Moretti on Ibsen settling accounts with the bourgeois century

This talk is part of a book on the bourgeois in European literature. Five chapters: Robinson Crusoe, the great archetype; the culture of seriousness; the Victorian compromise; metamorphoses in eastern and southern Europe; Ibsen. There is a brief coda on The Threepenny Opera, but Ibsen is the true ending of the book: the "settling of accounts" of the bourgeois century, to use one of his favorite expressions.

[A version of this text appears in the current New Left Review #61 (Jan-Feb 2010) as 'The Grey Area: Ibsen and the Spirit of Capitalism'. IB]

So, first, the social universe of his twelve-play cycle: shipbuilders, industrialists, financiers, merchants, bankers, developers, administrators, judges, managers, lawyers, doctors, headmasters, professors, engineers, pastors, journalists, photographers, designers, accountants, clerks, printers … No other writer has focused so single-mindedly on the bourgeois world. Mann; but in Mann there is a constant dialectic of bourgeois and artist [Thomas and Hanno, Lübeck and Kröger, Zeitblom and Leverkühn...], and in Ibsen not quite, his one great artist – the sculptor Rubek, in When We Dead Awaken, who will "work until the day he dies", and loves to be "lord and master over his material" [1064, 1044] – is just like all the others.[1]

Now, many historians have doubts on the concept of the bourgeoisie: on whether a banker and a photographer, or a shipbuilder and a pastor, are really part of the same class. In Ibsen, they are; or at least, they share the same spaces and speak the same language. None of the English semantic camouflage of the "middle" class, here; this is not a class in the middle, threatened from above and below, and innocent of the course of the world: this is the ruling class, and the world is what it is, because they have made it that way. This is why the "settling of accounts" is so breathtaking: finally, what has the bourgeoisie brought to the world?

I will return to this, of course. For now, let me say how strange it is to have such a broad bourgeois fresco – and no workers in it [except for house servants]. Pillars of Society, which is the first play of the cycle, opens with a confrontation between a union leader and a manager on safety and profits; and although the theme is never the center of the plot, it is visible throughout, and is decisive for its ending. But then, the conflict between capital and labour disappears from Ibsen's world, even though, in general, nothing disappears here: Ghosts is the perfect Ibsen title because so many of his characters are ghosts: the minor figure of one play returns as the protagonist in another, or the other way around; a wife leaves home in one play, and stays to the bitter end in the following one … It's like a 20-year long experiment he is running: changing a variable here and there, to see what happens to the system. But, no workers in the experiment – even though these are the years when trade unions, socialist parties, and anarchism are changing the face of European politics.

No workers, because the conflict Ibsen wants to focus on is not that between the bourgeoisie and another class, but that internal to the bourgeoisie itself. Four works make this particularly clear: Pillars of Society; The Wild Duck; Masterbuilder Solness; John Gabriel Borkman. All four have the same pre-history, in which two business partners, and/or friends, have engaged in a struggle in the course of which one of them has been financially ruined, and psychically maimed. Intra-bourgeois competition as a mortal combat: and since life is at stake, the conflict becomes easily ruthless, or dishonest; but, and this is important, ruthless, unfair, equivocal, murky – but seldom actually illegal. In a few cases it's also that – the forgeries of Dollhouse, the water pollution in An Enemy of the People, Borkman's financial manouvres – but in general, what’s characteristic of Ibsen's wrongdoings is that they inhabit an elusive gray area whose nature is never completely clear.

