The Realism of The Wild Duck
by Brian Johnston

     Neither the Elizabethan poet or playgoer would conceive of the mise en scène as determining histrionic character and action.  On Shakespeare’s indeterminate stage space, Greeks, Romans, Italians, Danes, English men and women could act and speak the same anachronistic stage rhetoric.   The tolerant space permitted extremes of murder and mayhem and the most violently rhetorical responses to such horrors.  In Ibsen’s Realist method, by contrast, the mise en scène determines the environment not only of the stage set but of the implied world of the play.  These dictate the conditions of character and action. In The Wild Duck, the expanding circle  of action encompasses the family histories; the protagonists' social and class histories; the surrounding natural world of retreating forests, lakes and marshes inhabited by the wild duck and its fellow creatures; and the metaphoric dimensions of the scene and action these imply. The relation between the inabitants of the play, human and animal, and their environments, might be termed 'Darwinian'.

     Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) had major impact upon later nineteenth century thought and was translated and widely discussed in Scandinavia soon after its appearance.   Its demonstration of how species-identity evolves from interaction with and adaptation to the environment could have influenced Ibsen’s realism.   There is good evidence that he accepted Darwin’s thesis immediately it was translated and published in Scandinavia in 1859.  Biological evolution, after all, is analagous to Hegelian cultural evolution.  The species of creatures in the Ekdal’s famous loft, in their various stages of adaptation from wild to tame are replicated in the human condition in the household: from old Lt. Ekdal and his forests, nine bears and superstitions through the next generation of plump Hjalmar incapable of any form of free and natural existence, to the last member of the family; dependent, visually impaired Hedvig. 

     The Ibsen realist stage set defines the cultural environment from which individuals derived their identities, within which they experience repression and ‘alienation’; causing certain protagonists to suffer, rebel and attempt to assert freer, more liberating, more adequate and authentic terms of action than the environment permits.  Such aliienated individuals resemble the mutants that may or may not advance the species.  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. The 'classic' case is the scene of A Doll House which evolves in each of its three acts from ideal to threatened to repressive environments paralelling.the evolution of Nora's identity.

Ibsen’s realistic stage sets, therefore, are not ‘backgrounds’ to the action.  Sets, lighting, props, sounds, are composed to await their moment of ‘epiphany’, when the limiting and even repressive milieu suddenly displays submerged and subversive content; when the text opens up dimensions of reality beyond the restrictive mise en scène.  The terms that sustain the realism also sustain a wide-ranging Supertext of poetic drama: the symbol being the material object seen from another perspective.   Such a’ bifocal’ vision means the realism can be acted and staged as a convincing account of everyday life while simultaneously embodying an archetypal drama. Ibsen's Realist stage possesses a multidimensionality missing from strictly naturalistic drama at one extreme, and purely symbolist drama at the other.

     From a realistic perspective, The Wild Duck enacts the domestic tragedy of Gregers Werle’s descent from Høydal and the consequences of his intrusion into the escapist environment of the Ekdal family which, he decides, is suffering as a result of his father's actions.  He encounters an old opponent, Dr. Relling, who has spun around the Ekdal family a web of 'life-lies' that helps them adjust to the alienated reality contrived for them by Haakon Werle  Believing that 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 to Hedvig that she sacrifice her most precious possession, the wild duck, to show her love for her father.  It is important to note that this stratagem would have succeeded.  When they believe this is what she has done, Gina and Hjalmar are reconciled and the marriage seems to be saved.  But, out of view, back in the attic, Hedvig arrived at her own mysterious decision.  Was it a defiant suicide, like that of her namesake, Hedda?  Or an accident?  Or an act of despair?  Ibsen does not tell us.  This is the element of the unpredictable in human affairs – an ‘uncertainty principle’ – that bedevils all attempts at the reformation of the human spirit.

