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Article Excerpt
IN A PASSING COMMENT in the fourth act of Henrik Ibsen's 1867 dramatic poem, Peer Gynt, Peer says to his four foreign companions "Man skal ej laese for at sluge, / men for at se, hvad man kan bruge" (134) [One shouldn't read in order to devour / but in order to see what one can use], which places the notion of the consumption and use of literary texts in an interesting light. Perhaps more than any other Ibsen text, Peer Gynt has been appropriated both by other writers and in popular culture in Norway. There is a subtle irony in the ease with which this text, with its ambiguous and complex questioning of the very nature of identity as a viable philosophical category, is reshaped to express quite different aesthetic, ideological, and cultural agendas related to national identity. Peer Gynt might be described both as a chameleon and a barometer of public sentiments about the current stare of Norwegian identity in any given era.
In this analysis, I will link three contemporary Norwegian novelists' use of Peer Gynt to the widespread popularity of the poem's protagonist as a cultural commodity in Norway during the first few years of the twenty-first century. As such, this essay presents a continuum of the contemporary uses made of Peer Gynt by arguing that both "high" cultural literary authors and "low" culture advertising and tourist campaigns are working with Ibsen's text in ways that can tell us something about the nationalistic forces at play in Norwegian identity formation at a time of increasing globalization and destabilization of received notions of identity itself. The texts in question, Atle Naess's Innersvinger [Inside curves] from 2002, Ketil Bjornstad's Tesman from 2003, and Terje Holtet Larsen's Peer Gynt-versjonen [The Peer Gynt version] also from 2003 all relate Peer Gynt explicitly to issues in contemporary Norwegian identity formation, albeit in different ways. Each is critical (explicitly or implicitly) of the way Peer Gynt is used, yet Naess, Bjornstad, and Holtet Larsen themselves all appropriate the text themselves. Thus, these texts both critique and replicate many of the ways that Peer Gynt is used in the Norwegian tourist industry.
It may perhaps seem strange to focus attention on a group of novels given the much more prominent engagement with Ibsen texts by two of Norway's most internationally acclaimed dramatists, Jon Fosse and Cecilie Loveid, who have both "rewritten" Ibsen plays in a postmodemist mode. Fosse's Barnet and Loveid's Osterrike: En overmaling, which were both premiered at the International Ibsen Festival in Oslo, appropriate Vildanden and Brand respectively. (1) An earlier Loveid radio play, Makespisere uses at least two Ibsen plays, Gengangere and Vildanden as hypotexts. Yet in the five or so years leading up to the international Ibsen year of 2006 marking the hundredth anniversary of the dramatist's death, the number of novels dealing with Ibsen or his works increased markedly, thus suggesting that Ibsen in general (and Peer Gynt in particular) transcends genre specificity and has become a key cultural commodity. Starting perhaps with Dag Solstad's "Ibsen-novels," Ellevte roman: Bok atten (1992), Genanse og verdighet (1994), and Professor Andersens natt (1996), the wave appears to have reached a kind of peak in 2002-2003. In addition to the texts by Bjornstad, Holtet Larsen, and Naess, the trend includes Linn Ullmann's Nar jeg er hos deg (2001), Peter Serck's Latteren (2002), and Lars Saabye Christensen's Modellen (2005).
What I have found in working my way through these novels is firstly that the figure of Henrik Ibsen himself, the few times that he appears in person as it were, is almost without exception the object of sarcasm. This attitude can be seen in Peter Serck's Latteren, which owes much to Solstad's work and indeed references Solstad directly at one point, (2) as well as in Bjornstad's Tesman. These recent Norwegian novels portray "regular" people who either think (a lot) about Ibsen's plays, or who are ironically unaware that their lives mirror the plays. In "Ibsen, Solstad and the Unspeakable Dimension: An Intertexmal Relationship," Vigdis Ystad provides an excellent overview of Solstad's long-standing engagement with Ibsen. Solstad's intertexmal relationship with Ibsen is, as she points out, among other things, a critique of the way Ibsen is "used": in essence, Ystad notes that Solstad's argument is that "today we are not staging Ibsen's plays, but Ibsen's fame" (Ystad 250). That Solstad has not taken on Peer Gynt directly places him outside of the scope of this analysis, but his point goes right to the heart of the cultural phenomenon that I am attempting to describe.
The degree to which the "Ibsen-novels" of the early 2000s intersect with or reproduce the plots of specific Ibsen plays varies widely. Both Nar jeg er hos deg and Moddlen are set against the background of a performance of an Ibsen play. Latteren is a novel about trying to teach an Ibsen play, and in it Serck consciously aligns himself with Solstad's work, such as Professor Andersens natt, in presenting the obsessive musings of a socially dysfunctional teacher. Although ostensibly an updated continuation of Hedda Gabler that follows the fate of the husband after the heroine's death, Bjornstad's Tesman resonates far less with the 1890 play than one might expect. In fact, I find that Peer Gynt is just as, or even perhaps more important than Hedda Gabler in Bjornstad's novel. The novel that most closely follows the plot of an Ibsen play, Atle Naess's Innersvinger, which retells Peer Gynt scene for scene, is in some ways the most original novel of the group. The novel is a parody and its protagonist, Per Floberg, is completely unaware that his life exactly follows that other Peer's trajectory. Interestingly, the novel that least overlaps with the narrative arc of an Ibsen play, Terje Holtet Larsen's Peer Gynt-versjonen, achieves in some ways much the same effect as Innersvinger, and both authors self-consciously use that text as a vehicle for reflection and speculation about the nature of Norwegian society as a whole throughout the twentieth century.
There are some significant similarities that link the three Peer Gynt novels that I discuss below. Beyond the cultural history and national identity that the poem both signifies and questions, Peer Gynt also presents a family constellation of mother, son, and absent father that has important psychological resonances in each of the novels that engages it. In Bjornstad's text, the protagonist Tesman grew up with an ornery mother and an uncertain and absent father he knows only as Zachariassen. In Holtet Larsen's, text the protagonist (also named Terje Holtet Larsen) never knew his father and part of his project in the novel is to document whatever information he can find about this absent father, which to begin with is only a name. In Naess's Innersvinger, the absent father died when the protagonist was only two and remains nameless in the text, and the protagonist himself believes that he is the absent father of an illegitimate child. Further, each of the personal histories related in these novels is predicated upon lies, and thus that central aspect of Ibsen's Peer Gynt forms yet another important thematic foundation for the contemporary works. In the analysis that follows, I will first examine the intertextual intersections with Peer Gynt in each of the three novels in question before turning to the broader phenomenon of how Peer Gynt functions as a popular cultural commodity.
BJORNSTAD'S TESMAN (2003)
Bjornstad's protagonist, the eponymous Tesman, refuses to reveal his first name, but is nonetheless a celebrity psychologist whose more serious psychiatrist wife has just committed suicide as the novel begins. Tesman identifies himself with the intellectual elite in Norway and has strong opinions about Henrik Ibsen as a person. An emblematic moment takes place late in the novel when the protagonist goes to the Grand Cafe to sit at what Bjornstad calls "selveste Ibsenbordet" (223) [the Ibsen-table itself] as he attempts to figure a way out of yet another...
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