Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

Transcript (PDF)

It's difficult to cover someone like Ibsen because of the extraordinary career which he had. It is almost impossible to take even the high points of his major works. We would be here all night. So I will try to present, as I have in the past, an essential insight into the individual so that you yourselves can go to Ibsen, to his works, and find there what he put there for you.

Ibsen is the culmination of the whole movement of the nineteenth century. The only other figure that really presents adequately the kind of cumulative insight into the century was the man that we had last week – Rodin. Rodin and Ibsen together express the electrifying discovery which the nineteenth century had made about society and culture about the nature of man. And there were very few individuals who were able to carry through from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, intact. Tolstoy was one of those who could. And in the next series we'll find other individuals who are able to make that transition. One of the other major figures was W. B. Yeats. We'll get to James Joyce, and James Joyce's first letter in the collected letters is to Henrik Ibsen. Taking the hat off to the old master who was then seventy-two years of age and would be incapacitated for the rest of his life through a heart attack – he would be unable even to remember alphabets. But Joyce would take his hat off to him saying, “you have pioneered a trail to the threshold,” and it is up to us in the new century coming up to walk through that threshold with courage, to try and find out what, in the words of Aldous Huxley, ‘what brave new world awaits man there?’ Because Ibsen in a very real way closes the door on the whole development of European civilization Then opens another threshold on an unknown world which was the twentieth century.

Ibsen, born in 1828, will live until 1906, but his effective career ends in December of 1899. He published at that time one of the most inscrutable plays ever written called, When We Dead Awaken. It was originally going to be called, Resurrection Day. I was able to see a performance once at the University of Wisconsin at a Frank Lloyd Wright Unitarian Church in Madison and it was an extraordinary performance. So I hope to build towards When We Dead Awaken. But I will have to make a major detour in about a half an hour in the lecture to go into the– one of the large epics of Ibsen's, Peer Gynt. So let's see if I can build towards that.

Ibsen maintained that he never really was cared for by his mother or father. The young Ibsen, in order to focus in on his development, we have to see that he played with dolls. He was a little boy who played with dolls up into his adolescence. He manipulated these dolls and he was a tough enough little boy so no one was going to cast aspersions toward him, but instead of giving up dolls – he liked manipulating them so much because there was an inner comfort, he made up little stories. So he made marionettes to be his dolls so he could really pull the strings. And he wrote little playlets, little vignettes. And the small town in Norway where he was born and grew up skiing which is probably eighty miles or so to the south of Oslo, called at that time Kristiania, on the main Oslo Fjord. The town of ten, fifteen thousand, at that time – very very tiny. But the young adolescent twelve year old Ibsen with his puppet shows drew audiences, paying audiences, of children and adults alike. And this was a revelation for the young Ibsen that his fairy tales as it were his private stories that he made up were of interest to people, captivated them. They would pay money to come and see these. He kept that alive in himself and kept developing his puppet shows through his adolescence. And at the age of sixteen his father who had been a small shopkeeper, he had run a general store, went bankrupt, and Ibsen had to go to work at the age of sixteen. This is not unusual.

Before the Second World War many boys go to work at the age of sixteen. He became a pharmacist apprentice in Bergen, Norway. That's on the Atlantic coast north even of Kristiania of Oslo. And while he was in Bergen he was a very primitive youth. He was denied his dolls, denied his puppets, denied his audience, and he became very withdrawn, secretive. One of the barometers of this withdrawal was that he had a relationship with a serving girl some ten years his senior who had a son by him. And Ibsen had to support this child that was an unruly boy until he was fourteen years of age. Then he was acquitted of the responsibility legally. He spent six years not, as is often mentioned, as a student of medicine, but as a pharmacist’s helper, a very lowly task. He was poor; he was threadbare a great deal of the time so that when he got money later in life he always dressed the part. He always looked like royalty: the characteristic long grey coat, the top hat, the cane.

For those six years Ibsen languished in what he would come to term, nothingness. In English, there's a translation of a term which he uses in Peer Gynt which means, the moving void, the dynamic void, and it's called the boyn – B-O-Y-N in English. And I've drawn a picture here which is carried in some early illustrations of Ibsen, of man being confronted by this voidness. Not a Zen voidness but a kind of a swirling mist that would envelop one and erase the world, erase oneself so that a man would have to fight against this primarily to establish his right to exist. But in establishing his right to exist what occurs to him again and again is that there must be some overriding motive for this struggle.

Why else would I do it? And what is that motive? And this became a key concern in Ibsen's personality. At the end of six years of complete anonymity, degradation. He would later call it being plowed into the current of normal, so-called normal life, where nothing ever happens. Nothing of value, no one thinks any thoughts of ideas. No one cares for art or cares for esthetics. It's just dog-eat-dog pulling out what you can as fast as you can and hoping to defend it against your fellow man. That kind of a life.

Ibsen began to show signs of coming out of this by writing poetry, so that poetry became for Ibsen the fuze which was ignited that would lead to a literary explosion that would free him from this imprisonment, this indifference of society. And remember now that the figure that we're talking about is from Norway. The figuring of– of ice is very strong for Norwegians. The Norwegian equivalent of stay cool is to have ice water in your veins. So that there is a stability in the cold. And when the cold freezes, there's mobility but there's also danger. There are too many possibilities. One could sink. The stability is in the freeze but if you're frozen you can't do too much. So there's kind of a quandary. And opposed to this ice is the fire. The fire, symbolized by the sun, or symbolized by the inner spark of creativity, and caught in between fire and ice is this condition where man must struggle against being erased by a hurricane of blahness.

For Ibsen, language became very important – the crafting of language to powerful short descriptive phrasings and all of his early dramas are in verse. All of them. In fact he managed to swing a job with a theater in Bergen that had just formed. They would not make him artistic director but he became somewhat of a consultant under commitment to write one play per year and on this basis, Ibsen applied to the Government of Norway for a traveling stipend. He wanted to go to Germany. He wanted to go to Denmark. Norway for four hundred years was under Danish control from 1400 to about 1800. So Copenhagen was the cultural center of Norway still at this time. And so if there were someone like an Ibsen who had literary aspirations he would want to go downtown. He would want to go to Copenhagen. And Denmark had lost its Schleswig Holstein province to Germany to Prussia. And so one would want to go to Berlin because that was the new power coming up very strong.

