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Love's
Comedy & Peer Gynt Click here for excerpts from the plays
THE TRAGI-COMEDY OF REPETITION 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:
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) [8] 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:
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; [10] 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 rhetorical poetic
method, though not of its 'agenda', which will continue in the anti-rhetorical,
analytical prose drama, Ibsen himself will inaugurate. Yet no more impressive
a leave-taking of verse drama can be imagined than this prodigal, prodigious
Peer Gynt. 8.
R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon Books)
p.119 |
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