Introduction to Peer Gynt

 

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Peer Gynt

THE CHOICE OF RHYMED AND UNRHYMED VERSE

When translating Love's Comedy, I felt it important to follow Ibsen's own rhyme patterns throughout. The play inhabits a single, restricted and uniform social setting within a shared linguistic circumference. Each character served to sustain this uniform medium; there were no dimensions of reality outside this mannered and uniform milieu. Peer Gynt, on the other hand, is an extremely varied text, with shifts in meter and rhyme patterns, with extensive and global changes of scene and, above all, of 'dimensions' of reality, from peasant realism, to wild natural settings, to supernatural realms of fantasy and fairy tale, to cynical entrepreneurial opportunism (in Act IV) to an extravagant Arabian setting, to an insane asylum in Cairo, and so on. Each of these dimensions of realty has its own speech pattern, in own 'tone' and it's this variety of texture that the translator must try to recreate. Whereas Love's Comedy is a drama of verbal confrontation where passions are raised and hearts are broken under the polished surface of polite discourse, Peer Gynt is a drama of violent transitions, of huge upheavals and of disruptions of any attempt at a uniform discourse. The language of the play never settles into a style of politeness or social conformity or of any established norm of reality.  Not only was there no need, therefore, to sustain a uniform poetic method; there was every inducement to find, in translation, an equivalent for the linguistic variety of the original.

A major division of consciousness in Peer Gynt is that between the 'real' world in all its variety from peasant earthiness to Arabian exoticism and, totally different, that of the world of fantasy, the supernatural. Ibsen's play employs rhyme throughout. For the original Norwegian audience, more familiar with the folklore traditions he is drawing upon, the transitions from reality to folktale fantasy would be easily apparent and would not need any 'signaling'. I decided that for a modern audience, more distanced than Ibsen's public from traditions of folklore and legend, it would be helpful to keep these fantastic sequences, (and the equally as bizarre Cairo madhouse scene) in rhyme in contrast to the blank verse of the rest: suggesting an area of the imagination deriving from the fairy tales and folk tales of Peer's childhood which, in a form of recidivism, continually erupts into Peer's adult consciousness.   This realm of folklore and the supernatural is one of the strengths of the play: but it is there to reveal Peer's continual retreat from engaging, dialectically, with reality.  It is possible, I think, to see in this Ibsen's own decision to abandon the ingratiating exoticism of verse drama for the dialectical realism of the twelve-play prose Cycle where, in each play, confrontations are not evaded but have to be painfully endured.  Ibsen's next two plays, the The League of Youth and Emperor and Galilean are prose plays not only strikingly different from each other but also from everything Ibsen had written before.  They lay the foundation for the great Cycle that follows.

Peer's mother, Åse, describes how she and Peer would console each other with this legendary past:

…we would retreat into fairy tales,
You know, princes and trolls and all kinds of beasts…(1)

and it seems natural to think these exist as an imaginative reservoir within Peer's mind - or a 'dimension' into which he is prone to drift. It could act as a subtle signal to the audience that these sequences are or a different order of experience than the 'real life' sequences. Therefore, I let the rhymed passages first appear in Act II Sc. IV where Peer, "wild, distraught" after the encounter with the three herd girls, is about to enter his own Unconscious in the troll sequence; he actually falls unconscious at the conclusion of this long speech in which, unlike his earlier daydreaming (in Act I Sc. ii), he exhibits an inability to separate reality from fantasy. In later sections, where he struggles to combat this tendency to fantasy (e.g. III.i.) I make his language slide in and out of rhyme, to express his vacillating condition.

Surreal fantasy is the condition of the inmates of the Cairo madhouse at the conclusion of Act IV, where Ibsen's own meter and rhyme scheme radically change; the speeches of Huhu, the Fellah and Hussein are virtuoso set pieces where the rhymes suggest a controlling, insane, hermetically sealed (solipsist) condition of the imagination: the speeches need to be reeled off maniacally, somewhat like Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot. The imaginative power of Act V, Peer's Homecoming, which to my mind is perhaps the finest imaginative sequence in modern drama, gains its poetic richness from the continual intersection of realistic and fantastic (rhymed) sequences. The continual reversion to rhymed fantasy, I hope, creates an 'eerie' aspect to these sequences, as a continually present, menacing dimension that always threatens totally to take over Peer's consciousness. 