The Norwegian authorities turned him down and Ibsen spent five years, plus another year in Bergen, writing plays that were abject failures. They were in verse; they ran for one performance and then shut down; no one wanted to see these things. One of his plays, near the end, drew a little bit of a comment, ran for eight performances and on the basis of that he was offered a position in Kristiania, in Oslo, at the theater there and he accepted it. It carried a salary twice what he was making in Bergen and so he moved there. He has a great friend and younger compatriot, Bjornson, took over the Bergen Theater.

So we find him finally in Oslo and he worked there on a drama which bears the title in English translation The Vikings at Helgeland – The Vikings at Helgeland. And this was the first real excursion for Ibsen into Norwegian history and into the beginnings of Norwegian folklore. And since he was denied a chance to go out of Norway to study, he applied for a grant to travel around in Norway, and study the mythology, the folklore. During the middle of the nineteenth century this was done by a number of individuals going around collecting the national folklore that lasted up until the First World War. Many individuals trying to reestablish the pride of the nationalities of Europe collected the folklore.

For Ibsen this contact with the basic rural backward so-called population of Norway was a real encouragement to him. He found, all over the countryside, persons very recognizable to him. They were just like him except that they had no vision whatsoever. They had no way of looking up from the hypnotic gruel of their daily grind. They weren't concerned with the world at all. They were just trying to make it through today, wherever they were. And he became convinced that his mission was to wake up the Norse public to the wider world. And of course he would then have to investigate what was it in the wider world that one should wake up to? What should one be aware of in this new society coming into being?

Ibsen then, with his genius and his insight, pole-vaulted over several generations of development while everyone else was just beginning to be nationalistic, Ibsen woke up to the fact that behind all of these nationalistic plots was some other more vast motive called, man's nature. And in fact he began to read. And when he read Kierkegaard and when he read some of the German philosophers – Hegel and so forth – he realized that just before him there were several generations that had sought to break the entire mold of Western civilization – to do what the French had done in the revolution to start from the year one. To cast off the shackles of the past.

And as Ibsen read further he realized that this had been done by a few courageous individuals but that the world by and large had backslid into an even deeper morass. They were trapped in the pride of thinking themselves contemporary, when they had fallen back into psychologically and sociologically, even more primitive conditions. They thought that they had arrived in a society where having things was proof that you were progressing– where having positions above someone else in town was a sign that you had really arrived as a human being. And he saw that all of this was completely fragile. Ibsen attempted several times in Oslo to try and broach this in a dramatic way in a dramatic form and just could not. The pressure of his own background, the lack of education, the lack of close ties with individuals that he could talk to; relate to in terms of these larger visions just was not obtaining. And so he realized that he would have to get ou; to grow. He could not stay where he was.

And finally in 1864, having just produced a play called, The Pretenders, which was in fact quite successful and was the first Ibsen play to really be staged in other cities in Europe. The Moscow Art Theater under Stanislavski made a production in 1907 of it. But, The Pretenders that came out in 1864 finally gave Ibsen enough of a credit with the authorities for them to raise six hundred pounds for him to travel and his friend Bjornson raised another seven hundred pounds and so Ibsen took off. He had a wife, he had another child, Sigurd, and he made his way south towards Rome. It would be twenty-seven years before he came back to Norway. Ostensibly he was going just for a short travel visit. That was the cover story. But interiorly, psychologically, he had to get free because there was something in him trying to get out. It was a vision and it was large. He went to Rome after having gone through Copenhagen and he got to Copenhagen just when the Prussians took over part of Denmark and Ibsen was ashamed of his Norse countrymen who hadn't come to fight on the Danish side he went to Berlin and there he saw the wishy-washy nature of the new people in Germany coming into power.

He saw nothing, anywhere in Europe, all the way to Rome, that encouraged him. Every country had its same parochialism. Everywhere the basic issues that had been raised by Hegel, by Kierkegaard, by the French Revolution, were not only ignored they were assumed to have been just a happenstance. They were just something that people at that decade and those– that generation were concerned with, and that that was old fashioned. So that man's essential freedom in this universe was just a fad. There were more important things, getting velvet lining for your coach, and making sure you had a bigger coach than your neighbor. These were important.

Seething with this, Ibsen was built like a little baby bull. Someone once described him – I think it was a George Brandis, the Danish critic – said he looked as if it would take a club to subdue him. Ibsen seething with these ideas but finding himself in Rome with the sun, the beautiful languid environment of the Italian neighborhoods and countryside, finally at peace with himself externally Ibsen opened up his internal feeling tone and it swelled in him and swelled and it produced a great epic poem in dramatic form called, Brand. And Brand was one of these hell and brimstone firebrand preachers who, in the play, roams the Norwegian countryside bringing everything back into question. Like a real revivalist, religious figure, of uncompromising integrity. And that was the basic flaw because it was uncompromising. He carried the brand which is like a firebrand. He carried his brand wherever he went and did illuminate but illuminated only in these unwavering terms. And eventually everything in the play polarizes itself and is not revivified, not brought into a dynamic play, because whatever energies are freed are immediately polarized by the strong tyrannical nature of Brand's personality.

And in this, of course, this is published in 1866, Ibsen is hearing already the kinds of demagogic avalanches that the twentieth century will become prey to. But even finishing Brand, which was two or three times as large as any normal play, regular length play, it still wasn't finished. And having put the Brand into publication, Ibsen, for a year, tried not to face himself at that depth realizing that something was even more powerfully stirring in him and he kept writing to his publisher, “Yes, I have other ideas for other poems.” Brand was selling at a phenomenal rate. It made Ibsen financially independent. It made a name for himself. It began selling more than two thousand copies a fortnight which is a tremendous sale at that time. He mooted a play on the Emperor Julian – the Emperor in the 360’s decade AD who attempted to bring the pagan ancient religion back into social order, to put Christianity aside as a basic aberration of man's true nature. Finally, this play would be written years later and instead of the title Emperor Julian it bears the title Emperor and Galilean – Jesus is the Galilean, the Emperor is Julian. It's not a very good play.

