Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen: Reports from the Fourth International Ibsen Seminar, Skien, 1978 ed. by Daniel Haakonsen (review)

REVIEWS Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen: Reports from the Fourth Interna­ tional Ibsen Seminar, Skien, 1978. Edited by Daniel Haakonsen. Universitetsforlaget, Oslo 1979. Pp. 205. $13.00. The contributors to this Ibsen Seminar to honour the 150th anniver­ sary of Ibsen’s birth in his dour little birthplace were asked to discuss the topic, “Henrik Ibsen’s drama—psychological, social or existential?” The unhappy anticipation the reader feels from this title, of an academic rechewing of already well-digested fare, is fulfilled by most of the papers that follow. The contributors were further restricted (it seems a most odd way of honouring a poet) to three plays: Ghosts, Rosmersholm and John Gabriel Borkmann. With only two exceptions, none of the contributors seems aware that he or she should be approaching, with all humility, a great poet who, more than Shaw or Brecht after him, created a theater that was both visionary and revolutionary. Instead, the Ibsen of these pages modestly addresses himself to the Tesman delegation, making his art obligingly amenable to various safe academic hobbies. One might be interested, for instance, in a little nineteenth-century social history (Edward Beyer), and so Ibsen’s plays illustrate somewhat unremarkable social issues of the times. Or one’s hobby might be amateur psycho-analysis (Otto Hageburg, Derek Russell Davis and David Thomas), and Ibsen’s texts obligingly provide us with fictional case-studies free of the messy and alarming unpredictibility of their real-life counterparts. One might enjoy, in the current British fashion, the endless teasing out of nuances of language (Andrew K. Kennedy) or one might want to relate Ibsen to one’s reading of minor Scandinavian literature (Sandra Saari). Worst of all, at the height of academic hubris, one might elect to hold court over Ibsen’s character (safe from the terrible consequences of the grim old poet’s revenge) as does Arne R0ed who drearily proposes that Ibsen’s last plays are covert autobiography in which the poet laments the betrayal of his God-given talents! The seminar, indeed, calls into question the value of such meetings. There is a false analogy, one feels, with the scientific seminar convened to keep abreast of consequential developments within a momentously expanding discipline. The corpus of Ibsen’s work does not expand so that, unless there is some radically new discovery about the poet, the necessity of keeping up, biennially, an endless series of such seminars is bound to encourage ingenious attempts to force new meanings on familiar texts. As academic careers are involved in these enterprises, contributors are encouraged to be cautious, to pay obeisance to the 280 Reviews 281 current powers and to create safely daring exercises that will mildly flutter the dovecotes of academe while contributing to the pleasant atmosphere of mutual gratulation. It is not Ibsen who is celebrated by this seminar, but the reigning fashions in Ibsen interpretation. The result is a fragmentation and trivialization of Ibsen’s great lifework, an evasion of the attempt to see it as a whole, to grasp its entire intention or to assess its place in our entire cultural heritage. Aesthetics, dialectics, history, ideology, philosophy, were banished from the seminar by its very terms. The three permitted categories, psychological, social and the conveniently vague “existential,” whether individually or in synthesis, discouraged the expansion of Ibsen’s theater into a challenging objective presence within our culture, discouraged seeing the poet in the company of the great creative spirits who have shaped our civilization. No reader of most of these papers would feel that the performance of Ibsen’s plays is of vital concern to our cultural life. Ibsen studies must be one of the few remaining literary terrains where amateur psycho-analysts (or professional ones) feel free to roam inno­ cently psycho-analysing the fictional elements of elaborate artistic struc­ tures. To such interpreters Ibsen is a psychotherapist manqué, presenting us with case-studies, not roles to be variously interpreted by actors and actresses within the histrionic artifices of theater. We are to see the plays not as shaped by the requirements of dramatic impact, thematic balance, theatric timing and spacing and aesthetic beauty, but as shaped by the unconscious compulsions of...