This gray area is Ibsen's great intuition about bourgeois life, so let me give you a few examples. In Pillars of Society there are rumours that a theft has occurred in Bernick's firm; he knows the rumours are false, but he also knows they will save him from bankruptcy, and so, though they ruin a friend's reputation, he lets them circulate; later, he uses political influence in a barely legal way, to protect investments that are temselves barely legal. In Ghosts, pastor Manders persuades Mrs Alving not to insure her orphanage, so that public opinion won't think that "neither you nor I have adequate faith in Divine Providence" [216]; divine providence being what it is the orphanage of course burns down – accident, more probably arson – and all is lost. There is the "trap" that Werle might [or not] have laid for his partner in the prehistory of The Wild Duck, and the unclear business between Solness and his partner in the prehistory of The Masterbuilder; where there is also a chimney that should be repaired, isn't, the house burns down – but, the insurance experts say, for a wholly different reason …

This is what the gray area is like: reticence, disloyalty, slander, negligence, half truths … As far as I can tell, there is no general term for these actions; which at first I found frustrating, in the book I often turn to the analysis of keywords to understand the dynamic of bourgeois values: useful, serious, industry, comfort, earnest … Take "efficiency": a word that had existed for centuries, and had always meant, as the OED puts it, "the fact of being an efficient cause": causality. But then, in the mid-nineteenth century, all of a sudden the meaning changes, and efficiency starts indicating "the fitness […] to accomplish […] the purpose intended; adequate power". Adequate; fit to the purpose: not the capacity to cause something in general any more, but to do so according to a plan, and without waste: the new meaning is a miniature of capitalist rationalization. "Language is the instrument by which the world and society are adjusted", writes Benveniste, and he's right;[2] semantic change, triggered by historical change; words catching up with things. That's the beauty of keywords: they're a bridge between material and intellectual history.

But with the gray area, we have the thing, and not the word. And we really do have the thing, one of the ways in which capital develops is by invading ever new spheres of life – or even creating them, as in the parallel world of finance – and in these new spaces laws are more uncertain, and behaviour can quickly become profoundly equivocal. Equivocal: not illegal, but not quite right either. Think of a year ago [or today, for that matter]: was it legal for banks to have a preposterous risk-to-asset ratio? Yes. Was it "right", in any conceivable sense of the word? Clearly not. Or think of Enron: in the months that led to its bankruptcy, Kenneth Lay sold stock at prices that grossly overstated its value, as he knew perfectly well: in the criminal case, the government did not charge him; in the civil case it did, because the standard of proof was lower.[3] The same act that is and is not prosecuted: this is almost baroque, in its play of light and shadow, but typical: the law itself, acknowledging the existence of the gray area. One does something because there is no explicit norm against it; but it doesn't feel right, and the lurking fear of being held accountable remains, and instigates endless cover-up. Gray on gray: a dubious act, wrapped in equivocations. "The substantive conduct may be somewhat ambiguous", a prosecutor put it a few years ago – ambiguous, because of the "fog of financialization", "opaque data", "dark pools", "shadow banking": fog, opaque, dark, shadows: all images of inextricable black and white ... The initial act may be ambiguous, "but the obstructive conduct may be clear."[4] The first move may remain forever undecidable: what followed it – the "lie", as Ibsen calls it – that, is unmistakable.

The initial act may be ambiguous ... That's how things begin, in the gray area: an unplanned opportunity arises all by itself: a fire; a partner ousted from the picture; rumours; finding a rival's lost papers. Accidents. But accidents that repeat themselves so often, that they become the structural, hidden foundation of modern life. The initial event had been punctual, unrepeatable; the lie endures for years, or decades; it becomes "life". That's probably why there is no keyword, here: just as some banks are too big to fail, the gray area is too pervasive to be acknowledged; it casts too bleak a shadow on the value which is the bourgeoisie's justification in the face of the world: honesty. Honesty is to the bourgeoisie what honour was to the aristocracy; etymologically, it even derives from honour [and there is a trait d'union between them in the female "chastity" – honour and honesty at once – so central in early bourgeois drama]. Honesty tells the bourgeoisie apart from all other classes: the word of the merchant, as good as gold; transparency ["I can show my books to anyone"]; morality [Mann's bankruptcy as "shame, dishonour worse than death"]. Even McCloskey's 600-page extravaganza on Bourgeois Virtues – which ascribes to the bourgeoisie courage, temperance, prudence, justice, faith, hope, love ... – even there, the apex are the pages on honesty. Honesty, the theory goes, is the bourgeois virtue because it's so perfectly adapted to a market economy: market transactions require trust, honesty provides it, and the market rewards it. Honesty works. "By doing evil we do badly" – we lose money – McCloskey concludes, "and we do well by doing good."

