White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled - the best books of 1866

The best book of 1866 is so obvious that it is barely worth disagreeing, but as Raskolnikov says himself, “The wrong form, you mean – the aesthetics aren’t right!” (VI.7, tr. Oliver Ready).  My favorite book of 1866 is not Crime and Punishment but Victor Hugo’s staggering and preposterous man-against-nature – man-against-hurricane – man-against-octopus – epic The Toilers of the Sea, illustrated above.  The steamboat pictured is about to get stuck on a strange rock formation, and the hero will spend most of the novel fighting everything Hugo can throw at him to get it moving again.  “Then, taking up in the hollow of his hand a little water from a pool of rainwater, he drank it and cried to the clouds: ‘Fooled you!’”  That’s right, he is insulting the clouds, defying the cosmos, as one does in a Victor Hugo book.

Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler this year, too, alongside Crime and Punishment, under contractual conditions that would have crushed most writers.  Now there is some kind of heroism.  I would like to read a Victor Hugo novel about Dostoevsky writing Crime and Punishment and The Gambler.

Henrik Ibsen’s Brand is from 1866, as well, about another defier of the cosmos.  Brand, Raskolnikov, and Hugo’s hero – big characters in big stories.

I do not believe I have read any English-language novels from the year.  Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, George Eliot’s Felix Holt, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, just barely unfinished, would be likely candidates for the Booker Prize, if there had been such a thing.  Gaskell had never won the prize, beat by Thackeray, Dickens, and Trollope, so I think she picks this one up posthumously.  I am just making this up.  Like I care about prizes.

It was a broadly interesting year for poetry.  Paul Verlaine published his first book, Poèmes saturniens, which I have only read in part, and of course in English.  The French looks like this, from “Chansons d’automne,” one of Verlaine’s best-known poems:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
     De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
     Monotone.

Lip-smacking French verse.  Those first three lines, those vowels, those nasalizations.  Maybe the poem also means something.

Algernon Swinburne’s first books of lyrics, Poems and Ballads, appeared, ruining English poetry for decades until austere, brutal Modernists dynamited and carted off his lush, sweet gibberish:

from Hymn to Proserpine

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

It is like The Toilers of the Sea turned into English verse.  Swinburne was Hugo’s greatest English champion.

Christina Rossetti’s second book, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems seemed like a paler version of her brilliant first book, but I’ll note it, at least.

In the United States, Herman Melville published Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, his debut as a poet and his first book in a decade, the first of all too few volumes of poetry.  Even more surprising somehow is James Greenleaf Whittier’s nostalgic, ironic “Snow-Bound,” surprising because Whittier was generally such a bad poet, but one who occasionally wrote a great poem.  Whether the torments inflicted by the poem on several generations of schoolchildren are to the demerit of Whittier I leave to the conscience of the individual reader.  Those days are long past.

The Quintessence of Shaw's Ibsenism - the unbearable face of the truth

I will be on vacation for a while, returning, with luck, next Thursday, so I will wrap up Ibsen with George Bernard Shaw’s brilliant little book The Quintessence of Ibsenism.  The publication history is complex:  lectures at the Fabian Society in 1890, a book in 1891 – and thus missing Ibsen’s last four plays, and revisions or I think really additions in 1913 and 1922.

Writing about Ibsen, I have included fewer quotations than usual.  I am mimicking Shaw, who uses almost none, maybe just a fragment slipped in occasionally.  He covers each play from Brand through When We Dead Awaken in a few pages – as few as a single page sometimes – that summarize the story, pull out a conclusion or two, and link the play backwards and forwards.

I have referred to Shaw’s summaries many times recently.  They were at first a bit baffling.  I would think, I just read this play, this is not how things happened.  But I was wrong.  Shaw does not tell the story that happens onstage, but rather the story that occurs in the fictional world of the play.  He dismantles all of the revelations about past behavior and straightens them out into a conventional linear plot.  If there is a secret from ten years ago that we do not learn about until it is explosively revealed in Act V, Shaw has moved it to the beginning of the story, to when it “really” “happened.”

As a result, in the six pages that summarize Hedda Gabler, four of them cover events before the curtain rises.  The play we see is all in one long (two page) paragraph.  The Master Builder is even more extreme.  Four short lines cover the onstage action.  Here are two of them:

The play begins ten years after the climbing of the tower…  This time he really does break his neck; and so the story ends.

Enough technical business.  It is a commonplace to say that Shaw tries to bend Ibsen into Shaw, but when the book was first published Shaw was not exactly Shaw.  He had not had a play produced, and was best known as a music critic.  He emphasizes the reformist side of Ibsen, and has no interest in the visionary side, or more likely thinks they are the same thing.  The Socialist paradise would be on earth.  Shaw has read the plays, so he is careful not to push too hard for specific Ibsenian reforms, but rather embracing the long-running and subtle Ibsenian attack on what Shaw perversely calls “idealists.”  What is Shaw if not an idealist, but no, the idealists are those who “will be terrified beyond measure at the proclamation of their hidden thought – at the presence of the traitor among the conspirators of silence – at the rending of the beautiful veil they and their poets have woven to hide the unbearable face of the truth” (“Ideals and Idealists”).  Ibsen’s plays are then are a powerful assault on false conventions, some legal, some traditional, but many more psychological.

Shaw’s book begins with some of the more hysterical attacks on Ibsen by English reviewers (“Bestial, cynical, disgusting, poisonous, sickly, delirious, indecent, loathsome” etc.) and ends with a call for an Ibsen theater along the lines of Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth.  “But I think Ibsen has proved the right of the drama to take scriptural rank, and his own right to canonical rank as one of the major prophets of the modern Bible.”  However excessive that rhetoric, however unrealistic the idea, all I had to do to agree with Shaw was read Ibsen’s plays one after the other.

