Abstract
This paper argues that Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People constitutes one his most ambitious literary and political achievements. In literary terms, the play seeks to reinvent the genre of history drama in a manner deliberately opposed to Hegelian aesthetics. Ibsen does so by systematically deepening the play’s central conflict. What at first appears to be a problem grounded in personal rivalries, reveals itself to be a social and political struggle, which in turn yields a moral crisis, to, finally, a problem of history. In this manner, Ibsen combines two positions that at first sight seem incompatible: the most relativistic impulses of the historicism of his day and a metaphysical form of tragedy that he identifies with Shakespeare. Politically, Ibsen stages what might be characterized as a profoundly pessimistic form of messianism. On that view, it is necessary to categorically reject any existing political project and instead champion the possibilities articulated by those in society who have no investment in the present. This is not because those individuals have greater access to utopian ideals that should be actualized, since any political success automatically invalidates the ideals in question. Instead, the defense of the socially marginalized is grounded in the view that their saving power lies with their ability to articulate ideals that have no stake in the persistence of our world. Against this background it becomes possible to fully understand the structure and continuing significance of this play.
Zusammenfassung
Dieser Artikel argumentiert, dass Ibsens Ein Volksfeind eine seiner anspruchsvollsten literarischen und politischen Leistungen darstellt. In literarischer Hinsicht versucht das Stück, die Gattung des Geschichtsdramas radikal zu erneuern, in einer Weise, die der Hegelschen Ästhetik bewusst entgegengesetzt ist. Ibsen tut dies, indem er den zentralen Konflikt des Stücks systematisch vertieft. Was zunächst als ein in persönlichen Rivalitäten begründetes Problem erscheint, enthüllt sich als sozialer und politischer Konflikt, der wiederum eine moralische Krise aufschließt und schließlich in ein Problem der historischen Erfahrung mündet. Auf diese Weise verbindet Ibsen zwei auf den ersten Blick unvereinbare Positionen: die relativistischen Impulse des Historismus seiner Zeit und eine metaphysische Form der Tragödie, die er mit Shakespeare identifiziert. Politisch inszeniert Ibsen eine Gesinnung, die als ein zutiefst pessimistischer Messianismus bezeichnet werden kann. Dieser zufolge ist es notwendig, jedes bestehende politische Projekt kategorisch abzulehnen und sich stattdessen für die Möglichkeiten einzusetzen, die von den Personen in der Gesellschaft artikuliert werden, die in das Weiterbestehen der Gegenwart nichts investiert haben. Dies liegt nicht daran, dass diese Gruppe größeren Zugang hat zu utopischen Idealen, die aktualisiert werden sollten, da jeder politische Erfolg automatisch die Ideale, für die er einsteht, ungültig macht. Stattdessen basiert die Verteidigung der sozial Marginalisierten auf der Ansicht, dass ihre rettende Kraft in ihrer Fähigkeit liegt, Ideale zu artikulieren, die am Fortbestand unserer Welt kein Interesse haben. Aufgrund dieser Analyse wird es möglich, die Struktur und fortdauernde Bedeutung dieses Schauspiels zu verdeutlichen.
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Notes
Already the early praise for Beerbohm Tree’s 1893 production of the play, which was instrumental in making Ibsen a respectable dramatist for the English stage, include verdicts such as »the piece is more interesting than attractive,« and »a rather tedious play« (Egan 1972, 299, 303). More recently, Franco Moretti (2010) deemed An Enemy of the People to be Ibsen’s »worst play (and of course, the one the Victorians immediately loved)« (122). Additional examples of such views are ubiquitous in the secondary literature. See e.g. Lambert (1965, 628); Knutson (1993, 173); Mori (2017, 27); Kittang (2002, 129); Van Laan (1986, 95-6); Johnston (1989, 164); Hemmer (2003, 282).
Johnston (166-8), Eide (2009, 4-5), and Gjesdal (2014, 114) are among the few critics to note that the play does not in fact rest in a static opposition but rather undergoes a gradual development of different perspectives on the same problem. However, Eide does not seem to recognize this as a systematic development, and what each of these critics identify as the nature of the various perspectives and their relation to each other differ from what I propose here.
Johnston (173-6) likewise notes that the first act is focused on physical experience, although he does not expand this to a concern with the personal more broadly.
I thus disagree with Gjesdal’s assertion (131, n.15) that Ibsen does not seem to distinguish between morality and politics. That distinction is a key concern of the third act.
It is sometimes asserted that Stockmann’s speech in this act constitutes a last-minute change to his intended lecture on the health conditions at the baths (e.g. Gjesdal 110). But I see no evidence for this claim. As this passage indicates, Stockmann makes up his mind about the new topic for his speech significantly before the public meeting. This provides further support for the reading of the play as governed by a systematic forward movement.
