Ibsen's Language: Literary Text and Theatrical Context

Author(s): Inga-Stina Ewbank

Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 9, Theatrical Literature Special Number
(1979), pp. 102-115
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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Ibsen's Language: Literary Text and

Theatrical Context
INGA-STINA EWBANK
Bedford College, London

This is not a paper on the problems of translating Ibsen, although the

questions I wish to raise have come out of the experience of being involved,
as a translator, in two recent London productions of Ibsen plays.' 'I do but
ask; my call is not to answer', Ibsen wrote in his verse letter to Brandes while
he was working on Pillars of the Community; and I should like to think that this

exploration could be carried out in something of the same spirit, which I take
to be one not of evasiveness, or reprehensible vagueness, but of concern for
asking the right questions. For it seems to me, when it comes to considering

Ibsen's texts, and in particular the part played by his language in the

dramatic effect and significance of those texts, that we have tended not to
ask enough questions, or to ask the wrong ones, or to press too readily for

easy answers. The qualities of Ibsen's prose, his personal handling of the
general characteristics of the Danish-Norwegian language he wrote in, are
not easily open to analysis, and especially not to analysis carried out with the
expectation of finding what criticism of the last forty or so years has taught
us to look for in 'poetic' drama: semantic ambiguities, complexities of syntax
and, above all, 'the kind of volatility or ductility of Shakespeare's or Racine's
metaphors'.2 Unlike Strindberg, Ibsen had nothing Shakespearian about his
verbal imagination, if by that we mean the associative power of thinking in
images. If that is what we look for we shall find Ibsen's language flat, thin,
lifeless, vague, and all the other adjectives which Scrutiny used to bestow on it

and which have recently cropped up again in two books presenting Ibsen
as a prosaic and pretentious writer with a spurious 'poetic' reputation.3
It seems that it is necessary to point out, with an Ibsenite obviousness, that
there are other kinds of verbal imagination as well. My contention is that
Ibsen's kind, his sense and use of language, is one very much at the service of
the theatrical context and governed by it. (Incidentally, I think there is more

of that quality in the infinite variety of Shakespeare's dramatic language

than the image-centred approach has paid attention to.)
1 Peter Hall's production of John Gabriel Borkman for the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, 1975,
and the Lyttelton, 1976; and John Barton's production of Pillars of the Community for the Royal
Shakespeare Company, at the Aldwych, 1977.
2Michael Black, Poetic Drama as Mirror of the Will (London, 1977), p. I62.
3 Black, Poetic Drama; and Ronald Gray, Ibsen: A Dissenting View (Cambridge, I977). Compare
R. G. Cox, 'Rehabilitating Ibsen', Scrutiny, 14 (1947), 211-17 (p. 217).

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INGA-STINA EWBANK

Io3

That this point needed making, and demonstrating, did not occur to me while

working with producers and actors in the rehearsal rooms of the National
Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. But practical answers, like
finding the proof of the pudding in the eating, should be capable of being
translated into scholarly language; and so one is grateful for the challenge of
Ronald Gray's Ibsen: A Dissenting View. The dissension, he makes clear, is not
a simple matter of Ibsen read in the study versus Ibsen seen and heard in the
theatre. His book makes a point of 'experiencing' each of Ibsen's last twelve
plays 'so far as possible as one would in the theatre, in one's own ideal
performance' (p. 25). The rather thin and sad experiences which these private
performances produce have, Dr Gray concedes, to be weighed against Ibsen's
'continuing success on the stage'. But this success can be explained, partly by
the fortuitous topicality of Ibsen's symbols (the relevance of A Doll's House
in the 1970s; or, one might add, the Watergate ethos of the world of Pillars
of the Community), partly by 'dutiful respect', and partly by 'the amiable
conspiracy of actors and actresses to provide an evening's entertainment,
which is not always doggedly faithful to every nuance of the text' (p. 207).
Or can it? In my own experience, there was little of 'dutiful respect' in the

way the Aldwych audiences in the summer and autumn of I977 reacted to
the revival of Pillars of the Community, and far more of that exceptional
agitation which Henry James felt at the first London performance of Hedda

Gabler and which swept him along 'the whole keyboard of emotion, from
frantic enjoyment to ineffable disgust'.1 No more does 'amiable conspiracy'
describe what I saw and heard of actors and actresses struggling indeed to
be 'faithful to every nuance' of Ibsen's text; and if they were 'dogged' in that
faithfulness, they were equally so (though no one would think of applying
that adjective) in relation to texts by Shakespeare, and Beckett, and Pinter,
on which they were simultaneously working. That the Ibsen they spoke was

not the one whom Dr Gray (who knows Norwegian) and Mr Black (who

does not) read is a problem not just of translation. Or, rather, it is a problem
more basic to the act of translation than are the details of vocabulary, grammar,