Ah, what an uplifting story! - the middle 4 Ibsen plays - sea trolls and suicides

The next thing that happens is that Ibsen, after writing four plays in a row about the terrible costs of living a life full of secrets and lies, comes up with The Wild Duck (1884), in which a brave truth-teller damages or destroys the lives of everyone around him, either because they cannot act on the truth, or because they take it so seriously that they do act.  The Wild Duck is undeniably, even by me, a tragedy, a shocker, but the way Ibsen punches a hole through the surface of his previous plays is hilarious.

This is just the sort of thing that leads people to cook up twelve-play interpretive schemes.  If nothing else, the later plays should add some nuances to interpretations of the earlier ones.  Maybe the exact nature or purpose of truth-telling matters. for example.

The other things that encourage schematism are the clear symmetries built into the plays.  George Bernard Shaw and Brian Johnston break them into clusters of four.  After the social realism of the first four, Ghosts and so on, the next set – The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady by the Sea (1888), and Hedda Gabler (1890) – certainly take a strange turn.  The plays get weirder, and the trolls start to appear, or perhaps start to reveal themselves more clearly.

For example, Ellida, the title character of The Lady from the Sea, has a strange affinity for the wild sea which life on a fjord, part of the sea, yes?, cannot assuage.  She is specifically identified as a mermaid.  She fell in love with a wild sailor, who, just after murdering a man, marries Ellida in a pagan ceremony, throwing wedding rings into the sea.  He never returns, and she eventually marries a doctor and leaves the untamed sea for the calm fjord.

The play begins with Ellida in crisis, yearning for the sea.  She has lost a child, and her marriage is failing, so when her first “husband” reappears to claim her I actually thought that he was imaginary, an expression of her inner turmoil.  The sailor, who has magic powers and appears to be some kind of sea troll, is real, though – “real,” I mean.  What is strange about the play is how what seems like it should be the symbolic background of the play is in fact the foreground, the source of the action, like in a fairy tale.

ELLIDA:  Once you’ve really become a land animal, then there’s no going back again – into the sea.  Or the life that belongs to the sea, either.  (Act V)

Obviously, this is symbolically laden, yet within the play itself it is pretty close to literal.

Ibsen is recasting A Doll House in The Lady from the Sea.  Ellida might walk out on her husband much like Nora did, but her husband does not duplicate Nora’s husband’s mistakes.  Nora considers suicide, and once I start looking for these patterns, it seems possible that the sea troll is offering not love but death, escape by suicide.  And in fact, it is this middle set of four plays that are full of suicides, five or six in four plays.  Rosmersholm introduces the bizarre and disturbing idea of people demanding suicide of others, as proof of loyalty and love, which is utterly insane, unless the person making the demand is, like the sailor, or Hedda Gabler, a troll.

My title is again from Pillars of Society.

MRS. RUMMEL:  Ah, what an uplifting story!

MRS. HOLT:  And – so moral!

MRS. BERNICK:  A book like that really does make you think.  (Act I)

I did it for the betterment of society - Ibsen's first four Realist plays

After Pillars of Society comes A Doll House (1879), in which Ibsen definitively invents the realistic play.  Whether he meant to do it, or whether the play takes on a different meaning in the context of his other plays, the deed was done.  A model was now available for other writers to put ordinary people and controversial social issues on the stage in a particular way, and they used it.

The dolls and doll house are used again in The Master Builder (1892).

Next comes Ghosts (1881), which is in some sense about inherited syphilis, all too relevant for its time, although the disease and its symptoms are also the manifestations and thus symbols of all of the other corruption and lies within the family of the characters, especially in the philandering father, another version of the hypocritical center of Pillars of Society.  It is a direct sequel to A Doll House, too – in that play, the wife leaves a bad marriage, while in this one  the wife stays, but with nightmarish consequences.

If any play set Ibsen’s reputation in England, it was this one.  Viewers had to form clubs and have private performances in order to get around obscenity laws.  Shaw, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, prints two pages of newspaper abuse of Ghosts in order to scourge his enemies.  “Most loathsome of all Ibsen’s plays…  garbage and offal,” like that.  Two highly entertaining pages.

The arson in Ghosts is reused in The Master Builder.  I should stop doing this, but it is almost possible to dismantle any given play in the sequence and distribute its parts among the eleven others.  I won’t go into the strange things Ibsen is doing with the passage of time, either, or with all of the strongly foregrounded symbolism.  While inventing Realism, Ibsen was simultaneously inventing Expressionism.  At some point while reading Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill began to make a lot more sense to me.

The fourth play is An Enemy of the People (1882), which after the intensity of Ghosts is thankfully a comedy of sorts.  Dr. Stockmann discovers that the municipal baths, a great tourist attraction, are contaminated with industrial runoff and sewage.  The pillars of society strike back, though, isolating the brave truth-teller, in part because the town’s commercial and political interests are powerful hypocrites, but also because Stockmann’s scientific certainty has so inflated his ego as to make him unbearable. 

DR. STOCKMANN (lowering his voice).  Shh, don’t talk about it yet – but I’ve made a great discovery.

MRS. STOCKMANN.  What, again?

DR. STOCKMANN.  Yes, why not!  (Gathers them around him and speaks confidentially.)  And the essence of it, you see, is that the strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone.

MRS. STOCKMANN (smiling and shaking her head).  Oh, Thomas, Thomas -!

PETRA [their idealistic daughter] (buoyantly, gripping his hands).  Father! 

These are the last lines of the play, which ends like a bad sitcom.  Has Stockmann triumphed somehow, or is he about to be destroyed, perhaps just as the curtain falls and the laugh track fades.  I feel even queasier here than at the end of Pillars of Society, where the hypocrite claims to have reformed in the name of the Truth, but who is fool enough to believe him?  The tragic ending of Ghosts is almost unbearable, but these seemingly happier endings are not so easy to take, either.

The title is from Act I of Pillars of Society.

I lay tossing and turning all night, half asleep, dreaming I was chased by a hideous walrus. - Ibsen's Pillars of Society

I’ll try to stick with a single play here, Pillars of Society (1877), the first of the so-called “Realist” plays.

