The Clever Dog and the Problematic Hare

NOTES The Clever Dog and the Problematic Hare JOHN H. ASTINGTON Gregers Werle, said Mary McCarthy, "preaches mysteries," mysteries which Ibsen himself had picked up from European intellectual and cultural traditions without a thorough consciousness of having done so.' McCarthy articulates something of a modem audience's impatience with what she calls the "catechism" between Hedvig and her mother on Gregers's meaning "something else" at the close of the second act of The Wild Duck, but perhaps one of Ibsen's concerns was to emphasize Hedvig's surprise at meeting someone who interprets the world so thoroughly - and so frighteningly - in symbolic lenns. Much of the symbolizing in The Wild Duck is ludicrous, and Ibsen mocks it by pointing up the inappropriate match between the actual world and the cliches which are drawn from it: Gregers's cry for more light met by Gina's removing the shade from the lamp, or Hjalmar's pieties about his white-haired father who is, in fact, bald and who wears a toupee. But the centre of the symbolizing is the eponymous duck which we never get to see for ourselves, as we do not see the interior of the attic, other than by:glimpses. Hedvig cares for the duck, although perhaps not quite as much as the sentimentalists around her assume that she does, but she has never really read it symbolically and continues to resist doing so, with fatal results. What excites her symbolically is reading in the everyday sense - Gina's sense - of that term: looking at books. The attic is also a home for lame books: useless - most of them are in English - and yet wonderful - they are full of pictures. And the picture she describes in most detail - "of Death with an hour glass, and a girl," which she thinks "awful" (III, 159)' - is a premonition of her fate, a more subtle "sort of road sign," in McCarthy's terms. When they hear this line the audience will think of the various examples of the "Death and the Maiden" images that they may know, whether in Renaissance prints or in nineteenthcentury revivals of the motif. They can't see Hedvig's picture but they have Modem Drama, 36 (1993) 578 The Clever Dog and the Problematic Hare 579 their own mental versions of it, and they also have a shared image, though they may not quite recognize it for what it is. The motif of the mysterious, challenging, ugly stranger claiming the virginal girl is embodied on stage before them. Hedvig's shock and unease at seeing the picture is matched by her encounter with Gregers. Or at least ·she recognizes that there is something about the way Gregers conducts himself that excites her and disturbs her in some manner that overlaps with her excitement and disturbance over the books and pictures: he seems to mean things in a similar way. The picture that has given Hedvig the pleasurable horrors is a venerable European emblem signifying the frailty of human beauty and the vanity of human desire; the other old books the Ekdals have inherited may contain similar symbolic images. What is remarkable about Gregers's application of the story of the retriever which has brought back the duck from under the water is that it too revives a traditional emblematic interpretation of the hunt. It seems unlikely that Ibsen knew the tradition directly, and therefore unlikely that he meant Gregers to be invoking a graphic image when he speaks of the "clever dog," but its metaphorical descendants live on in his words, and in the force of Hedvig's reaction to them. In an unpublished paper Karl Josef Holtgen has recently redirected attention to a woodcut print which first appeared early in the sixteenth century, as pan of a series which illustrate Gregor Reisch's Margarita Philosopizica, a sort of encyclopaedia of human knowledge that was much used in schools and universities, and: went through many editions.' The picture of the personified female figure of logic, "Typus Logice," has conceived of her as a huntress tracking down garne: human mental power pursuing solutions to difficulties. She is not duck shooting, but tracking a hare, labelled "Problema...