Ibsen had run out of steam by the time he turned himself to it because all of his energy went into a production which was knitting itself together so deep in Ibsen's psyche that for a year he didn't even realize it was there consciously. And then it began to take shape. And Peer Gynt began to slowly emerge from Ibsen's personality and he realized that he had opened up with a production of Brand a whole aspect of himself that he hadn't even supposed was there that he had with the production of Brand, pulled the plug which conveniently had allowed him to portion out life, his own life, his own personality, into nice little roles or even large powerful roles like Brand.

And now that plug was pulled and there was this torrential outpouring of an incredibly swift developing pattern of mythic proportions. So while he enjoyed a very stiff regimen in Rome he arose at four o’clock in the morning. He took a walk until the sun came up. Then he would sit down and he would write all day until the sun went down. And then he would relax and go to bed early. And in this external regiment in the Roman atmosphere he got the courage to face himself to become not the artist who was aesthetically pleased to have written Brand but the artist who was ethically shocked to find Peer Gynt coming out of him, and Peer Gynt like any torrential tour de force simply took over Ibsen's life. One is reminded in this respect of Thomas Mann when he was here in Los Angeles writing Doctor Faustus. Very capable novelist had written many large works but when it came to writing Doctor Faustus it wrote him. And while he was in Los Angeles and Pacific Palisades he was besieged by all kinds of occult happenings. And Doctor Faustus literally came out through him projected itself through him. The same thing happened with Ibsen with Peer Gynt. Fortunately for Ibsen he was doughty enough courageous enough man to let it happen.To open himself up.

And as Peer Gynt came out its complications stymied the intellectual Ibsen. He was unable to see where this pattern goes and so he just wrote and let it develop. And when he had the first three of the five acts of Peer Gynt he uncharacteristically sent these three acts to his publisher, a man named incidentally Friedrich Hegel. [He] sent these to his publisher and only after the publisher received these and they were set up and typed did he begin writing the fourth act. In other words he himself was unsure of the large structure consciously but he had the insight and the toughness psychologically to be willing to let it come out. In. The fourth act of Brand came out and it made it necessary for a fifth act to come out. And more and more Ibsen was getting himself into a situation which we recognize by the Norwegian term the forme. Facing this whirlwind of voidness which seeks to erase us and we having to struggle to paddle to navigate our life force, our life progress to make some pattern in this happen and to try and assert the indelibility of this pattern in the face of increasing evidence to the effect that we have done nothing; worse than writing in the sand we've only whispered in our minds certain fictions which are in no sense ever true. And so Ibsen when he finished the fifth act of Brand was exhausted of Peer Gynt.

Now we have to go to Peer Gynt and I have four or five different translations of it. I want to jump into act four. The first scene. There's a conversation here between Peer Gynt and a few other characters. It's what Peer Gynt says in here that gives us a clue to what has been happening. Peer Gynt, speaking,

“The power of money. The idea hasn't just entered my head. It's been the soul of all I've willed. As a boy in dreams I used to journey over the ocean on a cloud. I floated with cape and golden scabbard. Then fell down barking my elbows hard. But friends, my will has never swayed. It's been written or else been said, some place I can't remember where, that if you wound the earth entire and lost yourself what would you gain but a wreath on a grinning skeleton?”

That's the text approximately. And it's a lot more truth than poetry. And one of the other characters then says,

“But what then is this guintian self?” Here replies, “The world behind my brow serves to set me as far from anyone else as God's grace from the devil's wiles.” Someone else says, “I see what you're driving at.” And another one says, “Sublime thinker.” And the third one says, “Exalted poet.”

And Peer Gynt goes on, “The guintian self, it's an army corps of wishes, appetites, desires. The guintian self is a churning sea of whims, demands, necessities. In short, whatever moves my soul and makes me live to my own will. But just as our Lord had need of clay to be creator of the universe, so I need gold if I'm to play the Emperor's part with any force.”

And so we have an insight into Peer Gynt's discovery. His discovery that his interior self is one of power politics in the universe and that he needs economic facility in order to make his world go. What makes a world out of money? It's only the society that we have. It's the social relationalities that we have that are dynamically powered by money. It's not the interior person. Money has nothing to do with that. It's not a transcendental person. It has nothing to do with that. It's that whirlwind in between. That social realm, the social world. It's the world of business and pride of families; of hoping to get ahead. Peer Gynt also in act four relates this as a further addenda upon himself. What kind of a man he is. He says,

“As I have told you before, I am a self-taught man. I have studied nothing methodically but I have thought and speculated and read a little about most things. I started late in life and you know it becomes a trifle wearisome to plow through page after page trying to absorb what's dull, and with what is lively. I've learned my history by fits and starts. It was all I had time for. And since one must have some spiritual security to put one's trust in when times are hard, I read religion intermittently. That way it's easier to digest. One shouldn't read to gulp down everything. One must select what one is able to use.” And one of the characters remarks, “Very practical.”

And Gynt lights a cigar and continues. You see he's discoursing now on himself. “My dear friends consider my own career. What was I when I came to the West? A penniless lad. I had to sweat to earn my bread. Believe me things were very hard. But life my friends is sweet and death is bitter. Fortune smiled upon me as you see. And old man fate was tolerant. I prospered. And since my own philosophy was elastic. Things went from good to better.” And he continues in this light.

How does Peer Gynt get to that? And what becomes of him after that? Because that's the fulcrum of the play. That's at the beginning to the middle of the fourth act and the first three acts prepare us to enter into that. And the rest of the fourth act and the fifth act absorb the shock that that whole triumph dissolves and dissolves and dissolves and dissolves threatening as Peer Gynt once sees in a flash to unravel a man like an onion layer upon layer horrifyingly getting near to the fact that there is no center at all.