syntax, sound, and rhythm. Any translation of a text, whether into another
language or into stage performance, involves interpretation; and, whatever
the details of the interpretation, it reflects, as a whole, an attitude of trust or
distrust in the original text. Tidying up Ibsen's verbal texture (the broken
sentences, the leaps in logic, the inarticulacies) or 'trimming' the repetitions

out of his dialogue, has been one form of distrust common among translators.2 Refusing to see that texture in its theatrical context has been another,

among critics. The mind's stage is a fine and private place, but, with ourselves as all the actors and the producer, too, few of us are able to reproduce
1 Henry James, 'On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler', New Review, 4 (June I891), 519-30; reprinted
in Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, edited by Michael Egan (London, 1972), 234-44; see p. 235.
2 See John Gabriel Borkman, translated by Michael Meyer (London, 1960), 'Note on the Translation', p. 92.

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Literary Text and Theatrical Context

I04

on it the clash of voices and wills into which the text is demanding to be
translated; or, to put the same point differently, which is part of the language
of the text. Few of us, too, can re-create that other crucial aspect of the traffic
of the real stage: the fact that any play, be it Hamlet or Happy Days, is a process,

a continuous experience of one unrecoverable moment after another. In our

own 'ideal performance' it is far too easy to stop or even reverse the flow of
traffic, turning it into a hunt for symbols and significances. And so, with
Ibsen, we find ourselves left with nothing but 'calculated profundities' and
'inert' symbols.1
Meaningful questions about Ibsen's use of language in the theatre can be
asked only in relation to specific examples, and I shall now turn to some of
those. As I wish to avoid any text of which I have not had first-hand experience, I shall be choosing my examples mainly from Pillars of the Community
and John Gabriel Borkman, the first and the last-but-one of the twelve plays
Ibsen wrote after his decision to turn to prose drama on contemporary subjects. The last stretch of dialogue in Borkman, a well-known enough passage,
would seem to provide a way into issues which are central.
Borkman lies dead on a bench in the snow, 'an ice-cold hand of iron ore'

having gripped his heart; Ella Rentheim, his sister-in-law and the woman
whose love he sold for the chairmanship of a bank, has watched him die and
is now in front of the bench; Gunhild Borkman, his wife and Ella's twinsister, who will not look at the dead face of her husband, is behind it. Gunhild
is struck by the ironic justice of his mode of death: 'The son of a mountain-

miner...the Chairman of the Bank...couldn't endure the fresh air'. (It

is necessary now to quote in both languages, and for ease of comparison

I shall number the speeches rather than the actual lines.)
I. ELLA. Det var nok snarere kulden, som draebte ham.
2. MRS B. (ryster pd hovedet). Kulden, siger du? Kulden, - den havde draebt

ham for laenge siden.

3. ELLA. (nikker til hende). Og skabt os to om til skygger, ja.

4. MRS B. Du har ret i det.

5. ELLA. (med et smaerteligt smil). En dod og to skygger, - det har kulden virket.

6. MRS B. Ja, hjertekulden. - Og sa kan vel vi to raekke hinanden handen da,

Ella.

7. ELLA. Jeg taenker, vi kan det nu.

8. MRS B. Vi to tvillingsostre - over ham, vi begge har elsket.
9. ELLA. Vi to skygger - over den dode mand.

(Fru Borkman, bag baenken, og Ella Rentheim foran, raekker hinanden haenderne.)2

In the translation prepared for the National theatre production of the play
this goes as follows:
I. ELLA. It was the cold that killed him.

2. MRS B. (shakes her head). The cold, you say? It killed him long ago.
3. ELLA. (nods to her). And turned the two of us into shadows.
1 Black, p. I62.
2 The Norwegian text is quoted here from the Centenary Edition, Henrik Ibsen: Samlede Verker,

edited by F. Bull, H. Koht, and D. A. Seip, 2I vols (Oslo, I928-57), xIII (I936), I26.

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INGA-STINA EWBANK

105

4. MRS B. So it did.
5. ELLA. (with a painful smile). One dead man and two shadows... is what the
cold has made of us.

6. MRS B. Yes... the cold heart. (pause). Now we two can join hands, Ella.
7. ELLA. I think we can... now.

8. MRS B. We two... twin sisters... over the man we both loved.

9. ELLA. We two shadows... over the dead man.

(Mrs Borkman, behind the bench, and Ella Rentheim, in front of it, join hands.)'

In its visual starkness the scene might well appear an emblem of final
reconciliation: the time 'free' at last, with Borkman gone, and his death
meaningful in that it brings the two women together, like the two families
at the end of Romeo and Juliet. But the dialogue does more than illustrate

a visual image. It certainly establishes a mood of reconciliation: for the

first time Mrs Borkman abandons the strident aggrieved tone which has
characterized her since the opening of the play, and on which she entered
even this last scene, replying to Ella's 'Are you looking for us ?' with a snarling
'I had to'. For the first time in the play Ella and Gunhild are not using the
dialogue to tear each other apart. Earlier in the play, and particularly in the

long duologue with which it opens, their interchanges have, as here, been
built on the repetition of the same words:
ELLA. ... We have fought once before, haven't we, the two of us... fought to the
death over a human being.

