The Wild Duck; Ibsen and Illusionism in the Nineteenth Century
Gregers Werle returns to his home town.He seems still to be rather young,shall we say in his thirties ?He is an educated son of a successfull local businessman.He is the typical radical of the Scandinavian 1880’s.
He believes in the force of Truth.Truth is a force which shall set men free,not quite in the Pauline sense but in the sense of the French Enlightenment,and in the sense of the Scandinavian radicalism of the 1880s. Society is founded on unfounded beliefs,secret but strong conventions and mutual understandings which keep people from seeing themselves and their fellows in the true light of reality.They shall mobilize the courage to see themselves and their situation as they are and this knowledge will set them free.
As far as his idealism goes , Gregers Werle has very much in common with the protagonists in earlier Ibsen xx
So Ekdahl returns with the firm decision to clean up the veritable wasps nest of lies and concealed secrets which form the very social fabric of his past,and that of his parents,his home,and not the least of his friend from childhood,Hjalmar Ekdahl.And it is Hjalmar Ekdahl and his family who become the primary target of this idealistic zeal,with catastrophic consequences.
Instead of moving in at the house of his father ,the older Werle , Gregers rents a room in the much humbler dwelling of Hjalmar Ekdahl and his wife.
It is indeed a strange house.The attic has been turned into a sort of fake forest,with barren pines ,a few wild rabbits and a duck who is a survivor from an unsuccesful hunt.Severly wounded by a gunshot which has left it a cripple who cannot any longer fly ,saved by a retrieving dog from the bottom of a lake,it lives in the attic,the object of the loving care of Hedvig,the Ekdahl daughter.
But this is not the only function of the attic; to hold a crippled duck.This is where old lieutenant Ekdahl ,a former outdoor man and renowned bear hunter now goes hunting rabbits with his handgun,an arm which quite in line with Checkovs famous advice to dramatists ,will play a decisive role in the last act.Hedvig,Ekdahls daughter ,deprived of his fathers love when it has become clear to him that she is not really his daughter but the result of old mr Werles illegitimate relationship to her mother,when still serving in the Werles house,will,use it intentionally or nonintentionally,to kill herself.
There has been much talk about Ibsen’ s ”retrospective technique” – his extremely effective use of present dialogue to reveal a poignant past,not so different from one of the great popular forms of his period ,the detective riddle. Clearly The Wild Duck is the Ibsen play where this dramatic technique is driven to its highest effectivity.
Almost every detail is a prefiguration,a trace of something which later in the action will prove pignant with significance.E.G.Hardly have we been introduced to Hjalmar Ekdahls teenage daughter Hedvig,when we are told that she has en eye disease which is threatening in the futurre to turn into blindness.
But this is what we soon will know about old Mr Werle – he is also threatenede by a hereditary eye disease.In other words we have been given a very early hint that Hedvig is not Hjalmars but the older Werles daughter.
Indeed,in this drama the past is throwing its long shadows over the present ,pregnant with secrets which only wait to be revealed;Hjalmar Ekdahl believes that he is the father of his child,that he is a photographer and a bread-winner and not only that: in secret he is working on an invention which is supposed to bring him wealth and glory.
In reality Hedvig is not his daughter,Hjalmars father the old lieutenant,has served time in prison because of his involvment in the elder Werles criminal manipulations of foresting.The family does not live from the small photographic business but from the support it is still receiving from the older Werle.And Hjalmar Ekdahls activity a an inventor is limited to subscribing on technical journals,over which he tends to fall asleep even before he has found the time to cut them up.
It is all built on illusions.Gregers Werle , does not hesitate to disguise the secrets ,to reveal,to put an end to the life-lies.
”The Wild Duck” at its appearence in 1884,was not well received. The Norwegian critics as well as the Swedish ones,expressed moral indignation. Even Ibsens habitual admirers were confused. It was not so much that it represents some highly excentric people and what in our days would be called a dysfunctional family.It was rather that the drama seemed awkwardly to imply that everybody lives with the help of a dense fabric of illusions and lies and only can live that way.
The drama is a turning point,in Ibsen’s developement,but - in a wider perspecive - it is the point where the radical movement in Scandinavian literature implodes.Darwinistically colored optimism and brave atheism turn into pessimism,decadence,symbolism.
