O poor Robinson Crusoe, how could you possibly do so?

In Daniel Defoe’s novel, the eponymous hero, Robinson Crusoe, during the 28 years he spends on his desert island, sometimes asks himself whether his fate was God’s punishment for having committed the primal sin of disobeying his father. And it struck me, even on my first reading as a child, that, given that Crusoe had been the owner of a plantation that was worked by slaves, and that, further, given that Crusoe had himself been a slave trader, there were somewhat greater transgressions than merely filial disobedience that the Almighty could have punished him for. Crusoe’s failure to see something so obvious as this struck me then, and strikes me still, as a chilling piece of irony that underpins the entire novel. And to the question “Did Defoe intend this irony?” I’d answer “Does it matter?”

Not that I’m one of those readers who divorces the text from the writer, seeing the former as merely a product of its times, and hence, no more than a reflection of the various power structures of those times. Far from it. The terrible irony I see underpinning Robinson Crusoe strikes me as very much a  literary quality: it shifts the focus of the novel from that of human resourcefulness and self-sufficiency (which are usually taken to be the novel’s principal themes) to the more interesting themes – from my perspective, at least – of the human capacity of self-delusion, and humanity’s failure to recognise its own moral culpability, repining as we do at the thought of imagined sins when far greater crimes are staring us in the face.

Now, all the available evidence concerning Defoe indicates that this irony was not intentional on the author’s part, but I really don’t see what that should make a difference to the way I perceive this novel. Especially when this irony enhances both its literary and its moral qualities.

This year is the three hundredth anniversary of this very famous novel, and it is perhaps only natural that we should be disturbed by its content. I will not list the various reasons why modern readers may find the content disturbing: they are well described in this article that recently appeared in The Guardian. However, the headline-writer appears not to have read the article: “Robinson Crusoe at 300: why it’s time to let go of this colonial fairytale” says the headline, although Charles Boyle, the author, says quite explicitly:

The argument here is not with Defoe, who was a clever and contrary man. His acceptance of slavery as necessary for profitable business is one thing; his belief that Britain is a nation of immigrants and his championing of education for women are others. Nor is the argument with the novel itself … My quarrel is with the way the novel has been used, and continues to be used …

His quarrel, in short, is with interpretation. And Defoe’s novels, in general, are open to various interpretative stances. This is primarily because each of his major novels (at least, the ones that I have read: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Journal of the Plague Year, and Roxana) is a first person narration, and can, and, to my mind, should, be taken as a dramatic monologue. Thus, we find ourselves compelled to evaluate what is being said in the context of our understanding of the person who is saying it. In Moll Flanders, for instance, we notice the irony of Moll expressing, near the end of her narrative, penitence for her criminal life, while, at the same time, being content to live on the proceeds of that same criminality. That Moll is not aware of this irony is no reason why we shouldn’t take a different view. In Robinson Crusoe, we go a step further: not only is the fictional narrator not aware of the irony underpinning his narrative, it appears, from evidence external to the novel itself, that Defoe himself was possibly not aware either. But the irony nonetheless exists, and, to my mind, makes it a greater novel.

Charles Boyle’s other criticism – that of the pedestrian nature of the prose – may be possible harder to counter. Defoe was primarily a journalist, and only took up novel-writing comparatively late in his career; and he made a point of writing his novels in clear, precise, journalistic prose. It was, it seems to me, a conscious artistic decision. I must admit I do not find the prose “pedestrian” at all: indeed, the nature of the prose seems to me to serve its purpose well – to provide the utmost clarity and transparency even while concealing subtleties and ironies hidden even from the narrator. This conflict between transparency of the narrative style and the secrets hidden within the narrative itself seems to me to reach its apogee in Roxana (the work I take to be Defoe’s masterpiece), where, by the end, despite the absolute clarity of the prose, we cannot even be sure of what precisely happens, let alone how we are to interpret it.

It would be very wrong to “throw away” Robinson Crusoe as the Guardian headline-writer seems to suggest: but perhaps we should look again at this novel and, indeed, at Defoe’s other novels too, all of which seem to me to contain far more than is immediately apparent.

On bookshops, cathedrals, and fanciful analogies

We all have a favourite bookshop. And if we don’t, we should. We who are into blogging about books – we book-lovers, or, to employ a diction more suited to our pretensions, bibliophiles – should ideally have one particular bookshop that is particularly close to our heart. Not necessarily the biggest, nor even the best stocked, but one to which, for whatever reason, we find ourselves sentimentally attached.

For me, that is not an easy choice to make. Living as I do in a place from where it is as easy to travel to Central London as it is to Oxford, I am a bit spoilt for choice. In London, I do like Hatchards, which, unlike other big bookshops, has not diluted its bookishness by incorporating a coffee shop within its premises. And the big Waterstones in Torrington Place, near University College London, is particularly well-stocked, and is a delight to browse in. On the other hand, I have been known to describe the Blackwell’s in Oxford as my “spiritual home”. Spending a day in shops like this, if you ask me (and you probably don’t), is worth more than all your online outlets put together.

