• IBSEN COURSE •
Course Syllabus
Required Reading
Week I Material
Week II Material
Week III Material
Week IV Material
Week V Material
Week VI Material
Week VII Material
Week VIII Material
Week IX Material
Week X Material
Week XI Material
Week XII Material
Week XIII Material

WEEK V:Class notes to Peer Gynt

Text: Ibsen's Selected Plays

(See 'The Parable of Peer Gynt' in To The Third Empire pp.164-207)

     When Peer Gynt first appeared, in 1867, the influential literary critic of Scandinavia, Clemens Petersen, declared the play was "not truly poetry," but nothing more than a piece of polemic journalism.  Ibsen, living in exile in poverty was in a vulnerable position.  Despite the success of Brand, his position in his country was not yet secure.  Most writers would have attempted to placate Petersen.  Ibsen declared he would have beaten the life out of the critic if he had met him in the street. 

     Then, in reply to the charge Peer Gynt was not poetry, he wrote to his fellow writer, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson:

                   My book is poetry.  And if it is not, then it shall be.  The
                   conception of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall be
                   made to conform to my book.

       There are two things about that statement.  One, of course, is the superb self-assurance of Ibsen: he knows what he has done is great and that he must wait for the world to recognize the fact.  This was to be typical of his whole career, where his plays would be greeted with outrage and abuse which he then would patiently wait out until the play gained acceptance while the public waited to abuse the next play.

        The second and more important thing is Ibsen's belief that all beliefs and ideas will change in time: that there are no fixed values, and that the world itself and its ideas will be very different in a few years time.   Ideas of what is poetry, too, will change.   This is the absolute opposite of the neo-classical conviction that the rules and standards of art have been established for all time.   This was view articulated by Edmund Burke, (cf. the essay, Revolution and the Romantic Theater at the beginning of this course) where Burke was acutely aware that a violent change in the social order was reflected and implied in violent changes in artistic taste.  In the dynamic world following the Revolution, all concepts were subject to change; and with them, all standards and principles of art.  Conventional thinkers and arbiters of taste like Burke are likely to be appalled so that the pioneering artist like Ibsen, in advance of the age, must expect to be vilified for a while until the innovations are grudgingly conceded and the controversy dies down.  This is the history of art in the last two centuries. 

            When Ibsen's works first appeared, even his admirers were often perplexed by them.  The American novelist, Henry James, again and again grappled with the Ibsen mystery, trying to sort it out.  It is the example of one great artist, Henry James, responding to another artist in the new Realist discipline they both are extending.   Gradually, James is won over. Over the years, Ibsen did gain his public who were willing to accept the greatness of an art they did not always understand. One Ibsen admirer admitted he did not understand Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken, but added, "No doubt, when we stupid awaken, it will be seen to be a great and beautiful thing."   This brings up another aspect of the playwright as thinker that is notably different from earlier drama: each modern playwright, Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Pirandello, Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Heiner Müller and Peter Handke, is staking out new territory for which we have no precedents, making each new play an exploration into unknown territory.  This is not because these writers want to be difficult, or clever: but that this is how they see reality: in original and controversial terms.  They are forced to change the nature of dramatic form because the way they see the world can’t be presented in the old terms.  This is the dynamic logic of modern art resulting in its extraordinary evolution of forms.    

             
      There is a lot that is puzzling about Peer Gynt.  Who or what are the trolls?  What is the Great Boyg? Why is the Boyg, like the Sphinx, accompanied by birds?   Is the troll brat really Peer's child?  What is Memnon's statue and its song?  Who is the Strange Passenger?  The Button Molder,  And so on and so on. These puzzles tell us that Ibsen's imagery, his metaphors, are not easily shared with his public. Unlike Shakespeare's witches, ghosts or fairies, these images and metaphors do not emerge from a traditional way of looking at the world.  This means that Ibsen's art is, to an extent, confrontational and discomforting.   Ibsen, not drawing upon a traditional world-view, has to train his audience to share his own very unconventional vision. This is the condition of almost all significant modern art.

