by Henrik Ibsen
The setting is Mrs Alving’s estate by a ‘large fjord in West Norway’, and the scene is one of rain, fog and general greyness. As with Pillars of the Community and A Doll’s House, the movement is again one between an enclosed space and another, larger and freer one, outdoors or elsewhere. In Mrs Alving’s son Osvald’s case this elsewhere is Paris.40 But the movement is also, and perhaps more significantly, between different times, between a now and various thens; the ghosts (‘Gengangere’) of the play are reminders of the fact that the now is full of continuities, of different pasts that collide in violent and sometimes shocking ways in the present. In its slow, retrospective unravelling of the past, the play concerns itself with such issues as heredity, memory, causality and history, quite apart from Ibsen’s familiar explorations of truth and freedom.
Ghosts was Ibsen’s greatest succès de scandale and helped place him as a central figure of the European avant-garde. Thematizing, among other subjects, divorce, venereal disease, prostitution, incest and euthanasia, the play was bound to challenge not only the dominant aesthetic idealism of the time, but also various forms of censorship, official and unofficial. Ghosts became a central play for the new, independent theatre movement in Europe in the 1880s and ’90s.
Within the play, a battle of ideas, ideals, beliefs and conventions is being played out between Mrs Alving and Pastor Manders. Like Nora, albeit belatedly and too late, Mrs Alving claims that she has to work her way ‘out to freedom’. The idea of her son Osvald having inherited his father’s disease functions as an image, as one of several manifestations of the past in the present, of the things that come back to haunt the characters. In Mrs Alving’s definition of ‘ghosts’ or the ‘ghost-like’ (‘gengangeragtige’) in the second act, these are not just matters of inheritance from mother and father, but also of all sorts of dead ideas and beliefs. This general idea of inheritance is one that overrides what we now know are incorrect facts – the hints that syphilis, although it is never mentioned explicitly in the play, is being passed down from father to son – which Ibsen employs to such dramatic and philosophical effects. We are so ‘wretchedly frightened of the light, all of us’, Mrs Alving concludes. The word ‘lysrædd’ is one of the Dano-Norwegian compounds that tend to defy translation, but it also belongs to a group of Ibsenian neologisms which draw particular attention to themselves in the original. These coinages are not common colloquial expressions; they are more than ‘the sum of the two words yoked together’, and create a new unit, ‘much like the two halves of a metaphor’.41 To be ‘mørkerædd’ is to be afraid of the dark, a common enough ailment and expression. But on this model Ibsen coins ‘lysrædd’, afraid of the light. Another central compound in the original is ‘livsglæden’, the joy of life, and at the end of the play Osvald, against his mother’s expressed wish – in a futile, utopian gesture – asks for the sun, having long since noted that the ‘joy of life’ is not really known here, at home.
The official date of publication of Ghosts was 13 December 1881, and a stoical Ibsen anticipated violent reactions. If the play did not create an uproar, it would not have been necessary to write it, he told his Danish publisher.42 As the author had predicted, Ghosts created a sensation. It was deemed not just to be deeply immoral, but also to break with established aesthetic norms, and the main Scandinavian theatres refused to stage it. At the beginning of 1882, Ibsen, who began to worry about book sales, wrote to the Danish author and theatre critic Sophus Schandorph, pointing out that he was not responsible for the opinions uttered by the characters of the play. In no other of his plays had the author been ‘so completely absent’ as in this last one.43 In fact, not ‘a single opinion, not a single utterance’ could be attributed to the author, Ibsen claimed. ‘I took great care in avoiding that.’
When the play was given its first British performance, ten years later, on 13 March 1891, the shock effect of Ghosts had certainly not worn out. The production staged by the Independent Theatre, which avoided the censor’s interference by formally organizing itself as a private club, has been called the ‘most sensational of all nineteenth-century premières’.44 The editorial of the country’s biggest newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, did what it could to appeal to the theatre censor, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Ghosts was simple ‘in the sense of an open drain; of a loathsome sore unbandaged; of a dirty act done publicly; or of a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open’.45 This was not art. Rather than being an ‘Æschylus of the North’, Ibsen was like ‘one of his own Norwegian ravens’ hungry for ‘decayed flesh’. The ensuing debate led to well over 500 newspaper and journal items on Ibsen. When William Archer in an article called ‘Ghosts and Gibberings’ listed some of the abuse levelled at the Norwegian playwright, it became an effective piece of polemic, causing embarrassment to at least some of Ibsen’s most intemperate critics.46 But it was not until 1913 that the play was given a licence by the censor, and then after considerable debate within the Lord Chamberlain’s Office.
For a long time, Ghosts continued to be associated with scandal, and twenty years after its publication it stopped the ageing Ibsen from being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The statutes of the prize, established in 1901, demanded that it go to the person who had produced the most excellent work ‘in an idealist direction’.47 Considering his candidature in 1902, the Swedish Academy found that Ibsen was simply too enigmatic and negative.
