramatic. Such critics probably subscribe to Aristotle’s idea that a play should have as its high point a reversal (peripeteia) followed by recognition, or insight (anagnorisis). But in Little Eyolf Ibsen lets the reversal (Eyolf’s death) be followed by confusion rather than insight. The plot structure shows that the focus of this play is squarely on Aristotle’s third plot element, pathos or suffering, defined as external suffering visibly displayed on stage.36 Ibsen, however, is interested in the suffering of the soul. Thematically, the last two acts of Little Eyolf explore inner pain; formally, they ask about the power of theatre to express the inner life.
Two questions have always puzzled readers of Little Eyolf. What is the ‘law of change’ (forvandlingens lov), which the characters begin to obsess about after Eyolf’s death? And what are we to make of the Rat-Maid? In Little Eyolf, all the characters except Borgheim fear change. Rita thinks of forvandling as a threat and a curse, and Allmers speaks of the ‘law of change’ as a law of nature, as something to which we are subject whether we like it or not. In this respect Little Eyolf differs strongly from a number of earlier Ibsen plays, in which forvandling is represented as a hope and an achievement (A Doll’s House, The Lady from the Sea and Rosmersholm).
What, then, is this law that scares Allmers but holds no terror for Borgheim? Connected to desire, birth and death, it appears to be the Schopenhauerian or Buddhist insight that nothing is permanent except change itself; and that in the end change will destroy us and everything that matters to us. Change is temporal: to fear the law of change is to fear time and thus, ultimately, to fear death. The law of change is the law of human finitude: we are subject to change because we have human bodies and are therefore vulnerable in our sexuality and our mortality. For Allmers, the only human relationship not subject to the law of change is the relationship between brother and sister, presumably because he considers it the least carnal, the least sexual, the least embodied of all love relationships.37 Given the obvious sexual tension between him and his ‘half-sister’, nothing could be more ironic. In Little Eyolf, then, the ‘law of change’ stands for the real conditions of human life, the reality the characters refuse to acknowledge.
The Rat-Maid embodies the ‘law of change’. She may be based on a memory from Ibsen’s childhood (as Ibsen insisted), or she may be a figure out of a fairy tale, a version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.38 Whatever her origins, she instantly exposes Allmers’s denial of reality. When she asks: ‘would your lordships have anything a-gnawing here in the house?’ Allmers answers: ‘Us? No, I don’t think so.’ Maybe he genuinely has forgotten that he used the word ‘gnaw’ about his feelings about Eyolf’s lame leg just moments earlier (‘Oh Rita – how this gnaws at my heart!’). But even if he has, the theatre audience has not. In the self-deluded Allmers household, the Rat-Maid represents the awful irruption of reality, for she is the embodiment of suffering, ageing and death, the incarnation of the law of change, a constant reminder of human finitude. It is significant that Borgheim, the only character in the play who doesn’t fear change, is also the only character who is not present when the Rat-Maid enters.
In Little Eyolf the characters’ attempts to deny finitude and time take the form of a complete incapacity to acknowledge others. To understand that we exist in limited, finite bodies also means understanding that we are separate from other human bodies, and that other people are therefore different from ourselves – and not simply projections of our own desires. (Allmers, for example, can only see Eyolf as an extension of his own ambitions; he has no idea what his son is really like.) Little Eyolf thus becomes a play about the difficulty modern human beings have in seeing others as genuinely other, as persons with their own needs and wishes. To illuminate this question, the play methodically works through four kinds of others: one’s spouse or lover; one’s child; one’s sibling; and, finally, the children of strangers, that is to say, the whole of humanity, here embodied by the poor boys living down by the fjordside, who remain invisible, but not inaudible, to the characters and to the audience.
