Tag: Norwegian Literature

Jon Fosse – Septology

When I wrote about Aliss at the Fire, I wondered whether it had now become necessary for anyone wanting to write stories about faith and religion to adopt a style like Jon Fosse’s. A style that shifts constantly, fluctuating between perspectives and making porous limits which normally seem solid. One feels adrift within a more mystical world, where God and faith are not idle thoughts but lived experiences. Now, having finished Fosse’s much longer Septology, I wonder whether I can even write a blog post about it without adopting the same style, which here reaches still greater heights of mystic power, and letting my sentences run and run, and my entire language become like a breath, going in and going out but never, except at the end of the post, finally ceasing. 

I will spare readers such an attempt. Instead, I will try to say a few words about the book. It is hard. Normally, if I like or dislike a book, I will annotate it heavily. My Septology has been only lightly touched, mainly just with marginal notes indicating what scene we are in. I underlined only a single phrase. This gives some indication of some of the strangeness of the text, which has no full stops and lives by commas, ands, and paragraph breaks. Much of the narrative here is mundane, repetitive stuff, the kind we might know from Samuel Beckett or Thomas Bernhard – a character’s struggle to persuade themselves to get out of bed or open the door. When moments of great beauty or significance arrive, they are entire paragraphs of reflection which gain their power by accumulation and contrast, and which whither and die when we try to extract them. 

Septology concerns a painter called Asle, who lives in the Norwegian countryside. He has a friend, almost a double, also called Asle, who lives in Bergen and suffers from alcoholism. There is another double-like figure in the form of Asle’s wife, Ales, who died some time ago of a mysterious illness. Other characters include Beyer, a gallerist, and Asleik, a farmer. There is also a somewhat sinister woman called Guro, who has her own double too. Our narrative is mostly of reflection. The first Asle is our narrator, and he uses the first person, but when he reminisces or transports himself to the life of the second Asle, he uses the third person, even if he seems to be thinking of his own past.  

Over Septology’s seven books narrator-Asle goes to Bergen several times, discovers his friend Asle passed out in the snow and takes him to the hospital, delivers some paintings to Beyer, has an artistic crisis and decides not to paint anymore, and decides to visit Asleik’s sister for a Christmas meal. But mostly he ruminates. As in Aliss at the Fire, Asle seems to see into his doppelgänger’s soul. He also sees into his own life’s story, seeing figures as he drives past the places of his past, and in such a way that we cannot know whether he falls into their world, or whether they emerge back out into his.  

Asle is not the other Asle. But they are almost one another, being both artists, both being bearers of the same name. Yet what is the meaning of this? Fosse is careful with names. Streets and restaurants are given simple names like “The Lane” or “Food and Drink”; so too are people – “The Teacher”, “The Bald Man”, and so on. One effect of this is to give every encounter a heavy sense of symbolism and significance, even if we cannot always identify at first glance what that might be. The second Asle, when met for the first time in a memory, is “The Namesake” – not the same, but bonded to him, nevertheless.  

When I really think hard about Septology, I can say that it is a book of suffering. And the two Asles are part of this. They have led divergent lives, with a common root in their art and countryside upbringing, and the split occurring when it comes to the matter of love. Narrator-Asle meets Ales by chance in a café in Bergen, and immediately they fall in a kind of magical, dreamlike love that seems to last until her death. The other Asle arrives in Bergen to go to The Art School there with a girl already following him, pregnant with his son – The Boy. He marries her, but within a year has already found someone else, Siv, a woman who studies at The Art School and who seems to offer a more fulfilling relationship than the suicidal Liv. But like the names, the relationships echo, and it seems – seems, because nothing in Septology is quite certain – that Asle is then unfaithful towards Siv with another woman, Guro, and Siv leaves him too.  

