MARXISM, PROPAGANDA AND SHAW: VARIETIES OF IBSENITE CRITICISM

'I feel I must do something to make people understand our Ibsen a little more than they do,' wrote Eleanor Marx to Havelock Ellis in late December 1885. So invitations went out to a 'few people worth reading Nora to'; and on 15 January 1886, in their flat in Great Russell Street, Karl Marx's youngest daughter and her common-law husband, Edward Aveling, played host to one of the first readings in England of an Ibsen play - A Doll's House in the Henrietta Frances Lord translation. Bernard Shaw was a favoured invitee, playing the part of Krogstad to the Mrs Linde of William Morris's daughter, May. And the evening turned out to be an auspicious one for 'Ibsenism', a meeting point for the plethora of '-isms' - Marxism, Socialism and Fabianism - that hailed Ibsen as a spokesman of their cause.

Before the Great Russell Street soirée, Ibsen had been the subject of articles by proselytizing but generally apolitical English Scandinavianists, like Edmund Gosse, who were intent on making him known beyond the boundaries of Norway. Now Aveling was giving rabble-rousing papers on Ghosts and stirring up debate in the Playgoers' Club at which (writes Shaw) 'Mrs Aveling and I, being of course seasoned socialist mob orators, were much in the position of a pair of terriers dropped into a pit of rats.' Eleanor Marx was spreading the Ibsenist gospel beyond the confines of Bloomsbury to the working-class districts of London and the Midlands.

FREEDOM, TRUTH AND SOCIETY - RHETORIC AND REALITY

During the night of 9 January 1871, a young Dane lay awake in his hospital bed in Rome writing. He was committing to paper a poem to which he had given the title 'To Henrik Ibsen'. He had recently received a letter from Ibsen - a letter carrying a powerful appeal to him to put himself at the head of the 'revolution of the human spirit' which the age cried out for. In the poem which formed his enthusiastic response, the young Dane - the critic Georg Brandes (1842-1927) - described how all those mendacious and authoritarian forces of the contemporary age would be brought low when 'the intellectuals' made their revolt. And he raised the banner of freedom and progress with the words: 'Truth and Freedom are one and the same.'

Time after time in the years that followed, Ibsen was himself to raise this same revolutionary banner - with truth and freedom as the central watchwords. In later years these concepts could sound both abstract and ambiguous; nevertheless, within their historical context, they served as a battle cry in the struggle against the prevailing situation. 'Truth' alone - that truth of the new age such as a Brandes and an Ibsen saw it — could achieve liberation. Without truth there could be no change, no genuine 'freedom'.

Brand is a work that has invited terms of discontinuity. It was Ibsen's response to what Halvdan Koht called the volcanic events of the year 1864, an eruption of bitterness over the death of his National-Romantic illusions about a modern Scandinavian brotherhood to match the heroic past. Georg Brandes, Ibsen's Danish critic and ally, referred to 'a shocking, yes overwhelming, impression of having come face to face with a strong and indignant genius, before whose penetrating gaze weakness feels constrained to lower its eyes'. Bjorn Hemmer has identified it as a milestone in Scandinavian literature, leading away from the current aesthetic and idealistic tendency into new fields, committed and contemporary; Brand became, and has remained, the most powerful drama of ideas in the whole of Scandinavian literature. And it is primarily by the ideas that criticism has been at once inspired and divided.

Brand has been taken to be a Christian and an anti-Christian work; the enactment of a specifically theological debate between Old and New Testament concepts of divinity; the story of an individual fighting an existential battle to define his own religious identity; a celebration and an expose of idealism, secular or religious. It has been derived, for approval or blame, from different philosophical systems - Kierkegaard, Hegel, Nietzsche - and related to mythic patterns of universal extent. Brand has been seen as both a vindication of Romanticism and its indictment; or, more recently, as the victim of psychological or socio-psychological conditioning. The ambivalence concentrates, finally, on the meaning of the last scene; does it imply Brand's acceptance or rejection, and in what terms?

fougault among the historians – part i

Foucault's work always had an ambivalent relation to established academic disciplines, but almost all his books are at least superficially classifiable as histories. His first major work, in particular, seems to proclaim its status in the title: Histoire de la folie à l'age classique. One plausible way of trying to understand and evaluate this seminal book is by assessing its status as a work of history.

