Bernini's The Holy Dove/Spirit(Ånd) in St.Peter's, Rome.
I understand Michelangelo and Bernini and his school better. Those fellows had the courage to do something crazy (gjore en galskap) once in a while.. (Ibsen to Bjørnstjrne Bjørnson, Rome 1864)
I spent this winter spinning some new crazinesses (galskaper) in my brain until they assumed dramatic form, and in the last few days I completed a play in five acts. (Ibsen on The Wild Duck, to Theodor Caspari, Rome, 1884)
The Realism of The Wild Duck
The realist art of The Wild Duck dictates its scale and type of action; the characters' social class; the furniture and costumes; the stage directions for the actors' gestures and even the pitch of their voices. The demand for meticulous plausibility realism is expected to meet greatly increases the difficulty of the artistic act when the dramatic intention is as ambitious as Ibsen's. He needed to devise a dramatic method to circumvent the restrictions he imposed on his art, to make it do more things than its text seems to allow. The play's expanding circumferences of action encompass individual and family histories, social divisions, the surrounding natural world of retreating forests, lakes and marshes inhabited by the wild duck and its fellow creatures and, beyond these, perspectives of human history and culture stretching back centuries. By the multi-perspectival or contrapuntal aspect of his dramas, his realism still performs the function of his poetic dramas: of embedding universal perspectives within the particular details of his art. This, of course, is true of most major literature and especially of dramatic art. To create his poetic realism, Ibsen devised a bi-focal strategy that requires the reader or viewer to see and hear beyond the immediate events presented to an order of archetypal implications they have been devised to evoke. Even when unacknowledged, archetypal presences haunt our consciousness like the ghosts “as numerous as the grains of sand” detected by Helene Alving.
From his early critical writings Ibsen insisted on this nature of our modern consciousness with “its memories …within us fermenting quietly and uncertainly until the poet came along and put them into words: (The Heroic Ballad and Its Significance for Literature). This includes the forces from the pagan past that “continued to live in the consciousness and faith of the people and there they have continued to live until our own day.”(Ibid) The modern mind is a multi-layered palimpsest and a modern drama must find a way of including all its layers to be an adequate account of this consciousness. Looked at closely The Wild Duck brings into focus other stories than the one we are watching, from other times and places in the heritage of our collective consciousness These other stories are never mentioned because the characters onstage are unaware of them; but we subliminally respond to them because they already have created our modern identity.
In an effect reminiscent of Gestalt images or the pictures of M.C. Escher, what you look at gradually becomes a different image. Something like a Gestalt effect, I believe, is in the very title of the play, Vildanden, which to Norwegians, suggest Vildånden (wild/free spirit). I will take up this later. Ibsen, who once aspired to be a painter, was aware of the Gestalt effect. In The Lady from the Sea the artist, Lyngstrand, tells Hilde Wangel that in his future image of her, "You'll be like both yourself and [Boletta] at the same time - in one gestalt, as it's called."[1]
Optical references are sounded throughout the text of The Wild Duck; of failing eyesight; seeing and failing to see; of eyes “not always clear-sighted”; of opening someone's eyes to the truth; of perhaps seeing too much like Gregers, who converts reality into parables and symbols, and who asks Hedvig if she is sure the attic is an attic. And there is the presence of the camera, a neutral, inadequate recorder of reality. Each character in the play sees reality from a unique point of view; voiced in old Ekdal's superstitions, Hjalmar's sentimentalism, Gina's literalism, Relling's cynicism, and Gregers' mystical idealism. These competing voices surround Hedvig, whose tragedy might be as much provoked by this Babel of voices and views as by any other cause. The play's closing lines, after the senseless suicide, are a bitter disagreement between Gregers and Relling as to the import of what we have witnessed.
The loss of the Natural world permeates the characters' imaginations. The Ekdal's menagerie in its stages of adaptation from wild and injured to domesticated and unfree is replicated in the human species of the household: from the former hunter, Lieutenant Ekdal and his nine bears and forest superstitions through the next generation of plump, coddled Hjalmar incapable of free and natural existence, to the last generation - dependent, visually impaired Hedvig, recreating from the detritus in the attic an imaginative realm of freedom: “the depths of the sea”. The human and animal inhabitants' adaptation to their environment in The Wild Duck adds a 'Darwinian' aspect to the condition explored by the play.
The Wild Duck enacts the story of Gregers Werle's descent from Høydal and his intrusive mission into this environment of the insulted and injured. Long suspecting his father responsible for the fall that reduced Lieutenant Ekdal and his family to social disgrace and dependence, he decides to right the injustice. The family, however, is reconciled to its fallen condition, retreating from reality to live on Haakon Werle's largesse. The merchant controls this world, supplying even the wild duck, - the central feature of the Ekdals' imaginative world. Believing truth will set the Ekdals free, Gregers unwittingly destroys Hjalmar's belief in his own identity as husband, father and family breadwinner. To overcome the crisis that results, Gregers suggests Hedvig sacrifice her most precious possession, the wild duck, to demonstrate her love for her father. When they believe this is what she has done, Gina and Hjalmar are reconciled and the marriage is saved. But out of view in the attic, Hedvig arrived at her own mysterious decision. We know the moment of her action: Hjalmar's rhetorical question whether Hedvig would be willing to sacrifice a prospective new life for his sake: but this does not explain why her response was to kill herself. Was it a defiant suicide like that of her namesake, Hedda? Or an act of despair? Or of love? Her death is the element of the unpredictable in human affairs – an ‘uncertainty principle' that bedevils attempts at the reformation of the human spirit.