But there is one bookshop that is particularly close to my heart: Minster Gate bookshop, in York. It is an antiquarian and second-hand bookshop, and is much smaller than the ones I have mentioned, but it has character. The ground space is actually very small, but what it lacks in horizontal space, it makes up for in vertical: there are five storeys, including a basement, connected by very steep and very narrow flights of stairs. And these stairs, not having much room to extend, turn one hundred and eighty degrees between each successive pair of floors, creating a small landing half-way up. (I’m sure there is a technical architectural term to describe this, but since I do not know what it is, I have no choice but to provide laboured descriptions.) And these small landings each have a set of shelves, which one can only peruse by having to move to one side every now and then to let other customers squeeze past.

Minster Gate bookshop, York. Picture taken from bookshop’s website.

Needless to say, there’s no café here. Nothing compromises its air of bookish seriousness. And the stock is a delight. Being primarily an antiquarian and second hand bookshop, this stock is always changing, but every time I have been there – and I first went there over forty years ago now – I have found no shortage of items to tempt me. I don’t live very close to York these days, but when I do visit, not having a look at this bookshop is as unthinkable as not having a look at York Minster itself.

Which brings me to what is, perhaps, the greatest charm of this utterly charming bookshop: its close proximity to the mighty York Minster. The shop is situated a mere few yards from the magnificent soaring south transept of York Minster, which is one of the world’s greatest sights.

York Minster Cathedral, rising majestically above the city of York

The building itself I cannot help thinking of as a symphony in stone. I am not sure why this analogy with a symphony keeps coming to mind, but it seems apt: there is to this edifice an uncompromising and massive grandeur; it soars high, high above the maze of narrow streets around it, and looks down with a seeming disdain upon the small world below which seems almost too insignificant to encompass such glory. And, no doubt fancifully but nonetheless compellingly, this puts me in mind of the craggy grandeur I find in Beethoven’s symphonies, which, while enjoining us (quite literally in the finale of the ninth) to live our lives heroically, give us at the same time an image of a vastness so immense and so incapable of being adequately embraced by mere mortals such as ourselves, that we are put very firmly back in our place.

The interior of York Minster

The contrast between York Minster and Salisbury Cathedral – another favourite of mine, and one which, being closer to where I now live, I visit often – could not be greater. Instead of rising above narrow medieval streets, Salisbury Cathedral is situated in a spacious and airy close. Indeed, the world “close”, though literally accurate in this context, is also inappropriate, as this “close” is as open as may be imagined. Within this “close”, the cathedral is surrounded by gentle lawns and trees. The building itself epitomises grace and elegance. Even that famous spire, which is actually higher than any of the towers of York Minster, imparts no sense of massiveness or of grandeur, but rather of a certain lightness.

Salisbury Cathedral

For some tastes, compared to the mighty York Minster, Salisbury Cathedral conveys merely charm, is merely decorous, and is, hence, in the final analysis, merely insipid. I disagree, most vehemently. If York Minster is a Beethoven symphony, then Salisbury Cathedral is a Mozart piano concerto, delighting the senses with its charms, but touching also the strings of the heart, and sounding the deepest of chords. But then again, there are those who also think Mozart’s music is also a mere display of triviality, or, at best, of pleasant but ultimately insignificant fripperies. It is best, I think, just to shrug one’s shoulders and pass such people by.

And yes, Salisbury Cathedral is equally glorious inside

To complete the set, I think I should mention also the third of my three favourite cathedrals – Chartres Cathedral. In Chartres. France. And I guess I should liken this, too, with the works of a great composer. Bach, perhaps? The great passions, maybe, or the B minor mass? No, enough of this. An analogy that was no more than mildly fanciful to begin with reveals its silliness all too easily if stretched too far. So let us not stretch matters here.

Porch of North Transept Of Chartres Cathedral

But wait, wait … I got sidetracked. I was meaning to tell you about what I bought at the Minster Gate bookshop, and next thing I knew, I was talking about cathedrals and symphonies and all the rest of it. This is what happens when one has no discipline in one’s writing. So, let’s get back to where I had started: books. Or, rather, buying books.

What – I need more books? When I have so many at home I haven’t read yet? Of course, all bookish people – to which tribe, dear reader, I assume you belong – have been asked that question. And other questions too: Why do you have so many books in the house? Have you read them all? Yes, but surely you’re not going to re-read all of these? And so on. Nowadays, tired of explaining at great length why I surround myself with books, and still, despite my detailed and (as I like to imagine) articulate replies, encountering puzzled and uncomprehending faces, I have taken to saying, having put on as serious a demeanour as I can manage, that I fill my house with books because I believe they ward off evil spirits. That usually shuts ‘em up.

And the two books I came out with from Minster Gate bookshop yesterday to ward off evil spirits was a volume of Nabokov’s short stories, and a hardback edition – which, though second hand, looks not merely unread but unopened – of David West’s commentaries on the sonnets of Shakespeare. David West was, of course, a noted classical scholar: I have been greatly enjoying lately his translations of the odes of Horace (and I gather his translation of the Aeneid is also very fine). I am very curious to see what he makes of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

I’m on a long train journey back home tomorrow, so I should have plenty of time to start reading these. And even if I don’t, they will, I am sure, prove most effective in warding off evil spirits.

Please note: while the pictures of Salisbury and of Chartres are my own, the much better taken pictures of York I found by Google search, and they were not accompanied by a copyright notice. There was no intent on my part to breach copyright, but if I have inadvertently done so, please do contact me. Thank you very much.

