“Hedda Gabler” by Henrik Ibsen

*** SPOILER WARNING: Thefollowing post inevitably reveals some of the plot details of this play, and so, if such things are important to you, it is possibly best not to read this post till you’ve read or seen the play for yourself. 

 All quoted passages from “Hedda Gabler” are taken from the translation by Michael Meyer, published by Methuen

 

Surveying Ibsen’s last twelve plays – those plays stretching from The Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken, which occupied Ibsen for most of the last quarter of the 19^th century, and which he himself referred to towards the end of his life as a “cycle” – it is tempting to see in the sequence a sort of progression. Certainly, the later plays in this cycle are very different in nature from the earlier ones: they appear to be set in a world more dreamlike than real, are more accommodating of oneiric symbols and images, and less insistent upon the solid reality of the world they seemingly inhabit. By the end of the cycle, we seem to have returned to the poetic world of Brand and of Peer Gynt. But perhaps “progression” is the wrong word to use in this context, as that implies the later works are greater than the earlier (although, I suppose, a good case could be made that that is indeed the case); better, I think, to speak of movement. However, that movement is not consistent across the range of plays. In The Lady from the Sea, the play Ibsen had written immediately before Hedda Gabler, Ibsen seemed to have moved quite radically from the very realistic milieu he had presented us with in earlier plays: for one thing, there was a movement away from the stuffy bourgeois drawing rooms into the more bracing fresh air of the fjords and mountains; and the action of the drama itself was informed by symbols and images drawn from folklore, by dreams and fancies, and by more than a hint of the supernatural. But in Hedda Gabler, we are very much back in the real, solid world. The setting, as in A Doll’s House, is that stuffy, stifling, bourgeois drawing room, and, again as in A Doll’s House, the scene doesn’t change through the play: we are stuck, as Hedda is, as Nora had been, in this claustrophobic setting. The elegant French windows open sometimes, but there’s little evidence of fresh air. And whatever dreams Hedda may have remain in their domain: they do not permeate into the real world, as they had done in the previous play. In many ways, Hedda Gabler seems a step backwards: the progression, if such it is, seems suspended, at least for a while, as Ibsen revisits the unrelentingly solid world of Nora and of Torvald.

Yet, a more detailed comparison of this play with the earlier A Doll’s House gives an indication of the extent to which Ibsen’s dramatic art has developed. For one thing, it seems to pack far more in, despite being shorter: Ibsen had now fully developed the art of saying more with less. There’s not a sentence that doesn’t add something to the dramatic picture. Even the stage directions are important. For instance, in the first act, Hedda, on entering her new house, comments that the piano doesn’t look right where it is. It isn’t just a throwaway line to establish a realistic milieu; for, in the stage directions at the start of the second act (set only a few hours after the end of the first), we find this:

The same as in Act One, except that the piano has been removed and an elegant little writing-table, with a bookcase, stands in its place.

Hedda is a woman who knows her own mind, who has a highly developed sense of aesthetics, and who is very much, it seems, in control – although precisely what the extent of that control is becomes very much one of the major concerns of the play.

For Hedda, like so many of Ibsen’s heroines, has married because she really didn’t have much of a choice. But this is not entirely true, as Hedda herself realises. She did have a choice: she could  have chosen not to marry Tesman, and to embark upon the world independently, on her own account, as Nora does at the end of A Doll’s House. Of course, in a society in which women did not generally have the financial means to live independent lives, and where, in addition, such independence would have been frowned upon, this would have required tremendous courage, and such courage Hedda, despite her aristocratic pride, does not have. And she recognises this pusillanimity in herself, and she despises herself for it. And when a person naturally proud despises herself, she can find it easy to transfer this hatred for one’s self on to someone else. And for Hedda, this “someone else” is close at hand: it’s her husband, and his elderly maiden aunts.

Not that her husband, George Tesman is despicable. (Michael Meyer has chosen to translate the name in its Anglicised form, presumably so that it doesn’t sound too alien or foreign in those two important passages where Hedda addresses him by his Christian name.) He is an academic, with, we gather, a promising career ahead of him. But we are also made to understand that his professional reputation rests upon painstaking collation and organisation of material rather than upon any brilliant or original thinking of his own. He is a kindly, gentle person, brought up by his maiden aunts, to whom he remains very deeply attached. He is still, in many ways, a child, at home in the warm and comfortable domesticity he has grown up in, and somewhat in awe of this aloof and aristocratic woman Fate appears to have landed him with. He would love nothing better than to bring Hedda into his pleasant and comfortable world, but it is precisely this world that Hedda despises, mainly, one suspects, because she did not have the courage to have avoid contact with it.

We are not told why Hedda had married into a household she so looks down upon, but it is not hard to infer the circumstances. She was a general’s daughter, an aristocrat. (A picture of Hedda’s father hangs on the wall throughout the play, looking down upon the action.) Tesman and his aunt Juliana remember seeing her as a young girl gallop by on her horse: she had seemed then far above them all. But her father had died presumably without the means to allow his daughter continue the kind of life she had become accustomed to, and the door to a marriage with a fellow aristocrat was most likely closed. So when a reasonable offer of marriage came along, she accepted; and she hated herself for accepting. And now, having married, she finds herself, like Ellida in The Lady from the Sea, in an environment to which she is not accustomed, and which she cannot accept as her own. And, also like Ellida, she bears at the back of her mind an awareness that she had had little choice in the matter; and this awareness fills her with a deep and burning resentment. But where Ellida had recognised and respected the essential decency of her husband, Hedda feels merely contempt. But much of this contempt is but a reflection for what she feels for her own self. For, while her choice had not been entirely free, it had not been entirely coerced either: all it had needed to have avoided this was a modicum of courage on her part – a courage that she did not have.

Such complex psychology – a psychology far more complex than anything we had encountered in the superficially similar A Doll’s House – is enough material for a full-length novel, but Ibsen was, by this stage in his career, so much in control of his material, that he could communicate all this (and more) in merely a few short scenes. I have, in describing above the situation Hedda finds herself in, deliberately avoided citing passages from the play in support, and this is principally because no single excerpt in isolation gives us the entire picture: each line, though naturalistic in context, is charged with meaning, and the full picture only really emerges when we take a step back, and observe the fuller picture created by all the small pieces of the mosaic.

The play opens early in the morning. One of George Tesman’s elderly aunts, Juliana, has come to visit her nephew and his recently married wife in their new house. The newlyweds had returned the previous night from a long honeymoon in Europe, and Juliana, still somewhat in awe of the new member of the family, wishes to welcome her. Accompanying her is Bertha, previously a maidservant in the Tesmans’ household, but now assigned to the new house; and she, too, feels uncomfortable about having to serve Hedda. George Tesman she had tended to virtually all his life, but in that household, she had been effectively one of the family. Here, it will all be different, and Berha expresses the nervousness that Juliana too feels:

BERTHA: … There’s another thing. I’m frightened madam may not find me suitable.

MISS TESMAN: Oh, nonsense, Bertha. There may be one or two little things to begin with –

BERTHA: She’s a real lady. Wants everything just so.

MISS TESMAN: But of course she does! General Gabler’s daughter! Think of what she was accustomed to when the general was still alive.

It is interesting that Juliana confirms rather than contradicts what Bertha says. They share similar apprehensions.

Husband and wife are both in bed when Juliana arrives, and it is George who is up first. The warmth of their conversation is unmistakable: these are two people who are, emotionally, very close, and they had clearly been missing each other. George’s speech is childish in many respects: he has clearly picked up many of the homely and naïve expressions used by his aunts. A picture is presented of a warm and close-knit relationship; of, indeed, a warm and close-knit household, a household of which even the maidservant Bertha feels herself to be a part. In the original text, George addresses his aunt as Tante Julle. Michael Meyer has translated this as “Auntie Juju”, because, as he says in a note following the text, Tante Julle is, and is intended to be, a childish expression: it is probably something George had called his aunt as a child, and it has stuck, anomalous though it is coming from a fully grown adult. Hedda winces every time her husband uses this name, and puts her foot down very firmly when her husband requests her to call his aunt by this name also. (Her husband, still somewhat in awe of his wife, doesn’t press the point.)

in his notes to the play, Michael Meyer continues:

To render this name as Auntie Julie, as has usually been done, is completely to miss the point; it must be a ridiculous name such as Juju.

Tesman’s gentle afection and warm-heartedness, which could be viewed either as childlike or as childish, depending upon one’s perspective, could almost be Dickensian, but Ibsen not afraid to introduce a dissonant note:

MISS TESMAN: Yes! And the enemies who have tried to bar your way have been struck down. They have been made to bite the dust. The man who was your most dangerous rival has had the mightiest fall. And now he is lying there in the pit he has dug for himself, poor misguided creature.

It is hard not to imagine the satisfaction this kindly old lady takes in the downfall of the man who has had the temerity to stand in the way of her adored nephew. This rival is Eilert Loevborg, a brilliant man, but a notorious, self-destructive alcoholic, and a man of dissolute habits – a man who, even were it not for the rivalry, would have been most unwelcome in the Tesmans’ cosy world. To Tesman’s credit, he is, and continues to be, generous to his rival’s talents. But however generous Tesman may be, Loevborg is a man from outside his world: Tesman has spent his entire life in an environment of comfort and warmth, and Loevborg, as we soon see for ourselves, is not a person to impart either.