Karsten Bernick is the pillar, here, the owner of a prosperous shipping company who is about to go into the railroad business as part of an insider trading scheme.  A paragon of moral rectitude in public, he is also thoroughly corrupt.  He has an illegitimate daughter, Dina.  He successfully spread rumors that his brother-in-law, who had just left for America, was the actual father.  He tossed in, to protect his own financial sleight of hand, another rumor that the brother-in-law had robbed Bernick’s firm.  In a dramatic scene, he wrestles with the idea of murdering said brother-in-law, to keep him from spilling the beans, by the novel means of improper ship repairs.  So, incidentally, the entire crew  and any other passengers will be killed, too.  The result of his moral agony is: yes, let the unsafe ship sail.

Several points.  First, Bernick could easily be portrayed as a sociopath, but that is not Ibsen’s game, although I support any reader, director or actor who remains suspicious.

Second, once the ship launches, by means of other plotty stuff unknown to Bernick, both his daughter Dina and his beloved young son are likely on it, too.  I thought the subsequent scenes were genuinely tense – just how horribly ironic is the ending of this play going to be?

Third, Dina is running off with the brother-in-law, who, remember, is thought by almost everyone to be her father, so we have a shadow or parody of an incest plot.  Dina is a great character, however minor.  This is Shaw: she “wants to get to America because she hears that people there are not good; for she is heartily tired of good people” (from the “Pillars of Society” chapter in The Quintessence of Ibsenism).  Ibsen is terrific with his women.  He may have more “types” of women in his imagination than of men, which is unusual.

Fourth, the murder scheme, and the son on the doomed ship, and various secrets that are revealed by, for example, old letters, may seem overtly theatrical, artificial and even a bit ridiculous.  Is it ever.  Pillars of Society is a well-made play.  On stage, we see the moment when everything goes smash.  I will try to stop being so amused that this tense and unlikely contraption acquired the label of “realism.”

I think Pillars is one of the two or three weakest of the final twelve plays, actually, although I now have no doubt that they are all worth reading.  It does have my single favorite line from any of them. 

MRS. BERNICK:  Didn’t you sleep well last night?

HILMAR:  No, I slept miserably.  I took a walk last evening for my constitution and wound up at the club, reading an account about an expedition to the North Pole.  There’s something exhilarating about human beings battling the elements.

MRS. RUMMEL:  But it obviously didn’t agree with you, Mr. Tønnesen.

HILMAR:  No, it upset me.  I lay tossing and turning all night, half asleep, dreaming I was chased by a hideous walrus.  (Act I, p. 20)

I am going to go on and on in the next few posts about Ibsen’s repetitions and variations; it is his greatest artistic failing that this is all we ever hear about this walrus.

We have to stand firm against all this experimentation that a restless age would like to foist on us - Ibsen systems

Yes, that’s the spirit!  What is most curious about Henrik Ibsen’s last twelve plays, from Pillars of Society (1877) through When We Dead Awaken (1899), and including his big chart-toppers like A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), and Hedda Gabler (1890) is the temptation to treat them as a single big work, a thousand page avant garde novel in prose dialogue.  Ibsenists, beginning with George Bernard Shaw in 1891, insist that the plays need to be performed and seen in order, as with Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle.  Has this ever been done?  I did not even read the plays in chronological order, but rather in an order something like most to least famous.

I am certain, as a result, to be hopelessly confused about who appeared and what happened in which play.  Apologies in advance.

Ibsen scholar Brian Johnston has done the most audacious work, building the case that “the twelve plays constituted a single tripartite Cycle whose subject was modern humanity undergoing (in Hegelian terms) a journey of spiritual recollection,” and when he says “Hegelian,” he means it: each play is built around a stage of history as found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit.  Johnston took the unusual and admirable step of converting his books and research into a website, Ibsen Voyages, which I have used frequently.  It is full of valuable criticism and information even for the reader who finds the Hegel business laughable on its face.  I am unequipped to evaluate the argument, but am thrilled that it exists, a visionary critic’s mad work on a visionary playwright.

And like I said, the impulse is so common.  George Bernard Shaw finds a sustained ironic assault on bourgeois hypocrisy (“idealism,” he calls it), all detailed with verve in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).  Robert Brustein makes Ibsen the founder of the Theatre of Revolt (The Theatre of Revolt, 1964).  Hey Henrik, what are you rebelling against?  Whatta ya got?  “The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions – to destroy” – this is from an 1883 description of Ibsen expressing his views at a party, found in footnote 1 on page 38 of Brustein.

Here is the temptation, really.  Less subtle followers of Shaw, or really anyone who reads or sees the play, knows that A Doll House is an early feminist protest against the inequities, legal and social, or marriage.  Thus, Ibsen invents realist theater.  Prose, an ordinary family, a social issue reformed, at least for the audience.  Yet in later plays the actions of the heroine are rerun with different outcomes – she considers suicide; later characters do more than consider; she triumphantly leaves her husband; a later trapped wife stays with hers (admittedly, her alternative is not necessarily freedom but life with a sea troll).  If we think of plot as part of the author’s argument, and in doom-laden plays like these it has to be, allowing multiple outcomes in analogous situations undermines the argument of the earlier plots.

It is almost as if Ibsen invents realistic, socially engaged theater in the first four of the twelve plays, and then, once it is an existing institution, feels the need to blow it up. A grand scheme allows the critic to at least blow up received ideas about the plays.

Luckily, I do not understand Ibsen well enough to have developed any grand scheme of my own, so from this point I will just rummage through the plays themselves.  But they do hook back into each other and I will not resist following the connections, no matter how confusing.

For consistency and sanity, all quotations from these plays will be from Rolf Fjelde’s translations, with page numbers referring to The Complete Major Prose Plays (1978), Farrar Straus Giroux.  The post;s title is from Pillars of Society, Act I, p. 17.

Who shall conquer, the Emperor or the Galilean? - Henrik Ibsen's dialectic

Seven Ibsen posts, and then I go on vacation.

