Ibsen's Tragicomedy: The Wild Duck

Ibsen's Tragicomedy: The Wild Duck VERNA A. FOSTER Tragicomedy is an exceedingly slippery genre that can incorporate the tragic and the comic, the melodramatic and the farcical, the romantic and the satiric in a variety of combinations. It can boast antecedents in Euripidean, Terentian , and medieval drama and cognates in sentimental comedy, the drame (serious drama that is neither tragic nor comic), melodrama, savage farce, and so on. But the dramaturgical and emotional fusion of tragic and comic elements to create a distinguishable and theoretically significant new genre, tragicomedy, has developed only twice in the history of drama. Controversial in the Renaissance, tragicomedy has in modem times replaced tragedy itself as the most serious and moving of all dramatic kinds. In the modem age it is almost impossible to write tragedy, especially within the realistic convention, which emphasizes ordinary human beings from the middle or lower classes speaking unexalted language and possessing failings that often seem more embarrassing than lethal. Any attempt to write tragedy today is likely to produce melodrama instead. But though the dramatic form tragedy no longer exists, what is tragic in human experience has found its aesthetic home in tragicomedy, where it is simultaneously subverted, protected, and rendered more painful by its peculiar relation with the comic. I Ibsen seems to have realized this paradox in writing The Wild Duck. As the fIrst modern tragicomedy of any importance, as a tragicomedy written in the realistic convention, and as a paradigm for later tragicomedies, The Wild Duck is central to any understanding of this genre - of both the ways in which the modern form shares in the dramaturgy of its Renaissance counterpart and the ways in which it departs from it. Ibsen remarked as early as 1875 that his plays were concerned with "the conflict between one's abilities, between what man proposes and what is actually possible, constituting at once both the tragedy and comedy of mankind and of the individual.,,2 But in The Wild Duck (1884), a self-proclaimed Modem Drama, 38 (1995) 287 288 VERNA A. FOSTER departure from his earlier dramatic method, Ibsen goes further in creating a dramaturgy that more precisely embodies his tragicomic theme and produces in the audience the inextricably mixed tragic and comic responses described by Shaw: "To sit there getting deeper and deeper into that Ekdal home, and getting deeper and deeper into your own life all the time, until you forget that you are in a theatre; to look on with horror and pity at a profound tragedy, shaking with laughter all the time at an irresistible comedy."3 Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker argue that in referring to his new method in The Wild Duck (in a letter to his publisher, Frederik Hegel) Ibsen includes "the subtle mingling of comedy and seriousness in word, action and visual image" and a "deliberate diffuseness of focus."4 The play's multiplicity of emotional effects and perspectives derives in part from Ibsen's orchestration of the voices and attitudes of his ensemble of characters in a manner that was to become characteristic of Chekhov. But-the single most important element in Ibsen's tragicomic dramaturgy is his conception of the play's central character , about whose representation he expressed some anxiety in a letter to Hans Schr¢der, the head of the Christiania Theater. Ibsen urged that it was extremely important that the actor of Hjalmar Ekdal should in no way create a parody or show any awareness of the comic contradictions in his language and behavior.5 But this advice does not mean that the audience also should remain unaware of what is ludicrous in Hjalmar. In fact, it is precisely because Hjalmar is unconsciously comic that he is also tragic. Simply put, Hjalmar is a comic character caught in a tragic situation that he does not understand. His circumstances are potentially tragic. He has suffered a loss of social position and honor because of his father's disgrace, and he has been duped into marrying the cast-off, and probably pregnant, mistress of the author of his family's misery. His contribution to the suicide of his beloved daughter is undeniably the stuff of tragedy...