And neither, for that matter, is Hedda. She is not entirely happy seeing her husband’s elderly aunt in her home first thing in the morning, but she is too polished in her aristocratic manners to say so openly. However, when she sees a hat lying on the sofa – a hat that the aunt had bought specially so that Hedda would not feel ashamed to be seen with her – she cannot resist:

HEDDA: Tesman, we really can’t go on keeping this maid.

MISS TESMAN: Not keep Bertha?

TESMAN: What makes you say that, dear? What?

HEDDA (points): Look at that! She’s left her old hat lying on the chair!

TESMAN (appalled, drops his slippers on the floor): But, Hedda – !

HEDDA: Suppose someone came in and saw it?

TESMAN: But Hedda – that’s Auntie Juju’s hat!

Later, Hedda narrates this incident to Judge Brack (who is very much someone of her own class, and, consequently, someone she can talk to), and admits that she had known all along this was “Auntie Juju‘s” hat. The domestic bliss of her husband’s former home is driving her mad, perhaps quite literally. She cannot view it with anything other than contempt. And yet, this bed she is lying in is the bed she has made for herself, through her own lack of courage.

It is into this highly charged environment that two outsiders appear – first, Thea Elvsted, an old schoolfriend of Hedda’s; and, soon afterwards, Judge Brack. Somerset Maugham once said that all Ibsen plays essentially have the same plot: a number of people inhabit a close, stuffy room; an outsider comes in and opens the window to let in the fresh air; and everyone does of cold. It is a mischievous observation, all the more so because, to a great extent, it is true. In this case, the outsider who opens the window, albeit, in this instance, unintentionally, is Thea. Thea had been a quiet girl at school, and Hedda used to look down upon her; but even while looking down on her, she had envied Thea’s luxuriant hair. This same Thea is still someone Hedda looks down upon, but once again, Hedda envies her: for she has something Hedda knows she lacks herself – courage.

Thea had been engaged to a wealthy household to look after the mistress of the house, who had been ill, and, after her mistress’ death, the master of the house had proposed to her. And, as with so many other women in Ibsen plays, Thea had not really had much of a choice: what else was there for her to do with her life? She had accepted. But this same Thea, this same quiet, timid girl, has now – it emerges – taken a step that is unthinkable to Hedda: she has left her husband. She has left her husband in search of her stepchild’s tutor – one Eilert Loevborg, the once notorious alcoholic and dissolute, and Tesman’s erstwhile academic rival.

While Loevborg had been in her rich husband’s employ, Thea, it seems, had had a calming effect on him; and, under her influence, and, indeed, as Hedda worms out of her, with her help, Loevborg had written finally the great book he had been capable of. Thea knows something of his past, but not all. She knows that he had once been close to some woman, but that their relationship had been tempestuous, and that when they had broken up, she had threatened him with a pistol. But she knows no more about it than this. What concerns her now – what, indeed, is all but driving her mad – is Loevborg’s present state: he has walked away from the Elvsteds’, and has come in to the big city (presumably Kristiana, now Oslo), and Thea is distraught by the thought that the man to whom she had been closer than she ever had been to anyone else may now be returning to his drink.

As for Hedda, she knows full well who this woman was who had pointed the gun at Loevborg. That is what she once had been. And from that, she has come to this – settled in a comfortable domesticity, married to a big baby of a man, with only homely maiden aunts for company. Meanwhile, Thea, quiet, gentle Thea, whose luxuriant hair she used to pull at school, has tamed this Loevborg; and for his sake she has done what Hedda lacks the courage to do herself: she has walked out of her marriage, uncertain of her future.

We soon see Loevborg himself, but before that, Ibsen introduces us to the last major figure of the drama: Judge Brack. He is from Hedda’s own background: they understand each other immediately, and Hedda can speak to him with an openness that is quite impossible when speaking to her own husband. Brack is successful, well-established, extremely polished, and utterly confident of himself. His long conversation with Hedda at the start of the second act is an extraordinary combination of tact and of outrageousness: nothing is said openly, but every single sentence is loaded with meaning. To put it crudely – in a way that these two very polished and elegant individuals would never dream of doing – he, knowing how bored she must be with her husband, asks her to become his mistress, and she, politely but firmly, refuses; he, however, is not disheartened, because he knows well the rules of the game, and is something of an expert in gaining power over others. Indeed, this is what he lives for in his otherwise bored life: Hedda, to him, is just another challenge.

But Hedda can no more have an affair than she could walk out on her marriage, despise it though she might. Hedda Gabler is often classed with those other famous bored housewives of fiction – Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina; indeed, I once saw an eminent writer class them all together as “adulterous heroines” of 19^th century literature. But Hedda is far from being adulterous: if anything, she is more likely to be frigid. Though bored to death with the stuffy conventions of bourgeois life, sex is not a way out for her: she seems to have a horror of physical contact. It is suggested throughout this play that she may be pregnant, and “Auntie Juju” is, to Hedda’s disgust, particularly keen that she should be so; but the very thought of pregnancy fills Hedda with revulsion. When she had been with Loevborg, we find out later, she would listen, fascinated, to Loevborg’s accounts of his debauchery: but however tempestuous their relationship had been, she had stopped short of physical contact.

When Loevborg does finally make his entrance, in the middle of the second act of a four-act play, he perhaps confounds expectations. Far from the demonic hellraiser we may have been expecting, we see a quiet, polite man, seemingly in control over himself, and even refusing an offered drink. But then Hedda goes to work, and now, even those of us who had been following matters closely may find ourselves puzzled. Why does Hedda behave as she does? Even the worldly-wise Judge Brack finds himself saying at the end of the play “But, good God! People don’t do such things!” In terms of popularity, Hedda Gabler possibly ranks with A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People as Ibsen’s greatest hit, but the psychology of the characters in the earlier plays had not been too difficult to follow. Here, however, although, superficially, we may seem to be in the more realist world of those earlier plays, Ibsen’s art had moved on. Precisely what motivates Hedda, what makes her do what she does, is more open to interpretation and debate than the motivations, say, of Nora or of Dr Stockmann, and is certainly more difficult fully to account for; but, however little we may understand of it all, Ibsen holds us in his grasp, and we have little choice but to look on with mounting horror.

Why, say, does Hedda knowingly goad Loevborg back to drinking? One apparent motive is envy: Hedda is envious of Thea, and of her achievement in taming the seemingly wild and untameable Loevborg; and, out of pure spite, she wishes to undo Thea’s work. There’s certainly an element of that, but Hedda, I think, has other motivations too – motivations that go deeper.

In seeing Loevborg so tame and so domesticated, Hedda’s aesthetic sense, I think, is hurt. All this homely domestication, these endless meetings with Auntie Juju in her silly hat – it’s everything Hedda despises. She has an image of something greater than that – something that transcends all this absurdity and triviality. Seeing Loevborg, of all people – Loevborg, whom she had once threatened with her pistol – reduced to being but a pet dog on Thea’s leash, hurts Hedda’s aesthetic sense. She wants Loevborg to rise above Thea’s pathetic domestication: she wants him to achieve the greatness that she herself is too cowardly to aim for. For, just as Hedda projects her own self-hatred on to others, so she also projects her sense of what is beautiful. Like Solness in Ibsen’s next play, The Master Builder, Hedda is afraid to climb as high as she builds: however, trapped though she is by her own lack of courage in a life of pettiness that she disdains, she wishes others to reach a state of glory that she herself cannot even aim for. Loevborg, she is sure, will conquer. He will defy timid little Thea; he will go that the party that Thea so fears, and he will return triumphant. He will return, Hedda says with self-conscious self-mockery, “with vine leaves in his hair”. That will be his victory over Thea’s domestication; and that will be Hedda’s victory also.

At least, that, I think, may be part of Hedda’s motivation. Why exactly she acts as she does remains open to debate.

While the men are away, we remain in the same house, in the same room, with Hedda and with Thea: however stifled these characters may feel in this closed, claustrophobic setting, we are made to feel it too. We piece together what had happened that night from the various reports that emerge the next morning. Loevborg had, predictably, returned to his boozing with a vengeance; and, on his way to the “boudoir” of a certain Mademoiselle Danielle, he had lost the manuscript of his masterpiece, the work Thea had inspired him – and, indeed, helped him – to write. When he returns, he does not return “with vine leaves in his hair”: he returns instead a broken, distraught man. Rather than tell Thea the truth, he tells her that he has destroyed his work – their “child”, as Thea puts it. All they had worked towards is now gone.

And now, at this point, Hedda’s actions become even more bizarre than before. The manuscript has ended up in her possession, but she doesn’t mention this. Instead, she hands one of her duelling pistols – one of General Gabler’s pistols – to the suicidal Loevborg, and, in one of the most chilling moments in all drama, tells him to “do it beautifully”. Then, once she has the stage to herself, she brings out the manuscript, and sits in front of the stove.

HEDDA (throws one of the pages into the stove and whispers to herself): I’m burning your child, Thea! You with your beautiful, wavy hair! (She throws a few more pages into the stove.) The child Eilert Loevborg gave you. (She throws the rest of the manuscript in.) I’m burning it! I’m burning your child!

Not even the most grotesque physical violence of, say, Titus Andronicus, fills my heart with such terror as does this scene.

