Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of Peer Gynt

Introduction

Conspiracy theories are everywhere around us. Generating countless websites, books, films, series, and podcasts, and encompassing nearly every major negative event that has taken place since the end of World War II, conspiracies have become a phenomenon that anyone as a citizen and thinking individual has had to cope with in the last few decades, arguably reaching a peak during the Trump presidency, with the rise of QAnon and various conspiracy theories about the current Covid-19 pandemic (Barkun 2017; Amarasingam and Argentino 2020; Mitchell et al. 2020; Uscinski et al. 2020).

Not surprisingly, the rise of conspiracy theories has also coincided with an increasing scholarly interest, especially within psychology and the social sciences, although studies of conspiracies in literature and film have also grown in number during the last two decades. What has been much less thoroughly researched, however, is how the hermeneutical and epistemological mechanisms that lie at the foundation of conspiracy theories—what I term "conspiracy thinking"—have sneaked into other forms of discourse, and especially those that are far removed from classic conspiratorial themes such as the New World Order, Freemasonry and the Illuminati, the JFK assassination, or even ufology. In other words: Can conspiracy thinking also be traced where there is no hidden or evident conspiracy? What are the consequences for our understanding of the texts that contain and disseminate such modes of thinking? And are the boundaries between a conspiratorial and a legitimate interpretation of a work of art or literature always clear-cut?

The aim of this article is to study two contemporary examples of conspiracy thinking related to Henrik Ibsen's plays, and to show how these hermeneutical forms have sneaked into discourses—such as literature and drama, and the critical reflection on them—that in themselves do not have much to do with conspiracies. Although my study is limited to Ibsen, I claim that this example is just one of many that take place in contemporary readings of Western literature. For while blockbusters like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003) have contributed to spreading conspiracy theories widely in literary form, there is also a flourishing literature that seeks to find encoded messages and secret layers of meaning in canonical literary works. Just to mention two famous examples, the same Brown's Inferno (2013) draws upon the long-standing tradition of conspiracy theories related to Dante's Divine Comedy, and the works of William Shakespeare have been subjected to a long series of conspiratorial readings, arguably reaching a peak—at least in a Norwegian context—with Erlend Loe's and Petter Amundsen's mashup of theories about Shakespeare's persona and the coded messages that the English dramatist allegedly left in his texts (Loe and Amundsen 2006). These theories, as extravagant as they may appear, have made their way to mainstream media through both books, films, and TV series, and have garnered considerable public attention.

This article focuses on two case studies that have several features in common with the examples mentioned above. These are Hemmeligheten bak Peer Gynt (Benneche 2017; The Secret behind Peer Gynt, henceforth Hemmeligheten) a documentary film that was aired by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the play, and Peer Gynt-koden (Larsen 2006; The Peer Gynt Code, henceforth Koden), a pseudoscientific book published by the Norwegian academic publisher Abstrakt Forlag on the occasion of the centennial of Ibsen's death. I will argue that the interpretations these works present, although apparently marginal and not particularly influential on Ibsen scholarship, are a product of the much larger international phenomenon of conspiracy theories. Studying them allows us to identify not only how conspiracy thinking has spread to mainstream discourse to such a degree that its recipients are not likely to recognize that it is at its basis conspiratorial, but also to make a more general point about the pitfalls of interpretation that readers and scholars alike may fall into.

In addition, such case studies help us understand the fascination that canonical works of literature exercise...