One just runs out of layers and one disappears. And this is intolerable that I in my machinations for power should ultimately disappear. This is absurd. But how can that be? And so Ibsen's beginning of Peer Gynt in the first three acts sets up this personage and he is in a way a kind of a secular Parzival. He is the figure of someone. Well he's introduced right away in act one coming to talk to his little mother. And Peer Gynt is a very tall vivacious young Norwegian lad and he's telling his mother that he was just up to the high peaks of the mountains. And there's a certain ridge that runs razor sharp for half a mile. And how he tackled the reindeer and rode that reindeer and that razor sharp ridge and almost got to the end when the reindeer pitched over and took him with it and he said to his mother,

“We just fell with our backs to stone forever. And falling through deep space. And we parted a flock of pigeons and falcons. And just as we looked we saw this apparition coming up to meet us. It was the reflection of our own falling bodies upon this lake down below.” And just as the reflection and the reality hit he said, “I managed to jump off the reindeer and swim to shore.” His mother says, “Oh Peer Gynt, how can you tell such stories? Your poor mother. You need to grow up.” Peer again says, “I am grown up. This is me. The world is for me to enjoy and we're poor. I want to go and find excitement.”

And so he goes into town. And remember now we're speaking of a small community atmosphere where one would have to go to town and the town would be small. And when he gets there there's a wedding festival. And Peer Gynt, after dancing for a while and getting his dander, decides he's going to steal the bride. The bride has reluctantly locked herself in and doesn't want to see the bridegroom. And Peer Gynt takes her, takes her away because he's going to live life. The morning after, Peer Gynt and Ingrid are talking. One page gives you the Ibsen is so concise you get the whole picture. Gynt and then Ingrid,

“Have you a prayer book wrapped in your kerchief? Have you a gold plate that hangs down your back? Do you look modestly down at your apron? Do you hold on to your mother's skirt? Do you?”
“No, But–”
“Was it last spring you were confirmed?”
“But listen Peer, do you blush and lower your eyelids? Can you deny me when I beg? Lord I think he's out of his mind. Do a man's thoughts all grow holy when he sees you? Do they?”
“No, but then what else is there that counts?” He starts to go. Ingrid says, “You know that it's a hanging matter to desert me now.”
“Then so be it. I should bring you wealth and honor if you wed me.”
“I have no right.” Ingrid bursting into tears.
“You enticed me.”
“You were willing.”
“I was wretched.”
“I was mad.”
“I shall make you pay for this. Any price will be worth this bargain.”
“Is your mind made up then?”
“Firmly.”
“Very well. We'll see who wins.”

Peer Gynt says, “The devil take all who would remind me. And the devil take all women.”
And Ingrid turns her head and says, “All but one.”
And Peer Gynt replies, “Yes all but one.” And they go their separate ways.

So Ibsen in the first act and in the first scene of the second act is introduced this carefree to the point of careless individual. He moves from the human world because he's broken the bounds of the human world. He's broken the bounds of civilization. Peer Gynt no longer is constrained and he finds himself magically mystically in the world of folklore and fairy tales. He finds himself suddenly coming upon a whole band of trolls in the mountains. And so the threshold between myth and reality is broken by Peer Gynt. No longer applying the rules of civilization he has broken the rules and so those forms no longer constrain him. And he's fallen through the sieve that usually holds us back keeps us in this world and he finds himself in the mad world of the trolls. And the trolls love the fact that a man has come to them in this fashion.

They say, “We're going to make you into a troll…You must be a troll at heart even though you have but one head.” And they say, “Well it's getting rarer to find three headed trolls anymore. Even the double headed trolls don't show up much anymore.” And the troll king says, “Even my daughter has only one head so you'll do.”

But there's a basic difference between men and trolls. Peer Gynt says, “What is that difference?” And the king of the trolls says, “Outside among men where the skies are bright there's a saying, ‘Man to thyself be true.’ But here among trolls the saying runs, ‘Troll to thyself be enough.’”

Peer Gynt says, “I'm. I'm still a bit hazy.” The old man says, “Enough my son. Enough! That shattering word of power must be your battle cry.”

And now we can see some reverberations of Nietzsche's übermensch – the superman. What happens when you fall through the customs? If our human world of social reality can be cracked, can be broken and man falls through that what will he fall into? He will fall into his mythological realm. That will become true to him. He will have to become at home there. And the old man says the old troll king says, “It must, if you are to be master here. If you are going to be master in the mythic realms you have to become like us.”

Peer Gynt says, “All right then dammit. Things might even be worse.” Then he [troll king] says, “Of course you realize that trolls have tails. You have to have a tail.” Peer Gynt begins to look around. He says, “You're trying to turn me into a beast.” And the troll king says, “If you're going to be a master of this realm I'm going to give you half my kingdom now and my daughter, and half when you're done. You're a man going to be transformed into a troll. You're going to have this whole realm. You have to have a tail. We all have tails.”

So Peer Gynt says, “Well maybe I can use the Christian homilies you see. Maybe I should be humble and – and accept the world the way that it is.”
So Ibsen mixes like a gambler shuffling cards, mixes all the Christian homilies of the normal social world into conversations with all these mythic barbarities of the trolls. And so this conversation between Peer Gynt and the Old Man comes around to the fact that he's going to have to lose one of his eyes because trolls have only one eye.

Peer Gynt looking at him and says, “Now what else do you want me to do? I suppose I must give up my Christian faith?” The troll king says, “No that you can willingly keep in peace. Faith is free. It carries no duty.” He uses these words you see of business.

“There's no duty on faith that comes in free. It's nothing to it. The signs by which you can tell a troll are his outward appearance. The cut of his coat. Once we're agreed about customs and clothes, you're free to believe things that we find revolting. But you have to dress like us. You have to act like us. You can believe whatever you want.”

