Freedom and Authority in Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People”

In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism, and expressions of contempt respectively for both past and future. Wes & Erin discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us, and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the the role of education. 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His brothers is conservative, focused on the use of authority and aesthetic self restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism and expressions of contempt, respectively, for both past and future. Today we discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the role of education. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh and you're listening to Subtext. So Erin, what do you think of that Stockman report? Do you think it's credible? 1:35 Erin: I believe it if I see it. And if these infusoria are. Yeah, I know, exactly. And they seem pretty microscopic. I just think it's all bunk. 1:45 Wes: I guess they were on the cusp at this time of believing in the little tiny creatures that we call bacteria as causes of disease. Or maybe, obviously a man of science like Dr. Stockman would believe in them, but not his father in law. He thinks it's the funniest thing in the world that anyone would believe in these things. 2:05 Erin: Well, the animals he deals with are much larger and you know. 2:09 Wes: At the tannery. 2:10 Erin: At the tannery, yeah. 2:11 Wes: Yeah. So I thought it was interesting that there are two important claims that I don't think are ever really justified very much or explored. One of them is by the mayor, his brother. That's the idea that it's going to cost $200,000 to repair the water system for the spa. And it sounded a little suspicious when he pulled that number out. I don't see him as trustworthy. And then at the end of the play in the community meeting, he says it's $100,000. So the number changes, which I think is meant to be a signal that we're not meant to actually trust that 2:47 Erin: I hadn't Realized it changed. 2:49 Wes: Yeah. Unless I'm. Unless I'm misremembering. 2:51 Erin: Well, what's even more. More suspicious is that he's talking about American dollars when they live in Norway. No. 2:57 Wes: Oh, did I say dollars and not kroner? 2:59 Erin: Oh, okay. No, you're good. 3:01 Wes: Well, it's an exact one to one. For some reason. It might be actually. I don't know. Sounds. Yeah. 3:10 Erin: How much is it? 3:12 Wes: Be funny if it were just a hundred dollars, but. Right, exactly that time. A hot dog costs 5 cents, but anyway. Actually, 5 cents would be a lot. 3:25 Erin: I know. 3:25 Wes: Probably even less in the late 19th century, but. Yeah. I'm not sure about Stockman's credibility. He does get a report back from a laboratory, an independent laboratory, confirming that there's organic. Decayed organic matter. So the water is polluted. But what does that mean? How polluted is it? How dangerous is it? We don't get a lot of specifics, and also we find out that Stockman has a lot of extraneous motives. There's an element of kind of vindictiveness and almost manic elation when he first opens that letter and reports it to others. It's funny because I tried to watch the Steve McQueen version of this. Have you ever seen that? The film version? 4:17 Erin: No. I was going to watch it and I thought I just couldn't. 4:22 Wes: It's well rated, but it's. And I didn't get through that much, but I thought it was terrible, specifically terrible for McQueen's acting and the way his choices regarding Stockman, where he tries to play Stockman in this very reserved way. It's almost like he's trying to enhance the credibility of Stockman, which is hard to do given the original play, because Stockman is often kind of in hysterics and. Or a bit manic or a bit grandiose. In one way or another, I'm gonna be the savior of the community or screw the community. So in one direction or another, there's a real question around him. He's not a sober personage, and McQueen tries to make him into this sober, melancholic, serious person. So not to dwell a lot on whether the water is really polluted or as polluted as Stockman says it is, because ultimately that doesn't matter. But I think we're meant to be a bit suspicious of Stockman or. I don't know, is there a real hero in this play? Is there a real protagonist? Because this story could have been told as a. And maybe this is what McQueen ultimately ends up doing with it. You could say this is a story about government corruption and here's someone standing up to it, and here's the very obvious hero of the story. That's not what Ibsen does here. He makes it a lot more complicated. 5:50 Erin: That's right. I would have been interested to see, but I haven't. I'll probably watch it later. But I would have been interested to see the BBC adaptation set in Scotland, I think it is. I wonder what liberties they take with that. 6:01 Wes: I watched a bit of that. I mean, I just watched like a minute or two, and it looks very good. I didn't end up watching it because it was deviate so much. 6:10 Erin: Yeah, that's what I. I thought it might confuse me, actually. 6:14 Wes: Yeah. Then I realized, actually, after looking at it a little bit again yesterday, it actually is probably quite true to the substance I see, and maybe truer than McQueen's film, which is based on an adaptation by Arthur Miller. 