Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (42 page)

They come in the form of Hilda Wangel, a young girl with a surprising history and dirty underwear who indeed knocks on his door, makes her entry into his life, and rearranges everything she touches. It is here that the decorous Ibsen injects a huge dose of libido, kinkiness, and displaced desire into the script we saw in
King Lear:
Ibsen’s Cordelia lives, but she lives as a vibrant, hungry young girl who fills the empty nurseries in this house of death and who suavely explains to Solness that she has come to make good on his proposals of ten years ago. What proposals? Solness remembers nothing. “I want my kingdom. Time’s up,” she says. He is bewildered. She repeats: “Give us the kingdom, come on.… One kingdom, on the line!” One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this reworking of Goneril and Regan, transformed into a demanding virgin who will not be put down.

What is it that the old man doesn’t remember? (Is he amnesiac? He could be.) Well, there is this matter of promising to carry off the princess to the Kingdom of Orangia, and then there is the matter of solidifying this pledge: “You held me in both your arms and bent me back and kissed me—many times.” I don’t think theater gets more delicious than this: Solness, generally quite poised and in command, is befuddled, remembers nothing about kissing this girl—who must have been thirteen then, just at puberty—and can’t quite make sense of her story. Yet we’ve already noted the hypnotic power he has over women—exerted even silently, even without gesture—so he decides that yes, he must simply emanate rays of some sort, Hilda is probably not entirely wrong, he did not quite bend her over and kiss her, but he doubtless wanted to, and that was enough.
Desire is enough
. Here is the fertile terrain of
The Master Builder;
might this be the potency of old age?

Hilda is growing up, Solness is growing old. The play stages their pas de deux. So often Ibsen is misconstrued as “was drama,” as the master who pulled skeletons out of closets and cast his light backward, pastward. But his great plays go just the other way: they are “is drama,” and nowhere is this more spectacularly on show than here. All this twaddle about what happened ten years ago is essentially foreplay, since the real gambit is the strange music that Solness and Hilda make
now
. Hence, Hilda’s fable of a dashing architect who excited her to frenzy by climbing higher and higher, right up to the top of the church tower—critics have noted the erotic fervor of much of this—and then had his fiery dispute with God, all this evokes a man in his full prime, yet, like all men, a man primed for unraveling, undoing. Such is the force of gravity: we may climb, we may rise for a while, but inevitably we fall, inevitably the very weight of flesh carries us down. But old Solness climbs again; he does so by dint of the love aria he shares with Hilda as they go through their dreamlike romp. Hilda’s youth is intoxicating. With her help, he will build again:

It is customary to smile or yawn at Ibsen’s long-winded stage directions, but he sweetly captures this play’s mystery in those lines of Hilda’s, where she initiates the older man into a kind of erotic, imaginative trance, which it might not be wrong to term intercourse. Whatever may or may not have happened ten years ago, this is happening now. He is climbing, rising again. Forgive me if I say there is tumescence here. What might they make together? A castle in the air? A child? A shared ecstatic dream? We cannot know the answer, but we see the growing fusion of these two figures, their increasingly fluid and trancelike entry into each other’s wishes and dreams. This play is haunted by the specter of empty forms—Ibsen referred to himself as an architect, and Solness worries that he has wasted his years building soulless structures, devoid of life—but this scene posits human desire as the creative force that does not die, that resists the work of time. To be sure, we all know that it cannot be done. Yet it is done: Solness once again mounts the church tower (this time of his own house), led, lifted, indeed fueled by Hilda’s desire. No, this is not quite phallic, but it is splendid in its way. He goes to the top; he once again quarrels with God. And then he falls. Gravity has the last word.

But not quite. “My—my Master Builder!”: those are Hilda’s (and the play’s) final words. It remains a paean to human wanting, even human design. Yet as we draw back from the gruesome ending—Solness has plummeted straight down from the top, gone smash—we are stunned by the poetic logic Ibsen has conferred on these events. Hilda has come to initiate Solness into death. The door must be opened to the young. (Ragnar will be given his chance.) Herself a child, she is on a species mission to honor life’s forward drive, with its inevitable bias toward the young. Some have called her a Valkyrie. Yet—and perhaps this is the old Ibsen’s fondest fantasy—her intervention is erotic, signaling that she is sexually drawn to this father figure who must die. But die he must, and all of us can see in her “ensnaring” of Solness a radical reworking of the child/parent death struggle so evident in Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Balzac. She is the bright, irresistible face of life, and her tidings are: I shall escort you lovingly to the other side, I shall transform the journey of dying into an ecstatic duet of longing and shared hunger, I shall awaken all your forces for this final building project: to make your own exit. (Just how patriarchal, insane, and fantasy-ridden all this might be is another question.)

