Peer Gynt, by Henrik Ibsen

I liked this play a lot, and that mildly surprised me, especially given how different this play is from the general body of work of his that I am familiar with.  I must say that my reading of Ibsen’s plays has usually involved his famous “social” plays of the later period and not his early poetic dramas.  For better or worse, though, I preferred this play to almost everything else of the writer’s that I have read so far, as Ibsen did something in this large play that was highly remarkable and probably pretty offensive to the people of his time.  Of course, seeing that the lead character of this play could be seen by uncharitable readers as being somewhat Nathanish, there are likely a lot of people in the present-day who will find themselves or people they know to be skewered by this 150 year old Norwegian poetic drama that is based in part on various Norwegian folk tales.  And if that is not a high achievement for a play, that it takes such commonplace materials and comes up with a pointed masterpiece that includes some nonsense elements, it is hard to say what would merit the place of a classic drama for its time and genre.

As far as a book goes, the version I read was a large print book of more than 300 pages that contained the five act drama translated quite entertainingly as well as numerous drawings to illustrate the action.  The play itself has a sprawling scope, beginning when Peer Gynt is a deceptive raconteur as a young man and continuing on until the moment of his death and his realization that he is a damned soul who has wasted his life and not fulfilled his God-given purpose.  In between there are a lot of comic hijinks, including the way that he shamelessly tries to deceive his mother or that he paints himself as a victim of life’s circumstances or seems to become infatuated with dozens of women, one of whom happens to be the daughter of the troll king, something that nearly leads him to an early death.  He shows himself to be a romanticist in the worst kind of way, led by his impulses, full of the skill of justifying himself and avoiding personal responsibility for the course of his life, and witty in an empty and ridiculous way that humors those around him but that does not help him to do anything.  The play deliberately slows to a crawl as it approaches the ending to give Peer Gynt a few last chances to come to terms with the emptiness of his life, but it does not happen.

Although the play is not an allegory, there are clearly some targets that the author was aiming at that are quite entertaining.  Peer Gynt’s desire to be a kaiser and his populist zeal for Norway (even when he spends much of his life abroad) carries with it some of the foreshadowing of Norway’s own struggles in World War II.  The gulf between the romantic ardor and braggadocio of Peer Gynt and his lack of achievement of solidity in his life is somewhat painful to read and reflect upon, and demonstrates Ibsen’s radical commitment to honesty and integrity and the way that he saw the society of his time as being shallow and easily turned aside from facing the bitter truths of our existence and the need to back up our emotional and intellectual commitments with concrete action.  Not everyone is going to appreciate this play–it still has a lot to say about the intellectual state of the west and about a certain type of person who believes themselves to be a romantic hero but end up being a pitiable sort of person whose life is short of achievement because of a lack of willingness to work at anything.