Peer Gynt says, “You're really in spite of your many conditions, a more rational chap than I even expected.” The old man says, “My son, we trolls aren't as black as we're painted. There's another– another difference between us and you. Well that ends the serious part of our meeting. Now let's feast. Let's have some dancing girls and everything.”

But he has been told that he must lose an eye. He will not agree to this. And so he falls out of the troll society. He falls out of the mythic realm. He's gotten into the habit of breaking conventions. So he's broken man's conventions and fallen into the mythic. Now he breaks the mythic conventions. And what does he find? He falls into himself. Ibsen describes it as “pitch darkness”. What happens when a man falls through the mythic realm? He falls into pitch darkness. Peer Gynt can be heard flailing and lying about him with a great branch. What is that sound of the great branch? In Norway, that's the sauna. Trying to clean yourself. It's a symbol of trying to get clean in the pitch darkness.

And out of that Peer Gynt calls, “Who are you? Answer!” A voice in the dark. That is the dark embodied now as a voice on stage says, “myself”. Peer Gynt says, “Make way then.” The voice says, “Go round Peer, there's room on the mountain.”

Go round you see? How can you go around ultimate darkness? What kind of a life pattern would a man have if he tried to go around ultimate darkness? Even the absurd proportions of a flea crawling on the globe of the earth trying to skitter around it is insufficient. Peer Gynt again calls out, “Who are you?” The voice says, “Myself. Can you say as much?”

Peer again says, “I can say what I like and my sword can strike home. Look out for yourself. Hey! Stand from under. Who are you?”
“Myself.”
“I can do without stupid answers like that. Don't tell me a thing. What are you?”
“The great Boyg!”
“Oh? Is that so? The riddle was black. Now it seems to be gray. Out of my way Boyg!”
“Go round Peer!”
“No! I'll go straight through you. He's down!”
He starts slashing with his sword in the darkness. On the stage only Peer Gynt is there. They didn't have spots like we have in our days. They built lanterns. And he's slashing the Boyg. Peer Gynt the one and the only. Because Peer is asked after he slashed for a while, “Are there others?”

And the voice, the darkness, says, “There's only one alone. This one. This is the Boyg who was wounded. This is the Boyg who is whole. This is the Boyg who was slain. This is the Boyg who's alive.” Peer throws away his weapon he says, “My weapons bewitched but I have my fists.” And so like a rabbit and the Tar-baby story. He begins flailing at the darkness that he is in with his own fists trying to hit the darkness that he is in with his fists. Completely gone. Completely lost.

He finds himself at the end of act three, comes back and he finds that his mother is dead, that everything has passed through and in fact there's nothing around for him. But on his way through journeys from flailing at the darkness to finding his mother dead he retreats back up into the mountains and he builds a hut for himself with reindeer antlers over the door and he's thinking he will stay there until he makes some kind of new relation with the world reestablish something for himself. And while he's there a girl named Solveig, a young girl, comes up and delivers herself to him. She has heard from his mother all the stories about him. And she says, “I understand you; I know you. I am here for you.” And the conversation he's trying to see whether she's going to go back what she wants and finally establishes that she has come for him to be with him to be his life companion.

She has taken the mother love that his mother had for him and brought it into herself. And now she presents herself as a wife for him. But Peer Gynt says, “Well I have to go around and find out something and I'll be back. Wait here for you. You wait here.” And he goes and the rest of his life will be told in the fourth and fifth acts where he goes around trying to find himself. He ends up following this pattern which is archetypally below the mythic. You know they…you know when you get into certain in-depth imagery and you get deep enough into it the naturalistic images disappear and what's left are geometric relations. Instead of drawing Earth mothers or celestial fathers one starts drawing mandalas. And so Peer Gynt has fallen through to that structural level underneath the mythic images which controlled the social work. But this geometry of meaning controls the mythic realm. But Peer Gynt is not able to balance himself. And so he is trying to use a geometric pattern to order the social realm. And of course he finds increasingly that he short circuits himself. And he keeps finding again and again in his travels he goes to Morocco. He goes to Cairo; to Egypt. He keeps finding characters who tell him in intense moments when he asked them, “What is the self?” Because he's trying to find out what is the self. And they say, “The self is to eliminate itself.”

Well let's take a break. I think it’s break time and then we'll come back. Sorry to be anticlimactic.

Ibsen tonight that we're taking is somebody who– who saw this literally saw this. Now he's writing Peer Gynt, 1867 came out. I mean the carpetbaggers were rolling into Louisiana and Ibsen was struggling with this in exile self-imposed exile. I don't have time to go into all of it as much as I wish for you but there is a portion in the fourth act when he's in Egypt and he's standing before the Sphinx. And a voice comes out from the Sphinx. Peer Gynt is saying, “Did I get it out of a fairy tale or is it something I really remember? A fairy tale? I've got it now. It was the Boyg whom I cracked on the noodle or dreamed I did when I lay in a fever.”

He goes up to the Sphinx and he says, “That's it! The selfsame eyes, the selfsame lips…not quite so sluggish…a little more crafty…But in all matters the rest is the same. So that's it, Boyg — You look like a lion when seen in daylight and from behind.”

The mythic mass of this erasure voidness phenomenon is the Sphinx. The Egyptians sensed it but they pulled up from the undifferentiated depths the energy to the point to where it begins. It could be given a mythic mask. And that was the Sphinx. And just as he says that when seen in daylight and from behind from the other side.

Ibsen was one who realized intuitively, artistically, envisioned that there must be some center of gravitation to the psyche, that after you go in excess beyond that you begin recording in negatives. So that if you overdo purposely some kinds of imagery, it'll begin to give you from behind, the picture from behind. So Peer Gynt is one of these protean pioneers trying to unknowingly explore the excesses and he keeps coming up with weird visions of how the world looks because he's behind the scenes. He's not just underneath but he's gone to the negative side and in fact Peer Gynt will find himself delivered from his quandary in a way in which he could never have imagined. Never. So he says to the Sphinx,

“Do you still talk in riddles? Let's try you out. Hi Boyg, Who are you?” And the voice behind the Sphinx in German says, “Ach, Sfinx, wer bist du?”