I’m not sure how Ibsen manages to maintain the dramatic tension after something like this, but, somehow, he does. Eilert Loevborg does indeed end up dead, but he didn’t do it “beautifully”. Far from it. He had returned to Mademoiselle Danielle’s “boudoir”, and had created a scene, accusing her of stealing his manuscript. Judge Brack tells the story, with his customary tact. They had found his body in the brothel: the gun, in his pocket, had gone off, seemingly accidentally. The wound was not in the breast, as Hedda had thought, but “in the – stomach. The – lower part – ” Or, to put it crudely, Loevborg had accidentally shot off his own genitals.

HEDDA (looks at him with an expression of repulsion): That, too! Oh, why does everything I touch become mean and ludicrous? It’s like a curse!

Hedda had tried to rise above the mean and the ludicrous, but it was no good: she could not climb as high as she built. And here she was still, still a prisoner in an absurd marriage that she had knowingly stepped into; and, worse, she was now in Judge Brack’s power.

***

The grim, concentrated dramatic power of Hedda Gabler (the whole action take place in just two days) seems in stark contrast with the almost other-worldly atmosphere of its predecessor; and, while the previous play had ended with a rare burst of sunlight, this play moves with a seemingly inexorable logic into the bleakest and darkest of conclusions. In some senses, we are back in the world of A Doll’s House, but in other senses, we aren’t: Hedda is far, far more than a victim merely of a patriarchal society; the roots of her doom lie deep within her own troubled psyche. Alongside Ghosts, Hedda Gabler is perhaps the darkest play Ibsen ever wrote.

In 1891, a year after the first performance of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen returned to his native Norway. He had left some 27 years earlier, a minor and little-known provincial writer; he returned a Grand Old Man of Letters, famed throughout Europe. He was now 63 years old, but he was far from finished. For in the four plays he wrote between his return and his debilitating stroke some ten years later, he seemed to move into a new level of artistry, perhaps even surpassing all that he had achieved earlier. These are difficult plays: at times, I get the impression that Ibsen, at this stage of his life, was writing primarily for himself rather than for an audience. Not surprisingly, his audiences found these plays – and still find these plays – hard to follow, and to understand. But full understanding is not perhaps to be expected in any major work of art. These late plays, for all their difficulties, are worth the effort, as they seem to me the works of a visionary.

Some further thoughts on “The Wild Duck”

It is no original or startling revelation that Brand, Dr Stockmann (An Enemy of the People), and Gregers Werle (The Wild Duck) are cut, as it were, from the same cloth: all three insist that their fellow humans accept the Truth; all three make moral demands that humans aren’t, on the whole, capable of living up to. However, the family resemblance between the three should not be pushed too far, as there are salient differences between them also; and exploring these differences gives, perhaps, some insight into the way Ibsen’s thought was developing.

Of the three, Brand is the only one who is explicitly religious. He demands that humans accept the truth because God wills it so, and because God’s will is paramount. The question of human happiness barely enters into it. The God that Brand envisages loves Man, but he is, in Geoffrey Hill’s translation, “imperious in his love”.

My God is the great God of storm,
absolute arbiter of doom
imperious in His love!
…
your God can hardly move;
he’s weak of mind and heart,
easy to push about:
but mine is young, a Hercules…

To follow Brand’s God is to forswear earthly comfort; it is also perhaps to forswear happiness, joy. It is to engage in endless struggle. For Brand’s view of the world is God-centred rather than Man-centred: human contentment, human comfort, human joy, all mean nothing when placed next to God’s will, and if carrying out God’s will is to forfeit happiness and comfort, so be it. In this, though in little else, Brand’s vision corresponds with the views of Pastor Manders in Ghosts:

What right do we mortals have to happiness? No, we must do our duty, madam! 

Pastor Manders is very unlike Brand because he has neither the strength of character nor the unflinching and uncompromising intelligence to follow through his premise to its rightful conclusions; but their starting points are perhaps not too different.

Stockmann and Gregers Werle are different. Dr Stockmann is, specifically, a man of science: for him, the Truth is not something that is divinely revealed, but rather, something that Man arrives at by exercising his own intellect. And Gregers Werle never mentions God: he never even refers to him indirectly.

But Gregers’ moral code is very Christian: he places great emphasis upon sacrifice, and upon forgiveness. (It may be argued indeed that in his emphasis on forgiveness, he is more Christian than Brand: Brand’s God is “imperious in his love”, and unforgiving.) But Gregers’ reason for making such moral demands of his fellow humans is not to carry out the will of God: rather, it is to make men happy. For once man discovers his innate nobility and learns to sacrifice and to forgive, then the whole of mankind can, he believes, live together in harmony and happiness and joy. This is a consideration that is as alien to Brand as it is to Pastor Manders: “What right do we mortals have to happiness?”

It is Dr Stockmann’s insistence on Truth that is perhaps the most puzzling. He certainly makes no mention of God, but neither does he seem an idealist concerned with human happiness. In purely scientific terms, yes, the water in the spa is indeed polluted, and, unless the fault is corrected, people will suffer. But is his motivation ultimately to prevent human suffering? It hardly seems so:

It’s of no consequence if a lie-ridden community is destroyed. It should be razed to the ground, I say! All those who live a lie should be eradicated like vermin! You’ll bring a plague upon the entire country in the end; you’ll make it so the entire country deserves to be laid to waste.  And if it comes to that, then I say from the depths of my heart: let the entire country be laid to waste, let the entire people be eradicated!

So what does motivate Dr Stockmann? Truth for its own sake, yes: but why? Why should a man who, speaking from the depths of his heart, is happy to see the “entire people eradicated”, care whether or not these people grasp the Truth?

And for that matter, why should Brand be so tortured by the end? Yes, he is rejected and reviled; yes, he has lost everything that he has loved – his wife, his child. But had he not rejected the concept of earthly human happiness in the first place? Had he not told himself that carrying out the will of God is a hard task, and that those who set out to carry out the task must have no expectations of earthly comfort?

These are not easy questions, and these inconsistencies perhaps indicate no more than that we, as humans, are complex, and not perfectly rational creatures. But the most intriguing of the three, perhaps, is Gregers Werle, who, though clearly mad, seems to me particularly interesting. He does not mention God or religion, but his moral code is nevertheless Christian, and he acts by it because he genuinely believes that this will bring about human happiness. And even after his convictions bring about tragedy, he refuses to let go of them. At the start of the play, there had been thirteen at dinner, and, at the very end of the play, Gregers declares his destiny: to be thirteenth at table – that is, to be the odd one out, the one who refuses to abide by what the rest of the world thinks. For he cannot let go of his convictions, regardless of what people think, regardless even of what happens: for to give up his convictions is to accept Dr Relling’s formulation that humans need to live with lies and illusions, simply to make life bearable. But to Gregers, such a life is not a life worth living. This is why he has to adhere to his principles, no matter what: life cannot be worth living without them – there can be no reason to exist.

Ibsen was writing in the post-Enlightenment era: belief in God was still possible, but was by no means a default position, dictated by reason. And the question of how can justify life once we no longer take as given (as Brand had done) a divine overriding purpose is not an easy question. Without belief in an overriding divine purpose, the focus falls on what makes us humans happy.  And the realisation that the Truth does not necessarily make us happy is a terrible realisation: how can we live with that? And it’s not even that there exists a middle ground between Gregers and Dr Relling: either humans are noble beings capable of accepting truth, or they are not. And if we are to reject Gregers’ idealism, what option do we have but to accept Dr Relling’s cynicism, and the contempt for humanity that goes with it?

There still seems to be an image of Ibsen as a purveyor of bourgeois drama – reassuring, comfortable, and perhaps a bit stodgy. All I can say is that this is far from how I see them.

 

 

[The passages from Brand quoted above are taken from the translation by Geoffrey Hill. The passages from the other plays are from the translations by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik. All translations are published by Penguin Classics.]

“The Wild Duck” by Henrik Ibsen

*** SPOILER WARNING: The following post inevitably reveals some of the plot details of this play, and so, if such things are important to you, it is possibly best not to read this post till you’ve read or seen the play for yourself.

All quoted passages are taken from the translation by Michael Meyer, published by Methuen

HEDWIG: It’s only a loft.

GREGERS (looks hard at her): Are you sure?

HEDWIG (astonished):  That it’s only a loft?

GREGERS: Yes. Are you quite certain about that?

It is hard either to read or to see The Wild Duck, and not be aware of its various symbols. Of course, Ibsen had used symbols in his earlier plays too: if, as I increasingly think, the point of serious literature is to force language to communicate matters language is not primarily designed to communicate, then symbols becomes virtually unavoidable, and all serious writers, to some extent or other, use symbols to refer to that which cannot be stated directly. But in The Wild Duck, we seem so firmly enmeshed in a network of symbols, we can barely move without running into them.

The loft, for instance. It’s a strange concept in what is still a “realistic play” – by which I mean a play that takes place in the world we inhabit rather than in some dreamscape, features characters from walks of life familiar to us, and tells a story that we can believe could conceivably happen in our real world. This loft, which in performance is just offstage and can be just tantalisingly glimpsed, is a dark place, done up like a forest with what Meyer’s translation refers to as “Christmas trees”, and populated by chickens, pigeons, and rabbits. We don’t need to be told that this loft represents more than a mere literal description can convey.

