Henrik Ibsen: Mennesket og Kunstneren by Daniel Haakonsen (review)

450 Book Reviews Chambers's first point, regarding what might be tenned the illocutionary intensity of dramatic discourse, is confinned here by Jeannette Laillou Savona - who suggests the application of Searle's celebrated taxonomy of illocutionary acts to the classification of modes ofdiscourse in the drama - and by Patrice Pavis in his richly detailed analysis of communicative acts in a fragment ofComeille's Le Cid. It must be said. however, thatPavis 's application apart- the proposals remain rather schematic and programmatic, and represent little advance on the well-known work of Richard Ohmann and Alessandr Serpieri (neither of whom is cited) in precisely this direction. Indeed, one might ask, somewhat unkindly. what kind of speech act is represented by the reiteration of well-established principles in the guise of fresh proposals? And as for Chambers's theatrical "perforrnative," which bears a close family resemblance to Searle's suggestion that the written text should be seen as encoding an invitation to the actor to perform it, it is far from clear whether the speech-act framework is appropriate to the description of what is, in effect, a conventional law ofdramatic representation tout court (the spectator's competence as such comprises, among other factors, his willingness and ability to interpret the spectacle as a form of encoded narrative) rather than a particular act performed ex novo with every performance. Such doubts have to do with the precise descriptive and heuristic value in this field of criteria developed within a quite different universe of discourse and with reference to a set of philosophical (and not textual) problems. If the "pragmatics" of the drama limits itself to the annotation and classification of direct and indirect illocutions, implicatures and the rest, it risks leading to the tautological conclusion that dramatic dialogue is simply one among many forms of discourse more or less subject to the same types of semantic and contextual constraints. In order to move beyond such a position to anything resembling textual and critical analysis, it seems to me that three closely related questions need to be explored: I Is the iUocutionary level of the dialogue always and uniformly dominant in the drama: are there not, that is, other strata of linguistic activities or other modes of language-games (especially global. supraillocutionary kinds) that define what is really going on in certain exchanges or speeches, particularly in rhetorically rich and multilevelled plays? 2 What is the relationship between the verbal (illocutionary) interaction and the other levels of proairesis in the drama (fabula and plot)? 3 What is it that ties single speech acts or sequences thereof into a coherent textual structure? These questions concern, in a word, the rhetoric of the drama, a rhetoric that might very plausibly be refounded in pragmatic terms, but only if the borrowed models were duly adapted to the peculiar textual and proairetic laws of dramatic discourse. KElR ELAM, UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE DANJEL HAAKONSEN . Henrik Ibsell: Mennesket og KUlls/neren. Oslo: H. Ascheboug & Co. (W. Nygaard) !98!. pp. 335. illustrated. Professor Haakonsen of the University of Oslo has devoted a lifetime to the study of Ibsen, on whom he has written many specialized articles and two books. We can now be Book Reviews 451 grateful that at last he has given us a profoundly thoughtful overview ofIbsen's life and work, delivered in graceful, unpedantic Norwegian prose. To say that the text unfolds Ibsen's life and art in chronological order would be a paJe statement of the truth. Each biographical and literary event is so imaginatively grasped and vividly projected that Ibsen's private and artistic life becomes both absorbing io itselfand a vital part of the whole "speaking picture" which is the book. The text speaks not only through itselfbut through pictures, some 450 ofthem! Some are associated with Ibsen and his characters, from the island of Ischia (where he began Peer Gym) to Gjenden Edge in the lotunheim (where Peer "rode" the buck), from St. Peter's Basilica (where, as he wrote to Bj~rnson. he conceived the idea for the dramatic fann of Brand) to strange figures emerging from marble by Michelangelo and Rodin (figures with which Haakonsen associates the later work ofArnold Rubek). We...