Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 7 of 13

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
When We Dead Awaken. Hedda Gabler.
Drama intensifies Towards the Surreal
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 16, 1984

Transcript:
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The date is August the 16th, 1984. This is a seven flex Sheraton series of lectures on the preload allude to the 20th century. Tonight's lecture is on Epson, Ivy Sen who lived 1828 to 1906. When we debt awakened Hedda, Gabler grammar intensifies toward the surreal difficult to cover
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Someone. Like if somebody goes up the extraordinary career, which he had, it was 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 and essential insight into the individual so that you yourselves can go to Anson to his works and find there. What he put there for you. Ipsen is the culmination of the whole movement of the 19th century. The only other figure that really presents adequately, the kind of cognitive insight into the century was the man that we had last week wrote down Rodin and Epson together express. They electrifying discovery, which the 19th 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 19th century into the 20th in tech 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, Ms. WBA, we'll get to James Joyce and James Joyce. His first letter in the collected letters is to Hendrick. It's taking the hat off to the old master who was then 72 years of age. I would be incapacitated for the rest of his life through a heart attack. He would be unable to even remember alphabets.
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Joyce would take his hat off to him saying you have pioneered a trail to the threshold 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 all this Huxley, what brave new world awaits man there, because Ipsen in a very real way, closes the door on the whole development of European civilization and opens another threshold on unknown world, which was the 20th century. Ipsen 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, um, resurrection day. I was able to see a performance once at the university of Wisconsin. Now they Frank Lloyd Wright Unitarian church in Madison, and it was an extraordinary performance.
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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 they, one of the large epics of, and a pair of dent. So let's see if I can build towards that Epson, uh, maintain that he never really was cared for by his mother or father, the young Ipsen in order to focus in on his development. We have to see that he played with dolls. It 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.
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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 platelets, little vignettes, and the small town in Norway, where he was born and grew up skin, which is a probably 80 miles or so to the south of Oslo called at that time Christiana on the main Oslow theory, the town of 10, 15,000 at that time, very, very tight. But the young adolescent 12 year old Epson with his puppet shows, drew audiences, paying audiences of children and adults alike.
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And this was a revelation for the young Epson that his fairy tales, as it were his private stories that he made up, we're interested. People, captivated them. They would pay money to come and see things. He kept that alive in himself and kept developing his puppet through his adolescence. And at the age of 16, his father who had been a small shopkeeper, he had run a general store, went bankrupt and Epson had to go to work at the age of 16. This is not unusual before the second world war many boys go to work. The age of 16, he became a pharmacist apprentice in Bergen, Norway. That's on the Atlantic coast, north, even of Christiana Avastin. And while he was in Bergen, he was a very private to you. He was denied. His Dobbins denied his puppets, denied his audience, and he became very withdrawn secretive.
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One of the barometers of this withdrawal was that he had a relationship with a serving girl, some 10 years, his senior, who had a son by him and nibs and had to support this child. There was an unruly boy until he was 14 years of age. Then he was acquitted of the responsibility believe no, he spent six years. Okay. Not as is often Metis mentioned as a student of medicine, but as a pharmacist 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 gray coat, the top hat, the cane for those six years, Ipsen languished in what he would come to term, nothing less then English. There was a translation of a term, which he uses in peer again, which means the, the moving void, the dynamic void.
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And it's called the Boyne B O Y N in English. And I've drawn picture. Sure. Yeah. Which is carried in some early illustrations of Ipsen of man being confronted by this. Voidness not a Zen voidness, but a kind of a swirling mist that would envelop one, any race, the world erased 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? 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 norm 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 aesthetics. It's just dog, eat dog, pulling out what you can, as fast as you can, and hoping to defend it against your film on that, that kind of a life Ibsen began to show signs of coming out of this by writing poetry.
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So that poetry became for Epson, the fuse, which was ignited that would made to a literary explosion that would free him from this ice in prison, this indifference of society. And remember, now that they figure that we're talking about is from Norway, that figuring of, of ice very strong for Norwegians, the Norwegian, um, equivalent of steak, coolest to have, uh, ice water in your veins. So that there's a stability in the cold. And when the code 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 this 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 a man with my struggle against being erased by a hurricane of blondness for Epson language became very important. The crafting of language to, um, powerful, short, descriptive phrasings and all of his early dramas are in verse. All of them.