MRS B. (triumph). Yes. And I gained the victory.

ELLA. (scorn). Do you still think the victory was a gain?

MRS B. (darkly). No... there was bloodshed.

ELLA. There'll be no gain for you this time either.

MRS B. No gain, in preserving a mother's power over Erhart?

ELLA. No. All you want is power over him.2

but then the sameness measured the gap between the two of them. Here for
the first time the gap is bridged. But, as they join in 'cold', as 'shadows', over
'the man we both loved', there is nothing positive about the bridge; it simply
takes them both to the same side, beyond both hope and despair, from where
the past (for the dialogue is, of course, concerned to establish the immanence
of the past in the present) can be seen to have merely lighted them 'the way

to dusty [or snowy, or shadowy] death'. Unlike Macbeth's 'tomorrow, and

tomorrow, and tomorrow' speech, these lines do not affect us through the
power of verbal metaphor but through the patterning of statements which
are as much literal as metaphorical. Throughout the play we have seen and
felt the winter, inside and outside: in the snow driving beyond the window-

panes as the curtain rises; in Mrs Borkman's 'I'm always cold'; in Ella's
white hair ('Autumn has come, don't you think, Borkman?'); and in the
human relationships demonstrated. In various ways the characters have been
fighting the cold: Mrs Borkman by clutching Erhart and his 'mission'; Ella
1 John Gabriel Borkman. English Version by Inga-Stina Ewbank and Peter Hall (I975), p. 94.
2 Ewbank and Hall, pp. 34-35.

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Io6

Literary Text and Theatrical Context

by reaching out for the same Erhart to bring some warmth into the last few

months of her doomed life; Borkman by striding 'out into the storm' to
recover his lost vision. Ella's and Gunhild's speeches in this final scene,
conveying more acceptance than recognition of defeat, are psychologically
probable; they express character in attitudes and positions which we now see

as having grown out of what has gone before. In that respect they are, I

suppose, naturalistic. But they also extend, by their choice of words, their

strangely impersonal grammar, their slow heavy rhythm, to complete a

pattern which we now also see as having been immanent in the play as a

whole: a tightening stranglehold by ineluctable winter, with all its concomi-

tants of cold, whiteness, death.1 To say that this is 'symbolic' is not very
helpful if, as usually happens, it suggests that Ibsen has supplied on a detachable 'symbolical level' a kind of inert allegorical paraphrase of the 'meaning'
of the action. It says nothing about the dramatic process which started, in
terms of the play's structure, with the arrival of Ella (in black velvet, whitehaired) through the snow and, in terms of the reminiscences which extend
that structure backwards in time, with Borkman's betrayal of humanity for

'the kingdom and the power and the glory'. In that dramatic process far
stranger forces are at work and connexions made. Discussing repetitions of
words in King Lear in her brilliant essay on 'Shakespeare and the Limits of

Language', Anne Barton points out that 'it is a common psychological

experience that if you look at or repeat a single word long enough, concentrate
upon it in isolation, it ceases to be a familiar part of speech. Instead it will

take on a bizarre, essentially mysterious quality of its own, like a word in

some arcane and alien tongue'.2 Something of this, I think, happens to us
as we listen to the final Borkman dialogue. The words are hammered out and
re-hammered until they are like no words we have ever heard before, both
more specific and more universal than in their normal use. In such a moment
of wonder as only the theatre can produce we experience not only something
of what Ella and Gunhild feel but also something of the terrible, unspeakable
meaning of 'the cold heart'.
I have spoken now of the passage an sich, and it is clear that such a piece of
prose, superficially transparent and yet with the density of a submerged iceberg, will offer problems of translation. Some of these have to do with basic

differences between Norwegian and English and are almost unsolvable. For
example, Norwegian word rhythm is predominantly trochaic/dachtylic;
most native words have their main stress on the first syllable.3 In addition,
1 Winter is of course also dark, and one is aware of the darkness inside the Rentheim/Borkman
house. But to a Scandinavian imagination I think the whiteness predominates.
2 In Shakespeare Survey, 24 (1971), 19-30 (p. 26).
3 Compared to the polyglot English language, Norwegian is of course very purely Germanic, with,
therefore, a more limited vocabulary and sound range. Words of foreign origin stand out as 'loanwords'. In translating I find I have to overcome an unwillingness to use English words of French
or Latin origin and to remind myself that to an English ear there is nothing particularly 'borrowed'
about them. On rhythm in Ibsen I have found useful information in Ase Hiorth Lervik, Ibsens
verskunst i 'Brand' (Oslo, I969).

