Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism by TORIL MOI

Author:TORIL MOI
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2006-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

That Julian identifies with Dionysus is obvious. He too feels misunderstood and ridiculous. His insistence that Dionysus, not Apollo, is the god of poets and seers serves to underline his wish to communicate with his people. By choosing the god of ecstasy, Julian also expresses his hope that he might overcome his separation from others by losing his painful self-consciousness in ecstasy and mysticism.

It is hard to say whether Ibsen got this from Nietzsche. Reading Emperor and Galilean after Nietzsche, it is difficult not to see connections. Yet most of the elements mentioned here could have been derived from historical knowledge about Julian’s life, or from fairly superficial accounts of Nietzsche’s book. Given the state of the evidence, the only conclusion one can draw is the obvious one, which is that in 1872 Ibsen and Nietzsche certainly shared a preoccupation with Apollo and Dionysus and with the question of what theater is and what it could be in European modernity.

Finally, to turn the question of influence on its head, it is possible that Nietzsche was inspired by Emperor and Galilean.32 In fragment 984 of The Will to Power, written in 1884, Nietzsche writes about “the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul”, a phrase that Walter Kaufmann considers to be “the very heart of Nietzsche’s vision of the overman”, and which readers of Emperor and Galilean can’t fail to associate with Ibsen’s hovedverk.33

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