6:27 Erin: I think that's one of the things I wanted to talk about with the play, because you're absolutely right this time around. Reading it for the first time in a few years, I really thought Dr. Stockman is. I think, you know, you and I both now we receive media that we know. We're going to do a podcast on, sort of like through the other person's eyes. And I remember thinking that you would think that Stockman was manic and also that maybe the report was just bunk and he was making it up. So the McQueen adaptation is based on the Miller retooling of Enemy and. Which was supposed to be a parable about huac. And I think I had also mentioned that I had watched an adaptation by Ray set in an Indian town, in which the Stockman character. I forget what his name is in the film, but the guy who's supposed to be the Doctor is a hero fighting against the corruption of the town. And then there was a Jeremy Strong stage version, which was adapted by Amy Herzog, which I felt like I was the only person who had not seen that adaptation in New York. I know a bunch of people who saw it who all basically said that the speech of Stockman was retooled for that certain character. A lot. A lot of times you get characters taken out, I guess, or maybe something like a collapsing of Hofstad and Billing. And basically what all of these adaptations come down to, from what I understand when they're being used toward a certain end, is to make Stockman a straightforward hero and to use the speech as, you know, to sort of insert in the filling of the Stockman speech. Whatever political opinions they want, Stockman they think are sort of adapted to the time. And so from what I heard, the Herzog adaptation was very self consciously trying to invoke the present political moment and make a bunch of statements about. I don't know what particular political stance it was, but basically some critique of the Trump administration. You know, it strikes me that this play is so. It's treated so similarly to the way that Lear was treated in Victorian England, where they would do, you know, they would change up the ending so it wasn't so bleak. And Lear was just like this workshop for the playwright of the day to just use to kind of give it his own spin, adapt the ending in the way that whoever was retooling it saw fit. And it seems that that, like something about Lear and something about Enemy of the People inspire this desire to want to make things nicer or easier to swallow in some way. And I think Stockman is just such, ultimately such a difficult character to root for that people have this desire to go in and turn him into something that on the page he's really not. I mean, you could see him as being the villain of the play if you wanted to. I mean, not quite. I mean, everybody's terrible. There's no, there's no good character in the. But that's one of the problems is he's not the hero, it seems to me. 9:36 Wes: Yeah, I think it's a matter of people might want this to be the kind of play that it's not right with this straightforward hero resisting the system narrative. But, you know, in light of the fact that it's not that I was curious about, well, what, you know, what is Ibsen up to here? And I think, you know, we know enough about Ibsen to say that in some ways he's identified with the character of Dr. Dr. Stockman and even in his more intemperate moments, kind of shares some of these elitist condemnations that Stockman is going to make at the end of, well, a certain point in the play where he becomes disillusioned and becomes the enemy of the people. So here's what he said in a letter to the critic George Brandes. Well, here's one relevant quotation. What are we to say of the attitude taken up by the so called liberal press? I am more and more confirmed in my belief that there is something demoralizing in engaging in politics and joining parties. I, at any rate, shall never, never be able to join a party that has the majority on its side, Bjornson says the majority is always right. I, on the contrary, of necessity, say the minority is always right. I hold that the man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future. So very obviously identified in that quotation with the views of the Stockman character. He says in another letter that he's unsure whether it's a comedy or a drama. Here's another thing he said to Brandes. I'm still under the impression of the confusion and disturbance created by ghosts. So I had to write this new play, An Enemy of the People. It is a reaction against the mass hysteria, against the tyranny of the majority, against the lie which is enthroned in society. So I think there's a sense, and I think he basically admitted in a way that he is Stockman in a sense. So I thought, okay, so what is he up to here? Is he just so cantankerous that he doesn't know that Stockman comes across as a hysteric? Or is he just enjoying leaning into that idea and ribbing people? I think it's the latter. That he's approaching his own proclivities with some sense of irony and enjoying the fact, right. He gets to emit all this bile through Stockman. And it is partly against society and the sorts of people that he wants to criticize. And I think this sort of attitude actually pervades those plays of his that I've read. A certain amount of bitterness towards society. 12:18 Erin: That's certainly right. I think, too, he really flirted with social Darwinism for quite seriously for a while there. I think he later. Later changed his mind. But certainly there's an element of self parody. And he takes it as far as he can. What you've noted about the play being comic is key. That's really the only way to understand this play, I think. I mean, all of Act 2 is literally a farce. The mayor is hiding in a room. You know, it could be a bedroom comedy in a way. You know, with people running in and out and people hiding behind doors. It's so ridiculous. It's so over the top. And everyone, including Stockman, is over the top. And I think we're meant to laugh at some of the things that he says in the play. Certainly in the first scene. 