And what’s more, the characters know this as well. But to each character, it means something quite different. For instance, to Ekdal, once a fearless bear-hunter in the great forests but now reduced to a pathetic shell of a man, it is an image of the forests he used to love, but which he now does not have the nerve to go to. Once he went into the forest to hunt bears; now, he goes into the loft with his gun to shoot rabbits. He speaks of the forest “taking its revenge”, and when the final tragic act of this drama unfolds in this loft, he returns to this theme: “The forest has taken its revenge,” he says quietly. So to Ekdal, the loft is a symbol of the forest, and the forest itself is a symbol of some mysterious impersonal force that punishes humans for their encroachments – though why, we do not precisely know.

Meanwhile, the teenage girl Hedwig associates the loft with the “vasty deep” – the depths of the sea, where a former lodger, a sea captain, is now drowned. And this “vasty deep” she associates with the world of the imagination, a magical world removed from the solid, quotidian concerns of real life.

And inside this loft, this mock-forest, this “vasty deep”, there resides, amongst the pigeons and the rabbits and the chickens, the wild duck of the title. And, of course, this too is a symbol for something. But it’s perhaps best not to try to interpret these symbols too precisely, or too rigidly: the play is, after all, a play about humans interacting with each other, and not an abstract interplay of theoretical symbols, or some intellectual crossword puzzle to be solved. But the preponderance of these various symbols, and the various different interpretations that are attached to each of them (often by the characters themselves), create in this play a powerful poetical dimension: alongside the reality – the  real world that Ibsen by now was so expert in depicting on stage – we are shown another world, a mysterious and poetic world of the imagination, or, as Hedwig would call it, of the “vasty deep”. And these two worlds co-exist, each inter-penetrating the other, on the one hand giving the real world a poetic depth, and, on the other, anchoring the flights of poetic fancy to the solid and the everyday. While, in the four earlier plays of this cycle, we had mainly inhabited the real world of solid things, with The Wild Duck, I get the impression that Ibsen was moving into new directions: we are now in a world that is increasingly suffused by the poetic, by the mysterious and inscrutable powers of the imagination, by the “vasty deep” itself – by all those things that language unaided by the poetic sensibility is so ill equipped to communicate. And, however solid the real world had been that Ibsen had presented to us in his previous four plays, he was – as Brand and Peer Gynt should remind us – as much a poet as he was a dramatist. If his previous play, An Enemy of the People, was, as I had suggested, a sort of step back, then we can see it in the light of the subsequent plays as a sort of consolidation, a restatement of what Ibsen had already achieved, before setting out on a new and adventurous direction.

But to say we shouldn’t be too rigid in interpreting these symbols doesn’t mean we shouldn’t interpret them at all: we need merely to remember that each interpretation is at best partial – that these symbols can mean all sorts of different things simultaneously, and that what they mean at bottom is as elusive and as intangible as the workings of the human mind itself.

The wild duck, for instance, also means different things to different people. It is Hedwig’s pet, and she loves it; and Gregers, the fanatic, knowing how much it means to her, suggests she sacrifice it in order to prove her love for her father – an act of pure symbolism to demonstrate that which is real. But Gregers himself sees the duck as something else. This duck had been winged by his father (from whom Gregers is now alienated); it had fallen into the lake, and had gone down to the “vasty deep”; and from there, it had been retrieved by his father’s dog. And now, wounded and flightless, it resides in the loft that is at the same time real and symbolic. In one sense, this duck is Hedwig’s mother Gina, once violated by Gregers’ father, and now living her life in quiet, unassuming domestication. But that “vasty deep” into which the duck had sunk means to Gregers something other than what it means to Hedwig: to Hedwig, it represents the world of the imagination; but to Gregers, it represents a world of lies, of delusion. And he sees Hedwig’s father, Hjalmar, as the duck that has sunk into this world of delusion; and he sees his own self as the dog who is to bring him back to the surface, into the clear light of day.

There are other symbols too – weaving its way in and out. There’s the recurring image of vision (or the lack of it), and of light; there is the image of hunting; and so on. We can quite easily get to the stage that we start looking for symbols in everything. So, for instance, when Gregers fails to light his stove properly and the room fills with poisonous fumes, and he throws water over the stove to put it out and floods his room, we can’t help wondering what it symbolises. I personally think it is no more than a comic episode, and, far from symbolising anything, merely demonstrates Gregers’ inadequacy in dealing with the real world of solid things – an inadequacy that, in a different context, leads to devastation. But if we wish to tease symbolic meaning here too, I’m sure we’re entitled to: as long as we do not allow this interplay of symbols obscure the very human drama that Ibsen presents with such clarity. For the play does not merely inhabit a poetic world of the imagination: it is as firmly rooted in reality as is any of Ibsen’s earlier plays in the cycle.

And it has a very well-defined plot. The principal protagonists of this plot are two young men who used to be schoolfriends, but who are very unlike each other. There’s Hjalmar Ekdal, good-looking and vain (he speaks admiringly of his own curly hair), indolent, self-obsessed and self-dramatising, and living a blissfully contented life. And there’s Gregers Werle, who is (we are told) physically ugly; he is son of a very wealthy local businessman, but he is not on good terms with his father: his father had been a philandering type, and he cannot forget the misery this had caused his late mother. He has tried to stay away from his father, and on returning to his home town, finds he cannot forgive him:

WERLE: Gregers – I believe there’s no-one in the world you hate as much as you do me.

GREGERS (quietly); I have seen you at close quarters.

WERLE: You have seen me with your mother’s eyes.

Their respective fathers had been in business together, but Hjalmar’s father, Ekdal, had been found guilty of business malpractice, had served a prison term, and is now a broken man. Gregers’ father had been indicted too, but he had been found not guilty: Gregers does not believe his father had been innocent, although we, the audience, never know the truth of the matter. As far as Gregers is concerned, his father had merely used Ekdal, letting him go to prison while he himself had thrived.

And old Ekdal has a further reason for shame: when found guilty, he had a gun in his possession, and honour demanded that he turn the gun on himself; but he, the fearless hunter of bears in the forest, had proved (in his own mind, at least) a coward. And now, he is utterly broken, reduced to doing some menial copy-writing work given to him by his former business partner, and shooting rabbits in his own loft.

Hjalmar speaks sentimentally about his father, and speaks of rehabilitating him once again in society; but in reality, he is ashamed of him, and fails even to acknowledge him in public. He is married to the submissive Gina, who does all the work – and even, we find out, runs his business, as Ekdal is too lazy to run it himself. (He has been set up by Werle as a professional photographer.) And Ekdal is blissfully unaware that his wife Gina, when she had been housekeeper at the Werles’, had been Werle’s mistress; and Hedwig, the girl he thinks is his own, is, almost certainly, Werle’s.

It is into this atmosphere that Gregers intrudes. Unable to live under the same roof as his father, he becomes a lodger with the Ekdals. And he is determined that his old friend Hjalmar must not live with his delusions; he must know the truth about his wife, and accept that Hedwig, who loves him unconditionally, is not his own daughter. And Gregers is convinced that once Ekdal’s eyes are open, he will forgive, and that they will all live happily in perfect understanding of each other, and with perfect love – that a new life will open for them, based not on lies and illusion, but on Truth, which is the most important thing of all.

Gregers is quite clearly a fanatic, as Brand and Dr Stockmann had been; and he is also, quite clearly, mad. While it is possible to see his forerunners Brand and Dr Stockmann as heroic, it is hard to discern anything at all heroic about this strange character who insists on seeing life in terms of ideals, and who is so much at odds with the rest of humanity that he cannot see what really is so blindingly obvious – that a man as shallow and as self-dramatising as Hjalmar Ekdal is not capable of living with the Truth, however valuable that Truth may be.

But the principal conflict in the drama is not between Gregers and Hjalmar: the weak and indolent Hjalmar is not really strong enough character to carry the burden of such a conflict. The conflict is between Gregers and Dr Relling. Dr Relling, unlike Gregers, takes a much dimmer view of humanity: humanity, he feels, cannot live with the Truth, and it is better for them to live contentedly with whatever illusions they need to get through life. So he has convinced Hjalmar that he has the talent to be an inventor; and he convinces the rather pathetic drunkard Molvik that there is actually something “daemonic” about his character. Contrasting as he does with Gregers’ lunacy, it is tempting to see Dr Relling as the voice of sense – the chorus, as it were, commenting sensibly on what is happening, but unable to prevent the tragedy. But this won’t do.  At the very end, after the almost unbearably tragic outcome (which, seen in a good production, really does tear the heart apart), we get a brief scene between Gregers and Relling, where Relling says that, despite the uncontrollable grief of Hjalmar’s, he will not be ennobled by his experience, that he is incapable of being ennobled – that he will continue to be the indolent, self-dramatising and self-pitying man he always has been. Gregers’ can’t accept this:

If you are right and I am wrong, life is not worth living.

And while we may agree with Relling on this specific point, we would be wrong to dismiss Gregers: if life does indeed consist, as Relling insists, merely in drowning ourselves in illusion so as to avoid facing truths, then life really isn’t worth living. Gregers may be mad, but in this, he is surely right.

In An Enemy of the People, it was Dr Stockmann who held the people in utter contempt: this is because he saw them incapable of being the noble searchers for Truth that he feels they should be. But it is not just the idealists who can become enemy of people: here, it is Dr Relling who holds humans in contempt; it is he who knows Molvik to be merely a pathetic drunk, and Hjalmar a self-deluding fool. Can the case not be made that it is Dr Relling, so contemptuous of his fellow humans, and, indeed, of himself, who is, indeed, the Enemy of the People here?