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INGA-STINA EWBANK

I07

Scandinavian nouns take an enclitic definite article, so that a line or sentence

beginning with a noun in the definite form can also begin with a heavily
accented syllable. The effect, as in (2), 'Kulden, siger du?' ('The cold, you
say?'), is impossible to reproduce in English. Fortunately, other rhythmic
effects in the passage are not: the succession of heavy stresses in the last two
lines, (8) and (9), and in Ella's description of the three of them together, (5):

'En dod og to skygger' ('One dead man and two shadows'). Surprisingly,
most other translations, except for Michael Meyer's, begin that line with

'A dead man', thus making it far more difficult for an actress to achieve the
kind of drained, almost objective tone suggested by the three equal stresses.
Altogether Ibsen relies much on rhythm in this passage, turning colloquial
patterns towards a choric regularity; and fortunately a very literal translation
produces an almost entirely mono-syllabic or di-syllabic pattern with much
the same effect. Therefore it becomes important to find a solution to another
of the peculiarly Norwegian problems in the passage: the 'nok' in (I), which
is one of those virtually untranslatable little modifying adverbs (like 'jo', or

'vel') which haunt every page, sometimes every line, of an Ibsen play. Together with 'snarere' ('rather') it here implies an opinion held guardedly but
firmly and, as the sentence is constructed in the neutral third person, held
grammatically away from the speaker. Several translators have seen fit to
reconstruct this. Michael Meyer's version, 'I think it was the cold that killed
him' introduces a false note of first-person speculation; and Arvid Paulson

really goes to town on that subjective speculative note, expanding Ibsen's

eight words to sixteen and losing the rhythm of the dialogue altogether:
'I would say it was the - the coldness - the coldness he felt that took his
life'.l Our solution, 'It was the cold that killed him', may not be ideal, but
at least it is simple, dry, and speakable. It is also, we believed, faithful to the
original. After all, one would not re-write Edgar's statement of his sense of
retributive justice to read 'I would say it was the - the dark - the dark and
vicious place ...'2 (though there may be actors who would prefer to speak it
like that).
A final translator's crux is the word in which Mrs Borkman expands Ella's
insight into the life and death ofJohn Gabriel Borkman and encapsulates all

the terrible ironies of both: 'hjertekulden'. Norwegian shares with other

Germanic languages the facility for creating compounds, and Ibsen drew on
this, much as Shakespeare drew on the possibilities for puns in Renaissance
English. A compound is more than the sum of the two words yoked together:
at best they modify each other to create a new unit (like Mrs Alving's famous

'lysraed': 'afraid of the light'), much like the two halves of a metaphor.
1 Arvid Paulson, The Late Plays ofHenrik Ibsen (New York, Harper Colophon edition, 1973), p. 369.
For Michael Meyer's version, see note p. 103 above. My attention was drawn to various translations of

this scene by Anne Born's kind comparative review of the version by Peter Hall and myself, in
Notes and Queries, n.s., 24 (Jan-Feb 1977), 70-72 (p. 72).
2See King Lear, v. 3. I72-73.

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Io8

Literary Text and Theatrical Context

Mrs Borkman's 'hjertekulden' ('the heart-cold') is not a common, colloquial

expression; it makes us take notice, yet it is not far-fetched enough to draw
attention to itself for its own sake, to sound 'rhetorical'. It holds a kind of
oxymoron, for the heart is more readily associated with warmth; and the

commoner compound would be 'hjertevarme', with the adjective 'hjertevarm'. It is, in a sense, just as much on the borderline between the naturalistic and the non-naturalistic as the whole of this scene is. The problem is how
to render this. All Ibsen translators know how his compounds tend to make

one balance on a knife edge between the fatally quaint and the ridiculous.
The absolutely literal translation of'hjertekulden', 'the heart-cold', goes over
the edge to invite dangerous analogues with 'head-cold'. Paulson's solution,
'coldness of the heart', is not free of the diagnostic ring of 'cirrhosis of the
liver'. Meyer's double supply of definite articles, 'the coldness of the heart',
seems to me to make for just the kind of stilted and portentous Ibsenese which
critics decry. Try to speak it, and you sound like an oracle. Try to analyse the
meaning of this abstract expression, and you will soon be accusing Ibsen of
being vague and pretentious. Again, I would not suggest that our attempt at

a solution, 'the cold heart', is the best possible; but at least it makes Mrs

Borkman sound as if she knew what she meant and it more nearly preserves
the rhythm as well as the concreteness of the original. Norman Ginsbury,
who had already committed himself by writing in an interpretation of Ella's
line (I) ('It was the cold that killed him; the cold in our hearts') gets round

the problem by making Mrs Borkman simply echo Ella. Thus (6) becomes
'The cold in our hearts', and thus Ibsen's text is not only misinterpretedl
but its dramatic progression is lost: the run-up to the line on which the two
sisters truly meet at last.
What I have pointed to might seem like very fine details, but it is out of
such details that anything we call 'style' is made; and it is in faithfulness to
them that a translator's trust of Ibsen shows itself. Lest I be accused of having

approached Ibsen's text with too obliging an imagination,2 I should also

point to the fact that several of these linguistic and stylistic details were the

results of late revision. In the draft manuscript Ella's line (5) first went:
'Vi er tre dode, - vi tre her' ('We are three dead ones... we three, here').
The crucial 'cold heart' in (6) was an afterthought; and the last two lines of
dialogue, (8) and (9) were also added at a very late stage. To me this suggests
that only then did Ibsen fully hear his text andfeel its dramatic pattern. The

trouble he took to revise and re-write would seem to make the details all the

more significant.

