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Love's Comedy & Peer Gynt
Introduction by Brian Johnston

            Click here for excerpts from the plays

THE PRESENCE OF THE EXCLUDED ROMANTIC THEMES
Nevertheless, one of the curious aspects of Peer Gynt is that the Romantic poetic imagination is powerfully felt as a presence by its absence, by 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. 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.

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