AN ISOLATE FROM THE PEOPLE: IBSEN'S CANON AND SOCIAL INCOMPETENCE

“It might seem harsh to say so, but the truth is that I am more and more convinced that as an all-round thinker, or, more properly, as a systematic thinker, Ibsen really doesn’t fit the bill. … But of course Ibsen is Ibsen, and I should be the last to complain that he is not Herbert Spencer.”
- William Archer upon meeting Henrik Ibsen, as quoted in Henrik Ibsen: The Man & The Mask by Ivo De Figueiredo.

Absent from the end of Timeline Theatre’s new production of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People are the last lines of dialogue in the original play. The lead character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, has been driven almost out of town by a mob angry because he has revealed to them that the water in the springs of his spa town are contaminated. Focused only on the money they stand to lose, and not the risk to people’s lives, the townspeople refuse to accept the inconvenient truth about their environment. Does this 1882 plotline sound familiar today? Paradoxically, however, Ibsen ends this eternally relevant political drama not on a statement about environmental degradation, or a commitment to fight for the truth, but with an arcane observation Stockmann makes about himself. The following is from Project Gutenberg’s rather stiff 2000 translation of the play, by R. Farquharson Sharp:

Mrs. Stockmann: Let us hope it won't be the wolves that will drive you out of the country, Thomas.

Dr. Stockmann: Are you out of your mind, Katherine? Drive me out! Now—when I am the strongest man in the town!

Mrs. Stockmann: The strongest—now?

Dr. Stockmann: Yes, and I will go so far as to say that now I am the strongest man in the whole world.

Morten: I say!

Dr. Stockmann (lowering his voice): Hush! You mustn't say anything about it yet; but I have made a great discovery.

Mrs. Stockmann: Another one?

Dr. Stockmann: Yes. (Gathers them round him, and says confidentially:) It is this, let me tell you—that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

In Timeline’s excellent new production those lines have vanished. The adapter is Amy Herzog, whose self-described “new version” of the play won Jeremy Strong a Best Actor Tony on Broadway in 2024. This was the Chicago debut of that translation. “That didn’t resonate with me at all,” Herzog told The New York Times of the final line about the man who stands alone. In the place of those words, the show ends with Stockmann pledging to keep working for the truth, not alone but supported by his family. “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued,” Stockmann says. “We just have to imagine…” And the lights black out. The new version stresses what a group of committed individuals can accomplish together. I wonder to myself whether I think the new version edits the playwright’s intent too broadly. But I admire Herzog’s willingness to tell the playwright to shut up and stay on-message. The edits described above replace lines that are at odds with the rest of the play, lines that always struck me as out of nowhere as a theme, certainly idiosyncratic—and more than a little too defensive of Ibsen’s own personality as a recluse without (he said) many friends.

When this month I saw the Timeline show, which inaugurated the company’s beautiful new theater in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, it was the culmination of a few months’ reflection on the cantankerous, hermetic playwright. I’d slipped a little out of touch with him over the years, though I’ve been reading and seeing his work since seeing A Doll’s House in high school. I watched every video production I could get my hands on over the years, and read almost all his major works. My personal Ibsen project this year began after I read AS Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale, a story of a biographer who tries to write a biography of a biographer who has written about, among others, Ibsen. This year’s project was precipitated by the fact that I had experienced the entire Ibsen canon, short of three plays. Except for those nagging exceptions I’d read all or seen of the 16 mature Ibsen plays that are still produced and discussed, everything from 1866’s Brand to 1899’s When We Dead Awaken. So I acquired new versions of all three of the missing plays and read them that month, in February. Last night I also saw this year’s Hedda, a new film that sets Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in the present day. With each Ibsen play I watched or read this year, I was stuck anew by the peculiar personality that made Ibsen conclude Enemy, arguably his most timeless, accessible play, with such navel-gazing phraseology.  