There is a quite long step between a naturalist psychological drama like August Strindbergs ”Miss Julie” and his ”Dream Play”.And – indeed – the step from Ibsens social dramas ,e.g. ”A Dolls House” to ”The Wild Duck” is not shorter.
What is new in The Wild Duck is that Ibsen ,for the first time, explicitly poses the question whether not the illusion is a necessary condition for life ,which means a radical change in his moral orientation.
Henrik Ibsens ”The Wild Duck” came 1884.It is not only because of its relatively late date that it can be regarded as transitory to the dramatist s third,pessimistic and introvert period. third and last period. It shows a writer in deep hesitation about the validity of his own earlier positions.
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The disposition of physical space in Henrik Ibsens ”The Wild Duck” is very special and very characteristic. Everything takes place indoors and the only contact we have with the outdoors is through the different shades and intensities of light through the vindows.Most of the light is from artificial sources,candles and kerosene lamps,which seem to take on an important symbolic significance in the drama.
The rooms ,especially in the last four acts, are to a surprising extent rooms of which we only get a half-way glimpse.We have to guess them more or less.
There are strong elements of what should later be called symbolism in this stage architecture,foremost of course the attic where old Ekdahl is going hunting rabbits among barren old Christmas trees and where the wounded duck,saved from the lake bottom dwells with its water bucket,most symbolic of all the gadgets of the drama.
Actually you have to be a good director to convince us of the probability of this drama. Is it probable that an old bearhunter,even if he is crushed by his loss of social acceptance ,would go hunting on a dark attic ,killing rabbits with a handgun ? And what about the security of the rest of the family ? Should not an experienced hunbter know that you do not shoot if you do not have a back hold which can absorb a stray bullet.Actually Lieutenan Ekdahl would never have got a hunting licence in my home province,Västmanland.
But furter;is it probable that Hjalmar Ekdahl is able to go on living for years without observing that the economy of his household is entirely dependent on subsidies from the older Ekdahl,who is the biological father of his daughter ?
In spite of what is constantly written about his psychological realism Ibsen actually quite often invites us to accept psychologically impossible intrigues: A wife has borrowed money to help her housband to recover in a sanatory after a serious disease. The housband gets mad and refuses to see her.(A Dolls House).A gentleman has obviously aquired a luetic infection of the brain by visiting coffe houses in Paris. (Ghosts)
One is tempted to say that Ibsens real strength is not so much in psychological observation as in his talent to persuade us of the validity of his observations.And ob course –as he says himself – ”to set problems under debate”.
At a closer look”The Wild Duck” proves to combine very different elements. The form ,with acts and scenes developing in a chronologicl pattern, is fundamentally conventional. There is partial unity of time and space in the four last acts which makes the first one ,at old Werles house, look like a disturbance of symmetry. Compared to the dream aesthetic of Strindbergs Dream Play with its flexible space,expanding in a concentric pattern, Ibsens Wild Duck clearly belongs to an older generation of dramas.However,in its ambiguity and fundamental lack of realism it is rather a relative of Becketts ”Happy Days” and ,may be,still more obvious ,Jean-Paul Sartres ”No Exit”.
All the relevant events of the past ,which will prove to be decisive to the further dramatic developement are introduced through the dialogue which brings us quite close to classical drama,while the symbolist elements rather seem to bring us quite close to the domains of the theatre of the absurd.
In the last four acts we are close to the claustrophobia of Sartres piece ; people enclosed and interacting with each other in a game which does not seem to offer any definite ending.But here there is an ending,Hedvigs death,which still remains open-ended in the sense that we bever get to know ehether it was an accident or a suicide.One might feel tempted to compare with the death of MS Julie in Strindbergs drama with the same name,
On the surface of it,The Wild Duck has an obvious tragical ending with the accidental, or may be not so accidental, catastrophee when Hedvig shoots herself in the attic,where she has gone to bring the death of the duck as a last proof of her love to Hjalmar.
But is there really an end ? The cynical Dr Relling ,one of the two tenants of the house,doubts it.In a year,Hjalmar Ekdahl will have turned these events into rhetoric.Having lost one entire set of illusions – of himself,of his family life,of his daughter,of his vocation,he is already beginning to build a new web of what Ibsen calls ”livslögner” or ”life lies”.It is the moment in between the illsuions which is unbearable. Dr Relling seems to be right.
For Hjalmar Ekdahl there is not really any end within sight.Hed has to jump from illusion to illusion.And that is the core and essence of his life.