It is the multi-dimensionality and huge poetic range of Peer Gynt - of conscious and unconscious, realistic and fantastic, humdrum and insane, flippant and soul-searching, cynically superficial and humanly profound levels - that distinguishes this play's poetry from that of Love's Comedy. It is the difference, almost, between Classic and Romantic styles - except that Ibsen's most Romantic love poetry is found within the almost neo-classical restraints of Love's Comedy while Peer Gynt, though it employs so many of the metaphors of Romantic poetry: the majestic natural settings, the outlaw rebel-hero, the journey into the grotesque, is more a parody, even a negation, than an endorsement, of the rhetoric of Romanticism.

THE PRESENCE OF THE EXCLUDED ROMANTIC THEMES

A curious aspects of Peer Gynt is that the Romantic poetic imagination is powerfully felt as a presence because of its absence,  its constant negation through the actions of the hero. The reader or audience has the curious sense of another text within, or shadowing, the play's disenchanted text: a full-blown Romantic text (not just Goethe's Faust, but Byron's Childe Harold, perhaps, or Manfred) which is all the time struggling to get out: a combat of text and supertext. Henry James, in a review of Hedda Gabler, commented that Ibsen's "great gift seems made up of negatives" - a perception, perhaps, of the 'negative dialectics' of Ibsen's art, of the potent presence of the absent value; like the antimatter postulated by modern physics. In the seemingly reductive scenes of the prose plays, one becomes aware of another, huger world struggling to possess the scene.  It is the  'true marriage' that eludes Nora and Helmer in A Doll House, the baffled and defeated  'joy of life' of Ghosts; the open, free and courageous civic life Thomas battles to establish in An Enemy of the People -  and so on throughout the Cycle.  Behind Peer Gynt is the vast, unfulfilled promise of Romanticism now reduced to the wasteland of Act V. Sc. vi, where the devastated landscape reproaches Peer for the crime of betraying the promise.  The famous 'Onion Scene' of  Act V. sc.v,  presents the image of the disillusioned old man summoning layer after layer of his past for a devastating re-collection of dispersed identities.  It is an existential metaphor of ultimate non-identity that looks forward to Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. The most resoundingly Romantic passage in the play, Peer's account of the reindeer ride in Act One, which might remind us of any one of the more powerful passages in, e.g. Wordsworth's The Prelude, is quickly deflated by being revealed as fraudulent. What is notable about the passage, as we will see later, is that it both parodies Romantic Nature-sublimity yet at the same time introduces powerful metaphors and imagery that will be profoundly developed, 'contrapuntally', throughout the play. That is, it is doing more work in the drama than the Romantic equivalent it is invoking and negating.

One of the triumphs of the play is its recovery, for modern drama, of the vivid yet serious use of the supernatural; of directly symbolic and metaphoric figures, the equivalent of the supernatural forces in Greek and Elizabethan drama. Here, of course, Ibsen is indebted to Goethe's Faust, but Ibsen's use of such supernatural figures is more successful in creating, as a fully theatrical symbology, 'presences' possible for a drama of the modern stage. As consequential spiritual forces - the trolls, the Bøyg, the Strange Passenger, the Button Molder and the Priest-Devil - they carry the chill of real terror. They are emblems for our deepest anxieties; and the prospect of being recycled in the melting ladle is as desolate a prospect to us as the eternity of infernal tortures were for Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. The Inferno of Dante may no longer terrorize the modern spirit into authentic existence, but our imaginations still extend into equivalent metaphysical dimensions. These metaphysical dimensions will remain in Ibsen's drama all through the Realist Cycle, as such titles as Ghosts and When We Dead Awaken should alert us.

THE EXISTENTIAL ARGUMENT OF THE PLAY

There is a (probably apocryphal) story that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, walking in a park one night was stopped by a policeman who asked, "Who are you? What are you doing here?": at which the philosopher resonantly replied, "Ah, yes! Those are the questions!" These are the questions Romantic protagonists agonized over. Though Peer Gynt takes a disenchanted view of Romantic aspirations, it is a thoroughly Romantic work. Pre-Romantic drama's ideal had been Integrity; that of Romantic and post-Romantic drama is Authenticity. In the earlier drama an Oedipus, Electra, Hamlet, Othello or Phèdre at least possessed a strong sense of a self ("Who are you?") and a human order that could be seen to be violated and needed to be "set right"; ("What are you doing here?"). Even for Shakespeare's most questioning hero, Hamlet, there was a divinity that shaped our ends, a providence in the fall of a sparrow. In death, Hamlet could ask Horatio to "report me and my cause aright/To the unsatisfied". In his (presumably) last moments Peer has neither self nor cause to be reported aright: only the failure to discover either self or cause. There is a direct path from Romantic literature and drama like Peer Gynt to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. And, for that matter, to the movie Citizen Kane, whose hero, like Peer, learns it does not profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his own soul. It is the basis of the quest beneath Ibsen's later Cycle of twelve plays, setting out twelve stages of the same mutual exploration of world and human identity. The most familiar example, for American audiences, is that of Nora Helmer in A Doll House, brought to the realization she knows neither who she is nor what world she is living in.

