In Commemoration of HENRIK IBSEN: 100 Years Since His Death
In
commemoration of the brilliant playwright Henrik
Ibsen who died one hundred years ago, The Journal of the American Medical
Association (JAMA) published the following article.
http://www.geocities.com/dordot2001/IbsenXP.htm
It is
important that we learn who Henrik Ibsen really was
and why he wrote what he did.
Ibsen
is one of the author's whose works are sanitized when presented to
schoolchildren as part of their curriculum. He is not presented as he really
was – a revolutionary thinker. His work
is not presented for what it was – trenchant critique of society and how it
impacts on people.
Emma
Goldman referred to Ibsen a number of times in her writings. She wrote:
"In the literary world, the Humphrey Wards and
Goldman
refers to Ibsen once again in a piece entitled "Intellectual
Proletarians", which she published in the February 1914 edition of her
periodical "Mother Earth".
In
addition to her reference to Ibsen in the essay, it is most worthwhile to read
because in it Emma speaks to and about "all those who work for their
living, whether with hand or brain, all those who must sell their skill,
knowledge, experience and ability", whom she says, quite correctly
"are proletarians".
"White collar workers" do not like to think of
themselves as proletarians and wage slaves. Those descriptions, were they to
use them at all, would be applied to factory workers and garbage collectors.
Emma
reminds "white collar workers" that they too must sell themselves to
an employer who deigns to exploit them. Therefore, they too are proletarians and
wage slaves in every sense of the words and would do well to put their support
behind their "blue collar" brothers and sisters in the struggle for emancipation.
Returning
to Ibsen, Emma writes: "...those who are placed in positions which demand
the surrender of personality, which insist on strict
conformity to definite political policies and opinions, must deteriorate, must
become mechanical, must lose all capacity to give anything really vital. The
world is full of such unfortunate cripples. Their dream is to
"arrive", no matter at what cost. If only we would stop to consider
what it means to "arrive", we would pity the unfortunate victim.
Instead of that, we look to the artist, the poet, the writer, the dramatist and
thinker who have "arrived", as the final authority on all matters,
whereas in reality their "arrival" is synonymous with mediocrity,
with the denial and betrayal of what might in the beginning have meant
something real and ideal.
The
"arrived" artists are dead souls upon the intellectual horizon. The
uncompromising and daring spirits never "arrive". Their life
represents and endless battle with the stupidity and dull of their time. They
must remain what Nietzsche calls "untimely", because everything that
strives for new form, new expression or new values is always doomed to be
untimely.
The
real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature have remained aliens to their
time, misunderstood and repudiated. And if, as in the case of Zola, Ibsen and
Tolstoy, they compelled their time to accept them, it was due to their
extraordinary genius and even more so to the awakening and seeking of a small
minority of new truths, to whom these men were the inspiration and intellectual
support. Yet even to this day Ibsen is unpopular, while Poe, Whitman and
Strindberg have never "arrived".
Matters
have not changed since 1910. The public buys the work of hacks, while the
geniuses are wholly ignored and languish in obscurity.
I
likewise ask you, do you wish to be consumers of Stephen King and "The DaVinci Code" and "Geisha", or will you turn
your attention to Henrik Ibsen and the other great
writers and endeavor to hear what they said to you? Will you hear their voice
of emancipation?
Doreen
Ellen Bell-Dotan,