The more general conclusions I wish to draw from this passage are

probably obvious. First, that the important pattern in an Ibsen text, the
1 It is, of course, possible that Ibsen was speaking of the cold heart in all the three protagonists, but
he does not say so, and we need not as translators say it for him. See Norman Ginsbury's translation,
John Gabriel Borkman (London, I960), p. 53.
2 As Dr Gray thinks, Ibsen: A Dissenting View, p. 215.

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INGA-STINA EWBANK

Iog

figure in the carpet, is not made up of his 'symbols' but of the structure and
texture of his dialogue. The closing moments in Borkman complete, in their

hopeless reconciliation, a pattern of interaction and alienation, of power

struggle and of failures to connect with other selves. Secondly, therefore, one
is reminded that with Ibsen, as with any playwright, the figure in the carpet

should be perceived as in the making, as the carpet unrolls, up to the last

word and gesture of the play. The 'spatial' vision of an Ibsen play is likely to
present an inert structure of themes and symbols; but such a vision has little
to do with what happens in the theatre, where meaning comes through the
experience, developing moment by moment, of human relationships. The real
dynamics of Ibsen's dramatic form lie in this experience: in the progressive

relationship between play and audience. We have so often been reminded

that Ibsen said that 'to write is essentially to see'; but we have not been

reminded enough of the continuation of that sentence: 'but, remember, to see

in such a way that what has been seen is experienced by the recipient as the
writer saw it'.1 That is, it is no use being a seer, unless you can control your
audience's responses to what they see. Ibsen's plot structures are clearly one

form of such control, keeping us alert and learning about motives and

characters until the end of the play, and beyond, as James McFarlane has so

illuminatingly shown in his essay on 'Meaning and Evidence in Ibsen's

Drama'.2 The language of his texts is another, mediating between us and the
characters and us and the play as a whole (which is not necessarily the same

thing). Individual plays have their individual idioms, but they all, from
Pillars of the Community to When We Dead Awaken, use their texts to build

up an ever-shifting relationship between us and the characters, taking us

through a gamut of tones and emotional impulses.
I wish to stress this last point, because what seemed to strike Aldwych and

National Theatre audiences most was the sheer range of their relationship
with characters: the invitation to laugh at Borkman one minute, with him
another, and to give near-tragic sympathy the next; the alternation of repul-

sion from and attraction towards Karsten Bernick. I also wish to stress it

because I think far too much has been made of the question (which admittedly
Ibsen himselfinvited, in his sparse comments on his own language) of whether
or not he is able to differentiate his characters by the language they speak.3
The two points are interrelated, in that the play tends to be larger than the

characters, and that this often produces more or less ironically comic

effects. That the play is the thing means that the dialogue is often not primarily

1 Speech to Kristiania students, 10.9.1874; Henrik Ibsen: Samlede Verke, xv, 393.
2 In Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen, I, edited by D. Haakonsen (Oslo, 1966), pp. 35-50.
3 See especially the letters Ibsen wrote to Georg Brandes and Theodor Caspari in June 1884, the
year of The Wild Duck, in both of which he speaks in almost identical terms of how his final draft of a
play aims at 'the more rigorous individualizing of characters'. See Henrik Ibsen: Samlede Verker, xviii,

28-29.

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Literary Text and Theatrical Context

IIO

realistic.1 Aune may not sound like a real worker in a shipyard, but the opening

stichomythic dialogue between him and Krap, as patterned on repetitions

as the passage from Borkman which I have been examining, establishes with

great economy some of the main tensions in the pillars' community. Yet,
paradoxically, by such patterning Ibsen also sometimes reaches through
the tidy informative realism of much nineteenth-century and twentiethcentury drama to an obsessiveness about the little things which sounds very
modern in the I970s. Thus, near the beginning of Act iv of Borkman, Gunhild
wants to try to call Erhart back to her, as he is escaping in a covered sleigh
with Mrs Wilton to the South:

MRS B. Let me go, Ella. I want to cry out to him down the road. Surely he'll
hear his mother's cry.

ELLA. He can't hear. He must be in the sleigh already.

MRS B. No... he can't be in the sleigh yet.
ELLA. He's been in it some time, believe me.
MRS B. (despairing). If he's sitting inside the sleigh... then he's sitting there with
her... her.

BORKMAN. (sinister laugh). And he certainly won't hear his mother's cry.
MRS B. No. He won't hear it.