A harmonious home life, versus a chaotic one. But both are marked with tragedy and ultimate loneliness. Both Asles drank heavily when younger, but Ales’s Asle gave up – under pressure from her – whereas the other Asle did not. Early on in the novel we are faced with shocking images of the second Asle, “weighed down as he is now, so weighed down by his own stone, a trembling stone, a weight so heavy that it’s pushing him down into the ground, I think”, as he struggles even to get up to pour himself another drink. His life has completely collapsed with the breakdown of family life, and his thoughts seem to circle around suicide.  

The other Asle has also seen his life collapse. The love he has for Ales is so pure, so total (in a novel with much German, Ales’s similarity to Alles – “everything”, cannot be entirely coincidental), that her loss leaves her own Asle with deep, deep wounds too. He lives alone, he lives in the countryside, with barely a friend, and now his heart’s companion is gone. Though years have passed since then, the wounds remain. 

But still our narrator survives. He does not return to drink, he does not end his life. The reason is, without a doubt, his religion. Septology is a novel about faith’s ability to be a fortress that can protect us from the greatest injuries. Faith is this novel’s foundation and its source of power. Each of Septology’s seven sections begins with art, but each ends with Asle in prayer. Whenever he is in pain – and he often is, thinking of Ales and his loss – he takes his rosary and prays. The Our Fathers, Hail Mary’s, and Christ Have Mercy’s, stabilise him and help him cast off from the world when he needs to sleep. Because his life is so full of pain, these moments in the text feel fair and earned. Religious or not, we see that these moments are necessary – utterly vital and necessary – for Asle’s own survival.  

For the survival of pain is this story – not its complete defeat. We notice that for all the memories we encounter, Septology is also full of silences. Asle mentions, without remembering, the end to his drinking. And in truth aside from its beginning, the relationship with Ales is also a blank. We have to take on faith that the relationship was what he claims it was. Often Asle thinks of Ales and then says he doesn’t want to think about her, that the pain is too great, so that these blanks remain. We notice, sooner or later, that Asle’s memories of the boy Asle are indeed usually about himself. But making him another, not the “I”, seems itself a way of hiding past pains whilst approaching past realities.  

God is also present in the silences. Asle feels God, just as he feels Ales’s presence, and seems even to see her at times. The flowing prose of Septology allows for this, just as it allows the whole text to seem, at times, like a breath or a prayer. Asle’s art draws him close to God, as does his contemplation of Ales – who had introduced him to faith to begin with. Septology’s world is full of pain, as is that of Aliss at the Fire, so that as with that work God becomes a necessary force – the only way of not falling into despair. A child drowns, a sister dies suddenly of illness, as does a beautiful friend – and many other characters suffer similarly upsetting fates. But we see here, unironically, what it might mean to commend the spirits of the departed to God – and what solace we might find in those words.  

Ultimately, what Septology does is argue for the power of faith as well as any apologist could, perhaps better. Religion is proved, if ever, by experience, and Septology draws us into an experience which shows faith’s potency in that specific life – and, in the second Asle’s case, the damage of its absence. We see something similar in my other favourite religious writer, Marilynne Robinson. Both writers, Fosse and Robinson, are adept at making a reality that is sanctified and filled with wonder. Fosse’s difference is that it sometimes seems we are relying on Asle’s consciousness to make his reality so, whereas in Robinson’s works life really does seem to be invested with God’s reality. By this I mean that her language constantly confirms God’s presence, whereas Fosse’s language confirms God only at particular points, for a particular consciousness. That means that stretches of Septology can be quite dull and meandering, as we wait for that moment where we will feel significance and harmony again. 

Such an approach would most aid a story showing a wavering, on-off faith. But that’s not really what’s going on here. It’s just that Asle is remembering something, and we need to work to make it meaningful for ourselves, if we can. If sometimes it can feel like this is not worth the effort, that shouldn’t take away from the rest of the book. Septology is a work of contrasts, of light and dark, faith and the loneliness of its absence, and it may be that its magnificent, truly heavenly highs are dependent on the moments when the story is simply a limited low. Really, truly, it’s a marvellous book regardless.  