I think of Rilke’s poem “Herbsttag,” which begins with the injunction
“Herr, es ist Zeit”
and includes in its autumnal sketch a warning that could have come directly from Ibsen’s play, given its architectural figure:
“Wer jetzt kein Haus hat bildet sich keines mehr”
(“Who now has no house will not build one”). Rilke revered Ibsen but perhaps got this last part wrong, perhaps failed to see that the seasonal fate might nonetheless be overcome. Maybe it
is
given to us to build, right to the end. Maybe Ibsen came to understand his entire enterprise along just those lines: a dramaturgy that appears utterly cued to the hard facts and heavy data of the past is actually something far airier, far freer, far more invested in freedom than in bondage. Yes, one is coerced by one’s past—who doesn’t have cadavers somewhere?—and one cannot keep the door forever shut against the young, who are ready to step in and cancel out one’s future: this double lesson sinks in ever more acutely as we grow old. So: how does one spring clear?

To move this aging man from the center stage he cannot bear to quit, more than Hilda is required. Another time and place are needed, some actualizable realm outside the day-to-day world we all negotiate, the dreary material realm where, indeed, Ibsen’s plays are thought to take place. Far from being only a chronicler of the stifling and stifled European middle class, as is often thought, Ibsen is surprisingly dimensional. He has fashioned a place for desire—
Gi plads!
He has turned desire itself into a room, a place, a stage we know as the theater, an unfurling and happening that we can actually witness taking place in the arias between the older man and the young girl in
The Master Builder
—and offered it as the shimmering final station in a man’s trajectory. As is said of the Thane of Cawdor in
Macbeth
, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”
Castles in the air
. It is all too easy to interpret Hilda’s phrase for what she and Solness are to make as an empty illusion, baseless phantasm. But we would do well to turn it the other way: to realize that our most inhabitable castles are doubtless to be located in the air, in our dreams and desires, for they are the place where finally we perform our deepest negotiations with life and death. Would that every climacteric possessed this kind of beauty.

Ionesco’s remarkable play about dying,
Exit the King
, far from being “theater of the absurd,” deserves to be read as a bravura modern response to
King Lear
. The story seems grim—King Bérenger is obliged to accept the fact that he’s dying, king though he is—but it is leavened by the playwright’s tonic and irreverent humor. This Bérenger has had quite a run: building Rome, New York, Moscow, and Geneva, founding Paris, inventing gunpowder, airplanes, automobiles. Yet his most miraculous achievements are the pedestrian ones of sleeping and waking up, breathing, and having a body that works; and those are the “gifts” that are now going to be called. The systems we take for granted play out, and this might well seem a freighted, heavy subject; but Ionesco puts us on notice that death is not only the oldest of all topics but arguably one of the funniest and most idiotic, inasmuch as we foolishly and futilely wage war against it all our lives. That battle is what I want to focus on, for it suggests that life—not death—is our stubborn, insidious, ceaseless assailant, wounding us from the day we draw breath, scarring and warping us in ways we cannot see. Dying, in this play, makes those injuries visible. Bérenger, like Lear, like Solness, must be readied for his exit. Ionesco makes beautiful use of the theater here, for he sovereignly puts names to things we could not otherwise see:

This stunning evocation of the corrosion that a life in time exacts upon the living—the inner wounds, the twisted and warped postures, the gruesome responses (rifle, machine gun, saber)—comes to us as the privileged vision that dying inaugurates: at last you see clear, at last you can measure and gauge the shocking extent of your injuries, the ugly price you’ve paid for getting by. This is certainly at odds with Saint Paul’s religious view of seeing clear at the end, “face to face,” but as a visionary discovery of what one’s life (on this side) has produced, what one has become, it is unsurpassable. The writer finds images—horribly pedestrian ones of warfare, anxiety, fear, aggressivity: all now written into our bodies, all on show in the physiological spectacle that a life of stress makes of us—that are at once familiar yet never before seen, since we have no lights about the routine deformations of spirit that have been meted out to us. CAT scans and MRIs are not likely to get a sighting on the damage shown in this play.

But I’d go on to claim that we are not obliged to place this at death’s door, as a kind of exit gift from living. Remember Lear’s initial confidence that he was unburdening himself by dividing up his kingdom, and remember how dreadfully wrong he was, how besieged and assailed he was slated to become, in body, mind, and heart. Ionesco seems to have reversed gravity itself by imagining our exit from the stage as both liberation and self-possession, as an ascent into true majesty. Could we not see this as a form of “spring cleaning” that old age—the calm after the storm—might confer? Could there be a mellower, leaner, less encumbered, freer self waiting for us? Could our last chapter take place in airier fashion?

If love is a central formative experience for the young—as we’ve seen in so many of the growing-up stories, ranging from
Romeo and Juliet
on to writers as diverse as Prévost, the Brontë sisters, Rhys, Duras, Walker, and others—what is its place in the lives and values of the old? These issues are immense and of immense importance; they will even return to constitute the final rubric of my book. But I want to begin dealing with them—and narrowing them down—by emphasizing sexuality and desire, which add a very particular element to the discussion. Again recall the tumultuous love stories of the young, and then ask yourself: to what extent do those stories hinge on sexual desire? The anthropologists tell us that puberty is a key marker in all rites-of-passage scenarios, and even though great literature is rarely bound by raw somatic data, who can fail to see that the tempestuous feelings and sensations of the young are keyed to a biological clock?