An Enemy of the People
In the later part of his career, Ibsen got into the habit of publishing a new play every other year. One of the unusual things about his next play, En folkefiende, An Enemy of the People, was that it appeared only one year after Ghosts. The book was available in Scandinavia on 28 November 1882. It no doubt stands in a fairly direct relationship to Ghosts, or, rather, to the public reactions to Ghosts. Ibsen was bitterly disappointed with the lack of support from the liberals at home in connection with the play. But while An Enemy of the People was in part intended as an attack on the ‘compact majority’, and on a press that was becoming a powerful factor in contemporary life, the playwright also wanted to produce a play that was different in kind from Ghosts. For a while he even considered calling it a ‘lystspil’, a light comedy with satirical dimensions, and in March 1882 he assured his Danish publisher that the play would be ‘peaceful’, and that it could be read by pillars of the community and their ladies, as well as played at the theatres.48 He was to be proven right.
This time the action takes place in ‘a coastal town in southern Norway’, which has set great hopes on the income from its new baths. When Dr Stockmann, the town spa’s medical officer, discovers that the baths are infected, he naively thinks that the town will honour him for his discovery. Instead he manages to unite the liberals and conservatives against him. Ibsen again, and perhaps more harshly than ever, satirizes the blinkered, self-interested and provincial perspectives of the small-town bourgeoisie.
While it is possible to approach the play biographically and see Dr Stockmann as the playwright’s self-portrait, a number of features complicate such readings. Stockmann is too much of a naive idealist, and to an extent too self-destructive. He does much to injure his own chances of succeeding, his fiery temperament leads him to extreme characterizations of his opponents, and his quest for recognition and authority comes across as slightly ridiculous and pompous. But he exists in a society built on a lie, and among people who are content with their old ideas and beliefs, whether the new ones be good or bad. There can be little doubt as to the play’s critical perspective on Stockmann’s small-town opponents, both old-time conservatives like his elder brother, the mayor, and new-time liberals like Aslaksen and Hovstad. The play’s didactic climax comes in the public meeting in the fourth act, where Stockmann formulates his philosophy of the one against the many: ‘The minority is always in the right.’ While the argument can be made that the play brings up the problem of a minority’s position within majority rule, it is difficult not to recognize the political implications of Dr Stoc
kmann’s views, at a time when large democratizing processes were being both supported and resisted all over Europe. He is out to provoke:
And now let me turn to dogs, to whom we humans are so closely related. First, imagine a simple common dog – I mean, the kind of vile, ragged, badly behaved mongrels that run around in the streets fouling the house walls.
In contrast to such creatures, Stockmann points to ‘a poodle whose pedigree goes back several generations, and who comes from a noble house where it’s been fed with good food and had the chance to hear harmonious voices and music’. It is hardly odd that such a poodle is ahead of its mongrel relatives, the doctor suggests, that its ‘cranium has developed quite differently from that of the mongrel’: an ‘ordinary peasant mongrel’ would never be able to do the kind of tricks performed by a poodle.
Stockmann clearly wants to contrast the frustratingly conformist and unthinking masses with a progressive, noble minority, but these are ideas influenced by some of the more questionable Social Darwinist ideas of the time. The play’s ambiguous hero also questions the durability of truths, however, insisting that an ‘averagely built truth’ is rarely valid much longer than twenty years. It is such attacks on society’s seemingly stable values which help turn him into an ‘enemy of the people’. The result is broken glass, and isolation. At the end of the play, Stockmann does not claim that ‘the strongest man in the world is he who stands alone’, but, tellingly, ‘most alone’. Even this famous statement has a potentially ironic effect, surrounded as the protagonist is, in the play’s final tableaux, by wife and daughter. And while Petra seems to have faith in her father, his wife only smiles and shakes her head.
Soon the play was produced on all the main Scandinavian stages, and ten years later it became the first commercial success of sorts for Ibsen in Britain, when the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree brought it to the West End in June 1893. It happened in an admittedly domesticated and farce-like version, with Tree even impersonating Ibsen in the lead role. After this the critic of The Times, in a representative early response, expressed his pleasant surprise that this was a play ‘which everybody can understand’, rather than the usual Ibsen ‘full of enigmas and obscurities, intelligible only to the elect’.49 The Norwegian reception had been mixed but relatively friendly, even if a number of critics found it a weaker play than its predecessors. The play does not have characters with the kinds of complex inner lives characteristic of a Nora or a Mrs Alving. But a number of critics saw Dr Stockmann as a secular version of Brand, the fiery vicar protagonist of Ibsen’s great drama in verse.
Even if An Enemy of the People on the whole adheres to a classical construction, it has less of the discipline and artistic control generally associated with the mature Ibsen; there is more of the comic and outright burlesque. One of the fundamental conflicts is, as so often in Ibsen’s plays, that between the individual and society, only here it is distilled or heightened. Another tension is that between truth and convention, again portrayed in starker terms than before, and with greater and more obvious political implications. The five-act play’s somewhat caricatured lone hero has been subjected to a wide variety of appropriations, from those of early anarchists to German Nazis, who recognized a strong man opposed to the masses, to Arthur Miller’s adaptation for a McCarthyite America in the 1950s.