On the Edge of an Abyss – Jon Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire

This is a novella that seems to sit on the edge of an abyss. I have read nothing like it. As a description of madness, its brilliance is in showing madness as a thing within the mind that goes beyond merely mistaking what lies before us, or acting in a way that makes little sense to others. Yet what Aliss at the Fire shows may well not be madness at all and instead another, deeper consciousness. It is a supremely mystical, magical work.

Set by a fjord in Norway, Signe, an elderly widow reflects on her husband Asle’s disappearance over twenty years before. But this reflection is more like the spinning of a cobweb. Told primarily using only commas and line breaks, the text itself is a constant stream. So it is that Signe imagines her past self, and the text enters the perception of this past Signe, as she says goodbye to her husband. He walks to the shore, and there he encounters a vision of himself as a child, walking with his grandmother. Other figures are seen by Asle or Signe as the novella progresses, including Asle’s great-grandmother, Aliss.

Perspective

This shifting of perspective, or time and place, comes so smoothly, the way that we can follow one thread of the web to a junction and turn immediately to any of many others without pause, precisely because of the relative lack of punctuation. Amongst the flow, we notice a “he thinks” or a “she sees” and that is all we have to tell us of a shift from one Signe to another, or from one Asle to another.

Signe is our only character in the present. As with Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, we have a very isolated existence on which to build our drama. There is a reference to a boat builder, who built the boat that Asle heads out on to meet his fate, and also to two boys who burned the boat later as part of a Midsommer celebration.

But Signe is alone, friendless, and adrift in herself.

Alone, that is, except for all these memories. There is something almost cinematic about Fosse’s style in Aliss at the Fire, which builds up in echoes and reverberations until it becomes deafening. Asle drowns on a boat. His grandfather, also called Asle, drowns on a toy boat he receives for his seventh birthday. The original Asle’s father, Kristoffer, nearly drowns when out with Aliss. Aliss makes a fire to roast a sheep’s head, and both the second Asle and Signe see strange fires, out on the fjord or down at the shore.

The Signe of the present witnesses this past, as it passes through her house – for it is Asle’s family home – without understanding who these people are. She also witnesses her own self, watching for her Asle. Though alone, the doors are constantly opening as people rush in and out. The air is filled with the sounds of past life.

We must ask ourselves: is it madness or a great comfort to have the past be so real?

Trauma

Seen from the present, we know everything that is to come. We know, because Asle tells us, that his grandfather’s brother Asle died as a boy, long before we see the seven-year-old head out from the shore for the last time, bearing a cargo of shells for Bergen. We know also that Asle himself, whatever his doubts, will go out on his own boat during a storm, and will not return. What these moments lose in immediate shock, they gain in emotional weight.

If we read Aliss at the Fire as a novella about trauma, we can possibly see it is being about coming to terms with that trauma by seeing its many interlinkages and coming to accept it and the past it inhabits as a totality. At the back of my copy, I wrote down Asle’s family tree, not necessarily because it is complicated, but because I wanted to see the whole thing together. Signe goes from watching in bewilderment as the world passes through her house, to acceptance as she strokes Kristoffer’s wife Brita’s hair as she hurries inside with the drowned small Asle in her arms.

As a character, Signe thinks back to that final day with Asle because she wants to understand how he could have died – a moment that remains unrevealed to us. She goes in circles with her questions: “…what was it he said before he went out that day when he disappeared? what did he say before he left, did he say something? something about going out onto the fjord for a little while maybe?…”

Perhaps one way we can read what she experiences is as a demonstration of the answer to them – a showing of the answer, rather than its direct telling. Although, as we do not see Asle’s death, we must use the other memories – as must Signe – as a way of understanding her loss.

Without an insight into Asle’s death, we must speculate based on what little we have. Inevitably, one thinks of suicide. I am aware that Scandinavian intimacies may be more subtle than those of warmer climates, but it is difficult to find much fire in Asle’s heart. And she seems to have many more doubts than would be sensible. There are hints of friction in their past, such as when she thinks about how he does not like long words after she writes him a flowery love letter.

