射殺野鴨


普通人的悲劇


麥可·邁耶


麥可‧邁耶於1997年1月17日在《泰晤士報文學增刊》（TLS）上發表的一篇書評，評論對像是羅伯特·弗格森所寫的亨利克·易卜生傳記。易卜生於1906年5月23日去世。


1849年，當亨利克·易卜生創作他的第一部戲劇時，戲劇已不再被視為能夠嚴肅探討現代問題的媒介。人們轉而投身於詩歌、小說、散文或講道。


詩人仍然嘗試創作戲劇，但只是將其作為一種文學練習，總是以詩歌的形式，並且總是關注社會上層階級。然而到了1899年，當易卜生創作他的最後一部戲劇時，整個西方世界的作家，如蕭伯納和豪普特曼，都開始利用戲劇來塑造人們的觀念，而這種轉變——並非部分，而是完全——歸功於易卜生。古希臘人、莎士比亞和拉辛是他們那個時代偉大文學流派的佼佼者，而易卜生卻獨樹一幟，他用一種幾乎無人知曉的語言寫作，這種語言此前從未孕育出過任何世界級的作家。他證明了，即使是生活在普通人家裡的普通人，也能創造出偉大的悲劇。這些普通人住在觀眾看完戲後會回到的那種小客廳裡，用樸實的語言談論著辯論社和街頭巷尾都在討論的話題——地方政治的腐敗以及女性是否有權離開丈夫和孩子。


易卜生讓人們重新思考他們從未認真懷疑過的信念，到了世紀之交，他已成為繼托爾斯泰之後世界上最著名的作家。


作為易卜生早期傳記的作者（羅伯特·弗格森在這部新傳記的序言中對其讚譽有加），我必須承認，我對易卜生的這部新傳記抱有濃厚的興趣。弗格森完全有資格勝任這項工作，因為他曾在奧斯陸生活多年，並創作了兩部獲獎廣播劇。他孜孜不倦地翻閱了自1971年我的書出版以來挪威的舊報紙和文章，挖掘出一封重要的信件，信中顯示易卜生因無力支付私生子的撫養費幾乎饅鐺入獄。他還找到了據稱遺失的艾蜜莉巴達赫的日記，易卜生在61歲時曾對她傾心不已。可惜的是，除了先前發表的摘錄之外，他沒有從中找到任何值得引用的重要內容。他的其他新資料主要由一些瑣碎的細節組成，這些內容對研究19世紀挪威地方生活的學生來說最有價值，例如一封關於輪船股份的長信，以及關於易卜生的兒子西格德試圖進入挪威政壇的更多細節（這些細節我們其實並不需要了解太多）。但他以非常流暢易讀的筆觸，講述了易卜生前半生看似平淡無奇的故事。弗格森這本書的後半部讓我難以欣賞，因為他對當時的戲劇和文學界缺乏更廣闊的視野，而且用了大量篇幅貶低從《社會支柱》到《當我們死而復生》的最後十二部偉大的散文劇。他似乎更偏愛這些劇作的拙劣先驅《青年聯盟》，這部過時的政治鬧劇如今幾乎無人問津；就連他最喜歡的《培爾·金特》也被他視為“一個關於真愛勝利的無可爭議的寓言”，然而，除了最膚淺的層面之外，這無疑是一部令人深感不安的劇作，並且在它首次面世時，並且在它首次引起的爭議時，並且在它首次面世時，並且在引起了巨大的爭議時，並且在引起了巨大的爭議時，並且在引起了巨大的爭議


沒有一部著名的散文劇能逃脫弗格森的批評。他認為《玩偶之家》中孩子們的台詞“敷衍了事，他們的出現是幻像中一個粗糙的缺陷”，顯然沒有意識到，我們看到這些台詞恰恰凸顯了娜拉決定離開時最艱難的部分。在《人民之敵》中，弗格森抱怨易卜生的“詭計”，認為易卜生“抹殺”了所有主人公的對手，把市長塑造成“像《冒名頂替者》中的尼古拉斯主教一樣邪惡，但卻遠不如後者那樣令人信服的人性化”，以至於人們不禁懷疑他是否看過這部劇，或者易卜生的任何一部散文劇，哪一部像樣的散文劇呈現舞台劇。當然，他肯定沒看過《野鴨》，因為他覺得這部劇「有些場景過於矯揉造作……如果演繹不當，很容易落入俗套，讓人過於明顯地感受到易卜生作為舞台操縱者的存在」。如果莎士比亞的作品演繹不佳，也會出現同樣的問題。


