Customer Reviews

Ibsen Cycle: The Design of the Plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken

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Johnston builds the case that Ibsen's realist plays form a cycle based on Hegel's "Phenomenology of the Mind", stating that doing so "is not a mechanical strategy on Ibsen's part, but the starting point for the most boldly imaginative creativity, in which the artist is at no time subservient to the philosophical system." The result is an analysis that, at a minimum shows, Ibsen's body of work to be coherent as a whole and much deeper than merely a collection of liberal nineteenth-century social commentary.

The first part of the text compares the structure of dialectics in "Phenomenology" with those within the cycle as a whole, and those within the individual plays. The second part of the text deals with individual plays: linking "Ghosts" with Greek drama, discussing "Rosmersholm" as dialectic between southern European "civilization" and a northern European passion and freedom, and showing the Mithraic/Zoroastrian underpinning of "The Master Builder." This last chapter had a nice bonus for me as I had not known the extent to which Persian mythology underlay Germanic and Nordic mythology, and in particular had always wondered why there are so many parallels between Viking romances and stories in the Shahnameh.

Overall I quite enjoyed Johnston's analysis. Despite repeating "Ibsen is great" a few too many times, I found his criticism to be much more insightful, relevant, and open-minded than what I would have gotten from a more contemporary, obscure, jargon-laden analysis like those found in Marxist/Freudian/queer/feminist/postmodernist readings of texts.