Afterword: Ibsen, Beckett, and Uncertainty

2006 links Ibsen and Beckett, coincidentally, by accidents of death and birth, "things dying" and "things new-born" held in unlikely fusion by our subliminal need to celebrate significant centenaries or by our habitual scholarly inclination to find significance in the serendipitous. How do we accommodate the crashing gears of nineteenth-century realism to the postmodern world of the absurd or read the nothingness at the core of Ibsen's many onions in the context of the nothing-to-be-done that defines the experience of postmodern sensibility? It is the assumption of this journal, as Alan Ackerman has indicated in his "Prompter's Box" preface, that Ibsen defines "the historical moment that makes modern drama modern" - that he is, as Martin Esslin argued at the Ibsen sesquicentennial, "one of the principal creators and well-springs of the whole modern movement in drama," organically linked even to dramatists like Beckett, whose anti-illusionist techniques seem to deny any indebtedness to Ibsen's dramatic paternity (71). The link, Esslin suggested, is not technical but thematic, an existential vision fundamental to the subject matter of modernity: "the problem of Being, the nature of the self, with the question of what an individual means when he uses the pronoun I. How can the self be defined? Can one even speak of a consistent entity corresponding to an individual's self?" (76). The drift of Esslin's argument is that Krapp's Last Tape is a modernist emanation from the central preoccupation of Peer Gynt and that the image of the onion, with its core of nothingness, expands outwards from Ibsen to incorporate the existential quandary of Beckett's entire oeuvre.

This is a compelling notion of dramatic modernity, and it depends very much on an evolutionary theory of historical unfolding: a one-directional transmission of ideas and the visionary images in which they are theatrically conveyed. It is rephrased in Robert Wilson's claim that "I don't believe in talking back to a masterpiece. I let it talk to me" - as if the modern dramatist (or director) were merely a listening ear, receptive to the voice of the dead author (see Templeton in this issue). But the process of "talking back" that Joan Templeton invokes as an apt phrase for Wilson's travesty of Ibsen is nevertheless a feasible reconsideration of the dynamic connection between the ancient and the modern, the dying and the new-born, Ibsen and Beckett. It assumes a bi-directional "conversation" between Peer and Krapp and a scholarly willingness to read all drama as intertextualities in a universal Borgesian library, where history devolves into a timeless theatrical present and where our reading of Beckett enables us to read Ibsen in new and vital contexts. Alan Ackerman has opened up the argument for "other forms of historicism, readings in and of history, that can accommodate diverse conceptions of temporality and of relations between readers and texts, actors and spectators" - and the approaches to Ibsen, apparent in the essays in this issue of Modern Drama, invite precisely such a reading of Ibsen in the age of Beckett. Each dramatist would seem to exist as a reverberation in the other's echo chamber or (to segue from an intertextual model of reciprocal influence to Jonathan Miller's biological model of performance theory) one could argue that Ibsen in 2006 reveals, paradoxically, his "emergent evolution" from the unforeseen meanings and the unforeseeable inflexions that Beckett's absurdity now confers upon his drama. "[T]he afterlife of a play," writes Miller, "is a process of emergent evolution, during which meanings and emphases develop that might not have been apparent at the time of writing, even to the author" (Miller, 35).¹ The afterlife of Peer Gynt, I would argue, has been shaped as much by Beckett's existentialism and Pirandello's ontological inquiry into the reality of self as their modernism has been shaped by Ibsen's radical questioning of the "real" and his pervasive exploration of metatheatre as a critique of the phenomenal world.

"Beckett's Ibsen," as I have tried to define him, is surely apparent in several of the articles...