Ibsen´s realism

By Kjetil Jakobsen

Modern people meet and talk face to face, too. But as social creatures – involved in politics, moving money, enjoying art and entertainment – they live in and around torrents of mass communication. Newspaper features, television programmes, legal documents and scientific papers tend not to question their own lingua franca. The presume to give direct access to reality free of linguistic interpretation. In a general sense, realism could be taken as society’s normal state. Modernity is a mass-mediated state. It consists of messages that lay claim to verisimilitude. In a narrower sense, realism stands for an artistic programme. In the sphere of literature studies, literature has commonly been credited with a paradigmatic role in relation to universal realism. For example, it has been noted that elements of Ibsen’s realistic dramas were appropriated by the twentieth century’s entertainment business, and that they underlie the structuring of Hollywood movies and TV soaps. If we explore the issue in finer detail, there is little doubt it was a reciprocal affair. The history of everyday realism explains art’s, as much as vice versa.
The problem of realism emerged one could say with Gutenberg. The ability of the printing press to make untold copies breached the trust between author and reader. Writers no longer wrote for a select circle of equals or disciples. They wrote into the unknown. But how can textual representations convince and compel when „sender“ and „receiver“ reside in different realities as strangers, unknown quantities for one another? How should a text alone create an impression of reality so intense it is taken as a slice of reality? Fiction and non-fiction assumed after a while a new style of writing, emphasising information. Detailed descriptions created an illusion of a text that corresponded to actual fact. At the same time, information was organised to create certain expectations concerning the nature of the information waiting in the wings. This was how journalism and the realistic novel began a dialogue in the seventeenth which lasted to the nineteenth. They borrowed literary styles from each other, while defining themselves negatively in contrast to each another. Journalism was „reality“, artistic realism „fiction“. Everyday realism is still growing. In the past ten years or so there has been a revolution in the audio-visual representation in real time, affecting news and entertainment (CNN, reality television, Internet).
The problems connected with the creation of reality effects is something all realism suffers from. Artistic realism from the outset faced a different challenge: to overcome classical genre hierarchy. This ordained that everyday life and ordinary people were only good for comical or grotesque literature. For a classical sensitivity, the refined artistic form required refined subject matter. Realistic art promotes democracy. It gives the present and everyday life an artistic style and avoir du pois. In terms of the novel and poetry, the definitive breakthrough came in France around mid nineteenth century. „You have no right to despise your own time“, said Charles Baudelaire. With Les fleurs du mal and Poëmes en prose he turned everyday city life into a subject for poetry. In the dramatic genre, classicism’s conceptions were particularly robust. Plays dealing with contemporary issues hardly existed in Ibsen’s day. The serious theatre pursued mythical and historical subjects, based on a Greek tragedy template. Contemporary theatre was commercial and considered entertainment, almost like soaps on the television today. It was not until The Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881) that everyday life achieved artistic dignity and tragic penetration.
Realism is democracy’s art form. The paradox is that trailblazers like Balzac, Flaubert and the Goncourt brothers in the novel, Baudelaire in poetry and Ibsen and Strindberg in the theatre were all intellectual aristocrats, some of them quite severely. This is because realism is not only a form of art, it is also modernity’s normal „life form“. Realistic art needs to stand out from everyday reality. The Goncourt brothers open Germinie Lacerteux by casting virulent aspersions on „le public“. The realistic novel thus circles in a particular, sensitive reader from the mass media’s public. An Enemy of the People, one of Ibsen’s most typically realistic studies, constantly attacks the media and its mass public. The „free-thinking, independent press“ is represented by Hovstad, editor of the local paper. A more unprincipled „turncoat“ would be hard to find, even in Ibsen’s motley menagerie. Billing, his partner, is as contemptible, and the editorial office of The People’s Herald is described in the stage directions by adjectives like „spooky“, „intimidating“, „dirty“ and „tattered“ (ix: 246). We learn that Hovstad’s predecessor in the editor’s chair was the weathercock Stensgård, who figured in The League of Youth. The nasty book printer Aslaksen puts in an appearance in both plays. Media-speak is deconstructed, layer by layer. Take, for instance, the episode with the uplifting English story, which, according to Petra, should never be allowed to get within shouting distance of a radical, free-thinking publication.
Hovstad. I cannot agree more; but an editor can not always do as he likes [...] if I want people to ally themselves with me in the fight for liberty and progress, it won’t do to frighten them off. When they find a moral tale in the basement of the paper, they’re more likely to approve of what we give them on the ground floor. (ix: 254–255)
This is an example of what the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann calls media-speak’s compensatory mechanisms. The media parcel out information in different sections, which daily and with unfailing confidence produce a social reality characterised by dislocation, fragmentation, volume and norm disturbance. However, this is ascribed to observing „subjects“ (reporters, pundits, celebrities) whose normative preferences are continuity, peace, integrity, meaning and moral conformity. After Sensation! Scandal! War! Disaster! Shock! Sex! Grotesque! Murder! Jealousy! Massacre! Near You! follows a tiny piece of encouraging news. Family values in the leader compensate for pornography in the news section.
The perception of the mass media expressed in An Enemy of the People could be termed aristocratic and highbrow. It serves, however, to demarcate artistic realism as a separate space beside media-related everyday realism. From Flaubert and Ibsen to modern-day documentary art and literature, realism in art has adopted the role of critical commentator in relation to everyday reality’s script for representing reality.