Ibsen is the second most produced, and probably second most important playwright of all time behind Shakespeare. But he is an odd bird. Competing 19^th century Scandinavian playwright August Strindberg called him “the angriest man in Europe,” and he was always stewing in his own isolated bile. Byatt’s fictional biographer Scholes Destry Scholes has Ibsen say why he was such a loner in The Biographer’s Tale:

“Friends are an expensive luxury; and when one sinks all one’s capital in a vocation and a mission in life, then one cannot afford to have friends. The extravagance of keeping friends lies not in what one does for them, but what, out of consideration for them, one omits to do. On that account, many intellectual shoots are crippled in oneself. I have gone through this, and on that account, I have several years behind me, in which I did not succeed in being myself.”

Ibsen’s most recent biography, Ivo De Figueiredo’s 2019 Henrik Ibsen: The Man & The Mask, comments on the same phenomenon:

“The powerful and penetrating appeal of the works is interesting enough, but for a biographer, naturally, what is most fascinating is … that he, so uncomfortable and helpless in social settings, should become a star, idolised and admired across an entire continent--the poor son of a merchant in remote Norway turned into a celebrated European writer. And what is most fascinating of all is that the reason for the success of this metamorphosis probably has to be sought in the tension between his social incompetence and his genius.”

His “social incompetence.” That’s what his biographer thinks of the man who is most alone. (Not that I can talk about someone else’s social incompetence, nor can many of the bookish and isolated writers and readers who follow folks like Ibsen, but that’s neither here nor there.) Figueiredo goes on to suggest that in the late 19^th century, Ibsen was so highly regarded that “his silence was interpreted as wisdom, his aversions as principles, his quarrelsome nature as a necessary outlet for inner spiritual wrestling. Indeed, every aspect of his personality was interpreted in terms of a rhetoric of necessity that transformed every failing into a virtue.”

Herzog’s fix to the end of Enemy suggests that might be one of the reasons that theaters keep hiring new playwrights to adapt Ibsen. Every one of the scripts I read was a new adaption of Ibsen’s work, though not all necessarily as loose with his words as Herzog was with his conclusion to Enemy. Ibsen wrote brilliant plays that were ahead of their time but contained idiosyncrasies that were behind his time. That takes creative adaptation.

Ibsen was famous for his proto-feminism, writing insightful plays about the stifling treatment of women in the 19th century like A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, each of which features a heroine who is boxed into a terrible marriage and each of whom tries to get out. But outside of his plays he denied he was concerned with women’s rights, voiced support for “absolutism” in government and showed continual skepticism of democracy. He went so far as to suggest that the proletariat should be kept in check by the use of poison, Figueiredo said, adding that such language has been ignored by critics because if it were taken seriously, he might be “ineligible” for the cultural canon.

“If we are to take Ibsen’s extra-literary comments on politics and society seriously, it is hard to ignore the irrationalism, the contempt for the masses, the cultivation of the elite, and a certain affinity with violence and the exercise of power,” Figueiredo writes. “Taken to extremes it provides a fine ideological thread that links Ibsen’s universe of ideas to the vitalism and cults of personality of the leader-figures of the century that followed his. Had it not been for the writing.”

Indeed, the plays don’t show the intensely explosive language he used outside of his work. But the backwardness of his politics does show up. In the second act of Enemy, a show-down occurs between Stockmann, the elite, and the people of the town. This scene contains within it the kind of anti-democratic spark that often ignited Ibsen’s off-stage rhetoric. Herzog does the best she can with this, emphasizing the fact that Stockmann is a scientific expert. This makes the debate timely in an age when the marketplace of ideas in scientific debates is often filled with those who like to say “do your own research” but mean on social media rather than in scientific literature. But even Herzog leaves in a moment, for example, where Stockmann likens the less educated to dogs.