13:00 Wes: This is what I was hoping for from McQueen, I thought. Cause I couldn't find any other real versions available on video. And I wanted to see. Okay, is this played in the way that I think it should be played? Is this some of the farcical quality of it and the over topness of Stockman. Yeah, and McQueen doesn't do that. I think in the other thing that I found is, and this is from the critical heritage, is that early adaptations in London are the earliest adaptation in the earliest production in English in translation in English. This is in London, 1893. They had this very oddly tall person play, Stockman, and they really amped up the comedic element. And this is what you, you know, the critics at the time. I think there's some disagreement about whether that should have been the case. Some critics really liked that a lot. Others found it questionable. I think that's a very good, that's actually a very good choice. As you point out. You were pointing out that there's a way in which it becomes farcical. 14:02 Erin: Well, it's a good visual symbol so that we immediately see that this man is self inflated, first of all. And second of all, a bit ridiculous and out of place. And I think that is important to signal, I mean, it can't be overstated how maybe a good word would be bilious, how biliously that Ghosts was received. I mean, how upset people got over that production. And you know, we mentioned a bit of this, I think in the Doll's House episode. 14:29 Wes: Well, remind me of that a little bit. Yeah. Cause I'm not. 14:32 Erin: People were horrified. I mean, it was a moral outrage. And this was the reason, I think, why people create that club or subscription service or whatever it was that allowed people to see Ibsen plays because he was considered so outrageous because of Ghosts. And Ghosts is, you know, it's such a funny play for people to have gotten so, so upset about. Like, I, I, I dislike ghosts the most of any of the Ibsen. I think I've read all of his plays and I, I, Ghosts is my least favorite because nothing happens. It's just people talking about something that happened a long time ago. And what happened a long time ago was this Mr. Alving had syphilis. And that's, that's the terrible, you know, this terrible thing. 15:13 Wes: I mean, is there not, is there any play in which someone doesn't have syphilis? 15:16 Erin: I, if there is, I don't want. Yeah, no, it's not really a play if there's no syphilis. But this was the play written immediately after Ghosts. And gosh, I'm, you know, I'm working off of long, long memory here, but I know that, I know that Ibsen said something to the effect of this one at least won't cause any controversy. I know this one's going to be okay. Like, he wrote it in response to the reaction for Ghosts in order to try and get himself back on top. So he just wanted to write a go ahead hit that would offend and bother nobody. And that's pretty incredible when you look at the content of Stockman's speech, to think that Ibsen was so sure that this wouldn't offend anybody. That can only be possible if you understand the comedic element of it. 16:01 Wes: Right. 16:01 Erin: I mean, if he's really espousing these views through Stockman in a way that people are perceiving as very serious, then I can't imagine that it wouldn't be controversial. But as it was, it was a huge hit and he was totally right. Everybody loved it and it was a big, you know, it sold big and everything. So I highly doubt that. That the. These ideas of social Darwinism were so acceptable back then. I think it had to have been that Stockman's flaws were so evident that it was not controversial. 16:32 Wes: I see, yeah. So people weren't necessarily taking all that criticism of the masses as being, what. What does he call them? 16:40 Erin: Mongrels. 16:41 Wes: Mongrels, yeah, yeah. 16:43 Erin: Animals. 16:44 Wes: They weren't taking that personally. They weren't taking that as Ibsen's considered view. 16:50 Erin: Yeah, right, right. 16:51 Wes: It seems plausible because to the extent that you identify that with. With then that sort of. I think it. To anyone, that kind of elitism is cloying, even if you can sympathize with it to some extent. Maybe at least in one's, you know, more cantankerous moments. You can sympathize with all these things that he's saying, of course, but he does sound. Start to sound a little bit like, you know, Nietzsche. 17:15 Erin: Right. 17:15 Wes: Which may be curious about whether he had read any Nietzsche and he claimed that he hadn't because, you know, he had someone write to him saying, you know, you ought to check this guy out. I think Nietzsche did read Ibsen and had a very positive opinion of Ibsen. I might have said that in our. One of our previous recordings, but, yeah. So these ideas, of course, are floating around, but some of these speeches that Stockman gives. Yeah, they could be straight out of Nietzsche. 