The Paradox of Memory: Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken and Fin-de-siècle Psychotherapy

The Paradox of Memory: Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken and Fin-de-siecle Psychotherapy OLIVER GERLAND Although Ibsen is widely considered a precursor of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic interpretation of his texts has been sternly criticized by both American and Norwegian scholars.I Brian Johnston voices two of the main objections with reference to Freud's famous discussion of Rosmersholm: I. He pays no attention to the dramatic-theatric structure of the play. The sequence of stage events, in which actions, speeches, and memories of actions are presented to the theater audience as an artistic unfolding, creating the experience of the artwork, is simply set aside and another biographical sequence is substituted. ,.. 2. Freud treats Rebekka West as a real person whose theatrically presented identity hides a hidden and unconscious identity.2 In Johnston's view, psychoanalytic critics mistake the object of interpretation. Rather than the playwright's text, psychoanalytic critics interpret a text they themselves have constructed out of select pieces from the original, including some - like Rebekka West's "hidden and unconscious identity" - not manifestly present. The result, as Peter Brooks writes, is "that whatever insights [psychoanalytic interpretation] has produced tell us precious linle about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts."3 Contrary to Johnston, I believe that psychoanalysis can tell us something about the "dramatic-theatric structure" of Ibsen's dramatic texts, and without reference to a putative unconscious. An unusual moment in the second act of When We Dead Awaken (1899) provides my point of departure. Sculptor Arnold Rubek sits downstage near a stream describing his completed masterpiece , The Resurrection Day, to Irene, who modelled for one of the figures. "Yes, but listen now how I have placed myself in the group," says the aging artist. "In the foreground, beside a spring - as it might be here - sits a man weighed down with guilt. He cannot quite break free from the earth's crust. I Modern Drama, 38 (1995) 450 The Paradox of Memory 45[ call him remorse for a forfeit life. He sits there dipping his fingers in the rippling water - to wash them clean. He is racked and tormented by the thought that he will never, never succeed. Never in all eternity will he win free to achieve the life of the resurrection.'" Rubek's powerful account of his own suffering must not distract from the scenic interest of this moment: while the sculptor describes his masterpiece group, he and Irene occupy on the stage the very positions they occupy in the sculpture. For a moment, the absent Resurrection Day comes alive on the stage. This striking tableau has not received much critical anention.s M.S. Barranger documents similar moments of repetition which she explains as a form of play, "a complex visual and thematic device in which Rubek's past actions may be illustratively repeated in the present in order to document his culpability and lack of any demonstrable spiritual change over the years.,,6 Barranger does not, however, discuss Rubek and Irene's enactment of the Resurrection Day figures. P.F.D. Tennant traces the roots of this tableau back to "a romantic sense of composition which [Ibsen] developed as a painter and learnt to appreciate in Italy.'" True as it may be, Tennant's generalization hardly answers the pertinent question: how does this sculptural image function in the "dramatic-theatric structure" of When We Dead Awaken? I believe that the psychological theory of Pierre Janet, a French contemporary of Freud and one of his early inspirations, helps answer this important question.s Little known today, Janet's systematic study of psychological trauma in L'Automatisme psychologique ([889) laid much of the theoretical groundwork for Breuer and Freud's Studies on Hysteria ([895). Indeed, the celebrated psychoanalytic dictum "hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences" derives directly from Janet's work at the Salpetriere.9 I shall argue that Janet and Ibsen share a dramaturgy , a way of structuring or plotting personal histories. This personal history plot begins in a moment of trauma, proceeds through repetitions of that trauma, and culminates, ideally. in release from the trauma's iII-effects. To clarify this psycho-dramaturgical model and show how it illuminates When We...