1828-1906 Selected Plays
Of ali the dramatists discussed in this Plan, Ibsen, though by no means the greatest or most readable, has perhaps had the widest influence on the modern theater. Single-handed he destroyed the lifeless, mechanical, "well-made play" that dom- inated Europe when he began his life work. He turned the theater into a fуrum for the discussion of often disruptive ideas. He introduced a new realism. He made plays out of people rather than situations. And, being partly responsible for Shaw [99], he is the grandfather of modern Western social drama.
The son of a Norwegian merchant who went bankrupt in Henrik^ eighth year, Ibsen passed through a difficult boyhood and youth. In his twenties he began to write poems and romantic historical dramas, but was at first no more successful as author than he was as stage manager and theater director. In 1864 he left Norway for Rome, on a traveling scholarship. For the next twenty-seven years, except for two brief visits home, he lived abroad, mainly in Germany and Italy. During this fertile period he wrote most of the plays that astounded, shocked, or delighted Europe. Mental illness clouded the last few years of his long and probably not very happy life. There are at least three ways of looking at Ibsen. To H.L. Mencken and many others he is no iconoclast but "a playmaker of astounding skill," a superlative craftsman without a message, whose originality consisted in taking ideas gen- erally accepted by intelligent people and giving them a novel setting: the stage. Mencken quotes with approval Ibsen's state- ment: "A dramatisfs business is not to answer questions, but merely to ask them.,>
However, to Ibsen's disciple George Bernard Shaw, the asking of questions, if they be the right ones, can itself be a revolutionary act; and the Plato [12] who recorded or created Sуcrates would agree with him. Shaw sees Ibsen's theater as the means by which the nineteenth-century middle class was enabled to free itself from false ideas of goodness, from what Shaw calls "idealism." To him Ibsen is essentially a teacher, we may even say a teacher of Shavianism. Whether or not Shaw's interpretation is accurate, it does seem fair to say that Ibsen's plays, particularly those dealing with marriage, the position of women, and the worship of convention, had a decisive effect on the ideas of his generation and the succeed- ing one. My collaborator on this book suggests that I also mention Ibsen's powerful influence in the non-Western world. He points out that translations of A DolVs House, for example, had a huge impact on the literary worlds of China and Japan: That one play helped to liberate an entire generation of writers.
There is still a third Ibsen, and that is Ibsen the poet, whom in translation we can only dimly glimpse. To Norwegians his early Peer Gynt, written in verse, is, though not at ali national- istic, a kind of epic, an ironic-fantastic rйsumй of the Norwegian character. It is possible that the so-called social plays, such as A DolVs House, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler, will soon be forgotten; and that the more difficult, imaginative, symbolic dramas (Peer Gynt, The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken) will eventually be ranked among the dramatic masterpieces of the last two centuries.
The plays here recommended are arranged in their order of composition. To my mind the finest are Peer Gynt and The Wild Duck, but there is no absolute agreement on Ibsen's best work. At any rate try Peer Gynt, A DolVs House, Ghosts, An
Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, 27ie Master Builder, and W/ien We Dead Atvaken.
C.F.
90
EMILY DICKINSON
1830-1886 Collected Poems
What has long fascinated readers of Emily Dickinson is the seeming discrepancy between the uneventfulness of her life and the depth of her insight into the human condition. She once wrote "The Soul selects her own society—/Then—shuts the door—and again, "This is my letter to the World/That never wrote to Me—The door has opened, the letter has been answered, and this solitary has now become part of the canon of the workTs major poets.
Emily Dickinson came of good family, was educated at Amherst Academy and Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary until the age of eighteen. She never married and from her late thirties to her death she did not stir from her familys house and her beloved garden. From her early forties she dressed only in white. While her letters reveal certain romantic attachments, her erotic energy seems to have displayed itself only in her poetry.
She wrote some 1775 poems, of which only a tiny handful were published in her lifetime. Thus, in a sense, her work is a series of terse soliloquies, ali untitled. Even today her tem- perament and her way—willful—with the language are so original that we can't fit her in. She is the despair of critics. What can they do with lines such as these?
And then, in Sovereign Barns to dwell— And dream the Days away, The Grass so little has to do I wish I were a Hay—
When reading Dickinson, it's best not to expect immediate comprehensibility. Sometimes the thought is so dense or so odd as to confound most of us. Sometimes the syntax itself is off-putting. Try at first merely to submit yourself to the pitch and tone of her voice. Read twenty or thirty poems, no more, at one go, and get what you can. However, not ali of us will be satisfied with this impressionistic reading experience. For those who wish help in decoding Dickmson's odd metaphors and eccentrically slanted approach to such major themes as love and religion, I would suggest recourse to such works as Cynthia Griffin Wolff s Emily Dickinson (Knopf, 1986).
On occasion the poet reflects the sturdy individualism of Thoreau [80] and Emerson [69] and is often characterized as a transcendentalist:
I wonder how the Rich—may feel— An Indiaman—An Earl— I deem that I—with but a Crumb— Am Sovereign of them ali—
One collection of her poems published in 1945 was titled Bolts of Melody. The phrase is hers, and illuminates the Creative ebullition she felt when writing verse. One of her trade- marks, the dash (see preceding quotation), does not prove that she was ignorant of punctuation. It is more probable that the dash expresses the physical excitement accompanying compo- sition, the quick inhalations and exhalations as ideas and words crowd in upon her mind.
For human society Emily Dickinson substituted her gar- den. Flowers, bees, the oriole and spider, the dandelion, the twig, the leaf, the Caterpillar worms—these, to the recluse, are her constant companions, her social circle. Out of these she made the metaphors that expressed her sense of her own life. She capitalized on its seeming restriction. She writes "A Prison gets to be a friend—
Emily Dickinson wanted an audience, but in the end wrote only for herself. It took many years to become clear that she wrote also for us.
C.F.
91
LEWIS CARROLL
1832-1898
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass
Some may think Lewis Carroll has strayed into this rather for- midable list through some error. But he belongs here, for he proved, possibly not quite knowing what he was doing, that the world of nonsense may have strange and complex relations with the world of sense. I do not include him because he is a juvenile classic, for in that case we should also have Grimm and Andersen and Collodi and E.B. White and a dozen others. I include him because he continues to hold as much interest for grownups as for children.
In fact he is more alive today than he was in the Sixties and Seventies of the last century, when the two Alice books were published. He continues to fascinate not only ordinary men and women of ali countries and races, but the most sophisti- cated intellects: critics such as Edmund Wilson, W.H. Auden [126], Virginia Woolf [111]; logicians and scientists such as Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Arthur Stanley Eddington; and philosophers, semanticists, and psychoanalysts by the score.