Only a few critics even take note of Stockmann’s claim about the temporal limits of truth. Johnston (185-6) sees it, but only to equate it with Plato’s view that old truths must be supplemented by philosophic truth, which completely misses the historicism of Stockmann’s position. Gjesdal (127) quotes the passage, but limits its significance to the pedagogical point that education is a life-long process. That, however, can clearly be the case even if there is a single, objective truth. Kittang comes closest when he identifies a kind of nihilism (sanningsnihilisme) in Stockmann’s position that threatens to repress all claims to truth (161-2). However, instead of examining its deeper philosophical foundations, Kittang turns to an analysis of Stockmann’s character under the guidance of a psychological understanding of Nietzsche’s will-to-power. For reasons that will become clear later, I think the turn to psychological readings are particularly ill-suited for an understanding of the implications of Stockmann’s historicism.
Van Laan: »Dr. Stockmann’s problematic qualities – his rashness, his naivete about people, his lack of self-awareness, his egotism, his aristocratic sense of superiority, his eagerness to lock horns with the brother he so obviously resents – necessarily undermine his authority as the spokesman for the values of the play and should prompt us to view him with a certain amount of troubled detachment« (1986, 102). Knutson: »But whatever his winning warmth and naivete, there is ample evidence in the text that Stockmann is vain, inconsistent, hot tempered, impulsive and almost childishly egocentric – traits of character which, far from inflating him to heroic status, bring him down to our common humanity« (162). Gjesdal: »As presented by Ibsen, it is far from evident that the Doctor is right. He is too fanatic, too one-dimensional, to come off as a plausible politician« (117-8). For additional examples, see Kahn (1986), and Eide 8.
For an excellent overview of the historicist school of thought, see Beiser (2011).
Kittang understands the relation between Stockmann’s truth-nihilism and his assertion that no society can live on the truths of the past as simply expressing the contradiction of all relativistic positions (172-3). The point is rather that Stockmann is here bringing together two distinct modes of thought.
Roshwald, who otherwise fully endorses Stockmann, admits: »Ibsen’s attack on democracy is clearly exaggerated and vulnerable. The majority may not have a monopoly on being right, as Hovstad maintains, but there is no ground for asserting that it never has right on its side. Whether the majority is stupid or not would depend on the matters to which it addresses its judgment: in some cases it may be sensible, in other it may reveal stupidity. […] Thus, Ibsen’s criticism of popular opinion is not adequately substantiated, or convincingly proved« (231). The unease with Stockmann’s violent condemnation is also visible in Arthur’s Miller’s influential adaptation of the play, which elides almost all of them. Moreover, when Miller’s Stockmann condemns the crowd, he does so in terms that undermine the relativism of his speech in Ibsen’s text. In sharp contrast to the claim that no truth lasts for more than twenty years, Miller’s Stockmann condemns the majority by asking, »Was the majority right when they stood by while Jesus was crucified? […] Was the majority right when they refused to believe that the earth moved around the sun and let Galileo be driven to his knees like a dog?« (2006, 320). In this version, the rejection of the masses clearly rests on the assumption that Christ and Galileo expressed truths that have not lost their validity with time, and not even after the masses have come around to accepting them. As such, tellingly, Miller’s adaptation does away with both of the defining features of the fourth act, and of the play at large: its historicism and its pessimism.
The first to point out the similarities was Valfrid Vasenius in his 1882 review of the play (Aarseth 2008, 592). Since then, the parallels have been discussed most extensively by Van Laan (1995, 302-3) and Aarseth (590-3). Studies of Ibsen’s relation to Shakespeare more broadly are also frequent in the literature. Early twentieth-century criticism tended to insist that this influence was limited to Ibsen’s early works (Koht 1945, 85; Arestad 1946, 89), but Van Laan has rightly pointed out that it extends to Ibsen’s mature phase as well; indeed, that it is most prominent then (1995, 302). I am very sympathetic to Van Laan’s claim that Ibsen’s use of Shakespeare in his late works is part of an effort to think through the conditions for modern tragedy. Van Laan’s argument, however, suffers from the fact that it takes for granted that Shakespeare wrote tragedies and then simply asserts that Ibsen did the same since he deploys allusions to Shakespeare’s works in his bourgeois plays. It is my contention that Ibsen’s engagement with Shakespeare is more than the imitation of established paradigms, and that it instead involves a productive thinking beyond the boundaries of Shakespeare’s works, into new domains of drama.
Some of the following examples are also listed by Van Laan (1995, 302-3).