Furthermore, we must ask why Asle goes out on the fjord every day when he himself does not seem to like it or know why he goes. Perhaps we can answer the question by saying that Asle is in the grip of forces he does not know or control, just as Signe finds herself in the grip of memories she cannot control either.

God

The main thing one notices in Aliss at the Fire, more than minor questions of what and why, is the pervading mystical feeling. We know at once that we are not dealing with the physical rules that we are used to seeing governing our lives. Here the dead come back not as ghosts but as images, as if something is projecting the past back onto the present. Here we see mysterious fires, and we inhabit a universe that is essentially devoid of other human life.

It is only Signe, only Asle, only a few family members, and the world of the fjord and the elements. Often I thought of the prints of Edvard Munch, for here too we often see our characters only from their backs as they face the landscape and try to make sense of it. Here too, we see but do not truly know them.

What do we make of these porous boundaries? Is Signe losing her mind, or drifting between worlds? We might find something primeval and pagan in the mysterious fires seen above the water, or the sheep’s head Aliss burns on the shore. At the same time, however, as an old grandmother, Aliss provides comfort to her son and daughter-in-law after her grandson Asle drowns on his toy boat in a distinctly Christian way. For though Christianity is present indirectly in the novella, for example in Kristoffer’s name (Christ-bearer), it is only about two-thirds of the way through that God himself is invoked by Aliss:

“The Lord moves in mysterious ways, she says

He is happy, Asle’s happy now with God in Heaven, so don’t be said, she says

God is good, He is, she says”

This marks the beginning of God’s direct involvement in the novella, which culminates in the story’s final and very ambiguous moment, when the whole of reality seems to collapse, and Signe herself joins the memories in their ghostly realm. If I found Fosse’s A Shining a little silly, Aliss at the Fire is much easier to enjoy as a kind of religious work. Perhaps this is because the work as a whole is far more intense.

It is hard to convey, in my own neat sentences, the sheer force of Fosse’s writing in Aliss. The near absence of full stops, coupled with the constant shifting of perspective, really drags one into the world in the way that the mildly annoying personality of the narrator in A Shining kept me out. I felt like I had a mystery before me, whereas A Shining had something that seemed altogether too obvious.

This does not make Aliss’s words religiously convincing, but it makes them weighty. In a story where trauma seems destined to repeat, with drowning after drowning, we must believe in the earnestness of the characters’ attempts to deal with it.

Aliss is serious in her confrontation with death in a way that the bumbling narrator of A Shining is not. It is this seriousness that allows us to overlook the essential absurdities that might otherwise get on our nerves or seem entirely unrealistic. Things like the way that nobody has any friends, the way Asle has no job and literally spends his entire life going out on the fjord on his boat each day, and so on.

Instead, we see the beauty, and just like Signe, we find ourselves adrift in this strange and mysterious world.

Conclusion

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the work, as I reflect on it, is the way that Fosse’s stylistic approach aids and supports his thematic goals. Literarily, this is pretty elementary stuff. But the particular use of streaming narrative and flowing consciousnesses for the particular goal of turning our thoughts to realms beyond our reality is really rather effective. It makes me wonder whether we can actually write anything serious about religion or spiritual matters, now, in normal language, or whether we have to do something strange, like Fosse’s flowing language, or McCarthy’s cathedrals of prose. This seems to me, as someone who is interested in these things and can imagine myself writing about them, to be quite important to think about.

A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen

I knew that Joyce had rated Ibsen (he even wrote him fan mail), but it has taken a long time for me to read him. A Doll’s House is the first in the book, and so I began with that. I was expecting less than I should have, especially given Joyce’s praise. I thought the work would merely be one of those dramas of the 19th century where women are miserable and men narrow or cruel, and the meaning of life is all contained in a house of one’s own and a respectable personal income. I expected, in short, something a little like the works of my favourite German writer of the period, Theodor Fontane, without considering that the reason I like Fontane is precisely that he goes beyond the limits of that world to tell us things that are truly significant.

