ABSTRACT
It is almost only those words which at first appear unnecessary which give the work its value. It is in them that the soul may recognize itself. Alongside the necessary dialogue, there is almost always another dialogue which seems superfluous. Look carefully and you will see that it’s the only thing that the soul hears deeply, because this is the only place where the soul is addressed. You will also recognize that it’s the quality and expanse of this empty dialogue which determines the quality and the inexpressible reach of the work. For certain in ordinary dramas the necessary dialogue in no way responds to reality; and what makes for the mysterious beauty of the most beautiful tragedies is found precisely in the words which are spoken alongside the apparently rigid truth. What sustains the poem are those words that are true to the deeper and incomparably more immediate truth of the invisible soul. One might even say that the poem gets closer to beauty and to a higher truth to the extent that it eliminates words which explain action and replaces them with words which explain not what is sometimes called ‘the state of the soul’ but those unknown elusive and ceaseless struggles of the soul towards its beauty and its truth. This is also the measure of how far it approaches true life. It happens to everyone in their everyday life that they have to negotiate very serious situations through words. Imagine it for a second. At such moments, is it always (or ever?) what you say or how you respond that matters the most? Are other forces, other words which we do not hear, at work determining what happens? What I say often counts for little; but my presence, the attitude of my soul, my future and past, what will be born in me, what has died in me, a secret thought, the stars supporting me, my destiny, thousands of mysteries encircling me, surrounding you – that is what speaks to you at that moment of tragedy and that is what answers. Beneath each of my words and beneath each of yours, all of that exists, and it is principally this that we see and principally this that we hear, despite ourselves. If you appeared, you ‘the scorned husband’, ‘the deceived lover’, ‘the abandoned wife’, with the intention of killing me, it is not my most eloquent pleas that would stay your hand. But it may be that you will come up against one of these unforeseen forces and that my soul, which knows that they throng around me, utters a secret word which disarms you. Those are the realms in which these episodes are decided, this is the dialogue for whose echo one should listen. And it’s that echo – extremely weak and intermittent, it’s true – which one really hears in a few of those works which I have spoken a little about. But couldn’t one try to get a little nearer to those realms in which everything takes place ‘really’? I think the e»ort is being made. Recently, working on The Master Builder, the play of Ibsen’s in which this ‘second level’ dialogue resonates most tragically, I tried once again to clumsily penetrate its secrets. And yet, these are the analogous traces of the hand of the same blind man on the same wall and which direct themselves also towards the same glimmers. In The Master Builder, I would asked what has the poet added to life to make it appear so strange, so profound and so disturbing beneath its apparent simplicity? It’s not easy to discern and the old master keeps more than one secret. It is even as though what he wanted to say is nothing against what he was compelled to say. He has released certain powers of the soul which had never been given their freedom, and perhaps he was taken over by them. ‘See, Hilde,’ exclaims Solness, ‘See! There is sorcery in you just as there is in me. It is that sorcery which stirs up the powers out there. And we have to accept them. Whether you want to or not, you have to.’1