     Some of Ibsen's images are traditional, like the trolls, or the Devil; but he does not use them in traditional ways.  Others, like the Boyg, or Button Molder or the Strange Passenger, are symbols or metaphors not provided by traditional culture. because he is thinking outside the conventional categories from which traditional symbols derive. Ibsen uses Romantic themes and images in this play but employs them for distinctly non-Romantic purposes  Peer is given archetypal actions of a Romantic hero: rebellion, outlawry, erotic energy, escape into Nature, an ever-expanding exploration of the world, all of which would equip him for a Byronic role that, however, remains unfulfilled.

     Metaphors taken from pre-Romantic conventional sources do not serve to stabilize the text by supplying a familiar context but prove as volatile and unsettling as the unconventional metaphors.  The trolls, the Devil, the Sphinx have their roles disconcertingly re-assigned.  This is typical of Ibsen’s procedure throughout his career.   The devil appears frequently in Ibsen's plays: in A Doll House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, as well as in Peer Gynt.   Even in so modern and blasé a play as Hedda Gabler Judge Brack, is an urbane version of the diabolic. Ibsen's idea of the devil, usually a respectable pillar of society, is not the conventional one. 

Ibsen’s Negative Dialectics

     Ibsen's dramatic method, in all his plays, is a process of continuously negating the world it purports to present.  At least as much as Bertolt Brecht’s, Ibsen’s is an art of estrangement - of making the familiar world disturbingly a terra incognita – an unknown territory.  “The known, just because it is the known, is the unknown,” wrote Hegel.  In the method of the twelve-play Realist Cycle, everything familiar will dissolve into unreality under the pressure of the dialectic that forces situations into their opposites.  In the first four plays, for example pillars of the community are revealed to be its chief transgressors; delightful doll houses become intolerable prisons; vilified fathers are ultimately honored; a friend of society is designated its enemy.  The Ibsen method, like Hegel's, continually erodes what it appears to be giving.

       The first words in Peer Gynt, “Peer, du lyver!” (Peer, you're lying) warn us to watch him and listen to his every utterance skeptically and critically throughout.  A good contrast of dramatic hero is Cyrano de Bergerac’whose preposterous speeches are just as unbelievable as Peer's; but Rostand wants us to believe in them, so that we can escape into an enchanted realm: to surrender our intellects with our hats in the cloakroom before entering the auditorium.    In Rostand's genially conventional imagination Cyrano plays upon all the conventional chords of romantic love, patriotism, adolescent heroics, including Cyrano’s battles and duels, the secret love for Roxane that can only speak, at last, as the hero expires in the company of sympathetic nuns.  At every point the play reinforces conventional attitudes.  The one incongruity, Cyrano’s nose, is less a subversive idea than an endearing accident. The play is a likeable romp around totally conventional themes where we make sure our critical intelligence stays asleep.  It is startling to realize it was written long after Ghosts   It seems to pre-date Peer Gynt which already deflates all that Cyrano represents.

       Ibsen insists that we bring our skeptical brains with us into the theater. When we might be lured into thinking that Peer is just a likeable scamp, we are forced, also, to acknowledge his actions as disastrous to others, and often despicable.  The famous scene with Peer and his dying mother is a good example:  Rostand would work the scene (adding nuns)for full sentimentality: but Ibsen, while he shows Peer as acting tenderly and playfully, shows him betraying his mother at the same time.   He is not dutifully visiting her deathbed, but is running away from Solveig and the troll woman; he is not willing to listen to the serious matters she wants to talk about; does not allow her to collect her thoughts before dying (she asks for her Bible and he gives her a fairytale) and finally he abandons her after her death, telling Kari, “See she is buried with honor"” when his own actions have made that an impossibility. Peer is an actor [cf. Selected Plays pp. 463-470 W.H. Auden) who can play any number of parts and understand none of them.  He travels the world as if born yesterday, observing everything and learning nothing, a mere tourist of the world. Peer, consequently, ends up with no ‘self’.  The very insubstantiality of Peer’s actions and speeches, typical of the comic hero, allows them to encompass so large an area of natural and supernatural activity - in striking contrast to the honorable, tragic inflexibility of Brand. (Cf. To The Third Empire, 165)  Later, these negative dialectics will allow Ibsen to explore, over twelve plays, the huge external and internal wastelands of the Realist Cycle.      

