The Lacanian Imaginary in Ibsen's Pillars of Society and The Wild Duck

The Lacanian Imaginary in Ibsen's Pillars of Society and The Wild Duck Oliver W. Gerland III In a recent analysis of Ibsen's beginnings, Thomas F. Van Laan argues that the playwright "deceives us concerning both the matter of the play—i.e., its central business—and its manner —i.e., its particular style and mode."l The opening moments of an Ibsen play temporarily mislead the viewer in one way or another about its overall design. As the play moves from beginning to end, the reader is forced to revise initial assumptions about who the crucial characters are, where the action will go, and how it will get there. For Van Laan, reading an Ibsen text is an exercise in the revision of interpretative paradigms. This view has broader and deeper implications for the study of Ibsen's dramatic texts than Van Laan himself acknowledges. In this article, I argue that Ibsen stages the revision of interpretative paradigms. As Van Laan's reader revises strategies for reading the text, Ibsen's protagonist revises strategies for enacting the self. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory maintains that the self is a symbolic construction. The American psychoanalyst Roy Schäfer states: "we are forever telling stories about ourselves. . . . On this view, the self is a telling."2 Likewise, Peter Brooks argues that "man [is] a structure of the fictions he tells about himself."3 These attempts to coordinate selfhood and narrative owe much to Jacques Lacan's re-reading of Freud. For Lacan, the self is rooted in the mirror stage and the infant's identification with images of coherence and stability—e.g., its own reflected image. Lacan writes, "We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place OLIVER W. GERLAND III, Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of Utah, has published articles on Ibsen and Lyotard. 342 Oliver W. Gerland III343 in the subject when he assumes an image."4 Assuming such images to be truly representative, the child develops a sense that it is a discrete unit of identity, a self. Since the child's "self is composed of partial object identifications, however, it cannot be considered such an integral and stable entity. Rather, what the child sees to be its self is a complex of symbolic structures derived from culture. Visual images and mythic constructs serve as templates for the child as it constructs a fiction of unity that it will enact as the self. Ibsen's dramatic texts focus the reader's attention upon the protagonist's enactment of self. These texts tend to position a central figure, the protagonist, between two other characters, each of whom represents a particular vision of the protagonist: who he is and how he should behave. Characteristically, these images of the protagonist's self are intelligible in Oedipal terms. That is, the protagonist stands between a maternal and a paternal figure. Over the course of the action, the protagonist exchanges (or refuses to exchange) identification with one of mese figures for identification with the other. For example, as I argue below, Pillars of Society traces Karsten Bernick's shift from identification with a paternal figure to identification with a maternal figure, while Hjalmar Ekdal, the protagonist of The Wild Duck, does not make such an exchange. In this way, Ibsen's texts stage the Oedipal crisis in a revised form. Making this kind of interpretative claim, I do not want to affirm anything about the writer's psyche (as does James E. Kerans), nor do I mean to indicate mat the characters are persons with real psychological systems.5 Rather, I mean to suggest that the Oedipus complex illuminates the texts of a particular writer working in a particular moment in history which, interestingly enough, is nearly contemporary with Freud's major work. Besides, critics have established that Ibsen's texts position characters in a characteristic triadic structure: this structure positions a male protagonist between opposing female figures. The dramatist's first work, Catiline (1849), announces the Ibsen triad and, as Charles R. Lyons argues, it occupies a significant place in the dramatist...