Sept. 20. Ibsen and Nansen

An examination of the life of Henrik Ibsen, by wikipedia, reveal a somewhat bitter childhood and an adulthood mixed with failure, exile and eventual success. Ibsen's once wealthy father became an alcoholic after he lost his company and fortune and was forced to declare bankruptcy. As an adult, Ibsen failed to enter into a university since he could not pass the entrance exams. He worked for a great deal of time at a Norwegian production company where he helped to write, direct and produce plays but he did not write any original pieces. His abandoned his marriage, enacted in 1858, six years later for a self imposed exile of nearly 30 years in Italy. His original plays were not successful until 1865 when his play Brand received critical acclaim.

The scene in the Biographer's Tale, where the son greets his father asking for help and the father refuses, seems to reflect this turbulent and dark history. The father seems to see in his son all the characteristics he loathes in himself, the alcoholism and the lack of pride and diligence. Each of Ibsen's contributions to the work reveal a critique of the morals and accepted 'myths' or ideas used to explain a cultural belief. In the case of Henrik's confrontation between father and son, according to one myth, is the father not supposed to support his son and try to help him out in this time of crisis, and according to a different myth, the father should refuse the son's request, otherwise how will the son learn to become independent? Yet if the scene is examined with the knowledge of Ibsen's childhood, it would seem that the roles of father and son have been reversed. Ibsen would be the father character while Ibsen's father would be the son. Ibsen critiques his father's alcoholism and inability to support his family while Ibsen's father asks for aid. In this case what are the 'myths' that society would use to judge the situation? A son should always support a father, no? So, in his own mind, Ibsen is going against the grain of society, essentially breaking the moral code.

In Nansen's experience such a strange role reversal occurs when he discovers that the biographer he has been studying, and who is known to write acclaimed biographies known for their truth and lack of bias, has been writing fictional tales about his three subjects, Ibsen, Galton and Linnaeus. In essence Nansen's hero/idol, Destry-Scholes has just committed what would seem to be a crime against the rules of biographers, just as Ibsen has committed a crime against his father when he refuses to support him in his time of crisis. But as Nansen discovers along his journey, the truth is very flexible and in the game of biographers it can easily be broken.

Ibsen's acclaim comes from his criticism of social morals, myths and codes. How does one know what is right and wrong and who should decide that? Why should the relationship between father and son be dictated by outside forces in society? Why should a biographer write only the facts when often even those facts are subject to interpretation? Why can a biographer not write his own view of what happened in the subjects life? As Nansen discovers, he is the writer of his own life and only he can determine the rules he should live by.