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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, it's an applied to the government of Norway for a traveling stipend. He wanted to go to Germany. He wanted to go to Denmark. Norway for 400 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 Epson who had literary aspirations, he would want to go downtown, he would want to go to Copenhagen and Denmark had lost its, uh, slash wake, uh, Holstein province to Germany, to Russia. And so one would want to go to Berlin because that was the new power coming up. Very strong.
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The Norwegian authorities turned him down and Epson spent five years plus another year in Bergen writing plays that were abject failures. They were inverse. 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 Christiana, in Osland 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 con compatriot, uh, uh, the Aaronson took over the Bergen theater. So we find him finally in Ozlem and he worked there on a drama, which bears the title in English translation, the Vikings at Halligan when the Vikings had Helga land. And this was the first real excursion for and into Norwegian history and into the beginnings of Norwegian folklore.
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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 19th century, this was done by a number of individuals going around and collecting the national folk law that lasted up until the first world war. Many individuals trying to re-establish the pride of the nationalities of Europe collected the folklore for IBS in this contact with the basic rural backwards so-called population of Norway was a real encouragement 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 girl 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.
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You became convinced that his mission was to wake up the north 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 day aware of in this new society coming into BA Epson 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, what some other more vast motive called man's nature. And in fact, he began to read and when he read CareKit Gar, and when he read some of the German philosophers, Hagle 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 paps and his amps and read further, he realized that this had been done by a few courageous individuals, but the world by and large had back flip into an even deeper the morass.
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They were trapped in the room, 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. We're having positions about someone else in town was assigned that you had really arrived as a human being. And he saw that all of this was completely fragile. The Epson 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, um, close ties with individuals that he could, um, talk to relate to in terms of these larger visions just was not obtaining. And so he realized that he would have to get out to grow. He could not stay where he was.
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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 understand a Slawsky made a production in 19 seven, but the pretenders that came out in 1864 finally gave Ipsen enough of a credit with the authorities, for them to raise 600 pounds for him to travel. And his friend, the Aaronson raised another 700 pounds. And so Ipsen took off. He had a wife, he had another child cigarettes and he made his way south towards Rome. It would be 27 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. It was a vision and it was launch.
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He went to Rome after having gone through Copenhagen and he got to Copenhagen just when the Prussians took over part of Denmark and Epson was ashamed of his north country, men who hadn't come to fight on the Danish side. He went to Berlin and there, he saw, they 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 insane parochialism everywhere. The basic issues that had been raised by haggle 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 though that was old fashioned, so that man's essential freedom in this universe was just a fat, there were more important things getting red velvet lining for your coach and making sure you had a bigger coach than your neighbor. These were really important. [inaudible]
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with this Ibsen was built like a little baby bull. Someone wants to describe Kim. I think it was a George, the Dean, his credit said he looked as if it would take a club to subdue him Epson seeding with these ideas, but finding himself in a room with the sun, the beautiful languid environment of the Italian neighborhoods and countryside finally at peace with himself externally, it's opened up his internal feeling town and it's weld in him and swelled. And it produced a great epic poem in dramatic form called brand brand was one of these Helen 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 eliminate, 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.
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And then this, of course, this was published in 1866. Ipsen is hearing already the kinds of demagogic avalanches that the 20th 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 Epson and 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 Epps financially independent. It made a name for himself. It began selling more than 2000 copies of fortnight, which is a tremendous sale at that time. He moved into play on the emperor, Julian, the emperor in the three sixties, a decade, a D 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.
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Finally, this play would be written years later. And instead of the title emperor, Julian, it bears the tighter 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 and Ipsen, psyche that for a year, he didn't even realize it was there consciously. And then it began to take shape and peer again, began to slowly emerge from Epson's personality. And he realized that he had opened up with the production of brand, a whole aspect of himself that he hadn't even supposed was there that he had with the production of brand pool. The plug, which conveniently had allowed him to portion out life is okay. Um, 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.
