Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The Ibsen phenomenon burst in Berlin and then spread to Europe. It began in 1887, with Ghosts, which was banned by the police (a perfect modernist/avant-garde occurrence). Closed performances were given and heavily oversubscribed. (The book, however, sold very well and had to be reprinted.⁵¹) An Ibsen banquet was held where the ‘dawn of a new age’ was declared. This was followed by an ‘Ibsen Week’, which saw

The Lady from the Sea, The Wild Duck and A Doll’s House playing simultaneously. When Ghosts was finally allowed on to the open stage, later that year, it provoked a sensation and was an important influence on James Joyce, among others. Franz Servaes had this to say: ‘Some people, as though inwardly shattered, did not regain their calm for days. They rushed about the city, about the Tiergarten . . .’ Ibsen fever raged for two years.⁵²

‘The most important event in the history of modern drama,’ it has been said, ‘was Ibsen’s abandonment of verse after Peer Gynt in order to write prose plays about contemporary problems.’⁵³ Many other authors – Henry James, Chekhov, Shaw, Joyce, Rilke, Brecht and Pirandello among them – owed a great deal to him. The new territory which he made his own included contemporary politics, the growing role of mass communications, changing morals, the ways of the unconscious, all with a subtlety and intensity unmatched by anyone else. It is a tribute to Ibsen that he made modern theatre so much his own that we have difficulty these days seeing what all the fuss was about, so pertinent were his themes: the role of women (A Doll’s House), the generation gap (

The Master Builder), the conflict between individual liberty and institutional authority (Rosmersholm), the threat of pollution brought about by commerce that yet provides jobs (An Enemy of the People⁵⁴

). But it was the subtlety of his language and the sheer intensity of his characters’ inner lives that attracted many people; critics claimed they could detect ‘a second unspoken reality’ below or behind the surface drama or, as Rilke was to put it, Ibsen’s works together comprised ‘an ever more desperate search for visible correlations of the inwardly seen’.⁵⁵ Ibsen was the first to find a dramatic structure for the ‘second self’ of the modern age, and in doing so illuminated for everyone the central incoherence of man’s predicament ever since Vico. He showed how that predicament could be tragic, comic, or merely banal. Just as Verdi (and Shakespeare of course) had realised that the most profound form of tragedy concerns the non-hero (as Joyce would again show so perfectly in Ulysses, 1922), Ibsen showed that banality, absurdity, meaninglessness – or the threat of them – was the unstable bedrock of modernism. Darwin had done his worst.