To review: after writing twenty failed plays, Henrik Ibsen left Norway for Italy, where he was somehow inspired to write a pair of verse play masterpieces, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867).  His next play was a comedy I have not read, followed by the gigantic ten act Emperor and Galilean (1873).  After this came the twelve-play cycle, Hedda Gabler and Ghosts and so on, that permanently altered theater worldwide.  “Realism” and all of that business.

For now, Emperor and Galilean (1873), Henrik Ibsen’s in-between masterpiece.  Ten acts, several dozen characters, a nine hour running time.  The play is so rarely done that the London National Theater called its 2011 production the play’s “premiere.”  I assume they meant “English-language.”  I assume there were other qualifiers.  I assume it was chopped down to a less preposterous length.  I did not have to sit still for so long to enjoy Emperor and Galilean, since I did not watch the play but read it in Brian Johnston’s 1999 translation.

The emperor in the title is Julian the Apostate (reigned 360-3); the Galilean is Christ.  In the first five acts, “Caesar’s Apostasy,” Julian is not yet emperor.  He is torn between the old pagan gods and Christianity, now the official faith of the Roman Empire.  Or, no, he wants to synthesize them.  Emperor and Galilean is, I think, the most explicitly Hegelian literary text I have ever read.  Meanwhile, at the more usual dramatic level, Julian, whose entire family has been murdered by the current Emperor, manages to survive and even triumph.

In Part Two, Julian has become Emperor himself.  Although he first advocates tolerance, he becomes increasingly repressive against the Christians, perhaps inflamed by their willingness to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs.  Rather than synthesizing the two faiths, Julian simply becomes the enemy of the Galilean, and in the end is destroyed by Christ, or his hubris and fate, a good Classical ending for a play, or perhaps by the inevitable workings of the Hegelian dialectic.

JULIAN:  Who shall conquer, the Emperor or the Galilean?
MAXIMUS:  Both the Emperor and the Galilean will disappear.
JULIAN:  Disappear-?  Both-?
MAXIMUS:  Both.  In our time or in centuries to come, I don’t know.  But it will happen when the right one appears.  (Two, Act III, p. 155)

For thematic picturesqueness, this scene is set in the ruins of a temple of Apollo (“Isn’t the whole world a heap of ruins,” 154).  The conversation continues:

JULIAN:  Emperor-God and God-Emperor.   Emperor of the realm of the Spirit and God of the realm of the Flesh.
MAXIMUS:  That is the third empire, Julian!  (p. 156)

I am making Emperor and Galilean sound like the most boring play ever written.  It is not, although it is certainly not the most thrilling.  There are battles, betrayals, mad scenes, prophecies – plenty of drama.  One great character, Julian.  “He is the most complex dramatic character ever created” says Brian Johnston (xvii).  Now that sounds like special pleading.  I dunno.

I wanted to make sure we are all clear on the use of Hegel, that’s all.  Please note another, perhaps more interesting dialectic.  Pastor Brand, the austere Christian, is set against Peer Gynt, the life-filled troll.  Christian thesis, pagan antithesis.  Julian should be the synthesis, but fails, as any human likely would.

She will not read the philosophy of Hegel.

She can neither make a pancake nor darn a sock, and she will not read the philosophy of Hegel.

This misguided fellow, an Isak Dinesen character, is thinking of marrying – these are reasons not to marry the woman, if you can believe it.  I say marry that lady and go out for pancakes.  Here I am looking at Seven Gothic Tale s (1934), “The Poet,” p. 385.

I, too, will not read Hegel, although in some sense I should.  He has been popping up everywhere.

Alexander Herzen has just returned from exile in the provinces to Moscow, where he discovers that there is a hot new thing among the literary radicals:

My new acquaintances received me as people do receive exiles and old champions, people who come out of prison or return from captivity or banishment, that is, with respectful indulgence, with a readiness to receive us into their alliance, though at the same time  refusing to yield a single point and hinting at the fact that they are ‘to-day’ and we are already ‘yesterday’, and exacting an unconditional acceptance of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic, and their interpretation of them, too.  (My Past and Thoughts, Vol. 2 of the Garnett/Higgins translation, 398)

Young Russians fresh from the German universities have gone crazy for Hegel and the dialectic. “People who loved each other avoided each other for weeks at a time because they disagreed about the definition of ‘all-embracing spirit’” (398), and “[n]o one in those days would have hesitated to write a phrase like this: ‘The concretion of abstract ideas in the sphere of plastics presents that phase of the self-seeking spirit in which, defining itself for itself, it passes from the potentiality of natural immanence into the harmonious sphere of pictorial consciousness in beauty.’” (399)

Herzen is allowed to mock because, he says, “Carried away by the current of the time, I wrote exactly the same way myself.”  Plus, as he describes at some length, he successfully absorbed but also eventually purged himself of dialectical “scholasticism” – “I stretched its bow until the string snapped and the blindfold dropped from my eyes” (403).

I really need Hegel for Henrik Ibsen, as serious a Hegelian as Herzen once tried to be, with what level of understanding I do not know.  Brand and Peer Gynt make sense dialectically, a thesis and an antithesis.  The synthesis may be Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen’s long play about Emperor Julian, although I do not see how.  The latter play, with its unusual two part structure, presents another thesis and antithesis – they are right there in the title, Classical and Christian, and a synthesis is discussed in the text, a Messiah figure that blends the two.  That does not work out well for Julian, but perhaps it describes the age Ibsen saw himself living in.

Even better, Ibsen scholar Brian Johnston has argued at length that the twelve “realist” plays written from 1877 to 1899, including A Doll House and Ghosts and so on, were not meant to be taken as separate plays but in fact make up a single long tragedy “whose subject was modern humanity undergoing (in Hegelian terms) a journey of spiritual recollection,” with each play covering one of twelve steps from The Phenomenology of Spirit.

This sounds nuts – the kind of nuts I like.  Johnston, who died a year ago, put all of his work up at Ibsen Voyages, and I plan to loot it thoroughly as I read Ibsen’s plays, but with just a tinge of regret that I will not really be able to evaluate the argument about Hegel, because I will not read the philosophy of Hegel.  I know my limits.  It won’t do any good.