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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, go to better. And then this external Reggie in the Roman alphabet, his fear, he got the courage to face himself to become, not the artist who it was a aesthetically pleased or written brand, but the artist who was ethically shocked, defined, pure, again, coming out of pure again, like any torrential tour de force simply took over Epson's life. One has reminded in this, uh, respect of Thomas mom when he was here in Los Angeles, writing Dr. Faust, very capable, not written many large works, but when it came to writing Dr. Fastest, yep. Wrote him. And my mom was in Los Angeles and Pacific Palisades.
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He was besieged by all kinds of Okello happenings. And Dr. Faust has literally came out through him, projected itself through him. The same thing happened with Ipsen, with Paragon. Fortunately for Epson, he was Doty enough, courageous enough, man, to let it happen, to open himself up. And as pure again, came out its complications stymied the intellectual gifts. 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 appear again, he uncharacteristically sent these three acts to his publisher, a man named incidentally, Frederick Hayek sent these to his publisher. And only after the publisher received these and they were set up and tight. 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 Epson was getting himself into a situation, which we recognize by the Norwegian term, the woman facing this world wind avoid MIS which seeks to erase us.
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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 indel ability of this pattern in 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 Epson when he finished the fifth active brand was exhausted peer again. Now we have to go to pure again, and I have four or five different translations of it. I want to jump into act four. The first thing there's a conversation here between pure again and a few other characters. It's what Paragon says in here. That gives us a clue to what has been happening here. Again,
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Speaking
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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 clown. I floated with Cape and golden scabbard then fell down barking, my elbows harm, but friends, my will has never swayed. It's been written or else Ben said someplace. I can't remember where that if you won the earth tire and lost yourself, what would you gain by the wreath on the 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 Gideon self here? Three flies behind my brow serves to set me as far from anyone else as God's grace from the devils one, someone else says, I see what you're driving at. And another one says sublime thinker. And the third one says, exalted poet appear again. It goes on begin, 10 self it's, an army Corps of wishes, appetites desires. The 10 self is a churning sea of whim demands, necessities, insurance, whatever moves my soul and makes me live to my own well, but just as our Lord had Nita clay to be creator or the universe. So I need gold. If I'm to play, the emperor is parked with any force.
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And so we have an insight into pure against discovery. He has discovery that his in Jerry herself, yes, there's one of power politics in the universe and that he needs economic facility in order to make his world. What makes a world out of money? It's only the society that we have. It's the social relation elegies that we have that are dynamically powered. My money is not the interior person. Money has nothing to do with that. It's not a transcendental person that has nothing to do with that. It's that Rowan in between that social realm, the social work, it's the world of business and pride of families. I'm hoping to get ahead here again, to also enact for relates this as a further agenda upon himself. What kind of a man he is? He says, as I have told you before I am a self-taught man, I've studied nothing methodically, but I thought in speculated and read a little about most things.
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I started late in life and you know, it becomes a trifle wearisome to plow through page after trying to absorb what's doll 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. One is able to use. And one of the characters remarks, very practical. Yeah. Lights cigar continues. You see he's, he's just on his in himself. My dear friends consider my own career. What was I? When I came to the west of penniless land, I had to sweat to earn my bread. Believe me, things were very hard, but like 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.
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How does peer again, get to that? And what becomes of him after that? Because that's the fulcrum of a 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 pure again, once sees in a flash to unravel a man like an onion layer upon layer, horrifying like getting near to the fact that there is no center at all. One just runs out of life. And one disappears. This is intolerable that, and my machinations for power should ultimately disappear. This is observed, but how can that be? And so absence, beginning of Paragon in the first three acts sets up this person and he is in a way kind of a secular person.
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He is the figure of someone well, he's introduced right away in act one, coming to talk to his little mother and peer against the very tall [inaudible] young Norwegian lad. And he's telling his 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 rain during that razor sharp Ridge, and almost got to the end when the rain gear 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 then swim to shore.