Text and Supertext
As a tragi-comedy in the realist style, this is compelling enough. But, employing Ibsen's Supertext [2] we can tell the story another way. Its plot brings to mind Galatians, IV. “But when the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law." A Son ‘descends' from ‘above' (Høydal-High dale) to ‘redeem' a family that has ‘fallen' through the power of the law and from thralldom to his Father. The Son seeks to free them through saving truth but discovers this family is in the power of a Deceiver living ‘below' with a ‘demonic' ( demonisk) companion. The Redeemer and Deceiver clashed before, up at Høydal and now resume their quarrel. Gregers urges upon the family demands it cannot meet; Dr. Relling serves the interests of Haakon Werle by reconciling the Ekdals to their fall. From this ‘archetypal' perspective, the play reveals an evocative pattern of references, phrases and images evoking the Christian story: its major action (attempted redemption) and its principle figures (God, Son, Holy Spirit (duck) Devil and fallen humanity.
The Norwegian for 'duck'` is ‘and'; for spirit ‘ånd' The two words, typographically are almost identical. (The Norwegian title of The Phenomenology of Spirit is Åndens fenomenologi). In Nynorsk, in the definite form, they are identical though pronounced differently where a shift of tone changes the word's identity. In Christian iconography the Holy Spirit is depicted in bird form, as a dove (see Bernini image, above). Ibsen's wordplay and visual punning (here brilliantly combined) is an aspect of his art (his galskaper) that receives insufficient attention. The Wild Duck is uniquely rich in echoes and direct quotations from Scripture. Gregers, who complains of having to "carry the Cross" of his identity ( når en har det kors på sig ), insists his destiny ( bestemmelse ) is to be "thirteenth at table" as at a perpetual Last Supper. When Gregers reproaches Hedvig for not sacrificing the duck he says "I can tell by looking at your it is not fulfilled ( det ikke er fuldbragt ) from the 'consummatum est' phrase of Christ on the Cross. Hjalmar employs the phrase from Galatians IV : " But soon the fullness of time will come"( Men nu kommer snart tidens fylde ). He complains of drinking a bitter drink ( den beske drik ), like Christ in Gethsemane; and, like Joseph in some morality plays, suspects he is a cuckold. Gina, not given to metaphor, nevertheless comes out with the strange expression: “that blessed wild duck; there's been more than enough crucifying over her” (den velsignede vildanden, ja. Den gjøres der da krusifikser nok for .) Old Ekdal describes the depths to which the wild duck dived as all the devil's mess found below ( alt det fandenskab som dernede finds ). In Act V. Hjalmar Ekdal, recovering from their orgiastic night out calls Relling "a fiendish tempter" ( skaendige forfører ) and accuses him and Molvik of being "two scum filled with every vice" ( to avskum, så rige på alle laster ). Relling's location below the Ekdals, his role as a deceiver and long time opponent of Gregers, his dissolute nature, all suggest aspects of the conventional devil. Albert Bermel noted the diabolic aspect of Relling who “is given to a fairly free use in his conversation of the words devil and hell, up to his (and the play's) last line. If the studio is a mountain top, the downstairs is an infernal region inhabited by the Tempter and his acolyte demon. Like figures from a morality play, the chthonian pair are Medicine and Theology, two of the diabolical arts.” [3]
Relling, in an amusing pun, calls Gregers a "quacksalver" ( kvaksalveren ) a quack savior. 'Kvak' is the Scandinavian form of 'quack' - the cry of a duck. Gregers had already declared his ambition to be a clever dog that dives down to all the devil's mess to save ducks! Ibsen's supertextual counterpoint is extensive, but it is not solemn!
Onstage, we see a humble family in the foreground and animals in the background. Where have we seen this before in paintings? Gregers urges an act of self-sacrifice. Where does this idea come from? His mission is to be "thirteenth at table" Where have we encountered this before? These subliminal images and phrases infiltrate Ibsen's realist drama. The Wild Duck is not an allegory nor is it satirizing or parodying its Christian source. Gregers is not Christ, and Relling is not the devil; but as their avatars in the modern drama they allow the Christian story to be glimpsed analogously. Close looking and meditation on what we see will suggest much of Ibsen's procedure. In a finely perceptive account of the play Robert Raphael, long ago, noted its Christian imagery:
"Hedvig and her grandfather approach their world with a devotion and a ritual akin to religious reverence, for the attic with the duck and other treasures may be considered a metaphor for the Christian paradise: it performs in their lives exactly the same function as does a traditional church for many people. Existing on the top floor of the Ekdal microcosm, the attic is the summum bonum in their lives; it provides them, just like heaven, with a world of pure value, a world of nearly perfect orientation. The Ekdals keep returning to this private religion for sustenance just as people do with any traditional illusion that is sacred to them." [4]
There are two father-son pairs in the play. One, Haakon Werle and his son Gregers has displaced the second, Lieutenant Ekdal and his son Hjalmar. Bermel, detecting a number of Greek archetypes in the play, saw in Hjalmar "a lesser Dionysos" [5] with his wavy hair, his flute and beer instead of wine. Dionysos was the son of Zeus, so is the elder Ekdal is a 'lesser Zeus'? The name Ekdal means 'oak valley.' The oak was sacred to Zeus which could explain why, if cut, “the forests will have their revenge” as Ekdal fears. The displacement and disgrace of one divine father-son pair by another brings to mind Ibsen's perennial theme since The Burial Mound ( Kjaempehöien) (1854) of Christianity's displacement of the pagan world: a theme continuing up to and exhaustively explored in Emperor and Galilean (1873) , immediately preceding the Realist Cycle.