     There is, however, a positive aspect to Peer.  He has what in a later play (Ghosts) will be called "joy of life", (livsgleden) both physical and mental, that expresses itself in terms of energy and imagination.  In this he is the antitype to Brand.  If he did not have great positive gifts there would have been no great waste of them, such as we feel at the end of the play. There is a character in the play who stands as his absolute opposite: the young draft-dodger who cuts off his finger to avoid military service.  Peer watches in horrified fascination as the boy does this and admits it is something he could never do.  We meet with this alternative life to Peer’s in Act Five, in the funeral elegy on his entire life: how he stubbornly won an existence for himself and his family out of the inhospitable terrain where he had his farm: how, after disaster after disaster, he still stuck to his land and forced it to yield a living.

     I don’t think we are meant to think this man superior to Peer.  His life was cripplingly narrow.  But his stubbornness and determination is one aspect of our humanity that has helped our species to survive.  Brand possessed this in a different, higher sense: and, like the peasant, it kept him doggedly rooted in one place working the spiritual material of his community as the peasant forced the land to yield its produce. Peer has an opposite quality also needed by the species if humanity is to survive - his extraordinary adaptability.  As we will see a little later, his range of actions is greater than any other dramatic hero.  He may not act any one role in great depth or authenticity but he acts an impressive range of roles, opening up prospects of human possibility even if he traduces them.  His roles include

1. an outcast,
2. wanderer
3. on a quest through the world where
4. he encounters, fabulous monsters,
5. answers a riddle,
6. wins the troll princess and half the kingdom, but also wins then loses his true princess, Solveig,
7. becomes a Prophet, 
8. like Oedipus encounters the Sphinx and
9. like Odysseus embarks on a homecoming to his waiting wife.  Finally,
10. as the returning wanderer who has somehow lost his identity and searches for salvation, he is a form of Everyman. 

Most of these elements are ironically present: that is, Peer travesties each of the roles he takes up so that, at the end of all this negative activity, he discovers he has no identity at all.  This whole concept, of the tragicomedy of non-identity, of the inauthentic self, is, I believe, a totally new thing in literature.

       The play also is a modern parable, a modern version of the parable of the Prodigal Son, the parable told by Christ, of the young man who left his home, "took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living."  Then, remorseful, he made his way back to his homeland where he was joyously received, as Solveig, at last, receives the prodigal Peer.  In the last Act, with its figures of the Strange Passenger, the Button Molder, the Devil, the play evokes Christian allegorical drama, plays like Everyman.

      Peer Gynt is both something quite new and unique in theater and yet also is drawing on a rich storehouse of cultural memory.  This capacity to be both original and yet to draw upon rich traditions, makes Ibsen, for many, the most significant man in the theater since Shakespeare.  This was the judgment of e.g. James Joyce, Pirandello and of Bernard Shaw.   If we look at Peer Gynt as a dramatized internal and external landscape, like Brand, we will get an idea of its extraordinary range.  The layers of reality in the play are like the layers of Peer’s Onion: and they make peer Gynt, arguably, the first major Modernist  work.  The editors ofTwentieth Century American Poetry observe "The Modernist long poem tended to be a sequence of more or less lyrical or Imagistic sections, often layered with mythological, historical, and literary allusions."  (p.93) and the disjointed, multi layered, arbitrary seeming sequences of Peer Gynt, held together only by their occurring to the consciousness of the hero, has much in common with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.  The layers of Ibsen's poem include:

8.Metaphysical-philosophical: existential drama of authentic human identity
7. Supernatural (especially Act Five: Button Molder; Devil; Strange Passenger)
6. Historical world of international finance.  Act IV retraces history
5. Natural world. Mountains, desert, sea, final external/internal landscape
4. Social world (Ingrid's Farm, wedding; businessmen (yacht).
3. Familial: Peer-Aase; Peer-Solveig                     
2. Individual ego(Peer's encounters) Conscious world   
1. (Subconscious) Troll Underworld

The play, Act by Act.

