The Mythic Foundation of Ibsen’s Realism

Abstract

The Mythic Foundation of Ibsen’s Realism Brian Johnston I In the German tradition of intellectual life to which Ibsen acknow­ ledged his deep indebtedness, the nature of modern man’s spiritual history was explored through the development of his earliest mythic concepts. Jacob Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology (1844) was only one such example of the German investigation of the spiritual origins of the north, while the powerful influence of Hellenism upon the German imagination has often been attested. After Ludwig Feuerbach called on his fellow-men to renounce a false, other-worldly Christianity for a profound humanism and had demonstrated that all concepts of God are only concepts of Man, then the “hierarchies of human genius” of all of man’s spiritual traditions became of interest, being parts of his essential human identity. Feuerbach is a good example of one develop­ ment of Hegelianism in Ibsen’s lifetime (The Essence of Christianity was published in 1841), and whether Ibsen read Feuerbach, his em­ ployment of the Hegelian dialectic was as concerned as Feuerbach’s philosophy to transform the abstract and distant intellectual dialec­ tic of Hegel into a passionately experienced human drama. If the various spiritual streams feeding into modem man— Judeo-Christian, Hellenic and Germanic— constituted the essence of the modern ident­ ity, they were made up of not stages of a calm intellectual progress, but of a painful and often tragic human history. Reliving the past, as Hegel enjoined, in order to sublate it, meant suffering the past again: much as Odysseus wept at hearing the bard of the Phaiakians retell the story of the fall of Troy. Ibsen shares with Hegel and with Hegel’s successors in Germany and the North a profound conviction of the life of the past in the present and a sense that the most modern conflicts and identities have their origins, ultimately, in the remotest past. The dragging of the mythic past from its sea-depths, the setting free from the obscuring darkness of the original Idea, which Ibsen’s article on Paludan-Miiller’s poems describes, are not simply images of the actions of his plays; they remind us, also, of how much in Ibsen’s day the past literally was being dragged up from the sea-depths, or being restored from centuries of obscuring darkness — either of intellectual or physical oblivion. Schliemann announced his “discovery of Troy” in 1873, 27 28 Comparative Drama and it was events like these that created excitement among imagina­ tive men, rather than such problems as Probity in Public Life or Neurosis in the Suburbs with which traditional Ibsenism depicts the dramatist wrestling with such solemn strenuousness. My plan in this paper is to extend the limits of traditional Ibsenism by suggesting the mythopoetic foundations of Ibsen’s realism as these are illustrated by his cycle of twelve plays ranging from Pillars of Society (1877) to When We Dead Awaken (1899). In them, Ibsen dramatizes the twelve stages of the spirit’s painful odyssey toward the total comprehension and command of its past. And he reveals thereby considerable kinship with the leading German intellectuals— Hegel, Wagner, and Nietzsche. This concern with the spiritual past of the race was especially notable in Scandinavia. Both Ibsen and Strindberg wrote historical dramas, and Ibsen’s early attempts to resurrect the past of Norway were part of a deeply considered theory of literature. The writings of Viktor Rydberg in Sweden and of Peter Andreas Munch in Norway reflect this nineteenth-century concern with history. Rydberg, who hailed the year 1789 as signalling the rebirth of the Hellenic spirit, was an implacable opponent of Christianity. His novel The Last Athenian lauded the Hellenic tradition and denigrated the Christian. His own Teutonic Mythology is a very learned, if controversial, work of comparative mythology. He was also the author of a work of Biblical scholarship. In a fellow Scandinavian, therefore, we find the same presence of Hellenic Judeo-Christian and Germanic spiritual traditions. The great common theme of so many of these works is that of the survival of the old gods in the consciousness of the “ folk,” and much of the excitement of reading such a work as Grimm’s...