對於《羅斯莫莊園》，佛格森的評價尤其令人費解。他認為這是易卜生第一部將「公共的、準政治的……以及私人的家庭世界」融合在一起的戲劇（那麼《社會支柱》和《人民之敵》呢？），他想像易卜生和偏執的克羅爾醫生一樣，認為麗貝卡的任性是她私生子身份造成的，並且看不似多年相信她是第一個提出與他與父親有亂倫的關係。正是這一點——而不是她的私生子身份（顯然她並不在意這一點）——讓她感到如此污穢，以至於當羅斯默向她求婚時，她無法嫁給他。.......



Shooting wild duck

The high tragedy of ordinary people

MICHAEL MEYER

A review by Michael Meyer, published in the TLS of January 17, 1997, of Robert Ferguson’s biography of Henrik Ibsen, who died on May 23, 1906.
When Henrik Ibsen wrote his first play in 1849, the drama was no longer regarded as a medium in which a serious statement could be made about modern problems. For that, one turned to poetry or the novel, or essays or sermons.
Poets still tried their hand at plays, but as a literary exercise, always in verse and always about the upper reaches of society. Yet by 1899, when Ibsen wrote his last play, writers throughout the Western world, such as Shaw and Hauptmann, were using the drama to mould people’s opinions, and this change was – not in part, but wholly – due to Ibsen. Whereas the Greeks, Shakespeare and Racine had been the best of a great school in their time, Ibsen was on his own, writing in a language which hardly anyone knew and which had produced no previous writer of worldwide significance. He showed that high tragedy could be written about ordinary people, living in the kind of back parlour to which the audience would return after the play, talking simply and dealing with topics discussed in debating societies and on street corners – corruption in local politics and whether a woman had the right to leave her husband and children.
Ibsen made people rethink beliefs they had never seriously doubted, and, by the turn of the century, was the most famous writer in the world after Tolstoy.
As the author of an earlier life of Ibsen, to which Robert Ferguson pays flattering tribute in his introduction to this new biography, I must declare an obvious interest. Ferguson is well qualified to attempt the task, since he has lived for some years in Oslo and has written two award-winning radio plays. He has trawled assiduously through old Norwegian newspapers and articles published since the appearance of my book in 1971, unearthing an important letter, which shows that Ibsen’s inability to pay maintenance for his illegitimate son almost landed him in gaol. He has also tracked down the supposedly lost diary of Emilie Bardach, with whom Ibsen became infatuated at the age of sixty-one, although, sadly, he finds nothing significant to quote from it beyond the previously published extracts. His other new material consists mainly of minutiae, which will be of most interest to students of nineteenth-century Norwegian local life, such as a long letter about steamship shares and rather more than we need to know about Ibsen’s son Sigurd’s attempts to enter Norwegian politics. But he tells the outwardly uneventful story of, at any rate, the first half of Ibsen’s life very readably. It is the second half of Ferguson’s book that I find difficult to admire, for there is little sense of the wider theatrical and literary scene, and he spends much of it denigrating the final twelve great prose dramas from The Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken. He seems almost to prefer their lame precursor The League of Youth, a dated attempt at political farce which is hardly ever staged today; and even his favourite, Peer Gynt, he finds “an uncontroversial fable on the triumph of true love”, when, on any but the most superficial level, it is surely a deeply disturbing play, and aroused great controversy when it first appeared.
None of the famous prose plays escapes Ferguson’s condemnation. He finds the children’s lines in A Doll’s House “perfunctory and their presence a crude flaw in the illusion”, apparently unaware that our seeing them underlines the hardest part of Nora’s decision to go away. In An Enemy of the People, Ferguson complains of “tricks”, and that Ibsen “de-individualises” all the hero’s opponents, making the Mayor “as evil a character as Bishop Nicholas in The Pretenders but a far less convincing human being”, so that one wonders if he can ever have seen this, or any of the prose plays, decently staged. Certainly not The Wild Duck, for he finds in it “an artificiality about scenes that . . . can, if not played with great care, slip over into the obvious, creating a too-vivid awareness of Ibsen’s creative presence on stage as the manipulator of his characters”. That is equally true of Shakespeare, if he is poorly played.