Act I  Scene 1.  (10-20
      The play opens with a quarrel between Peer and his mother, Aase.  As in Brand, the major characters of a drama are a peasant woman and her son. Nevertheless, Peer is a world-historical individual: a portrait whose life story serves for a parable of modern humanity.  .  Peer can stand for the undirected energy of nineteenth century humanity - the most dynamic since classical Athens.  He has just returned from the mountains, playing truant from his home, a farmstead in disrepair, with a tale of having undergone a fabulous reindeer ride.  He is lying, embroidering someone else's story, confusing fantasy and fact.  His mother, who knows him, is skeptical, but Peer is a clever actor.  He needs to have Aase believe in him and so, as he tells the story, he puts into it all his skill until, at some point, he hooks her into his fantasy.  When he knows he has caught her, he then launches into a fantastic account of flying through the air on a reindeer's back, falling and plunging headlong into a fjord, where the reflection of rider and reindeer, in the ford, rushes upward to meet the plunging rider and reindeer above.  They meet in a blinding explosion. As Aase soon realizes, Peer is lying again.  Lying represents, for Ibsen, the dangers of poetry, of drama, itself, of his own vocation. The easy and usually lucrative temptation of the poet and dramatist is not to search out the authentic and new, but merely to rejuvenate old themes and forms in superficially new guise.  Ibsen, as a very skilful and imaginative poet could easily have made a fortune creating agreeable dramatic fantasies like Cyrano de Bergerac.

     But though Peer was plagiarizing, Ibsen created something new. That account of the reflection of the reindeer and rider in the lake rushing upward to meet the reindeer and rider from above in an explosion of energy, is a brilliant metaphor, developed all through the play, of the underworld, the unconscious and the overt world, the conscious life, helplessly confused.  Peer as an adolescent full of human potential, is describing the adolescent's experience of his powers, both mental and physical. The underworld, or unconscious, the reindeer reflection rushing upwards from the depths of the fjord, represents the whole realm of impulses, instincts, drives, appetites, inherited from our biological natures, beneath our consciousness, waiting to be integrated with our conscious life into a creative human identity.  In the course of the play Peer will fail utterly to integrate these two areas, lower and higher, unconscious and conscious.  The lower, subconscious world will become a powerful realm of trolls, and fantastic and sinister figures.  The upper world will become more and more empty of rational meaning until Peer’s collapse into a lunatic asylum.

     Peer had an identity to realize within the world, and also a world he should have attempted to transform by means of his best powers.  By the end of the play, this world has become a waste-land, emptied of meaning or value.  Act V. with its funeral scene, devastated landscape, ruined heritage, and spectral figures from the past, is a waste-land metaphor close in spirit to T.S. Eliot’s poem or Samuel Beckett's Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape.

     Peer is one of the most energetic heroes in literature .  Any actor playing the part, knows how physically exhausting the role is.  In the course of the play Peer walks, runs, jumps, carries his mother and wades a river, wrestles, describes how he rides a reindeer through dizzying space, dances, carries off a bride from her wedding feast, the Woman in Green riding a pig, then the Arab girl, Anitra, riding a horse, climbs mountains, has sex numerous times, in one evening with three partners, rides various steeds, swims from a shipwreck, crawls on all fours like an animal, scampers away from the Button Molder and, finally exhausted, sleeps in Solveig's arms. He is an archetype of human energies, that become totally lost without direction.   

     With this, goes an equally extraordinary imaginative energy which can make up stories and lies for every occasion and dress them up attractively.  Peer is neither a moral monster nor a lovable rogue.  He is an unresolved confusion of positive and negative.  In the last Act the devil reports on the new invention of photography "by means of the Sun" in Paris and will tell Peer that he is a negative photographic plate who never developed the positive image he should have represented and which the Maker intended.    All this makes us see Peer in terms of a human potential which he lets go to waste.   It is the same with his mind, where he plays role after role with totally superficial skill, playing at everything and learning nothing, as he realizes in the famous onion scene in Act .6. 