And astounded, Peer Gynt says, “What? An echo in German? How odd.” And the voice of the Sphinx on stage says, “Wer bist du?”
Peer Gynt says, “Quite passable German too. A new discovery all my own.”
And he notes it in his notebook. Ibsen cannot help his humor. It turns out to be a German professor, an archeologist. But he's introduced in this montage type form. Notice the cinematographic technique of Ibsen in the 1860s.

The archeological professor comes up from behind the sphinx the Sphinx boy and he gets into an in-depth conversation as we would call it. The professor's name is Begriffenfeldt.

“Can you keep a secret here Peer? I must talk.” Peer with growing uneasiness says, “What is it?”
“First promise you'll not be alarmed.”
“Well. I'll try.”

The professor leading him away into a corner and whispering, “Absolute reason drop dead here last night at 11 p.m.” [Peer Gynt] “God help us.”
“Yes. It's the greatest calamity. And in my position it's doubly unpleasant for till that emergency this institution was really a madhouse.”
“A madhouse? Good heavens!”
“But no longer of course.”
“Now I see how things stand. This fellow is mad and nobody knows it.”
He moves away, the professor,
“I hope most sincerely that you've understood. I said reason was dead. That's not strictly accurate. He's beside himself. He has gone out of his skin. Just like my compatriot Baron Munchausen's.”

Munchausen's Fox. Baron Munchausen reached into a fox's mouth so far he grabbed his tail and pulled him inside out. Skin the fox that way. Reason has been grabbed by man in his ingeniousness. In this way and turned inside out and is dead like that because it's now a negative. Peer Gynt says, “Excuse me a minute.” The professor says, “Well all right more like an eel, not a fox. More like an eel not a bit like a fox. He was flung to the wall with a nail through his eye.”

Peer Gynt says, “I must find some way out.” The professor says, “Then a slit around his neck and then ‘whoops off with his skin.’ ”

Absolute reason. Lost his skin here. Eleven o’clock last night. He's mad. He's undoubtedly out of his senses.” The professor says, “Now it's perfectly clear beyond all contradiction that this outside-oneself-ness.” Well that's hyphenated in English. “This outside-oneself-ness will have the effect of complete revolution land and sea. Therefore all persons formerly held to be mad since last night at eleven p.m. have been normal according to reason's most topical face. And if one considers the matter of right it follows that at the aforementioned hour so-called intellectuals started to rave.”

This is Nietzsche's transvaluation of all values. This is Ibsen packing it in. This is the– from the Boyg. In act five, Peer comes back and he runs into someone who is described as a “mutton a button molder.” Somebody molds buttons and he's come to melt Peer Gynt down.

Peer Gynt says, “What?” And the man says, “Well you didn't know did you? This is what happens to people who lead worthless lives. They send me and we melt you down. We use you. We don't want to waste anything.” He [Peer] says, “What are you…What are you telling me?” He says, “Well if you had a– if you had a perfectly good metal button except that it had lost its loop what would you do with it?” He said, “Well I'd throw it away and get another one.”
“See that's why we're melting it down. We're going to make a new one. You didn't work out.”

He says, “This is crazy. It can't. This cannot be.” And so the button molder says, “Well you have a little time left. I'll see you at the next crossroads.” And so this goes on for three or four jumps. And before every crossroads Peer Gynt keeps running into mythic characters that he's seen trying to find some way out. This is it. He's going to be melted down and recast.

“What about me?” He says. And finally he meets an old priest just before the last crossroads. And the priest says, “Well I can't save you. You haven't really done enough bad things to merit even saving.” Peer Gynt says, “But I've done everything.” And he says, “Well you've just been playing. You haven't really been bad. You've just been sort of getting muddy. You're not really evil. You didn't really take in anything so you haven't even been effectively evil. So I can't save your soul because you haven't really got even to the depth of where I can save you.”

So Peer Gynt is left and he realizes that he is doomed because of his shallowness. The very shallowness that what he has done he has just skimmed the surface. He's just gone around things. He's gone into nothing like the Boyg. He said, “Go around here.”

And that he really has no self. And this is completely destructive to him. And he begins to manifest what's called in psychobiology the Korsakoff syndrome. He's increasingly unable to remember what he knew and unable to learn anything new. And increasingly he finds himself starting to blank out. And in this dismay the button molder comes to him and the last crossroads is in front of a hut and he looks up and he sees some reindeer antlers. And there's a woman humming inside and she comes out and Peer Gynt says, “What is it? Of course!”

Where has Peer Gynt been since we last met? And she says, “Where?” He says, “With his destiny on his brow. Where since he sprang from the mind of God. Can you tell me that? If you cannot tell I must go down to the shadowy land.” And the woman smiling says, “Oh your riddle is easy.” Peer Gynt– “Then say if you know. Where was I? Myself complete and whole. Where? With God's seal upon my brow. And she replies, “You were in my faith, in my hope, in my love.”

And he's utterly shocked by this. Stupefied.

“What are you saying? You juggle with words? You were a mother yourself to the lad who was there?” And she says, “I am. I am. But who is his father? It is he who forgives when a mother prays.” He cries out, “My mother! My wife! The purity of women? Hide me O hide me within your love.”

And he clings to her burying his face in her lap. There is a long silence. The sun rises and she is singing softly over him. “Sleep now dearest son of mine. I will cradle you. I will guard you.” The button molder’s voice behind the hut going off.

“Here we shall meet at the last crossroads and then we shall see if I'll say no more.” And she singing ends the play. That his real self was in her love kept safe all the while. And he didn't know that. Peer Gynt was raked over the coals by the contemporary critics. They called it “a piece of dreck” It was nothing. Everybody canned it. The first printing sold out in two days and the next printing took years and years to sell out because people started to read it. And it didn't make any sense because Ibsen had poked through not just to the next level but he had poked all the way through. He had opened up the whole issue. That no one is going to organize themselves just by getting down to mythic images because that also is structured by something even more primordial. And the same techniques that man freed himself from the phony social world is going to have to use to free himself from the mythic realms. And when he does he'll come up against that quandary that that energy is a dynamic erasing of any bounds which he thought he was setting up to portion out reality by. That it doesn't take it doesn't want to hear from him what he thinks ought to be go round.