The sense that Coriolanus is the most relentless of Shakespeare’s tragedies in not offering any escape from its conflict is not uncommon in the scholarship. Jan Kott: »Here lies the thorn in the flesh of this drama, which for a long time has been the reason for its unpopularity. The image of the world is flawed and lacks cohesion. Contradictions have not been solved, and there is no common system of values for the polis and for the individual« (1974, 210). Zvi Jagendorf: »In Coriolanus the thematics of politics overshadow those of tragedy, and the body cut to pieces remains an obstinately secular final image. No nourishment can issue from these fragments, and no promise of any coherence that outlives the body is inscribed in them« (1990, 268-9). James Holstun: »There is no organic alternative to the play of power and domination […]. In no other play does Shakespeare show political conspiracy so widespread that it is the norm rather than a pathological deviation« (1983, 468). W.H. Auden: »Except for Virgilia, who is more or less mute, there is no really sympathetic character in the play« (2019, 243). Often, this uncompromising nature of Coriolanus is seen as a deviation from Shakespeare’s tragic mode. But I am inclined to agree with Auden that it is rather something like its purest form. As he writes, »Coriolanus illustrates the difference between classical tragedy and Shakespeare more than any other play« (250). Ibsen shared that insight.
I have reconstructed that tradition in relation to Kierkegaard’s reading of Hamlet, which is the Shakespeare play most frequently invoked by this line of interpretation in the nineteenth century; see Lisi (2015). As I have argued elsewhere (Lisi 2018), Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler makes clear that he shares that view of Hamlet. These interpretations of course draw on a broader cultural pessimism prominent in Germany during the time Ibsen lived there. Central to that general mood was Schopenhauer’s account of our empirical world as mere appearances that has a blind, inhuman will as its metaphysical foundation. For a survey of this cultural current in nineteenth-century Germany, see Beiser (2016).
On the importance of this idea in the German reception of Shakespeare, see Paulin (2003, 55, 100, 260, 402).
Hettner does depart from Hegel by asserting that at least Julius Caesar actually constitutes a drama of ideas, understood as a play that exhibits a conflict between principles that are logically incompatible rather than simply contingently at odds, as is the case with character drama (103). Hettner’s broader difference from Hegel resides in his insistence that there can be no reconciliation in tragedy proper (80-2).
See, most notably, the influential essay by A.C. Bradley (1995). At the end of the twentieth century, Harold Bloom (1998) reiterates the point: »Part of the immense fascination of Coriolanus, for me, is that in it Shakespeare experienced a sea change, and abandoned what had been the center of his dramatic art,« which is to say the representation of human inwardness (582-3). For similar views, see Schalkwyk (2016, 470-1) and Rabkin 211.
On the pervasive critiques of philosophies of history in Germany during this period, see Schnädelbach (1983, 58-65). More generally, such a mechanical view of time would resonate with the new materialist philosophies that rose to prominence in Germany during the mid-nineteenth century and which were debated intensely in the so-called Materialismusstreit well into the years of Ibsen’s residence in Dresden and Munich. Beiser provides an overview of this controversy in Beiser 2014, 51-86.
For a broader account of the close connection between the logical structure of mechanism and mid-nineteenth-century historicist practice, see Max Weber’s discussion of Roscher and Knies in his Wissenschaftslehre (1988, 1‑145).
See entries 1) and 2) for »Almue« (2021) in Ordbog over det danske sprog, which covers the Dano-Norwegian used by Ibsen.
This strikes me as one reason why Stockmann’s position cannot be termed proto-fascist, no matter how offensive it may be. Fascism seeks to defend and extend the present or past rights of specific population groups. What Stockmann wants, is an elite that does not derive its projects from the present world at all. In this respect, there is a strong similarity between Stockmann and Nora in A Doll’s House. The latter, too, goes through a movement of gradual dispossession of the beliefs of the present in order to end up in a position open to a future defined primarily in terms of not being like the world we know. While we have come to find Nora’s rejection of the existing less offensive than Stockmann’s, they share the same impulse. For a detailed analysis of A Doll’s House that follows some of these impulses, see Chapter 4 of my Marginal Modernity (Lisi 2013).
The only critic to my knowledge who comes close to recognizing this central concern of the play is Hemmer, who notes: »The perspective in An Enemy of the People is precisely the necessity, the historically conditioned necessity, of radical and future-oriented transformation of society« (298; my translation). But he does not elaborate on this claim.
The connection between Stockmann and messianism has been discussed by previous critics, although only in terms of thematic and verbal correspondences. See Yde; Haugen (1979, 80).
Fisher (2009) offers an insightful discussion of this phenomenon in contemporary culture.
Hemmer 283‑4.
For a powerful account of the principled conflict between capitalism’s pursuit of infinite growth and our planet’s finite resources, see Klein (2014).
In a related manner, although from a very different political position, Andreas Malm (2021) has recently argued that the severity of the crisis and the lack of any real progress demands that the climate movement question its pacifist dogmas. Flannery (2006) in turn traces the ease with which a lack of action on climate can land us in an Orwellian dystopia to ensure the survival of our species (290-5). That is, the current regime of values can be viewed as unsustainable regardless of whether one thinks the climate struggle can succeed or that it will inevitably fail.
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Lisi, L.F. History as Politics in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Dtsch Vierteljahrsschr Literaturwiss Geistesgesch 96, 91–123 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41245-022-00138-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41245-022-00138-w