Ibsen’s Relevance and Influence Endure
By JULIA M. KLEIN
Theater critics aren’t always the savviest harbingers of revolution nor, for that matter, its most ardent advocates. Even so, it is startling to note the contumely that greeted the premieres of many of Henrik Ibsen’s most enduring works. As recounted in Michael Meyer’s 1967 biography, Ibsen, the German critics were cool to A Doll’s House, the British press denounced Ghosts as a “mass of vulgarity, egotism, coarseness, and absurdity,” and nearly everyone regarded Hedda Gabler as a failure, largely because of the very moral complexity that now intrigues us.
Today Ibsen’s wedding of tragedy to the ethical dilemmas and unadorned rhetoric of middle-class characters seems like the necessary prelude to modern drama, from George Bernard Shaw to Arthur Miller. Within his stuffed Victorian living rooms, the Norwegian playwright championed free-thinking, if flawed, heroes over both the conformist masses and self-aggrandizing authorities. His signature metaphors of corruption and contagion along with the violent undertow in his works, informed by the upheavals of 19th-century Europe retain their relevance. The fateful door-slamming in A Doll’s House, the shattered glass in An Enemy of the People, and the climactic gunshots in Hedda Gabler and The Wild Duck are staples of our theatrical vocabulary. Ibsen has become, as W.H. Auden might say, a whole climate of opinion about the possibilities and the limits of realistic prose drama though the dramatist himself, more protean than his legacy, was also a poet and a symbolist.
According to Meyer, Ibsen (1828-1906) was a prickly, obsessive character, estranged from most of his family, his small hometown of Skien, and, for many years, Norway itself. He remained haunted by his father’s financial failure a theme that turns up frequently in his plays and later fathered an illegitimate child, an event that also provided dramatic fodder. (Meyer claims that Ibsen had doubts about his own paternity as well.) After the embittering experience of directing financially struggling theaters in Bergen and Christiania (now Oslo) and the poor reception afforded his early works, he lived for 27 years in Germany and Italy. His first real success was Brand, an 1866 poetic drama that the translator Geoffrey Hill calls “a tragic farce.”
Ibsen returned to Norway to live in 1891, when his reputation was secure. In his final years, though still married to his longtime wife, Suzannah Thoresen (with whom he had a son, Sigurd), he indulged in a series of flirtations with considerably younger women, bartering his fame for romance, or the illusion of it. By the time he died, he was a world-historical figure and an icon in his native Scandinavia. It was not uncommon for other European writers an admiring young James Joyce among them to learn Norwegian so they could read Ibsen in the original.
In this centenary year of his death, Ibsen continues to spark fresh appraisal and controversy. In recent months, he has been the subject of critical re-evaluation (Toril Moi’s Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy, from Oxford University Press), historical conjecture (Steven F. Sage’s provocative Ibsen and Hitler: The Playwright, the Plagiarist, and the Plot for the Third Reich, from Carroll & Graf), and a translated Norwegian novel (Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity, from Graywolf Press). In addition, as one might expect, Ibsen’s plays are being adapted and produced in festivals around the world.
In New York, for example, Oslo Elsewhere recently presented “Henrik Ibsen + Jon Fosse: Norway Meets New York” at 59E59 Theaters, juxtaosing the American premiere of the contemporary Norwegian playwright’s deathvariations with a new translation of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (1886). At Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company through October 22 is the acclaimed Norwegian director Kjetil Bang-Hansen’s brisk, engaging version of An Enemy of the People (1882), which emphasizes the play’s comedy and humanity.
As Meyer notes, many English-language productions, using stilted translations, have leached the humor and sexiness from Ibsen’s work. In recent years, however, that trend seems to have reversed. A West End production of A Doll’s House (1879), which won four Tony Awards after its 1997 transfer to Broadway, presented a Nora (Janet McTeer) bursting with neurotic tics and sharing a genuine sexual bond with Torvald (Owen Teale). Her exit became as a result more emotionally complex, marking not just a feminist triumph but a moment of sadness and loss. A 2001 Broadway production of Hedda Gabler (1890), starring Kate Burton, was alternately praised and chided for delivering a sympathetically frustrated Hedda who might have stepped out of Diary of a Mad Housewife.