Destructive in his rigid insistence on transparency and truth, Gregers Werle,the idealist, is not really the most interesting person in the drama.The interesting one is Hjalmar Ekdahl.In his weakness,his inability to survive for a moment without his illusions,Ibsen has not merely meant to portray a weak character, subjected to tests which he is unable to stand .What we have in Hjamlar Ekdahl is more or less the portrait of a generation.
There is,in Scandinavian life,a distinct difference between the fairly free and open atmosphere of the public dialogue in the 1860ies,still in the aftermath of the year 1848 - on one hand - and the increasing orthodoxy and bigotry of the 1880s,in other words between the age of Carl XV Johan and the Oscarian age,as the era of King Oscar II is traditionally called in Sweden and Norway.In the sixties quite a measure of anticlericalism and respectless liberalism are accepted.In the 1880s it is possible for the clerical and political reaction in Denmark to force Georg Brandes away from his professorship at Copenhagens University,to prevent a state stipend to Alexander Kielland in Christiana and to start a process against August Strindberg in Stockholm. ”From where has the darkness come ? How has the putrifaction been able to attack the spirits to such a degree ?” These are questions,posed by August Strindberg in the aftermath of his blasphemy process in 1884.
The accelerating process which takes place in Western Europé around 1848 and only slightly later in Scandinavia and which is the cause of the revolutionary movements of that year ,becomes visible a little earlier in French literature than in the German or Scandinavian ones.We can observe it already in Gustave Flauberts ”Madame Bovary”.Emma Bovary becomes a victim not exclusively of her illusions,inspired by literature,her dream of the perfect and liberating erotic passion,but quite as much of economic forces.It has been observed that her human catastrophee fundamentally is an economic one. She is a victim not only of her own illusions but of the illusions of consumerism.
With the industrialisation,the railway building and – not the least – the radical chances in banking and credit systems which in their new inpersonality contrast against an older and more personlized business moral a new uncertainty enters social life.In the place of old types of contracts and agreements new ones like the stock corporation with limited liability arrive .The social contacts become less permanent and more fluctuating.As Marx and Engels observe in the famous introduction to the communist manifesto, hierarchies change,entire populations like the European immigrants in the US are uprooted from their original habitats, the social forms seem to dissolve into smoke.
The stranger about whom we do not quite really know whether he has come to rob us,to cheat us or to become our friend, poses a problem which we have to deal with.The con man from Balzacs novels and all the way to Tomas Manns ”Felix Krull” becomes a favored literary figure.Strangers about the intentions of whom we do not know very much enter into the place of well known faces and we have to establish ourselves among strangers.
It is striking to what extent unclear or problemativ economic situations,often instigated by unreliable advisors,helpers or loangivers play a decisive role in the later Ibsen dramas .It is the same uncertainty which a generation earlier becomes the ultimate catastrophic force in Flauberts novel.Even in the last dramas,which are often described as non-naturalist and symbolistic Ibsen is careful to construct a plausible set of economic conditions.xx
Protagonists get lost in their passions,but these passions would not become quite as catastrophic if it were not for the fundamental instabilities and dependencies In other words:the entire question whom we shall give our confidence enters into a new icecold light.
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It is exactly in this ice-cold light that Emma Bovary lives and dies. Like Don Quijote ,she is a victim of her imagination,of a heroic attempt to force the world to follow the prescriptions of literary imagination.But her end is of an entirely different sort.
While Don Quijote at the end of Cervante’s two volumes dies in relative peace,healed as if it were,from a disease , Emma Bovary has no way out.Her end is a chessmate.
It is a part of the dialectic of the period 1850 to 1890 that the new patterns of social relations and the upheaval in older virtues and contractual obligations lead to an increasing interest in stabilizing forces,foremost of these religion and religious moral.So,paradoxically the Scandinavian societies at the end of the century make the impression of being less tolerant,more hypocritic and more orthodox in moral and politics than att the midcentury.
The radical ideas of the Brandes generation are meeting an increasing resistance,and at the time of Ibsens ”Wild Duck” the whole movement seems to be on the retreat in all the Nordic countries.This retret often takes the form of introversion,elitism and exactly the pessimistic theme which we find in Ibsen s drama:life is not possible without illusions.