In an earlier study [6] I claimed that in the Realist Cycle Ibsen united the parochial perspectives of The League of Youth (1869) whose key phrase was “de lokale forholde” (the local conditions) with the historical and cultural perspectives of Emperor and Galilean, whose key phrase was “det tredje rike” (the third empire). The two plays seem a trial run of the two perspectives, separately - the local and the universal - before their integration in the art of the Realist Cycle where localized time enacts a timeless drama. The very success of Ibsen's method, however, has made it possible to overlook its achievement. The texts of Ibsen's realist plays are filled with images and phrases that are keys opening onto forgotten or evaded perspectives of the past buried in our psyches. Details that do not seem particularly significant can, when looked at closely, activate something like epiphanies. Recognizing this aspect of Ibsen's art is a requirement of adequate interpretation.
HEGELIAN SOURCES IN IBSEN'S TEXT
The world of The Wild Duck. is one of profound dualism, the condition explored by the Phenomenology as ‘Spirit in Self-estrangement'. In both the Werle and Ekdal settings the stage is divided between a foreground place of work and a background area of recreation Act I is set in Werle's spacious and elegant home; the following acts in the impoverished Ekdal studio. The text's imagery is structured from polar opposites: a mountain terrain and the depths of the sea; the free natural world and the confined Ekdal studio; life before and after the Fall; alienated reality versus the refuge of fantasy; the bringer of truth versus the fashioner of ‘life-lies'- and so on. The two major characters, the sons Gregers Werle and Hjalmar Ekdal, represent a dialogue of Body and Soul- the medieval dualism of Spirit (Gregers) and Flesh (Hjalmar). Hjalmar is prodded by Gregers into reluctant parody of the latter's messianic program, repeating Gregers' phrases and struggling futilely to forego the demands of the flesh for the spiritual claim of the ideal. This Body/Spirit dualism is repeated in another medieval pair: theology student Molvik (Spirit) and doctor Relling (Body). For the fathers, there is the dual incongruity of character and setting between old Ekdal, shabbily dressed, intruding into the opulent Werle world and the richly appareled Werle's startling intrusion into the impoverished Ekdal home. The opulence of the Werle setting and the chamberlains dancing attendance around Werle and his mistress mirrors the situation in the impoverished Ekdal home gathered round Hjalmar in the rest of the play. The Werle domain's sumptuous feasting contrasts with the frugal feast in the Ekdal home. The insistent dualism recreates in the play the major feature of Hegel's analysis of spirit in self-estrangement.
The frequent emphasis on food and drink and the dramatically central, humble social gathering at the meal in Act III is unique in the Cycle. It sets up a tug-of-war between humanity's recalcitrant flesh and the intellectual agenda of the Cycle that is resumed in the next play, Rosmersholm. The Christian tradition notably emphasizes meals and its most sacred rite is the bread and wine of the Eucharist. The New Testament particularly features gatherings at meals: the feast at Cana, the feeding of the multitude; the paternoster asks for "our daily bread". “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” [7] The most famous meal is the Last Supper to which Gregers alludes, at being “the thirteenth at table”. [8]
The counterpoint between the text and supertext of The Wild Duck reinforces and enriches both. The archetypal is incarnated as a substantial contemporary world that, in turn, is expanded into archetypal significance. Without memory of its past the contemporary world would not be fully human. The heritage of culture and history shapes our everyday lives and our global conflicts whether we are always conscious of this or not. An art adequate to our modern condition would need to locate these potent presences. In The Ibsen Cycle (1975) I claimed Ibsen's twelve plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken formed a Cycle whose sequence exactly paralleled the dialectical sequence of cultural/historical stages of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit (Åndens fenomenologi) a stage-by-stage ‘psycho-analysis' of our modern identity revealing the process of how we became what we are.
Spirit's goal of self-knowledge requires us to relive the key episodes of our cultural evolution submerged within our modern identities. The first four plays of Ibsen's Realist Cycle from Pillars of Society to An Enemy of the People followed, in strict sequence, the parallel Hellenic sequence in the Phenomenology . [9] The Wild Duck takes up the next stage of Hegel's text that inaugurates a new stage of the dialectic, the Christian sequence. The parallel sequences require us to accept either that Ibsen is adapting Hegel's text or to accept the operation of miraculous coincidence. The miracle continues with Rosmersholm that follows as the next stage of Hegel's sequence; and with The Lady from the Sea that follows that stage, continuing through the Cycle and the Phenomenology all the way to When We Dead Awaken [10]
The situation of the Ekdals in the play can be termed “after the Fall”. The remarkable preponderance of Christian imagery in The Wild Duck sets it apart from the other plays of the Cycle. The play recreates the condition of culture in which, in Hegel's account, humans in retreat from alienated reality inhabit a dualistic world at every level. Consciousness compensates for its loss of freedom by constructing a pure jenseits or other realm into which it retreats from 'fallen' and corrupted reality. This other world becomes filled with symbols, marvels, miracles, and parables. Historically, this is the medieval world of Christian faith: but, like all the major stages of the Phenomenology, it survives within modern consciousness and culture. For this reason, Ibsen can recreate its condition as a deeply searching drama of his contemporary world.
