More Ghosts

First of all I reckon Joyce recognised an implacable honesty in Ibsen. It's easy to forget that that same kind of honesty was something that Joyce saw as central to his own art, and it was, of course, that honesty that got him into so much trouble with the censors. It's also easy to forget how deeply shocking Ibsen must have been to his first audiences. I thought I'd find that aspect of the plays fairly routine as I reread a couple - i.e., Ghosts and A Doll's House - but I found myself aware of the intensity of their challenge to our conventions of respectability both then and now.

Worryingly I saw enough of myself in Torvald Helmer to instill at least a temporary sense of humility regarding the scandals of others.

Secondly I think Joyce saw, even just on the printed page since he wouldn't have witnessed any productions, the poetry that seems to lie behind the plays. The action of each seems to take place against a web of symbolic associations, signaled clearly in the titles of the two I'm talking about here. This poetry takes us beyond the immediate social applications of the dramas. It gives them that peculiarly Joycean sense of stasis, the integritas, consonantia, claritas of Aquinas that Joyce made his own, and ours.

It seems to me remarkable that the young Joyce knew immediately what hardly anyone else of his time recognised - that these are not in any sense 'message' plays.