Listen to Ibsen.

Shifting to Henrik Ibsen today. The best thing he has for me is his sense of authenticity, that one has to (must) live life in an authentic way. What is to live life in an authentic way for Ibsen? It is to subject life to scrutiny, to examine yourself closely, and to live your life as you feel your life must be lived. This drama of vocation can be found since his first play, Catiline, passing through Brand and Ghosts, and ending in When We Dead Awaken.

In the Ibsen studies his biography is rejected in favour of other lines of interpretations (post-modernism and the Post-Truth era, pals), but one can see how close the biography is to the works (and how both are closely related) by reading the main biographies around. There are four great ones:

Life of Ibsen, by Halvdan Koht, 1954 revised edition.

Ibsen, by Michael Meyer, 1971, abridged edition.

Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography, by Robert Ferguson, 1996.

Henrik Ibsen: The Man & The Mask, by Ivo de Figueiredo, 2019.

Of these four ones, I would chose the one by Robert Ferguson in 1996, as it is more critical. The last one, so much publicised as a great work, is rather dull and unsubstantial. It disappointed me greatly. The one to get is the one by Robert Ferguson. It still remains in my mind as an act of courage and criticism. It shows the character of the biographer, his mind, his way of thinking and valuing the work of Ibsen. For me this is the most important thing in a biographer: dare to express your view; do not follow academia in santifying an artist. Do not create an icon with your book, but show us the man, with all his imperfections. Those imperfections make the artist more humane, closer to us, authentic. It may be that Figueiredo achieved that (I have many selected passages in the book, as I see now), but I do not remember the reading of his book to be as powerful and intense as the one by Ferguson. For example, this paragraph by Ferguson never appears in the other three: “Its antidemocratic preaching, and eugenic theory that the Nazis later rendered scandalous, mean that An Enemy of the People is now an embarrassment to many of Ibsenʼs admirers.” Count me in. 

Or this one by the end: “By the time of When We Dead Awaken the mystical element present in varying degrees in Romersholm, The Lady from the Sea, The Master Builder and Little Eyolf had become a dominante feature ... In these autobiographical terms [a sacrilegious thing to think for an Ibsenian scholar like Brian Johnston with his Hegelian interpretation of Ibsen] the pattern of relationships and their development in When We Dead Awaken is simple [sacrilege upon sacrilege!]. Ibsen/Rubek announces to his lifetime wife Suzannah/Irene that he has finished dabbling with Bardach/Maja figures and is returning to her, to the font of standards and supreme goals which she represents to him ... In Brand the hero dies alone in his avalanche. For Ibsen personally perhaps one of the most important aspects of When We Dead Awaken was that Rubek and his old love are allowed to  die together.” This is a courageous thing to say in academia, pals. But it has to be said one time and again. 

Imagine what it will be like to interpret Shakespeareʼs works like this, in a biographical way...., well, you donʼt have to, because we have it already; it is what the Oxfordian theory has been doing for almost a century when we discovered that Edward de Vere was the mind behind the Shakespeare pseudonym (sacrilegious thought!). And that is why I value this kind of interpretations. As an artist myself, I know that I write what I live, think, suffer from, aspire, want, love, desire, respect, dream about, defend, enjoy. An artist is a man, not a structure with signs to be interpreted freely by an exegete. For post-podernism, truth has no value, and the artist has no preference. And that is why post-modernism in academia brought us our present Post-Truth era, as Lee McIntyre says in his short but great work Post-Truth (The MIT Press, 2018; especially Chapter Six, “Did Postmodernism Lead to Post-Truth?”). Robert Jammes did the same biographical thing for Göngora in his magnum opus of 1967 and no one, not even that great Göngorist who is Antonio Carreira, his heir, has surpassed him. Truth matters, the work matters, and the author matters. Listen to Ibsen.

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Nota Bene. A great work to read on Ibsenʼs mind and work is Ibsenʼs Houses: Architectural Metaphor and the Modern Uncanny, by Mark B. Sandberg (Cambridge University Press, 2015). A good question to study for an Ibsenian scholar would be this: Why the author sounds frustrated with life if precisely his life was to be that of a writer? Rubek-Ibsen is closing his Realist Cycle with the feeling that he has not lived his life, but lost it writing about it. It is clear that the joy of living (joie de vivre) is something lost to Ibsen as philosopher: he wrote about it, but could not feel it inside himself. All this lead to this answer: Ibsen chose his literary vocation for power and recognition, not for itself, for otherwise Rubek-Ibsen would not be feeling like a loser at the end of his life. Rubek-Ibsen had honour, fame, recognition at the end of his life. Once he had all this, like Tolstoi, he felt empty with his literary vocation. Santayana shows the exact opposite of this.