The play ends with the two protagonists’ hesitant efforts to acknowledge even these children. The action of the play takes them from blindness and hard-heartedness to an effort to look with compassion at the boys who mocked Eyolf, or, as Rita tentatively puts it, in the hope that she will find ‘Something resembling love of a sort.’ Little Eyolf shows that if we have the courage to face reality, the only viable response to the suffering of others, and to our own sense of guilt and responsibility for their suffering, is love, not in the sense of some new feeling or inner experience (Rita knows that she does not feel genuine love for the boys by the shore), but simply in the sense of doing the things that a loving person would do.
Little Eyolf is structured as a double, or simultaneous, movement away from fantasy towards reality, away from selfishness towards love. The first act focuses on characters living in an atmosphere of dreamlike unreality or fantasy (at once heightened and contrasted by the presence of the Rat-Maid); the second on the pain caused when reality and the law of change can no longer be denied; and the third, in its avoidance of either a happy or a tragic end, on the characters’ effort to live in a world of suffering.
The end of Little Eyolf is a challenge to the audience: just as Rita and Allmers will try to acknowledge the suffering of the children by the fjordside, we will have to try to acknowledge their own suffering. That these two characters are neither heroic nor ideal, and not necessarily well equipped to carry out their project, makes the task more difficult. After seeing Little Eyolf with Ibsen, Caroline Sontum, a friend of Ibsen, expressed sympathy for Rita: ‘Poor Rita, now she has to go to work with all those mischievous boys!’ Ibsen replied: ‘Do you really believe so? Don’t you rather think it was more of a Sunday mood with her?’39 But even if we share Ibsen’s doubts about Rita’s persistence and resolve, it doesn’t follow that she is wrong to try to lead a life of charity and compassion.
In its relatively plotless dwelling on what we do once the worst has happened, Little Eyolf becomes a precursor of radically modernist plays such as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or Endgame. But Little Eyolf also contains three elements that break with modernist aesthetics. First, the figure of Borgheim provides a reminder of the power and possibilities of what Osvald and Mrs Alving in Ghosts call the ‘joy of life’. Second, Little Eyolf is explicitly concerned with ethical and moral problems: given that there is no God, how are we to live in the presence of the pain of others? Third, the play emphasizes love as a moral and dramatic force. While Act One is all about the characters’ selfish fantasy world, and Act Two is about guilt and responsibility, Act Three asks how to go on living in the full knowledge of the guilt we bear and the responsibility we have for the suffering of others. Little Eyolf is not a tragedy in Aristotle’s sense. It has no heroic figures, and it is not intended to inspire pity and fear, n
or to provide catharsis. This is not tragedy, not comedy and not melodrama, either, but a new form of realism that hovers on the brink of modernism.
John Gabriel Borkman: Time and Death
Ibsen’s contemporaries were impressed by the structure of John Gabriel Borkman. Many reviewers admired its remarkable unity of time. One pointed out that the time of the dramatic action corresponds almost exactly to the time it takes to perform it.40 And time is indeed of the essence in this play. The characters constantly count and recount time: years of imprisonment, months to live, days required to fulfil their grandest scheme. They fear time, and connect it to death: ‘Time flies you know: the years fly past; life – ah, no – I daren’t think about that!’ Borkman exclaims.
John Gabriel Borkman is obsessed with mortality and its existential consequences. The parallel between Borkman’s fear of time and Allmers’s fear of ‘the law of change’ is obvious. In John Gabriel Borkman, however, the themes of death and time are more insistent than in Little Eyolf. Instead of an abstract philosophical ‘law’, this play presents us with Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre, the Dance of Death, which the young Frida Foldal regularly plays on the piano for Borkman. In the Dance of Death, Death is the Great Leveller, the destiny that respects no human distinctions.
The action of John Gabriel Borkman is peculiarly elusive. Modern critics still disagree on what the plot actually is. Some have complained that the fourth act adds nothing to the action, while others see it as the very essence of the play. In my view, such disagreements arise because critics overlook what I want to call Ibsen’s radical ‘perspectivism’ in John Gabriel Borkman, by which I mean that in this play the action looks different depending on which character one imagines as its bearer.