At the center of the Christian imagination is the prayer to the Father taught by Jesus.
Fader Vår, Our Father
Du som er i himmelen, Which art in heaven
Helliget vorde ditt navn, Hallowed be thy name
Komme ditt rike, Thy kingdom come
Skje din vilje som i himmelen, så og på jorden. Thy will be done in heaven as on earth
Gi oss i dag vårt daglige brød, Give us this day our daily bread
Forlat oss vår skyld, så som også Forgive us our guilt (trespasses)
vi forlater våre skyldnere) As we forgive the guilt of others to us
Led oss ikke inn i fristelse Lead us not into temptation
Men fri oss fra det onde. But free us from evil.
For riket er ditt, For the kingdom is thine
Makten og æren i evighet, The power and glory for ever
The italicised section of this prayer at least recalls Hjalmar Ekdal's situation: notoriously craving each day his daily bread, unable to forgive those (Gina, Haakon Werle) who trespass against him, led into temptation by Relling (the 'hideous tempter" - skaendige forfører ) and disastrously delivered from evil by Gregers. This suggestion might seem ‘outrageous' to many, but before indignantly rejecting it, we should entertain the idea that the ‘galskap' (wildness/craziness) Ibsen confessed he was employing in this play probably included much that might dismay us. The theme of this essay is that Ibsen's Modernist art boldly and often irreverently encompasses many areas of cultural reference as it traces the stages of how we became what we are. This, in fact, would be required from an adequate Modernist project.
The cultural stage in the Phenomenology that, in The Ibsen Cycle, I claimed Ibsen was drawing upon in The Wild Duck, describes the formation of our cultural consciousness from the arrival of Christianity through the medieval world and up to pre-Enlightenment Europe under the ‘Sun King', Louis XIV and his court. This historical dialectic of the (Western) spirit is the most extensive and expansive sequence in the Phenomenology and accounts for a corresponding richness of texture in The Wild Duck. In The Ibsen Cycle I suggested many of the cultural references intricately woven into the text and imagery of the play. Along with so much else, I claimed, were parallels between Haakon Werle's domain and that of the Sun King, Louis XIV. I added, "Grosserer Werle is surrounded by 'court chamberlains' (kammerherrer ) who need, Mrs. Sørby reminds them, "the sunshine of the court." 11]
If Haakon Werle is a modern avatar of the Sun King, his mistress Mrs. Sørby fulfills the role of the Sun King's mistress, who firmly set the rules of etiquette for Louis' court. Bermel noted Mrs. Sorby's commanding role at the party: "she calls for the coffee, punch, and liqueurs; she dictates which room they shall be served in; she plays the piano; she leads the mock satyrs in the game of blindman's buff." [12] Ibsen inserts a scene in which the chamberlains futilely protest her rule.
THIN-HAIRED GENTLEMAN: When did you introduce these severe restrictions into our cigar regulations, Mrs. Sørby?
MRS. SØRBY: After the previous dinner party, Chamberlain; when certain persons present allowed themselves to overstep the limit.
THIN-HAIRED MAN: And it isn't permitted to go just a tiny bit over the limit? Not even the slightest little step?
MRS. SØRBY: Not under any circumstances... [13]
A mistress imposing restrictions, regulations, and limits actually more plausibly fits the Sun King's court than a Norwegian merchant's household. The episode reveals Ibsen's concern to recreate in the reduced provincial setting some feature of its more exalted archetype. This is Ibsen's procedure throughout the Cycle and was to be the procedure of Ibsen's lifelong admirer, James Joyce. A notable feature of Werle's feast, along with the chamberlains who need the sunshine of the court is Tokay wine, emphasized by Hjalmar's unfortunate display of ignorance of the 'noble wine' (aedel vin ) before Werle and the chamberlains. It is further elaborated in his ‘retouching' of the incident back in his family circle.
Let us consider the following cluster of details:
1. The court chamberlains needing the sunshine of the court;
2. Werle's mistress setting rules for the court chamberlains.
3. The discussion of the 'noble' Tokay wine.
Helge Salemonsen, a fellow detective of Ibsen's Hegelian sources, recently sent me the following description of Tokay wine in a weekly wine review: Vinum Regum Rex Vinorum
The Tokay is "The king of wines, and the wine of kings", Louis XIV declared when offering a glass of golden-gold wine from Tokay to his mistress Madame de Pompadour *. These words of the sun-king are still used as a marketing slogan on Tokay bottle labels."
(*This most likely would have been Mme de Maintenon. Mme. de Pompadour was mistress of Louis XV.)
Hegel treated at length the court of the Sun King in the section of the Phenomenology that I claim The Wild Duck is drawing upon. As far as I know, Hegel does not mention this incident of the wine; neverthelss it turns up in Ibsen's play at precisely the right place in the Cycle's sequence recreating in the modern provincial setting a feature that occurred in Louis' court. Ibsen must have read about this incident and decided to include it in his play in order to flesh out Hegel's more abstract dialectic – something he does throughout the Cycle. Ibsen did not just recommend but employed an extensive knowledge of history to judge his own age and his contemporaries and their motives in a far from incomplete and superficial manner.