One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry at the way Mrs Borkman's whole

devastated life is suspended on the question of whether or not Erhart is

sitting in the sleigh yet. Similar tragicomic impulses occur throughout the
prose plays, as Ibsen uses his text to keep us aware of the lack of congruence
between what characters say and what the play says around them. Elsewhere

I have discussed the dark comedy which issues from the inadequacies of

pseudo-philosophical statements in Borkman to the situations of human heart-

break on which they are meant (by the speaker) to comment (Borkman's
'in a shipwreck someone always has to sink', for example); and also from the
sheer unredeemed and unremitting awfulness of characters to each other.2
When Ella tells Borkman that the doctors do not expect her to live beyond the
end of the winter Borkman is so far from being willing and able to take in
what this means that he replies: 'Well ... the winter's long here, isn't it ...'.

Such cruelty, deliberate or, as in this example, 'unthinking' (as the Stage
Direction says), is particularly pronounced in the dialogue of Borkman; but
it is there from Pillars of the Community on. Very few Ibsen characters are

aware of what other characters really think and feel: Karsten Bernick's

dismissals of his wife and his sister are blatant examples of this; but Rosmer

in his way and Hedda Gabler in hers are equally unaware, and ultimately

equally unable to reach out to others.

1 It can be exceedingly so, as when, at the end of the dinner party in Act I of The Wild Duck,

the dramatic intention is to create the feel of a real bourgeois world. But then The Wild Duck is a play

which uniquely works through its very realism. It is almost unbearable to watch and listen to the
destruction of Hedvig's and Gina's real world by the symbolical constructs of Gregers Werle; and the
most poignant line in the play is Gina's Lear-like 'Look at the child, Ekdal!'.
2 In Theatre Research International, n.s., 2 (October 1976), 44-53.

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INGA-STINA EWBANK

II I

We begin to see that this limitation of characters' vision applies, too, to

their visions of their own selves and fates. And so even the 'poetic' visionary

moments, when characters look into their past, articulate their 'symbols',
and state their faith, are hardly ever as single-minded ('remorselessly full
of significances') as the dissenting critics would have it.1 The dramatic
significance of a scene like the last dialogue between Ella and Borkman
before he dies comes from its provoking a complex set of responses in the
audience. Dr Gray berates the play for not being Faust, King Lear, The Voysey
Inheritance, or Oedipus at Colonus and Ibsen in this scene for not, 'unlike Wagner

in the Ring', doing 'enough to endow the metals with symbolical value'.2
Such criticism falls desperately wide of the mark of what Ibsen, when we look
at and listen to the dialogue, is doing: clashing two visions of the past, each
suggestively evoked, against each other. Borkman's speeches evoke the nonexistent factories as effectively as Edgar's Dover Cliff speech creates a nonexistent dizzy height, and even Ella is drawn into his hallucinatory sense of
the presence of the 'spirits' he wanted to arouse from the vaults of the bank

and the depths of the mountain, insofar as she answers him in his own

imagery:
Yes... your love is still down there, John. Where it has always been. But up
here in the daylight, remember... was a warm and human heart which beat
for you. And you took this heart and broke it. No, worse than that... ten
times worse! You sold it for... for...

BORKMAN (shivers as if the cold went right through him) For the kingdom... the

power... and the glory ? Is that what you mean ?

I do not think we side with either side here, or feel that either character has
hold of the whole truth. The dialogue is an intensified version of that struggle

which we have watched whenever any two of the three main characters of
the play have met; and what we feel most keenly is the terrible power human
beings have of destroying each other. There is nothing even remotely comic
now, of course, about the separateness of their visions. Indeed it is the very

separateness which is fatal, and Borkman's death feels utterly inevitable:

whatever the medical cause, the pattern of the dialogue presents it as human
beings and dark powers avenging themselves on him.
It should be said that dialogue like this, and it is true for most of Ibsen's

dialogue, needs a bold, direct, quick delivery.3 Ibsen's texts have suffered
from being spoken with a portentousness which is not there in the phrasing
and the rhythms of the original, from interpretative underlining of symbolic
meanings, from unspoken 'as ifs' before metaphors. His speeches are written
to keep us, the audience, both outside and inside the situation, in a questioning involvement with the characters. The characters do not question, but we
1 See Black, p. 162.
2 Gray, p. I82.
3 Peter Hall speaks with authority on this subject in the introduction to our version of John

Gabriel Borkman.

