Forest Fictions: Thomas Bernhard’s Holzfällen and Henrik Ibsen’s Vildanden

Abstract

One hundred years after Ibsen’s Vildanden (1884; The Wild Duck [1890]), Thomas Bernhard published Holzfallen (1984; Woodcutters [1987]), a venomous roman a clef about the Vien nese artistic class. A nameless narrator eagerly pours his contempt on the middle-aged guests he observes at a dinner party after a premiere of Vildanden at Vienna’s Burgtheater. The entire narrative consists of his thoughts and reminiscences as he watches the dinner party unfold from a wing chair off to the side. Earlier that day, the same group of people attended the funeral of their friend Joana, a dreamer who has committed suicide. As the dinner party awaits the guest of honor, a respected actor who will be joining them after playing Old Ekdal in the Ibsen premiere, the narrator reflects with bitterness and contempt on the inauthentic life he witnesses. His harsh and hilarious invective streams over almost two hundred pages of unparagraphed yet rhyth mically structured prose—a typical feature of Bernhard’s captivating narrative style. Why would Vildanden be employed as an intertextual antecedent by this controversial novel? Readers of the Ibsen drama will recall its main characters and incidents: a vain photographer, Hjalmar Ekdal, lives with his wife, Gina, and 14-year-old daughter, Hedvig. Also living in the apartment is Old Ekdal, Hjalmar’s father, a former lieutenant whose illegal felling of timber with Haakon Werle in the play’s backstory led to his punishment and current degradation. When Haakon Werle’s idealist son, Gregers, returns from self-imposed exile in the