The Master Builder and Other Plays

by Henrik Ibsen

  The dictionary informs us that an epilogue can either be a conclusion or an appendix; either the full fruition of a work, or something more like an afterthought. But if Ibsen was thinking of the theatre, he would have known that an epilogue was a ‘speech or short poem addressed to the spectators by one of the actors after the conclusion of the play’, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. The most famous epilogue in dramatic history is Prospero’s speech at the end of The Tempest, in which he breaks his staff, bids farewell to magic and illusion and begs the audience to release him back into the ordinary world. Here, the epilogue is a moment of transformation, a mid-point between art and everyday life, between the character of Prospero and the actor who will walk off stage, to become again an ordinary man in the ordinary world.

  To read When We Dead Awaken as a ‘dramatic epilogue’ means to see it as a moment in which Ibsen takes a step back, positioning himself halfway between the fictional worlds of his previous plays and reality, in which he himself exists as Ibsen, an elderly playwright of international fame. Seen from this angle, the characters and the themes of the play at once continue the preoccupations of the preceding ‘series’ and acquire an exceptionally insistent metatheatricality which invites reflections on the status of art and the artist around 1900.

  The setting of When We Dead Awaken is unusual for Ibsen, for it takes place entirely out of doors. The first act is set outside a hotel by the seaside, the second outside a sanatorium in the mountains, and the last on a steep mountainside, next to an old, ruined cabin. As the play opens, Arnold Rubek, a world-famous sculptor, has returned to Norway with his younger wife, Maja. The action begins as Rubek recognizes Irene, the model for his world-famous breakthrough sculpture, Resurrection Day. Dressed all in white, Irene is clearly more than a little mad. She is accompanied by her nurse, a nun, dressed all in black.

  Irene is distraught when Rubek confesses that he has changed the sculpture, moved her further back and surrounded her with realistic figures, ‘people with animal faces concealed beneath the skin. Women and men – just as I knew them in life.’ In the foreground he has placed a version of himself, a man regretting his life. After the success of the great group, he has lost faith in art and begun to carve portrait busts with ‘animal faces behind the masks’. Rubek clearly develops from a Romantic idealist to some kind of naturalist obsessed with the animality, or bestiality, lurking behind the human surface.

  When Rubek tells Maja that he is bored with her and wants to be with Irene, Maja goes hunting with Ulfheim, a well-off bear hunter, whose earthy vitalism contrasts with Irene’s ethereal idealism. In the last act, as a dangerous storm threatens, Maja and Ulfheim descend from the mountains, while Irene and Rubek begin to climb upwards. As they disappear from sight, we hear Maja singing a jubilant song that begins ‘I am free! I am free! I am free!’ (thus echoing Erhart’s ‘I’m young! I want to live, live, live!’ in John Gabriel Borkman). An avalanche comes thundering down, and the nun appears just in time to see Rubek and Irene disappear in the snow. Making the sign of the cross, she says ‘Pax vobiscum!’ (Peace be with you), as Maja’s joyful song of freedom still resounds from the lowlands below.

  It is possible to read When We Dead Awaken metatheatrically as Ibsen’s final judgement on idealism, the aesthetic tradition that dominated his youth, and which all his great plays work to undo.44 Around 1900, idealism, which had been the dominant aesthetic paradigm throughout the nineteenth century, had begun slowly to give way to modernism. Idealism has its roots in Romanticism. Idealists believed that the role of art was to show us the true, the good and the beautiful. Late nineteenth-century idealists thus looked for reconciliation and moral uplift in art, and particularly in the most public art available at the time, namely the theatre. The violence of the ‘Ibsen wars’ in different countries depends, in part, on the strength of idealism in the specific context, for Ibsen’s plays challenged everything idealists held dear.

  There is no doubt that Rubek began his artistic career as an idealist. When he met Irene, he had long had the idea for a work representing a young woman arising from death: ‘It was to be the world’s most noble, pure, ideal woman, awakening. Then I found you.’ The irony is that the more Rubek worships the ideal woman, the more he denies love. Rubek is Pygmalion in reverse: by not kissing Irene, he turned her into stone. Once the sculpture was completed, Rubek said farewell to Irene, calling their work together an ‘episode’. Irene never recovered. She disappeared and spent her life posing naked in tableaux vivants and in living sculptures: the pure woman fallen, the madonna turned whore. She has, she says, killed her first husband, or at least inspired him to kill himself. She has spent time in an insane hospital, and her nurse carries a straitjacket in her suitcase.