“The Master Builder”: a postscript

My last post was a long one, and given I have already spent over four and a half thousand words on it, I really shouldn’t need to add a postscript. But on reading my post over again, there seems to me that something important is missing. At no point do I address the question “What do I, personally, think the play The Master Builder is about?”

The standard answers come easily. It is about a very great number of things, not all of which can  be articulated; to state directly what “it is about” is necessarily reductive, because if “what it is about” can be directly stated,  Ibsen wouldn’t have employed such intricate indirections; to insist on one single interpretation is to deny a host of others; that even one’s personal perspective on a work so profound and so complex as this changes over time, often from reading to reading; and so on, and so forth. All of which is true, but since I do not aim to give an objective overview of any work I discuss here on this blog, I really should be obliged to offer at least my own subjective perspectives. Not insist upon them, but merely to offer them, such as they are.

In an article on this play that appeared some nine or so years ago (and which I had not seen till only a few days ago), distinguished Ibsen scholar Toril Moi (whose book Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism I most warmly recommend) speaks of Hilde being fascinated by and longing for sex, and yet, at the same time, being afraid of it. She compares Hilde to Hedda Gabler, who used to listen fascinated to Loevborg’s accounts of his various debaucheries, but who threatened him with a gun when he had made an advance on her. (I must admit this is not a parallel that had occurred to me.) And in Solness, Toril Moi sees a man who, underneath all the various complexities – the various neuroses, the various pieces of myth-making about himself – is afraid simply of death.

Moi has interesting things to say also about Aline Solness, who, far from being a desiccated old woman in her sixties, is someone who had borne children only thirteen years earlier, and is most likely in her mid-to-late thirties. It is surely her relative youth that makes her living death so much more terrible.

For me, the marriage of Aline and Halvard is among the greatest mismatches in drama. Aline’s greatest sorrow is not the loss of her children, traumatic though that had been: it is the loss of her childhood, the violent break from the only world in which she had been happy; it is her dislocation into a world that feels forever alien. She has nothing of her husband’s energy and vigour, her husband’s zest for life and longing for joy: if Halvard feels chained to a corpse in being tied  to a woman who is incapable of moving on from her emotional attachment to a vanished past, she, on her part, cannot live in a present that has nothing to offer her but regretful memories of what has been forcibly wrenched from her.

Hilde, on the other hand, wishes to escape her past, but where she is to escape to is not certain. She describes her home as a cage, and herself as a wild bird; and when she is asked if she may wish to return to her childhood home – that one thing that Aline Solness desires more than anything else – Hilde replies that wild birds do not fly back into their cages. When she had been about twelve or thirteen – when, like  Juliet in Shakespeare’s play, she had been in the early stage of her journey from girlhood to womanhood, and was becoming aware of her sexuality – she had seen the vigorous and charismatic Solness, then, perhaps, in his early forties, climb up to the top of the tower; and she had found it thrilling beyond anything she had ever experienced, or had experienced since. From then on, her family home had been merely a cage from which she had to escape. So deep is her longing to escape the domesticities of home, that at times she becomes almost masochistic – as at that rather shocking moment when she speaks of the ancient Vikings, and of her excitement not at the thought of carrying away others (as Vikings used to do), but of being carried away.

And there’s Solness himself, of course. Yes, he is afraid of death. But I think he is afraid of something even more than that: he is afraid of nothingness. He is afraid of the possibility that nothing really matters. To me, the crux of the whole play, the climactic point of the drama, occurs during Solness’ final duologue with Hilde in the third act: he tells her of his defiance of God – even though he cannot bring himself even to speak God’s name; he tells her that from moment on, he had determined to build no more churches for God, but houses – houses for people to live in. From that moment, his world was to be people-centred rather than God-centred: he would embrace what we would nowadays describe as “humanism”. But it was no good: he has found no fulfilment in this either. All he has found was nothingness. And it is this nothingness he fears, more than anything else.

That first time he had climbed up the tower despite his fear of heights, he had done so to express his defiance of God whom he had believed in. Now, he climbs the tower again, but this time, he does so in defiance of nothingness, which he now also believes in. If nothingness is all that reality has to offer, then the greatest castles that can be built, the only castles that can be built, are “castles in the air”.

I have, in the above, refrained from citing passages from the text to support what I am saying. This is partly because I have done enough of that in my last post, and also because what I am offering here is, without apology, my own personal view of the play.

And of course, the usual caveats apply: I am not insisting upon my view of the work; there are a great many other valid ways of seeing it; I am sure I will see things differently again the next time I encounter it; and so on. But, for the moment at least, this, I think, is what lies at the centre of all the various complexities and profundities of this inexhaustible work – the fear that, at the heart of it all, there is simply a vast nothingness.

“The Master Builder” by Henrik Ibsen

*** SPOILER WARNING: The following post inevitably reveals some of the plot details of this play, and so, if such things are important to you (they needn’t be), it is possibly best not to read this post till you’ve read or seen the play for yourself. 