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His mother says, Pierre can, how can you tell such stories? The poor mother need to grow up pure. Again, says, I am. This is me. The world is for me to enjoy. And, uh, we're poor. I want to go and find excitement. And so he goes into town. I remember now we're speaking of a small community atmosphere where one would have to go to town at the time. It would be small. And when he gets there, there's a wedding festival in pier again, after dancing for a while and getting his dander up decides he's going to steal abroad, right? Reluctantly locked yourself in. Doesn't want to see the bride room. And PR again takes her, takes her away because he's going to live life. The morning after peer dent and Ingrid are talking, one page gives you the it's so concise. You get the whole picture again.
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And then Ingrid, have you appear a book wrapped in your coachee? Have you a gold plate that hangs down your back? Do you look modestly down at your apron? Do you hold onto your mother's skirt? Do you know? But was it last spring? You were confirmed, but listen here, 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 know? 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 with 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. PR again says the double take all who would remind Banda. Double-take all the women. And then Greg turns her head and says all but one and then grow and pure again, replies. Yes, all but one. And they go their separate way. So it's in, in the first act and in the first scene of the second act is introduced this cure free to the point of Karelis individual.
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He moves from the human world because he's broken the bounds of the human world. He's broken the bounds of civilization peer. Again, no longer is constrained. And he finds himself magically mystically in the world of folklore and fairytales. 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 Paragon, no longer playing the rules of civilization. He has broken the rules. And so those forms no longer constrain him. And he's fallen through the sip 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 one head and they say, well, it's getting rare to find three headed trolls anymore.
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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 again says, what, what does that difference? And the king of the troll 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 by self, be enough peer again says, and I'm still a bit hazy. The old man says enough, my son, he not that shattering word of power. It must be your battle cry and how we can see some reverberations that you chase Uber. Super.
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What happens when you fall through the customs? If our human world of social reality can be cracked, can be broken and then 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. Man says the old troll king says, it must. If you were to be master here, if you're going to be mastering the mythic realms, you have to become like us. Peer again says, all right, then, things must, might even be worse. Then he says, of course you realize that trolls have tails and you have to have a Tam appear. Again, 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 round. You have to have a town. We all have tails. So peer again says, well, maybe I use the Christian homily. As you say, maybe
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I should be humble and accept the world
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The way that it is. So Ipsen mixes like a gambler, shuffling cards, mixes all the Christian harmonies of the normal social world in the conversations
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With all these mythic barbarities
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Of the trolls. And so this conversation between again
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And the old man comes around to the fact that he's going to have to lose
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One of his eyes because turtles have only one.
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Hi, Eric, and looking at him 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's you can willingly keeping peace. Faith is free. It carries no duty. He uses these words. You see a business. There's no duty on faith that comes in free. It's not Jewish. The signs by which you can tell a troll 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 you can believe whatever you want. Pure again, says, you're really in spite of your many conditions, a more rational chapter than I even expected. The old man says, my son will trolls out as black as we're painted. There's another, another difference between us and you. Well, that ends the serious part of our meeting. Well, let's be, let's have some dancing girls and everything, but he has told that he must lose an eye.
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You 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 falling into the mythic. Now he breaks the mythic conventions. And what does he find? He falls into himself it's and describes it as pitch darkness. What happens when a man falls through the mythic realm, he falls into pitch darkness. Your guests can be heard flailing and laying about him with the drape branch. What is that sound of a great branch in Norway? That's the sun I'm trying to clean yourself. It's a symbol of trying to get clean in the pitch darkness and other that pure Ghent calls, who are you answer a voice in the dark. That is the dark embodied. Now, as a voice on stage says myself, you're against this make way. Then the boy says, go round here. There's room on the mountain, go round. You see, how can you go around ultimate, dark?
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What kind of a life pattern would a man, if he tried to go around ultimate darkness, even the observed proportions of a flee crawling on the global, the earth, trying to skitter around it is insufficient there again, again, calls out who are you? The voice says my self. Can you say as much there again says, I can say what I like and my store. It can strike home. Look out for yourself. Hey Stan. From under, who are you? My self I can do without stupid answers like that. Don't tell me a thing. What are you the great blame is that so the rental was black. Now. It seems to be great out of my way. Boy, go round here. No, I'll go straight through you. He's down. And he starts slashing with the sword in the darkness on the stage. Only pure against is there. It didn't have spots like we have in our days. They've no lanterns and he's slashing the Boyne. Okay? Peer again, the one and the only because Perez asked after he slashed the wall, either others and the voice, the darkness has said, there's only one
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Alone. This one,
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This is the boy who was wounded. This is the boy who was whole. This is the boy who was slaying. This is the boy who alive. Pierre throws away his weapon. He says, my weapons be witch, but I have my fists like bear rabbit. And the tar baby story begins boiling into the darkness that he is in with his own fifth, trying to hit the documents that he is in with his fist, completely gone, completely lost. He finds himself at the end of act three, come 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 hot 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.