On Rosmersholm, Ferguson is particularly bewildering. He thinks it is the first of Ibsen’s plays to bring together “the public, quasi-political . . . and the private family world” (what about The Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People?), imagines Ibsen shares the bigoted Dr Kroll’s view that Rebecca’s waywardness is the result of her illegitimacy, and believes that Freud, many years later, was the first to suggest that she had an incestuous relationship with her father, as though this were not obvious from a close reading of the text. It is this – not her illegitimacy, which does not obviously bother her – that makes her feel so tainted that she cannot marry Rosmer when he asks her.
The Lady from the Sea is “Ibsen’s weakest play since An Enemy of the People”, and again one can only suppose that Ferguson has never seen it properly done, as in Michael Elliott’s famous 1979 production with Vanessa Redgrave. Hedda Gabler fares little better. Brack’s famous last line: “People don’t do such things!” is too feeble a response when a young woman has just blown her head off . . . Of course there is a sense in which a “surprise” last line like this can never work, for as audiences we are so familiar with the events that . . . the actors are the only ones in the theatre who are taken by surprise. . . We judge the playing of these lines but we cannot feel them. A similar problem exists with the climax to A Doll’s House . . . . It is obvious that an intellectual problem is being worked out.
If familiarity breeds such coldness, none of us would be moved by the climax to Hamlet or by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Of The Master Builder, “the Solness-Hilde situation . . . is the least satisfactory from a dramatic point of view . . . . At several points, Ibsen deliberates the possibility that Hilde is somehow not a real person at all.” I should like to know where Ibsen even remotely suggests this. Little Eyolf’s strength “lies in the conversations, not the plot”. Strangest of all: “In the plays of his middle years, from The Pillars of Society in 1877 to Hedda Gabler in 1890, Ibsen tended to neglect the psychology of his male characters to (concentrate) on the female’s”, a conclusion which will astonish any actor who has attempted Oswald, Dr Stockmann, Hjalmar Ekdal, Gregers Werle, Rosmer, Lövborg or Brack. Ferguson allows some merit to Borkman, albeit on curious grounds – that it contains “no lines like Little Eyolf’s ‘The crutch is floating’ for disrespectful young members of the audience to laugh at”, and because he thinks “Borkman is Ibsen’s first character since Julian (in Emperor and Galilean) whom it is possible to like”, Stockmann being “too arrogant” and Rosmer “too indecisive”, as though one could never like anyone indecisive, and as though Borkman were not fatally arrogant and self-centred.
There are a few errors in the book. Ibsen was not “wealthy” at the end of his first four years in Italy, merely comfortable, living as parsimoniously as he did, nor in his last years was he “very wealthy” (his account books, to which Ferguson never refers, shows how modest his earnings were compared with those of much lesser authors in England). He surely returned to spend his last years in Norway, not because “Suzannah, with Sigurd’s support, had presented him with an ultimatum”, for which there is no evidence, but because he wanted to be close to his son, who was starting a career in Norway. Ferguson reiterates the old canard that Ibsen was influenced by Scribe, despite Ibsen’s repeated dismissals of the latter and the fact that there is nothing in Scribe which Ibsen could not have learned from his beloved Ludvig Holberg. To say that the young women with whom he became infatuated in old age “had little or no influence on his writing” must seem incredible to anyone who has read or seen Heddaand The Master Builder. Little Eyolf played to full houses in London in 1896, not because “Ibsen’s name was already big enough to outweight (sic) critical disapproval”, but because, after a few performances, the fashionable Mrs Patrick Campbell took over the leading role.
There is much implausible speculation. “One feels, not least from the occasional references in his letters to the pleasures of bathing in the Mediterranean, that there was a suppressed sensualist in him.” How can anyone read Peer Gynt, Hedda or The Master Builder without realizing that? “The very slight hint of a failed budding romance between Sigurd and Hildur Andersen might also account for Sigurd’s desultory progress through life.” There is no evidence whatever that there was anything serious between Sigurd and Hildur; Ibsen’s son enjoyed a long and notably happy marriage with Bjornson’s daughter Bergliot, and his political failure was due to his having a cosmopolitan outlook at a time when only unquestioning nationalism was acceptable in Norway, as later in Ireland. A new biography of every major writer should appear at least every twenty-five years, and Ferguson’s book is honest and provocative, but the general effect is as of a life of Picasso which regarded everything that he painted after his Blue Period as a series of aberrations.