     When, In Act One, Peer goes off to the Hegstad wedding feast we see the society from which Peer is something of an outcast. and conclude immediately that he is superior to this community.  The fact that he is attacked by the community, in Ibsen's scheme of things, guarantees his value.  He has an energy and imagination beyond theirs.   The bride at the wedding feast is only too happy to elope with Peer rather than marry the man, Mads Moen, chosen for her:  Solveig, too, although alarmed by him, immediately sees Peer's superiority,.  At that wedding feast she and Peer "change eyes" like the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet.  This is the real marriage that takes place at the wedding feast and it is unlawful and unconventional.  The lawful, socially approved marriage of Ingrid and Mads Moen is a fraud.   Act One ends with Peer's first rebellion and, as he is an adolescent, it is a sexual rebellion: while drunk, he carries off the bride from the wedding feast into the mountains which become his outcast habitation.

     Act II exhibits most clearly Ibsen's dramatic method throughout all his work: how it exists simultaneously on a realistic level and an allegorical level. That is, details in his plays function as realistic things, but also as symbols at the same time. For Ibsen, the symbolic is merely the realistic looked at from another perspective: the new Modernist method, sacrificing nothing that the old poetic and symbolic drama delivered.  The sequence of actions of Act Two goes through a distinct temporal cycle; from morning, through the day into evening, night, midnight and then the next morning.  And this sequence in time also represents stages of Peer's conscious life.

      Scene One (30-31): Ingrid and Peer confront each other like Adam and Eve "after the Fall" Ibsen intends us to pick up this Biblical reference.  In Act One Peer had boasted to the wedding guests that he had trapped the devil.  Now, he discovers the devil has trapped him.  “The devil’s in all women!”  Ingrid, with her property and promise of honor in society is not the partner Peer needs and craves: this is Solveig, and this alerts us to a feminine hierarchy in the play.  Solveig, the ‘Christian’ partner for Peer's pagan energies, is at the summit of the hierarchy.  After Solveig it is all downhill: Ingrid, the three herd girls, the woman in Green, Anitra - all represent Peer's debasement of the feminine principle.  Ingrid goes off threatening Peer with both outlawry and hanging, and this presents Peer with his first choice of identity. For a moment, Peer is potentially a Romantic rebel.

     Scene 2 'Searching for the Lost Peer'(31-33).   Peer is lost in two senses: physically and spiritually.  Solveig's Christian parents are willing to see Peer executed, sacrificing his body in order to save his soul:  Aase is concerned only to save Peer's body.  And, in this scene, Solveig goes over to the side of Aase.

     Scene Three (33-35)  Peer's  energies are now fully roused and he imagines taking on all society in his rebellion.  But just at this moment the three herd girls appear, and Peer's energies are dissipated into undiscriminating sexuality, as he takes on all three of them for the afternoon. 

                   Grief in the heart, thoughts running riot,
                   Eyes lit with laughter, tears choking the throat!
                   (Hugen sturen og tanken kåt.
                   I øyet latter; i halsen gråt)

(Literal tr.  Mind/heart dejected, thoughts running wild
                   Laughter in the eyes, in the throat, tears.)    

            
     Scene.4.  (35-36)Peer confronts the great natural landscape of the Ronde mountains.  In Romantic convention, this ‘sublime’ natural should instigate in Peer a corresponding sublimity.  And, at first, the scene does make him ashamed of his lies, and lecheries. But, instead of responding to this external sublimity, he slides back into mere fantasies of grandeur and the scene ends with Peer losing consciousness.  This brings us, for the first time in the theater, the hero's journey through his own unconscious.   King Lear’s descent into madness is an analogous dramatic action: the opening up of a submerged and unexplored terrain of the mind.  (It also recalls the Witches’ Sabbath sequence in Goethe’s Faust).   This Night sequence was remembered by James Joyce in the Night town sequence in Ulysses.