The setting is the apartment (I made my typical note in the margin that all action for women has to be domestic in the 19th century) of a former lawyer, just then promoted to bank manager, Torvald Helmer. He lives with his wife, Nora, and their three small children. There’s a maid and a nursemaid, and a regular guest in the consumption-stricken Dr Rank. A friend from the past, Kristine Linde, comes to see Nora. And there is also the figure of Nils Krogstad, who works at Torvald’s bank but has other reasons to come by too. A small cast of characters for what I assumed to be a kind of simple, domestic tragedy.

Act One

At first, the play did little to encourage me. The first act’s portrayal of Nora and Torvald’s relationship is just as unpleasant as all the other unhappy marriages of that period which I have read, even though Nora seems happy enough. Her husband controls her access to money, he controls what she eats (no macaroons!), and rather than refer to her as his wife or even by her name Torvald much prefers to call her a bird or squirrel or pet: “My little pet is very sweet, but it runs away with an awful lot of money. It’s incredible how expensive it is for a man to keep such a pet.”

Torvald does not come across well to the modern reader. He seems quite comfortable embodying all the least attractive elements of 19th century bourgeois society. “Oh, what a glorious feeling it is, knowing you’ve got a nice, safe job, and a good fat income.” He does not approve of borrowing money or any kind of concealment or deceit. The household which he lords over is his heart and rock. Krogstad, who managed to avoid a criminal conviction for forgery by lying, comes in for particular scrutiny in Torvald’s eyes: “A fog of lies like that in a household, and it spreads disease and infection to every part of it. Every breath the children take in that kind of house is reeking with evil germs.” Torvald here speaks the language of medicine and sanitation, just as later he will speak the language of heredity to explain criminality. His language is authoritative; his knowledge, however, doubtful.  

Nora’s life within the household seems happy, notwithstanding her husband’s dreadful choice of pet names. She is able to play with the children and to sneak a macaroon every now and then. We can assume that this is enough – she certainly thinks it is, at least at that moment. “Oh yes! When you’re happy, life is a wonderful thing!”

When her friend Mrs Linde arrives Nora seems shocked by just a certain lack of respectability in her friend compared to herself. Mrs Linde’s husband died without even giving his wife a reason to mourn him, which is shocking to Nora, who knows, as a good girl should, that marriage is all about love. But Mrs Linde was forced into a marriage of necessity to a richer man, so that she could help save her younger brothers and mother from destitution. She has not had the luck, for that’s all it is, that her former schoolmate Nora has had. Mrs Linde has come to see Nora in search of work. Her life now, with her brothers old enough to fend for themselves and her mother passed away, is “unutterably empty.” Mrs Linde had found her life’s meaning in living for others, and without the others, things have become terribly hard and sad.

Fortunately, Torvald can set Mrs Linde up at the bank, based on her experience. The only catch is that it will require Krogstad to lose his job. This is no bother at all, Torvald declares. There is but one snag, of which he is entirely unaware. Some years ago, when her husband had worked himself nearly to death, Nora had borrowed an extraordinary sum from Krogstad in order to take herself and Torvald to the South of Europe for some rest and recuperation. Nora had pretended that the money came from her own father, who had died recently, to avoid suspicions, while paying down the debt secretly through odd jobs and scrimping and saving on her allowance.

The problem is that Krogstad wants his job at the bank, and he can reveal not just the truth concerning where the money was found, but also that Nora is guilty of a forgery in signing for her father even after he died. Such a truth, he remarks, would ruin Nora in the eyes of her husband and the law. And Krogstad, who has only just begun to recover his own social standing after his earlier transgression, has no desire to be thrown back down into unemployment and disrepute. Nora cannot believe that she could face prison for forgery, should the truth come out, but she is not wise in such things:

Krogstad: The law takes no account of motives.

Nora: Then they must be very bad laws.

Alas, Nora is naïve. As her discussion with Mrs Linde shows, she has a good idea of how the world should be. Luckily for her, the world has not yet proved itself to be otherwise. But things soon begin to change on that front.