17:40 Erin: It's a little difficult to detect in Act 1 when you're still sort of learning the characters. Right. But if you go back and you look at Stockman's very first words in the play, all of his flaws are very much in evidence. And I think one of the pieces of evidence to your point about his mania or about the fact that the report might not be legitimate. Or it might be him. What, catastrophizing or drawing a conclusion which maybe can't be drawn. I'm unsure about how to. How to characterize what might be wrong with the report. But we do know from. Granted, from unreliable sources like the mayor. That Stockman has a reputation. For always having a bee in his bonnet about something. And also, we see in his own words, you know, when he first comes on stage. He's been out for a walk during the. Shortly after dinner. And so various people have come into the house before we see Stockman. But when he comes back in, he's waxing poetic to the mayor about. I feel so indescribably content. With all this budding, bursting life around me. Which I take to be pretty. Pretty suggestive. Because, of course, he's talking about how great this place is, how happy he is. He's pointing out all these things, you know, which is really lovely. Pointing out all these nice things that he's been able to afford. Because he's been up in the north, really struggling. We also find out that he's been struggling. Partly because he's felt so bereft of the company of real human beings. But because he's such an elitist. He basically calls the townspeople where he was no better than animals. But, you know, he's. He's happy to be successful. He's so excited. He calls this a thriving metropolis, you know. But one laughs at this idea of. Of all the life bursting around him. Because, of course, during this entire scene. He keeps asking if the postman has come. And we. We learn very soon that this whole time that he's been talking about how wonderful this place is. He has strongly suspected and needed the report only to confirm his suspicion that the waters at the spa are contaminated. And that, in fact, the idea of this place as being sort of teeming with life. Is, if we're to take his report seriously. A good kind of metaphor for the. Whatever the spike of microorganisms is. That has caused some problems in the water source. So how could he be so excited about living here. And so excited about the prospect of what's going on around him. When he knows that this report is coming down the pike? It's as though he's wishing for this report. He's wishing for something to happen. He's hinting to his brother at first about what. What he's waiting on. And says there may be a great many things that are extraordinary about the circumstances. Which he's alluding to whatever is going to be in the report, or then again, absolutely nothing. It may be that it's just a figment of my imagination. So he has all this excitement about being there, but in a certain light, it could be seen as excitement about stirring up trouble, about finding something wrong, about getting to crusade for something, as though he's wishing for. For. For there to be something wrong with the water. 20:40 Wes: Yeah. When he delivers the news to his family, he's quite elated in an inappropriate way. He doesn't think about the possibility that this might be bad news for people to find out that this thing that the town, in a way relies on or is coming to rely on for its prosperity could be, you know, built on a cesspool. I think the phrase he uses, you know, he does. And then he casually says, oh, it can all be fixed very easily, which is not clear that it can be fixed very easily. So that's. He's not thinking often. He's not thinking about a. How other people might feel about this. He's not thinking about the fact that his brother might be right. Someone points out to him that the mayor, his brother, might be jealous of him. Making this discovery brings up the question of what the mayor will think of this. And I think Stockman says, oh, he'll be happy to learn about this. So there's a lot of naivete that's highlighted on the part of Stockman. 21:40 Erin: Well, you might almost think that if Stockman is happy about this discovery, it's because he knows that when they're building it, it's done shoddily. Or that something like this might happen. Right. Because they don't actually take his plans for the building of the pipes. So it does seem. I mean, there's a reading of the play in which all of this does come down to a rivalry between the brothers. 22:02 Wes: Right. 22:02 Erin: You know, where the mayor seems more obviously jealous of the brother. But. But really, if we look at the subtext, everybody drink at home, then the doctor is just as jealous of the mayor or just as undermining as attempting to be undermining of the mayor's authority or to prove that he did something wrong, that he's not as smart as the doctor is, et cetera. But if we are to take seriously the idea that Stockman is thrilled at this discovery, it occurred to me that his desire for there to be something wrong with the spa, regardless of whether or not it's. It's about competing with a brother or just about his desire to crusade for something or just I don't know. Whatever it may be, it occurs to me that it's. It's quite similar to the spa itself, the sort of functioning of the spa itself. Someone talks about the fact. I think it's. I think it's the mayor in that early scene, talks about the fact that he hopes that a lot of invalids will come. And do you remember this? He makes some really funny comment, which it's clear that the mayor himself doesn't understand is funny. 