In 1956, the German critic Peter Szondi famously argued that John Gabriel Borkman was not a play, but a novel. The play was obsessed by the past, and the characters’ inner life, neither of which were suitable for dramatic presentation.41 But because Szondi overlooks Ibsen’s ‘perspectivism’, his claim is convincing only in relation to certain characters, and not to others.
As the play opens, Borkman, a powerful banker imprisoned for embezzlement, has spent sixteen years in some form of confinement: three years in custody, five years in prison and eight years in self-imposed imprisonment in the great gallery of the manor house that he once owned. In the first act, we don’t see him at all. But we hear him pacing the floor like ‘a sick wolf pacing in a cage’, as his wife, Gunhild, puts it. In the second act, Borkman engages in conversation with his only friend, Frida’s father, Vilhelm Foldal, a failed poet, and with Ella Rentheim, the woman he once loved. Borkman decides to go back to work. In the third act Borkman meets his wife, Gunhild, Ella’s twin sister, for the first time in sixteen years. In the fourth act, Borkman walks out into the cold winter night with Ella. They reach a bench with a splendid view, where Borkman dies from a heart attack. This action could be summarized as: ‘John Gabriel Borkman decides to begin to work again, and then he dies.’ While this confirms Szondi’s claim about the absence of external conflict, it also shows that the play is not just concerned with his past, but essentially focused on Borkman’s present-day change of mind.
From the point of view of Borkman’s son, Erhart, however, this evening is a moment of frantic action, the moment when he gives up his whole life in Norway and turns his back on his family. Around Erhart, conflicts abound. His mother wants him to restore the Borkman name to its former glory. His aunt, who brought him up after the scandal had engulfed his father, wants Erhart to take the name of Rentheim and stay with her for the months she has left to live. His father wants Erhart to work with him to realize his grand visions.
Erhart refuses it all, not with arguments, but simply by repeating – five times! – some version of the exclamation: ‘I’m young! I want to live, live, live!’ To him, this is clearly a momentous discovery, a true turning point. (‘I’m young! I’d never realized it before!’) It makes Erhart refuse every idea of work, and of self-sacrifice. Instead he will travel south with the alluring, rich and somewhat older Fanny Wilton, a divorcée with liberal views on relationships between men and women. The strong conflicts over Erhart contradict Szondi’s point entirely, for they are classical examples of external dramatic action concerned with present conflicts. However, the ‘Erhart-plot’ finishes abruptly with the dramatic departure of all the young characters at the end of the third act.
In the end, Szondi’s description is John Gabriel Borkman as seen from the twin sisters’ point of view. For them, the play’s action is in fact both internal and concerned with the past. The loving Ella is disappointed in her wish to get Erhart to herself. Inga-Stina Ewbank points out that at the end of the play, Ella’s realization that Borkman gave her up for ‘the kingdom – and the power – and the glory –’ is a kind of recognition (anagnorisis), one of the key elements of Aristotle’s conception of drama.42 While this illuminates Ella’s understanding of her past, it has no consequences for the future.
For Gunhild, the vindictive wife, Erhart’s disappearance is devastating. Left without her son, she no longer has a reason to live. At the end, she too seems to have a moment of recognition concerning the past, namely that lack of love kills. (I take her claim that Borkman died from ‘the cold that lies in the heart’ to mean that he died both from his own and other people’s, including her own, coldness of heart.)
When the play ends, the two sisters no longer have a future. Their lives are as finished as Borkman’s, and they know it. One sister is already marked by death, the other might just as well be. They have become shadows: ‘We two shadows – over the dead man.’ Because they no longer have any projects to give life meaning, time comes to a standstill for them. In this respect, the end of John Gabriel Borkman points forward to the ‘death in life’ or ‘life in death’ of Irene and Rubek in When We Dead Awaken.