     Scene Five (37-39It starts with the Woman in Green and the inversion of values::

                   Black seems white and ugliness, fair.
                   Big seems little, filth passes for pure.

and then modulates into -

     Scene 6 (39-45) - the complete troll-inversion of the human world in the Hall of the Old Man of the Dovre ‘kingdom’. The troll sequence, underground, reverts to Peer's fantasized reindeer ride: of the mirror image rushing up from the depths to collide with the reindeer and rider descending from above. Peer enters the troll kingdom, once again mounted - this time on a pig. The underworld again rushes up to meet him in the form of the grotesque trolls.who want to arrange a wedding feast, for Peer and the Woman in Green - a grotesque underworld version of the Hegstad wedding feast where Peer met Solveig.  (In productions, usually the same actress plays Ingrid, the Woman in Green and Anitra, while the wedding guests become the trolls, and later the monkeys and the lunatic asylum inmates: emphasizing Peer is trapped in the absurdity of endless repetition.

                   Who are the trolls? We learn that they reject the human motto, “Man, become yourself” ("Man vaer deg selv") i.e. self-determine your identity but choose, instead "Troll to yourself be - sufficient"  (Troll, vaer deg selv - nok!) (i.e. be content in your given situation)

                   The trolls are our possible sub-humanity; what we might be if we did not struggle to 'realize' our potential humanity.  Humans, ideally, see things as they really are and try to go beyond; trolls, instead, settle for imagining their reality to be better than it is.  They get their cakes from cows, and their mead (wine) from bulls.  They can live in filth and squalor and imagine it is grandeur, Peer already is disposed to this form of evasion and Ibsen will write a whole play, The Wild Duck about this condition.  Peer goes along with much of the troll program but finally rejects the operation that would make him see like the trolls.  For this, the trolls set upon him just as the wedding guests at Hegstad set upon him.  The ‘overworld’ drama is repeating itself as underworld farce.  Yet Peer will find out, at the end of his life, that he has adopted the troll identity. He is saved from the troll’s violence by Solveig and Aase ringing the church bells. 

Scene 7 (45-47) The next scene takes place in pitch darkness, suggesting the absolute reaches of Peer's unconscious.  Here he fights the invisible Great Boyg.

What is the Great Boyg?  There have been many guesses: mine is that the Boyg is the impulse to evade, give in, right at the centre of Peer's Id.  It is the devourer of the Will, that in us that refuses to confront and overcome reality.  The Boyg's advice is "Go roundabout": to evade and not confront.  Peer does not defeat the Boyg: he is saved from it by instead the women, Aase and Solveig. 

Scene 8 (47-48) He wakes the next morning, with a hangover, after this journey into his own interior: and Solveig sends Helga, her sister as a kind of ambassador to negotiate with Peer.  Peer gives Helga a silver button to give Solveig, and that silver button, and a ‘Button Molder’, will re-appear at the end of Peer's life, in Act V.  Ibsen frequently plants clues in this way.   The silver button might stand for Peer's best identity, given to Solveig for safe-keeping and which might keep him from being melted down in the button molder's ladle.

Act III 

The two levels of commitment.  Betrayal on the heights and in the valley:

        Solveig joins the outlawed Peer making an irrevocable commitment to this height of the play’s metaphoric landscape.  As against the ‘property and honor’ that Ingrid offered, Solveig brings only her total loyalty to his rebel-identity.  This is the highest point of Peer’s  evolution and the point his loss of authentic identity will commence., As Peer builds his outlaw hut, the troll woman and her brat appear.  The troll woman threatens to prevent Peer from making love to Solveig, that she will always be there, between them.  That is, out of the underworld Peer has been unable to subdue emerge these monstrous figures (desires, instincts) that will come between Peer's consciousness and his life with Solveig.  Peer's requirement is to stay his ground, wrestle with his unconscious demons, overcome them and win his right to Solveig. But Peer runs away, stopping on the way at this mother's house where he commits his next great evasion.  It was both Solveig and Aase who had earlier saved him from the troll-world, and perhaps could do so again.

