Ibsen and the Great World by Naomi Lebowitz (review)

102Rocky Mountain Review The fifth chapter presents the very powerful work of Maryse Condé, Heremakhonon, where the modern black woman questions the self. Her quest is multiple and multicultural. The Guadeloupean writer sees the issues of origins, race, language, and sociopolitical histories while telling her story/fiction about Africa. Quite correctly, Hewitt shows us how Condé succeeds in finding a true voice through the constructs and constraints of a fictive self, while merging past, present, and future, the Antilles and Africa, in a constant dialogue with otherness. In the last chapter, called "Dialogues with the Other," Hewitt insists on this meaningful exchange with otherness. Her technique ofhaving chosen five writers so different from one another is the proofthat each writer's singularity and personal signature foster great unity of thought and that autobiography is not an innocent genre. The texts ofthe five writers studied by Hewitt were carefully selected since they all have appeared in English translations for those who do not read French, and it is an added bonus of Tightropes. This critical book proves that autobiographical texts written by women keep reaffirming life through literary displacements, cracks, or ruptures, and allow for the emergence of a specific feminine subject. This is, indeed, a well researched analysis with a newer slant, which corresponds to a growing trend of interest in autobiography and adds to the continuing criticism on women writers. Ifone wanted to reside and linger in the pages of this book/hotel (that is, a book of criticism as opposed to the book/home of our favorite original masterpieces), I would give it three stars. CLAUDINE G. FISHER Portland State University NAOMI LEBOWITZ. Ibsen and the Great World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 256 p. This important book argues for Ibsen's larger significance and emphasizes his spiritual dimension, his existential concerns. Its main thrust is on target. Lebowitz insists on the importance of the pervasive irony and self-parody in Ibsen's work and demonstrates convincingly that Ibsen does indeed use parody to "liberate" power and depth. In Lebowitz's words, he "parodies the best in him[self] in order to deserve it and preserve it for the great world" (83). Ibsen, therefore, is not merely a social dramatist but a citizen ofthe "Great World," a human being whose "demands for spiritual expansion" are "difficult and merciless" (2). Lebowitz is as uncompromising, implacable, and merciless as Ibsen, himself. She sinks her teeth into thejugular ofbourgeois morality, and she shakes her prey intensely, relentlessly as she continuously explores the contrast between the great world inhabited by great spirits (existential thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevski, and Kafka) and the small confined middleclass world, the houses inhabited by the characters of Ibsen's plays. The scholarship displayed in this book is extensive and exhaustive. Lebowitz knows Ibsen, and she is exceptionally strong when dealing with Kierkegaard Book Reviews103 and Nietzsche. And, as a bonus, she can be counted on to provide provocative and original readings of other inhabitants of the great world: her readings of Madame Bovary, Lawrence's The Rainbow, and Kafka's "A Country Doctor" are especially illuminating. While Lebowitz performs a valuable service by emphasizing Ibsen's place in the existential tradition, this book would be even stronger if she had taken the time to put Ibsen in theatrical context as well. Some of the obvious connections with the plays of Beckett, Chekhov, O'Neill, Pinter, Shaw, or Synge should have been made. Also, there is a problem with the organization. With typical existential disdain for the matter offact chronology of day to day existence, Lebowitz has ambitiously attempted (apparently using her previous book on Kierkegaard as a model) to capture the rhythms of Ibsen's life, and she has only partially succeeded. Her general categories, "The Great World," "Exile," and "The Small World," for example, all deal with the same conflict; the discussion tends to blend together. Even though she demonstrates both a sure-handed switching back and forth between the plays and a skillful integration of Ibsen's thought into her discussion of the other inhabitants of the great world, the reason for including any given material in one section and not...