23:11 Wes: Yeah. The mayor says early on, the mayor is enthusiastic about the spa as an economic foundation for the town. And there's a good flow of money between people. There's life and activity. Right. This is in direct parallel to what Stockman will say about vitality. There's two competing conceptions of vitality here, which I want to get into in a second. And then Hofstad says, oh, and the unemployment's falling. So Hofstad is thinking now not about business and the taxpayer, but about the poor people. And then the mayor turns that into the burden of the poor. Rates on the property classes has been reduced most pleasingly. So he twists it into the economic benefit to the middle class. And that's when he says the thing about invalids. Yeah, if you want to read them. 24:02 Erin: But yeah, he says, a substantial volume of visitors, a good number of invalids, to spread the institute's reputation. You know, I love this idea that. And this probably speaks to your idea of vitality, this idea that, are we building things on health or are we building things on sickness? It's reminiscent to. Of what Billing says in regards to his desire to run for a position at the magistrate's office. When Hofstad says, you know, I can assure you you won't get it, billing responds, you think I don't know that already? But that's exactly what's so dear to me, not to get it. A rebuttal like that fires your fighting spirit. It gives you a kind of supply of fresh bile. And that can certainly be needed in a dull backwater like this, where hardly anything really rousing ever happens. I thought that was so fascinating and so maybe insightful, too, about Stockman's frame of mind, if he was wishing for there to be something wrong with the spa. So in the same way that the spa seems to be. I mean, economically, it feeds off of sick people coming to partake of it, hopefully being cured. But it needs an influx of sickness. Right, in order to produce some sort of positive result. It seems Billing operates in the same way regarding getting riled up resistance, negativity, riles him up and gives him something to react against. And perhaps that's Stockman's idea as well, which is, oh, now I have a cause. Something's wrong with the spa. Hooray. Now I have something to get angry about, and that's going to give me this influx of energy or something so that I can live to rally another day. 25:41 Wes: Yeah. And I think this is key to Stockman's early conception of what vitality is, as opposed to the mayor's. So for the mayor, it seems to be. And this gets us back to the very beginning of the play where there's a lot of great characterization of the mayor because he's come in and he's greeted warmly. He rejects food because it would hurt his digestion. He likes a plain and economical diet. We get the impression that when, you know, Mrs. Stockman says just for once. Right. There's an indication that he rarely or never accepts those invitations to eat with them. And then she worries that he'll think that they're spendthrifts. It's another thing that comes up again and again, I think, in Ibsen. And then the mayor says, not you. So little backhanded swipes against his brother. And then we find out that, as you pointed out, Stockman is out getting his 10,000 steps, but the mayor thinks that's unhealthy. That's really interesting. So he has this conception of health, which is conservative, you could say politically defensive. It's about what you have to preserve, or maybe in the case of the spa, it's about being sick and then bringing yourself back to baseline or preventing sickness. So it's in that negative territory. Whereas for Stockman, it's all about vitality. And he's going to associate that ultimately with youthfulness and progressivism and change. So when Stockman arrives and then he offers the mayor a toddy, and the mayor goes, toddy too, right. So comment about the fact that they're libertines, that they're drinking. I don't partake in toddy parties. And then he criticizes the amount of food people are eating. And Stockman says it's a joy to see young people eating. And he's thinking of their appetite and the sustenance that they get, which will increase their strength because they're the ones, the quote, ones who will dig about in the fermenting stuff of the future. So all of this warm social environment that Stockman is trying to create for the youth, who, by the way, are. There's Petra. But it's mainly Hofstad and Billing. The youngsters who will betray him and turn out not to be have any real vitality. Right. Or there's a progressivism there, but they're willing to and even a revolutionary fervor. And I think they get Stockman amped up beyond what he's originally wanting to do, but they'll abandon that very quickly. Unlike Stockman, Stockman's idea of what health is, is associated or vitality is associated with youth and overflowing and change as opposed to the more conservative position of preserving what you have. And that'll be carried over into the realm of values. Right. Because later Stockman is going to say the old values are like the decayed organic matter in the waters. They actually make us sick. They only have a lifespan of up to 20 years. And then we need new values to become healthy again. For the mayor, it's the old values which are the healthy things and the health producing values and the sorts of values that must be preserved because they're tried and true and also because they support this top down conception of health where the authorities look out for the well being of the people. For Stockman, it's bottom up, right. It's the young, it's those who are growing into the future. It's change. For the mayor, it's top down and it's let's keep things the same. 29:41 Erin: I wonder too if this also then goes along with this idea of using the sludge, using opposition as fuel. So it's sort of, you know, the doctor has this idea that the grit in the oyster is going to be something that produces ultimately greater strength. It's going to cause this energetic response that's going to then produce the revolutionary spirit that will result in an upheaval and a sort of cleansing. Whereas the mayor wants to get rid of the grit entirely so that things stay on that even keel, as I think you're, you're suggesting. 