Act Two

The action of A Doll’s House takes place around Christmas, so there are plenty of excuses for guests to pop round and merriment to be had. In the play’s second act Nora tries to get Torvald to reverse the decision to replace Krogstad with Mrs Linde. She begs and she pleads, but there can be no luck. “If it ever got around that the new manager had been talked over by his wife…”, as Torvald charmingly remarks, it would be the end of him. He fears the embarrassment and any sense that his integrity – that highest of virtues for a respectable citizen – might be compromised.

Nora, convinced that she would receive the IOU note and be able to destroy it if she simply paid off the money as soon as possible, also turns down an opportunity to get the funds when old Dr Rank confesses that he is not long for this world and has secretly been in love with Nora. Not unexpectedly, she takes it badly, rather than using the position Rank has placed himself in to get the money.

Krogstad also returns, albeit secretly, to pressure Nora. Their talk turns to suicide, and here I began to see what I thought would be the shape of the play, with Nora ending her life rather than facing the shame and collapse of the family that the note would bring out. “Krogstad: Most of us think of that, to begin with. I did, too; but I didn’t have the courage.” Krogstad says he has a letter for her husband, detailing the truth of the matter, which he leaves in the letterbox and which only Torvald has the key to.

Nora manages to keep her husband from looking at his post until after they have gone to a dance, which takes place in act three, but act two ends, all the same, without much cause for optimism:

“Nora: Five. Seven hours to midnight. Then twenty-four hours till the next midnight. Then the tarantella will be over. Twenty-four and seven? Thirty-one hours to live.”

Act Three

Nora enlists Mrs Linde’s help to try to convince Krogstad to change course. She leaves him a note during the second act, and act three begins with them meeting while the Helmers are upstairs at their dance. Here, we discover that these two knew each other long ago. And that the love Mrs Linde lacked in her marriage she had once felt for this man, who thus far has seemed the villain of the play. Mrs Linde had married for others, at a time when Krogstad had few prospects. The poison he is alleged to have brought into his own household – he has children and is a widower – appears not hereditary, as claims Torvald, but rather perhaps to have come from these disappointments of youth. “When I lost you, it was just as if the ground had slipped away from under my feet. Look at me now: a broken man clinging to the wreck of his life.”

Now that she and Krogstad have seen their loveless marriages end, Mrs Linde suggests they may be together at last. Krogstad immediately agrees to try to secure the return of his letter, unopened. But then Mrs Linde changes her mind, and suggests that the right thing to do is let the letter be read after all. “Those two must have the whole thing out between them. All this secrecy and deception, it just can’t go on.” For those awaiting a tragic conclusion, these words, designed to bring good, seem unintentionally fatal. These two leave, and now Nora and Torvald, newly returned and a little drunk, have the flat to themselves until Dr Rank shows up briefly to say his goodbyes.

Torvald is in a good mood and seems determined to seduce his wife. Those phrases about his “most treasured possession” and his rights “Am I not your husband…?” redouble now, though his wife resists, knowing as she does that he will soon see the letter. Rank’s arrival saves her, but he does not stay long. Torvald discovers the visiting card that Rank left, marked with a black cross to indicate his oncoming death, but his mourning lasts half a paragraph before the man, who had visited every day during his healthy life, is forgotten. Torvald instead returns to his passion, declaring how he sometimes wished his wife were in terribly danger so he could save her. When he finally reads Krogstad’s letter it does not take long for him to have just such an opportunity.

He bungles it, completely, of course. He insults her family and her poor breeding, “no religion, no morals, no sense of duty…”, her intelligence, and even insults her suggestion that she will shortly end her life: “Oh stop pretending!” In short, Torvald reveals to her just what an awful creature he is. “From now on, there can be no question of happiness. All we can do is save the bits and pieces from the wreck, preserve appearances…” This is not a resolution worth having. But the play does not end here, nor with Nora’s flight to end her life. Suddenly, a letter comes from Krogstad for her. Her husband opens it and finds the IOU and an apology. “I am saved!” he shouts, forgetting for a moment that perhaps his wife may need some salvation too. Everything can go back to normal. “I’ve forgiven you,” he declares magnanimously. Ever the gentleman.

