The importance of being Henrik

The celebrations and theatre- productions for this centenary year of Ibsen’s death certainly attest to the continuing vitality of his work. At August’s Ibsen conference in Oslo I heard delegates from China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Latvia, Mexico speak both of the plays’ intrinsic fascinations and of their relevance to specific contemporary societies. Likewise scholars and critics of many orientations showed what satisfying harvests, say, Ghosts or The Wild Duck yield when looked at from this or that perspective. What we have lacked, however, has been a full-scale English-language study of the relationship of this impressive oeuvre to the western culture of which it provably is so firm and illustrious a part. Ibsen has been widely saluted for the modernity of his subject-matter — double standards for the sexes outside and inside marriage, tensions between individual rights and social institutions, but far less decidedly for the modernity of his actual art. The eminent feminist literary critic, Toril Moi (herself Norwegian), has now splendidly and substantially righted this situation. Ibsen, so radical in his attitude to men and women and to the forces that animate them, was radical also in his approaches to his art and in his ongoing practice. Nor was this a matter of trial and error. Autodidact he may have been, but he gave lifelong devotion to the question of how the arts (he was interested in them all, though less in music than the others) could most intensely express the complexities of personality when faced with the ever-expanding demands of experience. And he himself came to see his corpus as an organic unity, stretching a full half-century from Catiline (1850) to When We Dead Awaken (1899).