All quoted passages are taken from the translation by Barbara Haveland and Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife, published by Penguin Classics

 

The Master Builder continues to puzzle and bewilder audiences and readers. When watching a performance in the theatre, or reading the text at home, one can hardly miss its intense, life-and-death seriousness. But what is it all about? All kinds of possible interpretations have been put forward – that it is a political allegory, a representation of Man turning against God, a dramatisation of inter-generational conflict, an exploration of Nietzschean concepts of morality, and so on. Ibsen himself, when asked about its interpretation, replied that he simply wrote about people, and that he didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Of course, he was being disingenuous, but perhaps that is not a bad way of approaching this inscrutably obscure drama. It’s not that the play is not about a great many different themes and ideas, but, perhaps, none of that makes too much sense unless we engage first with the people – the characters on stage who carry the drama.

The setting seems realistic enough. In the first scene, we are in an office in the house of master builder Halvard Solness, and we see his employees at their work. This could easily be the setting of a realistic social drama, such as The Pillars of Society. And indeed, in the course of the drama, nothing happens that is unrealistic – in the sense that nothing happens that is physically impossible. But yet, it becomes impossible to take this drama on purely realistic terms. At the heart of the drama are a number of scenes between Master Builder Solness, and his young visitor, Hilde Wangel (whom we had seen in the earlier play The Lady From the Sea), and the duologues between them seem to make little sense if considered from a strictly realistic perspective. From such a perspective, we could say that they are both, in essence, mad – that they are both locked into their own personal fantasies, and that these fantasies somehow feed off each other. We could say that, on occasion, the reality of the lives around them enter into their fantasies; but equally – and, by the end, fatally – their fantasies also obtrude into the real world.

But to leave it there is to relegate this drama into the realms of nonsense: what interest could there possibly be in the fantasies of two crazy people? The reviews of the first London performance did, indeed, see the play in such terms (there’s a wonderful collection of quotes from these reviews in Michael Meyer’s biography of Ibsen): “… a play written rehearsed, and acted by lunatics”; “… platitudes and inanities…”; “… the most dreary and purposeless drivel … pointless, incoherent, and absolutely silly…”; “three acts of gibberish…”; “dull, mysterious, unchaste”.

It is easy to look back on such uncomprehending early criticism, and congratulate ourselves on our greater understanding, but it remains true, I think, that if we fail to enter imaginatively into the fantasy worlds created by Solness and by Hilde, and if we fail to see these fantasies as important counterpoints to the very real and solid world with which they overlap, then the criticisms quoted above may be seen as entirely reasonable, and “dull, mysterious, unchaste” may appear an entirely reasonable summary. Ibsen did, indeed, as he insisted, portray people, but to understand the nature of the people he portrayed, we must prepare ourselves to enter into their fantasies, and take them as seriously as the reality which, throughout all the dramatic complexities, never quite go away.

The opening scenes are very realistic indeed: Ibsen needed a strong, solid base on which to build. Master Builder Solness (Bygmester Solness, as the Norwegian title proclaims) is described in the stage directions as being in his “late middle age”: I think we can take that to mean he is in his 50s – hardly in the first flush of youth, but far from descended into the vale of years: we see him as vigorous, energetic, masterful, exerting his personal power over people around him; and, if the drama that unfolds is to make sense, he is charismatic, and still sexually attractive. Certainly Kaja, his bookkeeper, is completely in thrall to him: he is, naturally, fully aware of the power he exerts over Kaja, and is happy to take advantage of it.

Kaja’s intended, Ragnar Brovik, and Ragnar’s father Knut, also work in the office, as architects and designers. Old Knut Brovik once had his own construction business, but that had failed, and we see him merely an underling of Solness. Now, obviously old and ill, he would like to see his son succeed in the business, and he asks Solness to recommend Ragnar’s design for a commission, but Solness, terrified of the thought of being supplanted by a younger generation (as he, as a young man, had supplanted Knut Brovik), angrily refuses.

BROVIK: Am I to depart this life so poor?

SOLNESS [appears to be  struggling with himself; at length he says quietly, but firmly]: You will have to depart this life as best you can.

BROVIK: Well, so be it. [He walks away.]

SOLNESS [going after him, almost despairingly]: But I can’t do otherwise, you see! I am the way I am, after all!

Like God Almighty, he is what he is.

This opening exchange lays bare the essential character of Solness. He can be cruel, he can hurt people; but cruelty is not something that comes to him naturally. He has to struggle with himself before he utters those immensely cruel words “You will have to depart this life as best you can”. And afterwards, he has to try to explain himself. As the scene continues, we see him pour out a glass of water for his employee, and seeing that he is ill, advises Ragnar to take his father home. He is not amoral: he has a sense of what is right and what is wrong, of what is kind and what is cruel, but he cannot do otherwise: he is what he is.

So far, so realistic: this could still be a play from Ibsen’s earlier years. But in the scene that follows between Solness and the doctor, Solness comes out with the most extraordinary paranoia: has not Aline, Solness’ wife, asked the doctor to keep an eye on him? Has not Aline confided to the doctor that she thinks he is … mad? The doctor denies this, but Solness doesn’t quite believe him.

Because to some extent, you see, she – she might have reason to think such a thing.