It keeps saying go round me. Where is there to go around that infinite darkness? Peer Gynt was the last drama that Ibsen wrote in poetry. It wasn't just the Castigation that his poetry was bad. He replied classically to his critics. He said, “If it's not poetry now it will be.” But he began to realize that he had gotten hold of an issue which language has to address itself to and that language in its poetic mode becomes mythic if pressed hard enough. And that one has to move beyond that. That one has to move down to mythic patterns to display and show the drama of what is going on. We are not just people moving. We're a mythic motifs moving but it's not at that level that comprehension can be had. One has to go deeper. And so one has to set aside poetry. One has to go into a prose which is arranged in a dramatic form that is only through dramatically structured prose that one can then drill as it were. Penetrate as it were through all these levels.
Ibsen began then writing a series of prose plays that aside from Shakespeare are just unparalleled. Nobody has written that many good plays one after another every two years like clockwork. He came out and people railed against them. They caused all kinds of consternation. But Ibsen began with the League of Youth to just publish play after play after play. He developed in fact a wonderful book called Six Dramatic Plays: A Study of Six Plays by Ibsen published by Cambridge University Press, Brian Downes. And he takes in here Loves Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, The Wild Duck and The Master Builder. I just don't have time to even list to you all the major plays that he did.

But as he worked his way through he rose above the mythic level that he had worked in with Peer Gynt and went back to the social relational plays. Pillars of Society, An Enemy of the people, The Wild Duck; these classic plays about the phoniness of society not because society was phony in its own terms, but because there were energies which were loose which were electrocuting men on levels which he could not get to. And if he had revelations as a social being, they threw him into mythic realms. But he was fractured even there and the cure was not to be had there because the problem was structural with man. Not just being healed by going to some transcendental level. That his basic cracking of the form of mental absolute reason had gone all the way through to the core; the drive shaft of history as it were. And that through this abysmal humming he realized that he was really on the edge of everything and nothing.

There are haunting images in Ibsen's series of plays leading up to the last ones. At the end of A Doll's House, which was always pointed out as being the first women's lib play, Nora realizes she has to live her life alone. She's been devoted to her husband. Her husband has been successful but he cannot love her with the fullness that she needs as a human being. She's just a doll in his house. She's part of the choreography of his ambition. But she's awakened as a human being. She's real to herself as a human being. She has to have some real relationship in order to exist. He says, “But couldn't we live here as brother and sister?” She's putting her hat on. “You know quite well that wouldn't last.” She pulls her shawl around her. “Good bye. Torvald. I won't see my children. I'm sure they're in better hands than mine as I am now. I'm no good to them.”
“But some day Nora. Some day. How can I say I have no idea what will become of me.”
“But you are my wife now. And whatever becomes of you.”
“Listen Torvald. I've heard that when a wife leaves her husband's house as I'm doing now he's legally freed from all obligations to her. Anyhow I set you free from them. You're not to feel yourself bound in any way. Nor shall I. We must. Must both be perfectly free. Look here's your ring back. Give me mine.”
“Even that?”
“Even that.”
“Here it is.”
“There. Now it's all over. Here are your keys. The servants know all about running the house better than I did. Tomorrow when I've gone Krista will come and pack my things that I brought from home. I'll have them sent after me.”

“Over. All over. Nora won't you even think of me again?”
“I know I shall often think of you and the children and this house.”
“May I write to you Nora?”
“No. You must never do that.”
“But surely I can send you–”
“Nothing. Nothing”
“Or help you if you ever need it?”
“No I tell you I couldn't take anything from a stranger.”
“Nora can't I ever be anything more than a stranger to you?”
Picking up her bag, “Oh Torvald there would have to be the greatest miracle of all.”
“What would that be?”
“The greatest miracle of all. Both of us would have to be so changed that. Oh Torvald I don't believe in miracles any longer.”
“But be I'll believe. Tell me so changed that. That our life together could be a real marriage.” “Goodbye.” She goes out through the hall. Helmer sinking down on a chair by the door and burying his face in his hands. “Nora. Nora.” He rises and looks around empty. “She's not here anymore. With a glimmer of hope. The greatest miracle of all.”

And as he says that was the sound of the door slamming. And he went relentlessly on play after play dissecting opening up until he reached a play called The Master Builder. And with the Master Builder, Ibsen began to realize that he had at last got hold of that thread of a basic pattern of life, of Holiness, and his last four plays are mandala of wholeness of the Master Builder a sort of the Summer of life the The Openness of It Little Air as the autumnal transition and John Gabriel Borkman is the Winter of man. In his last play, which in fact he didn't even want to call it a play, he called it an epilogue and its title as we started out today was When We Dead Awaken.

Someone once described the play as, “The most mysterious stage machinery.” One gets glimpses here and there of moving parts and you see them clearly but you have no idea of what kind of a pattern is moving there, what kind of a machine or what its purposes might be. Shaw…George Bernard Shaw in The Quintessence of Ibsenism reminds us somewhat about the tone of the time when this came out. 1899 very late December 1899. Almost the turn of the century. Almost 1900. January first. In fact, Shaw's review came out in January 1900. He says, “This play– this last play of Ibsen and at first the least esteemed has had its prophecy so startlingly fulfilled in England that nobody will now question the intensity of its inspiration. With us the dead have awakened in the very manner of prefigured in that play. The simplicity and brevity of the story is so obvious and the enormous scope of the conception so difficult to comprehend that many of Ibsen's most devoted admirers failed to do it justice.”

They knew that he was a man of 70 and we were prepossessed with the belief that at such an age his powers must be falling off. It certainly was easier at that time to give the play up as a bad job than explain it.