Ideally, a theater audience watching The Wild Duck would respond at least subliminally to the archetypal perspectives within the modern realism. This procedure is not new in art. Literature and art ever since Homer (and probably before) insisted on keeping perspectives of the past within narratives of the present. Writers and painters presented Biblical, classical and mythological characters in the settings and costumes of their own day. In medieval drama ancient Biblical events take place in e.g. medieval York or Wakefield. In painting, the Annunciation occurs in a renaissance Italian or Flemish interior. Modernists like Ibsen, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot maintain this tradition in new terms. One critic, Ronald Peacock, wrote of Eliot and Joyce:
Another aspect of intellectual life in this century showed itself unfavorable to dramatic art: the sense of history, the voracious extension of all historical knowledge regarding human civilization…Eliot and Joyce are the two authors who have shown themselves most sensitive to these, most deliberately conscious of their importance and most concerned that imaginative writing should adjust itself to them. Their writing is saturated with the historical and literary culture of Europe, it is allusive in the extreme, it postulates a similar culture in the reader. There is no drama that shows a similar reaction. [14]
By a singular injustice Ibsen, who most fulfills these requirements, is cited by Peacock as an example of a dramatist failing to respond to “the historical and literary culture of Europe”. Ibsen's dramatic art, we now can see, is "saturated" with historical and cultural reference, is "allusive in the extreme, it postulates a similar culture in the reader." The very success of Ibsen's method of tracing the evolution of "civilization, of literature and of art…" within modern consciousness has prevented it from being recognized even by those who claim to interpet his art.
It will be useful, at his point, to offer an account of the first two acts of the play; showing how its archetypal content can counterpoint a subtle and plausible depiction of the modern condition. I am sure I detect only a fraction of its contrapuntal complexity.
THE FIRST TWO ACTS OF THE WILD DUCK
The act opens with two servants, Pettersen and a hired waiter, Jensen discussing the history of Werle and his son Gregers feasting in the rear room. Their theme is the arrival of the son from on high (Høydal) whose existence was unknown to Jensen: “I never knew [Werle] had a son” and Pettersen replies that the son never appeared in town all the time he served in the house. The reader probably by now is prepared for the suggestion that, in this play in which the Christian era is inaugurated, a conversation about the unexpected arrival of a Son (who later will set out to right the conditions created by his Father) carries archetypal resonance.
The servants' dialogue is interrupted by old Ekdal, a displaced father whose marginal status in both the Werle and Ekdal households is emphasized throughout the play. With his superstitions drawn from Nature and his former military and hunter status, the old lieutenant is, in Ibsen's iconography, a pagan presence. If he reflects a divine father, like Zeus, it is one who is in disgrace and no longer recognized under the new Christian dispensation. Nor is his son, Hjalmar, who is painfully out of place in the exalted company and whose condition we will learn is created and controlled by Werle. “My father has been a kind of Providence ( forsynet ) to you" Gregers tells the unsuspecting Hjalmar.
Ekdal's emergence leads to an account of his former glory and his present destitution. Readers might recollect Emperor and Galilean which opens on themes and images of a pagan world overthrown and despised by a triumphant but alienated Christianity. Ekdal's second appearance at the feast causes shock and dismay to Werle and his guests, especially to Hjalmar and Gregers and triggers the quarrel between the Werle father and son, inciting the son's messianic resolve to free the fallen Ekdal family from his father's control. Werle, he decides, trapped the Ekdals into accepting their guilt and disgrace, evidenced by Hjalmar's shamefaced denial of his father. Gregers' judgment on his own father goes far beyond domestic terms: “When I look back upon your whole career it's as if I were looking over a battlefield with shattered human lives strewn all across it.” [15]
Act II moves to the humble scene of Hedvig and her mother, Gina. The dialogue, here, is subdued, intimate, in contrast to the Act I and its dialogue of festivity and violent confrontation. The subtle rapport between the two female characters continues when old Ekdal enters. A quiet comedic rhythm emerges as Ekdal conceals the fact he is about to go to his room and drink the brandy donated by Mrs. Sørby, part of the largesse from the higher world. The comedy deepens when Hjalmar returns home. At the grand party the son had been ashamed of his father, pretending not to see him; while the father had been ashamed of intruding into and ruining his son's moment of glory. Their mutual guilt and embarrassment creates an awkward tension that needs to be overcome and so the old man and son pretend they had been unaware of each other's presence and, under this pretence, delicately restore their mutual affection. Tactful concealment and evasion of awkward reality characterizes this family's subtle life style in contrast to the irreconcilable conflicts of Werle and his son.
Hjalmar, humiliated by his ignorance at Werle's party, now recasts himself as the occasion's shining light, using the chamberlains' cruel comments against him as his remarks against them. He had been hurt by the episode and needs to 'retouch' it more congenially. The “sunshine of the court" and Tokay wine details are flatteringly transformed. The rest of the family colludes in fortifying his self-esteem until Hjalmar presents his hungry daughter with the menu instead of the meal. His shame and humiliation increase: he blusters embarrassedly and immediately starts talking about the attic and the work that needs to be done, there. The attic is thus established as the place of retreat from awkward reality for these characters. The agitated action subsides as Hedvig brings in beer and a flute for her father and the family gathers in a tableau of harmony as Hjalmar plays a sentimental tune. The scene takes place at night, in soft lamplight.
We have witnessed the everyday, unchanging life of this family: its kindness, sentimentality, tactful strategies of evasion and play-acting where the 'breadwinner' of the family is a child coddled by his wife and daughter. This is how the family has lived all its unheroic life. It has gone through a small crisis and found the means to recover its harmony. It is a world reconciled to its fallen condition, living by the troll injunction adopted by Peer Gynt: "To yourself be enough!” This reconciliation to alienated reality is shattered when a knock on the door brings the play's Brand-like truth-teller, Gregers Werle.
