The Cycle Returns: Brian Johnston's Ibsen Cycle

REVIEW ESSA Y The Cycle Returns: Brian Johnston's Ibsen Cycle GERALD DUGAN It has been nineteen years since the first publication of Brian Johnston's TIle Ihsell Cycle;' yet this seminal work was so poorly distributed and so little reviewed in '975 that it is no wonder that dull-minded appraisals of Ibsen still continue to flourish like so many hardy weeds growing even in such unexpected gardens as the New York Review ofBooks: The greatest of Ibsen's plays deaJ with individuals and their particular moral predicaments within a society that necessarily constricts them. Ibsen's moral analyses recall Wagner in that they explore the inner compulsions driving the characters on to their doom. However, Ibsen's characters are real people whose actions reveal psychological conflicts and evasions familiar to mosl of us. Thomas Mann made much of a comparison between the late works of the two masters, Whell We Dead Awaken and Parsifal; but evenifIbsen set some of his dramas in a timeless Nordic world, the most powerful plays are those finnly situated in avery specific Scandinavian society at a very specific historical moment.2 All the cliches of current Ibsen interpretation are trolled out in this seemingly innocuous paragraph. There is the nOlion that the much-travelled Ibsen, who spent a great deal of his life in self-imposed exile, was actually primarily concerned with the lillie world of provincial Norwegian society in his realistic plays. Furthermore, his characters are "real people ... familiar to most of us." Yes indeed, we have all met mothers who are forced to murder their terminally syphilitic sons (Mrs. Alving in GilOSIS), while most of us are familiar with women drawn to Flying Dutchmen (Ellida in Tile Lady from Iile Sea). Then there are those other "real people," the Master Builder who talks seriously about erecting "a real castle in the air ... with solid foundations;"J not to mention the megalomaniacal John Gabriel Borkman, who secludes himself in one room for eight years before abruptly deciding to climb a steep hill at midnight Modem Drama, 37 (1994) 665 666 GERALD DUGAN in order to praise buried minerals in the earth just before he expires. Presumably these strikingly eccentric actions are the typical "psychological connicts and evasions" ofibsen's fellow Norwegians, faithfully delineated in those tidy thesis plays and clinical case-studies written soon after Ibsen completed three of the most imaginative and expansively poetic works of nineteenth-century Romanticism, Brand, Peer Gym, and Emperor Gild Galilean. For some unexplained reason, the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan poet of his age presumably chose to perform a cultural lobotomy upon himself by voluntarily restricting his genius to the narrow confines of prosaic realistic plays "firmly situated in a very specific Scandinavian society at a very specific historical moment." This account of a writer who supposedly abandoned his poetic calling to become, first, the bourgeois social reformer of A Doll's House and Enemy of the People, then the proto-Frcudian psychologist of Rosmersholm and Hedda GaiJIer, and fi nally the enfeebled symbolist of the murky late plays, is, depressingly, still the standard view of this great dramatist. This is more or less the Ibsen one encounters in the Michael Meyer biography or in Robert Brustein's The Theatre of Revolt: the Ibsen whose plays evoked for Henry James the odor of gas "lamps burning, as in tasteless parlors, with the flame practically exposed.'" And it is this conventional image of Ibsen that Brian Johnston totally demolishes in his revolutionary The Ibsen Cycle, newly revised and published after being out of print for a number of years. Jolmston argues that Ibsen's last twelve realistic plays comprise a single work of art arguably even more ambitiousand comprehensive than those other vast projects of the nineteenth-century imagination, Goethe's Faust, Wagner's Rillg of the Nibelung, and Balzac's Camedie Hllmaine. The subject of the Ibsen Cycle is nothing less than the painful spiritual and intellectual history of human consciousness, as that history manifests itself (through a process of archetypal recollection) in the ordinary life of Ibsen's own time - producing "a succession of dialectical dramas," in other words, "in which, under the nineteenth century...