  Rubek’s idealism theatricalized Irene: it turned her into a spectacle, a mere surface. By refusing to love her, and – even more damaging to Irene – by refusing to acknowledge that she loved him – he desouled her and turned her into a statue. Rubek’s sin is not that he couldn’t distinguish between the woman and the sculpture, but that he preferred the sculpture.

  After he finished his great group, Rubek has not been able to create. Like Ulrik Brendel in Rosmersholm, he refers to his imagination as a locked box, to which only Irene has the key. When Maja responds that Rubek clearly regrets marrying her, he defends himself by saying: ‘You have no real concept of what an artistic nature looks like from the inside’, to which Maja ripostes: ‘Lord, I haven’t any concept of what I look like from the inside.’ In his condescending way, Rubek takes this as evidence of Maja’s frivolousness. We, however, are free to see it as her rejection of Rubek’s unilateral demand for complete acknowledgement of his soul and of his narcissistic self-idealization in the name of art. Rubek, then, does not want a woman; he wants a muse able to read his mind, someone entirely unconcerned about reciprocity (she is not supposed to have a mind of her own, let alone a mind she wishes him to read and express): unless he finds such a creature, he cannot express himself artistically.

  Traditionally, readers and directors take Rubek to be the play’s anguished hero, whether in an idealist or ironic mode. This perspective invariably overlooks his belittling treatment of Maja. I owe this insight to Copenhagen’s Betty Nansen Theatre’s extraordinary 2002 production of When We Dead Awaken, directed by Peter Langdal, with Sofie Gråbøl (later to become famous for her role as Sarah Lund in the TV series The Killing) as Maja. In this production, Maja came across as a modern, perspicacious woman caught up in a bad marriage to a selfish artist. Gråbøl managed to convey Maja’s powers of observation, her sharp insights into Rubek’s thoughts and feelings, as well as her realization that he has used her to fill a void in his own life. As played by Gråbøl, Maja was right to feel free as she leaves her horrible marriage. Her song may not be great poetry, but that is the point: Maja is not interested in art, but in life and love. (She is delighted to discover that Ulfheim’s mansion has no artworks in it.) And as the critic Sofie Ottesen has pointed out, her song demonstrates that Maja finally has found her own voice.45

  When We Dead Awaken demonstrates that Ibsen had a late style. But it also shows him exaggerating and rehearsing it, halfway between irony and seriousness. Brimful of references to the three plays that precede it, this play contains the same conflict between love and ambition as we found in John Gabriel Borkman, and a more intense version of the kind of folie à deux first explored in The Master Builder. Like Little Eyolf, it presents us with a marriage in which the husband has lost sexual interest in his wife, and with an artist who can no longer create. (In Little Eyolf we have a philosopher who can’t write.) While no actual child dies, Irene refers to the sculpture as ‘our child’ and claims to have killed all the children she had, or might have had, after leaving Rubek. As for Hilde Wangel and Solness, the borderline between fantasy and reality dissolves entirely for them, as it does for Irene, and ultimately for Rubek too. In contrast, Maja and Ulfheim embrace ordinary life without illusions, much like Allmers a
nd Rita at the end of Little Eyolf. Finally, Rubek and Irene’s ascent up into the raging storm represents the ultimate denial of human finitude: they deny sexuality (in the name of a utopian, transfigured sexuality); they deny time (by appearing to believe – like Borkman, and like Solness – that they can just begin over again, as if the past had not happened); and they deny bodily frailty and mortality (by refusing to heed the storm).

  All the late plays reveal the monstrous egoism involved in the denial of finitude: the heroes of these plays never learn to acknowledge others. (If Little Eyolf looks like an exception, it is because the question of working for the good of others is explicitly broached there, but we should remember that, at the end of the play, a child is dead, and when the curtain falls, the protagonists haven’t actually done anything for others yet.) These characters wreck their own lives and those of others because they don’t know how to see others, don’t know how to love and don’t know how to begin coming to terms with their own mortality.

