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The Influence of Ibsen on Joyce
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
James Joyce's debt to the past has been repeatedly and sometimes indiscriminately acknowledged. I wish to show that there is an undefined debt to the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen which it is fruitful to recognize and to elucidate. It is a debt far more inclusive than that of a merely literary influence. It is rather that of a fiery and consuming ideal, adopted freely and with love in adolescence, and warmly invading James Joyce's conduct both as man and as artist. Indeed, the first three decades (roughly) of Joyce's life were subtly and pervasively, consciously and unconsciously, modeled along the central lines of Ibsen's own biography.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1945
References
1 Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941), pp. 53-62.
2 Ibid., pp. 16, 56, 49-52, 58, 75.
3 James A. Joyce, Ibsen's New Drama (London: Ulysses Bookshop, 1930), reprinted from Fortnightly Review (London, April, 1900).
4 See Joyce's awareness of this in Ibsen's New Drama, where he wrote: “It maybe questioned whether any man has held so firm an empire over the thinking world in modern times.” Ibid., p. 1.
5 Ernest Boyd, Ireland's Literary Renaissance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), pp. 298-303.
6 Gorman, op. cit., p. 72.
7 Boyd, op. cit., p. 294. Amusingly, the second performance of the Irish Literary Theatre on May 9, 1899, was Martyn's The Heather Field which, although clearly deriving from Ibsen, yet pleased the popular taste well enough to act as anodyne to the stormy opposition which had greeted the previous day's performance of The Countess Kathleen by William Butler Yeats. Another version of this incident, however, is given by Gorman (see p. 60) in which both the Martyn and Yeats plays are said to have been performed jointly on May 8, 1899, and to have aroused widespread opposition.
8 Ibid., p. 295.
9 Miriam Franc, Ibsen in England (Boston: Four Seas Company, 1919), p. 53.
10 Ibid., p. 53. The piece was called “Little Eyolf: A Plea for Reticence” and appeared in the January issue.
11 Ibid., p. 69.
12 Gorman, op. cit., p. 59. Joyce was for four years the only student in the class.
13 Ibid., p. 59.
14 Franc, op. cit. Archer made a practice of translating the plays very soon after they had been released in the original. By 1891, five volumes of Ibsen's plays were available in English. As early as 1894 there were three English translations of Brand alone.
15 Gorman, op. cit., p. 60.
16 Ibid., p. 69.
17 Henrik Ibsen, Works, ed. William Archer and C. H. Herford (New York: Charles Scribners and Sons, 1911) iv, 231.
18 William Archer, Brand (London: Wm. Heinemann, 1894), pp. xxiv ff.
19 Ibid., p. xxxv.
20 Gorman, op cit., p. 72.
21 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Modern Library, 1928), p. 204.
22 Amusingly enough, Ernest Boyd, in an over-zealous attempt to claim Joyce for the Irish Renaissance as a “profoundly Irish writer” says A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man is to the Irish novel what the Wanderings of Oisin was to Irish poetry and The Playboy of the Western World to Irish drama—the unique and significant work which lifts the genre out of the commonplace into the national literature.“ Op. cit., p. 404.
23 Gorman, op. cit., p. 72.
24 Trolls is a favorite word in the Ibsenian vocabulary.
25 Gorman, op. cit., p. 73.
26 Ibid., p. 70. Italics in this passage are mine and serve to emphasize the immediacy of Ibsen's appeal to Joyce as well as the ethical and artistic code which he derived from the master's life and work.
27 Gorman, op. cit., p. 83.
28 A. E. Zucker, Ibsen, The Master Builder (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1929). Chapter XI, The Last Years in Christiania, pp. 235-288, is perhaps the best description in English of this period in Ibsen's life.
29 Joyce, J., A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, p. 291.
30 Gorman, op. cit., p. 94.
31 Zucker, op. cit., p. 44.
32 Gorman, op. cit., p. 95.
33 Ibid., pp. 106-107.
34 Ibid., p. 110.
35 Zucker, op. cit., p. 10.
36 Joyce corresponded voluminously during his years of exile with his father, his sisters and brothers; he brought first a brother and then a sister to live with him during various phases of his Italian and Austrian residence.
37 Ibid., p. 11.
38 Vivienne Koch, “An Approach to the Homeric Content of Joyce's Ulysses.” Maryland Quarterly (July, 1944), pp. 119-130.
39 It is interesting for what it may mean as childhood conditioning that both Joyce's father and Ibsen's father had much in common. Both men were imprudent, improvident, convivial, and witty. Both took their families from relative wealth in childhood years to a mean and shabby poverty. Both sons thus experienced the same kind of shock and had the same adjustment to make. Like Daniel Heire in The League of Youth modeled on Ibsen's father, Joyce's Simon Dedalus in A Portrait and Ulysses is modeled on his own. See: Gorman, pp. 6, 7, 13, 49, 76. Zucker, pp. 3, 5, 7, 12. See also Ibsen's letter to Peter Hansen in which Peer Gynt's autobiographical cast is made clear. Of the pious Ase he writes “My own Mother—with the necessary exaggeration served as the model …” Works, iv, 6. And to Georg Brandes, years later, he wrote: “In writing Peer Gynt I had the circumstances of my own childhood before me when I described the life in the house of the rich Jon Gynt.” Ibid.