The Oslo Elsewhere double bill, which closed September 9, was a far chillier affair. In Fosse’s riveting deathvariations, Keatsian romantic longing is laced with Scandinavian melancholy, and the play’s spare, incantatory dialogue recalls Beckett and Pinter. The Norwegian-American Sarah Cameron Sunde both translated and directed the play, complementing its austere symbolism with an exquisitely stylized staging that used light to suggest both mood swings and the passage of time.
Deathvariations begins quietly with an estranged couple, grief-stricken but still at odds, trying to absorb the news of their daughter’s death. It then flashes back to the early days of their marriage, as the optimistic young man and his anxious pregnant wife discuss how to make ends meet in their basement apartment. The realism of the setup contrasts with the later metaphysical preoccupations of their daughter, who flirts with a mysterious handsome stranger called “the Friend.” In an image torn from an Edvard Munch canvas, the doomed woman and her prospective mate (or fate) extend their arms and take each other’s hands in a slow, seductive dance of death. She leaps finally into the sea, an act that left my theater companion (not unlike the girl’s bereaved parents) complaining about insufficient motivation. Still, deathvariations, only the second of Fosse’s works to be presented in this country, is a fine introduction to a playwright who has already won considerable European acclaim.
In Rosmersholm, too, a man and a woman in love are able to find passionate unity only in a watery grave. But this production, directed by Timothy Douglas from an adaptation by Anna Guttormsgaard and Bridgette Wimberly (with Oda Radoor), never managed to find a coherent style, nor to endow its final tragedy with a convincing rationale. Admittedly, this latter failing is largely Ibsen’s and more bothersome in a work filled with talky attitudinizing than in the poetic Fosse.
This adaptation pares down the original considerably and transposes the setting from Norway to America a move indicated mainly by colloquialisms, name alterations, and nontraditional casting (John Rosmer is played by the soap-opera star Charles Parnell, one of three African-Americans in the cast). Rosmersholm contains much vague talk about conservatism, radicalism, and spiritual transformation, but, politically speaking, it’s hard to grasp precisely what’s at stake or even what era we’re in.
In any case, the core drama is a psychological one, played out primarily in the shifting relationships among the minister Rosmer, his live-in friend Rebecca West (an excellent Guttormsgaard), nd Rosmer’s dead wife, Beth (Beata in the Norwegian), a suicide. Like the daughter in deathvariations, the absent woman remains a persistent presence among the living. “It’s the dead that cling to Rosmersholm,” the housekeeper, Mrs. Helseth, says portentously.
West, in this version a photographer, is haunted by her past, driven by her desires but also willing to abjure them. As for Beth, she is at once deranged and prescient, a crazy Cassandra whose prophecies are inevitably fulfilled. Neither the play nor the production makes an adequate case for Rebecca’s decision to sacrifice herself for Rosmer, and still less for his following suit. We’re left only with the housekeeper’s anguished scream another evocation of Munch to underline the horror and the pity of their choice.
Toril Moi, in her study of Ibsen and modernism, makes the play more intelligible by situating it in its aesthetic context. To Moi, a professor of literature and Romance studies at Duke University, Rosmersholm is an investigation of romantic delusions, linguistic skepticism, and the increasingly sterile idealist tradition. She sees Rebecca and Rosmer as both grand and mad, “heartbroken romantics … who cannot bear the world that bourgeois democracy has produced.” Moi doesn’t deny that Rosmersholm has its Gothic and melodramatic elements from the “white horses” that foreshadow death to the ancient curse of Rosmersholm. But Ibsen’s intentions, she says, are to mock and appropriate those genres, not to ape them.
While Moi interprets Ibsen through the lens of modernism, Sage peruses the playwright’s work for the keys to Hitler’s murderous ascent. Ibsen and Hitler is an odd but fascinating book, cultural history written with a veneer of scientific rigor. Sage maintains that three Ibsen dramas An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean (1873), and The Master Builder (1892) were key influences on Hitler. He demonstrates that rhetoric from Enemy found its way into Mein Kampf, and that Hitler was in contact with German intellectuals who regarded the playwright as a prophet.