I’m more in need of life than you - Ibsenian gusto

My temptation is to wander through Act V of Peer Gynt in the same way I pawed through my favorite bits of Act IV.  “Part of the lasting strangeness of Peer Gynt is that it is more of a trilogy of drama than a single work” writes Harold Bloom in The Western Canon (p. 339).  A small part of the strangeness, given all of the other strangeness, but this is true.

I guess I will not do that.  The play ends with some sort of escape from or transcendence of death, or with a great victory of the Female Principle, or It Was All A Dream (“Sleep and dream, my dearest boy!” is the last line), or Peer never did get out of that insane asylum at the end of Act IV, or he was there all along, or he died earlier in the play without my noticing, since he is still there, on stage.

At this point I am not going to choose an answer or try to reconcile them.  I see why I always want to refer back to the clearer, narrower Brand as a handhold.

Whatever else the two plays have in common, the central characters are big, full of life, and should be played big.  The paradox of Brand is that his gusto is so destructive.  Peer Gynt, and the acting of Peer Gynt, ought to be fun, like Mephistopheles in Faust of Falstaff in Henry IV, two characters so big it took two plays to contain them.

Robert Brustein, in The Theatre of Revolt (1964), argues that Brand is meant to be “Ibsen in his best moments (which is to say, at his most morally elevated)” while Peer Gynt is “Ibsen at his most irresponsible moments (which is to say, at his most morally lax)” (p. 50), which if true is instructive, since I find it difficult to avoid condemning Brand and loving Peer.  I respect Brand for his integrity, but also fear him as a fanatic.  Meanwhile, Peer Gynt has so little integrity that he becomes a slave trader and even murders a cook at the beginning of Act V (they are fighting over a capsized lifeboat):

PEER GYNT:  Let go that hand!
THE COOK:                                  Spare me please!
                       Think of my children, what they’ll lose!
PEER GYNT:  I’m more in need of life than you;
                       I haven’t had children up till now.   (V.ii.)

This scene has another of the play’s many blasphemies, as the cook drowns while trying to recite the Lord’s Prayer.  “Give us this day our—(Goes under).”  I am not sure why the character is a cook.  If it was just for this “daily bread” joke, he should have been a baker.

At this point one of the last act’s multitudinous devil figures pops out of the sea to reassure Peer:

PEER GYNT:  Clear off, you monster!  Get away!
                       I won’t die!  It’s the land for me!
THE PASSENGER:  You needn’t worry in that respect –
                                No one dies halfway through the last act.  (Glides away.)

Look, I am on the verge of doing what I swore I would not do.  I will just repeat the paradox, that in literature liveliness outweighs many sins.  Who would want Falstaff to reform?

This observation is new, and mine. (Later came to another conclusion) - crazy Peer Gynt

Brand is a single-minded and intense play about a monomaniac proving himself right, whatever the cost.  Of course he is not actually right, which is irony.  Or perhaps he is partly right, which is ambiguity.  Regardless, Ibsen marches his fanatic down one mountain and up the other, trimming everything away until nothing is left.

In Peer Gynt, Ibsen sprawls.  The first act is almost deceptive.  It stays in the village, mostly at a wedding part, until Peer Gynt runs off with the bride.  Outlawed and wandering the mountains, in Act II he has some strange encounters with the Troll King and his court, and with the mysterious invisible Great Boyg, the subject of much interpretation:

PEER GYNT:  Who are you?
THE VOICE:                             Myself.
PEER GYNT:                                            That stupid answer
                        You can keep; it makes nothing clear.  (II.vii.)

In Act III, Peer Gynt returns to the natural world, down from the mountain, to say farewell to his dying mother in that wonderful scene I looked at yesterday.  Then he is off “[t]o the sea…  and farther still” (III.iv.).

In the last two long acts, Ibsen cuts loose.  The action moves to a symbolic plain.  Peer Gynt becomes a slave trader and plantation owner and arms dealer (almost).  He spends a scene in a tree fighting off a pack of monkeys:

PEER GYNT:               The beast!
    The whole load on top of me!  Ugh, horrible - !
    Or could it be food?  It tastes – equivocal;
    But then, it’s habit that forms our taste.  (IV.iv.)

Try to imagine this philosophical scatology in a English play from 1867.  I wonder how this scene is staged.  Monkey puppets, maybe.

Peer Gynt fantasizes about recovering the desert by flooding it.  He has an affair with a houri.  He engages in archaeological research, discovering the statue of Memnon that sings at sunrise.

PEER GYNT:              (Writes in his notebook.)
“The statue sang.  Hear definite tones,
But can’t quite figure what it all means,
A hallucination, obviously.
Nothing else worthy of note today.”
                                   (Moves on.)

The statue of Memnon shows up in one of the Ubu plays, where it is thrown in the toilet.  The statue reminds Peer Gynt of the King of the Trolls, while the Sphinx, in the next scene is more like the Great Boyg, a puzzle since the Boyg was invisible.  In the Oedipus story, the Sphinx asks a riddle, but here it is Peer Gynt who asks the sphinx questions.

PEER GYNT:  Hi, Boyg, who are you?
A VOICE (behind the Sphinx)
                                         Ach, Sphinx, wer bist du?
PEER GYNT:  What?  An echo in German?  How odd!
THE VOICE:  Wer bist du?
PEER GYNT:                         The accent, it’s very good!
This observation is new, and mine.
                        (Writes in his notebook.)
“Echo speaks German,  Dialect – Berlin.”
(BEGRIFFENFELDT comes out from behind the Sphinx.)
BEGRIFFENFELDT:  A man!
PEER GYNT:                       So he’s the explanation.
                                                           (Notes again.)
“Later came to another conclusion.”  (IV.xii.)

Mythologists and Sophocleans will likely note that the answer to that other Sphinx’s riddle was “A man.”  The next and final scene in the act takes place in a lunatic asylum, making me wonder if that is where Peer Gynt has been all along.

