The Master Builder and the Failure of Symbolic Success

Abstract

At a time when "difference" is so powerfully in vogue Ibsen's The Master Builder would seem thrust into a defensive posture by virtue of its reliance on symbolism. For its symbolism apparently asserts, not difference, but identity, and thus seems to run counter to the diacritical character of language itself: the arbitrary division between signifier and signified, between sign and referent. As a result of this recent stress on the diacritical, the figural dominance of symbol over allegory and discursive language that has been in force since the Romantics is now threatened with reversal, as Murray Krieger has shown. The supposed fusion of object and meaning wrought by the symbol is regarded in some quarters no longer as a virtue but as a species of linguistic bad faith, a mystifying refusal to acknowledge what Paul de Man calls the fallen world of our facticity and the existential gap between man and nature.