Nietzsche, Georg Brandes, and Ibsen’s Master Builder

Nietzsche, Georg Brandes, and Ibsen’s Master Builder Michael W. Kaufman One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is. Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History I At the heart of The Master Builder abides the unresolvable conflict between freedom and responsibility. This preoccupation was certainly not new to Ibsen in 1892. As early as 1866 he had explored Brand’s uncompromising self-assertion and the catastrophic results of megalomania. And Ghosts (1881), Rosmersholm (1886), and Hedda Gabler (1890) continue and expand this theme right up through 1891 when Ibsen now set­ tled again in Norway began work on The Master Builder. Never­ theless there is something unique about The Master Builder that deserves special attention. In no other Ibsen play does the protagonist’s self-assertion so much resemble a “will to power.” My choice of the phrase is deliberate since I believe that The Master Builder reveals many remarkable correspondences with Nietzsche’s fundamental ideas. It is impossible to know exactly how deeply Nietzsche’s thought affected Ibsen, but if we remain attentive to the possibility of an influence a parallelism of idea and structure emerges which may help to clarify many of the play’s most vexing problems of action, motivation, and character. The difficulties of establishing the certainty of such an in­ fluence are legion. I wish to stress from the beginning that the 169 170 Comparative Drama usual standards of adducing literary influence are not available in Ibsen’s case. His life-long, self-conscious reticence regarding the books he read and the intellectuals who affected him is notorious.! What is more, the investigator’s problems are com­ pounded by the fact that Ibsen apparently destroyed most of the correspondence he received, while he himself wrote to others mainly about business matters and publication problems. More­ over, Ibsen’s scrupulous artistry, reflected in his painstaking re­ visions, meant that few obvious verbal parallels or echoes have made their way into his final drafts. Finally, Brian Downs is surely right to stress that Ibsen did not possess “the kind of mind that reflects from its surface whatever has just been cast upon it from the outer world; everything that passed out of him was the effect of a greatly protracted rumination and thorough assimilation into his moral being” (p. 23). Whether the consequence of his ruminating mind or the requirements of his dramatic craft, whatever contemporary ideas may have influenced Ibsen were absorbed and transformed in the process of creation. Nevertheless an inquiry into Nietzsche’s influence on Ibsen is rendered tenable by Georg Brandes whose work, Ibsen admitted more than once, strongly exercised his mind. Brandes’ essay on Nietzsche, published in 1889, exerted an enormous influence on many of his Scandinavian contemporaries, includ­ ing Strindberg;2 and it may very well have helped to synthesize and highlight what had been recurrent themes in Ibsen’s earlier work. The important point for this study is that in all probability Ibsen read Brandes’ lectures shortly before he began work on The Master Builder. n We may begin directly by raising the difficult questions re­ garding the possibility that Nietzsche’s writings may have in­ fluenced Ibsen’s intellectual development. In the twenty-one volumes that comprise Ibsen’s collected works, Nietzsche’s name appears only once. The occasion was an interview conducted late in 1900 shortly after Nietzsche’s death when Hans Tostrup asked Ibsen to comment on the philosopher’s significance. Ibsen’s reply was typically evasive: “I wasn’t so well acquainted with him; it was actually only a few years ago that he really became well known. He was a remarkably gifted person but because Michael W. Kaufman 171 of his philosophy he couldn’t become popular in our democratic age.”3 Ibsen’s disavowal of anything more than a passing famili­ arity with Nietzsche’s work seems strange indeed if we consider how pervasive and influential a part of the European intellectual climate his philosophy had become during the nineties. Still, Ibsen’s reluctance to admit any...