I guess I have just been cataloguing the free weirdness of Act IV.  The final act is similar, with taking Threadballs, the return of the Troll King, and three different avatars of death.  This stuff would not exist without the example of Part II of Goethe’s Faust (1832), but once Ibsen has borrowed Goethe’s free dramatic form and inventive use of symbolic characters, the contents are all his own.  This is all a lot of fun.

Some Ibsen blasphemies - I’ll sit and sing you ballad and song

Brand (1866) is a long play in verse about a Norwegian pastor who seeks martyrdom and finds it.  “Mere lifelong sacrifice / itself may not suffice” (Act II) describes the action well.  Pastor Brand begins up in the mountains, descends to the coast, and again ascends the mountain when the play ends.

Peer Gynt (1867) is a long play in verse about a Norwegian folk hero who seeks himself.  “I gave up love and power and glory / Since being myself was more necessary” (V.viii.) describes the theme if not the action of the play.  The action is wild.  Peer Gynt also begins his play up in the mountains where he has ridden a giant reindeer buck off a cliff, or at least claimed he did – the first line of the play is “Peer, you’re lying!” – before descending to the coast and the desert and then returning to Norway and the mountains as the play ends.

There are parallels between the plays, is what I am saying, even though the plays and characters in many ways stand in opposition.  Brand has too much self, is too sure of himself, while Peer Gynt has almost no self, adopting roles as they comes along – hero, troll, slave trader, emperor – whatever is handy.

The mothers of both Brand and Peer Gynt die in the third act of their respective plays.  Brand refuses to see his mother or comfort her in any way because she refuses to sacrifice her miserly fortune, even on her deathbed.

BRAND:  I don’t make different laws,
one for my own hearth, the other
for strangers.  My mother knows
that ‘all or nothing’
is absolute.  One piece
struck from the Golden Calf
is an idol, no less
than the beast itself. 

Ibsen has a dramatic problem with this scene, so it requires a series of messengers, one after the other, to deliver Brand news about his mother, but in these plays Ibsen had liberated himself from dramatic problems.  Peer Gynt has it better.  Here is how the godless, outlawed anti-hero treats his dying mother:

PEER GYNT:  Pah! Let me tuck in the coverlet,
Like so.  If the night seems long,
We’ll shorten it.  There; I’ll sit
And sing you ballad and song.
AASE:  No, my Bible!  I’ll read the Apostle.
My thoughts are weighing me down.
PEER GYNT:  In Soria-Moria Castle
There’s a feast for the king and queen.
Lie back on the silken cushion;
We’ll drive there over the snow.
AASE:  But – I have an invitation?
PEER GYNT:  Why, of course!  Both of us do!  (III.vi.)

At this point Peer Gynt pretends to drive a carriage.  The mother is dying, but her son explains away her fears:

AASE:  Dear heart, what is it, that ringing--?
PEER GYNT:  The silver sleighbells you heard!

Saint Peter awaits at the castle gate.  There are cakes with wine and coffee at the party.  Peer Gynt even concocts a little drama where Saint Peter keeps his mother outside, but God himself intervenes to let her in.

PEER GYNT:  (in a deep voice)
“An end to this fuss and bother –
Mother Aase can come in free!”
                         (Laughs aloud and turns to AASE.)
Isn’t that how I said it would break?
Now they’re singing a different tune!

And at this point the mother dies, led personally to heaven by her sacrilegious, blaspheming son.

(Closes her eyes and bends over her.)
Here’s thanks for all of your days,
For the blows and kisses I had –
But give back some little praise –
(Presses his cheek to her mouth.)
There – that was thanks for the ride.

Peer Gynt is in places so crazy, with its invisible trolls and singing statues and talking threadballs that Ibsen risks losing the humanity of his characters, but not in this fine scene.

Henrik Ibsen ground work - the strange plays in the middle

Henrik Ibsen escaped a narrow little town much like (or so I imagine) the one in Kielland’s Skipper Worse.  His plays began to be performed when he was only twenty-two years old, and he was employed as playwright-in-residence at a theater company by age twenty-three.

This should be where my interest in Ibsen begins, but I have not come across an Ibsen scholar who has not steered me away from his first ten plays, mostly pastiches of Norwegian history or Viking sagas modeled on the history plays of Schiller and Shakespeare.  Too specialized for non-specialists.  And not all that good, even though one is titled The Vikings of Helgeland, which seems like a sure thing, but I guess not.

But no, the plays mostly flopped and Ibsen’s theater went bankrupt.  So he escaped again.  In 1864 he went to Italy with the help of a government art’s grant.  Inspired by the Italian air, or Roman antiquities, or a crisis of vocation, Ibsen quickly wrote a pair of verse drama masterpieces, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) that made his name in Norway; a related closet drama, Emperor and Galilean followed in 1873 – it has ten acts, so I am assuming a big closet.

Now, finally, we get to the so-called “realist” plays that revolutionized theater around the world, Hedda Gabler and Ghosts and so on, twelve plays in twenty-three years.  To see what Shaw and O’Neill and Schnitzler are doing, these are the plays that will be helpful.  Those earlier plays are off in their own world, maybe even, in retrospect, dead ends.

But they are so good!  So I would like to spend a little time writing about them.  I wrote about Brand a bit a couple of years ago, a post about trolls and another about martyrdom, both posts shadowed by Alfred Jarry’s Ubu plays, which make explicit reference to Peer Gynt, perhaps even in Père Ubu’s name.  I have come at Ibsen from the wrong direction, from Jarry’s travesties rather than Shaw’s social reform.  Of course I am suspicious of received ideas about Ibsen.  Of course Peer Gynt is not a dead end.

I read Brand in Geoffrey Hill’s version, so it is trimmed but in first-rate verse.  Peer Gynt is Rolf Fjelde’s, Emperor and Galilean by Brian Johnston, two premier Ibsen scholars presenting every word of these long, crazy plays, leaving the dirty work of cuts to stage directors so I could enjoy the whole thing.

