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Book Reviews then he'll put in a color. In tenns of structure, he'll have very dark scenes and then a bright one or all gray, and then a bright color. It's all very figured out. The work is increasingly about technique. ... He should do something at Disney World with robots. (My ilalics.) Comparably, Sheryl Sutton, the actress who peeled the two hour onion, suggests' 'the emblem of Wilson's theatre might be the onion: layer upon layer but no core." To be · sure, no theatre of essence in evidence here. The name La lalla for the stunning and nearly magical town in Southern California connotatively translates to the hollow jewel, The idiom applies to Wilson's work. Nonetheless, Shyer masterfully polishes the jewel. EILEEN FISHER, NEW YORK CITY TECHNICAL COLLEGE OF CUNY BRIAN JOHNSTON. Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama. The Pennsylvania State University Press 1989. pp. 299· $28.15 (U.S.). Brian Johnston's new book on Ibsen is a challenge to read. Ibsen is put in relationship with the cosmos and is not found wanting! And yet at the same time as Johnston works easily within larger structures, ·he also has a keen eye for detail. His analyses of individual dramatic texts are always thought-provoking and often convincing. Anyone reading this book after Johnston's earlier two (The Ibsen Cycle and To the Third Empire) will not be surprised to find him again using Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind and Phenomenology of Spirit as keys to the larger structures he sees in Ibsen's work. Johnston sees Ibsen " whole," as Ibsen wanted to be seen. But Johnston also sees him "steadily," and when Johnston looks steadily at a dramatic text, the vision can become very exciting indeed. If we include the "Preface," the book is conveniently divided in half: five chapters of theory and the larger vision ("whole' ') and five chapters in which individual plays are looked at ("steadily"). These five plays are Pillar of Society. A Doll House. An Enemyo/the People. The Lady/rom the Sea and]o"n Gabriel Barkman. Johnston begins by summarily disposing of his critical opponents without always giving them a fair show. Hennann J. Weigand's Modern Ibsen, surely one of the classics of Ibsen criticism, is reduced to a narrow psychoanalytical study welcomed by "every timidly circumscribed self" (p. I). But surely Ibsen's characters did have psyches as well as hearts, souls, and minds, and deep psychological structures can exist in plays quite as much as deep mythological structures. Each alone could be limiting, but concern for the psychological dimension ofcharacter is certainly nOl limiting when taken together with (in Johnston's own words) "imagery ... range of reference ... cultural and historical reverberation ... aesthetic nature as scripts written for theatrical perfonnance before the European public of the nineteenth century" (p. 2). Book Reviews "Modem lbsenists ... tend to be academics," who want "to demonstrate that Ibsen shares their reasonable, responsible, conformist though 'ambiguous' - a key value term - attitude (the sensibility of a fallen spirit),· (p. 2). I am not quite sure just who these "fallen spirits" are. Perhaps I am one of them. Non-academics, presumably like Johnston himself, are better. They see Ibsen as a revolutionary, « like Jean Genet in our own day" (p. 2). Apparently, however. "they [the non-academics] possess the intellectual language to describe his art" (p. 2). At least Brian Johnston does! What about his own language? Much of the time it is brilliant; sometimes it is fervently prophetic. Not since O. Wilson Knight has such a voice been heard in our land. The kerygma must be proclaimed and must be believed. Faith is called for. Examples are everywhere: Only within the world of art are we able to escape the limitations of the alienated reality we have constructed around ourselves. The end of human endeavor, however. is not art but heroic individualism, and the heroes of the past serve to remind us of heroic possibilities within a new form of humanity: an idea closely resembling Henrik Ibsen's " third empire of the spirit." (p. 48) To this we can only assent or dissent. (f we are moved to assent, it...

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