Ibsen: The Open Vision by John S. Chamberlain (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews JOHN S. CHAMBERLAIN. Ibsen: The Open Vision. London: Athlone Press 1982; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press 1982. Pp. ix, 223. $31.50. Inga-Stina Ewbank suggested a few years ago that the reason Ibsen caught on so slowly in England was that his "vertical" ethic - the hero rising and falling on a scale of metaphysics - was incompatible with the "horizontal" ethic ofEnglish empiricism - the hero's fate determined by his social relationships. This is no longer a dichotomy in English Ibsen criticism. Ibsen: The Open Vision, by a Canadianprofessor, is another in a growing number of recent and respectful books that take in both dimensions of Ibsen's moral world. Chamberlain's argument is unassailable. Ibsen is a "multidimensional" dramatist of "deeply felt ambivalences," who rarely "endorses ... the ideas and attitudes expressed in his plays," and who tempers their heroics with mock-heroics, their tragic themes with "ironic appraisal." Their "characteristic spirit ... arises from a dramatic exploitation of unresolved ... thematic tensions" ("Prefatory Note" [n.p.], pp. i-ii). This was Ibsen's own view, of course, when he tried to protect his plays from misreadings by ardent Ibsenites and anti-Ibsenites alike, and it is pretty much the current view. But Chamberlain pursues it more single-mindedly than other recent proponents. (He handsomely acknowledges his indebtedness to Northam, McFarlane, Guthke, and others in his first introductory chapter.) He supports it in chapters on Peer Gynt, Ghosts, The WildDuck, and The Master Builder. He chose these plays because they represent the four major phases in Ibsen's mature drama - romantic expressionism, play of ideas, "naturalistic tragicomedy," and heroics "in the light of" metaphysics - and because together they "illustrate clearly the principal features of Ibsen's tragicomic world" (p. 20). Chamberlain is an informed and alert reader of Ibsen, with a reading knowledge of Norwegian. (His few misreadings are not important. For example, that the name "Engstrand" means "meadow beach" and not "narrow beach" [po 90] does not affect his point about its ironic import.) He has written a book rich in viewpoints and illuminating critical specifics. But it does not do full justice to his argument. It is not discriminating or conceptually rigorous enough. Book Reviews 571 The introductory chapter sets up an analytical scheme based on certain "constants" and "variants" among Ibsen's themes and techniques (pp. I7-20). But the scheme is only sporadically on view in the chapters that follow. The Peer Gynt chapter is almost all serial annotation ala Logeman - helpful commentary, but not dynamic discourse. In the other chapters, where there is less sustained exegesis, it is harder to say what the principle of organization is. The book never becomes a systematic, cumulating inquiry. There are many examples of ambivalence, but different kinds of ambivalence are not distinguished, nor the dramaturgical means that achieve the different kinds and to what ends. Patterns do not emerge. Precepts crowd out concepts. Without a context of fully formulated theory, crucial terms do not define and judgments do not cohere. Chamberlain uses "tragicomedy" and "ambivalence" as virtual synonyms, as if the semantically valid proposition "All tragicomedy is ambivalent" were reversible. If his premise is that any disharmony or incongruity of souls is intrinsically comical, he does not argue it, and the premise would be false. Were it true, Oedipus and Othello and Phaedra would be tragicomic characters, but they are ironic characters, which is not the same thing. Chamberlain sees Mrs. Alving as both a truth-seeking heroine of "stoical courage" and a frustrated, possessive, vindictive, and "almost literally murderous matriarch" (pp. 98, 101), but he does not say why her ambivalence makes her tragicomical. Is it because she is "muddleheaded" for failing to recognize atheism and agnosticism in the books she reads? (It is arguable that she does.) And why are morally ambivalent characters an intellectual and artistic liability in Ghosts (an "untidy" play) but an asset in the other plays? Sometimes Chamberlain's dislike of Ghosts seems just idiosyncratic. "If there is a joke here," he says about a passage that may slyly allude to Brandes, "it is a literary joke and not a dramatic one, because it is obscure and barely hinted at" (p...