In the year 1900 the eighteen-year-old James Joyce wrote an essay on Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), in which he observed a tendency in the playwright’s later work ‘to get out of closed rooms’.50 While the four plays in this volume mostly take place within closed rooms, they display the beginnings of the same tendency. Lona Hessel pulls away the curtains and longs for fresh air, while Hovstad in An Enemy of the People speaks of ‘air[ing] this place out’, without, admittedly, ever getting around to doing it. The thematics of indoors and outdoors is there from the beginning of what, as Ibsen saw it, became a cycle of plays, and the broken windows after the public meeting in the fourth act of the last play in this volume may represent the difficulty of upholding clear boundaries between out there and in here, abroad and home, province and centre.
Radical Classics
We treat Ibsen as a prominent figure in the Western canon, hailed as one of its great ‘titans’.51 That is testified to through the sheer number of performances, translations, editions and individual readings of his works throughout the world. The plays in this volume have, since Pillars of the Community was first published in 1877, continued to perform their ‘world-making’. And this has, of course, been dependent on the rapid canonization of these texts, on the fact that they have been made available to ever-new audiences, on page and stage. But it is important, because potentially more rewarding, that we try both to stage and to read Ibsen in ways which do not simply take his canonization for granted.52 One of the ways this can be done is perhaps in ‘reprovincializing’ him, remembering where he came from, not smoothing out his strangeness. In the process of these plays becoming classics certain things have been forgotten or erased, certain ghosts have not been evoked.
It is worth remembering that the specialness of a writer can be lost if we take him for granted, if we domesticate him too strongly, if we assume that he is too much like us. This Penguin edition wants to contribute to opening Ibsen up, to establishing premises for fresh approaches, through capturing the strangeness of his language, the individuality of his plays, how they each create their own storyworlds, through making readers and audiences aware of the historical contexts of these texts and some of the most significant of the many choices made in the process of translation.
From an early stage there was a sense in certain radical and avant-garde milieux throughout Europe that the new literature from Scandinavia and Russia was ‘the “classical” literature of their own time, or at least the artistic precursors of a coming classical literature’.53 The waves of cultural export from these hitherto peripheral regions became significant factors in the renewal of nineteenth-century literature, both the novel and the drama. But world literature and theatre always come from somewhere, and a work manifests itself differently at home than abroad, in another language and in other cultural contexts. At the same time, world literature, David Damrosch notes, is ‘always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture’.54 A reflection on such matters of exchange ought to be part of any approach to reading, studying, teaching and performing Ibsen in English.
One of the tasks the contemporary reader and interpreter of Ibsen (whether they encounter him on page or stage) may face, then, is to discover or rediscover the playwright’s strangeness; that is, to pull him off centre, to resist the many habitual readings to which he has been exposed, to avoid ‘reducing him to the familiar’, even as we try to understand him.55 At the same time, it is notable how Ibsen has been put to use, and to all kinds of different uses, for around 150 years since his Scandinavian breakthrough with Brand and how he is still being put to use today. In numerous languages, forms, adaptations and versions he still affects us, his plays continue to touch us, to stir and surprise us, to change the way we feel about and perceive reality.
With the major exception of Shakespeare, Ibsen is played more often around the world than any other playwright, most strikingly perhaps in countries like India, Bangladesh and China, and in parts of Africa, in addition to being alive in the classical repertory of European and American theatres. Ibsen’s plays, in short, still seem capable of letting in fresh air, of creating newness or otherness in the world, of gaining in translation. And even if some of his plays are less polyphonous and composite than others, his own genuinely quizzical poetics can be adopted in relation to them all. As Ibsen put it in a much-quoted ‘rhymed letter’ written for the Danish critic Georg Brandes’s journal Det nittende Aarhundrede (The Nineteenth Century) in 1875: ‘I do but ask; my call is not to answer’.56 The answering or interpreting must be up to us, his readers, spectators, co-creators.
Tore Rem, University of Os
lo
NOTES
1. Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso, 2013), p. 181.
2. William Archer, ‘The Real Ibsen’ [1901], in Thomas Postlewait, ed., William Archer on Ibsen: The Major Essays, 1889–1919 (London: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 53–68 (p. 54).
3. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 288.
4. See ‘A Note on the Translation’ in this volume.
5. See Emily Apter and her criticism of world literature and a ‘translatability assumption’, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), p. 3.
6. Rolf Fjelde chose A Doll House for his translation, thus correctly rejecting the genitive form, while not substituting ‘Home’ for ‘House’; see Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays (New York: Penguin, 1978). The Norton edition of Ibsen’s Selected Plays, translated by Rick Davis and Brian Johnston, has followed suit. This alternative cannot be said to have won out in popular usage, though.
7. Frederic Wedmore, ‘Ibsen in London’, The Academy, 15 June 1889, xxxv, pp. 419–20, in Michael Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 107–8 (p. 108).
8. Frederic Wedmore, ‘Ibsen Again’, The Academy, 27 July 1889, pp. 60–61, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, p. 132.
9. Henry James, review of John Gabriel Borkman, Harper’s Weekly, 6 February 1897, xlv, no. 2094, p. 78, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, pp. 364–5; and ‘On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler’, New Review, June 1891, iv, pp. 519–30, in Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen, pp. 234–44 (p. 244).