The reactions of professional historians to Histoire de la foile seem, at first reading, sharply polarized. There are many acknowledgments of its seminal role, beginning with Robert Mandrou's early review in Annales, characterizing it as a “beautiful book” that will be “of central importance for our understanding of the Classical period.” Twenty years later, Michael MacDonald confirmed Mandrou's prophecy: “Anyone who writes about the history of insanity in early modern Europe must travel in the spreading wake of Michel Foucault's famous book, Madness and Civilization.” Later endorsements have been even stronger. Jan Goldstein: “For both their empirical content and their powerful theoretical perspectives, the works of Michel Foucault occupy a special and central place in the historiography of psychiatry.” Roy Porter: “Time has proved Madness and Civilization far the most penetrating work ever written on the history of madness.” More specifically, Foucault has recently been heralded as a prophet of “the new cultural history.”

To many of his readers, Foucault's preoccupations with subjectivity and practices of the self in his later writings have been puzzling and disappointing – even embarrassing. His turn toward an esthetics of the self appeared on the surface to fly in the face of his earlier proclamation of the death of man and his anti-authoritarian predilections for anonymous authorship. Moreover, it seemed to mark a retreat into the self and away from the more politically engaged texts such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. Had Foucault, the notorious “post-humanist” critic, recanted? This very question manifests a now outmoded concern for coherence and continuity – in short, for identity – in an author's work and life. Yet, if we are to take Foucault at his word, each of his works can be understood as “part of [his] own biography.”

In one of his last essays, one that is uncharacteristic in its positive and programmatic format, Michel Foucault asked: “What is modern philosophy?… modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised by Kant two centuries ago: What is Enlightenment?” Foucault, echoing Kant, answered that Enlightenment is not the name of an epoch but the exit from immaturity to maturity. The possibility of that exit lies in the relationship the philosopher establishes with the use of reason at the present historical moment. Such a philosopher is not searching for origins and uncovering totalities, nor sculpting Utopias. A modern philosopher, one who is curious about the specificity of the present moment, is someone seeking to find out what difference it makes to be thinking today. This is a critical task in the Kantian sense of an exploration of limits. The task is to inquire into the conditions in which the use of reason is legitimate “in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped.” Such an inquiry entails reflection on the limits of the individual's free use of reason, the political conditions under which that use is possible, and a diagnosis of the current state of affairs. It sits at the crossroads of “critical reflection and reflection on history.” As we will see, it requires an understanding of thought as a practice and critical thought as a specific kind of situated testing and reflection on the results of that testing which is thoroughly active.

There can have been few periods of theatrical malaise as extended and as acute as that of the 1870s and early 1880s. Theatre, it was generally agreed by most who wrote about it, did not reflect the intellectual and scientific advances of the nineteenth century, nor did it address the fundamental problems created by an age of industrialization and urbanization. Zola's famous call-to-arms, the essay 'Naturalism in the Theatre' (1880), was but the most inflammatory contribution to what was becoming, by the late 1870s, an escalating critical assault upon the theatre. Zola accused French and, by implication, European drama of being mechanical, superficial, lacking in authentic characters, and perpetuating the outworn cliches of Romanticism. These objections were shared by critics elsewhere. The brothers Hart, leading theorists of the German naturalist movement, bewailed the decadence of German theatre, claiming that no great drama had been written since Schiller and that acting had been in decline since the Napoleonic wars. Everything presented on stage was intended either to complement the 'trivial, shallow taste of the public' or to underpin those values that created a complacent, materialistic society. In England things were little better; Harley Granville-Barker, looking back on the 1880s, suggests that theatre was all 'a rather childish affair'.

A recent ethics textbook aimed at university-level students, in listing the presuppositions of any ethical system, begins, “Singular moral judgments are never merely singular.” By their very nature moral judgments are implicitly universalizable, and only “a peculiar kind of irrationality” that “has come to infect contemporary thinking” could allow one to dispute this self-evident truth. Aristotle was mystified by those who claimed that a characteristic function could be found for an eye, a hand, a foot, a carpenter, or a tanner, but that none could be found for human beings in general. An ethical principle, according to Kant, must be universally applicable if it is to be considered as having any validity whatsoever.

Foucault, however, disconcerts. By claiming that there are no universally applicable principles, no normative standards, “no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life,” Foucault, according to Charles Taylor, relinquishes any critical power that his historical analyses might have. Without such a “normative yardstick,” according to Jiirgen Habermas, Foucault's historical analyses cannot be genuinely critical. Indeed, Foucault's skepticism with regard to the notions of universal human nature or universal rationality is clear. He associates universal human nature with the Enlightenment doctrine of humanism, which provides a vision of the human essence with which men and women are expected to conform, thus offering a universal criterion of moral judgment.