To understand the drama in realistic terms rather than as an abstract clash of  theories, we need to try to re-create something of these characters’ past. Gregers had been quite devoted to his mother. When Hjalmar speaks of his feelings when his father had been indicted and sentenced to prison, of how the world seemed at the time to collapse around him, Gregers is immediately reminded of how he had felt when his mother had died. It does not require too great a psychological insight to deduce that Gregers blames his father for his mother’s unhappiness, and that his present actions may be (albeit unknowingly) motivated by this hatred. But the nature of his parents’ marriage is not easy to unravel. Towards the end of the first act, we get the following exchange between Gregers Werle and his father:

WERLE (lowers his voice a little): But you should remember her vision was sometimes a little – blurred.

GREGERS (trembling): I know what you are trying to say. But who was to blame for that? You were! You and all those – ! And the last of them you palmed off on Hjalmar Ekdal, when you no longer – oh!

WERLE (shrugs his shoulders): Word for word as if I were listening to your mother.

The vision being “blurred” is a reference to the image of sight and of blindness that runs through the play: old Werle is going blind, as is the young Hedwig, presumably through some hereditary defect. And here, this reference to blurring is also, quite obviously, a euphemism: Gregers certainly understands what his father is driving at: though it is never made clear, we may infer that she was becoming mentally unbalanced. And that, at least as far as Gregers is concerned, it was his father who had driven her to madness. Now, it could be that Werle was simply an unprincipled and ruthless sybarite, who was cruel to his wife; or it could be that their marriage had already broken down for other reasons. We cannot really tell. We see Werle now as a successful and respectable businessman, but of course, that means nothing. We see him also as a man who is careful to do his duty: he may have escaped prison (rightly or wrongly), but he spends his own money to set up his disgraced partner’s son in business, and later, makes sure his illegitimate and unacknowledged daughter Hedwig will be more than adequately provided for. And we certainly don’t see him as dissipated: he is clearly living with his housekeeper, the very self-possessed independent minded widow Mrs Soerby, and in the course of the play, announces his engagement with her. Dr Relling and Molvik go out boozing  together, and often visit a certain establishment run, we are told, by a Madame Ericsson: Werle is not the type of person to frequent such places. Now, it could be that with age, and, possibly, under the good influence of Mrs Soerby, Werle has grown out of his past habits; but it could equally be that, though far from morally pure, he was not quite the monster his son thinks him to be. We cannot be sure.

But Gregers has, for better or worse, taken after his mother. And so disgusted is he by what he sees as his father’s moral depravity, he is determined to see other humans as essentially noble beings. Or, at least, as the noble beings they would be if only they were to perceive the Truth. He is certainly a fanatic, and in this, he recalls Brand, but the differences are important: for one thing, Gregers does not mention God. Brand had insisted on the highest moral standards for humans because that is what God wants from Man: it’s not as a means of achieving happiness, but rather, to carry out God’s will, for only in carrying out divine will can the soul be purified. Pastor Manders too, in Ghosts, had asked why we humans should search happiness: we have our duty, given us by God himself, and that is sufficient.

But if God is no longer part of the equation, then what can we live for? How then can we justify life at all? Gregers may not mention God; he may not even believe in God; but his moral compass is very firmly rooted in Christianity all the same, and is centred, as Christianity is, around the concepts of forgiveness and sacrifice. Search for Truth, take this Truth to our hearts, forgive, and sacrifice for the sake of those we love; for only through that can we achieve for ourselves happiness and joy, and make life worth living. We may think all this hopelessly naïve, but before we dismiss it as such, we should consider Dr Relling’s position: live in delusion, he says, for we are not good enough or strong enough to live with the Truth; and, far from searching for happiness and joy, take solace instead in drunkenness, and in the joyless pleasures of Madame Ericsson’s establishment. Is this really any better than Gregers’ naivety? If Dr Relling is right and Gregers is wrong, then is life really worth living?

The Wild Duck addresses some of the most fundamental of questions about our lives: how should we live? How can we justify our lives, and make our lives worth living? But there is nothing abstract about the drama: it is a very human story, peopled with weak and fallible people who nonetheless demand our sympathy and understanding; and it culminates in a tragedy that really does break the heart. Hjalmar may be weak and self-dramatising, but seeing him weep over the body of one who had loved him unconditionally, but whose love he had in his moral blindness rejected; and to see also the equally helpless tears of the mother Gina, who saw the terrible tragedy unfold before her eyes, but who was helpless to prevent it; is among the most heart-rending of all scenes in drama, and even brings to mind the final scene of King Lear.

And interfused with this tragedy is the poetry – the deep and resonant imagery of the loft, which is at the same time the forest and the “vasty deep”, and whatever associations the forest and the vasty deep may have; and of the wild duck itself, winged, brought up from the vasty deep, and now, wounded, residing in the mock forest in the loft. The point is not to identify what these things mean, but, rather, to allow this world of dreams and of the imagination to intermingle with the worldly solidities, and reveal to us some of  the most hidden compartments of our consciousness.

Ibsen in his later plays was to go much further in using theatre, the most public of all art forms, to delve deeply into our unconscious: The Wild Duck is only the beginning.

“An Enemy of the People” by Henrik Ibsen

All quoted passages are taken from the translation by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik, published by Penguin Classics

Konstantin Stanislavsky’s production of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, with Stanislavky himself playing the protagonist Stockmann, was a sensation. The year was 1905, a rather significant year in Russian history: there was great social and political unrest, mutinies, attempted revolution, and a disastrous military defeat at the hands of Japan. Near the very start of the year, in Petersburg, soldiers fired on unarmed protestors, killing 96 people according to Tsarist official records: the actual toll is likely to have been much higher. Feelings were running high, and Ibsen’s play, written some 23 years earlier, and depicting a heroic individual speaking truth to power, struck a powerful chord. Even in its inevitably censored version, with censors actually attending performances to ensure unauthorised passages were excised as ordered, the effect, to judge from Stanislavsky’s autobiography, was electrifying. Stockmann’s speeches were enthusiastically applauded, and, at times, members of the audience actually came on to the stage to shake Stanislavsky’s hand, or to embrace and kiss him.

It is easy to see why this play, at this particular time, should make such an impact. At a time when truth was suppressed by tyrannical authorities, here was an individual standing up for this very truth in the face of everything that may be thrown at him – a man who insists that truth matters above all else. And it is tremendously theatrical. It is, perhaps, a bit difficult to stage, given that the big scene in the fourth act requires a crowd – and the bigger the crowd, the more effective the drama – but even on reading it at home, the theatricality of the various dramatic confrontations seems virtually to leap out from the page. Not surprisingly, the play has proved one of Ibsen’s greatest hits, and, despite the difficulty of staging the big crowd scene in the fourth act, has been frequently revived. It has also been filmed several times, and adapted in all sorts of ways. The opening half of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is effectively a re-tread of this play; and Satyajit Ray’s Ganashatru placed the action in Bengal, with the Bengali version of Dr Stockmann finding dangerous pollution in holy temple water. (Sadly,  Ray made this film soon after a major heart attack, and in defiance of doctor’s orders not to return to work: for understandable reasons, this film isn’t among his best.) Dr Stockmann, in his various manifestations, has become the very epitome of the courageous individual who stands up alone for what he knows to be right, for what he knows to be true.

But while this heroic and inspiring stand for truth defines the principal tonality of the work, there are some very troubling dissonances throughout that frequently threaten to overwhelm this tonality. I can’t help wondering, for instance, how well the Petersburg audiences appreciated the profoundly anti-democratic nature of Stockmann’s stand, and, perhaps, of the play itself. Quite early in the play, for instance, we get this exchange between the newspaper-man Billing and the sea captain Horster:

BILLING: Still, we all have to vote, at least.

HORSTER: Even those who understand nothing?

BILLING: Understand? What do you mean? Society is like a ship; everyone must come together at the helm.

HORSTER: That might be all right on land; but it would come to no good on a ship.

Dr Tomas Stockmann himself is presented as a loquacious man, a dynamic personality, never still, forever brimming with energy and optimism. He is clearly highly intelligent, but in terms of judging the political temperature, or of judging the people around him, hopelessly naïve. He has made the discovery that the water in the spa, the very spa on which the entire economy of the town depends, is dangerously polluted. And he knows also the solution: the pipes carrying the water need to be re-laid. But he never gives a thought to the financial implications of this. He is certain that, in making this discovery, he is saving the town itself, and that he will be lionised for doing so; he is certain that he has the “solid majority” behind him.  Certainly, the liberal press is on his side, but he cannot see what the rest of us can – that they are supporting him not out of any love for truth, but merely to score political points. The points they want to score are against the town’s conservative mayor, Peter Stockmann, Dr Stockmann’s own brother, and chairman of the spa’s board. And it never even occurs to Dr Stockmann that a person in such a position is not likely to welcome his scientific findings: his belief that the truth is something that everyone would welcome is simultaneously touching in its naïvety, and also somewhat alarming. For how can someone with so inadequate an understanding of human behaviour cope with humanity as it really is?