The idea that one's 'self' and the world it finds itself in, are both equally unknown entities: that the self is a project, only, to be realized, authentically or otherwise, removes all sense of abiding normality, a set of certainties against which the human drama can be played. Peer finds himself confronting what Jean Paul Sartre stated was the essence of the existential condition:

Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is only
what he wills himself to be after this first thrust towards existence.
Man in nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first
principle of existentialism [2]

This is the dilemma that Peer confronts in his encounter with the Button Molder, when he is brought up against the realization that he may have no authentic identity at all.

'ARCHETYPAL' ELEMENTS IN THE PLAY

Peer Gynt invokes not only Romantic drama but such archetypal forms as the Quest myth, in which (in Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, the Oedipus story, Beowulf), the hero leaves home, travels extensively through the world performing heroic actions, meets monstrous and divine beings, descends to the underworld and returns at last to his native home, often with some magic possession or knowledge that might redeem the wasteland his home has become. Peer follows, even if in parody, this quest pattern. He leaves home; is outcast; travels over an extensive land-and-seascape; journeys underground (the troll sequence); speaks with monstrous and phantasmal figures; like Oedipus, encounters the Sphinx; and returns, in old age, to a wasteland where his wife, like Odysseus's Penelope, is faithfully waiting. He returns, however, with no healing wisdom, which alerts us to yet another 'absent presence'; for while continually invoking, he also has negated, the redemptive purpose of the quest myth.

This 'circuitous journey', M.H. Abrams reminds us, often was linked, in Romantic poetry, with the parable of the Prodigal Son:

The Bible contained an apt, detailed and impressive figure of life as a circular rather than a linear journey, which had been uttered explicitly as a parable of Man's sin and redemption, and by the authoritative voice of Jesus himself. This was the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-32) who collected his inheritance and "took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living:; then, remorseful, made his way back to his homeland and the house of his father, who joyously received him, clothed him in the best robe, a ring and shoes, and ordered the fatted calf that they might "eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." [3]

Like the other 'absent presences' in the play, the parable reproaches the text that traduces it. In Act V. the play also takes on the aspect of a Morality Play, such as Everyman, where the hero is summoned to confront allegorical images of his past before preparing for his imminent death.

THE TRAGI-COMEDY OF REPETITION

Peer Gynt, however, is far from being a solemn or lugubrious Morality Play, or allegory, setting out some doctrinal recipe for redemption. The quality of the drama that most impresses us is the boundless energy and high spirits of its hero, who has the comic improvisational agility of a dropped cat always able to land on all fours. Although Peer is not the 'lovable rogue' as is often claimed - as modern Hollow Man he is more severely judged - nevertheless, he manifestly is superior to the other human characters in the play - with the exception of Solveig - and this is what Solveig perceives at the Haegstad wedding feast where she and Peer 'change eyes' and enact a true marriage in contrast to the socially approved but actually corrupt marriage of Ingrid and Mads Moen - a theme looking back to Love's Comedy.

What Peer possesses above all is what will be called in a later play, Ghosts: "joy of life" a 'pagan' resourcefulness and energy that exults in living, and which complements Solveig's 'Christian' self-sacrificing steadfastness and faith. The play honors as much as it deplores Peer's mental agility that can play at any role that offers itself, chatter away on any subject without understanding it, like a facile actor. And this is matched by an amazing physical agility. The number of physical actions given to Peer exceeds, I believe, that of any other dramatic hero; and outside drama, only Odysseus, another consummate liar, can compare.. Peer runs, jumps, carries his mother wading through a stream, wrestles, rides a reindeer in space (where the lie and the physical agility combine) climbs, carries off and has sex with a bride, three herd girls, a troll woman, a Bedouin girl, rides various steeds, crosses a desert, fights with trolls and monkeys, swims, crawls on all fours and, finally exhausted, sleeps in Solveig's arms. He is infinitely resourceful, and the actions given him seem to make up the entire range of the human body. The demands upon the actor match the tremendous opportunities the role presents.