By doing evil we do badly ... This is true neither in Ibsen's theater, nor outside of it. Here is a contemporary of his, a German banker, describing the "undecipherable machinations" of finance capital:

Banking circles were and are dominated by a striking, very flexible morality. Certain kinds of manipulation, which no good Bürger would in good conscience accept […] are approved by these persons as clever, as evidence of ingenuity. The contradiction between the two moralities is quite irreconcilable.[5]

Machinations, manipulation, no good conscience, flexible morality ... The gray area. Within it, an "irreconcilable contradiction between two moralities": words that echo almost verbatim Hegel's idea of tragedy – and Ibsen is a playwright. Is this, that draws him to the gray area? The dramatic potential of a conflict between honest Bürger and scheming financier?

The curtain rises, and the world is solid: rooms full of armchairs, bookcases, pianos, sofas, desks, stoves; people move calmly, carefully, speaking in a low voice... Solid. Old bourgeois value: the anchor against the fickleness of Fortune – so unstable atop her wheel and her waves, blindfolded, garments blown by the winds ... Look at the banks built around Ibsen's time: columns, urns, balconies, spheres, statues – gravity. Then the action unfolds, and there is no business that is safe from ruin; no word which isn't hollow at the core. People are worried. Sick. Dying. It's the first general crisis of European capitalism: the long depression of 1873-96, which Ibsen's twelve plays [1877-99] follow almost year by year.

The crisis, reveals the victims of the bourgeois century: I vinti: "the defeated", as Verga entitled, one year after Pillars, his novelistic cycle. Krogstad, in Dollhouse; old Ekdal and his son, in The Wild Duck; Brovik and his son, in Solness; Foldal and his daughter, but also Borkman and his son, in John Gabriel Borkman. Ekdal and son, Brovik and son … In this naturalist quarter century, failure flows from one generation to the next here, like syphilis. And there is no redemption, for Ibsen's defeated: the victims of capitalism, yes, but its bourgeois victims, made of exactly the same clay as their oppressors. Once the struggle is over, the loser is hired by the man who ruined him, and turned into a grotesque Harlequin, part parasite, part worker, confidante, flatterer ... "Why did you put us into this little box where everybody is wrong?" a student once asked about The Wild Duck. She was right, it's unbreathable.

Irreconcilable contradiction between honest and fraudulent bourgeois? That's not Ibsen's point. Someone was deceitful, in the pre-history of many plays, but his antagonist was often more stupid than honest – and anyway, he's neither honest nor an antagonist anymore. The only conflict between good Bürger and corrupt financier is An Enemy of the People: Ibsen's worst play [and of course, the one the Victorians immediately loved]. But in general, "cleaning up" the bourgeoisie from its murky side is not Ibsen's project; it's Shaw's. Vivie Warren: who leaves her mother, her boyfriend, her money, everything, and – "goes at her work with a plunge", as the final stage direction has it. When Nora leaves everything at the end of Dollhouse, she walks into the night, not to a good white-collar job waiting for her.

What draws Ibsen to the gray area ... Not the clash between a good and a bad bourgeoisie. Not an interest in the victims, for sure. The victors? Take old Werle, in The Wild Duck. Werle occupies the same structural position as Claudius in Hamlet, or Philip in Don Carlos: he is not the protagonist of the play [that's his son Gregers – just like Hamlet, or Carlos], but he is certainly the one with most power; controls all the women on stage; buys people's complicity, or even affection; and he does all this without emphasis, in an almost subdued way. Possibly, because of his past. Many years earlier, after "an incompetent survey", his business partner Ekdal "carried out illegal logging on state property" [405].[6] Ekdal was ruined; Werle survived, then prospered. As usual, the initial act remains ambiguous: was the logging truly the result of incompetence? was it fraud? did Ekdal act alone? did Werle know – did he even "lay a trap" [449] for Ekdal, as Gregers suggests? The play doesn't say. "But the fact remains", says Werle, "that [Ekdal] was convicted and I was acquitted" [405]. Yes, replies his son: "I'm aware that no proof was found". And Werle: "Acquittal is acquittal."