     As a domestic tragedy this is affecting enough.  But we can tell the story another way.   The story seems a gloss on 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’ 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 who lives ‘below’ with a 'demonic' companion.  The Redeemer and the Deceiver have clashed before, up at Høydal (High dale).   They now resume their quarrel, leading to the human tragedy. This Deceiver in many ways serves the interests of Merchant Werle; by keeping the Ekdals reconciled to their 'fall' he also keeps them submissive, adapting to alienated reality. From this ‘archetypal’ perspective, the play reveals a richly evocative pattern of supertextual references, phrases and images. It is a sardonic, domestic recreation of the Christian story: its major action (Redemption) and its principle figures (God, Satan, Son, Holy Spirit (duck)* and Fallen Humanity. 

[*The Norwegian for 'duck'` is ‘and’; for spirit it is ‘ånd’ (the two words, typographically are almost identical! Ibsen's 'wordplay' is an aspect of his art that recceives insufficient attention]       

THE ARCHETYPAL AND REALISTIC ACTIONS

     By re-activating the Christian 'supertext' in The Wild Duck Ibsen brings the huge dimensions of this area of the past into his realistic scene.  In all Ibsen's work there is an elaborate, shifting textual interplay between realistic and metaphorical dimensions. Gregers is not Christ, and Relling is not the devil; but the huge Christian story is evoked and glimpsed, ironically, through the smaller human actions.   Hegel's The Phenomenolgy of Mind is an account, stage by stage, of the evolution of the human mind/spirit; how we become what we are.  The modern spirit or mind relives the key episodes of its own human/cultural evolution. Just as our bodies contain stages of our biological evolution, so our minds contain the stages of our cultural evolution. To know ourselves, to know who we are and how we got to be what we are, we need to call up the key stages of this evolution lying within our modern identities. They are our unconscious inheritance, perhaps, forming  areas of our psyches that, in Ibsen's own words in his essay on on the use of myth in modern literature, need to be "dragged up from their sea-depths."  In The Ibsen Cycle  I claim that in the 12 plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken Ibsen adapts Hegel's account of our mental journey.  The Wild Duck is one of the journey's stages.

     Ideally, a theater audience watching The Wild Duck would subliminally respond to the archetypal perspectives within the realism. This procedure is not new in art.  Literature and art ever since the Greeks (and probably before) always insisted on keeping the perspectives of the past within narratives of the present. Writers like Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, etc., incorporated classical models in their contemporary work.  Painters presented Biblical, classical and mythological characters in the settings and costumes of their own day. This has a double benefit: the everyday world finds a place for archetypal presences that take on a local habitation (the Annunciation might occur in a 17th. century Dutch or Italian household) and the archetypal forces, in turn, animate and transfigure our modern world.   Modernists like Ibsen, James Joyce or T.S. Eliot maintain this tradition in new terms, where their works are intersected by multiple temporal dimensions; resembling the spatial multi-dimensionality of e.g.Cubist painting   Ibsen's realism is one of the earliest Modernist projects, in which archetypal and historical presences inform multiple temporal perspectives as in Eliot's plays.  

     One should approach an Ibsen play much like a conductor approaches a symphony: to find out its major themes, its structure, its 'music' (its polyphony, tonalities, rhythms, accelerations, crescendos, diminuendos, climaxes) and, through rehearsal, make it a coherent and unified aestheitc experienced for the audience to experience.  What the play does rather than what it means is what we should respond to: how many levels of our consciousness it assembles and activates .  We should seek, not the 'truth' but the adequacy of the play.  To emerge from the play with a firm idea of the its intention might be to settle for a smaller, less adequate experience than Ibsen devised for us.  An interpretation that finds it necessary to evade many details of the play in order to arrive at a confident (usually moral) judgment is not offering an interpretation at all.  The texture of The Wild Duck offers an especially complex and multilayered experience for the reader or viewer. It is better to be willing not to want to know what it 'means' but, instead, to respond to its rich counterpoint as we would to that of e.g. a Brahms' symphony. 

