Henrik Ibsen (2014)
A low-poly portrait by Taudalpoi
A low-poly portrait by Taudalpoi
In 1869, the Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen composed a short poem entitled 'To My Friend, the Revolutionary Orator'. It was addressed to a critic who had accused Ibsen, then aged forty-one, of betraying the radical promise of his youth and becoming increasingly conservative.
In the verse, Ibsen not only wishes to refute the charge, but demonstrate that he remains a perfervid revolutionary; more - not less - radical than before; one who desires the total destruction of the old order. He's not interested, he says, in moving pawns about the chessboard, or in futile social reforms. He wants to make a clean sweep of things.
Becoming increasingly intoxicated by his uncompromising vision of a future founded upon absolute freedom and purity of being achieved via a purge of all existing life forms, Ibsen announces that, come a new flood, he will happily torpedo the ark.
Discontent with anything other than the dream of a new beginning and a new mankind, Ibsen finds it impossible to identify with any political parties or programmes. His extreme individualism leads him towards a form of anarcho-nihilism in which not just the modern state, but the world itself needs to be blown out of the water.
For some, this might all sound rather like Nietzsche in his grand political mode when he imagines himself as dynamite; a sort of human bomb longing to explode and make a breach in the walls of whatever constrains and coordinates life. For it's true, there are elements of fascism in Nietzsche - particularly in the later works, as he grows ever-more frustrated and possessed by the spirit of revenge that elsewhere in his texts he deplores and seeks to combat.
We shouldn't overlook or deny this; but we should remember also the Nietzsche who wrote: "I do not love people who have to explode like bombs in order to have any effect at all" and advocates a politics of resistance rather than a politics of revolutionary redemption. The Nietzsche who also wrote:
"If change is to be as profound as it can be, the means to it must be given in the smallest doses but unremittingly over long periods of time! Can what is great be created at a single stroke? So let us take care not to exchange the state of morality to which we are accustomed for a new evaluation of things head over heels and amid acts of violence ..."
Of course, some will point out that this 'small doses' passage taken from his mid-period writings is no more indicative of the authentic Nietzsche, or any more quintessential than the later texts in which he fantasizes the seizure of history and evolution. And they'd be right to do so. However, it seems to me to offer a much more interesting and credible teaching than the lame and ludicrous notion of holy war and a return to Year Zero.
I don't know if Ibsen ever had cause to regret his desire to implement a final solution - but shame on him, as an artist and as a man, if he never came to realise that the chick does not break the shell out of animosity against the egg (as Lawrence would say).
And I would hope, finally, after 500 posts, that the phrase torpedo the ark is understood to mean something very different in the context of this blog to what Ibsen meant by it ...
Notes:
Those interested in reading the Ibsen poem in which the line 'torpedo the ark' appears should click here.
The lines quoted from Nietzsche can be found in (i) The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), III. 218, p. 210, and (ii) Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), V. 534, p. 211.