Solness changes the subject quickly after this, but if we had thought this a realistic play, we are, perhaps, a bit less sure of our ground now. The ground shifts even further as Solness tell the doctor that he feels that he has certain supernatural powers: his deepest desires, he feels, though unspoken, somehow communicate themselves to others, and these others, unbidden, serve him: he can, he is convinced, bend the will of others to his own merely by desiring.

And then there comes a most extraordinary exchange that seems to confirm Solness’ suspicions concerning his own sanity. Contrary to the doctor’s suspicions, he is not, he insists, having an affair with his bookkeeper Kaja, but he allows his wife to suspect that he is:

Because I feel there is a kind of – kind of salutary self-torture for me in simply allowing Aline to think unjustly of me … it’s like paying off some portion of some vast and bottomless debt …

The doctor at this point throws up his hands and says he doesn’t understand a word of this, and we in the audience may start feeling the same. But Solness goes further: he is frightened. Yes, he has been successful in his career, “but at some point, the turn will come”. The younger generation will rise up, he says, and will overthrow him. Youth will come knocking at the door. And, as if to underline how far we have strayed by this point from the strict realism with which the play had begun, there is indeed a knock on the door at this precise point, and it is indeed youth who is knocking. But not the youth that Solness had been expecting: it is a young lady, a stranger, Hilde Wangel, who seems to have known Solness, but whom he cannot recognise. Having laid the basis of the drama in these few short but densely packed scenes that start with strict realism, but which, in Solness’ conversation with the doctor, drift towards what seems like madness, Ibsen now introduces Hilde, the final character of the drama. The prologue, as it were, is now over.

Hilde had appeared in a play Ibsen had written some four years earlier – The Lady from the Sea. There, we had seen her a teenager, living with her elder sister and her father, both gentle and loving souls, and with her stepmother, from whom she feels alienated. The play does end with a promise of renewal, but Hilde herself had emerged a not entirely sympathetic character: she is fascinated by the fact that a neighbouring young man is, unknown to himself, terminally ill, and, while others are kind to him despite his foolish and conceited nature, she teases him mercilessly. There was, in that play, something predatory about her, a certain failure of human empathy. Ibsen presumably felt that given the supporting role she had played in that drama, there wasn’t room to develop her character as he might ideally have wanted; whether he did or not, he brings her back here, and allots her a more prominent role. There is still an element of the predatory about her: though it is not explicitly stated – virtually nothing is explicitly stated in this play – she has certainly come to take Solness away from his wife. But there is more. She is, we find out, also locked into her own personal fantasies, although how much of her fantasy is also real is, from the beginning, uncertain, and open to question.

Solness does not recognise her at first. She has to remind him: some ten years ago, when she had been about twelve or thirteen, Solness had gone up north to Lysanger, Hilde’s hometown, to build a church. And, on that occasion, to consecrate the new church, Solness had climbed up the high tower and had placed upon it a wreath. Hilde describes the scene in almost ecstatic terms:

… it was so splendid and so terribly exciting. I couldn’t believe there was a master builder in all the world who could build such an enormously high tower. And then the fact that you were standing up there yourself, at the very top! In person! And that you weren’t the slightest bit dizzy. That was the most – kind of – dizzying thought of all.

But there is more. Hilde goes on to claim that afterwards, he, Solness, had found her alone, and had told her she looked beautiful, like a princess. Solness has no recollection of this, but Hilde continues. He had promised that in ten years’ time he would return like a troll; that he would carry her off; and that he would buy her a kingdom, and a castle. Solness feels uneasy: he doesn’t remember this, but doesn’t contradict her. But then, Hilde says, he had bent her back and had kissed her, passionately, many, many times.

In our own times, with our greater awareness of child abuse, we are likely to find this narration deeply shocking. I think it is intended to be shocking. There can be no excuse for any man behaving in such a manner with a twelve-year-old girl. And indeed, at this point, Solness himself is very deeply shocked by the accusation, and he vehemently denies it. But, very disconcertingly, she is not accusing him: she has come, she says, to claim what she had been promised – her kingdom and her castle. The ten years, she says, are up, and since he hadn’t come to her, she has had to come to him. And in a tone that seems both joking and serious at the same time, she claims from the Master Builder the promised kingdom.

Solness first claims that all this is something she may have dreamed, but then seems to halt in his tracks: “Wait, though,” he says, “there’s something here that goes deeper…” Could it be that the memory of actually having done all this now resurfaces? Or could it be that he thinks that he had communicated to her his unspoken desire, and, as he is convinced he has the ability to do, he had, through some supernatural power, bent her will to his? We never do find out whether the story Hilde tells is indeed true – whether Solness really had done all this. But true or not, Solness, though remaining puzzled as to her true motive in seeking him out after all these years, is happy that she had come: he seems to find in her someone who is, if not necessarily a kindred spirit, someone he could talk with openly, in the hope of being understood. He invites her to stay in his house, in one of the three empty rooms, the nurseries that have never been used.