       The scene where he visits his mother as she is dying shows how difficult it is for us to view him completely positively or negatively.  He does not come to help her, for he is running away from his responsibility to Solveig, who has joined him in his outlaw's life.  He does not want to hear of Aase's troubles and, instead, recreates a scene from his childhood.  Now it is he who acts as the parent, and Aase as the child.   She wants to collect her thoughts together as she faces death: but Peer instead plays the childhood game of the sleigh-ride to Soria-Moria castle.   As he gets her to believe in the sleigh ride, she dies.  He kisses her and asks the family friend, Kari, to see that his mother is buried with honor.   In performance, one has to beware of playing the scene sentimentally, yet at the same time, Peer is not a monster The scene is creative and tender, and Peer seems attractive: yet he is playing his old game of evading truth,. As far as Kari burying his mother with honor is concerned, this patently is impossible because of Peer's own actions.  He has merely shuffled off the problem on to Kari..

      These first three acts of Peer Gynt are all involved with Peer's adolescence.  It is in these Acts that we see the hero lay the groundwork for his later loss of identity.   In a conventional comedy (e.g. The School for Scandal) Peer, if he was to remain the hero: i.e. the focus of the audience's attention throughout would, after his sexual transgressions, show himself to have a heart of gold and would return, repentant, to his society.  This is the theme of a great traditional novel, Henry Fielding's  Tom Jones.  But Peer Gynt is a highly unconventional work, and Ibsen shows Peer as having a 'destiny' - an unfulfilled identity that he can either realize or betray.  In Act IV we see the great betrayal, and in Act V. the consequences of the betrayal  Act Three has shown us Peer's two evasions: to Solveig 'on the heights' and the future and to Aase, the past, below.

Act IV

        Peer journeys from Morocco ( West) to Cairo ( East) crossing a desert covering the ruins of past civilizations.  He takes up the roles of these previous cultures without truly living up to their challenge.  He begins as modern entrepreneurial man, the millionaire of Europe and America, selling slaves and idols, mixing with international financiers.   As soon as he speaks we know that for all his outward success he is inwardly empty, a hollow man.     After he is forced to give up this identity through the treachery of his partners he first contemplates sliding down the evolutionary tree by living with the monkeys and eating the "food" (shit) they throw at him.  This scene occurred before, with Peer among the trolls (cow cake and bulls' mead). Like the trolls and the Hegstad guests, the monkeys set upon him.  Peer is now caught in endless repetition.   He is invested with the role of a Muslim Prophet but he debases and abuses this role, also, to the level of deception and theft.  He decides to live a Christian life as a universal scholar (p.91 IV. ix) though he has only the most superficial idea of what this means.  This scene is interrupted by the sudden appearance of Solveig, bathed in light" and singing a song of her Christian faith in him.  He also decides to take on the "Roman" identity of Emperor of Human Life.

      After failing at living as a Christian scholar or Roman emperor Peer' moves on to the Greek statue of Memnon, where the statue also sings a message from the supreme Greek god, Zeus which Peer does not comprehend (94-95  IV.xii.)  He decides "Hellenism I'll have to postpone" suggesting this role is too demanding even for Peer to play at.  He ends up in Cairo, before the great Sphinx of Gizeh where, unlike Oedipus, he gains no wisdom.

      The whole sequence of Act IV. from West to East, is against the course of the sun and reverses the course of human history which, in e.g.. Hegel's Philosophy of History, begins in the Orient, especially with Egyptian religion which took on animal identities, moved on through Hellenism, to Rome, then Christianity, Islam and the modern world from which Peer started out on his reverse journey.  So, in this act, Peer not only loses his individual identity: he loses (reverses) his cultural identity, too.  The result of this reversal of rational evolution is a world of insanity.

    Act V shows us, in what I think is the poetically richest sequence in modern drama, the homecoming of Peer.  Peer now totally confuses the upper world and the lower worlds, imagination and reality, as all the figures of his earlier imagination, and some more, walk upon the mental landscape of his homeland.   This Act is similar to Krapp's Last Tape where Samuel Beckett created an old man, Krapp, listening to his previous selves via a tape-recorder: Peer re-encounter the creations of his previous selves.   In both Beckett and Ibsen we gain the sense of a loss of self over time, of having been unable to defeat the deterioration of Identity by time.