There is a piece by Barthes, "Racine is Racine", on the arrogance of tautology: this trope "that resists thought", like "a dog owner pulling the leash". Pulling the leash is certainly in Werle's style, but that's not the point, here: acquittal is acquittal, that is to say: the outcome of a trial is a legal act – and legality is not justice: it's a formal notion, not an ethical one. Werle accepts this potential contradiction, and so does Ibsen: some kind of legal injustice is for him almost intrinsic to bourgeois success. Other writers react differently. Take the masterpiece of bourgeois Britain. One of the main characters of Middlemarch is a banker, Bulstrode, who begins his career by cheating a mother and child of their inheritance – without however being "in danger of legal punishment" [615] for that.[7] A banker – in fact, a profoundly Christian banker – in the gray area: a triumph of bourgeois ambiguity, made even more so by Eliot's use of free indirect style, which makes it almost impossible to find a standpoint from which to criticize Bulstrode [a consequence of this style that was famously denounced at the trial against Madame Bovary]:

The profits made out of lost souls – where can the line be drawn at which they begin in human transactions? Was it not even God’s way of saving His chosen? [...] Who would use money and position better than he meant to use them? Who could surpass him in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God's cause? [616, 619]

A triumph of ambiguity – had Eliot stopped here. But she couldn't. A petty swindler, Raffles, knows the old story, and by a series of coincidences this "incorporate past" [523], in Eliot's wonderfully Ibsenesque formulation, locates both Bulstrode and the child. While at Bulstrode's house to blackmail him, Raffles falls ill; Bulstrode calls the doctor, receives his orders, and follows them; later, though, he lets a house-keeper disregard them – he doesn't suggest it: he just lets it happen – and Raffles dies. "It was impossible to prove that [Bulstrode] had done anything which hastened the departure of that man's soul" [717], the narrator says. "Impossible to prove"; "no proof was found". But we don't need proof; we have seen Bulstrode acquiesce in manslaughter. Gray has become black; dishonesty, has been forced to shed blood. "Forced", because this is such an incredibly implausible sequence that it's hard to believe that someone with Eliot's profound intellectual respect for causality could have actually written it.

But she did; and when a great writer contradicts her own principles so openly, something important is usually at stake. Probably, this injustice protected by the cloak of legality – Bulstrode, guilty, wealthy, and unscathed by his early actions – this is for Eliot too bleak a view of how society works. Mind you, this is indeed how capitalism functions: uneven exchange, "equalized" by contracts; expropriation and conquest, rewritten as "improvement" and "civilization". Past might, becomes present right. But Victorian culture – even at its best: "one of the few English books written for grown-up people", as Woolf said of Middlemarch – cannot accept the idea of a world of perfectly lawful injustice. The contradiction is unbearable: lawfulness must become just, or injustice criminal: one way or the other, form and substance must be aligned, making capital ethically comprehensible. That's what Victorianism is: social relations cannot always be morally good – but they must be morally legible. No ambiguity.

Ibsen doesn't need this. In Pillars of Society there is a hint in that direction, when Bernick's "incorporate past" boards a ship that he knows will sink, yet he lets it sail, just like Bulstrode with the housekeeper. But then he changes the ending, and never does anything like it again. He can look at bourgeois ambiguity without having to resolve it: "signs against signs", as they say in The Lady from the Sea [659]: moral signs saying one thing, and legal signs another.

