Ambiguity, Discontinuity and Overlapping in Peer Gynt

Ambiguity, Discontinuity and Overlapping in Peer Gynt ALICE N. BENSTON "Peer, you're lying!" From this famous first line we are given a characterization that invites us to view the play's hero negatively. But the speaker is Aase, Peer's mother, and her love for him is obvious from this first scene.This double or ambivalent reaction has been mirrored in the critical tradition. As Bernard Shaw puts it, " ... Peer Gynt, selfish rascal as he is, is not unlovable." In explaining this ambivalence, Shaw notes Peer's affinity to Don Quixote. Their common error is the pursuit of beautiful, seductive "ideals." But even in their failure to recognize the "real," Shaw adds, one cannot "despise [them] or wish [them] to have been ... Philistine[s]."1 Shaw's comparison of Peer to Don Quixote is continued by Brian Downs, whose overall distaste for Peer's character is expressed in his wonder that Peer had become "something in the nature of a national hero." Downs contents himself, finally, with the observation that comparable characters like "Don Quixote ... exhibit attributes by no means altogether consonant with perfection or palatable to the more discerning among their compatriots."2 Peer Gynt, in his view, "is the tragedy of a man who, however much of amor he may have, lacks principle and ignores ideals."3 The moral and social censor that is latent in Downs's comments is wittily explicit in Eric Bentley's characterization of Peer: "In his gay unscrupulous­ ness, his adventurous egoism, and his amiable immorality, Peer Gynt is the Don Quixote of free enterprise and should be the patron saint of the National Association of Manufacturers."4 Bentley goes on to judge the play as " ... perhaps Ibsen's greatest work, ... [but largely] experiment[al]."5 With this his discussion turns to the later, realistic plays, and we are left to guess at the source of Peer Gynt's greatness. The continuity of the tradition is illustrated in Richard Gilman's judgment that Peer, the "picaresque adventurer,"6 is the ALICE N. BENSTON baser part of man, and Peer's"refusal to commit himself to anything ... makes ... [him], despite his charm and vivacity (or perhaps because of them: seductiveness is an agency of corruption), material for the Button Molder, ... whose function is to melt down such anomalous souls into non-human substance."7 Even with the emergence of the existentialist view, usually specifically and appropriately Kierkegaardian, this trend continues. The best example of this approach is Rolf Fjelde's perceptive and suggestive analysis of the play.8 He reads it within the tradition of the great Western tragedies. Ibsen's genius, Fjelde contends, was to convert the traditional question of choice into the modern Kierkegaardian scheme. To avoid the repetition of pain and suffering one may either"strike out ... for a new contribution to the life of man. ... [or] ... accept despair ... [as] the potentiality of self-transcendence in other dimensions of existence." Peer does neither. "So, for the Gyntian perso.nality, the cycle must hold; and the effective function of fantasy ... is to throw just enough of a veil over repetition to persuade the self that no really fundamental change or effort is necessary."9 Hence, in Fjelde's judgment, Peer Gynt is a tragedy of "the nonheroic hero ... [as] the pilot model of the hollow man of our own time, rendered perplexed and anxious by problems of identity and direction. "10 Finally, Fjelde, too, compares Peer with Don Quixote as "a dreamer patching together the tatters of an outworn ideal, ... "" Thus the critics have responded to the power of the play but have been embarrassed or perplexed by Peer's obvious positive appeal. This ambivalent, double reaction is prompted by internal cues like the frrst line of the play, as well as by Ibsen's own statement that Brand represented the better part of himself, Peer the worse. Impelled by their own concern for a drama of social and political commitment, the critics have been uneasy with Peer Gynt, turning their attention to the "mature" plays that earned Ibsen the title of the "father of modern drama." What has not been recognized is that the very tension between a myth of...