      The act opens in shipwreck, so that Peer is thrown, destitute, upon the land. Before he lands he encounters a Strange Passenger, a riddling figure who tries to terrify him into seeing his true condition, to make him at least understand, as the Prince of Homburg was forced by dread of the grave to embark upon a journey of self-understanding.  The Passenger asks Peer:

                   Friend – have you ever, say, twice a year
                   Searched into the abyss of dread.               
  and,
                   Well, have you even once  in your life
                   Known the victory that only comes with dread?

      From now on, each scene Peer enters is an aspect of the wasteland.  He comes upon the funeral service for the draft-dodger and incongruously compares this steadfast and limited life to his own; then he comes upon the Hegstad farm, run down, "a dried out river-bed" with Ingrid dead having gone to the bad.  Peer learns about his own reputation as wastrel and liar who probably was hanged.  Now follows the famous “state of the onion” scene, as Peer peels away one layer after another of false and inauthentic identity, only to find no core to the onion, that is, no authentic centre of identity. Solveig's voice, singing, pierces this sense of loss, but Peer again evades her and encounters, in a burnt-out forest, aspects of what he might have been: the thoughts he should have thought, the poems he should have written, the principles, or watchwords, he should have lived by, the tears he should have shed, the actions and deeds he should have done.  This is a Limbo of unborn identity.  This now leads to encounters with the Button Molder, the troll king, the Devil.  The landscape Peer travels is simultaneously a chaos of subconscious fantasy and conscious misdirection. We go all the way back to the reindeer ride and the explosive meeting of the two realms, conscious-subconscious.  Because Peer has failed to confront and overcome either, he is helpless now that they confront him.  As in Everyman, Peer is our universal self facing judgment day before death. 

          Solveig, it seems, did glimpse the potential Peer and held to and preserved that potential, as Idea, while Peer destroyed it in actuality.  Solvig, however, in a way is as 'wasted' as Peer.  Her life of solitary waiting was denied the knowledge of the world, the activity within the world, that Peer experienced.  Ibsen does not let us imagine Peer is 'saved' - and the Button Moulder might still have the last word.  But the important thing is not the ultimate 'meaning' of the play but the wonderfully imaginative, multilayered journey Ibsen has created. One does not fret about the 'meaning' of a Brahms symphony.  A British beer commercial boasted that its product 'reached parts of you that other beers do not'   The same can be said of Ibsen's plays.  In saying goodbye to poetic drama, Ibsen created one of its most impressive examples. Peer is an anti-hero who, with the whole world before him, totally loses himself and ends up in an anguish of non-identity. 

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The interplay of subjective and objective worlds, inner and outer  

     The landscape of the play is a mirror of Peer's internal landscape: his self and its possibilities.  This includes the supernatural underworld within Peer and within the metephysical landscape.   Hegel described the Unconscious as a 'mine' "with an infinite host of images" we all possess and which we can 'call up'.  Peer becomes helpless before this inner world and, instead of possessing and controlling it,  it takes possession of him..One of the dangers of poetry itself: and much poetic drama, was its way of glamorizing reality: making the stage fiction more enthralling, and more exotic, than reality.  Peer Gynt  is a Romantic poetic drama attacking poetic Romanticism.  After this play, he gave up verse drama altogether: so that one of the best of all verse dramas is a renunciation of verse.  Ibsen himself wrote that the future of drama did not lie with verse: a prediction he brought about through the achievment of the Reaist Cycle.  All his work following Peer Gynt is written in the analytic method of prose: yet Ibsen always called his later plays ‘poems’ insisting it was infinitely harder writing poetry in prose than in verse.  The point is, he remained a poet in a deeper sense.  Ibsen was to find poetry in the people and things of modern life - to fill modern life with poetic, that is multi-dimensional, meaning.

Map of the Play

Peer Gynt  as dramatized spiritual landscape, internal and external.

External landscape - conventional social identity