Signs against signs. But, just as there is no real conflict between Ibsen's victims and their oppressors, so that "against" does not indicate an opposition in the usual dramatic sense. It's more like a paradox: lawful – injustice; unfair – legality: the adjective grates against the noun, like chalk on a blackboard. Enormous discomfort, but no action. What draws Ibsen to the gray area ... This: it reveals with absolute clarity the great unresolved dissonance of bourgeois life. Dissonance, not conflict. And, unresolved: strident, unsettling – Hedda and her pistols – precisely because there are no alternatives. The Wild Duck, writes Adorno, the great theorist of dissonance, does not solve the contradiction, but articulates its insoluble nature.[8] This is where Ibsen's claustrophobia comes from: the box where everybody's wrong: the paralysis, to use the keyword of the early Joyce, who was one of his greatest admirers. It's the same prison of other sworn enemies of the post-1848 order: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Manet, Machado, Mahler. All they do, is a critique of bourgeois life; all they see, is bourgeois life. Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère.

III

So far, I have talked of what Ibsen's characters "do" in his plays. Now I'll turn to how they speak, and specifically to how they use metaphors. The first five titles of the cycle – Pillars, Dollhouse, Ghosts, An enemy of the people, The wild duck – are all metaphors; and [with one possible exception] they are all, in one way or another, delusions. Take Pillars of society. Pillars: Bernick and his associates: exploiters that the metaphor turns into benefactors, in the semantic somersault which is typical of ideology. Then a second meaning emerges: the pillar is that [sham] "moral credibility" [78] which saved Bernick from bankruptcy in the past, and that he now needs again to shield his investments. And then, in the last lines of the play, two more transformations: "Another thing I have learned", says Bernick, is that "it's you women who are the pillars of society". And Lona: "No, my dear – the spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom – those are the pillars of society." [118]

One word; four totally different meanings. Here, the metaphor is flexible: it’s there, like a sort of pre-existing semantic sediment, but characters can bend it to their different views of things. Elsewhere, it's a more threatening sign of a world that refuses to die:

I almost believe we are ghosts, all of us, Pastor. It’s not only what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that keeps on returning in us. It’s all kinds of old dead doctrines and opinions and beliefs, that sort of thing. They aren’t alive in us; but they hang on all the same, and we can’t get rid of them. I just have to pick up a newspaper, and it’s as if I could see the ghosts slipping between the lines. They must be haunting our whole country, ghosts everywhere ... [238]

They hang on and we can't get rid of them ... One Ibsen character can:

Our home has been nothing but a playpen. I've been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child. And in turn the children have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you played with me, just as they thought it fun when I played with them. That's been our marriage, Torvald. [191]

Nothing but a playpen. It's a revelation, for Nora. And what makes it truly unforgettable, is that it's followed by a switch to a wholly different style. "Doesn't it occur to you", she says, after changing from her tarantella costume into everyday clothes, "that this is the first time we two […] have ever talked seriously together?" [190]. Serious; another great bourgeois keyword: serious as mirthless, of course; but also sober, concentrated, precise. Serious Nora takes the idols of ethical discourse ["duty"; "trust"; "happiness"; "marriage"], and measures them against actual behavior. She has spent years waiting for a metaphor to come true: "the most wonderful thing in the world" [or "the greatest miracle", as it's also translated]; now the world, in the person of her husband, has forced her to become "realistic" [206]. "We are closing our accounts, Torvald". How do you mean that, he reacts; I don't understand you, What's that, What do you mean, What a thing to say … And of course it's not that he doesn't understand what she is saying: it's that for him language should never be so – serious. It should never be prose.

Prose has turned out to be the hero of my book; it wasn't meant to be – it just happened, in trying to do justice to the achievements of bourgeois culture. Prose as the bourgeois style; style as conduct, as a way of living in the world, not just of representing it. Prose as analysis, first of all: trying to see clearly: "unmistakable definiteness and clear intelligibility", as Hegel's Aesthetics has it. Prose as the acknowledgment – half melancholy, half proud – that meaning will never be as intuitive and memorable as it is in verse: it will be delayed, scattered, partial; but also articulated, also strengthened by the effort. Prose as, not inspiration – this absurdly unjustified gift from the gods – but work: hard, tentative, never perfect. And, finally, prose as rational polemic, like Nora's: emotions, fortified by thought. It's Ibsen's idea of freedom: a style that understands the delusions of metaphors, and leaves them behind. A woman who understands a man, and leaves him behind.