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Re-establish something for himself. And while he's there a girl named Solvig, 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 is 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, the Paragon, it says, well, I have to go around and find out something. And I'll be back way here for you. You wait here. And he goes, and the rest of his life will be told in the fourth and fifth act where he goes around trying to find himself, he ends up following this pattern, which is archetypally below the message.
(00:49:58):
Yeah, they, yeah. You know, when you get into certain, in depth imagery and you get deep enough into it, then naturalistic images disappear and what's left are geometric relationships. Instead of drawing, uh, birth mothers or celestial fathers, one starts drawing in dominance. And so peer guns fallen through to that structural level underneath the mythic images, which control the social work. But this geometry of meaning controls the mythic realm, but pure again, does not Abel to balance himself. And so he's trying to use a geometric pattern to order the social realm. And of course he finds increasingly that he's short circuits himself and he keeps finding again and again, in his travels, he goes to Morocco. He goes to Cairo, Egypt. He keeps finding characters who tell him, get intense moments when he asked them, what is the self cause he's trying to find out why, why does the self? And they say the self is to eliminate. Yes. Well, let's take a break. I think we're two break time. And then we'll come back.
(00:51:27):
Sorry to be anticlimactic [inaudible].
(00:51:36):
Yep. Since tonight that we're taking somebody who, who saw this, literally saw this. Now he's writing pure again, 1867. It came up. I mean, carpetbaggers were rolling into Louisiana and Epson was struggling with an exile self-imposed exile. I don't have time to go into all of it as much as they wished for you, but there is a portion in the fourth act when he's in Egypt and he's standing before the Spinks and a voice comes out from the Spinks here again is saying, did I get it out of a fairy tale? Or is it something I really remember a fairy tale? Ah, I've got it. Now. It was the Boeing who I cracked on the noodle or dreamed I did when I lay in a fever. And he goes up to the Spanx and he says that it, the self same on the self, same lips, not quite so sluggish, a little more crafty, but in all matters the rest of the same.
(00:53:03):
So that's it Blaine, you look like a lion when seen in daylight in, from behind the mythic mass of this eraser voidness phenomenon. Yes. The stinks Egyptians sensed it, but they pulled up from the undifferentiated depths, the energy to the point to work because it could be given a mythic mask. And that was the Spanx. And just as he says that when seen in daylight and from behind from the other side, absolutely was one who realized intuitively artistically, uh, envisioned that there must be some center gravitation to the psychic that after you go in excess, beyond that, you began reporting a negatives so that if you overdo purposely some kinds of imagery, it will begin to give you from behind the picture from behind. So peer again is one of these protein 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, Paris again, will find himself delivered from his quandary in a way in which he could never have imagined never.
(00:54:52):
So he says to this things, do you still talk in rentals? Let's try you out. Hi boy, who are you? And the voice behind the Spanx in Germans is thinks they're this dude and astounded peer dances. What an echo in German, how odd and the voice, the Spanx on stage says, Verbus do hear against this quite passable German too. I knew discovery on my own and he notes in his notebook. If some cannot help this here, it turns out to be a German professor, an archeologist, but he's introduced in this montage type form. Notice the cinema graphic technique of Edson, the 1860s, the archeological professor consent from behind the Spinks. The Sphinx boy gets into a, an in depth conversation as we would call it. The professor's name is Griffin felt.