In his Introduction to the 1957 edition of his Collected Plays, Arthur Miller singled out certain aspects of Ibsen's work for comment:

In 1873 - close to the mid-point of half a century of creative authorship - Ibsen published the drama which he himself regarded as his 'hovedvserk', his 'main work' or masterpiece: Emperor and Galilean. It was not to be a historical drama of the merely traditional kind. Ibsen's choice of subtitle - 'a world-historic drama' - betrayed his ambitions.

It was a vast historical canvas which he then unfolded, much broader than that of any of his earlier dramas. Years of painstaking labour, including the close study of historical sources, went into this evocation of characters and events from a distant past: the Roman Empire of the fourth century AD and the last twelve years of the life of Julian the Apostate.

Ibsen himself admitted in his correspondence [iv, 603-9]x that the historical material he had been grappling with was enormous, and that he realized that he had sacrificed years of his life to this mammoth work, a 'double' drama in ten Acts. To call forth this historical epoch had been 'a Herculean task'. Nevertheless he was persuaded that he had succeeded in re-creating these historical characters in 'realistic' form. This had however not been his main concern: his perspective of history here had been — to use Nietzsche's terminology — neither antiquarian nor monumental.

From the very start of his career, Henrik Ibsen learned the compulsions of working to a rigorous deadline. When in the autumn of 1851 he was offered a post at the newly established theatre in Bergen, his contract stipulated that he was to 'assist the theatre as dramatic author'. The unwritten assumption was that he would be expected to come forward with an original dramatic work, all ready and rehearsed for performance, every 2 January - the anniversary of the founding of the theatre. This, as he soon discovered, was to be achieved alongside a punishing regime of daily practical work in the theatre as 'Instructeur'.

His first 'anniversary' occasion, on 2 January 1852, clearly allowed him insufficient time to compose a new full-scale dramatic work; but he did go some way towards meeting his obligations by writing a 'Prologue', partly in rhymed and partly in unrhymed verse, the sentiments of which placed the young author very firmly behind the nationalistic endeavours of the new theatre [i, 619-20].

The succeeding five anniversary occasions — and the nature and quality of the works performed — clearly testify that during these years Ibsen found himself having to work at the composition of his dramas under severe time pressure. On the first of these, in 1853, St John's Night flopped, running for only two performances; although at the time he was quite ready to acknowledge the play as having come from his pen, in later life he tried to disown it [see i, 686].

against interpretation

For all Foucault's reservations about modernity and authorship, his writings are typical of a modernist author in their demand for interpretation. Any writing, of course, requires some interpretation as part of our efforts to evaluate, refine, extend, or appreciate its achievement; or to provide special background that readers outside the author's culture or historical period may require. But certain authors – in literature, the twentieth-century modernists are among the best examples – present themselves as so immediately and intrinsically “difficult” as to require special interpretative efforts even for those well equipped to understand them. The Wasteland, Cantos, and Finnegans Wake, for example, require explanation, even for culturally and historically attuned readers, in a way that Paradise Lost, the Essay on Man, and Emma do not. Philosophy, at least since Kant and Hegel, has also provided its share of “intrinsically obscure” writing. Although it may not be easy to formulate the precise difference, it is clear that Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger, and Derrida require a sort of interpretation that Russell, Dewey, and Quine do not.

Foucault's penchant, particularly prior to Discipline and Punish, for the modernist obscure explains much of the demand for interpretations of his work. But the need to interpret Foucault sits ill with his own desire to escape general interpretative categories. More important, as the enterprise of interpretation is usually understood, interpreting Foucault is guaranteed to distort his thought. Interpretation typically means finding a unifying schema through which we can make overall sense of an author's works.

INTERVIEW BY JANET GARTON

JG: You have produced three Ibsen plays, one realistic, one historical and one poetic: Pillars of the Community with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977, The Vikings at Helgeland in Bergen in 1983, and Peer Gynt in Oslo in 1990. Why these three plays?

JB: It is a peculiar selection and it doesn't necessarily represent my interest in Ibsen. In general I think I tend to go for the flawed masterpiece or the early play or the undiscovered play, more often than not. So there is a certain common ground here, though it might not seem so. In the case of all the Ibsen plays I have done, either I was asked to or I chose to or I was required to adapt in some way, and this is something I always find myself drawn to. Pillars of the Community was the first major production outside Shakespeare that I had ever done at that time for the RSC. I pushed for it because I thought it was a potentially wonderful play. It is one of those plays that has to have a good group cast and there was a very good group available. I was also fascinated by all the problems of how to bring off the ending. I suppose on the surface it is like certain Elizabethan plays: it's plain sailing for four Acts and then goes crazy at the end. So there were resemblances.