Nora's dispelling of lies at the end of Dollhouse is one of the great pages of bourgeois culture: on a par with Kant's words on the Enlightenment, or Mill's on liberty. How telling, that the moment should be so brief. From The Wild Duck on, metaphors multiply – the so-called "symbolism" of the late Ibsen – and the prose of the early phase becomes unimaginable. And this time, the source of the metaphors is not the past, not a cultural old regime, but the bourgeoisie itself. Two very similar passages, from Bernick and Borkman – two versions of the financial entrepreneur, one at the beginning and one at the end of the cycle – will explain what I mean. This is Bernick, describing what a railway will bring:

Think what a lift this will give the whole community! Just think of the vast tracts of forest that'll be opened up! The rich lodes of ore to mine! And the river, with one waterfall after another! The possibilities of industrial development are limitless! [32]

Bernick is excited here: sentences are short, exclamative, with those "think!" [think what a lift, think of the forest] that try to arouse his listeners' imagination, while the plurals [tracts, lodes, waterfalls, possibilities] multiply results in front of our eyes. It's a passionate passage – but fundamentally descriptive. And here is Borkman:

Do you see those mountain ranges there […] That's my deep, my endless, inexhaustible kingdom! The wind works on me like the breath of life. It comes to me like a greeting from captive spirits. I can sense them, the buried millions. I feel the veins of metal, reaching their curving, branching, beckoning arms out to me. I saw them before like living shadows – the night I stood in the bank vault with a lantern in my hand. You wanted your freedom then – and I tried to set you free. But I lacked the strength for it. Your treasures sank back in the depths. (His hands outstretched) But I'll whisper to you here in the silence of the night. I love you, lying there unconscious in the depths and darkness! I love you, you riches straining to be born – with all your shining aura of power and glory! I love you, love you, love you! [1021]

Bernick's was a world of forests, mines, and waterfalls; Borkman's, of spirits and shadows and love. Capitalism is de-materialized: the "lodes of ore" become kingdom, breath, life, death, aura, birth, glory ... Prose withdraws in front of tropes: a greeting from captive spirits, veins of metal beckoning, treasures sinking into the depths, riches straining to be born ... Metaphors – this is probably the longest metaphorical string in the entire cycle – metaphors no longer interpret the world; they obliterate it and then remake it, like the night fire which clears the way for masterbuilder Solness. Creative destruction, Schumpeter will call it: the gray area, become seductive. Typical of the entrepreneur, writes Sombart, is "the poet's gift – the metaphorical gift – of calling up to the eyes of his audience ravishing pictures of realms of gold [...] he himself, with all the passionate intensity he is capable of, dreams the dream of the successful issue of his undertaking."[9]

He dreams the dream … Dreams are not lies. But they aren't the truth, either. Speculation, writes one of its historians, "retains something of its original philosophical meaning; namely, to reflect or theorise without a firm factual basis".[10] Borkman speaks with the same "prophetic style" that was typical of the director of the South Sea Company [one of the first bubbles of modern capitalism];[11] the grand – and blind – vision of the dying Faust; the faith "that the golden age lies not behind, but ahead of mankind" that Gerschenkron saw as the "strong medicine" needed for economic take-off:

Can you see the smoke from the great steamers out on the fjord? No? I can. […] Hear that? Down by the river, the factories whirring! My factories! All the ones I would have built! Can you hear how they're going? It's the night shift. Night and day they are working. [1020]

Visionary; despotic; destructive; self-destructive: this is Ibsen's entrepreneur. Borkman renounces love for gold, like Alberich in The Ring; is jailed; imprisons himself at home for eight more years; and in the rapture of his vision, marches into the ice to certain death. That's why the entrepreneur is so important for the late Ibsen: he brings hybris back into the world – hence tragedy. He is the modern tyrant: The Banker's Tragedy, would have been the title of John Gabriel Borkman in 1620. Solness's vertigo is the perfect clue: the body's desperate attempt to preserve itself from the deadly daring demanded of a founder of kingdoms. But, unfortunately, the spirit is too strong: he will climb to the top of the house he's just built, challenge God – "Hear me, Almighty […] from now on, I'll build only what is most beautiful in all this world" [856] – wave to the crowd below … and fall.

