Ibsen—A Dissenting View by Ronald Gray (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 321 "thematise" the nonsensical position of man as analysed by Sartre and Camus. For those, the label is appropriate. because their thematic concern is "absurdity ", But the epithet becomes inadequate, even absurd, if the existentialist reference is lost, and "the theatre of the absurd" is just an easy category for all plays that use dramatic elements in a different way from preceding dramatic genres. Professor Goetsch does not give an American representative of absurdist drama. and he is right to break with the nonsensical pigeon-holing of Albee as one. There are good reasons to suppose that the English representatives he lists are not real absurdists either. If Who's Afraid is a realist drama for Professor Goetsch, one has difficulty in seeing why The Homecoming is not. Interestingly, one of the very few English plays that would stand up to Ionesco-like absurd farce, Saunder's Alas Poor Fred, does not get a single mention. The notable exception with regard to the English so-called absurdists is, probably, Beckett; but then he is Irish, or counts as French, for that matter. RUDIGER IMHOF University of Wuppertal, Germany mSEN - A DISSENTING VIEW. by Ronald Gray, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977. 231 pp. £7.50. This is a thoroughly unsatisfactory book to which the best response might seem, initially, to be silence. It is written, however, by a scholar whose eminence in other fields gives an air of unwarrantable authority to judgements on Ibsen so wrongheaded and unimaginative as to necessitate refutation. No intelligent Ibsen critic- and there are many more of them (both "pro" and "con") than the twenty-five whom Gray deigns to mention in his "list of works consulted"-wishes "bardolatry" to overtake Ibsen studies. Capricious carping about Ibsen is, however, equally undesirable, and there is therefore no good reason to allow Ronald Gray a free hand to administer posthumously the whipping that a member of the Norwegian government advocated for Ibsen in 1863. Ibsen himself would be amused at the heroic light in which Gray sees himself taking anns against a BJllyg-like foe: "the juggernaut," Gray declares, referring to the world-wide critical appraisal of Ibsen as a dramatic poet, "has been rolling for a good many years now, and is likely to go on by its own inertia indefinitely. Only deliberate effort wiJI reverse the movement." Such negative conviction is, not inappropriately, reminiscent of Thomas Rymer 's attack on Shakespeare, which was made at an interval after Shakespeare 's death of about the same length as that which separates Gray's onslaught from Ibsen's demise. Ultimately this "dissenting view" may prove as unintentionally useful to Ibsen criticism as Rymer's condemnations have in the appreciation of Shakespeare. In theory, as an eminent writer in English on major figures of modem European literature, Gray is well qualified to evaluate Ibsen and his critics. In practice, he confines himself to oversimplified (though lengthy and detailed) analyses of the later prose plays, and to praising a select few for damning Ibsen and damning a select few for praising him. But even at the level of accurate plot summary, Gray is deficient as is shown, for instance, by his mistaken assertion that Rhon Werle is indisputably the father of Hedvig Ekdal. The importance that is attached, at the beginning of Gray's diatribe, to 322 BOOK REVIEWS the fact that "Dr Leavis and his associates" omitted Ibsen from "their broadly comprehensive survey of the great European and American men of letters" is ominous. No qualms are felt about implying the complete objectivity of Scruliny; the mistaken claim is made that Yeats was as dismissive of Ibsen as Synge was; and Eliot's virtual silence on Ibsen is generously interpreted as wholly in Eliot's favour. Even so, most readers, whether deeply versed in Ibsen studies or not, will find Gray's treatment of Ibsen scholarship astonishing: most of the best North American, many of the British, and virtually all continental European commentators are utterly ignored. Only two Scandinavian critics are cited, and there is no mention whatever of Norwegian scholarship . The very possibility that intelligent Ibsen criticism might have originated elsewhere (as it has...