     Act One, is set in Werle’s spacious and elegant home, to emphasize one of the many dualisms in this play: that between the haves and the have-nots.  At first glance, the opening dialogue between the servants on the past history of Werle, Gregers and old Ekdal seems like obvious ‘exposition’ untypical of Ibsen.  His usual procedure would be to begin the play with Gregers’ arrival at the Ekdal home in Act Two and allow the relevant past to seamlessly emerge, as in the opening scene of the next play in the Cycle, Rosmersholm.  What we notice about the sumptuous scene of Act One is how it mirrors in reverse the situation in the impoverished Ekdal home in the rest of the play.  There is the same division of the stage space between foreground and background, between a place of work and one of recreation. The two scenes set up a contrast between sumptuous versus frugal feasting; they similarly emphasize the odd extraneous or marginal status of old Ekdal, an anachronistic figure from the past shuffling apologetically in and out of view in both households.   There is the same startling visual incongruity between old Ekdal, shabbily dressed, intruding into the opulent Werle world, and the richly furred Werle's startling intrusion into the impoversshed Ekdal home. 

Ideas planted in Gregers’ mind in Act One, become the seeds for his fertile imagination to evolve into full-blown parables later in the play.  It is likely that Ibsen created this action in Act One to emphasize these parallels and contrasts of a radically divided world.  For dualism is the profound condition of the world of The Wild Duck.  More than any play in the Cycle, it is torn between antinomies: between heights and depths; between foreground and background spaces; between before and after the Fall; between the powerful and the powerless; between reality and fantasy; between the truth bringer and the fashioner of ‘life-lies’, and so on.    Act One is created to set up a strong expression of this dualism within reality.  The powerful image of the courtiers or 'chamberlains' dancing attendance around Werle, the monarch of this world, is what should be emphasized. 

In the second act, by contrast, we move to the humble scene of Hedvig and her mother, Gina. The whole dialogue, here, is subdued, intimate, made up of tiny brush strokes of dialogue.  We observe the rapport between the two female characters and this is continued when old Ekdal enters.  Now a comedic rhythm emerges as Ekdal conceals the fact he is about to go to his room and drink the brandy donated by the Mrs. Sørby.  The comedy deepens when Hjalmar returns home. At the big party the son had been ashamed of his father and pretended 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 embarrasment, creates an awkwardness that must be overcome.  Therefore, the old man and his son now pretend they had been unaware of each other's presence and, under this pretence, delicately restore their mutual affection..  Ibsen subtly establishes how concealment and subtle evasion of awkward truths characterize this family's life style. 

The comedic rhythm then accelerates.  Hjalmar, who had been humiliated by his ignorance at Werle's party, now recasts himself as the shining light, using the chamberlains' cruel comments against him as if they were his remarks against them.  This tells us how much he had been hurt by the episode and how he needs to 'retouch' its harsh photographic reality.  The rest of the family conspires in fortifying his self-esteem. The acting style becomes broader, more exposed, especially in the scene where he 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 loft and the work that needs to be done, there.  We will note later that the loft is the place of retreat from unpleasant reality for these characters.  This whole agitated scene now subsides, as Hedvig brings in beer and a flute for her father .  The family regathers in in a tableau of harmony as Hjalmar plays a sentimental tune.   The whole scene takes place at night, in soft oil lamp light.

What we have witnessed is Ibsen's portrait of the everyday, unchanging life of this family: its kindness, sentimentality, tactful evasions, play-acting, where the Victorian 'breadwinner' of the family is a child coddled by his wife and daughter.  This is how the family has lived all its unheroic life and how it is designed always to live.  It has just gone through a small crisis and has found the means to overcome it and recover its harmony. It is a world reconciled to its fallen condition, living the troll injunction adopted by Peer Gynt: "To yourself be enough!  And this scene of reconciliation to its alienated condition will be shattered absolutely, when a knock on the door brings the play's truth-telling 'Brand-like' figure, Gregers Werle. . Gregers will introduce into the play a new kind of language: a language we've not heard before.