It has been said ,among others by Gunnar Ahlström in hismonumental study ,”Det moderna genombrottet i Nordens literatur” that a very important reason that the radical movements never became decisive was that the presumtive public was to small.The layer of freethinking,darwinist,liberal doctors and teachers which were supposed to carry the ideas to the point where they would be able to carry momentum was simply too thin.Very often we find this presumtive publich represented and portrayed inside the narratives.So is the case with Dr Borg ,an evolutionist and rationalist with strong elitarian tendencies ,whom we encounter in a number in quite a few of Strindbergs stories most significant as the protagonist in his most naturalist novel,”By the Open Sea”.The cynical Dr Relling, is another representative of this group of sceptical men with a background in the natural sciences who have to take on the role of the sceptic,the superior observer ,the detached interpreter of life and its conditions in so many narratives and dramas of the period.
The problem is only that these representatives of natural science,political radicalism and positivism in existential matters are much too few to form a solid public for the Nordic writers of the radical break-throigh.
To Dr Relling is given that famous sceptical last line in Act IV of ”The Wild Duck” so difficult to translate:
”Fan tro’t”,which a typical translator renders to the much to weak ”I wonder” but which literally means that not even the Devil could believe such a thing.
His previous line could be taken as a motto for the entire drama:
” Oh life would be tolerable enough,even so,if we could be rid of these intolerable duns who come to us poor people’s doors with their claim of the ideal.”
This is ,in nuce,the rejection of the entire program of the radical movement. Dr Relling’s terapeutic program is to let people keep their illsuions.The alternative would be unbearable.
An important contributing cause of the consternation,not to say the indignation with which the play was met in the mid-eighties is probably that in the end Hjalmar Ekdahl does not come out as an extremely weak personality but as a quite ordinary citizen with completely normal needs.
That is the schocking message which Dr Relling delivers at the end ;a diagnosis and at the same time the complete resignation from the educational ideals of the radical movement.
Optical metaphors play an important part in the drama.
Lamps and local lights ,the character of placement of which is described in detail im Ibsens stage instructions.The roof over Hjalmar Ekdahls photo laboratory is partly glass,covered på an inside curtain.Through the different scenes in the house the illumination is prescribed in detal,shifting between night and gray early morning.The possibilities of shifting illumination are supported by the process of retouching the photographs .We find Gina preoccupied with this work when we are permitted to look into the Ekdahl home.
The possibilities of the photograph and even its possibilities of illusionism play an important role in literature of the peiod,actually all the time from the first photographich pictures by the pioneers.The camera backwall ,a neural representative of the human eye and supposedly capable of an objective gaze at the objects is treacherous.Pictures can be processed.From an early stage the Photographic Journals are involved in lively discussions of the objectivity or lack of objectivity of the photographic picture. The great other Scandinavian dramatist developes a personal interest in the camera and performs a number of experiments,with double exposures and attempts to catch such vague phenomena as clouds.
”Den offentliga lögnen” or ”the Public lie” is a favorite expression in August Strindbergs polemical prose.The public lie in this sense is an untruthful conviction which nobody really believes but everybody pretends to believe.In other words ;the situation in H.C.Andersens fairy-tale ”The Emperor’s new Clothes”,where everybody sees that the Emperor is naked but nobody has the courage to admit it.
Perspectivism,illusionism,different attempts to relativize the generally accepted conventions and views of the world have actually been present in the European continental conceptual repertory for quite a time.The sociopolitical situation in eighties seem to set it free,referring to those geometrically distorted .Language is an anamorph,says Nietzsche in ”Human,All too Human”.In a much earlier essay ”On Truth and Deceit in Transmoral sense” (”Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinn”) the philosopher tries an interpretation of the human ability to lie where it stands out as the superior talent – from a darwinist perspective – as to the ability to stick to the truth.The essay is hardly consequent;it does never make it clear whether its subject is systematically misleading semantic systems or individual lies.However it is an interesting early contribution to an illusionism which at the end of the century should become an important part of conservative and extremely conservative political thinking.In political thinkers like Julien Sorel ,Barres and Maurras we find the doctrine of the useful myth as a precondition for social stability.Here,in the shadow of the Dreyfus Process,we are close to the roots of the modern rightist totalitarian movements.
We have come full circle from the the core ideas of 1848,and Ibsen’s drama can well be seen as the point in the ideological landscape where the tracks divide and go apart in two directions further and further from each other.
But here another story begins.
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Big fan of wild duck here too http://pearlcompany.ca/
Something New - 26 06 09 - 14:55
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