All right, good to get this out of the way.  Next, text.

Denmark, Sweden, Norway - more Scandinavian books - I can't read all this

More Scandinavian literature, this time from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.  I won’t read it all, I am no kind of expert, I am stuck with English, etc.  But it is easy to get me excited about literature, so suggestions are most welcome.  And if anything looks appealing, perhaps we can read it together.

Denmark

At the forefront are Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.  The former I read in some quantity just before I started Wuthering Expectations, which was a while ago, I admit, but close enough that I doubt I will revisit him now.  The latter is, I fear, a philosopher, and thus spinach.  In real life, I like spinach, so that is just a metaphor.

More to the point are two short books by Jens Peter Jacobsen, the 1880 novel Niels Lyhne and the 1882 collection Mogens and Other Stories.  Jacobsen has had a strange career in English, kept alive by the glowing testimony of Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, where Rilke seems to rank Jacobsen with the Bible.  I should see for myself.

Another novel, Pelle the Conqueror (1910) by Martin Andersen Nexø, I have meant to read for twenty-five years since I saw the magnificent 1987 Bille August film adaptation.  The novel will unfortunately not feature Max von Sydow, but it likely has other virtues.  It is long – the film only covered a fraction of the book – and grim.  I have no idea how it is written.

Isak Dinesen’s work is from the 1930s and later, but so many of her stories are set in Denmark’s past that she would fit well with the older writers.   I am thinking of Seven Gothic Tales (1934) and Winter’s Tales (1942) in particular.

By chance, unconnected to this project, I began reading the contemporary conceptual poet Inger Christensen, and I would like to continue my study of her work.  And I mean study – anyone want to help me work on her cosmic long 1969 poem it?  It (it) features elaborate mathematical patterns – tempting, yes?

Sweden

Even poking around, I still know nothing about Swedish literature.  August Strindberg obviously tops the list, and I hope to read a number of his plays, ranging from the 1888 Miss Julie to the strange 1907 Ghost Sonata.  But there are also novels, stories, essays, some freshly translated.  Please, I beg you, recommendations, guidance.

The Queen’s Diadem (1834) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist is a novel I encountered a year ago in this post by seraillon.  It is either deeply original, or a knockoff of E. T. A. Hoffmann, or something in between.  The Hoffmann connection by itself would give me something to write about.

Hjalmar Söderberg is another novelist I met through book blogs.  I have read a number of convincing posts about his short, intense 1905 novel Doctor Glas.  If I like it, there are a couple of other Söderberg books in English.

Norway

Henrik Ibsen, of course.  I have read six Ibsen plays, I realize, yet I still feel at sea.  I want to read or re-read a good chunk of them, although I will likely follow conventional opinion and ignore his early phase.  Critics are always dividing Ibsen’s work into phases.  Expect lots of Ibsen.

Knut Hamsun had a long, complicated career, but I know him from his early novels Hunger (1890) and Pan (1894).  Talk about intense.  I would like to revisit those and also read another from the same run, Mysteries (1892).  Then – then I don’t know.  Hunger would likely make my Top 50 Novels of the 19th Century list, if I were to make such a thing.

Off the track – far, far off – is Farthest North (1897) by Fridtjof Nansen, a favorite of min kone, the account of his insane attempt to reach the North Pole by freezing his ship in the winter ice.  Eventually, he just decided to walk.  Utterly nuts.  Sounds wonderful.

Now, some trouble.  Henrik Pontoppidan, Karl Gjellerup, Selma Lagerlöf, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Verner von Heidenstam, Frans Eemil Sillanpää – the early Scandinavian Nobelists, the ones who, unlike Hamsun or Sigrid Undset lost their place in English, or never had one.  I gaze upon these names in ignorant awe.

I have often thought that it would be a great book blog project to sort through these and other old prize winners.  I do not believe it is my project.  Yet already comments in the previous post have me warily eying a long, recently translated Pontoppidan novel, the 1904 Lucky Per, which sounds either like a standard attempt to move Naturalism into Danish, or else something much stranger.  Hmm hmm hmm.

Please feel free to correct my errors and recommend more books. 

Reading badly

That is the illusion of all writers, the belief that people open our books and read them from start to finish, holding their breath and barely pausing.  (from p. 366 of Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear, Javier Marías, 2002, tr. Margaret Julia Costa)

In context, this quotation is a bit of a joke.   The narrator of this Javier Marías novel is the one who barely pauses, who spills out words breathlessly, literally, I guess, since he is writing, but the speakers in the novel seem to have the same problem with digressions, qualifiers, and finding a place to end their flow of words.  I have trouble imagining the reader who reads this exhausting novel without pause, without many good long restorative pauses.

And then I have to consider that this novel is the first of a trilogy, the latter volumes of which may be much like this one in their discursiveness and sly concealments.   Many people are in fact reading it right now, as I type, possibly this very instant, as part of a Caravana de Recuerdos readalong opportunity.  The plan of many, and of me, too, is to read all three novels this summer, one each month, although they were published years apart from each other, in 2002, 2004 and 2007.  Perhaps a wiser reader would allow a little more space between the books.  Perhaps a more deliberate pace would allow me to be a better reader of Marías.

I say this not because I believe I read the Marías novel badly, although it is a tricky devil, but because I had actually planned to spend this week, or most of it, writing about a really substantial and brilliant book, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867).  Unlike, oh, I don’t know, Life in the Far West by George Frederick Ruxton, Ibsen’s long verse play is enormously complex and obviously worth attentive re-reading.  I am reading Ibsen’s book with great pleasure, but I am also reading it badly.

Confused, fragmented, distracted, jittery – that’s how I am reading it.  When I began Peer Gynt, it was so immediately rich and juicy that I had assumed that a series of posts would suggest themselves.  And they have, oh they have – a series of banal posts, any number of tedious and bad ideas.  I am not merely reading badly but thinking badly, although I suspect the one is the same as the other.

