The Apocalyptic Ibsen: When We Dead Awaken - Henrik Ibsen

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2000 by Elinor Fuchs

The apocalyptic scenario has its destructive and emancipatory modes, and a symbolic trajectory of scenes, figures, and actions that are epidemic in twentieth-century modernism. There it is in Yeats with his rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, and again in Karl Kraus's immense play on the Great War, The Last Days of Mankind. It is there in Artaud's Spurt of Blood with its Great Whore, war in heaven, and restored virgin; in D. H. Lawrence's Apocalypse; in T. S. Eliot's "this is the way the world ends"; in Beckett's end-of-the-world games; in Malina and Beck's Paradise Now!; in Grotowski's Apocalypsis cum Figuris; in the world destruction of Heiner Muller's Hamletmachine; and, jumping forward, in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, with its books, angels, ecological destruction, and prayer of hope for the approaching millennium. Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken stands at the brink of a century whose history was shaped by the millennialist movements of the Bolshevik revolution and the thousand-year Reich, and much of whose art--after the credo of make it new (Canto 53)--looks, from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, like a sustained premillennial paroxysm. Ibsen put his play in a retrospective frame: it is an "epilogue." If he lived to write another play, Ibsen wrote with a certain millenarian flourish, he intended to "come forward with new weapons, and with new equipment" (Meyer 785). The apocalyptic and millenarian strains of When We Dead Awaken, though not partaking of the next century's antihumanism, foreshadow the new weapons and new equipment of much of twentieth-century literary and artistic modernism.

ELINOR FUCHS is professor of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama and adjunct professor of theater at the Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the author of The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism and editor of and contributor to The Apocalyptic Century, a special millennium issue of Theater. Her articles on theater have appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, American Theatre, and numerous journals.

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