And this uncanny act of self-immolation is the right prelude to my last question: so, what is Ibsen's verdict on the European bourgeoisie? What has this class brought to the world?

The answer lies in a wider arc of history than the 1880s and 90s; an arc, at the center of which lies the great industrial transformation of the 19th century. Before then, the bourgeois is not the ruling class: what he wants is to be left alone, as in the famous reply to Frederick the Great, or at most to be recognized and accepted. He is, if anything, too modest in his aspirations; too narrow: Robinson Crusoe's father, or Wilhelm Meister's. His great desire is "comfort": this almost medicinal notion, halfway between usefulness and leisure: pleasure, as mere wellbeing. Caught in a neverending struggle against the vagaries of Fortuna, this early bourgeois is orderly, careful, with the "almost religious respect for facts" of the first Buddenbrooks. He is a man of details. He is the prose of capitalist history.

After the great industrialization, though more slowly than we used to think – chronologically, all of Ibsen falls within Arno Mayer's "persistence of the old regime" – the bourgeoisie becomes the dominant class; and one with the immense means of industry at its disposal. The realistic bourgeois is ousted by the creative destroyer; analytical prose, by world-transforming metaphors. Drama captures better than the novel this new phase, where the temporal axis shifts from the sober recording of the past – the double-entry book-keeping practiced in Robinson and celebrated in Meister – to the bold shaping of the future which is typical of dramatic dialogue. In Faust, in the Ring, in late Ibsen, characters "speculate", looking far into the time to come. Details are dwarfed by the imagination; the real, by the possible. It's the poetry of capitalist development.

The poetry of the possible ... The great bourgeois virtue is honesty, I said earlier; but honesty is retrospective: you're honest, if, in the past, you haven't done anything wrong. You can't be honest in the future tense – which is the tense of the entrepreneur. What is an "honest" forecast of the price of oil, or of anything else for that matter, five years from now? Even if you want to be honest, you can't, because honesty needs firm facts, which "speculating" – even in its most neutral etymological sense – lacks. In the Enron story, for instance, a big step towards the great swindle was the adoption of so-called mark-to-market accounting: entering as actually existing earnings that are still in the future [at times, years in the future]. The day the Securities and Exchange Commission authorized this "speculation" on the value of assets, Jeff Skilling brought champagne to the office: accounting as "professional skepticism", as the classical definition had it – and it sounds so much like the poetics of realism ... – skepticism was over. Now, accounting was vision. "It wasn't a job – it was a mission […] We were doing God's work."[12] This was Skilling, after the indictment; Borkman: who can no longer tell the difference between conjecture, desire, dream, hallucination, and fraud pure and simple.

What has the bourgeoisie brought to the world? This mad bifurcation between a much more rational and a much more ir–rational rule over society. Two idealtypes – one before and one after the industrialization – made memorable by Weber and Schumpeter. Coming from a country where capitalism arrived late, and encountered few obstacles, Ibsen had the opportunity – and the genius – to compress a history of centuries into just twenty years, making it explosive and irrevocable. The realistic bourgeois inhabits the early plays: Lona; Nora; perhaps Regina in Ghosts. The realist as a woman: an odd choice, for the times [Heart of Darkness: "it's queer how out of touch with truth women are"]. A radical choice, too, in the spirit of Mill's Subjection of Women. But also profoundly pessimistic about the scope of bourgeois "realism": imaginable within the intimate sphere – as the solvent of the nuclear family and all its lies – but not in society at large. Nora's prose at the end of Dollhouse echoes the writings of Wollstonecraft, Fuller, Martineau:[13] but their public arguments are now locked inside a living room [in Bergman's staging, a bedroom]. What a paradox, this play that shocks the European public sphere, but doesn't really believe in the public sphere. And then, once creative destruction emerges, there are no Noras left, to counter Borkman's and Solness's destructive metaphors; the opposite: Hilda, inciting "my masterbuilder" [860] to his suicidal hallucination. The more indispensable realism is, the more unthinkable it becomes.