40 Archer, op. cit., p. 71.
41 Ibid., p. 67.
42 Ibid., p. 94.
43 Ibid., p. 139.
44 Gorman, op. cit., p. 226.
45 Harry Levin, James Joyce (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941). Mr. Levin identifies Exiles with When We Dead Awaken (this has been the general tendency) on the grounds of the recurrence of “the basic situation of a set-to of partners” (p. 21). Mr. Levin's estimate of Exiles seems somewhat over-simplified: “The limitations of his drama are those of a literal-minded subservience to another convention, to the school of Ibsen and the naturalists” (p. 37). Mr. Levin errs, I believe, in classifying When We Dead Awaken with “the school … of the naturalists.” When We Dead Awaken is, of all Ibsen's plays, the most highly symbolical and bears little relation, technically, to his plays in the “naturalist” manner.
Mr. Gorman, on the other hand, sees Exiles as Joyce's “final compliment to the old master beneath whose dark reasonable actuality vibrating with symbolic inferences he had so long remained a willing captive” (p. 226). He is quick to point out, however, that this did not “set a final period” to Joyce's interest in Ibsen and that as late as 1934 “he was inspired to one of his finest unpublished poems” the Epilogue to Ibsen's “Ghosts” by a performance of that play in Paris (p. 226).
46 James Joyce, Exiles (New York: W. Huebsch & Co., 1918), pp. 13-14.
47 This accusation echoes, as well, Irene's accusation of Rubek as a woman-killer in When We Dead Awaken when she says she made him the gift of her “young, living soul. And that gift left me empty within-soulless … it was that I died of, Arnold.” See When We Dead Awaken, Works, xi, 412.
48 Joyce, Exiles, p. 116.
49 See footnote 38.
50 Joyce, Ulysses, Modern Library (New York, 1935), pp. 204-205.
51 Gorman, op. cit., p. 226.
52 Ibid., p. 227.
53 The theme is clearly announced in the Portrait: “He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood rather to them in the mystical kinship of fosterage, foster child and foster brother,” p. 111.
54 Naturally, it is absurd to argue from this, as does Boyd, that this makes Joyce a peculiarly Irish writer. The corresponding claim for Ibsen as a peculiarly Norwegian genius is equally suspect.
55 Zucker, op. cit., p. 144.
56 Gorman, op. cit., pp. 184-185, 188, 194.
57 Zucker, op. cit., p. 145.
58 Gorman, op. cit., pp. 138-139, 140.
59 Ibid., pp. 140-141.
60 Levin, op. cit., p. 21.
61 Brand, p. lxxix. In 1887 Ibsen wrote to a friend: “Brand came about as the result of something I had lived through … I felt it necessary to free myself through poetic forms from something which I had inwardly done with.” Although the tone differs, this is not too remote from Joyce's squib on the function of the artist qua “Katharsis.”
62 Halvdan Koht, The Life of Ibsen, 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1931), i, 277.
63 Self-mutilation, apart from its literal meaning, is suggestive as a symbol of self-imposed exile; a voluntary cutting oneself off from one's own—that is, family, country, etc.
64 Ibsen, Henrik, Eleven Plays, Modern Library (New York, no date), pp. 452-454. I do not quote the Archer verse translation of this passage because the meaning seems needlessly obscured.
65 Ibid., p. 454. Another Gyntian strain in Joyce's work appears in the brothel scene in Ulysses. Here, the device of the interchange of personalities (while related to the Circe story and to the Walpurgis Nacht scene in Goethe's Faust) seems also to have been influenced by the episode in the insane asylum in Peer Gynt. (See Act IV, Scene xiii.)
66 Written in Christiania in 1862. Ibsen, Works, i, 297.
67 Koht, op. cit., i, 192.
68 A sprightlier fellow than one might expect from his closeness to the author!
69 Works, op. cit., i, 364.
70 Ibid., p. 430.
71 Ibid., p. 423.
72 Ibid., p. 470.
73 Ibid., pp. 471-472, 481.
74 Weigand develops the analogies with Ibsen's life very fully. See Hermann J. Weigand, The Modern Ibsen (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1925), pp. 299-309.
75 Works, xi, 405.
76 Ibid., p. 480.
77 Joyce, Ibsen's New Drama, p. 29.
78 Weigand, op. cit., p. 235.
79 The climax of that play is reached with Wangel's decision not to influence the choice his wife must make between himself and the Stranger. “… now you can choose in freedom; and on your own responsibility, Ellida.” Works, ix, 407.
80 Joyce, Exiles, p. 90.
81 Ibid., p. 86.
82 Ibid., p. 86.
83 Ibid., p. 154.
84 Works, xi, 449, 450.
85 For a fuller discussion of Joyce's drawing of the artist and the creative process I must refer the reader elsewhere. See my article cited in footnote 38.
86 Works, op. cit., xi, 448.
87 Levin, op. cit., p. 184.
88 Ibid., p. 154.
89 Ibid., pp. 204-205.
89a Since this article was written, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson has been published. This study would seem to suggest further Ibsenian sources (on the allusive level, at least) for various passages in Finnegans Wake.
90 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, 1934), p. 179.
91 David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930).
92 Gorman, op. cit., p. 164.
93 Ibid., p. 186.
94 Ibid.
95 Compare with Ibsen's letter to Georg Brandes, Jan. 30, 1875: “Why do you and all of us whose standpoint is a European one, occupy such an isolated position at home? … because the people at home think parochially, feel parochially, and regard everything from a parochial … point of view… . Only entire nations can join in great intellectual movements… . A change in the theory of life and of the world is not a parochial matter; and we Scandinavians, as compared with the other European nations, have not yet got beyond the parish-council standpoint. And do you ever find a parish-council looking for, and preparing the way for ”the third kingdom.“ Letters of Henrik Ibsen, transl. by John Nelson Laurvik and Mary Morison (New York: Fox Duffield and Company, 1905), p. 209.
96 Joyce, Exiles, p. 45.