Premium
Joyce/Ibsen: Dialectics of Aesthetic Modernism
Author(s) -
San Juan Jr E.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2008.00930.x
Subject(s) - individualism , aesthetics , philosophy , realism , dialectic , literature , modernism (music) , psychoanalysis , art , epistemology , psychology , law , political science
From his early review of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken to the 1903 essay on Catiline , Joyce never failed to acknowledge Ibsen’s powerful influence. Joyce locates the playwright’s genius not so much in his technical virtuosity as in his worldview. Uncannily Joyce anticipated the shrewd comment of one scholar who perceived Ibsen’s obsession with the “conflict between the ethical and acquisitive personalities.” But Ibsen’s allegorical realism transcends that conflict by diagnosing the social milieu in which libertarian individualism (as Friedrich Engels noted) was inscribed. The constant dialectic of freedom and necessity in Ibsen’s work informs the “didactic pathos” which Georg Lukács admired. Joyce appreciated Ibsen’s socially conscious individualism for what it is historically: a defiance of the commodifying world of bourgeois society interpellated in a satiric mirror (Ibsen’s astute critical self‐awareness) without which a paralyzing nihilism may be the only alternative. Joyce’s engagement with the theme of exile echoes Ibsen’s concern with art and its pedagogical, heuristic function in modern life as well as the artist’s fidelity to his vocation as a touchstone of the integrity of a rebel‐artist’s fight for freedom and truth in solidarity with all the exploited and oppressed.