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I I2

Literary Text and Theatrical Context

do; the pattern of the dialogue helps us to do so; and the delivery of lines
should not stop us from doing so.
I wish, finally, to examine a scene which seems to me to bear out the points
I have been trying to make. It is the one between Martha Bernick and Lona
Hessel in Act iv of Pillars of the Community, where we learn of Martha's
hopeless love, longing and waiting for Johan. In the structure of the play,
lively group scenes alternate with quiet albeit intense duologues. This is one
of the latter, but its lyrical quality, as Martha opens her heart and bares her
feelings, makes it different from anything else in this argumentative-rhetorical

play. It almost threatens the convention of naturalism, and in the recent

RSC production the actress was given the aid of speaking after a drink from
the celebratory punch-bowl (Martha Bernick is clearly not used to drinking).
But this was no Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, where alcohol enables people
to speak out what they would otherwise not realistically say. Thanks to the

superb acting of the actress in the part of Martha (Paola Dionisotti), who
indeed stayed faithful to every nuance in the text, the scene worked in its

own right, to show what, even at this early stage, Ibsen can achieve by a
compound of naturalism and non-naturalism.

There is no plot need for this scene. Johan and Dina have gone off on
The Palm Tree to a free and natural life in America, aided and abetted by
both Martha and Lona. As both Dina and Martha are still under the impres-

sion that Johan was the seducer of Dina's mother and the cause of all her
misfortune, the kind of revelation we might have expected is of Bernick's
infamy in continuing to let Johan bear the blame for his own misdemeanour,
and worse. But instead we get Martha's confession of love. One might explain
it in symbolical and thematic terms. Ibsen's earliest notes towards the play
show that the basic motif of the piece was going to be the position of women
in a men's world of self-important business.' Though this was overlaid with
other concerns as the play eventually took shape, plenty of the motif remains,

and the action makes us well aware that, as Lona Hessel says in the closing
moments, the men 'don't see' the women. Martha's experience of not being
seen by Johan, as he returns, is then a more poignant version of this theme;
and her sitting there waiting, 'spinning', as women have done, from Eve to

Goethe's Gretchen, while the man travels abroad to adventures, is typical

enough. Hers is truly the tragedy of the spinster.
But such a thematic paraphrase says nothing of the emotional effect and
the dramatic quality of the dialogue. They are produced entirely by verbal

means: by words in comment on what we have seen and what we are now

seeing. The means are almost entirely literal statements. Some of the words
are in themselves emotive, like the repeated 'alone'; some are made peculiarly

emotive by their repetition: 'I have loved him and waited for him. Every
summer I waited for him to come. And then he came, ... but he didn't see
1 See Henrik Ibsen: Samlede Verker, VIII, 154.

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INGA-STINA EWBANK

II3

me.' 'He didn't see me' is repeated in Martha's next speech: a flat, literal
statement in itself, but poignant in its theatrical context, and not only because
we have witnessed the confrontation between Johan and Martha in Act in,

and heard Johan and Bernick discuss Martha's faded existence.

The one exception to the literalness of the language in the scene is Martha's
image of herself waiting:

... and meanwhile I had been sitting here, spinning and spinning...
LONA. .... the thread of his happiness, Martha.
MARTHA. Yes, it was gold I spun. No bitterness.

By caring for Dina and bringing her up, Martha had indeed been spinning
the thread ofJohan's happiness. Like the girl in Rumpelstiltskin she spun straw
into gold. As with Esther Summerson, there may be a slight mawkishness in
the fairy-tale reference; but I think it is held in check by the idea, also present,
of Martha as one of the Fates, or Norns, spinning the destiny of Johan. The
ineluctable sadness of the lines, however, comes from quite a different echo:

the song sung in every Scandinavian nursery (including, one presumes,

Ibsen's),
'Spin, spin, spin, daughter mine:
Soon your suitor will come.'
And the daughter spun,

And her tears did run.

But never did that suitor come.1

The sadness is counterpointed with Martha's desire to give the tale a happy

ending at her own expense ('We've been two good sisters to him, Lona,
haven't we ?') and in the fifth draft of the play Ibsen allowed her to finish on
a bitter-sweet line which he later removed (but which we presumed to retain

in the RSC production): 'The aim is not so much to be happy as to deserve

to be.'2

The changes between the last draft and the printed version of this scene are

revealing. Poignancy is strengthened in the revision, as Martha is made to

open on the declaration that she loved Johan 'more than anything in the
world', rather than 'more than you [that is, Martha]' as in the draft. The
repetitions of phrases ('He didn't see me' and 'Every summer I waited') are
new and serve much the same purpose. But there is also a major and significant revision of a whole passage:
MARTHA. .... Oh, it was a happy life, really; even though it was a life of longing
and impatience.
LONA. How can you call yourself impatient, when you have waited all these years ?

1 This nursery song has folk-song antecedents: see A. I. Arwidsson, Svenska Fornsdnger, 3 vols
(Stockholm, I834-42), III, 489; and compare L. A. von Arnim and C. Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 3 vols (Heidelberg, i806-08), III, 40: 'Spinn, spinn, meine liebe Tochter, Ich kauf dir einen
Mann'.

2 I quote from my own translation of the text and drafts of Pillars of the Community.

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II4

Literary Text and Theatrical Context

MARTHA. Yes, that was the unfortunate thing, that I didn't notice how the years

were passing. When he went away...