We are alerted that something is wrong when Gina, opening the door, shrinks in fear.  We are about to see 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 disastrously evasive trolldom preventing the urge to human freedom?    Or is the message, “Humankind/Cannot bear very much reality?"  Is Gregers Savior, Destroyer or both?  His speeches are 'loaded' either with menace or with mystery. Does he come to bring Peace or a Sword?   With his entry the dialogue shifts to such somber themes as Hedvig's approaching blindness, with Hjalmar's sentimental retouching of the reality:

       "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!  (105)

      Hjalmar derives pleasure from the 'aesthetic' idea of his sorrow, retouching and making it bearable.  Much of the rest of the play will be the comedy of Gregers attempting to raise the inert Hjalmar out of his comfortable, self-pitying condition to embark on a rigorous regimen of truth and freedom.

      The dramatic rhythm of the act takes off in new directions.  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 mountains, forests, bears and the superstition that the depleted forests will take their revenge.  The text movingly evokes the memory of the whole lost world of Nature, preparing our imaginations to receive with maximum impact the image of the loft and its strange inhabitants.  Language, here, becomes musical modulation, developing a richly evocative imagery. . A metaphoric world is being built up through the language of seemingly reported facts; like brush strokes gradually bringing a whole Other world and its history into being.  The impoverished and constrictive interior realistic setting makes the evocative counterpoint of the lost, free and expansive realm of Nature all the more powerfully affecting.

     It is now that the central mystery of the loft is revealed as the characters onstage gather at the entrance and peer into it like witnesses to a wonder. The musical modulation, its moods evolving and deepening, evoking new areas of the imagination, has been preparing us for a stunning visual effect, until the moment is right for the "revelation."    The stage suddenly opens onto a whole new area in the background: a strange world of small trees, animals, birds, and the very mysterious wild duck, all seen in moonlight through the skylight - an evocatively lit space filled with shadows.

      We are not presented immediately with 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: which is even more mysterious if "we", the audience, don't see it but only watch the characters seeing it. After we, and Gregers, have contemplated the wild duck the attic doors are closed and the room returns to its impoverishment.  Like auditors to a sacred legend we now hear the strange history of the duck; its being shot by Gregers' father, wounded, diving to the depths of the lake to die and being dragged up to life by a very clever dog.  From this factual history Gregers will discover a parable and build up a whole symbolic world that gives him his messianic ‘mission’. 

      The play's dramatic language modulates over so many areas: realistic, comedic, satiric, sentimental, confrontational, and mysterious; no one language being adequate to the reality.  They build up a progression to the central mystery of the act preparing us to receive the full impact of the ‘revelation’which will have the force almost of a religious ceremony. Ibsen presents us with an image of the everyday, 'doubled' by a metaphoric reality that surrounds the little scene with a vaster reality    The evoked huge landscape is a buried interior gradually dragged out of the interior ("sea depths") of the mind as out of the Flying Dutchman's chest of treasures.  In this second group there will be a huge reversal in The Lady from the Sea where the landscape will be there, onstage, and a figure resembling the Flying Dutchman will rise out of the depths of the sea).     Rainer Maria Rilke, watching The Wild Duck, wrote that Ibsen was quite a different artist from what one had heard, "misunderstood in the midst of fame".   In The Wild Duck he detected "something great, deep, essential.  Last Judgement." (ISP. 492).

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The Many Voices and Perspectives  in the Play        

     The play is especially notable for the rich diversity of its dialogue.  Each character possesses a distinct form of discourse, suggesting each inhabits a world quite separate from the others.  Making up this Babel of voices are:

Merchant Werle, shrewd, pragmatic, using the language of one who controls the material world, dismissing any other perspective.