Remember the German banker, with his "irreconcilable contradiction" between the good Bürger and the unscrupulous financier. Ibsen of course knew the difference between them; and he was a playwright, looking for an objective collision on which to base his work. Why not use this intra-bourgeois contradiction? It would have made so much sense to do so; so much sense for Ibsen to be Shaw, instead of being Ibsen. But he did what he did, because the difference between those two bourgeois is perhaps "irreconcilable", but is not really a contradiction: the good Bürger will never have the strength to withstand the creative destruction of capital; the hypnotic entrepreneur will never yield to the sober Puritan. Recognizing the impotence of bourgeois realism in the face of capitalist megalomania: here lies Ibsen's unforgettable political lesson.

[1] All quotations from Ibsen come from The Complete Major Prose Plays, translated and introduced by Rolf Fjelde, New York 1978; page numbers are indicated in parenthesis in the text. Many many thanks to Sarah Allison for her help with the Norwegian original.

[2] "Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory", in Problems in General Linguistics, 1966, Miami UP, 1971, p. 71.

[3] See Kurt Eichenwald, "Ex chief of Enron pleads not guilty to 11 felony counts", New York Times, July 9, 2004.

[4] Jonathan Glater, "On Wall Street today, a break from the past", New York Times, May 4, 2004.

[5] Richard Tilly, "Moral Standards and Business Behaviour in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Britain", in Jürgen Kocka and Allan Mitchell, eds, Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1988, Berg, Oxford 1993, pp.190-1.

[6] As Sarah Allison pointed out to me, this "incompetent survey" is a very grey area: the word "uefterrettelig" is given as "false, mistaken" in Brynildsen's Norsk-Engelsk Ordbog (Kristiania, H. Aschehoug & co., 1917) and translated as "misleading" in Michael Meyer's 1980 edition for Methuen; "inaccurate"in Christopher Hampton's [Faber and Faber, 1980]; "fraudulent" in Dounia B. Christiani's [Norton, 1980]; "disastrously false" in Brian Johnston's [Smith and Kraus, 1996]; and "crooked" in Stephen Mulrine's [Nick Hern 2006]. The etymology of "uefterrettelig" – a negative prefix "u" + "efter" [="after"] + "rettel" [="right"] + a suffix "ig" indicating that the word is an adjective – indicates something, or someone, which cannot be relied upon to be right: misleading, unreliable, or untrustworthy seem the best equivalents for a word in which an objective untrustworthyness neither assumes nor excludes the subjective intent to provide false information.

[7] All quotations from Middlemarch come from the Penguin edition, New York 1994; page numbers are indicated in parenthesis in the text.

[8] Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 1963, Stanford UP 2001. p. 161.

[9] Werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism, 1913, Fisher Unwin, London 1915, pp. 91-2. It’s impossible to miss the erotic component of Sombart's thesis, which, after all, identifies "the classic type of the entrepreneur" in Faust, Goethe’s most destructive – and creative – seducer. In Ibsen, too, the entrepreneur’s metaphoric vision has an erotic origin in Solness's hysterically chaste adultery with Hilda [whom he had already "seduced" when she was twelve].

[10] Edward Chancellor, The Devil Take The Hindmost. A History of Financial Speculation, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999, p. xii.

[11] ivi, p. 74.

[12] Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The smartest guys in the room. The amazing rise and scandalous fall of Enron, Portfolio, London 2003, p. xxv.

[13] The sources of Nora's speech have been identified by Joan Templeton; see Alisa Solomon, Re-Dressing the Canon. Essays on Theater and Gender, Routledge, London-NY, p. 50.