It doesn’t take long for the expected to happen – especially as Ibsen moves the drama forward with virtually every line, barely pausing for breath. Dr Stockmann’s brother, the mayor, consummate politician that he is, goes to work behind the scenes. He puts forward a proposal for some minor changes that will, he personally assures everyone, solve all the problems; and he lets people know how much Dr Stockmann’s solution will cost: it will require not merely a huge rise in taxes, but also the spa closing down for two years while the work is carried out. In short, the town will effectively be deprived of an income for two years. Dr Stockmann, still as naively optimistic as ever, continues to believe that the “solid majority” will continue to support him: how, after all, can any rational person, when faced with the truth, fail to acknowledge it? It is impossible! But others know better. Those who had previously expressed support for him now change their minds: after all, isn’t the mayor proposing a solution that would cost far less? Only a fanatic, after all, would propose depriving the town of its income for two whole years while hiking up taxes. Even the liberal press backs out: it’s not that they’re against the truth, as such – of course they aren’t – but they cannot, obviously, back Dr Stockmann’s dangerous fanaticism.

Ibsen spares no-one, not even the “centrists”, the men of sensible moderation: the printer Aslaksen (who had appeared in Ibsen’s earlier play The League of Youth), always preaching temperance and moderation, always warning of the dangers of fanaticism, also deserts the man  he now comes to see as a dangerous fanatic: when it comes to it, his “centrism” is no more than pusillanimity, a craven failure to back radicalism when radicalism is what is needed. This frankly makes for uncomfortable reading for political moderates such as myself, and that is, undoubtedly, as Ibsen had intended. While this play is still seen (as A Doll’s House often is) as a comfortable work that flatters our sense of our own honesty and integrity, it is, in truth, a deeply uncomfortable work that turns the spotlight very disconcertingly on to our own selves, and reveals things that we would perhaps prefer not to see. I must confess that if I saw myself at all in this play, it was as the cowardly and self-justifying Aslaksen rather than the heroic Dr Stockmann. And that is far from comfortable.

If things are beginning to become uncomfortable by the end of the third act (where Dr Stockmann is threatened by his own brother with losing his job should he refuse to see reason), the remarkable fourth act goes even further. Stockmann, denied a public platform, has decided to hold a public meeting where he could speak to the “solid majority” he still reckons will back him. No public hall would accept his booking, so the meeting is held in the large front room of the sympathetic sea captain Horster.

The public, even at the start of the meeting, is hostile to Stockmann: the powers ranged against Stockmann, while denying him a platform, have already let the public know how much Stockmann’s solution would cost, and have further let them know that the patches proposed by the Mayor will solve whatever problem there is. It is easy for us to take sides against the public here (as Stockmann himself does), but a simply dichotomy of Good vs Bad serves but to weaken the drama: the public’s position is surely understandable, and I, for one, find it easy to sympathise: it is, after all, their livelihoods that are at stake. Even at this meeting, against Stockmann’s wishes, a chairman and moderator are appointed, and they quickly rule that Stockmann is not entitled to speak about the water pollution. And then the dam breaks: the anti-democratic seeds that had been planted early in the play now blossom, and take on frankly grotesque forms.

Of course, since this is, after all, an Ibsen play, we know that the pollution of the public water is a symbol for something else. And now, Dr Stockmann clearly and explicitly sees it as a symbol, and explains what it is:

DR STOCKMANN: I have some great revelations to make  to you, my fellow citizens! I  want to report the discovery of a very different scope than the trifling matter of the water supply being poisoned and our Health Spa built on  plague-infested ground! … I’ve said I wanted to talk about an important discovery I’ve made over the last few days – the discovery that our spiritual wells are being poisoned, and that our entire civic community rests on a plague-infested ground of lies!

Readers of Ibsen’s earlier work should have no difficulty identifying Dr Stockmann here: he is Brand, the unyielding idealist and stern moralist, insisting that his fellow humans must accept the truth at all times without compromise – insisting on moral imperatives that human beings are, on the whole, incapable of following. The heroic Stockmann then goes on, in his rage, to articulate a number of things that are, frankly, hard to stomach. The broadside against democracy continues:

The majority never have the right on their side, never I tell you! That’s one of those lies in society against which any independent, thinking man must wage war.  Who is it that constitutes the greater part of the population in a country? The intelligent people or the stupid ones? … The might is with the many – unfortunately – but not the right. The right is with myself, and a few other solitary individuals.  The minority is always in the right.

Then, he draws a parallel between humans and dogs, coming in the process close to advocating what we would nowadays describe as eugenics:

First, imagine a simple, common dog – I mean the kind of vile, ragged, badly behaved mongrel that runs around in the streets fouling the house walls. And put one of these mongrels next to a poodle whose pedigree goes back several generations, and who comes from a noble house where it’s been fed with good food and had the chance to hear harmonious voices and music. Don’t you think that the poodle’s cranium has developed quite differently from that of the mongrel?

Michael Meyer, arguing that the poodle has associations in English that aren’t present in Norwegian, changed the breed to greyhound in the above passage in his own translation, but its meaning is unmistakable either way. Not that Stockmann is favouring the aristocracy: the “mongrels” he is referring to are, as far as he is concerned, from all social classes. But even so, those of us who had been cheering on Stockmann so far, and who remain convinced that he is in the right (as he surely is), can but grit our teeth. But Stockmann is now unstoppable:

It’s of no consequence if a lie-ridden community is destroyed. It should be razed to the ground, I say! All those who live a lie should be eradicated like vermin! You’ll bring a plague upon the entire country in the end; you’ll make it so the entire country deserves to be laid to waste.  And if it comes to that, then I say from the depths of my heart: let the entire country be laid to waste, let the entire people be eradicated!

The mayor, the press, Aslaksen, weren’t wrong: Stockmann really is a dangerous fanatic. He is declared by the meeting to be “an enemy of the people”. And if Stockmann is Brand in his unbending integrity and his fanaticism, he is also, it seems to me, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, who, also in a public meeting, is declared an enemy of the people and exiled; and who, again like Stockmann, remains unbowed, and vents his fury upon the populace that repudiates him, banishing them even as they banish him:

You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate
As the reek of the rotten fens, whose love I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air: I banish you.

The  play ends not with victory, but on a note of defiance. Stockmann has been attacked by the mob, and the windows of his house smashed; he has, predictably, lost his job, and so has his daughter:  not that her employer wanted to dismiss her, but, like everyone  else,  they dare not keep her. No-one in the town dares: the weight of public opinion is too strong. The Stockmanns are evicted by their landlord: once again, he dares not do otherwise.  But Stockmann, like his predecessor Brand, is determined  to fight on, to stand up for the Truth, no matter what the cost to himself or to his family. And we are left not entirely sure whether to admire or to deplore him.

***

In the context of the twelve plays beginning with The Pillars of Society, which may loosely be termed a “cycle”, this play, the fourth in the series, is, in some ways, a step back. After having used the very public medium of theatre to explore inner lives of his characters in A Doll’s House and, even more, perhaps, in Ghosts, we are, in this play, back in the very public world of The Pillars of Society: the inner lives of the characters here are not addressed; the characters are only really important here in terms of their public function. Of course, Ibsen was soon to delve more deeply into the inner lives of his characters in his subsequent plays:  in some of these works, he delved as deeply into the recesses of the human mind as is perhaps possible. But this play stands apart somewhat from the others: it is, in a sense, simpler, in that its content can be fairly adequately summarised, in a way that the contents of plays such as Rosmersholm or The Master Builder, say, cannot. But it is still very much a part of the cycle: its themes – the nature of truth, our human capacity for accepting and acknowledging the truth – are every much themes that Ibsen explored from different perspectives in this and in other plays.

The truth here, despite Wilde’s famous epigram, is both pure and simple: in literal terms, the spa water is indeed dangerously polluted, and, in symbolic terms, our human society, as in The Pillars of Society, is indeed built upon lies and corruption. What is at issue here is not the nature of Truth (Ibsen was to explore that later), but, rather, our human capacity to accept and acknowledge the Truth, and also the inhuman fanaticism to which an entirely admirable devotion to Truth all too often gives rise. For the title is not ironic: Dr Tomas Stockman is, quite literally, an enemy of the people. That he is a man of the utmost integrity, and heroic and admirable, does not alter this fact. It is a play that should make us all feel uncomfortable.

“Ghosts” by Henrik Ibsen

*** SPOILER WARNING: The following post inevitably reveals some of the plot details of this play, and so, if such things are important to you, it is possibly best not to read this post till you’ve read or seen the play for yourself.

All quoted passages are taken from the translation by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik, published by Penguin Classics

The stage directions for the first of the three acts tell us:

Through the conservatory windows a gloomy fjord landscape can be seen, veiled by steady rain.

We’re in the same location for the second act, and the stage directions tell us:

A rainy mist still lies heavily over the landscape.

The location remains unchanged in the third and final act also, and now, we are in the depths of night:

The lamp is still burning on the table. It is dark outside apart from a faint glow to the left in the background.

The sun does begin to rise in the final moments of the play, but what we see on stage as the sun rises is a scene of unmitigated horror: the rising of the sun brings with it no renewal. Quite the opposite.

It is hard to think of another play quite so unremittingly bleak and sombre as Ghosts. Even Long Day’s Journey into Night had begun in the light of day. The English title, Ghosts, is evocative, but Ibsen’s original Dano-Norwegian title is perhaps even more powerful: Gengangere means – so the notes to my Penguin Classics edition tell me – “something that or someone who walks again”. It is about the Past that refuses to stay in the past, that poisons the Present, and crushes the joy out of our lives.