Old Lt. Ekdal totally retreating into a private, mythicized fantasy of past glory (military) and freedom (hunting). The scene directions make him marginal’ both in the Werle and the Ekdal worlds, a lost, superfluous soul belonging to an abandoned natural world.

Gina, pragmatic, prosaic, seeing only immediate facts and nothing inconveniently complex.   A practical but ultimately inadequate vision refusing to extend itself.  ‘Photography’ in its least ambitious form is her perspective.  She accepts the world as it is and does not interrogate it.

 Hjalmar, inheriting his father's tendency to escape into fantasy, now in sentimental form, evading the present. He has learned to dress reality in fine sounding 'language'. 

Relling, the Cynic, who accepts his 'fallen' condition, managing the world that Werle has devastated.  He encourages accommodation to one’s fallen condition, instead of protesting against it.  He is too likely to be seen sympathetically as the wise psychotherapist..  He is a‘satanic’ figure and spinning a world of deceit to keep Werle’s victims docile, because that confirms his cynical attitude to his own failed life. 

Gregers who is given to forcing symbolic meanings onto reality, projecting symbolic and visionary possibilities onto life at the cost of its realities. He is the eternal ‘revolutionary’ for whom the Ekdals’ situation is unbearable.  He frequently is played as a villainous meddler but his is a necessary perspective upon the world, however clumsy and disastrous in practice.

Hedvig who responds to all these voices and their perspectives, - struggling to synthesize all these into her own adequate unity.  She alone understands Gregers' mode of speech.  Her's is the most adequate voice in the play. 

Gregers has confirmed to himself what he long suspected: his father had ruthlessly destroyed his best friend's father, reduced the family to poverty and maintained this injustice over the years. This was behind his decision to put this right and go to live with the fallen family.   This family, however, has made itself quite comfortable in its fallen condition, retreating from reality to live in its own sentimental fictions, even constructing a fantasy world, the loft, to retreat into. This was not unusual in the nineteenth century: lofts often were places of mysterious treasures and of mystery.  Gregers' father controls this world, even supplying the wild duck which becomes the centre of their imaginative world.   Here, Gregers' mission can seem sympathetic.  Hedvig, he realizes, most likely is his half sister as his interrogation of Gina early in the play suggests. He alone can speak to the depths they share - "the depths of the sea" - in their imaginations.  However, his attempt to shake this family out of its fantasy life leads only to disaster.

   Both Relling and Gregers, significantly, are bachelors in a play whose central group is a family.  Neither is Ibsen’s spokesman. Gregers, whose messianic mission is to be "thirteenth at table, urges an act of self-sacrifice that brings about a human tragedy. But Relling is just as disastrous an influence on the family, wishing to drag it down to his own ‘fallen’ condition.  Hjalmar’s disastrous unfitness to receive Gregers’‘truth’ is greatly due to Relling’s long program of coddling him in fictions.  If Gregers seeks to raise the family ‘above’ its possible level, Relling seeks to drag it ‘below’ to its ‘fallen’ condition.  His misery loves such company as Molvik.

      The reduced realistic space of Ibsen's modern scene is greatly enlarged into a supertextual space of archetypal quotation.. The characters do not know that they are carrying archetypal overtones, but we in the audience can be 'awakened' into glimpsing them. The intersection of the archetypal and the humbly real produces perspectives that are comic, sardonic, incongruous, mysterious, and tragic all at once. Incongruity is inherent in Christian mythology itself: in the profound co-presence of the banal and the 'sublime' which this play is evoking.   The humble details of the stable, manger, animals, shepherds, Joseph the carpenter, the humble life of Jesus in an obscure little province of the Roman empire, is linked to the most staggeringly cosmic claims ever made for and about our human condition and importance.  The infinite cosmos was created expressly for humanity, with God and the angelic and diabolic hosts watching on ever since the Creation.  All mankind is involved in the Fall of the first man and woman and burdened with the promise of salvation, or damnation; with personal immortality guaranteed after the end of the world on Judgment Day - and so on. Ibsen in this play is recreating this Christian imagination which, like Gregers Werle, saw the world as filled with symbols, metaphors, miracles, and parables.