For the most part the plays are so immaculately constructed that the small idiosyncrasies that reveal his politics do stand out. Essayist James Wood says the plays are almost too well-constructed. In an essay on what Chekov does right, he uses Ibsen as a counterexample, quoting Chekov himself: "But listen, Ibsen is no playwright!” the Russian master protests. “Ibsen just doesn't know life. In life it simply isn't like that." Wood writes: “Ibsen's people are too comprehensible. We comprehend them as we comprehend fictional entities. He is always tying the moral shoelaces of his characters, making everything neat, presentable, knowable.”

So Ibsen’s people are too comprehensible, Wood argues. But the plays I read in February all have their shoelaces a little askew in one way or another. Stockmann has his thesis about the man who stands alone. The League of Youth (1869) begins neatly as a tale of a “radical” reformer who supports democracy in Norway but ends with that same reformer selling out those leftist principles each time a deal is offered him. This is mostly a nicely tied up argument about how virtue can be misled, but it gradually hints more and more as the play progresses at Ibsen’s anti-democratic feeling, which feels less timeless than the rest of Ibsen’s work. The opening of the play sparked riots from left-leaning youth. He tried to hedge as usual without taking a side between the left and the right. He preferred to speak in enigmatic metaphors not of support for the salvation of either side’s dogma but of “torpedoing the ark,” and playing (as Figueiredo analogizes) not with chessmen on either side of the playing board but knocking out the board itself altogether.

When writing Emperor and Galilean, the play he wrote next, he spent years trying and failing to find his angle on the fascinating figure of Emperor Julian, who was the last Pagan emperor of the Roman empire. After the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, he finally found he was able to write again. But what he crafted was a somewhat politically vague ode not as much in line with the theology of his last religious work, Brand, and not endorsing either Christianity or Paganism but an unspecific “third empire” that would spring in Hegelian style from the opposition of those competing religious empires.

“Emperor and Galilean is not the first work I wrote in Germany,” Ibsen wrote, “but doubtless the first that I wrote under the influence of German spiritual life. When, in the autumn of 1868, I came from Italy to Dresden, I brought with me the plan of The League of Youth, and wrote that play in the following winter. During my four years’ stay in Rome, I had merely made various historical studies, and taken sundry notes, for Emperor and Galilean; I had not sketched out any definite plan, much less written any of it. My view of life was still, at that time, National-Scandinavian, wherefore I could not master the foreign material. Then, in Germany, I lived through the great time, the year of the war, and the development which followed it. This brought with it for me, at many points, an impulse of transformation. My conception of world-history and of human life had hitherto been a national one. It now widened into a racial conception; and then I could write Emperor and Galilean.”

We are told by Archer, who wrote the introduction to an edition of the massive two-part play, that this does not mean what it sounds like, a conception of a Germanic master race. It’s about the human race, he says. And in fact Ibsen and his family (riskily) supported the French while living in Germany during the Franco-Prussian War. But again Ibsen’s words beg for an editor because his off-kilter personality gets in the way of his paradoxically shoe-tied perfection.

“A change of front in our conception of life and of the world is no parochial matter,” Ibsen wrote in 1888. “And we Scandinavians, as compared with other European nations, have not yet got beyond the parish-council standpoint. But nowhere do you find a parish-council anticipating and furthering ‘the third empire.’” On September 24, 1887 he said, similarly, “I have sometimes been called a pessimist: and indeed I am one, inasmuch as I do not believe in the eternity of human ideals. But I am also an optimist, inasmuch as I fully and confidently believe in the ideals’ power of propagation and of development. Especially and definitely do I believe that the ideals of our time, as they pass away, are tending towards that which, in my drama of Emperor and Galilean, I have designated as ‘the third empire.’ Let me therefore drain my glass to the growing, the coming time.”

So he kept speaking of that third empire well after he had moved onto other plays when called on to speak politically. But it had never been clear what the third empire practically might mean.