30:15 Wes: Yeah, I mean, this is the connection I was trying to make to what you were saying. And thanks for bringing us back there because it's important. What if there is nothing to resist and fight against? Right. What if it is just all good and then what do the young people do? Is there a form of vitality that doesn't involve yelling at your parents when you're a teenager and smoking pot and being rebellious and then overturning going to overthrow the system, man. Yeah. How do we express vitality if that's not available to us for whatever reason? 30:52 Erin: One heck of a pertinent question. What do we do except tear it all down and what do we put up in its place? But, but that's interesting, though, that, that these. That these two things are twins. Like, there's. One would think that a greater vitality and the sort of like, say the higher. Higher peaks of vitality that you're talking about with Stockman versus sort of like safe, subdued, you know, no, wa. That the mayor suggests, you know, that. That those peaks wouldn't go along with this grit in the oyster idea or this sludge idea. But maybe I'm being naive. Maybe in order to get those peaks, you need the. You need the troughs. But one would think that, that that kind of idea of vitality would not go along with. Would not go along with this toxicity. But of course, that's the immune response, for instance, you know. Right. We spike with vitality as a way to. As a way to kill the invasion, the infection of bacteria. Of course, this is why people, you know, when they feel they're on the brink of revolution and are trying to incite, you know, the population, they're hoping that the government behaves as badly as possible so that people will be the most fed up that they can be, so that the revolution will actually happen. Right. It sort of exists on that kind of energy. What can we make then? I mean, I don't know. I don't know the answer to this question myself, but what can we make then that. That of this rivalry piece. Both the doctor and the mayor come from the same family. You know, there's no, no talk of their parents. They seem to have sprung up out of nowhere. Both Mrs. Stockman and in a way, Captain Horster have paternal figures or the. Or the conspicuous absence of a paternal figure in their lives, which kind of hangs over the play. And this idea of inheritance seems. What you say about this, in a way, Stockman's idea about inheritance are rather conservative ultimately. No, I mean, in his family, he. He has two radically different personalities. His wife is the descendant of three generations of Tanners, which Stockman married into. I don't know. There. There just seem to be two different tracks. We have this idea of health and of. Of preserving the present self, and then we have this idea of lineage. And what in our present selves do we owe? All of these things seem to be knotted up, and the sibling rivalry and this idea of genetics, but I don't know how to. So I'm just throwing a lot of things at you. I'm not sure how to untangle all of that. 33:21 Wes: Yeah. He'll accuse the mayor of being a spiritual mongrel. And then we have to ask the question, right, well, why isn't Stockman a spiritual mongrel? And then you wonder, well, which is the older sibling? And you think, well, the mayor seems kind of like the older siblings sibling because he's more controlling and grown up. But in a way it would be funnier and maybe truer if he's the younger sibling fighting to be the. In Stockman and his older brother, he has not the most stable of father figures, if there ever was that. Right. If there's a bit of a gap in their ages, for instance, which might explain some difference in character. And then you have kind of this goofy person as your secondary father figure and then overreact, becoming this kind of hard ass, tight ass, which is what the mayor is. Either way you go, yeah, you think about an interesting family dynamic in which these two different versions of the principle of vitality have shunted themselves into two different branches, right, let's say of the same tree. And we know that these are two fundamental tendencies that we have to honor. In some sense they reflect a tension within the human psyche and we can't really ultimately discard either one of them. Right. So the more conservative instinct and the idea of relying on the values of a previous generation, which includes all the formative influences and includes culture, which is one of the things that Stockman will appeal to at the end. High culture, that all comes from the past, but also it includes, as I've said, the rear guard action of trying to heal people who are sick with the spa, but then also the financial element. So the well being of the community can. Can be measured to some extent in terms of economics, which is boring and dry, and it's the taxpayers and the housing association and all that nonsense. And it seems almost those sorts of material conditions seem like a demeaning thing to focus on, unless you're focusing on the deprivation of the proletariat and the need for revolution to equalize this disparity between them and the authorities. One of the things I like about this play is with the way these two principles just sort of break off into these two different sibling characters. And they are siblings in important ways and they have this dynamic interaction that you were pointing to, which is that Stockman's version of vitality, which involves youthfulness and growth and progress, also involves