(00:56:05):
Can you keep it secret? Secret hair pier? I must talk pier with growing uneasiness says, what is it? First promise. You'll not be alarmed. Well, I'll try. And then professor leading him away into a corner and whispering it's that absolute reason drop dead here last night at 11:00 PM to help us. Ah, yes, it's the greatest calamity. And in my position, it's doubly unpleasant for till that emergency. This institution was really a mad house, a mad house, 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 the reason was dead. That's not strictly accurate. He's beside himself. He has gone out of his skin, just like my compatriot barren look, housings Munchausen. Spock's bamboo Johnson reached into a Fox's mouth so far.
(00:57:23):
I grabbed his tail and pulled him inside out skinny Fox. That reason has been grabbed by man in his ingenious, in this way and turned inside out and is dead like that because it's now a negative peer. Again says, excuse me, a minute. The professor says, well, all right, more like an eel, not a Fox. More like an you, not a bit like a Fox. He was flung to the wall with a nail through his peer. Ken says, I must find some way out. The professor says, then the slid around his neck and woops off with his skin. Absolute reason lost his skin here. 11 o'clock last night, he's mad. He's undoubtedly out of a census. The professor says, now it's perfectly clear beyond all contradiction that this outside one selfness, all that's hyphenated in English, this outside oneself MIS will have the effect of complete revolution, land and sea. Therefore, all persons formerly held to be mad since last night at 11:00 PM and have been normal, according to reason's most topical phase. And if one considers the matter of right, it follows that at the aforementioned, our so-called intellectual started to rate.
(00:58:55):
This is niches. Tran's evaluation of all of them. This is Epson packing it in. This is the, from the boy in act five, peer comes back and he runs into someone who was described as a mutton, a button molder, somebody molds buttons. And he's come to know pure camp down against his wine. And the man says, you didn't know, did you? This is what happens to people who leave worthless lives. They send me and we note you down, reuse you. We don't want to waste anything. He says, what are you? What are you telling me? He says, well, if you had, if you had a perfectly good, uh, metal button, except that it had lost its loop, what would you do with it? You say, well, I throw it away. And the other one said, that's why we're melting it down the drain to make a new one. You didn't work out.
(01:00:03):
This is crazy as this. It can't. This cannot be. And so the button moment says, well, you have a little time left. I'll see what the next crossroads. And so this goes on for three or four jumps into that before every crossroads peer game 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 recap. What about me? He says, 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 Paragon says, but I've done everything. And he says, well, you've just been playing it live and really been bad. You 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 yourself because you haven't really got even to the depth of where I can save you. So peer again is left and he's, he realizes that he's June because of the shallowness is a very shallowness and what he has done, he's just skimmed the surface. He's just gone around things. He's gone into nothing like the boys and said go around
(01:01:34):
Here.
(01:01:36):
And that he really has no cell, and this is completely destructive to him. And it begins to manifest. What's called in psychobiology, the course of cough 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 disband, the button molder comes to him. And the last crossroads is in front of a hot and he looks up and he sees some reindeer antlers, and there's a woman humming inside. And she comes out and pure again, says, what, what is it? Ah, of course we're here pure again, Ben, since we last met and she says, yeah, 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 line and the woman's smiling and says, oh, your rental is easy here again. Then say, if you know, where was I? My self complete and whole were with God's seal upon my brown. And she replies. You were in my faith, in my hope in mind, love.
(01:03:18):
And he's utterly shocked by this stoop defy. What are you saying? You juggle with words. You were mother yourself to the lads 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 well, hide me within your love. And he clings to her, burying his face in her lap. There was a long silence. The sun rises and she is singing softly over him. Sleep. Now dearest son of mine. I will create a room. I will guard you the button, molder boys behind the hut going on here. We shall meet at the last crossroads. And then we should say, if I'll say no more, and she singing ends the play that his real self was in. Her love kept safe. Wow.
(01:04:35):
And he didn't know that was raped over the coals. By the contemporary critics, they call it a piece of what do they call it drag? It was nothing. They said everybody candidate, 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 it's had poked through not just to the next level, but he'd 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 framework.
(01:05:28):
Okay. And the same techniques that man freed himself from the phony social world, he's going to have to use to free himself from the mythic realms. And when he does, he'll come against that fondant, 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 around. It keeps saying, go around. Where is there to go around that infinite darkness peer again was the last drama that Epson 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.
