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BOOK REVIEWS HENRIK IBSEN, by G. Wilson Knight, Grove Press, Inc. (Evergreen Pilot Books), New York, l1P1, 119 pp. Price $.95. G. Wilson Knight approaches Ibsen in substantially the same way he approaches Shakespeare. By weaving a fabric of countless quotations from the plays, he attempts primarily to reconstruct Ibsen's vision rather than to judge it. What emerges most clearly from his examination are Ibsen's dominant themes. Knight sees Ibsen's "emphasis on vocation, on the instinctive will, forcing persons to selfrealization ." He sees what, for Ibsen, the struggle for self-realization is: a struggle against "convention, hypocrisy, sexual passion, marriages of expedience, a corrupt press, and vested interests; and, hardest of all, the past, either of society or of oneself, which may involve guilt and hamper freedom." Each of Ibsen's plays deals centrally with the protagonist's searCh for (or avoidance of) his own destiny, which is to find and realize himself. What Knight sees beyond this quest itself and the specific obstacles to its fulfillment is the grandeur with which Ibsen envisioned that fulfillment. The man who achieved self-realization was of the race of new supermen, a genius whose full destiny, in Knight's words, "will be to surpass art, strive for a wholeness including love, touch the occult, and challenge death." To Ibsen, self-realization was the only way of resolving the great "discords of human nature and human society." It was the means for attaining "his dream of a new nobility." Knight points clearly to Ibsen's themes but not always to the artistic means by which Ibsen transforms them into dramatic substance. In fact, Knight unfortunately often seems more interested in explaining and evaluating Ibsen's themes than his art. He spends as much time on Emperor and Galilean as he does on Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and Hedda Gabler combined; as much time, that is, on one ponderous, thematically stuffed work as on four much more artistically conceived and executed works combined. He spends almost as much time again on Lady from the Sea and Little Eyolf, even though he feels that "on these two occasions Ibsen steps outside his main sequence, subjecting his dramatic interests to metaphysical enquiry." His heavy emphasis on themes leads one to suspect that he sees these two plays as "profoundly conceived dramas" more because they are "metaphYSical" enquiries than because they are dramas. By concentrating too much on Ibsen's main ideas, Knight tends to see in the later plays what often amounts to a mere repetition of early themes. He sees a Hedda Gabler, for example, who is merely a modern reincarnation of the Dionysian heroines of Ibsen's early plays. Missing the qualifications produced by the modern context, Knight believes that Hedda Gabler turns defeat into victory, for "in death Hedda succeeds where Lovborg failed." How consistent with this heavy thematic emphasis it is to say that "in recalling Lovborg from literary brilliance to drink Hedda may be seen as drawing him from a limited intellectual achievement to all the fiery vitalities devined by Shakespeare in Falstaff's speech on sherris sack." More serious, since Knight takes no pains to judge or examine Ibsen's techniques closely, he tends to interpret all of Ibsen's plays on a rather literal, realistic level. He sees Brand, for example, as unsuccessful because he is not kind to his dying mother, his wife, child, or community; like Shaw, Knight disapproves of Brand because his ideals at first seem to leave no room for love and lead to destructive 466 1965 BooK. REVIEWS 467 consequences. Peer Gynt, on the other hand, seems to Knight successful because be is kind to .his dying mother and is consistently true to his code of cowardice. By ignoring techniques, Knight fails to realize that Ibsen constantly shifts between allegory and realism in Brand; he cannot conceive the idea that Ibsen means Brand to be symbolically" heroic and victorious while literally and realistically defeated. Similarly, since he misses the sharply satiric techniques of Peer Gynt, he does not recognize the implicit satire of Peer, his escapism, even in the death scene with his mother. In assuming that Ibsen is essentially...

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