Three

THE UNCONSCIOUS IN SCANDINAVIAN LITERATURE

Despite a thorough investigation of sources and a comparison of texts, Henrik Ibsen scholars have been unable to ascertain whether some aspects of the mas- ter’s thought is attributable to positive philosophical influences. Otto Weininger (1907) and other critics attempted to link Ibsen’s philosophy to that of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, or Søren Kierkegaard; but that link is unlikely. The Norwegian dramatist had almost no formal education and was not interested in books. Edmund Gosse, who visited the author at Drammensvej, was amazed by the complete absence of books in Ibsen’s home, except for a Bible, which he read daily (1908, p. 221). According to Gosse, no proof exists that Ibsen had ever read Kant. He was not inclined to philosophic speculation and he lacked curiosi- ty and interest in intellectual discussions and ideas. Although Ibsen knew German, he had not read Friedrich Schiller or Hei- nrich Heine, so he probably was not acquainted with Kant or Fichte either. As for Kierkegaard, Ibsen’s positive denial leaves no room for doubt: “Of Kierkegaard also I have read little, and understood less” (1905, p. 136). We may find many points of resemblance between Arthur Schopenhauer and Ibsen’s concepts, but we cannot adduce conclusive proof of an influence. Henri Lichtenberger (1905, p. 808) believes that Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche influenced Ibsen. At the end of the nineteenth century, pessimism was widespread throughout Eu- rope, especially in France and Germany, and a dozen channels might have con- veyed it to Ibsen. Finally, the philosophical foundation, if not always the ex- pression, of Ibsen’s dramas is almost identical with the metaphysics underlying the work of his great predecessor, Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863). Both, claims Lichtenberger, postulate the same Schopenhauerian concept of a supreme and absolute will inherent in the universe (ibid., passim). The only influence that can be positively established is that of the Danish writer Henrik Hertz, whom Ibsen met in Copenhagen in 1852, but even that influence must be limited to the earli- est versified dramas. Fortunately, we do not have to seek in literary and philosophical influences the explanation for Ibsen’s singularly original themes. Apparently ignorant of philosophy and even of literature, he was able to draw on much nearer and richer sources, his experience and keen knowledge of human nature, acquired through an unusual power of observation. All those who knew Ibsen have described him as a person who possessed great concentration (his eyes turned inward), who was capable of achieving total isolation in the turbulent life of Rome, wholly undis- turbed by the agitation of the outside world (Gosse, 1908, p. 261). We do not 62 THE UNCONSCIOUS IN PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE need Schopenhauer’s philosophy to account for Ibsen’s pessimism. His unhappy childhood, his father’s financial collapse (when he was eight years old), his long years of unrewarded toil as an apprentice with the apothecary of Grimstad, and the failure of his first play, Catilina (1850), sufficed to convince him that the world is ruled by a blind, unkind fate. His revolt against social order and reli- gious orthodoxy may be attributed to the narrow religious formalism of his mother, to the prejudices of the provincial society of Grimstad, and to the hypo- crisy of many people with whom Ibsen consorted in the years of his triumph at Christiania. The symbolism of the sea that inspired The Lady of the Sea (1917c) does not call for any source other than Ibsen’s early childhood, which he spent at the sea harbor of Skien and the legend of his grandfather, a sailor lost at sea. Ibsen revealed the decisive part played by his experience in the elaboration of his masterpieces and gave us, as much he understood, the secret of his inspira- tion. Berating critics who had misunderstood his work, the author wrote that a person must be:

extremely careful in discriminating between what one has observed and what one has experienced; because only this last can be the theme for crea- tive work. If we attend strictly to this, no everyday commonplace subject will be too prosaic to be sublimated into poetry. (Ibsen, 1905, p. 190)

The genesis of Brand’s daughter, as explained by Ibsen, conforms with an example in the above remark:

[Brand (1866)] came into being as a result of something which I had, not ob- served, but experienced; it was a necessity for me to free myself from some- thing which my inner man had done with, by giving poetic form to it; and when by this means I had got rid of it, my book had no longer any interest for me. (1905, p. 193)

Ibsen gives us almost the exact formula for the successful work of art proposed by another great explorer of human nature, Sigmund Freud. His method to bring to consciousness hidden complexes and reestablish the mental equilibrium paral- lels Freud’s. Ibsen even applied Freud’s literary criterion to judge whether the works of other authors reveal inner personality. “What continued to occupy me as a problem long after reading Brand was the personality of the authoress: your inner, psychical relation to your work” (ibid., p. 193). Let us compare Ibsen’s method with those of Dostoyevsky. If Ibsen owes more to an acquired know- ledge and if established influences played a larger part in Dostoyevsky’s literary formation, they cannot account for Ibsen’s genius. They have acted only as a spark to activate the much richer material that experience had provided. The omnipresent preoccupation in Ibsen’s plays, either minor (romantic or social plays), or dominant (psychological works) is the search for the individual soul and its motives, reactions, and propensities. In that search, assisted by the