Ibsen's "Strange Story" in The Master Builder: A Variation in Technique

IBSEN'S ((STRANGE STORY" IN THE MASTER BUILDER: A VARIATION IN TECHNIQUE CRITICS OF HENRIK IBSEN'S STRUCTURAL TECHNIQUES have concentrated upon his innovations in the well-made formula, his attention to unities of time and action in his realistic prose dramas, and his masterful technique of retrospective exposition.! Although major critics have commented upon new directions in Ibsen's last plays, his use in The Master Builder of the strange story as an experimental structural device has largely gone unnoticed. Instead critics of The Master Builder have concentrated upon Ibsen's autobiographical confession in the guise of master-builder Solness or upon language and symbol as innovations in the play rather than upon significant departures in structural technique. Despite critical opinion that the basic pattern of the last plays fails to differ significantly from Rosmersholm and earlier plays,2 Ibsen, nevertheless, has experimented with structure in The Aiaster Builder, the first of his last four plays which comprise the epilogue to his work. Perhaps his recent return to Norway in 1891 after twentyseven years of self-imposed exile in Italy and Germany recalled to mind narratives both real and legendary about his past. It is also possible that the young Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun's attack on Scandinavia's literary giants as reactionary and outdated set Ibsen to rethinking how to project the remoter areas of his characters' lives. In 1891, before an audience which included Ibsen as guest of honor, Hamsun had insisted that modern literature must explore the "darker corners of the human mind" rather than concern itself. as had the older generation of writers, with social problems or external events.3 Whatever the reason, Ibsen's familiar retrospective technique, ! See Muriel C. Bradbrook, Ibsen The Norwegian: A Revaluation (London, 1946); P. F. D. Tennant, Ibsen's Dramatic Technique (Cambridge, 1948); John R. Northam, Ibsen's Dramatic Method: A Study of the Prose Dramas (London, 1953); Maurice Valency, The Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to Modern Drama (New York, 1963); Mitsuya Mori, "The Creation of Suspense in Act I of The Master Builder," Ibsenarbok, 1967, ed. Daniel Haakonsen and others (Oslo, 1967), pp.72-102. 2 Valency, p. 206. Mitsuya Mori also states of The Master Builder: "As far as the structure is concerned the play mostly follows the pattern that Ibsen adopted for his previous plays." (p. 84) 3 James Walter McFarlane, ed., The Oxford Ibsen, VII (London, 1966), 573574 . 175 176 MODERN DRAMA September which reveals past events at the moment when their relation to the present is most significant and revelatory, is subtly altered in The Master Builder, written in 1891-92. The retrospective method found in earlier plays, such as Pillars of Society, A Doll's House, Ghosts, 4n Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, and Hedda Gabler, becomes in The Master Builder sl,lpportive of the new structural device: the anecdote or the narration of a "strange story." Five separate narrations, which span the three acts of the play, relate real or imagined events in the life of Halvard Solness, the protagonist, and mirror his present anxieties, fantasies, doubts, fears, and hopes. Furthermore, the anecdotes have their source in past events and relationships, fantasies and dreams. The strange· story, therefore, is a variation on the celebrated retrospective method, but its narrative qualities-novelistic in approachprovide the means for dramatizing the relationship between past actions, real or fantasized, and on-going psychological distress. Through the telling of the strange story, past actions in the lives of the characters are keyed into mental delusions and guilt feelings which inform the present action and determine the tragic conclusion of the play. The anecdotes or strange stories are five in number and have a specific pattern of development subtly unlike the retrospective method explored by P. F. D. Tennant in Ibsen's Dramatic Technique.4 Each anecdote relates an objective experience in the life and career of the master builder and is then climaxed by the revelation of a crucial subjective experience within that recalled event. For example, the appearance of Kaja Fosli in Solness's life, the subject of the first strange story in Act I, takes...