Far more audaciously, Sage suggests that Hitler used Ibsen’s monumental Roman historical drama, Emperor and Galilean, about Julian the Apostate (331-63), as a virtual blueprint for everything from Kristallnacht to Hitler’s nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. Sage argues, for example, that Hitler arranged the murder of his niece and rumored lover, Geli Raubal, in 1931 as part of a ritualistic prelude to seizing power a parallel, however inexact, to the death of Julian’s wife, Helena, after eating a poisoned peach (itself a dramatic invention). Historians won’t buy all of Sage’s contentions, but his work is likely to spur further investigation.
Another Ibsen drama, The Wild Duck, serves as the springboard for Shyness and Dignity, a slim but impressive 1996 novel about a schoolteacher whose life reaches both its climax and its nadir in a single day. (It has been admirably translated by Sverre Lyngstad for the Ibsen centenary.) The narrative starts with teacher Elias Rukla’s attempt to offer a new interpretation of a minor character in The Wild Duck to his uncomprehending class. After indulging in a fit of rage that may end his career, he ruminates on his student days, his onetime best friend, and the origins of his now-deteriorating marriage. The novel ends, like many Ibsen plays, on a note of pessimism and irresolution.
So, too, does An Enemy of the People. The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s staging nevertheless reminds us how engrossing Ibsen can be. This is a beautiful production, set in the 1930s, elegantly lit, and designed by Timian Alsaker in grays and browns reminiscent of a sepia-toned photograph. Yet there is nothing languid or still about Bang-Hansen’s directionof this new translation by Rick Davis and Brian Johnston. The show breezes along, in concert with Dr. Thomas Stockmann’s headlong rush toward both triumph and disaster, before climaxing in a stunning tableau of isolation.
Acting in an official capacity, Stockmann has discovered the bacterial pollution of the town’s water supply, which is poisoning the baths that are the town’s economic underpinning. No problem fixing the mess, he naïvely figures until he encounters the corruption of the politicians, press, and townspeople who would prefer to see the costly problem hushed up. Joseph Urla’s Stockmann, moving from convivial warmth to almost unintelligible rage, is a man whose intransigence is not so much innate as the product of desperate necessity.
Both set and sound design amplify Ibsen’s symbolism. Pipes arrayed in a deco pattern frame the stage, while others are visible through the large arched windows. At key moments, we hear the drip of water, as though forecasting a deluge or the wearing down of Stockmann’s resistance.
Stockmann’s chief adversary is his brother, Peter, the mayor, as stiff and pompous in Philip Goodwin’s reading as Thomas is loose-limbed and sincere. Caught in between are the “moderate” Aslaksen (Rick Foucheux) and the backpedaling liberal newspaper editor, Hovstad (Derek Lucci), another in Ibsen’s gallery of contemptible press barons.
In some productions, the crusading doctor’s hyperbolic attacks on the stupidity of the majority can seem almost maniacal or, at the least, embarrassingly elitist and antidemocratic. This translation wisely emphasizes the notion of intellectual distinction and eliminates Stockmann’s eugenic rants. But the tension at the heart of the play remains: Stockmann’s passion for the truth (or is it simply for being right?) is arrayed against every interest in the town, and finally even the welfare of his own family. The stakes rise, and so do the temptations to acquiesce. One thinks of the tempting of John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) written just three years after Miller himself adapted An Enemy of the People.
Enemy was Ibsen’s angry response to the critical vituperation directed at Ghosts, but it has transcended its historical context in a way that Rosmersholm cannot. In this sleek production, the play still cracks like a whip against the dangers of groupthink, callow politicians, double-dealing newspaper editors, and a menagerie of other discreditable 19th- and 21st-century types.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia who writes for The New York Times, Mother Jones, and other publications.
The inscrutable Mr Barnes
(Filed: 23/09/2006)
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Julian Barnes’s bestselling novel ‘Arthur and George’ is his 20th book – but what do we know about the man who wrote it? He talks to Jasper Rees
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Julian Barnes: ‘I don’t care what happens after I’m dead.
I assume it’s even worse than old age’ |
Of the golden generation of British novelists now within hailing distance of old age, Julian Barnes is much the hardest to pin down. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan you know where you are with them, and have done for years.