In the course of the play, a series of quite extraordinary duologues develop between Solness and Hilde, as each invites the other into their own fantasy, and they find these fantasies, in effect, complementing each other. If we are to look at it purely from a realistic perspective – and while this is not the only perspective, it is one always worth bearing it in mind – regardless of whether or not Solness had made advances towards the then twelve-year-old Hilde, she had been drawn to him; and now, a grown-up woman, she has come to take him away from his wife. And he – again regardless of whether or not the reported incident had actually happened – had secretly desired her then; for how could he have communicated his desire to her if he had not desired in the first place? And he continues to desire her now. But that is only a very partial view of the drama. To get to the mysterious and elusive heart of the play, we must enter into their fantasies, which develop on a related but somewhat different plane from reality. We seem, in some ways, to be back in the world of Peer Gynt, where reality and fantasy seem to exist and develop side by side, interpenetrating and reflecting each other, but never quite touching.

There is, of course, a third point in the triangle: Aline, Solness’ wife, to whom Solness feels he owes a “vast and bottomless debt”. In the first two acts, she seems a pallid, almost a ghostly, presence, solicitous of her husband, but very unlike her husband: she is retiring and self-effacing, and almost entirely passive. When she says she will help Hilde settle in, she adds it’s her “duty”. The emptiness of duty devoid of love had been a theme in many of Ibsen’s earlier work – in particular, Ghosts – and this sense of emptiness strikes Hilde forcibly. Why had she not said she would help Hilde because she wanted to? This emphasis on duty has such a coldness about it.

But before this, there had been a brief but remarkable scene between Solness and Aline, which, like so much else in this play, seems almost impossible to summarise. Solness, we know, feels guilty towards his wife, although we do not yet know why. In this scene, she surprises him by expressing her own sense of guilt. “I should have hardened myself. Not let the shock get hold of me.” We cannot be sure at this stage what she is referring to. Solness tries to assure her that things would be better for them once they move into their new house, but she can see no such hope. Eventually, Solness gives up trying to persuade her, and vents his frustration:

SOLNESS [clenching his hands and crossing the floor]: Oh, but this is all so hopeless! Never a ray of sunshine! Not so much as a glimmer of light falling into this house!

MRS SOLNESS: This is no home, Halvard.

SOLNESS: No, well may you say that. [Heavily] And God knows you could be right – maybe things won’t get any better for us in the new house either.

MRS SOLNESS: They never will. Just as empty. Just as desolate. There as here.

The worst is that these two, caught in their joyless life together, are actually solicitous for each other, and have for each other a kind of love, even in their mutual misery. Later in the play, Solness describes his marriage in startlingly vivid terms:

And now she’s dead – for my sake. And I am chained, living, to the dead. [Frantically] I – I – who cannot live a joyless life!

The soul within Aline seems dead. At the start of the third and final act, Hilde has a scene with Aline, after which she says “I have just climbed out of a tomb … I am chilled to the bone…” In Ghosts, Ibsen had depicted a world stripped of human joy by insistence on duty – unquestioning duty that is to be carried out for its own sake, without love. Here, similarly, Solness, who cannot live without joy, feels he is chained to a corpse. But if Aline is indeed a corpse, Solness knows it is he who has killed her. This is the “vast and bottomless debt” he feels for her, and he is caught hopelessly between this immense sense of obligation he feels for her, and an overwhelming desire to break free.

The past that has led to this present is related in Act Two – but then again, only through Solness’ narration, which is not necessarily the most reliable. He has, in his career, been successful, but that success had only come at a great cost. His wife’s family home had burnt down, to the ground. This had given him the opportunity to divide the estate into small plots, and build houses on them. And that fire he had willed. He had noticed a fatal crack in the flue of the old house which, if not seen to, could cause a catastrophic fire; and every day, he would look at that crack, willing the disaster to happen. And yet, when the fire did happen, it wasn’t because of that crack: it was proven that the fire had started elsewhere. However, he had willed it: that, for Solness, was enough:

SOLNESS [confidentially]: Hilde, don’t you too believe that there are certain special, chosen people who have been granted the blessing and the power and the ability to wish for something, desire something, want something so deeply and so – so inexorably – that they’re bound to get it in the end? Don’t you believe that?

In Solness’ mind, there are, as he calls them, “helpers and servants” – supernatural beings who are summoned merely by the fact of his desire. And so, because he had willed it, the house had burnt down, and the entire family had had to evacuate into the freezing cold night. And the price paid was even greater than the house: their newborn infant sons, twins, had died shortly afterwards. But for this, Solness refuses to accept responsibility: he claims that Aline had caught a chill that night, and that her breast-milk had become infected; but that she had insisted that it was her duty to carry on breast-feeding them.

Now, this part of Solness’ narrative I, personally, would take with great scepticism. First of all, there is no evidence, either in medicine or in popular folk belief, that this can happen. And secondly, even if this really did happen, one may justly ask how Solness, in those days before full post-mortems, could be so sure of it. I would guess that this is another of Solness’ fantasies, part of the mythology he has created around himself. He is prepared to invent the mythology of his “helpers and servants” to justify the immense sense of guilt he feels for his wife, but to accept responsibility for the death of his children was too much, even for him; and here, I think, he had to transfer the guilt to his wife, and, significantly, to that particular aspect of his wife’s character that he finds so intolerable – that sense of loveless duty.

Later, at the start of the third act, Hilde speaks with Aline, and, like her husband, Aline finds herself telling things to Hilde that she is unlikely to have told anyone else – certainly not to her spouse. To Hilde’s surprise, Aline feels no remorse for the death of the children: that was God’s will, and it is her duty to accept. But it’s the smaller things that hurt more – things that to most other people may appear insignificant: in that fire, her childhood dolls had been burnt, and that she cannot come to terms with. Her connection with the past, her childhood, had been destroyed.