fighting against a reaction to what has come before. Right. He says, I think you've already quoted this, but he says, I have an infinite number of things to work and fight and to fight for. That's one of the things he's so excited about, being back in his hometown. And then the question is, yeah, can you find a form of vitality that doesn't necessarily involve that sort of fight? The other aspect of Stockman's version of vitality involves. It's another kind of overflowing, I think, which involves his prolificness as a writer and just wanting to spout every opinion that he has. So it's about speech, right? And that could be political speech. That could be revolutionary, or it could be editorials complaining about the state of things, or however you want to think about it. It could be the thing that Hofstad and Billing are very focused on, speech for the sake of representing, let's say, politically disenfranchised. But it also can be what Stockman talks about at the end of the play, which is high culture. That's one form, ultimately, of vitality, the aesthetic, the artistic, which we don't hear a lot about in the play. But until Stockman is insulting people for being uncultured, insulting the masses for being uncultured, mongrels. One of the themes I revisit a lot in the podcast. But, yeah, as a form of sublimation, we get a. We get a possibility of a form of vitality which isn't necessarily part of either one of these two different poles, the defensive conservative instinct or the progressive instinct. It sort of transcends it, maybe. 37:51 Erin: I think you're pointing out for me a couple of things about Stockman which are quite confused and speak to the complexity of his character, perhaps, that we have. On the one hand, I love this idea that you're pointing to of how prolific he is and how he seems to always have something to sort of rally on about. And yet, at the same time, as I think you also pointed out, he's very easily contaged by other people's ideas. It's kind of funny how little true conviction politically he actually seems to have prior to Hofstad and Billing getting to him and convincing him that this could be the vehicle for revolution. So those two things seem to sort of work opposite each other. Like, we can imagine him as someone who writes a lot of editorials, and yet, at least in the play, and what we see of him taking up a cause on his own, it's not native to him. He becomes convinced of this idea that it speaks to a larger political problem over the course of the play, and only then does he espouse these types of revolutionary ideas. 38:52 Wes: Yeah, he's induced by. I think Billing is the more revolutionary of the two newspaper guys. Hofstad's a little bit more moderate in the beginning. Well, first of all, they get kind of contaged or induced by him. Everyone wants to get in on it. In my notes, I call them hop ons, right? You have Hofstad, Billing and Aslaksen. They all get contaged with the grandiose quality that Stockman has. Okay, I'm going to be. Now I'm an important person who's going to do something for the good of the community. They all get quite grandiose. But Stockman is carried along by this wave. Ironically, they're the ones. Billing is the one. Stockman's a little bit nervous when Billing is saying, rah, rah, rah, revolution. At first. He's carried along reluctantly at first, but he doesn't put up too much resistance. And then he's like, okay, yeah, I guess I'm a revolutionary, too. 39:45 Erin: That's right. Yeah. There's that conflict in Stockman, and then there's the other one which you're pointing to, which is this conflict between. And maybe you characterized it a bit differently, but there are conservative elements, it seems to me, of Stockman's at least of his way of life, certainly. I mean, he's not living like a bohemian. He has. He has his job at the SPA Institute. He has his private practice. He has a normal family life, a home life. And in fact, he's gone back to this unnamed town from being out in the wilderness. He's come back to it. And if anything, if the mayor and if the doctor have a parentage, it's the town itself, right? So in a way, the town is like the Howards end of. Of. Of the play. You know, it's the symbol of maybe all of Norway or of the past or just of society itself and determining where it'll go at the end. His last words are about standing alone. So he seems to want to remove himself from society, to stand outside it, to achieve this freedom. Of course, he's not alone. That's one of the problems is that he has this family that he's affecting with everything that he does. And we're all part of society. None of us can step outside of it. But he has this. This hatred of the masses and yet a certain reverence for, you know, as you said, culture, high culture, which is a result of civilization and of many of the things which he seems to be rallying against. And also his ideas of social Darwinism are Also I think ultimately a bit confused. He has this idea of a genetic inherited mongrelism in terms of some people are just not as good as other people, according to him. But then in the end he's going to take up this school idea which who knows if this will get, you know, catch on. Five minutes after this plays over, maybe he'll be on to another idea. But he has this idea that perhaps these mongrel children who would be in his school would somehow have some hidden ability which you know, maybe would speak to a Darwinian idea of genetic mutation. But still it's a bit. Yeah, it's just a bit confusing. 