But the unifying theme of Barnes’s work? The through line? If there is such a thing, it’s an elegant unknowability, a distaste for the business of sifting through the contents of his own navel.
The one time I met Auberon Waugh, the founder of Literary Review, he was arguing that no one would be reading Barnes in 20 years’ time. This would have been about 20 years ago. Waugh had recently set up his literary magazine as a sort of critical sea-wall, its task to hold back the tide of postmodernism, experimentalism, clever-clever obfuscation and general dicking around with form. Perhaps Waugh was just trying to wish Barnes into obscurity. He was best known at that point for Metroland, a debut that loitered in suburbia and didn’t frighten the horses, followed by Flaubert’s Parrot, which did.
Published in 1984, that novel now seems a very Barnesian admonition to literary enthusiasts that the hunt for biographical trivia is a wild goose chase. It is certainly the closest he has come to a mission statement and, if its author hasn’t exactly been languishing in the shadows, for the next 20 years it looked more and more likely to be the book for which he would be principally remembered.
Then last year came Arthur & George, which has reached more readers in hardback than any of its 19 predecessors (11 fiction, four whodunits under the nom de plume of Dan Kavanagh, three non-fiction, one translation of Daudet).
The story behind the creation of the Court of Appeal might not sound too gripping a pitch to a Hollywood producer, but, as well as being his longest book, Arthur & George is his first to have its readers actually sweating about the outcome. They are far more used to rolling his books pleasurably around on the palate, like an enigmatic Burgundy, and certainly putting them down now and again.
“It’s the novel I wrote most intensely in terms of hours per day,” Barnes allows. “And it drove me along in a way that I then wanted to drive the reader along. It sounds a bit glib to say I wrote it in order to have something to read on the subject, but there’s something a bit like tat going on.”
The subject is a miscarriage of justice. George Edalji, a blameless solicitor of Parsee origin, was found guilty in 1903 of a series of brutal attacks on horses in Shropshire, despite a glaring lack of evidence. He was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude, then released without explanation or exoneration after three. Unable to resume legal practice without a pardon, he appealed to the creator of Sherlock Holmes to take up cudgels on his behalf.
It was the only time Conan Doyle responded to such a cry for help, but, a century on, Edalji’s story has been forgotten anew. If Arthur rescued George from obloquy, it is Julian who has rescued him from obscurity. Barnes being Barnes, the original seed for Arthur & George was, of course, French.
“I was reading about the Dreyfus case,” he says. Specifically, he was reading Douglas Johnson’s France and the Dreyfus Affair on the points of similarity between the infamous conviction for espionage of a Jewish officer in the French army and the contemporaneous victimisation of the young Anglo-Indian. Both cases put a nation’s attitude to its own minorities on trial.
More than that, says Barnes, “in both cases there is a shocking crime, a miscarriage of justice, key handwriting evidence, a sentence of hard labour, and a famous writer rides to the rescue. Why has one case been forgotten and why is the Dreyfus case resonating throughout France even to this day? Johnson was a very witty man, as well as a great scholar. He said that you might think it was because the Dreyfus case was about high treason and the British case was about animal mutilation. But in fact the British are much more shocked by animal mutilation than high treason.”
To begin with, Barnes didn’t have “any particular interest in Conan Doyle. I deliberately didn’t re-read the canon in order to write this book because I didn’t want it to be that sort of book.” When his interest was pricked, it was by Conan Doyle’s modish espousal of spiritualism, and by his long courtship of Jean Leckie while his invalided first wife was still alive.
“In his autobiography he completely lies about Jean, and early biographers completely cover it up. The spiritualist stuff is also about evidence, proof, knowledge, belief. And you think, this is the point at which it starts to become potentially a novel.” He started to fill the gaps between the facts with fiction.
We meet in a pub near Barnes’s home in north London, where I order him a beer brewed by Trappists. He’s slightly late because he’s been watching athletics on the box. Now that he no longer writes as Dan Kavanagh, watching sport is how he stays in regular contact with his macho side (although his slobby sleuth was actually bisexual). Barnes says his wife (and agent) Pat Kavanagh thinks “it’s easier to list the sports that I’m not interested in than the ones I am. I’m not terribly interested in swimming and power-boat racing. I think you can get interested in diving if it’s late enough at night.” We sorrowfully discuss the inability of the nation’s heptathletes to chuck a javelin.
