Toril Moi - Duke professor and one of the most renowned and recognized Ibsen scholars in the world - writes about Ibsen's iconoclastic modernity in this essay, based on her upcoming book "Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism".
6/30/2006 :: Henrik Ibsen believed in the transformation of the individual and that of society. He was not afraid of destruction if it could produce something radically new. In 1870, while Ibsen was living in Germany, war broke out between France and Prussia, and it rapidly became clear that France was losing the war. In December 1870, Ibsen, a French sympathizer, excitedly wrote to Danish intellectual Georg Brandes:
“Besides, the world events occupy a great deal of my thoughts. The old illusory France has been smashed to pieces, when finally the new factual Prussia is smashed to pieces too, then in one leap we shall be in an age of becoming. How the ideas then will collapse around us! And it will truly be high time. Everything we have been living on until today amounts to no more than the crumbs from last century’s revolutionary table, and that nourishment has been chewed over for long enough. The concepts need a new content and a new explanation.Freedom, equality and fraternity are no longer the same things they were in the days of the blessed guillotine.”
Ibsen sounds positively cheerful about the destruction of old regimes and ideals. They, like the dinosaurs and the dodo bird, are doomed to extinction: This is cause for joy, not sorrow, for what truly matters is the birth of the new, the creation of a transformed world.
The war killed 187,500 French and German soldiers, and more than 30,000 Parisians were slaughtered in the brutal repression of the Commune in May, 1871. That two of the most economically and culturally advanced countries of Europe could engage in slaughter on such a scale shook Europeans to the core. However appalled Ibsen may have been at the horrors of 1871, he knew how to mobilize the energy produced by horror for creative work. Less than two months after the fall of the Paris Commune, he began serious work on the enormous historical play, Emperor and Galilean.
Although it is one of the writer’s least- known plays, Ibsen himself always considered Emperor and Galilean his “most important work” [hovedverk]. Subtitled “A world-historical play,” and set during the period from 351 to 363 A.D., Emperor and Galilean is about the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, who renounced Christianity and tried to return the Roman empire to the ancient Greek gods.
Ibsen intended his “world-historical” play to be a parallel of Europe in his own time. But it remains eerily relevant today, for this is a play preoccupied with warfare, revolt, terrorism, dictatorship, and cataclysmic historical and cultural change, as well as with historical transition and the search for meaning in a world where God is dead and traditional values have lost their grip. In the end, Julian dies on the plains of Mesopotamia – in the country we now call Iraq – killed by a Christian fanatic hell-bent on martyrdom.
There is an enormous discrepancy between the attention Ibsen wanted us to pay to Emperor and Galilean and the neglect it has suffered. There have been very few productions of this magnificent work. It is true that Ibsen wrote the play as a closet drama (a play intended to be read), because 19th-century stage technology could not cope with the production of a 10-act play with great narrative sweep and stunningly spectacular scenes.
Today, however, technology is no obstacle, and plays of a similar nature, and of similar scope are often performed. In 2000, the National Theater in London produced an impressively lean and fast-paced version of David Edgar’s Speer, which charts the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and in 2002 it produced Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy that took more than nine hours to perform.
Emperor and Galilean is about the corruption of the purest ideals, about the abuse of power, and about religious fanaticism and madness: Today the right director could work marvels with Henrik Ibsen’s “most important work.”
Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism
By Toril Moi
Published in August, 2006 by Oxford University Press: www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-929587-5
About Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism
The book situates Ibsen in his cultural context, emphasizes his position as a Norwegian in European culture, and shows how important painting and other visual arts were for his aesthetic education. The book rewrites literary history, reminding modern readers that idealism was the dominant aesthetic paradigm of the nineteenth century. Modernism was born in the ruins of idealism, Moi argues, thus challenging traditional theories of the opposition between realism and modernism.
By reading Ibsen’s modernist plays as investigations of the fate of love in an age of skepticism, Moi shows why Ibsen still matters to us. In this book, Ibsen’s plays are showed to be profoundly concerned by theater and theatricality, both on stage and in everyday life. Ibsen’s unsettling explorations of women, men and marriage here emerge as chronicles of the tension between skepticism and the everyday, and between critique and utopia in modernity.
This radical new account places Ibsen in his rightful place alongside Baudelaire, Flaubert and Manet as a founder of European modernism.
About Toril Moi
Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University. Her most recent book, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, will be published by Oxford University Press in the fall of 2006.
Agnete Øye’s Norwegian translation of the book, entitled Ibsens modernisme, was published by Pax Forlag in Oslo in May.
Toril Moi