The third and final play I read in February, Pillars of the Community (sometimes called Pillars of Society), was the prototype for the first of Arthur Miller’s great explorations of the conflict between public and private morality, All My Sons. Miller’s play is about a manufacturer of airplanes during World War II who knowingly let faulty airplane parts into the planes. Ibsen’s play is about a businessman who knowingly sends out ships on the seas that are not safe. In both cases the businessmen have reason to believe by play’s end that their sons were on the dangerous vessels. In some ways this was a more politically daring work than Ibsen had been writing: there were shipmen at the time who were in fact sending out ships knowingly that weren’t seaworthy, Figueiredo says. But Ibsen’s play ends idiosyncratically with a happy ending for the tycoon. “The spirit of freedom, and the spirit of truth, these are the pillars of the community” is the enigmatic final line.

Finally, last night I watched the new Hedda by director Nia DaCosta. This film shows how hard it is to fix Ibsen for a modern audience, despite his forward-looking treatment of women. The film was a success critically in part because it was faithful in Ibsen’s depiction of a strong woman tragically trapped in a mismatched marriage and a limiting role in society. But it had the challenge all productions of Hedda Gabler do: the problematic ending. Ibsen’s Hedda has married a man who does not inspire her, to understate. She is in love with another man—or, in this new film, a woman—who has just finished a book that represents his life’s work. Hedda burns the book for spite, then hands her love a revolver, imagining his dying a “beautiful death.” He shoots himself, but in the stomach, causing Heda to recoil at the grotesqueness of the death. Details of this plot were changed in the movie. 

After the movie was over, the room I watched it in exploded into debate. I spent a couple of hours arguing over whether Ibsen had intended to support Hedda’s famous decision to kill herself at the end of the play in order to achieve a “beautiful death.” I felt Ibsen was critiquing aestheticism, which before the end of the 19^th century put notions of what is beautiful ahead even of the idea of saving one’s own life, romanticizing suicide in much the way Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther had done at the end of the previous century. My debate partner felt there was an extent to which Ibsen was romanticizing the beautiful death himself too. We read notes from Ibsen that he’d written after writing the play: “In the fourth act when Hedda finds out that he has shot himself, she is jubilant … [Eilert] had courage. … Life isn’t tragic ... Life is ridiculous … And that’s what I [Ibsen] can’t bear.” One of the notes seemed to imply Ibsen did not endorse Hedda’s view that shooting oneself through the bowels is less “beautiful” than through the temple. “Do you know what happens in the novels? All those who kill themselves – through the head – not in the stomach – How ridiculous – how baroque.” This debate is a dilemma each production potentially faces: In an age of trigger warnings for the mere mention of such themes, what do we make of a playwright who forces us to debate such a gruesome point. The famous conclusion of Hedda, which has been likened to a female Hamlet, shows that strange sensibility of Ibsen’s: not quite of his time and not quite out of it.

Byatt’s novel, which started all this reflection on Ibsen for me this year, quotes Ibsen on his own social awkwardness:

“I know that I have the failing of not coming close to those people who want to open up completely. I can never bring myself to bare myself. I have a feeling that all I have available in personal relations is a false expression of that which I bear deep within me, and which is really myself; therefore I prefer to keep it locked up inside, and that is why we sometimes seem to stand as if we were observing each other at a distance.”

The “rigid gnome” that was Ibsen, Byatt’s fictional biographer writes, “was obsessed with the idea of being himself. He was so very sure, it appeared, that he had a true self to be … Maybe this so-dreadfully desired, so elaborated real self was an absence of self, a freely-moving, flickering flame of knowledge and language, which should not be forced, or frozen, into any of the gestures required by the social touches and approaches through which most people discover themselves through others?”

Ibsen’s first great play, Peer Gynt, gave us the famous image of the self as an onion which when peeled leaves nothing on the inside. That’s the image Byatt is dancing around in the above prose. But there is another aspect to Ibsen’s elusive self: It is ever-present, gifting his works and damning them with that idiosyncratic uniqueness that is part of what it means to be human. Ibsen could never not be Ibsen, for better and for worse.