(01:06:30):
But he began to realize that he had gotten hold of an issue, which language has to address itself to, and that language in his poetic mode becomes mythic if pressed hardiness. 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 that level that comprehension can be happy. One has to go deeper. And so one has to set aside poetry. One has to go into a prose, which is a range in a dramatic form. And it's only through dramatically structured pros. That one can then drill as it were penetrate, is it were through all these levels. Epson began them writing a series of prose plays that beside from Shakespeare are just unparalleled. Nobody has written that many good plays. One after another, every two years like clockwork, he came up, people railed against them.
(01:07:52):
They caused all kinds of consternation. But if sin began with the league of youth, just published play after play, after play, he developed, in fact, there's a wonderful book called gem six dramatic plays study of six plays by Epson published Cambridge university press Brian Downs. And he takes in here, loves comedy brand, pure Gant doll's house, the wild duck and the master builder. I just don't have time to even list to all the major plays that he did. But as he worked his way through, he rose about the, the mythic level that he had worked in with pure Gant and went back to the social relational place where, whereas the society and enemy of the people, the wild duck, these classic plays about the phoniness of society. Not because the society was phony and its own terms, but because they were energies, which were loose, which were electrocuting man on levels, which he could not get to. And if he had revelations as a social being, they threw him into mythic realm, but he was fractured even there. And the cure was not to be had there because the problem was structural with men, 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 car, the drive shaft of history as it were, and that through this, uh, Bismal hunting, he realized that he was really on the edge of everything and nothing.
(01:10:01):
Yeah. The haunting images in Epson series of plays leading up to the last ones at the end of a doll's house, which always is pointed out as being the first women's lib play. Nora realized that she has to live her life alone. She's been devoted to her husband. Her husband has been successful, but she 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 big, she's real to herself as a human being. She has to have some real relationship in order to exist.
(01:10:50):
He says, but wouldn't 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 goodbye Torah. 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 someday Nora, someday, 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 to ball. I've heard that when my wife leaves her husband's house, as I am 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.
(01:11:53):
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. Why don'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 in Nora? No, you must never do that, but surely I can send you nothing. Nothing. It helped you if you ever need it. No, I tell you I couldn't take anything from a stranger neuron. Can't I ever be anything more than a stranger to you picking up her bag. Oh, tar vol. There would have to be the greatest miracle, but what would that be? The greatest miracle of all the best would have to be so changed that, oh, Torvald I don't believe in miracles in England, but the I'll believe.
(01:12:57):
Tell me so change that that our life together could be a real marriage. Goodbye. She goes out through the home, sinking down in a chair by the door, during his patients 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 this is the sound of a door slam. And he went and relevant mostly on play after play dissecting, opening up until he reached the play called the master builder. What the master builder Gibson began to realize that he had at last got of that thread of a basic pattern of why of homes. Okay. And his last four plays are then doll of wholeness of the master builder has sort of the summer of life. They, the openness of it that'll pay off as the autumnal transition. And John Gabriel Borkman is the winter of man and his last play, which he, in fact, didn't even want to call it a play.
(01:14:23):
He called it an apple and its title as we started out today was when we away, someone wants to describe 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 pattern is moving there. What kind of a machine or what its purpose is might be Shaw, George Bernard Shaw, and the quintessence of its aneurysm reminds us somewhat about the tone of the time when this came out 1899, very late December 18, 19 9, almost the turn of the century almost 1900 January 1st.
(01:15:18):
In fact, Shaw's review came out in January, 1900. He says, this play this last play of Ipsen. And at first the least esteem has had his prophecy. So startlingly fulfilled in England, but nobody will now question the intensity of its inspiration with us. The dead have awakened to the very manner 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 prepossessing with the belief that at such an age, his powers must be falling on. It certainly was easier at that time to give the playoff 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.
(01:16:19):
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 artists who put it there. Chagos 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 Epson's heroine without having read a word of the play. The matter is simpler, but there is no falling off here. And 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. The other is the production of equally good or better work with much greater effort than it would have caused the author. 10 years earlier, Epson produced this play with great difficulty in twice as long, a period as had before sufficed. And even at that, the struggle left his mind direct, right? Not only never wrote another play like an overstrained athlete lost even the normal mental capacity of an order. Yeah.