We are not told this, but we may infer that, after the fire, after the death of their children (of which the symbolically empty nurseries stand as a permanent reminder), she had suffered some sort of mental breakdown. Which, of course, would have been untreated in those days. In an earlier scene with her husband, she blames herself not for the death of the children (that story about the infected breast milk is, I think it is safe to assume, entirely Solness’ fantasy), but for not being strong enough after the tragedy had struck. And so she remains, a living corpse to whom the still vigorous Solness finds himself chained. This is what he has willed – this is the desire his “helpers and servants” have brought to fruition.

This is what folk call having Fortune on your side. But let me tell you how that Fortune feels! It feels like a large, raw patch here on my chest. And the helpers and servants, they go around tearing chunks of skin off other people in order to close my wound. But still the wound won’t heal.

Hilde diagnoses him: he has an “ailing conscience”. This is not the Master Builder she had pictured. She had pictured a man with a robust conscience, a man unafraid to strive for what he desired. That was the man whom she had seen those ten years ago, on the tower, unafraid, not dizzy. And she had heard “harps in the air”. Soon afterwards, Hilde hears from Aline that Solness is actually afraid of heights, and dare not climb up towers any more. Hilde is outraged. Is it true that “my master builder dare not – cannot – climb as high as he actually builds?” Does he, after all, have a “dizzy conscience”?

It would be easy to see Hilde as merely a harpy, compelling Solness to leave behind his moral obligations. And while there is certainly some truth in this, this is not the entire truth either. After all, it is she who persuades Solness to do the right thing with Ragnar Brovik, and to approve his design. And, after speaking with Aline, she seems to lose her own will: her conscience, too, is not as “robust” as she had thought.

I cannot hurt someone I know! Cannot take away something that belongs to her.

Solness, too, acknowledges his moral  obligations:

HILDE: That a person doesn’t dare to reach out and seize his own happiness. His own life! Simply because someone they know is standing in his way!

SOLNESS: Someone they’ve no right to pass by.

HILDE: Who’s to say one doesn’t, in fact, have the right to do that? But, then again – Oh, if only one could sleep through the whole thing!

Hilde’s hopes seem dashed. Claims of moral obligation, which she had once thought dispensable, now assert themselves. As Rebecca West had found in Rosmersholm, the Rosmer way of life ennobles, but … but it kills happiness. It makes impossible the joy that Solness cannot live without.

And now, Solness, in the final duologue between them, tells her of what he had actually done when she had seen him on that one occasion, defying his fear of heights and actually climbing that tower. It had been ten years ago, shortly after the death of his children.

Solness had, he tells Hilde, come from a “religious home from a small village”. And he had believed that building churches was the finest thing he could do.

SOLNESS: I feel he ought to have been pleased with me.

HILDE: He? Who’s he?

SOLNESS: Him – the one the churches were for, of course! The one they were meant to glorify and praise!  

Solness cannot even bring himself to speak God’s name. But that day, on top of that tower that he would usually be afraid to climb, he had rebelled against God, whose name even now he is unable to articulate. He had said to God that he shall no longer build churches. He shall build houses – houses for people to live in. But it was no good: for at the centre of Solness’ own house remain those empty, desolate rooms. John Rosmer, having rejected the God he had once believed in, but unable to shake off the God-given guilt, had to pass judgement on himself; Solness, similarly having rejected Him whom he cannot even name, and similarly weighed down by guilt, now faces the horrifying fact of nothingness:

So you see, that’s what it all amounts to, no matter how far I look back. Nothing built, basically. And nothing sacrificed to be able to build anything either. Nothing, nothing – all of it.

This contemplation of nothingness is the bleakest point of the drama – its moral and spiritual nadir. But there is a coda. Solness and Hilde, from this point onward, both appear to retreat completely into the fantasy worlds they have created for themselves. Solness will give his princess the castle he had promised her, and it will be the finest castle that may be built – a castle in the air. He will, once again, defy his dizziness: he will climb the tower, and prove himself free. To Aline Solness, living in the real world and terrified for her husband’s safety, he is foolishly endangering his life for no reason; but on a different dramatic plane, this is his victory, and this is Hilde’s victory: she sees him great again. Of course, he crashes to the ground, and dies: from the perspective of the real world, it was madness. But Hilde, by this stage, is completely locked in her fantasy.

HILDE [in a sort of quiet, bewildered triumph]: But he got to the very top. And I heard harps playing in the air. [She waves her shawl above her head, and cries with wild rapture] My – my master builder!

The master builder that others see – their master builder – fell to his death in a foolhardy escapade. But her master builder finally dared to climb as high as he builds: he got to the top.

***

What are we to make of this strange play? I have tried in this post to give as lucid an account as I can of how I see the play, but reading over what I have written, I can’t help but feel that my interpretation simplifies matters, smooths out too many complexities. Perhaps that is the fate of all interpretations. Great works of art are all, despite possible interpretations, ultimately inscrutable, and do not give up their secrets. In this dizzyingly enigmatic and elusive play, Ibsen takes us into realms of the human mind which even he had not entered before. It is a play that continues to fascinate my imagination, even as I struggle to articulate why.