  So why should we care about them? Because, in their illusions and their denials, they are like us. We should be relieved that Ibsen was capable of looking at them with ‘a just and loving gaze’, as Iris Murdoch called it, that is to say, with the kind of realism that gives them – gives us – a chance of understanding what Wittgenstein called ‘our real need’ and Marx and Engels the ‘real conditions of life’.46

  Toril Moi, 2014

  Notes

  1. See Ivo de Figueiredo, Henrik Ibsen: Masken (Oslo: Aschehoug, 2007), 494.

  2. Asbjørn Aarseth, ‘Bakgrunn’, Introduction (Innledning) to John Gabriel Borkman, in Vigdis Ystad, ed., Henrik Ibsens Skrifter (from now on: HIS). All references to this edition are to the free online edition. http://www.ibsen.uio.no.

  3. Asbjørn Aarseth, ‘Utgivelse’, Introduction (Innledning) to Bygmester Solness, HIS.

  4. The play was available in bookshops in Kristiania on 12 December and in Copenhagen on 14 December. See Ibid.

  5. See the Repertoire Database at http://ibsen.nb.no/id/1998.0.

  6. Henry James, ‘Ibsen’s New Play’, Pall Mall Gazette, 17 February 1893, reprinted in Michael Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 267–8. Future references to Egan’s collection will be abbreviated to Egan.

  7. Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, ‘Ibsen in France from Breakthrough to Renewal’, Ibsen Studies 12, no. 1 (2012), 56–80.

  8. Figueiredo, Masken, 442.

  9. Ibid., 442–3.

  10. Ibid., 443.

  11. Ibsen, Letter to Edvard Brandes, 27 December 1892, Brev, HIS.

  12. In Britain, Ibsen’s canonization was manifested through the edition of his collected works, begun in 1906. See Tore Rem, Henry Gibson/Henrik Ibsen: Den provinsielle verdensdikteren (Oslo: Cappelen, 2006), 18.

  13 Asbjørn Aarseth, ‘Utgivelse’, Introduction to Bygmester Solness, HIS.

  14 For details, see Aarseth, ‘Oppførelse’, Introduction to Bygmester Solness’, HIS.

  15 Alfred Sinding-Larsen in Morgenbladet, 14 December 1892, quoted by Aarseth in ‘Utgivelse’, Introduction to Bygmester Solness, HIS.

  16 An unsigned notice, Black and White, 25 February 1893, reprinted in Egan, 281.

  17 Edvard Brandes, ‘Henrik Ibsens Skuespil’, Politiken, 14 December 1894, unpaginated cutting at the Ibsen Centre Library (Oslo).

  18 Anonymous review in Dannebrog, 1896, summarized by Aarseth in ‘Utgivelse’, Introduction to John Gabriel Borkman, HIS.

  19 For a general overview of the reception, see Vigdis Ystad, ‘Oppførelse’, Introduction to John Gabriel Borkman HIS. For some of the contemporary reviews, including James Joyce’s ecstatic response, see http://ibsen.nb.no/id/114.0.

  20 Atle Kittang, Ibsens heroisme: frå Brand til Når vi døde vågner (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2002), 7.

  21 James McFarlane, Ibsen and Meaning: Studies, Essays and Prefaces 1953–87 (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1989), 308; Frode Helland, Melankoliens spill: en studie i Henrik Ibsens siste dramaer (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2000), 242.

  22 For an excellent overview of metatheatricality in late Ibsen, see Inga-Stina Ewbank, ‘The Last Plays’, in James McFarlane, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 130–32.

  23 Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 6.

  24 Ibid., 7.

  25 Ibid.

  26 Vigdis Ystad, ‘Bakgrunn’, Introduction (Innledning) to Når vi døde vågner, HIS.

  27 Ibsen, Speech to the Students in Christiania, 10 September 1874, Sakprosa, HIS.

  28 Ibid.

  29 My understanding of finitude is inspired by Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  30 See Helland, Melankoliens spill, 38–9.