One is reminded of Faulkner's last great novel A fable when it came out. I read every review on it and there was one review by Carlos Baker at Princeton who even read the book.

“Some works are just so magnificent they outstrip the critical acumen of the age. No one can see it except the artist who put it there.” Shaw goes on,

“Now that the great awakening of women which we call the militant suffrage movement is upon us and you may hear our women publicly and passionately paraphrasing Ibsen's heroine without having read a word of the play. The matter is simpler but there is no falling off here in Ibsen. It may be said that this is physically impossible but those who say so forget that the natural decay of a writer's powers may show itself in two ways.The inferiority of the work produced is only one way. The other is the production of equally good or better work with much greater effort than it would have cost the author ten years earlier. Ibsen produced this play with great difficulty and twice as long a period as had before sufficed and even at that the struggle left his mind a wreck. For he not only never wrote another play but like an overstrained athlete lost even the normal mental capacity of an ordinary man.”

Faulkner once described it as, “breaking the point of the pencil.” Like Shakespeare and writing The Tempest. That when he got there he had to break the pencil because it was over. That was what one could do on tip toe at finger's length and that was all that one could do. Ibsen broke the pencil with When We Dead Awaken.

There are two couples in there, two men and two women, and there's a crisscross between them. There's a modern day pair and then there's a pair who are atavistic. They're throwbacks to primordial man. They live for the power. After what they can achieve what they can take what they can experience. And there's a crisscross between the two of them. Shaw goes on to say, “Ibsen's greatest contemporary outside his own art was Rodin the French sculptor. Whether Ibsen knew this or whether he was inspired to make his hero a sculptor the hero of When We Dead Awaken which is a resurrection play. It's about spring. It's about coming into a new world.”

In fact Ibsen in a letter a week before his heart attack which incapacitated his mind and memory said to his publisher, “If I ever write another play I will come with new techniques, new words, new plots, new characters because it's a whole new world that I have found.”

The hero's name is Rubek instead of Rodin and he comes through. I will give you just a little bit at the end of When We Dead Awake because we just don't have time to go into it. You'll have to go to this for yourself. It appears in ghosts and other plays. Ghosts is a tremendous play of Ibsen's. It caused all kinds of consternation when it came out. I mean people walked out of the theater and they started to burn it down. You know when you touch live wires people jump. Even today if you put on an Ibsen play today in certain areas of Los Angeles County you would have people threatening to burn your place down. You're not supposed to talk about these things. You can talk about sex. You can talk about greed. You can talk about all these things but not these things. These seem too real. This touch is too close to home. This is what we didn't want to tell ourselves. The end of When We dead Awaken, Professor Rubek-

“Well then we are free and there is time for us to live our lives. Irina.” She looked at him sadly. “The longing for life died in me Arnold. I've risen now and I seek for you now that I've found you. I see that both you and life are dead as I have been.”
“Oh but you're wrong. And in us and around us. Life pulses and flowers as strongly as ever.”
She's smiling and shaking her head. “The woman you showed rising from the dead can see life itself lying on the bier.” He embraces her violently. “That led us to dead things. Live life for once. To the full. Before we go down to our graves again.” She cries out ecstatically, “Arnold! But not here. Not in the half light. Not here with this hideous wet shroud swirling around us.”
She says, “No no. Up in the light. Up in the shimmering glory. Up to the promised heights.”
And he: “Up there we will hold our marriage feast. Irina, my beloved, in those shimmering heights.” And she proudly: “There the sun may look upon us freely.” And he, “All the powers of light may look on us freely. All the powers of darkness too!” gripping her hand. “Will you follow me my ransomed bride?” And she as if transfigured, “I follow you freely and gladly. My master and my lord.” Taking her with him, “We must first pass through the Mists Irena.” And then she, “Yes through all the mists. And then right up to the topmost peak gleaming in the light.”

The clouds of mist completely blot out the view. And on stage all we see is mist. Hand in hand, we hear climbing. And then through the mist a nun comes over the scree the fallen hillside the mountain side the scree coming over the scree. She stops and peers about her silently and tensely. Then heard singing triumphantly far down in the depths below. The other woman in the play Maia singing, “I am free I am free I am free no longer the prison I'll see I am free as a bird I am free.”

Suddenly there is a loud roar. Like thunder from high in the snows. The avalanche slides down at a terrific pace and the mist is replaced by the sliding snow. Just sheets. Continuous sliding nothingness. Professor Rubik and Irena are dimly seen as they hurtle down in this mass of snow and are buried under it. The nun with a scream stretches out her arms to them as they fall. Cries their names, stands silent for a moment then makes the sign of the cross in the air before her and says, “Pax Vobiscum.”

Maia's triumphant song still floats up from the lower mountains about freedom. Freedom. Freedom. And the play ends. The few times that it has been played in recent history the last 30 or 40 years, even late twentieth century audiences have gone out shaking their heads because the play reveals and reveals and reveals and reveals. And the characters, there are only just a few of them, just a handful of characters and Ibsen sets the whole tone. Everything comes out on the table. All the cards are out immediately. You know what the situation is, you know what's going to happen. And you follow it through and you realize what a powerful dramatist Ibsen was because he spells it out exactly as you know it's going to happen. Only the detail gets deeper and deeper. And finally you realize that there are patterns and motions there that you hadn't really considered before. And as those that are the controlling motifs as Wagner would say it's those that control the melodic line. And we had been paying attention to the rhythm all the time. The percussion, we had not seen that the melodic line has a motion of its own. That man and all of his myths and all of his dreams are just a current for some other energy that's there all the time. Something else something else. The perception of this was profound for Rodin, profound for Ibsen. They, in trying to deliver an artistic form to express this, almost broke the forms of the material that they had with them. And next week we'll see a man, an artist, a painter, who literally broke the whole form of painting, Paul Cezanne, in order to try to present the very vision which he was able to entertain. We'll see that next week. I hope we'll have some slides. You never know.