Sublimation leads to sublime drama. Or, if you don’t have sex you may become a great writer

Abstract

A Critique of Jørgen Haugan’s Dommedag og djevlepakt. Henrik Ibsens forfatterskap – fullt og helt [Doomsday and Devil's Pact. Henrik Ibsen's work Fully and Wholly.] Jørgen Haugan’s magisterial and long (607 pages) new book on Ibsen (Haugan 2014) sums up his lifelong engagement with the playwright. Over the years, Haugan has written extensively on Ibsen in articles but not least in his two previous books Henrik Ibsens metode (1977) and Diktersfinxen. En studie i Ibsen og Ibsenforskningen [Doomsday and Devils Pact. Henrik Ibsen’s Work – not in Parts and Pieces] (1982). Both of these serve as a background to the present study. Haugan elaborates upon arguments first put forward in these earlier works in the new book, which he characterises as his last contribution to the field. I have always held a certain respect and fascination for Jørgen Haugan. He has been an odd man out in the Ibsen field, particularly in a Norwegian context. His close relationship to the milieu around the charismatic professor Aage Henriksen (1938–2011) at the University of Copenhagen taught him a different approach to Ibsen and also to view literature and literary scholarship from other perspectives than those that have been prominent in Norway. In addition, I have liked his often contrarian and self-assured attitude to what has been the accepted way of looking at the great works of Norwegian literature, not least demonstrated by his book on Knut Hamsun from 2004 – Solgudens fall. This being said, I was also during my reading of Dommedag og djevlepakt frequently irritated and in vehement disagreement both by his analyses and his methodological and theoretical approach, despite often finding many aspects of his concrete examinations of the dramas insightful. In the programmatic brief foreword to the book, Haugan states some principles that guides his reading. The first is that he will