1
Ibsen’s Fresh Air, Joyce’s Heavy Breathing, and the Only kind of Comparative literature Worth Pursuing
One could mimeticise Pascale Casanova’s categories to give a much sharper understanding to the motivations of envy, rivalry, and prestige which she uses as simple alternatives to political or commercial determinations to shape her model of The World Republic of Letters, but I want to rather move quickly to a more interesting and heartening relation between writers. The direction I want to trace here then is not that of a younger disciple ‘growing up’ to be an envious rival, but the positive resonance between writers both Giuseppe Fornari (Da Dioniso a Cristo, 2006), and João Cezar de Castro Rocha (Cultures latino-américaines et poétique de l’emulation, 2015) call emulation. How might we follow Fornari and Castro Rocha’s important elaboration of emulation as a serious positive development of mimetic theory?
I want to extend emulation to a peculiar kind of positive reciprocity, what Jean-Pierre Dupuy would probably call bootstrapping, to a writer graduating from apparent or perhaps nearly invisible discipleship or rivalry to another writer, to emerge as the emulous disciple and beneficiary of her or his own writing, to suggest how Ibsen and Joyce inspired themselves with their own work.
In James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, chapter V, Stephen Dedalus is walking to the university; he is late again, probably with intention, to mark his independence from rule. Stephen's masters are rather his small cadre of writers that he has chosen as teachers, models and companions.
The rain-laden trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory of their pale sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of quiet joy. His morning walk across the city had begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silver-veined prose of Newman; that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile; that as he went by Baird's stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty; and that passing a grimy marine dealer's shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by Ben Jonson which begins:
"I was not wearier where I lay."
Stephen Hero, Joyce's first draft of Portrait, discursively treats events and ideas in Stephen's life, including his reverence for Dante and Ibsen, two proud exiles he will follow forever. Portrait is dramatic, not at all discursive, but in the passage above we see nevertheless, within the group portrait of Stephen's models, a rigorous distinction: Hauptmann, Newman, Cavalcanti, and Ben Jonson are mental associations conjured by Stephen himself from specific places in Dublin, but Ibsen is (literally) a powerful spiritual 'influence' blowing right through him, of "wayward boyish beauty."
Of course Bjørn Tysdahl wrote the book on Joyce and Ibsen,[1] and shows how in this passage Joyce credits Ibsen's influence for the quality of freedom, of standing alone. I have written about them as well, but I consciously left alone Joyce's curious depiction of Ibsen's spirit of "wayward boyish beauty." Frankly I didn't know what to do with ‘boyish.’ Have you ever seen a portrait of Ibsen that showed any, much less all of the above-named qualities? Quite the contrary, I am sure. What characteristic of Ibsen beyond what Tysdahl has already showed us is Joyce valuing here?
Before anything, Ibsen's influence is personal and life-changing for Joyce. Richard Ellmann's treatment of Ibsen's influence on Joyce in his book James Joyce (1959; 1982) is a set-piece of modern literary biography. (I read it myself when I was 18, and his inspiring narrative of the episode made me a lifelong reader of Ibsen and Joyce). In 1900 Joyce reacted contentiously to a university debating-society paper elevating Greek and Elizabethan theatre against modern drama, especially despising in its treatment of Ibsen, and Joyce proposed to deliver a paper elevating Ibsen above them all. At the same time he precociously proposed (for he was just eighteen years old at the time) a general essay on Ibsen to The Fortnightly Review, a preeminent British journal. Remarkably, the editor offered instead to take a review of Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken. Joyce's review was published soon after his lecture on Ibsen, and soon after its publication Joyce received a letter from William Archer, quoting Ibsen's appreciation of Joyce's review. Joyce replied to Archer: "I am a young Irishman, eighteen years old, and the words of Ibsen I shall keep in my heart all my life." [Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 74.]
In "Drama and Life" the paper Joyce delivered, he argues that Greek drama is 'played out,' a victim of its confining conventions, that Shakespeare was literature in dialog, not drama, that Corneille and Calderon were plot jugglers, not dramatists; none of them can match Ibsen. Joyce deliberately infuriates his listeners, and needles those who are also supporters of Irish independence in politics and culture, asking them to set aside their conventional and second-hand opinions by saying "let us criticise in the manner of a free people, as a free race." In other words, he creates and relishes an uproar, a word we share in English with Ibsen for such incitations.
Joyce concludes by arguing that only modern drama focuses on what is essential in our lives by paying special attention to its "true position," not its conventions. "In the meantime, art, and chiefly drama, may help us to make our resting places with a greater insight and a greater foresight, that the stones of them may be bravely builded, and the windows goodly and fair. Joyce ends with a quotation from Ibsen’s Pillars of Society, where a complacent man needles Lona Hessel for returning home from America: "…what will you do in our Society, Miss Hessel" asked Rørlund—"I will let in fresh air, Pastor" answered Lona."
What does it mean for Lona to let in fresh air? Is she a good model for creating an uproar? You bet she is.