Changes

Like wines or whiskies, we all age differently. As we alter physically with age, so our perceptions also change, the way we view the world alters – imperceptibly, but, over the course of years, often quite dramatically. And it leaves one wondering whether there is any unity underneath it all – whether there is an underlying me that has remained constant through all the alterations; and if so, what that me really is.

And if not, whether there is a me at all.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you leaf, the blossom, or the bole?

Some time back, I ruminated here on my loving the symphonies of Bruckner a few decades ago (I am at an age where I think of these matters in units of decades rather than merely of years), but finding them frankly rather boring these days. I hastened to add, as I do now, that this does not indicate that Bruckner’s music is not worth liking, or that my tastes have necessarily changed for the better: it is not so much a critique of my changing tastes that nowadays occupies my mind, but, rather, a fascination with the fact of the change itself.

What the changes betoken, I do not know, but the changes themselves I can at least record. Perhaps I should begin with that which is constant – those works of literature (let us restrict ourselves to literature here: otherwise this post will degenerate very quickly into a tedious series of lists) that I loved in my youth, and which I continue to value: King Lear, L’Education Sentimentale, Anna Karenina, “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, and so on. Even here, I find, I value these works now for reasons different from the ones that swayed my judgement all those years ago. I first read L’Education Sentimentale when I was eighteen, I remember, and was much affected by the disappointments and disillusions of its protagonist Frédéric Moreau; now, in my sixtieth year, I see in the dashing of Frédéric’s youthful illusions not merely the specific disappointments of one specific individual – the sort of individual I was then determined not to be – but, rather, a reflection of the general sadness of life, in which, however great one’s achievements, or delightful one’s joys, there remains in the midst of it all a lingering sense of emptiness. The novel still strikes in me a powerful chord: but the chord is different. Or, more accurately, the chord is the same, but I now hear certain notes in that chord more clearly than I used to. And, no doubt, there are certain other notes that I used to hear prominently that have now receded into the background.

Back then, I loved the novels of Zola. I read as many as I could that were then available in (what were then) modern translations, since the older translations, I was reliably informed, were often bowdlerised. By my count, I read eight of those novels, and much regretted that all twenty titles of the Rougon-Macquart series were not then available in reliable English translations. Now, they are, and, as I understand from Twitter, many book-bloggers are embarking on a group-read of Zola. Some twenty or so years ago, I would have been enthusiastic, but I cannot, I’m afraid, summon up much enthusiasm for this now. I do not mean, of course, that Zola is an inferior writer: quite clearly, he isn’t. It is just that the riches he has to offer do not mean as much to me as they used to. His strengths – his descriptive powers, his keen awareness of social and economic trends, his skill in organising vast amounts of material into coherent structures, the extraordinary vividness of his narratives – are as impressive now as ever they were. Are my tastes merely jaded with age? I don’t think so, as there is still much that I love and value dearly. It is just that what Zola has to offer, wonderful though it still is, is no longer something that attracts me: the focus of my interests has become narrower.

And at the same time, I find myself being called back to works that continue to resonate in my memory – works that I know I will see from different perspectives were I to revisit them now. I have recently been re-reading – and writing about on this blog at no doubt tedious length – the plays of Ibsen, and, recently, I have been immersing myself in the very late plays. And they strike me with an intensity even greater than what I had experienced in previous readings. They strike me as the works of a visionary. That, I realise, is a vague term, but I do not know how else to put it. His piercing vision in these works seemed to look through the solidities of the everyday, and penetrate into regions of the mind and of the spirit in ways that resist summary, and make a mockery even of any attempt at explication. Which leaves me in a quandary: how the hell do I write about them? What should I write? I have already written long posts on several plays by Ibsen, and I suppose I really should finish this series of posts, and, little read though they undoubtedly are  – I am writing for myself, I keep saying – I would like to finish the series as best I can. But the world of late Ibsen is one that is difficult to penetrate, and perhaps impossible completely to understand. I suppose I am at a stage where I feel that, in the immortal words of the late Magnus Magnusson, I have started so I’ll finish: I can but try my best, safe in the knowledge that, after all, not too many people will read these posts and witness my inadequacy.

And there are some other works toothat seem to beckon. I have long given up any hope of being well read: better, I now feel, to know a few works well, then many works superficially. So while I have not given up entirely on further broadening my horizons, I find myself more frequently attracted to re-reading what I have read before, from my now inevitably older perspective. And what I find beckoning particularly strongly these days are the late novels of Henry James – The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl – the last of these, especially, possibly the most elusive and enigmatic novel I think I have encountered. As with the late plays of Ibsen, the late novels of Henry James are also works that I would describe – for want of a better word at my disposal – as “visionary”. Given the extreme difficulty of these novels, and given also the slow pace of my reading, it may well take me a year or so to read them: but surely, it would be a year well spent.

In the meantime, I suppose I should gird my loins – however one girds one’s loins: I never quite understood what that meant – and get started on writing something on Ibsen’s The Master Builder. These late plays of Ibsen are, after all, more or less permanent fixtures of my mind, so I might as well examine them more thoroughly, if only to try to understand why they mean so much to me.