       Looking at Act 3, we see how carefully the ‘musical’ texture of the play evokes different levels of imagery and supertextual reference at the same time that it stages a sequence of 'realistic' events.  It opens, in the prosaic light of morning, in contrast to the previous act's poetically mysterious moonlight.   Gina gives an account of the mess Gregers has made in his room; a necessary plot device so that when Gregers' father appears later there's a good reason why father and son do not exit the stage to talk in private.  The account also serves a symbolic indication of Gregers' clumsy intrusion later, which will have tragic results.  The scene is intimately realistic and comic, as Gina tries to get her reluctant husband to attend to his work rather than escaping with his father to the attic.   Hjalmar is manifestly, painfully, torn between the two worlds: the studio, an alien space of work: the attic, a space of happy escapism.  His father, teasingly, has kept the door between the studio and the attic ajar: and the 'forbidden' realm, glimpsed through the door opening, exerts an unbearable temptation on Hjalmar.  Finally, the lure of escapism wins out as Hjalmar gets Hedvig to take up the retouching work on the photographs, though it will be bad for her eyes. We now divide our attention between the lonely, near-sighted girl and the sounds of the two men, father and son, happily busy in their fantasy-world.  At this moment Gregers enters, unnoticed, and contemplates the scene, taking it in.  

Gregers strongly suspects Hedvig is his half-sister. As he silently watches the scene, he can observe how pathetically trapped her life is destined to be.  She is going blind, her father is callously ignoring her needs, her mother, Gina, can offer nothing for Hedvig's spiritual needs and Relling feeds her only illusions to live by.  She is barely 'tutored' by a drunk and faces a destiny of an old maid and basket-weaving.  The pathos of the situation explains the strange dialogue that now ensues with Hedvig, a dialogue in which Gregers will try to implant into Hedvig's mind a larger,subversive and more mysterious idea of the world – a world in which a supreme sacrifice later will not seem unthinkable. 

       Gregers brings into the household a whole alternative language to which Hedvig, alone, responds and together they discuss the attic and its contents and inhabitants.  Gregers knows how to draw on this dimension of Hedvig’s inner life, and they discover that they share a vision of the attic as "the depths of the sea".    Ibsen has a working note to the play, which says that Gregers alone knows the secret sorrows of children and can communicate with Hedvig on this level.  She probably has never before met anyone who managed to draw out of her, as he does, all the details of the attic: the chest and its treasures, the flying Dutchman, the clock that has stopped so that Time stands still, the depths of the sea.   He attempts to lead her further, to suggest the attic has another reality, that it is not just an attic: an idea that astonishes her.  He is, in fact, trying to draw her into his own vision, like a Christian missionary who does not see the world in its everyday aspect, but sees it as filled with other dimensions of reality: with another ‘story’ behind, or above, the world’everyday story.    

      Everyone in this play, we noted, has a mode of speech that defines his or her idea of reality. No one of these languages is adequate and their disjunction suggests a world spiritually fragmented, needing integration into a unity containing all these perspectives.  Hedvig, alone, is in touch with all these modes of speaking, as they act upon her, bewildering her: and this confusion and inadequacy is probably partly responsible for her tragedy as she tries to create for herself a coherent totality out of this confusion of voices and views. She flashes response to Gregers, but then draws back; she responds to her father's sentimental rhetoric, but can also speak practically with her one-dimensional mother.  She trustingly accepts Relling's cynical deception that her father will one day be a great inventor, but observes to Gregers that Relling's companion is often drunk.