This crushing of the Joy of Life is here a major theme. It is, ironically, Pastor Manders who introduces the motif of the Joy of Life early in the play, when he thinks back on the late Captain Alving:

As a young man, he was certainly full of the joys of life.

But to Manders, this is no more than a ready-made expression: he does not think too deeply on what it may signify. But Mrs Alving’s son, Osvald, recently returned from Paris, seizes upon it:

Yes, the joy of life, Mother – no-one knows much about that here at home. I never feel it here.

The word used in the original Dano-Norwegian is livsglad, a compound word, meaning (as, once again, the notes tell me) “happy in life” or “enjoying life”. I suspect that the power of this compound word is diminished when unpacked into the somewhat weak and prosaic “joy of life”. There is, I think, no way around this: in Bengali, too, it is permissible (as it isn’t in English) to create compound words in this manner, and the poetic or dramatic force comes from the often unexpected juxtaposition of the words that are welded together; translated into speakable English, something of this power is inevitably lost. And I suspect it is similar when translating from Dano-Norwegian. But, once introduced, livsglad becomes a major motif in this play. What Ibsen presents here is not a lachrymose wallow in the misery that is life, but, rather, a yearning for livsglad that seems ever beyond our reach, and a barely suppressed anger that this should be so.

Not that there aren’t thematic continuities from Ibsen’s previous play, A Doll’s House. It has often been pointed out, for instance, that while A Doll’s House presents a woman who walks out on her husband, Ghosts presents the tragedy of a woman who didn’t. This is true enough, but this neat pattern doesn’t really take us very far, as the marriage between Nora and Torvald is very different from that of the Alvings, and the reason Nora walks out is very different from the reason Mrs Alving had, in the past, nearly walked out. If we are to focus too intently on the thematic continuities between these last twelve plays (which Ibsen himself, towards the end  of his life, referred to as a “cycle”), there is a danger, perhaps, that we fail to see each of these plays as individual entities, and that we miss out on the new themes that Ibsen introduces in each. Yes, there is a thematic continuity in that Nora had refused, Brand-like, to continue living with lies, while Mrs Alving had been persuaded to continue doing so. But what takes centre-stage now are those lies themselves, those gengangere, that do not remain suppressed, that return to poison our lives, and destroy us. Indeed, these gengangere had never really gone away in the first place. And the livsglad that is crushed by them is more than merely “joy of life”: it is, rather, an elemental power that we are born with, that should make life beautiful, but which, when crushed, turns into its very opposite, so that even the rising of the sun brings with it pain and horror.

We do not see the marriage of the Alvings: Captain Alving, when the play opens, has long been dead. But the exposition here is more than merely communicating to the audience the events of the past so that the present drama may be understood: the exposition here is an examination of the past, and much of the present drama consists of the characters re-evaluating it, and coming to a new understanding. Thus, even as late as the final act, we see the characters revisiting the past, and understanding it in a different way.

Captain Alving had been one of the “pillars of society” Ibsen had written about in an earlier play, the very image of civic respectability, but, as with those pillars, there was moral rottenness inside. For, in this instance, this exemplar of respectability had been in reality a lecherous and dissipated sybarite. Mrs Alving had left him once, and had taken refuge in the house of Pastor Manders.  And there is more than enough in the dialogue of this play to indicate that, at the time, Mrs Alving and Pastor Manders had loved each other. But, while it is all too easy to play Pastor Manders as an outrageous hypocrite, he had had denied himself for the sake of the principles he sincerely believed in, and had persuaded Mrs Alving to return to her rightful husband. For Pastor Manders does not believe that humans were created to be happy:

It is the mark of a rebellious spirit to demand happiness here in life. What right do we mortals have to happiness? No, we must do our duty, madam! And your duty was to hold firmly to the man you’d once chosen, and to whom you were tied by holy bonds.

Duty. Duty not with happiness, or livsglad, as the end, but duty for its own sake, duty as its own end. And, far from being a hypocrite, Pastor Manders sincerely believes this: he lives by this, and for this. However, Captain Alving had not, as Manders had thought, reformed after his wife’s return: he remained as dissipated as ever, and Mrs Alving had been compelled, for the sake of the family’s good name and standing in society, to live a lie. And she knows the toll it has taken:

But I almost believe we are ghosts, all of us … It’s not just the things we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that return in us. It’s all kinds of old dead opinions and all kind of old dead doctrines … They aren’t alive in us; but they are lodged there all the same, and we can never be rid of them. I have only to pick up a newspaper and read it, and it’s as though I see ghosts living throughout the entire land.

Mrs Alving has suffered because she had submitted to the conventions of society that had demanded she continue with her farce of a marriage. She had realised that the convention that had condemned her to this was wrong, and this realisation leads her on to further realisations:

Yes, when you forced me to submit to what you called my duty and obligation; when you extolled as right and proper what my whole soul rebelled against as an abomination. That was when I began to examine the stitching that held your teachings together.  Only wanted to unpick a single knot, but the instant I had loosened that, the whole thing fell apart. And then I realised it was machine sewn.

And yet, she has to go on living with these ideas, these values, that she knows destroy all the Joy of Life. The past that lives with us, in us, those dead ideas that we cannot shed off … ghosts, gengangere.

Mrs Alving had been determined there must be, for the next generation at least, a complete break from the past – that her son should inherit nothing from his father. She had sent him away from home at an early age, so he would ever find out what his father had been like. And all the wealth that had come from his father’s side, she had used to open an orphanage, to ensure that none of it ever comes to her son – that her son should be free, in all respects, from all his father had been. And as she had lived a life of lies while her husband had been alive, she continues, for form’s sake, to perpetuate lies about him after his death, preserving his public image as a man of irreproachable moral integrity, while herself burning with resentment inside at the very lie she is perpetuating.

However, despite all her efforts, the Past continues to live within her son Osvald in a most terrible way: he has inherited his father’s syphilis – a terrible incurable disease that, in the context of the play, is both symbolic of the Gengangere of the title – that which walks again – and also terrifyingly real. Medical science tells us that syphilis is not something that could be passed directly from father to son, but before we rush to condemn Ibsen for getting his facts wrong, we should consider an even more terrifying possibility. Michael Meyer, in his introduction to his translation of the play, writes:

 In view of the oft-repeated complaint that syphilis cannot be inherited from one’s father, it is worth pointing out that it can be inherited from one’s mother, and that a woman can have syphilis without realizing it or suffering any particular discomfort. In other words, and this is a far more frightening explanation of Oswald’s illness than the usual one, Mrs Alving could have caught syphilis from her husband and passed it on  to her son. Dr Jonathan Miller has pointed out to me that Oswald could also have been infected by smoking his father’s pipe. Ibsen knew more about medicine than some of his critics.

The fruits of sin (as syphilis was then regarded), as well as having afflicted the father, afflicts the son also; the inheritance is metaphorical, and also very real. Osvald’s brain is weakening: he knows that after the next attack, he will remain utterly incapable – alive, but with a brain that is, effectively, dead. He who had in him that yearning for livsglad, that unbounded joy in the simple fact of just being alive, finds himself saying to his mother:

I didn’t ask for life! What kind of life is it you’ve given me? I don’t want it!

But he is not the first for whom the delight in living has turned into its very opposite. When, at the start of the play, Pastor Manders had referred unthinkingly to Captain Alving being “full of the joys of life”, he was simply and unthinkingly using an expression, without considering what it really meant. Since then, we have had a picture of Alving that is very far removed from the joys of life: he enjoyed merely life’s debauched pleasures. But, in an extraordinary passage towards the end of the play, Mrs Alving sees her dead husband, and, consequently, her own past, in a startlingly different light. Pastor Manders may have used the term unthinkingly when speaking of the late Captain Alving, but he had not really been mistaken:

MRS ALVING: You should have known your father when he was a young lieutenant. He was certainly filled with the joy of life!

OSVALD: Yes, I know.

MRS ALVING: It was like a sunny Sunday just looking at him. And such incredible energy and vitality he had!

OSVALD: And – ?

MRS ALVING: And then this joyous child – because he was a child back then, had to while his time away back here, in a middling-sized town that had no real joy to offer, only diversions. He was stuck here without any vocation in life, with nothing but a civil service appointment … Without one single friend capable of feeling what the joy of life might be; only layabouts and drinking companions …

The man she had, for most of her life, hated and despised now appears to her as someone whose natural exuberance and joy had, for lack of any outlet, festered, become corrupted. And she sees as well her own part in this:

MRS ALVING: Your poor father could never find any outlet for this excessive joy of life inside him. And I didn’t bring any Sunday sunshine into his home either.

OSVALD: Not even you?

MRS ALVING: They had taught me about duties and the like, things I have gone around believing in for so long. It always seemed to come down to duty – my duties and his duties and – I’m afraid I made this home unbearable for your poor father, Osvald.

As Pastor Manders may have said, why strive for joy, for happiness, in the first place? Duty, joyless duty, is what we are here for, and to think otherwise is to rebel against the Laws of God Himself. Pastor Manders’ ideas may be old and dead, but they remain with us, and they crush whatever delight, whatever joy, we may take in the very fact of living.

This theme introduced in this play of livsglad, that problematic compound word for which “joy of life” seems to me perhaps too weak a translation, returns again in later plays in the series, most notably, perhaps, in The Master Builder, in which, at a climactic point, Solness exclaims “I – who cannot live without joy!” It is the denial of this livsglad, and the terrible consequences of this denial, that seem to me to be at the centre of this darkest and most unremittingly bleak of all Ibsen’s plays. Throughout the play, there is a sense of terror that makes itself increasingly apparent as the drama progresses, till, by the end, it is right there on the surface.