I am taking too long to finish Peer Gynt, I know that – it deserves a bit of breath-holding.  But then I look at The Frigate Pallada by Ivan Goncharov (1858), the author of Oblomov.  I have been reading this travel book about a Russian diplomatic expedition to Japan for three months, and am not half done.  It’s a wonderful book, but it feels entirely natural to slip into it now and again, to follow Goncharov’s account of a day or a week  and set it aside.  The events of the book covers a couple of years, so I will read about them faster than Goncharov lived them.  I feel that I am reading The Frigate Pallada fairly well; I am sure I am reading Peer Gynt badly.

Not that I have identified any sort of guideline – books in Category Alpha should be read with Technique Aleph.  Nonsense.  Books are full of surprises.  Peer Gynt surprises me on every page.  With luck a second reading will suggest an order to my thoughts, or perhaps another book, or another Ibsen play, will teach me to read it and think about it.

The danger of worrying about this issue at all is that it could very well mean the end of book blogs.  If I began to think too hard about what I have written here, for example -  where’s that Publish button?   Where’s that dang – oh, there it is.

Mere lifelong sacrifice itself may not suffice - or, not writing about Ibsen

Am I frittering because a good idea is percolating, or am I avoiding the emptiness of my ideas?  Prof. Ape boldly claims “that book blogging is no longer principally the purview of rank amateurs (most are at least competent amateurs),” but I do not believe he reads Wuthering Expectations.  I guess he did say “principally” and “most,” and our definition of “competent” may differ.

It is not as if there is nothing to say about Ibsen’s Brand, the 1866 book (it was published long before it was staged, and is more of a poem than a play).  The title character, the martyrdom-obsessed minister, a man who is not himself a troll, a force of nature, but wishes he were:

My God is the great god of storm,
absolute arbiter of doom,
imperious in His love! (Act I)

He is not Captain Ahab, but wants to be, which is worse.  The whale bites off one leg; Brand seeks out the whale not to kill it but to offer another limb.  His humanity is allowed to surface, but each time it does, something happens to remind him of the need for sacrifice, for nothing but sacrifice.  Perhaps God actually does desire his purging and martyrdom, although for what, now there’s a mystery.

All or nothing.  That
is my demand.  The task
is very great.  And the risk,
also, is very great.
There’ll be no mercy shown.
There’s no provision made
for weakness or dread.
Falter, and you go down
into the depths of the sea.
Mere lifelong sacrifice
itself may not suffice. (Act 2)

Mere lifelong sacrifice!  So Brand is a substantial work, ethically complex, poetically invigorating.  Geoffrey Hill’s adaptation is a treat, Ibsen’s rhymes replaced by a deft mixture of slant rhymes and alliteration.  The “storm \ doom” pair up above is a sample of what Hill does with the entire play.    The short lines make the play hurtle forward.  I might have read it too fast, gulped without chewing.

And I have moved on to Peer Gynt (1867), and want to write about it, not Brand.  Just look at these characters:  A Voice in the Darkness, An Ugly Brat, The Statue of Memnon (ah ha, this critter reappears in Ubu Cuckolded), Prof. Begriffenfeldt, Ph. D., A Lean Person, The Troll King.  I have been trying to sell Ubu Roi as a compendium of crazy, but Peer Gynt is completely insane.    And, of course, realistic.  Ibsen = realism.

Well, as non-writing goes, I have written worse, so I should stop and fritter away my time in some other manner.  Vacation preparation, maybe.  Are three kinds of Trader Joe’s candy sufficient for a long car trip, or should I bring something more substantial as well, like a box of doughnuts?  Ibsen offers no guidance on this question.

Hey! Have you heard? Throngs of dwarfs and trolls swarm on the hills.

Anybody else out there carrying around the idea that Henrik Ibsen introduced something called “realism” to the stage?  Plays were, for a long time, not realistic, and then Ibsen produced – I’m not sure which ones – A Doll’s House and The Wild Duck, let’s say, and then Shaw and Chekhov and other playwrights of a similar temperament took notice and thus was melodrama and nonsense banished from the legitimate theater, replaced by somber realism.

I think there is some truth to what I just wrote.  Shaw and company really were inspired, partly, by Ibsen to do whatever it was they did.  I do not know Ibsen well, and had not read any of his plays before last year; when I did, I could see the path the realists followed.  The puzzle was: how did the realists escape all of the trolls hiding along the path?  Ibsen’s plays, it turns out, are full of trolls.

Hey! Have you heard?
The priest’s flown away.
And now the throngs
of dwarfs and trolls,
all swart and spry
swarm on the hills.
The spiteful things,
they scratched my eyes,
look!  with their claws. (near the end of Act 3)

The speaker here is Gerd, herself half-troll, the visionary madwoman of Ibsen’s Brand (1866).  The title character is the priest, a uncompromising hellfire preacher who destroys all who come near him as part of his service to, or his mortal struggle with, God.  I believe there is room for interpretation here.  The novel – I mean play, or poem - ends with Gerd discovering that Brand, purged of all earthly remnants, is in fact Jesus Christ, with the unsettling consequences one might expect.  Brand is some sort of anti-troll, all too attuned to the world’s trollishness.

I’m not sure what a troll is.  I have not even read D’Aulaires’ Book of Trolls.  They are easy to recognize, though.  They are the characters who appear to be human but are not – Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, for example, or Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, destructive and chaotic, creatures whose presence in in the human world appears to be some sort of error.  They make good villains, even if they are somehow too primitive to be genuinely evil (evil is a human quality).  Quilp, from The Old Curiosity Shop, is a troll.

I am actually reading Brand and Peer Gynt (1867) because of Jarry, because of Ubu.  Alfred Jarry translated Peer Gynt and actively tried to get it performed.  Père Ubu, Jarry’s great creation, is himself something of a troll, as is the protagonist of his Rabelaisian anti-philosophical novel, The Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician.  Not that any of this matters much, except that there seem to be other paths leading away from Ibsen that have nothing whatsoever to do with “realism.”

The Geoffrey Hill adaptation of Brand that I am reading is, as an aside, spectacularly good.