      The Wild Duck is Ibsen's one drama of "the insulted and injured" - of humble folk.  Only in this play does he lavish almost loving attention upon such absurd, humble and unheroic figures who want only to be left alone, to retreat from all intrusion and certainly all dialectics. With this profoundly dualist play Ibsen inaugurated and released a persistent and potent metaphor of modern drama: the creation of an alienated space of unhappy consciousness and retreat from this alienation to an Other world of compensatory fantasy.  The theme will be repeated throughout modern drama. 

It is found in Chekhov in the yearned for an unattainable Moscow or the lost estate and cherry orchard. It constitutes the pipe dreams of Gorky’s The Lower Depths o r Eugene Neill’s The Iceman Cometh; or the illusory retreats of Tennessee William’s ‘fugitive kind’ (Laura’s glass menagerie is a brittle version of the Hedvig’s).  The lost Belle Réve of Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire recalls Old Ekdal’s lost world; the desperate escapist fantasies of George and Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfv. are another form    In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a play in which figures curiously resembing Gregers and Hjalmar re-appear as Vladimir and Estragon; and where a powerful merchant, Pozzo, goes blind like the similarly afflicted merchant Werle, the infinitely promised and delayed appointment with the elusive Godot serves a similar escapist function.  In none of the later versions is this condition of the alienated modern spirit in retreat more compellingly presented than in Ibsen’s play.

      Act III is the 'slow movement' of the play, in which we contemplate the full condition' for which the Ekdal family has settled, presided over by its practical organizer, Gina and its master of lies, Relling.  We are provided with only conflicting views on the facts.  Was Gregers father a lecher or is Mrs. Sørby right that this was mostly exaggeration?  Can she be trusted on this subject?  Can Gregers?  Or his father?  Did the merchant trap old Ekdal into the forest fraud that led to his disgrace and imprisonment?  Is Hedvig the child of Hjalmar or is she Gregers' sister?  No-one can say  for certain and it does not matter.  The play is not a whodunit.  It is a meditation on the multilayered, perplexing human condition that resists any single, simplifying perspective.

       The central sensibility of the play is Hedvig trying to create a unity out of the Babel of contrary voices and conflicting perspectives.  However, there is another still centre in this very ‘interior’ play: in the deepest recesses of the attic the mysterious wild duck lives, an element of our own natural spirit (and/ånd), perhaps, surviving the distortions and confusions of the unhappy dialectic of civilization and its discontents.  In Act II, this interior center of the Ekdal world was revealed to us as a mystery: with moonlight streaming down through a skylight and the inhabitants of the attic in shadow. Inside that attic is accommodated the lost natural world, long ago abandoned by us.  Around this center the action of the play circles, around the mystery at the heart of its world.

       Relling often is portrayed as the wise psychotherapist, in contrast with the blundering idealist, Gregers: but he, too, has a negative aspect, also. He is the manipulater of a realm of lies, who prevents any impulse to truth or freedom by reconciling humanity to its fallen condition.   In the earlier play, Brand, this benevolent quietism (in the Doctor) was the priest's worst enemy.  Neither bachelor, Relling nor Gregers, is Ibsen's spokesman.

    The fallen Ekdal family remembers and compensates for a lost, freer world of nature. Onstage, we see a family in the foreground and animals in the background.  Where have we seen this before, in painting? Gregers urges an act of self-sacrifice, bringing about a human tragedy. His mission will be to be "thirteenth at table"  Where have we heard this plot before?  These are the subtle subliminal images that infiltrate Ibsen's supertext into the dreama. The Wild Duck is not satirizing or parodying its Christian 'supertext'. 

     , Gregers is not Christ, and Relling is not the devil.   But the huge Christian story is evoked through the small human drama.   Ibsen believes that the modern spirit or mind - us - should relive the key episodes of its own evolution: that it should make sure it does not forget or evade anything of key significance.  For, just as we have biologically evolved, so we have culturally or spiritually evolved.  And just as our bodies contain all the stages of our biological evolution, so our minds contain the stages of our cultural evolution.