(01:17:38):
Well, three one is describing as breaking the point of the pencil, like Shakespeare and writing the temper. Yeah. When he got there, he had to break the pencil because it was over. That was what one could do on tip toe and fingers length. And that was on that one could do Ibsen broke the pencil with when we did awaken, there are two couples in there, two men and two women. And there was a criss-cross between them. There's a modern day pair. And then there's a pair who are activistic their throwbacks to primordial, man. They live for the power ethic, what they can achieve, what they can take, what they can experience. And there's a criss-cross between the two shock goes on to say Ibsen's greatest contemporary outside his own art was rubbed down the French sculpture, whether it's a new this, or whether he was inspired to make his hero a sculpture.
(01:18:53):
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, it's 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 Rubeck instead of red, dead. Yeah. 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. Your peers and ghosts and other place goes to the tremendous play because all kinds of consternation, when it came out, I mean, people walked out of the theater, threaten to burn it down.
(01:19:59):
You know, when you touch live wires, people jump that even today, if you put out on hips flight 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 touches to close to home. This is what we didn't want to tell ourselves. The end of when we dead awake, professor Rubik, well, then we are free and there is time for us to live our lives. Every now she looking at him, sadly, the longing for life died in me.
(01:20:55):
I've risen now. And I seek for you now that I found you. I see that both you and life are dead is I have been, oh, but you're wrong. And then us and around us, light pulses and flowers, as strongly as ever. She's smiling, shaking your head. The woman you showed rising from the dead can see life itself, lying on the beer. He embraces her violently. The let us to dead things live life for once to the fall. Before we go down to our graves. Again, she cries out ecstatically Arnold, but not here. Not in the, half-white 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 promise tights. And he up there, we will hold our marriage feast. I Reyna my beloved in those shimmering Heights. And she proudly, the other son may look upon us freely.
(01:22:16):
And he, all the powers of life may look on us freely, all the powers of darkness to gripping your hand. Will you follow me? My ransom to 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 Ms arena and then G yes, through all the mess. And then right up to the top, most peak gleaming in the light, the clouds of Ms. Completely blot out the view and onstage. All we see is miss hand-in-hand. We hear climbing. And then through the mess, a nun comes over the scrape. They fallen hillside mountain, the size of the screen coming over the screen. She stops and peers about her silently intensely. Then heard singing traffic really far down in the depths below the other one in the play mine singing. I am free.
(01:23:22):
I am free. I am free no longer the prison. I'll see, I am free as a bird. I am free. Suddenly there was a loud roar like thunder from high in the snow. The avalanche slides down at a terrific pace. And the mist is replaced by the sliding snow, just sheets, continuous sliding, nothing. Professor Rubeck and Irene are dimly seen as they hurdled down in this massive snow and are buried under it. The nun with a scream stretches out her arms to them. As they fall cries, their names stand silent for a moment then makes a sign of the cross in the air before it says, POCs will be Maya's traffic songs still floats up from the lower mountains about freedom, freedom, freedom, and the play ends the few times that it has been played and recent history, the last 30 or 40 years, even late 20th century, uh, audiences have gone out shaking their heads because the play reveals and reveals and reveals and reveals.
(01:24:41):
And the characters. There are only just a few of them. You're just a handful of characters and Epson sets. The whole tone. Everything comes out on the table. All the cards are out immediately. You know what the situation, yes. You know, what's going to happen and you follow it through. And yeah, they realize what a powerful dramatist to Simpson 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 emotions there that you hadn't really considered before. And is those that are the controlling motifs, as Bachman would say, it's those that control the melodic line. And we've been paying attention to the rhythm all the time. The percussion we had not seen that the melodic line has emotion of its own that man and all of his mess and all of his dreams are just a current for some other energy. That's there all something else, something else, the perception of this was profound for them profound for Epson. They in trying to deliver an artistic form to express this almost broke the forms of the material that had with them. And next week, we'll see a man, an artist, a painter who literally broke the whole form of paint Paul citizen 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.

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