  31 I follow Ibsen’s usage, typical of late nineteenth-century Scandinavia, and refer to male characters by their last name, and most women characters by their first name.

  32 In Melankoliens spill, Frode Helland has developed the most radical reading of negativity in Ibsen’s late plays, including The Master Builder. For an English version, see Helland, ‘Ibsen and Nietzsche: The Master Builder’, Ibsen Studies 9, no. 1 (2009), 50–75.

  33 Quoted in Atle Kittang, ‘Ibsen, Heroism, and the Uncanny’, Modern Drama 49, no. 3 (2006), 305.

  34 This discussion of Little Eyolf draws on my essay ‘ “Something That Might Resemble a Kind of Love”: Fantasy and Realism in Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf’, in Susan Wolf and Christopher Grau, eds., Understanding Love: Philosophy, Film, and Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 185–208.

  35 Recently, many critics have focused on child abuse, incest, perversion, impotence, cross-dressing, paedophilia and female sexual desire in Little Eyolf. See particularly Michael Goldman, Ibsen: The Dramaturgy of Fear (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Robin Young, Time’s Disinherited Children: Childhood, Regression and Sacrifice in the Plays of Henrik Ibsen (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1989); Arnold Weinstein, Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to Bergman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

  36 See Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York: Norton, 1982), 56.

  37 Allmers’s view appears related to Hegel’s idea that women reach the highest possible stage of ethical action when they act ethically in relation to a brother. See the discussion of Antigone in G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §§473–5.

  38 Ibsen acknowledged that he knew the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but in an interview he said that he had in mind a figure from his childhood in Skien. Asbjørn Aarseth, ‘Bakgrunn’, Introduction (Innledning) to Lille Eyolf, HIS.

  39 Bolette Sontum, ‘Personal Recollections of Ibsen’, The Bookman: An Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Life 37 (1913), pp. 247–56, quotation from p. 252.

  40 Rasmus Steinsviki, Den 17 de Mai, 1896, summarized in Aarseth, ‘Mottagelse av utgaven’, Introduction to John Gabriel Borkman, HIS.

  41 See Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, trans. Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

  42 Ewbank, ‘The Last Plays’, 149.

  43 Ibsen in, respectively, a letter to August Larsen, 30 April 1900; an interview with Verdens Gang, 12 December 1899; and a letter to Count Prozor, 5 March 1900. See Ystad, ‘Bakgrunn’, Introduction to Når vi døde vågner, HIS.

  44 See Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 321–4.

  45 Sofie Gram Ottesen, ‘Om at finde sin stemme: Melodrama som skepticisme i Ibsens Når vi døde vågner’, in Lisbeth P. Wærp, ed., Livet på likstrå: Henrik Ibsens Når vi døde vågner (Oslo: LNU og Cappelen Akademisk Forlag, 1999), 149–78.

  46 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 2001), 3
3; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. The German Text, with an English Translation, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, revised 4th edn (Malden, Mass., and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §108; Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. Gareth Stedman Jones, trans. Samuel Moore (London: Penguin, 2002), 223.

  THE MASTER BUILDER1

  A PLAY IN THREE ACTS

  * * *

  CHARACTERS

  HALVARD SOLNESS, master builder1

  MRS2 ALINE SOLNESS, his wife

  DR HERDAL, the family doctor

  KNUT3 BROVIK, former architect, now assistant to Solness

  RAGNAR BROVIK, his son, draughtsman

  KAJA FOSLI, his niece, bookkeeper

  MISS4 HILDE WANGEL

  SOME LADIES

  CROWD ON THE STREET

  The action takes place at the house of Halvard Solness.

  Act One

  A plainly furnished office in the house of Solness the master builder. Double doors in the left wall1 lead to the hall. On the right, the door to the rooms beyond. In the back wall an open door on to the drawing office. In the foreground on the left is a desk strewn with books, papers and writing things. Beyond the door a stove. In the right-hand corner a sofa and two chairs grouped round a table. On the table a water carafe and glasses. In the foreground, on the right, a smaller table flanked by a rocking-chair and an armchair. Work lamps burn on the table in the drawing office, the table in the corner and the desk.