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The Master Builder and the Failure of Symbolic Success JAMES L. CALDERWOOD I At a time when "difference" is so powerfully in vogue Ibsen's The Master Builder would seem thrust into a defensive posture by virtue of its reliance on symbolism. For its symbolism apparently asserts, not difference, but identity, and thus seems to run counter to the diacritical character of language itself: the arbitrary division between signifier and signified, between sign and referent. As a result of this recent stress on the diacritical, the figural dominance of symbol over allegory and discursive language that has been in force since the Romantics is now threatened with reversal, as Murray Krieger has shown. I The supposed fusion of object and meaning wrought by the symbol is regarded in some quarters no longer as a virtue but as a species of linguistic bad faith, a mystifying refusal to acknowledge what Paul de Man calls the fallen world of our facticity and the existential gap between man and nature.2 De Man gives this argument a temporal cast by finding in allegory a commendable reliance on anteriority: Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference.3 Thus allegory affirms, as it resides within, the spatial distance between man and nature, the verbal distance between signifier and signified, and the temporal distance between the text and the "pre-text" of ideas it derives from; whereas symbol is guilty of attempting to collapse these distances into existential, verbal, and temporal identities. De Man's argument offers a useful though rather gloomy corrective to the claim that real instead of illusory identities can The Master Builder: Failure of Symbolic Success 617 be established by symbolism - that the subject can unite with its object, that nature can be made answerable to man's meanings.4 In The Master Builder, as I hope to show, Ibsen has anticipated the kind of criticism de Man brings to bear on symbolism by putting his own symbolic mode on the rack to test its limits. In doing so he forces the symbol to traverse that hazardous space between identity and difference claimed by de Man for allegory. At the same time he engages in a metadramatic exploration of The Master Builder itself, for the symbolic structures within his play are themselves the materials of which the symbolic structure that is his play is constructed. II The Master Builder is fittingly dominated by architectural imagery. The character of the hero, the form of his life, his relation as artist to his art, the diachronic form of the play itself and its modes of meaning - all are translated into spatial symbolism. Moreover, this symbolism is itself conceived of in spatial terms, as a hierarchy comprising a material foundation and a signifying superstructure. Thus the play is self-reflexive, or metadramatic, concerning itself with the precariousness of its own dramatic-symbolic structure. Before discussing the self-reflexive features of the play, however, let me review its general outline in light ofthe symbolism ofspace and structure that informs it.5 The play begins with Bygmester Solness, the master builder, solidly ensconced in bourgeois success - or so it seems until we discover that his present prosperity is undermined by his sense both ofguilt about the past and of foreboding about the future. As he tells the family friend Dr. Herdal, he is troubled by suppressed guilt for having "cut the ground out from under" his original employer, Kurt Brovik, and held down his son Ragnar as he rose to "stand the top man in [his] field,,,6 and by his fear that the younger generation in its demands to "Make room - make room - make room!" will, in the person of Ragnar, do the same to him: "If Ragnar Brovik gets his chance, he'll hammer me to the ground" (pp. 800, 834). For the Broviks, "a clever pair, those two," are the foundation of Solness's building practice, handling the kind of work in which he, master builder but not fully...

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