It’s hard to square this image of a sports nerd with what we know of the writer. But then, what do we know of the writer? It was about halfway through Metroland, which took an unconscionable time to complete, that Barnes says he “learnt how to invent”. The self-portrait glimpsed in the first half of the book is like a rare snap of Pynchon or Salinger. Ever since, Barnes has kept himself well out of it. Was that him being retroactively jealous of his wife in Before She Met Me? In Talking It Over and its seqel, Love Etc, his two novels about the trials and triangulations of love, would he be the plodding money-maker Stuart or the mercurial flop Ollie?
“None of those characters is based on anyone,” he says. “Even writers say that fiction is the higher autobiography, and I don’t buy that at all. I think that what most of us do is more complicated. Everyone thinks, ‘I had a difficult childhood, then I grew up, and then I had lots of affairs, and then some resolution happened to my life: that’s a novel.’ Oh no it isn’t. It wouldn’t even be a very good autobiography. It sort of vaguely irritates me.”
Can we at least assume that The Lemon Table, his recent collection of beautifully elegiac short stories, suggests a personal preoccupation with getting on a bit? (Barnes is now 60.) “No, I’m sorry. I’ll swat that one down easily: (a) it took me about 10 years to write those stories, so I was writing them from my mid-forties or so; (b) I always had my eye on the thought that it gets worse, rather than better. It wasn’t as if I turned 50 or was approaching 60 and suddenly looked over the brow of the hill and thought, oh, I don’t like the look of it there.”
From where Barnes sits, even when he’s not on one of his frequent walking holidays (latest stop: Liguria), there is still quite a lot to like the look of. It would have been nice if Arthur & George, his third nomination, hadn’t been pipped for the Booker last year by John Banville’s The Sea. But how many other English-language writers have been made Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres?
And the good news is that the press can even stop bothering him about his spat with Martin Amis, recently spotted at the launch party for the paperback edition of Arthur & George. As usual Barnes keeps his trap politely shut when this comes up, save for a question. “Have you heard about *********’s love-child?” And he names a famous writer knight. Which I take to be Barnesian for “mind your own business”.
Not all good news is real news. A few weeks ago, it was reported that Harvey Weinstein had bought the rights to Arthur & George for a seven-figure sum.
“I was in the States for my book tour at the time and I got home and I rang up a friend who said, ‘Oh Jules, I heard you’re going to be very rich.’ I said, ‘That’s very odd, I haven’t heard anything about this.'” It turned out that someone somewhere had confused Arthur & George with a French film called Artur. In which there is a certain piquant irony.
The last time a novel of his was filmed, it was Talking It Over and it was transplanted to France. “I had nothing to do with it. There was a very nice woman director who I met on the last day of principal photography. They shot a scene on a cross-channel ferry. I sailed back with them to Calais, then came back again by myself. And I said to the director, in French, ‘I hope you have betrayed me,’ and she said, ‘But of course.’ And we both smiled at one another. I thought, it’s got a chance.” She obviously didn’t betray him enough. Arthur & George, he reveals, is more likely to fetch up on television.
Barnes hasn’t finished his Trappist beer, but the cricket highlights beckon. As a parting shot, I ask him how he’d react if someone did to him what he’s done to Conan Doyle and Flaubert if someone wrote a history of Julian Barnes in 10½ chapters? “Oh I’d be very cross,” he says. But what about when he’s gone? “I don’t care what happens after I’m dead. I assume it’s even worse than old age.”
Not for George Edalji, who died in Welwyn Gaden City at the age of 77 in 1953. Among the readers who have written to Barnes is an elderly woman. As a girl she was evacuated to a house in Hertfordshire Edalji shared with his sister Maud, who has a supporting role in the novel.
“At one point Maud took her to the back of the house and opened a door and said, ‘This is my brother George.’ And there was a man sitting at a desk who looked up and bowed, and then she closed the door.” Barnes has opened the door again, and given him an afterlife.