Like Solness, Borkman thinks he is exceptional, a member of the chosen few (‘we, the exceptional, we, the elect’), whose greatness is such that ‘the masses – all the average folk’ can’t possibly understand him. He is convinced that one day the leaders of the new bank (founded after he bankrupted the old) will knock on his door and beg him to take over. Like Solness, who thinks that when he wishes something intensely, it simply must happen, Borkman persuades himself ‘That they must, must, must come to me one day.’ Foldal, who lost all his money in Borkman’s swindle, supports him in this belief, on one condition: that Borkman reciprocate by believing that the tragedy Foldal wrote in his youth is a great, misunderstood masterpiece. For eight years they have stuck to this pact. But then something goes wrong.
The true turning point in Borkman’s situation comes in a conversation with Foldal in the second act. Surprisingly, the two break over their radically different view of women. It turns out that Borkman’s scheme was betrayed by Hinckel, his best friend, who was in love with Ella. Borkman himself loved Ella and knew that she was deeply in love with him. But, as Borkman later proudly admits, his ambition, his love of power, was stronger than his love for a woman. So he bought Hinckel’s support by marrying Gunhild and leaving Ella to him. When Ella refused Hinckel’s advances, Hinckel betrayed him.
Borkman considers the whole disaster to be Ella’s fault: ‘Women! They corrupt and complicate life for us. Confound our entire destinies – our march to victory.’ Borkman’s misogyny clashes violently with Foldal’s Romanticism. For Foldal fervently believes in the existence of the ‘true woman’ (den sande kvinde). When Borkman angrily rejects any talk of the ideal woman as ‘poetic claptrap’, Foldal declares that Borkman is completely irrational to think that he will ever be asked to run a bank again, for the law simply doesn’t permit it. Borkman haughtily declares that exceptional people are above the law; Foldal retorts that the law draws no such distinction. This dramatic scene precipitates Borkman’s decision to emerge from his isolation.
Borkman now appears as a changed man, as someone yearning for a new realism: ‘And now I want to
get out of those dreams.’ He realizes that he has wasted eight precious years, that he should have left his fantasy world for the harsh, dreamless world of reality and begun to work himself up from the bottom again. Borkman’s analysis of his situation is obviously right. Any existentialist philosopher would surely agree that if Borkman is to get the ‘restitution’ he wants, he can’t expect Erhart, or anyone else, to provide it for him. However, such philosophers would surely also point out that Borkman’s decision to return to work is a case of bad faith, an excuse to avoid having to acknowledge the past, avoid taking responsibility for his past actions, avoid facing his crime and his lack of love.
The deeper trouble with his idea of beginning afresh is that Borkman has no future. There is a striking contrast between Erhart’s repetition of the refrain of ‘I’m young! I want to live, live, live!’ and Borkman’s failure to realize that he is old, that he must die, die, die. In his eagerness to live as if the past never happened, he denies his own finitude: the frailty of the body, time, mortality. Ironically, Borkman’s rejection of his old delusions leaves him mired in a much more fundamental one.
When We Dead Awaken
The subtitle of When We Dead Awaken is ‘A Dramatic Epilogue in Three Acts’. When he published the play, Ibsen declared that it was intended as an epilogue to the series of plays that preceded it, but he was quite unclear on what exactly he meant by that. On different occasions, he suggested that the play was the epilogue either to all his plays, or to the series of plays that began with A Doll’s House, or just to the series beginning with The Master Builder.43 There is even a fourth candidate, namely the series that begins with Brand (1866), the first play Ibsen wrote after leaving Norway (and which he saw performed for the first time in Copenhagen in April 1898, just as he was beginning work on When We Dead Awaken). For, like Brand, When We Dead Awaken ends with an avalanche that sweeps the protagonists away. Since the play is full of references to earlier Ibsen plays from all periods of his career, all the answers are plausible.