At the outset of his career, as a stage director in Bergen and subsequently in Christiania (now Oslo), Ibsen developed a keen sense of the practicalities and performance conditions of the living theatre that never left him. That intimate knowledge of the stage and its conventions which the playwright derived from these early experiences fostered his extraordinary sensitivity to the poetry of environment in the theatre. In staging his own early saga dramas, he taught himself to write a carefully visualized, highly charged mise-en-sèene into his plays, aimed at concretizing the psychological states and spiritual conditions of the characters, and designed to create a specific mood that would enhance and strengthen the inner action. Costumes, settings, objects, colours, sounds and lighting effects thus remained, from the beginning of his career to its close, the basic syntax of his dramatic poetry. In turn, the intense theatricality inherent in his work has been the source of its continued vitality in performance, long after the specific theatrical conditions for which a given play seems intended have changed irrevocably.

The philosophers who have considered Cervantes's Don Quixote to be a major philosophical event can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, to my knowledge only two have done so: Auguste Comte and Michel Foucault. If Comte had written a history of madness – and he could have – he would have made room for Cervantes, for he referred to Don Quixote more than once in defining madness as an excess of subjectivity and as a passion for countering the contradictions of experience by endlessly complicating the interpretations that experience can have. Yet the author of L'Histoire de la folie turned to Descartes, not Cervantes, for help in presenting the Classical era's idea of madness. Conversely, in Les Mots et les choses, Cervantes and Don Quixote are honored with four brilliant pages, and Descartes is mentioned just two or three times. The single Cartesian text cited, a short passage from the Regulae, comes up only by virtue of the manifest subordination of the notion of measure to the notion of order in the idea of mathesis. And probably also by virtue of the precocious use of the Regulae in La Logique de Port-Royal, Foucault elevates that hitherto neglected account of the logic of signs and grammar to the status of a seventeenth-century masterwork. By this striking displacement of the sites where they might have been expected to be invoked as witnesses, Descartes and Cervantes come to be invested with adjudicative or critical power. Descartes is one of the artisans who set out the standards that resulted in the relegation of madness to the asylum space, where nineteenth-century pathologists found it as an object of knowledge.

In presenting the topic of Michel Foucault's significance as a writer of the history of ethics, I have two main goals. First, I hope to be able to elucidate Foucault's own aims in shifting his attention, in his last writings, to what he himself called “ethics.” These aims, in my opinion, have been widely misinterpreted and even more widely ignored, and the result has been a failure to come to terms with the conceptual and philosophical distinctiveness of Foucault's last works. Volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality are about sex in roughly the way that Discipline and Punish is about the prison. As the modern prison serves as a reference point for Foucault to work out his analytics of power, so ancient sex functions as the material around which Foucault elaborates his conception of ethics. Although the history of sex is, obviously, sexier than the history of ethics, it is this latter history that oriented Foucault's last writings. Foucault once remarked to me, as he had to others, that “sex is so boring.” He used this remark in different ways on different occasions, but one thing he meant by it was that what made sex so interesting to him had little to do with sex itself. His focus on the history of ancient sex, its interest for him, was part of his interest in the history of ancient ethics.

Beckett's plays of the 1970s and 1980s form a well-defined grouping: we can refer to them as 'the late plays' with confidence. The pairing of Waiting for Godot and Endgame has generally proved a helpful critical move, even if these, the 'longer plays', cannot sensibly be referred to as a period grouping (they are hardly 'early'). But what of the major stage plays which come between these groupings: Krapp's last tape (1958), Happy days (1961) and Play (1963)? Are there critical rather than merely chronological reasons for regarding them as forming a micro-sequence? Is it helpful to group them together?

We can begin to answer these questions by observing the centrality to all three plays of monologue. Waiting for Godot and Endgame both contain monologues; but Krapp2019s; last tape, Happy days and Play, different as they are, are all essentially monological. Even though none of the three consists entirely of a single voice speaking, the radical treatment in all of them of the isolated consciousness invites definition in terms of monologue. There is an interesting complication, however: monologue in Beckett tends, paradoxically, to yield more voices than one. Hamm in Endgame offers a model of the process: ’babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark‘ (E, 45). Monologue is never single: Krapp has his tape recorder to multiply voices, Winnie her quotations and ‘voices’, and the inquisitor-light of Play interlaces no less than three monologues into a single brutal relay. If as a sequence these three plays make monologue central, they also render it problematic. Far from revealing and confirming individual identity, as we might expect the mode to do, monologue in these plays tends to destabilize and disperse it.