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毛择东青年时在北京大学图书馆当一名书籍登录员，想与学生菁英分子如傅斯年、罗家伦等人攀谈、结交而不可得。他后来多次提到此事，意颇怏怏。中共建政十余年后，毛发动文化大革命，折磨并逼死成千上万的知识分子，应非无因。
毛及其同僚，多起自乡野，文化素养并不深厚，大概出于某种心理反射，都欢喜舞文弄墨。毛之诗词，除《沁园春。咏雪》有点“开国之君”的气象外，其他也算不上什么佳构。甚至在《鸟儿问答》中，连“放屁”这么粗鄙的话都入诗了。
大陆领导们表现文采风流的方式之一是“题壁”。凡名山大川、雄关要塞、历史古迹，只要有游客去的地方，他们都会编出两句词，写上几个字，一以标志“到此一游”，再则也可“教化众生”。只是这些文字，或言不及义，或生吞活剥，或多此一举，总教人有胜景蒙尘的不甘。
在这些“官大好吟诗”的大官中，虽也有陈毅、叶剑英、陈云这些人等，但仍应以“后起之秀”的江择民表现最为“突出”。几年来到大陆寻幽揽胜，好像还找不出哪个地方瞻仰不到江前主席“墨宝”的。
前年远走丝路，受王维那首《渭城曲》的召唤，顶著炎阳，冒著风沙，来到阳关。如今不是“西出阳关无故人”，而是“西出阳关无阳关”，城墙、关门早已风化为一堆黄土。故址上新建了一排现代化的曲形长廊，活像一位乡村老妪穿上香奈儿时装，十分地不搭调。廊里竖立许多石碑，上面镌刻时人的题词，当然也少不了江择民的。《渭城曲》千古绝唱，读书认字的中国人都能琅琅上口，不知谁还对政客们的那些大作看得上眼？
日前去四川访胜，“向例”又在各地拜读长官们的题词。拿都江堰来说，不仅有江择民的字，也有提拔他的“小平同志”的字。都江堰的年纪“寿比长城”，惟长城现在只剩下观赏性和纪念性了，都江堰却仍然辛勤眷顾成都大平原的千万农庄。筑堰的李冰早已进入历史，千秋不朽，何贵乎今人多余的歌颂？
江择民的题词，似已“无所不在”。成都体育馆门口竟也见江先生勒石：“全民健身，利国利民；功在当代，利在千秋。”最令人吃惊的是，连一个接待观光客的丝绸店都在劫难逃，江氏策勉：“弘扬古蚕丝文化，开拓新丝绸之路。”
同为唐代诗人，崔颢的诗作没有李白多，诗名也没有李白大，但是他游黄鹤楼时所题“昔人已乘黄鹤去，此地空余黄鹤楼”那首七律，却令李白自叹不如，这位诗仙承认：“眼前有景道不得，崔颢题诗在上头。”
今天，大陆名胜古迹所受政治人物题写的污染，依我看，与风尘、寒热和人为破坏所造成的损害同样严重。后人要的是祖先遗产的清白面貌，请高官们就别再“杀风景”了。
台湾政坛诸多不堪，但政客们好像还未染上乱涂胡抹的恶习。百害之外终有一利，乃此岛之福。
（作者为台湾《联合报》前主笔）
To describe this posture as “adolescent” is perhaps unfair: After all, there are plenty of quite grown-up people who believe that American foreign policy since World War II has been founded on a mistaken conception of America’s role in the world. And it is true that we all make mistakes–so that Prof. Chomsky’s erstwhile support for regimes that no one could endorse in retrospect, like that of Pol Pot, is no proof of wickedness. But then the mistakes of American foreign polcy are no proof of wickedness either. 
hen Superman debuted in 1978, it invented a whole new movie genre—and a new kind of cinematic magic. Today, hundreds of millions of dollars depend on the heroic box-office performances of costumed crusaders whom Hollywood once thought worthy only of kiddie serials or campy parodies. The two Spider-Man movies rank among the top ten of all time for gross domestic receipts, and X-Men: The Last Stand and Superman Returns are among this year’s biggest hits.