Ghosts, after its premier in 1882, predictably, caused a huge scandal, even bigger than the one occasioned by Nora walking out on her husband and family at the end of A Doll’s House. Even years later, when Ibsen was a Grand Old Man of Letters rather than the enfant terrible, the then monarch of Norway, Oscar II, told Ibsen at some formal reception that he really shouldn’t have written Ghosts.  Ibsen had replied: “Your Majesty, I had to write Ghosts!” Unremitting as it is in its intensity, it bears throughout the marks of a play that had to be written.

Grappling with Ibsen

It was in the late ’80s, when I was in my 20s, that I developed a fascination with Ibsen. I think (although, with the passage of time, I cannot be certain on this point) it was a couple of BBC broadcasts that set off my passion – Little Eyolf, with Diana Rigg and Antony Hopkins, and The Master Builder, with Leo McKern and Miranda Richardson. The plays puzzled me. I could sense a lot going on under the surface; I could sense powerful undercurrents, of the presence of mysterious, irresistible forces; but the precise nature of these undercurrents, of these forces, eluded me. Possibly they elude me still, even after all these years of reading and re-reading, of seeing various productions. For all Ibsen’s reputation as a depicter of the bourgeois and creator of firm solidities; as one who had his finger firmly on the pulse of society and who pointed out and excoriated its various hypocrisies; Ibsen seemed to me, and seems to me still, to be looking beyond all that: he seemed to me to be plumbing mysterious depths, and exploring hidden recesses, of the human mind. Not that the social themes did not exist, of course, but these were not what fascinated me so. But what did fascinate me I found hard to articulate. I think I still do.

It is perhaps for this reason that I have generally kept away from Ibsen on my blog, but if the point of my writing this blog is for me to talk about what interests me most, and what I love best, then I really have to tackle Ibsen here some time. If only so that I can say, as Hilary famously said after conquering Everest, that I’ve “knocked the bastard off”.

I doubt whether here is any other writer of comparable stature whose literary career had so slow a start. Ibsen’s first play, Catiline, was written in 1850, and nine more plays followed in the next fifteen or so years; but had he written nothing other than these plays, it is doubtful whether he would have been remembered at all. Not that some of them do not show flashes of what was to come: The Vikings at Helgeland, especially, clearly foreshadows the later Hedda Gabler. But it’s fair to say that stodgy historical melodramas, with such creaking plot devices as overheard conversations and intercepted letters and so on, are not really to modern taste.

Ibsen himself seemed to tire of all this. Love’s Comedy, written in 1862, seemed a very conscious departure: forsaking historic romance and melodrama, Ibsen set this play in contemporary times, and wrote the whole thing in rhymed verse, rich in poetic imagery; and its principal theme – which, predictably, scandalised contemporary audiences – was the barriers set in the way of human love when institutionalised as marriage. It’s a fascinating work in many respects, but, I must admit, not one I find particularly dramatic: how much I should blame translations for this I am not entirely sure, but I do get the feeling that Ibsen was branching out into new and unexplored territory, and it shouldn’t really be too surprising if there are some shortcomings.

Ibsen turned back to historic drama again with his next play, The Pretenders, an epic work that seems to me quite clearly a great advance on his earlier historic plays. Although, even here, it must be admitted that, compared to something such as, say, Danton’s Death, written by Georg Büchner some thirty years earlier, it can seem a bit leaden.

It was at this time something remarkable happened. A government grant, for which he had applied a year earlier, freed him from the responsibility of having to write specifically for the theatre; and Ibsen left Norway for Italy (he remained an exile from Norway for the next 27 years). And here, in the southern Mediterranean climes, he wrote a verse play set in the mountains and the fjords of the home country he had turned his back on. This play – the first of his two plays written specifically to be read rather than to be performed – was Brand, and I don’t think even the finest of his earlier works could have prepared anyone for the immense stature of this: it was as if the freedom not to write for the stage had freed his imagination also.

However, the verse, even in translation, is vividly dramatic. The whole work is far too long for a single evening’s performance, but the dramatic seemed to be such an inexorable feature of Ibsen’s imagination that, even when cut down for performance, and even in translation, it holds the stage triumphantly. Here, with bold dramatic strokes, Ibsen depicts a dramatic world that is perhaps best described as “mythic” – scenes, situations, and characters of immense power, resonating in our minds as insistently as the most potent of ancient myths.

Its title character, Brand, is a preacher whose stern, unbending search for truth, the absolute truth, and his refusal to accept compromise, inflicts cruelties not only upon his flock, but also upon those he loves most, and even upon himself. It is a theme that haunts Ibsen’s work: the truth. We may all acknowledge its importance: we always have done. Tell the truth and let all else go hang. But all else can’t go hang: Ibsen was fascinated by the extent to which humans can accept the truth – the extent to which they can acknowledge it, or even, perhaps, recognise it. In the magnificent final scene of Brand, Brand, rejected by his flock, is led into a mountain crevice covered above by ice – the “ice church”. The truth is indeed holy, but it is also cold. Can humans inhabit such an ice church?

Peer Gynt appeared the very next year, 1867. As far as I have read, this, and Brand, are – for me at any rate – the last great plays in verse (although, I suppose, a case can be made for the verse plays of T. S. Eliot). In many ways, Peer Gynt is the antithesis of Brand: if Brand is unbending, Peer is only too happy to bend in whichever direction the wind blows, evading his responsibilities, compromising his morals (which he possibly never had much of to begin with), until, by the end, he is no more than an onion – layer upon accumulated layer, with no real core. If in Brand Ibsen had invented his own mythology, here, in a troll-haunted world, he invents his own folklore; and such is the reach of this astounding work – again, not written specifically for the theatre, but which works splendidly on stage even in cut-down versions – that he seems to me to anticipate virtually all the dramatic innovations of twentieth century theatre: I once saw a production of Peer Gynt by the Berliner Ensemble, directed by Peter Zadek, and, true to their Brechtian roots, they presented it in the mould of Brechtian Epic Theatre: it worked beautifully. There are also elements in this play that seem to me also to anticipate Strindberg’s dream plays, or the Theatre of the Absurd. It is an audacious achievement.

After scaling these heights of poetic drama, Ibsen seemed to turn his back on poetry. But first came a curious anomaly – Emperor and Galilean, a two-part epic drama, filled with the bizarre and the opulent and the exotic. I have read this a few times, but have failed to make sense of it, and to see where exactly in Ibsen’s work it fits. It seems like nothing Ibsen had written before or after, either stylistically or thematically. It is tempting to think that Ibsen took a wrong turn with this one, but it shouldn’t really be dismissed so glibly: he collected material for this play for over four years, and spent another two years writing it; and what’s more, he averred it to be his finest work. It is all very mysterious. I sometimes think this is Ibsen’s equivalent of Flaubert’s Salammbô – something he had to get out of his system as an outlet before he could focus on more everyday matters. But I may well be wrong. I re-read this recently, and I was, once again, very puzzled.

There was also a comedy – yes, Ibsen did write comedies – The League of Youth, which is, to be frank, an enjoyable but comparatively slight affair. And then followed the twelve prose plays that critic Brian Johnston refers to as “The Ibsen Cycle”- plays set not in the world of the mythic, or of folklore, but in the everyday world, with characters from ordinary walks of life, speaking, naturalistically, in prose. But appearances can be deceptive. While the earlier plays in this cycle certainly seem to focus on social issues, even here, it seems to me, the undercurrents run deep. And these undercurrents become more apparent on the surface as the cycle progresses, the poetic imagery becomes ever denser and ever more resonant, until, in the last play, When We Dead Reawaken, though written in prose, we seem to be back again in the poetic world of Brand and of Peer Gynt. The adjective “visionary” does not seem misapplied.

***

Perhaps it’s the literature of the mid- to late- 19^th century that attracts me most. Not exclusively: I love my Shakespeare, of course, and the Romantic poets; I have a keen interest in Greek tragedies, am entranced by Don Quixote, and so on; and I love also a great many of the achievements of modernism – Ulysses, The Four Quartets, etc. And inevitably, given my Bengali background, Tagore is important to me – I don’t have a choice on that one. But it’s perhaps the mid- to late- 19^th century that I keep going back to most, for reasons I haven’t frankly bothered to analyse. And the literary figures of that era who are most important to me, who are, as it were, permanent residents of my mind (such as it is), are, I think, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Hopkins, and, most certainly, Ibsen. But I have never really understood why Ibsen exerts so powerful a hold on my imagination. So I am planning, over the course of this year, to read Ibsen’s major works – by which I mean Brand and Peer Gynt, and the twelve prose plays beginning with The Pillars of Society and ending with When We Dead Awaken – and to write here some unstructured personal musings. (I’ll give Emperor and Galilean a miss: it may well be a major work, but if I try to write about something I really don’t understand, I’m afraid I’ll end up just making an arse of myself.)

As ever, these posts will not be analyses, and certainly not “reviews”, but merely some reflections on what these works mean to me. I shall, in short, be talking to myself. But I’ll be talking out loud, so do please drop in to listen, if you feel like it; and, as ever, feel free to add your own thoughts, and let me know if you disagree. It’ll all help me sort out my own thoughts on this most fascinating of writers.