Cracks in the Doll’s House
Like everyday realism, artistic realism justifies itself generally from a mimetic linguistic angle. The text is said to mirror reality. But the criteria of empirical correspondence of text to reality is too general and too impractical. No more can an author „reproduce“ a given matter than Tristram Shandy can give an account of his life (never getting further than the circumstances around his own birth due to the rank mass of information). The fuse in linguistic observation apparatus will have blown long since from an information overload, reducing everything to blackness. The good realistic literature observes social reality, but at two removes. It does not observe unmediated reality, but how reality is linguistically constructed. A second-order observation is a specially selective form of observation. It observes only how it observes. We have seen how a piece like An Enemy of the People observes how the mass media shapes reality. In A Doll’s House the three protagonists Nora, Helmer and Dr Rank pursue their separate discourses. The play can be said to observe the construction of reality in the discourses of medicine, law and intimacy. Dr Rank thinks only in terms of illness/health. Helmer is a lawyer and views the world relative to right and wrong. The usual criticism of the play is that Nora, too abruptly and without sufficient reason, becomes a self-aware women’s rights woman and middle-class liberal. We note, however, that her cognitive apparatus remains the same. Nora’s communicative perception of the world is and remains organised by the love/indifference code. The world consists first of people she loves who love her, and second of the others, the strangers, people who do not concern her. Everything beyond the haven of intimacy falls into unmarked space.
It is my view that A Doll’s House merits its status as an indicator of the breakthrough of modernity in the theatre, but not simply because it treats so effectively the issue of women’s emancipation. In this play, Ibsen dramatises the translatability problem between three of modern society’s most entrenched systems: medicine, law and intimacy. He lets modernity observe itself in all its eccentricity. The modern society is no doll’s house, and can not be reflected over in terms of piecework philosophy. It is not integrated itself, and has no organised centre to facilitate translatability among its subsystems. The doctor, lawyer and middle-class housewife talk at cross purposes or, more exactly, at no purposes at all. Our sympathies lie with the intimate voice, it’s a known quantity after all. Because the play has no meta-speech, it is impossible to decide which is right. Dr Rank, Helmer and Nora are not allegories over social systems. They are embodied system-speak of flesh and blood. The function systems’ wilfulness is the play’s drama.

Kjetil Jakobsen obtained his dr.art. degree with a thesis on Ibsen. He is on the teaching staff at Telemark University College.