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 Clyde Fitches are the idols of the mass, while but few know or appreciate the beauty and genius of an Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman: an Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Butler Yeats, or a Stephen Phillips. They are like solitary stars, far beyond the horizon of the multitude." (Minorities Versus Majorities, 1910.)

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, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com