Yet, for all this mobility, Peer, spiritually, gets nowhere as the play makes clear by showing a persistent pattern of repetition. The reindeer ride was a piece of fraudulent boasting on Peer's part, but it also is a variably recurring metaphor in the play. Not only does it introduce the image of Peer and his various 'mounts' - from reindeer, to pig to Arabian stallion, to upturned dinghy: What it so brilliantly describes, in that collision where:

…there below us, something flashed
White, just like a reindeer's belly.
Mother, it was our own reflection,
Rushing up through the dark water
To the mirror-surface of the lake
As fast as we sped down to meet it…
Buck hurtling down, buck rushing upwards
Collide, horns tangling, in one instant;
A burst of foam cascading over us…

is a violent collision of conscious and unconscious forces, world and underworld, that all through the play, will be repeated while resisting integration: the Haegstad wedding feast, where Peer is attacked, is repeated in the troll underworld 'wedding' and in the scene where the Woman in Green and her hideous offspring erupt from the underworld to invade the outlaw hut where Peer and Solveig are to set up home. In Act V. the two areas, world and underworld, conscious and unconscious, are uncontrollably confused as Peer journeys through a landscape of his own disordered and disintegrating imagination.

The pattern of repetition becomes more evident if the same actors play the wedding guests, the trolls, the monkeys, and the funeral guests of Act V., and if Ingrid, the Woman in Green and Anitra are played by the same actress. Peer, in a form of mental entropy, continually finds himself asking "where have I heard/read that before" as his 'progress' through the world becomes a spiritual regression.

Repetition and regression are the conditions the spirit is doomed to if it accepts the troll condition of "to yourself be enough" instead of the human "to yourself be true." Being true to yourself is to seek for self-determination, as in the Pindaric (and Hegelian) injunction: "You shall become who you are" which is at the root of most modern liberation movements (and, for that matter, of every fitness class!). As Falk and Svanhild learned, and as the Button Molder tells the uncomprehending Peer, "to be yourself means to slay yourself": to slay "that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality" (as R.D. Laing expressed it) [4] which prevents you from becoming who you are. All dialectical thinking is shadowed by the agony of unattained identity, whether as self-determination or Marxian utopia. "Say where has Peer Gynt been…with his destiny's seal on his brow…since he sprang from God's thought" Peer finally cries out to Solveig and her answer insists he exists only as potentiality: as our possibly attainable authentic humanity only, preserved within her faith and hope and love.

In Peer Gynt, Ibsen created for modern drama the existential archetype of modern man; immensely resourceful yet without direction, unable to invest his material and intellectual world with compelling reasons for continuing. It was Ibsen's fellow Scandinavian, Søren Kierkegaard who succinctly described this modern condition:

Our age reminds one of the dissolution of the Greek city-state:
Everything goes on as usual and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond which gives it validity, no longer exists, and so the whole age is at once comic and tragic - tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on. [5]

Beneath the infectious comic energy of the play and its hero (tragic because he is perishing, comic because he goes on) is the same tragic undercurrent, like the "double soundboard" that Falk, at the conclusion of Love's Comedy, claims will be his new poetry: "A twofold note; one high for happiness, And one below, with sorrow answering."

Peer Gynt is Ibsen's last verse drama; it also, arguably, is the modern world's last major verse drama and it was Ibsen himself who pronounced that the future of modern drama did not lie with verse; a prediction he more or less single-handedly brought about by devising a compelling new form of modern drama, a form of 'poetry of the theatre', that proved irresistible. The play contains its own renunciation of the Romantic, poetically rhetorical  method, though not of its 'agenda', which will continue in the anti-rhetorical, analytical prose drama, Ibsen will inaugurate. No more impressive a leave-taking of verse drama, however,  can be imagined than this prodigal, prodigious Peer Gynt.

NOTES

1.  All quotations are from the new translation of Peer Gynt in Ibsen's Selected Plays, Selected and Edited by Brian Johnston, (New York and London, WW.Norton & Company 2004)

2.  Jean Paul Sartre, 'Existentiaiism and Human Emotion' in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (London: Rider, 1955)

3. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971) p. 165

4. R.D.Laing The Politics of Experience, (New York: Pantheon Books) p. 119

5.Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (New York: Doubleday Anchor) II. 19