Ending

So things are back to normal, the family is protected, the values of honesty and integrity reaffirmed. It’s like the conservatism of the marriage plot that ends works like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Fontane’s On Tangled Paths, despite their otherwise liberal tendencies. What a lucky man Torvald is. “Here I shall hold you like a hunted dove I have rescued unscathed from the cruel talons of the hawk, and calm your poor beating heart.” Readers or audiences can pat themselves on the backs and take away that message we always seem to from works of the 19th century, namely that society could do with some improvements, especially in how it treats women, but that in general it’s better than chaos and formlessness, and that family and proper values should always come first.

Only, that’s not how the play ends. Only the alternative German ending, which Ibsen was literally forced to write, is like this. The true ending is so much more awesome. It was here that I understood what Joyce found in Ibsen, the link I had not anticipated between that incomparably great novella “The Dead” and the works of this magnificent Norwegian. Just as Gabriel in Joyce’s novella, on learning of his wife’s more real and authentic romance to a young man in the countryside before she met him, cannot continue living the same way as before, so too can Nora not merely shrug her shoulders and go back to playing with the children and stealing quick bites of macaroons as if nothing had happened. No, Nora rebels.

“You don’t understand me. And I have never understood you, either – until tonight.”

“We have now been married eight years. Hasn’t it struck you this is the first time you and I, man and wife, have had a serious talk together?” Ironically, in a work that is all about paper – paper that condemns (the IOU and Krogstad’s letter), paper that provides work (the files from the bank Torvald constantly carries around), paper that saves (Krogstad’s final note) – there is very little real communication. Nora turns on her husband and her father, the two men who had shaped her life, as she realises what a life it was they had shaped for her:

“You two never loved me. You only thought how nice it was to be in love with me.”

“He used to call me his baby doll, and he played with me as I used to play with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house….”

It comes out. That Nora’s life has not been a life at all, but an object of other’s play. Not work, which would be serious, but just a toy to have around. And suddenly she sees a different image of herself, one that could never have existed in this kind of world: “It’s your fault that I’ve never made anything of my life.” And so she decides on a course of action. Not suicide in the woods, but still a departure into the night. “There’s another problem needs solving first. I must take steps to educate myself. You are not the man to help me there. That’s something I must do on my own. That’s why I’m leaving you.”

Torvald’s attempts to rebut her are so pathetic they are almost not worth quoting. “Helmer: Oh you blind, inexperienced. / Nora: I must set about getting experience, Torvald.” He tries appealing to her duty, her “most sacred duty” to her family. But she is wiser now. “I have another duty equally sacred… My duty to myself.” She wants to discover herself, her own truth, not society’s. She wants, above all, to live, not to be a doll in someone’s house. Torvald is shocked. There can be only one explanation possible: “You don’t love me any more.” To which Nora gives the hilarious response, the one Torvald was definitely least expecting: “Exactly.”

And so she goes.

Oh how exciting! How brilliant! Readers, if I may at times strike you as being a little too much from the 19th century, which is certainly a fault, at least it gave me one advantage in reading A Doll’s House: I was not at all expecting this. I was expecting suicide, I was expecting Nora to be cast out of the house like poor Effi in Effi Briest. I was expecting God to Punish the Sinner for mistreating His Sacred Values. What I was not expecting was this heroism. How awesome Ibsen is for writing such a work. I think I must have been burned by Chekhov, whose brilliant plays always end with nothing changing, or everything somehow getting worse. Here we have a positive ending which doesn’t involve marriage, but involves something much more important – truth, personal truth, pursued. I am not saying that it is always right to abandon one’s family in pursuit of truth – after all, we know what happens to Anna Karenina. But it is surely right here.

And so I was delighted that at last I turned to Ibsen. This will not be the last work of his that I read – that much is for certain.