We are about to witness the destruction of a way of life. Whether that is a bad or a good thing depends on which of the play's perspectives we adopt. Is the Ekdal way of life a troll condition preventing the urge to human freedom or is the play's message, “Humankind/Cannot bear very much reality?" Is Gregers a Savior, Destroyer or both? His speeches are loaded with menace and with mystery. To adopt any single perspective, as many commentators do, generally favoring Relling, is to settle for a smaller play than Ibsen created.
The dialogue now shifts to such somber themes as Hedvig's approaching blindness, which Hjalmar's account sentimentally retouches: "Happy and carefree, singing like a little bird, she's fluttering into life's eternal night. (Overcome) Oh, it's all so crushingly hard on me, Gregers!” Much of the comedy of the play will consist of Gregers futile attempts to raise the inert Hjalmar out of his comfortable, self-pitying condition to embark on a rigorous regimen of truth and freedom.
Old Lt. Ekdal, by now drunk, comes in wearing his old officer's cap, at first frightened by the name of ‘Werle' but then lured into remembering a lost world of Nature; of mountains, forests, bears and the superstition that the depleted forests will take their revenge. The dialogue prepares our imaginations to receive with maximum impact the image of the attic and its strange inhabitants; modulating to a richly evocative imagery where a metaphoric world emerges through the language of reported facts. Infiltrated into the impoverished studio is disclosed a miniature vision of a free, expansive but irretrievable realm of Nature.
The central mystery of the attic now is revealed. The characters onstage gather at the entrance of the attic and peer into it like witnesses to a wonder. The dialogue, its moods evolving and deepening, evoking areas of the audience's imagination, has prepared the right moment for a stunning visual effect for the 'revelation'. The stage has opened onto a 'green world' of trees, animals, birds, and the mysterious wild duck, all seen in moonlight and shadow.
We do not immediately see the mysterious wild duck: Ibsen leads us through the less exotic creatures, rabbits, hens, pigeons, to the heart of the mystery: the sight of the duck itself. After we, and Gregers, have contemplated the moonlit scene the attic doors are closed and the room returns to its impoverishment. Like auditors to a sacred legend after a vision, we now can be told the strange history of the duck; how it was shot by Gregers' father, wounded, diving to the devol's mess at the depths of the lake to die, then dragged up to life (saved) by a very clever dog. From this, Gregers will construct a symbolic world that provides him with the imagery for his messianic ‘mission'. As Gina exclaims, “that blessed wild duck; there's been more than enough crucifying over her” (den velsignede vildanden, ja. Den gjøres der da krusifikser nok for ).
The awed approach to the revelation has the atmosphere of religious ceremony. The attendant legend brings into consciousness a lost landscape of the mind, buried but now emerging. So the play proceeds, its varied and subtle rhythms carrying a rich cargo of metaphor and allusion to the final moments of the last act. Maria Rilke, watching a performance of The Wild Duck in 1906 wrote to Clara Rilke that “all its splendour came from the inside and almost to the surface.” Ibsen, he added, was "misunderstood in the midst of fame. Someone quite different from what one hears.” In the play he detected "something great, deep, essential. Last Judgement." [16]
The criterion for a good interpretation of a work of art is that it brings the greatest number of its details into aesthetic unity. The interpreter should approach a play as a conductor approaches a musical score: to find out its major themes, structure, polyphony, tonalities and rhythms. We should respond to what the play does not what it means - how it signifies; how many levels of our consciousness it assembles and activates. We should experience its adequacy as a meditation on the human condition.
This account of the method of "the old masterbilker" (as Joyce called Ibsen) will incur the objection that, even if we accept that Ibsen intended all these dimensions to his art, how could he expect them to be seen by the average playgoer? To this question, often asked by anguished students, one replies that a major artist is primarily concerned with the integrity and adequacy of his or her art which must take precedence over the average student's or playgoer's mental comfort. Most will concede that, even if much of Ibsen's intention might elude us, he provides sufficient aesthetic and human interest to keep audiences engaged.
The plays are capable of an exciting life as theatrical performance and a rich afterlife of more scholarly contemplation. Ibsen invariably addresses the ‘reader' who, with time to reflect on the complexities of the art, will find subsequent viewing a richer experience. A fellow Modernist playwright, T.S. Eliot, described his procedure of smuggling his larger text into a more audience-amenable one. He wrote to Ezra Pound: “IF you can keep the bloody audience's attention engaged, then you can perform any monkey tricks you like when they aren't lookin, and its what you do behind the audience's back so to speak that makes yr play IMMORTAL for a while.” [17]
To the question, "why cram your play with cultural references few people will detect?" the answer, therefore, is "for the sake of the art form itself." Ibsen's art, like James Joyce's similar procedure, was a Modernist breakthrough. Audiences are free to learn and appreciate its necessary complexity even when many of its dimensions are not immediately perceived. An extensive knowledge of history, however, is indispensable to an Ibsen interpreter, for without it we are incapable of judging his plays except in the most incomplete and superficial manner.