41:55 Wes: At a certain point he wants to explain himself and say he means this spiritually rather than literally with the genetics. But yeah, the reference to education is sort of in the same line as the hopefulness about the possibility of education at the end of the play is in line with the embrace of high culture and in the embrace of aesthetic speech. He doesn't embrace that, but I've introduced that idea. Embrace of the artistic. So the idea is that it's another bottom up idea. Right. It's not like revolution exactly, but bottom up idea is that you educate people to make them amenable to good government. This is a current theme philosophically as well. Right. Schiller wrote letters on an aesthetic education that the idea there is that revolution is not going to work if people aren't ready for it, if they don't have the virtues, if they don't have the character that you need for that. And that's why the French Revolution turned out so badly. That was the idea. So in the end you get a different. It's a more elitist conception of a bottom up approach, which is that you have to educate people. We can't just have top down authority. We can't just force society to be good if people in their characters are not good. But we can do it from the bottom up. We can make good citizens through the right sort of education. So what it does is it really reveals that there's this elitist tendency within Stockman's conception of vitality that very much resembles his brother. His brother in the beginning, the mayor is slagging off the inferiors, the peasants. I think he accuses Hofstad of not having any tact because he's of peasant stock. And so you can see in, in the beginning Stockman is very pro masses. And then when he feels insulted, he switches and the elitist tendency comes out. But the idea of education is a more positive possibility. That flows out of that elitist component. 43:58 Erin: Yeah, that's good. I think with this idea of hop ons as well. I love that term. The reason why we have people very, very quickly, you know, I think you've demonstrated well that Stockman sort of switches a bit, but, you know, everyone in the play ultimately will switch position except for the mayor. Is that right? And, and Horster, you know, everyone eventually will flip and join a different side. And I think part of the reason why that is is because maybe Petra, it's pretty constant. That's right, Petra. Petra is pretty constant too. 44:31 Wes: Like a rock. Sorry. 44:35 Erin: Yeah, but that doesn't work because the mayor's name is Peter too, so. Well, actually, no, it does because they both. They're both similarly. There you go. That's because I was wondering why is her name. 44:46 Wes: She's stable, right? 44:48 Erin: Yeah, but they're both. They both don't move. That's good because I kept trying to find the connection why they would have the same name. But maybe the reason for that flip flopping is regardless of party or one's ideas about the solution to the problem, you know, everyone pretty much treats the sludge, or whatever we want to call it as a symbol. No one really treats it like a real problem. It just immediately becomes the cudgel with which everyone is going to push through their own agenda. It's. It's a rhetorical device that's being used by every character to make some kind of point. And so none of the character seems to actually care about the threat to health that this sludge potentially, I mean, if we're gonna take Stockman's word for it, that it potentially represents, and therefore this idea of the masses and of the people, you know, that too is kind of used very symbolically. I mean, the idea that the doctor is the enemy of the people too, seems to me to be signaling this. You know, we don't actually care that, that people, that real people who live in this town are going to get sick from these waters. Rather, we care about the people as an idea used as support or in defense of certain values or against certain values. Because Stockman, from the very beginning, as we've already said, he's delighted, he seems delighted to have found this problem. And one of the reasons why he's discovered this problem is because people have already been getting sick. That seems to be the last thing on everyone's mind. 46:27 Wes: This is another thing that makes it a bit suspect because he says, at first I thought they were bringing the sickness with them, which makes sense. Right. They're sick when they come. So how do you know that they're getting sick? From the. It's a bit. He thinks he's discovered this incredible reversal. What is supposed to make healthy is making sick. And the people don't. They may come sick, but they leave sicker. 46:48 Erin: Right. 46:49 Wes: So, yeah, I think in light of what you've been talking about with the hop ons, let's just visit of those moments. I think let's visit in our second half. We're going to stop here for the first half, but in the second half we'll visit the point where maybe we can pull out a few quotes from where Stockman delivers his news just to kind of justify what we've been saying about his mania. Because maybe, I don't know if this reading is going to get on people's nerves where we're so, so hard on Stockman and we're not just reading him as a hero, but anyway. And then we could look at those moments where other people get induced by him with revolutionary fervor and turn this right, turn the concrete issue about the pollution of the waters into something that's mainly symbolic. Right. Mainly a tool for fighting a kind of partisan political war. Listeners can listen to that right now. patreon.com subtextpodcast or you can wait a week and listen for free. Thank you, thank you. 48:05 Erin: And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.