The Apocalyptic Ibsen: When We Dead Awaken - Henrik Ibsen

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2000 by Elinor Fuchs

To the naive triumphalist and millennialist vision of the first statue, in which the dead rise in a state so pure that they need not even be cleansed of sin, Rubek has added a darker aspect of the apocalypse narrative. He has retrieved the image of the beast. The statue is now an allegory of conflict within the artist's soul. Since completing his masterpiece, Rubek has made a career carving animal faces into and beneath the likenesses of his wealthy patrons. He gives them "worthy horse faces and the stubborn muzzles of mules--lop-eared, low-browed dog skulls, and pampered pig snouts--and every so often, the heavy, brutal semblance of a bull" (1036).

Rubek brands his patrons, in the resonant language of Revelation, with the "mark of the beast." The image of the beast in the books of Daniel and Revelation has spawned a long history of interpretation. The beast is Nero, is Rome, is the church, is the pope, is the monarchy in the French Revolution, is capitalism in the Russian Revolution, is the Jews in the Nazi revolution, is the United Nations, is the dark machinations of the digital society surfacing in the supermarket codes. In When We Dead Awaken Ibsen gives us an Augustinian version of the beast as a force in the battle between carnal and spiritual, earthly and heavenly, within each human soul, and he does so on two representational levels. The allegorical battle represented in Rubek's statue, "Resurrection Day," doubles the struggle between the two males in his quartet of figures.

Emerging, like the canonical apocalypse beasts, out of the water, his name derived from "wolf," running with dogs, hunting bear, eating bloody red meat, Ulfheim represents for Ibsen that aspect of human nature given over to appetite. He too bears the mark of the beast. That Rubek and Ulfheim are at root aspects of a single figure is signaled by Ulfheim's own comparison of the two as artists:

We both like working with hard material, ma'am--both I and your husband. He likes wrestling with blocks of marble...and I wrestle with the hard, straining sinews of bears. And both of us force our material down under control at last. Become lord and master over it. We never give up till we've overcome it, no matter how much it fights back....[B]ecause the stone has something to fight for, too....It's dead, and it resists with all its strength being hammered into life. (1044)

Motifs of apocalypse in When We Dead Awaken are supported by the highly charged formal pattern of the play. In three acts, it traces a three-day journey from light to dark to dawn, from low to higher to highest, mirroring the emancipatory death and resurrection pattern of the Christian narrative. As they disappear up the highest peak moments before the catastrophic/redemptive avalanche, the ecstatic conviction of Rubek and Irene that they are consummating a marriage feast invokes the marriage imagery at the end of Revelation.

The linings of Ibsen's realist plays were always shot through with myth and folklore, but Ibsen's overt reliance on Christian imagery in When We Dead Awaken (the swan from Lohengrin in act 2 notwithstanding) seems suddenly somewhat, shall we say, regressive. However, Ibsen had long been attracted to millennialist thinking in the Christian, or perhaps post-Christian, mode.