Lona's sudden homecoming in Pillars of Society is the return of fresh air to the community. She was notorious for upsetting conventions, cutting her hair short and wearing men's boots in the rain and especially for face-slapping one of the pillars of her society for his hypocritical lovemaking to her. Although Mrs. Rummel is one of the ladies who serves in Rørlund's condescending 'spiritual' society for ‘other’ women, you can hear her lifted out of the conventions that stifled her then (and now) in her subtly admiring memory of Lona in action: "Lona Hessel rose from her chair, and gave the handsome, aristocratic Karsten Bernick a ringing box on the ear." (249) [så reiser Lona Hessel se opp fra den stol hun sitter på, og gir den fine, dannene Karsten Bernick en ørefiken, så det sang i ham" (15)
Lona has not lost her touch. When she arrives with Johan she says she has come home with 'her boy,' letting them first think she comes with her fatherless child. Rørlund shows her one of his social projects, ladies busy sewing in a darkened room of Bernick's house, for the sake of fallen women: he has named it, of course, "The Society for the Moral Regeneration of the Lapsed and Lost." Lona is perfect: "[half to herself.] What? These nice-looking, well-behaved ladies, can they be-----?" (271)
Lona's allergy to oppressive authority highlights resistance in others that might otherwise go unnoticed, and marks out an incipient alternative community opposed to wall-to-wall conventionality. In the beginning Dina, a daughter of a fallen woman, feels alone and isolated in her rebelliousness, and instinctively resists do-gooding and positive influence aimed (always) in her direction. Although Mrs. Rummel feigns innocence to the charge of restarting old scandal, Mrs. Holt reminds her that she instigated this day's exposure of Dina's past by hinting at how dissipated their community was formerly, and this isn't the first time, for she must have confessed on an earlier occasion to Mrs Holt, who remembers being told that Mrs Rummel once had the starring role in a play (plays are also frowned upon).
Lona's launching of torpedoes (one of Ibsen’s favorite metaphors for stirring up society) reminds us of other characters of Ibsen. Dr Stockmann in Enemy of the People is not simply effective at getting his brother, the mayor, angry; he can get a meeting hopping mad, so that they end up declaring this friend of the people now as an enemy of the people. In my book I have discussed in detail how these brothers intricately enrage each other, but I simply want to invoke here the hidden pleasure that must be behind Dr Stockmann's success at infuriating others. Can he really be surprised that the community will not thank him for discovering the pollution of the baths which were to revive the community’s depressed economy with tourism, or his father-in-law’s tannery at being identified as the source of the pollution?
And if Enemy of the People begins as a response to the public's infuriated response to Ghosts, was Ibsen serious when he wrote his publisher Hegel in 1881 that he was hoping to complete Ghosts in time for the holiday gift-giving season?
We see this same spirit of resentful provocation and payback in the Joyce family. When Charles Stewart Parnell fell from his political role as Ireland's uncrowned king because he was publicly identified as an adulterer and therefore a Protestant no longer supportable by Ireland's Catholic clergy, James, only 9 years old, wrote a poem commemorating Parnell and castigating Parnell’s enemies, entitled "Et tu, Healy." (Healy, formerly an ally of Parnell, had turned on him). James father, an ardent Parnellite, had the poem printed and, according to his own testimony, sent a copy to the Pope.
By 1904, Joyce's circumstances were desperate. He had no job, his family was impoverished and often went hungry. He was writing the first chapters of his autobiographical novel where he would pay back all those who had betrayed him. He shared this narrative of Stephen Daedalus with several sympathetic readers, including A.E. Russell, an old friend of WB Yeats who served as a kind of mentor to young writers in Dublin.
Russell edited a journal named The Irish Homestead for an agricultural society which promoted Irish cooperation and solidarity among farmers. They ran a short story contest with a one pound prize. Russell told Joyce he should submit a story, but if Joyce was embarrassed about such a venue for his writing he could use a pseudonym. But Russell told Joyce he needed an uplifting story, with rural values and a rural setting. Joyce gave him "The Sisters", the first story of Dubliners, and signed the story "Stephen Daedalus" thus copperfastening his whole artistic mission with the story.
As you may remember, the story is about an elderly paralyzed priest who mentors a young boy. To a certain kind of informed or gossipy Dublin reader, the priest's symptoms could suggest general paralysis of the insane, gpi, caused by syphilitic contagion. Edmund Epstein also argues that the shop behind which the priest lives was an address well-known to Dublin gallants as a source for condoms. We are told in the story that the shop was "an unassuming shop registered under the vague name of drapery," a sentence certainly inciting suspicion: why "registered" rather than simply named, and why is the name "vague" except to hide something? The sign in the window which says "umbrellas recovered" completes an exercise in what is callow rather than boyish, and underlines the hazard of merely giving scandal, creating uproar as an end in itself, for Joyce or Ibsen. The air of this story is fetid not fresh and the boy narrator of “The Sisters” suffers from the patter of conventional pieties offered as the last words for the priest. He declines the cream crackers offered to him because he is afraid of drawing attention to himself.
We should not blind ourselves to the resentful pettiness of such responses, resistance in an unworthy cause. I still believe that Dubliners is a powerful effort to work beyond resentment and rivalry, resulting in the last story, “The Dead.”
A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and A Doll House are not unworthy, they are beautiful and youthful in the best sense, a young student and a young mother who will find their way to live, on their own.
To an audience of ardent Joyceans I would go on to show that Joyce's rewriting of Stephen Hero as Portrait is precisely not callow, that Joyce's writing of "The Dead" under the inspiration of Ibsen's last play “When We Dead Awaken” which Joyce reviewed made that rewriting possible, creating in Portrait a new affectionate prose towards the boyish and wayward Stephen now renamed Dedalus. In that review Joyce notes that Ibsen's plays are increasingly set out-of-doors. The fresh air that Joyce through Stephen Dedalus offers Ireland, published mere months before The Easter Rising in 1916 which hijacks their religion forever to a political agenda of blood sacrifice (for who can think of Easter in Ireland without the Rising) is a hero who refuses his Easter duty, who refuses to sacrifice himself, who chooses to live rather than die for his country.
For an audience of ardent Ibsenists I would cut that elaboration short, to return to Lona Hessel, whose intention in Pillars of Society is not to torpedo Karstin Bernick and her own community but to redeem them. But she does not urge redemption through sacrifice, and she deftly refuses to accept Bernick's offloading onto women of the self-sacrificing burden of being society's newly acknowledged pillars. In the last speech of the play Lona says that the spirits of truth and freedom, these are society's pillars.