(Fifth Draft)

MARTHA. ... You wonder what grounds I had for hope?

Oh, I do believe I had some grounds... But then, when he did come back...
it was as if everything had been wiped out of his memory. He didn't see me.

LONA. Dina overshadowed you, Martha.

MARTHA. Just as well she did. When he went away....

(1877 text)

In both versions this interchange follows on Martha's statement that 'my

whole life has been lived for him, since he went away', and leads on to the
terrible realization that, while they were contemporary when he went away,

she is now 'ten years older than him'. The final version gains emotional

strength from repeating the painful 'He didn't see me', though it is arguable
that it loses by omitting Martha's attempt to see her life in the last fifteen
years as a 'happy life'. There may be a loss, too, in that the focus widens in
the final version to take in, first, Martha's self-justification for having any
hope at all, and, secondly, the position of Dina in what never even became a
triangle. I would defend this, in that it makes the emotional web more complicated and richer to the audience. The draft, with its concentration on the
longing and its own peculiar happiness, is more single-mindedly nostalgic,
more Chekhovian. The final version involves a co-existence of the passionate
and the reflective; it presents Martha as anxious (if not as able as she thinks)
to be aware of her situation from the outside. The attempt to judge it ration-

ally ('what grounds ... ?') and the mixture of pain and pleasure (even
relief) in Dina taking her own place and, while gaining happiness, also
preventing Johan from seeing her, Martha, as she really is nowadays: all

this is far less Chekhovian, and probably far more Ibsenite. It is certainly more
of a piece with the tissue of the play.
Pillars of the Community is a play particularly easy to dismiss as a prosaic
structure decorated with an obvious set of symbols: the rotten ships, the fresh
air, the quicksands, the whited sepulchres, and so on. But as it unrolls in the
theatre the symbols are often seen to be part of the false rhetoric of the pillars,

and the real figure in the carpet begins to be made up of a progressive (and

progressively disturbing) exploration of the gap between what is said and

what is thought or felt.' One might think that the gap between sincere
and hypocritical sentiments, as yawning as it is in characters like Rorlund, or

Hilmar Tonnesen, apart from all the more civic pillars, is a very easily
measurable one; and that, having had it measured in the first Act, we are
tediously made to repeat the process for a further three Acts. But it is not
1 I have expanded this point in an essay on Pillars of the Community forthcoming in the first volume

of Themes in Drama, edited by James Redmond (Cambridge University Press). The paradigm I have
in mind is Matthew Arnold's fragment of a poem: 'Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,I
Of what we say we feel - below the stream, I As light, of what we think we feel - there flows I With
noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, I The central stream of what we feel indeed.'

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INGA-STINA EWBANK

II5

quite as simple as that. Rorlund, for example, is introduced to us as an archPharisee, holding forth before the moral sewing-circle about the wickedness

of the 'big countries', but next he is in a duologue with Dina which shows
him drawn to her by a (presumably physical) passion which he neither
understands nor dares openly acknowledge. That passion proves useful in
the plot, especially for providing Act endings, and the line on which he bows
out of it and of the play is the most Pharisaical of all: 'So she was completely
unworthy of me.' Yet we cannot just dismiss him as a two-dimensional figure;
he keeps bothering our minds with questions about where self-delusion ends
and wilful delusion of others begins. Nor can we make an altogether clear-cut
division between the deluded and the clear-seeing, the rhetorical and obscur-

antist, on the one hand, and the fresh-air and plain-words people, on the
other; for, in the end, is not Lona Hessel the one who proves most strongly
to be seeing 'truth' through the filter of an old love which hasn't rusted and
to close the play on the most rhetorical flourish of all ?1 Bernick in particular
seems to run the whole gamut from deliberate and flagrant deceit, presented

to us in speeches with clearly satirical intent, to self-deceit so basic that

he is totally unaware of it, making us wonder how sincere he really is in his

penitence, and how much his very partial confession really represents a
victory for 'the spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom'. The figure in the

carpet, then, is not a symmetrical contrasting of 'truth' and 'lying', or

'reality' and 'appearance', but a far more arabesque-like enquiry into why

we say what we say. And of that figure, Martha's lyricism is as much a part
as is Bernick's, or Rorlund's, rhetoric.
Ibsen's texts were prepared for reading, and were always printed before
they were performed. But it is in the theatre that their life must be tested,
and for which their life was conceived. The first and still the most faithful

translator of all his plays, William Archer, knew where the life of his texts
lay: in their ability 'to make people think and see for themselves.'2
1 Lona's line in the fifth draft, 'Old love doesn't rust', is changed in the printed version to 'Old
friendship...'. In either case, the end of the play seems to wish to remind us that Lona is not an
objective judge of Bernick.
2 William Archer, 'Ibsen and English Criticism', Fortnightly Review, 46 (I July 1889), 30-37;
reprinted in Egan, p. I i9.

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