Translation as elimination of Supertext
A claim for Ibsen’s contrapuntal art will puzzle readers of most English translations of the plays where unsettling imagery usually is eliminated. Three examples of this process can serve as demonstration. They come from versions of The Wild Duck: one taken from the Oxford Ibsen translation by James Walter McFarlane (1960) and two more recent versions - one American and one British - by Robert Brustein (1997) and by David Eldridge (2005). McFarlane’s text is a translation; Brustein’s and Eldridge’s are versions or adaptations. Each conveys some one instance or other of Ibsen’s imagery but then fails to connect the single instance as part of a carefully constructed pattern which, with the visual imagery, continually infiltrates perspectives from Christian myth into the realistic scene. The result lf these omissions is that the play's Supertext - for which the play itself was brought into being - disappears as a contrapuntal feature of Ibsen's art.
Gregers: Father's been a kind of Providence for you. (Far har nok naesten vaeret som et slagsforsyn for dig, han)
McFarlane: My father seems almost to have acted the part of Providence for you.
Eldridge: My father does seem to have brought you some luck
Brustein: My father seems to have proven himself a real provider for you.
Gregers "when one must carry the Cross of being called Gregers" (når en har det kors på sig, at hede Gregers)
McFarlane But when you are burdened with a name like ‘Gregers”…
Brustein: Once you’re doomed to live with the name Gregers Werle.
Eldridge: The name Gregers Werle is a cross I have to bear.
Gregers: “I was expecting for certain that when I came through that door I’d be greeted with a transfiguring light shining from both husband and wife…” (...så skulde der slå mig imøde et forklarelsens lys bade fra mand og fra husfru).
McFarlane: …I should be greeted by the light of radiant understanding on the faces of both husband and wife alike
Brustein: I expected..to see a husband and wife transfigured and radiant.
Eldridge: “I thought when I came through the door then I’d feel enlightened…”
Gregers: "I can tell by looking at your it is not fulfilled (det ikke er fuldbragt)
McFarlane: I can see from your face nothing’s been done.
Brustein: You haven’t done it yet..
Eldridge: it’s not been done…
Hjalmar: “But soon the fullness of time will come” (Men nu kommer snart tidens fylde).
McFarlane: But soon we shall know what time in its fullness will bring, I should think.
Brustein: The day will come when…
Eldrige: “But things will change soon.”
Gina “that blessed wild duck; there's been enough crucifying over her. (den velsignede vildanden, ja. Den gjøres der da krusifikser nok for.)
McFarlane: That blessed wild duck! All the carrying-on there is about that bird.
Eldridge: That duck, you make such a fuss of it.
Brustein: That blessed wild duck! What a fuss you make over her.
Hjalmar (of Relling) “fiendish tempter" (skaendige forfører)
McFarlane: A shameless rake.
Brustein: You’re a bastard…you shameless seducer.
Eldridge …you bloody scoundrel
Ekdal: “all the devil's mess found below” (alt det fandenskab som dernede finds)
McFarlane: …all the other mess you find down there.
Brustein all the garbage down there
Eldridge some seaweed and whatever else they can find…
Relling: Oh, the devil believe it... (Å fan’ tro det) (Untranslatable, but the diabolic reference should be kept.)
McFarlane: The devil it is.
Brustein Oh, fuck you
Eldrige: Damn you
Relling; Quack Savior (qvaksalver)
McFarlane: This quack here.
Brustein: This quack
Eldridge: (omitted).
These examples convey the literal meaning or emotion of the lines; what they omit is the counterpoint woven into them by the extra-literal, metaphoric dimension Ibsen is sustaining. They show the translators anxious to bring Ibsen closer to our world rather than bringing us closer to Ibsen’s. Given the nature of theater and audiences, this is understandable. One reason for this indifference to the actual text lies in the translators' ideas of Realism. If confronted with verse instead of prose, they probably would try harder for accuracy. (Ibsen, incidentally, called his plays 'poems'). Instead, they see Ibsen's dialogue as spoken by real people emotionally reacting to real situations and they want to transmit these imagined 'real' emotions to audiences. Often they will rewrite the lines to make the imagined emotion more persuasive. As long as they come up with an expression suitable to the emotion, the actual verbal form it takes seems unimportant. They are unable to see that Ibsen, like Shakespeare, is an artist who carefully creates his patterns of interlocking imagery - an imagery unique to each play.
The versions seriously mislead by wiping away from the texts their metaphorical dimensions that are at least as important to the plays as the realistic story. Much of the interpretation of Ibsen in the English speaking world is derived from such versions: which is as if interpreters of Shakespeare based their judgments on 'Simplified Shakespeare' texts. Many who profess to be Ibsen interpreters do not see the plays as intricate works of art requiring conscientious attention to their structure and texture.
It is true that many in a theater audience, even when confronted by the original text of e.g. T. S. Eliot's The Family Re-union will reconstruct it in their imaginations in terms simpler than the poet intended. A simplifying 'version' or adaptation, however, would not be delivering the difficult play at all. Its textual difficulties, similar to those in an Ibsen play, are essential to the conscientious intention and labor of the poet. 'Accessibility' should not entail a wholesale dumbing down in the cause of audience appeal. The distinction and difficulty of a work, the standard it adheres to, even its strangeness, is its value for us. In simplified versions of his texts, it is the audience, too, that is being simplified.
Ibsen ‘s strategy behind his ‘realistic’ method requires the reader or viewer to see alternative layers, or perspectives, of archetypal presences from the past behind the modern realistic events presented. From his very earliest critical writings Ibsen insisted on this nature of modern consciousness: that it was a continuum between the present and our total cultural past. This past was still alive, with “its memories …within us fermenting quietly and uncertainly until the poet came along and put them into words.” (Ibsen; ‘The Heroic Ballad and Its Significance for Literature’). This, Ibsen insisted, includes forces from the pagan past that “continued to live in the consciousness and faith of the people and there they have continued to live until our own day.” He never relinquished this vision and devised a revolutionary dramatic method for realizing it in the modern realist plays.
