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• W2884704828 abstract "REVIEWS Richard Hornby. Patterns in Ibsen’s Middle Plays. Lewisburg, Pennsyl­ vania: Bucknell University Press, 1981. Pp. 196. $19.50. For the first half of this century Ibsen interpretation was dominated by the British critics with their pragmatist insistence that the plays were primarily psychological and social; now, the most significant writing on Ibsen, which recognizes the mythopoeic, archetypal, historical, philoso­ phical dimensions of his art, is coming from America. Any new study contributing to this perception of the dramatist is to be welcomed, and Richard Hornby’s book has much to recommend it. Oddly, what is least valuable is what Hornby is most emphatic about proffering: a “structuralist” discipline which, he claims, “transcends” such “fads” as “historical, rhetorical, imagistic, psychoanalytic, Marxist, anthropological, and mythic criticisms” (14). To transcend all these is to offer us the heavenly riches of Caliban’s dream but, though Hornby makes much play in his Introduction with “codes” which can “provide a theoretically infinite number of interpretations and decodings,” his own interpretations, though often interesting enough, are conventional, some­ what reductive, and remarkably thin in cultural referents, as a glance at the Index to the book will indicate. One reason for this is that Hornby’s major source for his interpreta­ tion of Ibsen—i.e., Kierkegaard—is a highly solipsist philosopher. Hornby rashly chides “Hegel’s abstractness, his obsessive systematizing or “system­ building” that does not sit well with Ibsen’s delight in the particular” (26). As gently as possible I would suggest Hornby has not read very much of Hegel. His remarks will gain gleeful agreement from the cul­ tural groundlings but, as Walter Kaufmann in his Introduction to Kierke­ gaard’s The Present Age remarks, such “professors” scorning the great man “know not what they do” and betray an ignorance both of Hegel’s life and of his work. Hegel’s philosophy is crammed with the details of his own times, of history, the sciences and the arts whereas, by contrast, the Kierkegaardian account of the cosmos is astonishingly meagre in the number of objects and events it takes note of. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard is the obvious first choice for those who, like Hornby, are aware of an impressive intellectual dimension to Ibsen’s art ignored by traditional Ibsenism, and there is no doubt that the Kierkegaardian influence on the dramatist’s art is greater than he would allow. Love’s Comedy, Brand, and Peer Gynt, in particular, call out for a Kierkegaardian gloss. The problem, however, is that where Kierkegaard can offer the poet, a structural principle for his art, as in the distinctions between the aesthetic, ironic, ethical, and religious forms of experience, 267 268 Comparative Drama this structure is neither very original nor very profound— and that where Kierkegaard is both original and profound, as in his concept of “the teleological suspension of the ethical” in Fear and Trembling, he is notoriously abstruse and, one would imagine, particularly unhelpful to an artist. Detesting systems and structures, Kierkegaard adopted a shifting series of personae, attitudes, strategies, and attacks on particular targets that hardly could be “taken over” by an artist. He insisted that the individual, in his own inimitable way, should arrive at his authentic relation to God; and by “God” Kierkegaard emphatically meant the strict and authoritarian Christian God whose apostle was St. Paul. A true “follower” of Kierkegaard, therefore, would have to find his own way to this relationship, which would be unlike Kierkegaard’s! If he employed another man’s (i.e., Kierkegaard’s) categories, he would be unKierkegaardian. There are many passages in Kierkegaard’s writings that remind one of Ibsen’s plays, but the ideas of reality of the two writers seem fundamentally different. Hornby, for example, claims that, “taken together” (76), Brand and Peer Gynt can be seen as Ibsen’s Either/ Or; but could anyone be more different from the agonized Brand than the self-assured, somewhat prosy Judge William of the “Or” section, or more different from the wild and reckless Peer than the careful, refined, highly cultured and sharp-witted aesthetic hero of the Either.” What Kierkegaard terms the “aesthetic” is very different from what either Peer represents or, in his analyses..." @default.
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• W2884704828 title "Patterns in Ibsen’s Middle Plays by Richard Hornby" @default.
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