  The two dimensions of The Wild Duck do not fight, but re-inforce each other. Each is reinforced by the the other: the universal by the particula and vice-versa..   They possibly also deconstruct each other.  There is a creative-destructive interplay between the two kinds of action or two kinds of text.  Each needs and refutes the other.  The reduced realistic world, without archetypal memory, would not be a fully human world: but neither would a lofty archetypal action without a recognizable modern reality.   The characters in the play do not know that they are carrying these archetypal overtones, butperhaps we in the audience can be 'awakened' into 'seeing' them.  This is a subtle and delicate matter.  One must permit the larger images to emerge without clobbering the audience with them: and recognize that Ibsen frequently means the juxtaposition of large archetypal memory and reduced modern action to be incongruous, or even hilarious, as well as mysterious and tragic .  For our everday human lives do live in the shadow of the huger spiritual dramas of recorded culture and history.   In the West, especially, the Christian story has woven itself into the unconscious.

This juxtaposition of huge spiritual myth and our humdrum everday lives. produces a whole number of perspectives: comic, sardonic, incongruous, mysterious, tragic.   The collision of the two texts in this play produces a tragic disaster but also a comic satire. A major danger, in Ibsen interpretation and performance, then, is to play him either too big or too small.  If we see only archetypal pattern in the realism, [e.g. the 'Christian' action of Gregers'] we may exaggerate it, not realizing it is only one dimension of the text.  Apart from the Christian myth, I believe Ibsen, in The Wild Duck  has infiltrated images from Elizabethan theatre and Shakespearean drama and images from the visual arts, especially, I think, Rembrandt.  But apart from these, the realistic story is also filled with details that must not be overlooked.  One must be humanly as well as culturallysensitive to the multilayered text. 

      A performance should not take sides, and make Relling, say, the most adequate voice - for there's good evidence that his influence is disastrous.  The extreme richness of this play - it is Ibsen's richest - comes from its exploration of a multiple profusion of perspectives in collision.  We have to find a way of performing this profusion without imposing a simplifying pattern.  And this is only the fifth play in a 12-play Cycle which is evolving its total, omnibus voice.

      The most notable feature of this play is its intense interiority.  I have suggested that the central sensibility of the play isHedvig, trying to create a unity out of the Babel of contrary voices and conflicting facts.  Yet there is another still centre in this interior play: the deepest recesses of the loft where the mysterious wild duck lives, still an element of our own natural self, perhaps, surviving the distortions and confusions of civilization.  We saw how in Act II, this interior centre of the Ekdal world was revealed to us as a mystery: with moonlight streaming down through a skylight, the inhabitants of the loft in shadow.  Inside that loft is accommodated the whole lost natural world, long abandoned by us when we became city dwellers.

     No other play by Ibsen is focused so inwardly towards a mystery at the heart of its world that the camera cannot 'see'. Like the Impressionists, Ibsen was intrigued by photography and its processes.  Yet the central consciousness of the play, Hedvig, wants to be an engraver: an engraver can seem like the photographer, dealing in black and white and grey: but the engraver can show what the camera cannot see. The tragedy of the play takes place in the inner recesses of the loft, but also in the inner recesses of Hedvig's consciousness:    And her death is a mystery.  Had she sacrificed the wild duck, Gregers' would have been proved right:  we see Gina and Hjalmar reconciled when they hear of her supposed sacrifice.  We can never know why Hedvig killed herself because we do not 'see' the moment of her resolve - as we will see Hedda Gabler's.  Like everything else in this play it is open to multiple interpretation.  Ibsen does not tell us because he wants to keep all these possibilities open: they will each be explored in the plays that follow.  In fact, The Wild Duck, as the first play of this second group is setting out the overall situation that the other three plays will more clearly respond to.  (Pillars of Society) did the same for the first group)  Instead, he ends the play with the would-be Savior and the Deceiver resuming their quarrel  as to how to interpret what they've just seen.