There are many textual and visual evocations within the recollective dialectic of the The Wild Duck: from Cervantes, Shakespeare, perhaps Moliere and from the visual arts, suggesting in Ibsen, "a thorough study of the history of civilization, of literature and of art…[and] an extensive knowledge of history." All Ibsen’s plays are filled with such reverberations and cry out for locating their innumerable sources. Being baffled by a play is a better response than settling for a temporarily coherent account that violates a work of art's complex adequacy. As with listening to a great symphony, you are aware, watching or reading an Ibsen play, of more elements than you immediately can take in. This is why all major art rewards continual revisiting. I believe Ibsen found in The Phenomenology of Spirit a way of organizing and liberating his imaginative world, of expanding the perspectives of his art. The intention behind the Cycle is the liberation of our imaginations, getting us to see adequately, or “think greatly” - not a 'truth' or 'message' to be conveyed, but through experiencing the art form he is realizing in all its possible dimensions. Reading and seeing his plays creatively is to be liberated into his imaginative project, finding surprises, new insights at every turn. The good news is that we do not yet ‘know’ Ibsen; that there is a lifetime of discovery ahead of us!
[1] Ibsen Volume II: Four Plays , translated by Brian Johnston and Rick Davis, (Lyme, N.H. A Smith and Kraus Book, 1998) p.68
[2] By 'Supertext' I mean a visual and verbal vocabulary, imagery and iconography by which a cultural heritage is shaped, promulgated and sustained; a public domain of traditions and archetypes drawn upon, often unconsciously, by thinkers and artists.
[3] Albert Bermel “Virgin Sacrifice in The Wild Duck' Comic Agony: Mixed Impressions in the Modern Theatre , Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996 p. 16
[4] Robert Raphael Illusion and the Self in Ibsen's The Wild Duck': Ibsen, A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed.Rolf Fjelde, (New York: Prentice Hall 1965) p. 121
[5] Albert Bermel pp.16-17)
[6] To The Third Empire: Ibsen's Early Drama, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press1980) 209
[7] Luke 14:14
[8] Ibsen; Selected Plays, p.222
[9] ‘The Structure of the Cycle', The Ibsen Cycle, 98-186. For the first four plays, cf. pp.101-122
[10] Ibid. pp. 39 -40
[11] The Ibsen Cycle , p.135
[12] Albert Bermel, p.22)
[13] Brian Johnston, Ibsen's Selected Plays : (New York: W.W. Norton 2004) p. 215
[14] Ronald Peacock, The Poet in the Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960) p.12
[15] Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Letters 1902-1926 Translated from the German by R.F.C. Hull, (London: Quartet Books, 1988). 95
[16] Lyndall Gordon, T.S. Eliot ; An Imperfect Life, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999) 289
A Darwinian dimension?
I. Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) was translated and widely discussed in Scandinavia soon after its appearance . There is good evidence Ibsen accepted Darwin's thesis early on (Peer Gynt recognizes his kinship with the apes who attack him). Biological evolution, after all, is analogous to Hegelian spiritual evolution. Darwin's demonstration how species-identity evolves from interaction with and adaptation to its environment might have influenced Ibsen's realism. In the Realist Cycle, a complex interdependence of the characters of the plays with their environments determines the actions to a remarkable degree. The result is that each play in the Cycle is a distinct world brought into being with its own themes, cast of characters, action , ambience, vocabulary and imagery that makes it distinct from any other play in the Cycle. One cannnot imagine the characters of any one play in the Cycle inhabiting the world of any other. (Hilde Wangel's journey from The Lady from the Sea to The Master Builder is the significant exception proving the rule.) Each play's dialectic deconstructs forever the conditions that brought its world, characters and supertextual perspectives into being.
In the Realist Cycle each play defines the cultural environment from which individuals derived their identities and within which they may experience ‘alienation'. Certain protagonists suffer, rebel and attempt freer, more adequate and authentic terms of action than the environment's constraints permit. The emphatic interaction between scene and character contributes to the creative tension of Ibsen's poetic realism. The scene too, undergoes transformation and evolves with the evolution of the main characters. A classic case is A Doll House whose scenes in the three acts evolve successively from (i) an ideal then (ii) a threatened and finally (iii) a repressive environment paralleling the evolution of Nora's identity. The stage sets are composed to await their moments of ‘epiphany' when they open up unsuspected and often subversive content. The terms that sustain the realism also sustain a symbolic drama: the symbol being the realistic detail seen from an alternative perspective.
II.
“Realism in [the] Hegelian sense means more than simple representation. It means an art which penetrates through the appearances of social life to grasp their inner dynamics amd dialectical interrelations. ...true knowledge is knowledge of the underlying mechanism of things. The more a work of art succeeds in laying bare the hidden forces of history, the finer it will be. There is a sense in which this kind of art is more real than reality itself, since by bringing out its inner structure it reveals what is most essential about it. Reality, being a messy, imperfect sort of affair, quite often fails to live up to our expectations of it.” (Terry Eagleton, 'Pork Chops and Pineapples': London Review of Books; Vol. 25. No. 20, 17-20)
.
0 comments