clever dog

8/15/2019 Clever Dog

1/5

Access provided by University of Sydney Library (19 Apr 2016 09:40 GMT)

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/499563https://muse.jhu.edu/article/499563


2/5

NOTES

The Clever

og

and the

Problematic Hare

JOHN H. ASTINGTON

Gregers Werle, sa

id

Mary McCarthy, preaches mysteries, mysteries which

Ibsen himself had picked up from European intellectual and cultural traditions

without a thorough consciousness

of

having done so.' McCarthy articulates

something

of

a modem audience 's impatience with what she calls the

catechism between Hedvig and her mother on Gregers's meaning some

thing else at the close of the second act of

The Wild Duck

but perhaps one

of Ibsen s concerns was to

emphasize

Hedvig s surprise at meeting someone

who interprets the world so thoroughly - and so frighteningly - in symbolic

lenns

Much

of

the symbolizing in The Wild ck is ludicrous, and Ibsen mocks

it by pointing up the inappropriate match between the actual world and the

cliches which are drawn from it: Gregers's cry for more light met

by

Gina's

removing the shade from the lamp, or Hjalmar's pieties about

hi

s white-haired

father who is, in fact, bald and who wears a toupee. But the centre

of

the

symbolizing is the eponymous duck which we never get to see for ourselves,

as we do not see the interior

of

the attic, other than by :glimpses. Hedvig cares

for the duck, although perhaps not qui

te as much as the sentimentalists around

her assume that she does, but she has never really read it symbolically and

continues to resist doing so, with fatal results. What excites her symbolically

is reading in the everyday

se

nse - Gina's sense - of that term: looking at

books. The attic is also a home for lame books: useless - most

of

them are

in English - and yet wonderful - they are full

of pictures. And the picture she

describes in most detail -

of

Death with an hour glass, and a girl, which

she thinks awful (III, 159)' - is a premonition

of

her fate, a more subtle

sort of road sign, in McCarthy's terms. When they hear this line the audi

ence will think

of

the various examples

of

the Death and the Maiden

images that they may know, whether in Renaissance prints or in nineteenth

century revivals

of

the motif. They can't see Hedvig's picture but they have

odem

Drama

6

(1993)

578


3/5

The Clever Dog and the Problematic Hare

579

their own mental versions of it, and they also have a shared image, though

they may not quite recognize it for what it

is.

The motif

of

the mysterious,

challenging, ugly stranger claiming the virginal girl is embodied on stage

before them. Hedvig's shock and unease at seeing the picture is matched by

her encounter with Gregers.

Or at least ·she recognizes that there is something about the way Gregers

conducts himself that excites her and disturbs her in some manner that

overlaps with her excitement and disturbance over the books and pictures: he

seems to mean things in a similar way. The picture that

ha

s given Hedvig the

pleasurable horrors is a venerable European emblem signifying the frailty of

human beauty and the vanity

of

human desire; the other old books the Ekdals

have inherited may contain similar symbolic images. What is remarkable

about Gregers's application

of

the story

of

the retriever which has brought

back the duck from under the water is that

t

too revives a traditional em

blematic interpretation of the hunt. It seems unlikely that Ibsen knew th e

tradition directly, and therefore unlikely that he meant Gregers to be invoking

a graphic image when he speaks of the clever dog, but its metaphorical

descendants live on in his words, and in the force of Hedvig s reaction to

them.

In an unpublished paper Karl Josef Holtgen has recently redirected attention

to a woodcut print which first appeared early in the sixteenth century, as

pan

of a series which illustrate Gregor Reisch 's argarita

Philosopizica

a sort of

encyclopaedia of human knowledge that was much used in schools and

universities,

and:

went through many editions.' The picture

of

the personified

female figure of logic, Typus Logice, has conceived of her as a huntress

tracking down garne: human mental power pursuing solutions to difficulties.

She is not duck shooting, but tracking a hare, labelled Problema, with two

hunting dogs, Veritas and Falsitas - truth and falsehood. As the duck

dives to the depths

of

the sea to avoid being taken - and in Gregers's meta-

'

phor to avoid the world of light and truth - so the hare may disappear into

. the thicket

of

insoluble problems ( Insolubilia ) or the wood of opinions

. (I'Silva Opiniorum ); to be sniffed out only by the true dog, Veritas.

t

is such

a clarifying role Gregers imagines for himself, but the schematic plan

of

the

old woodcut makes plain the irony perceived by Ibsen, Relling, and the

audience: tracking down the problem may lead to confusion and error unless

one is a truly clever dog. Gregers is Falsitas who thinks himself to be Veritas.

So the problem he scents out and brings back

to

Hedvig really

is

an insoluble

one; she, dazzled by his specious symbolizing, is led

to

a false conclusion.

Had she seen Reisch s picture the dialectical nature

of

the pursuit

of

problems

would have been immediately clear to her; the human voice itself, symbolized

by

the hunting hom Logic blows, produces two matched flowers standing for

logical premises - presumably one true and one false, to correspond to the

paired dogs. King Claudius, confronting his rebellious subjects, cries out


4/5

5

80

JOHN H ASTINGTON

Woodcut from Margarita ilos

op

ica 1508 ed ition Basel)

Thomas

Fisher Rare

Book Library University of Toronto


5/5

The Clever Dog and the Problematic Hare

581

"How cheerfully on the false trail they cry 0, this is counter, you fal se

Danish dogs "

Hamlet,

4.5.107-8). The false Norwegian dog Gregers revives

a traditional European symbol

of

the search for truth, although - typically for

him - with an in sufflctent understanding o its complexities.

The print also has an interesting bearing on a play more recent

in

date than

Th e Wild Duck,

Tom Stoppard's

Jumpers. t

is even more unlikely that

Stoppard knew the picture before writing his pla

y,

but the inherited metaphors

of the philosophical search for truth which George embodies in his archery

demonstration and in his having engaged Bertrand Russell in obsessive chatter

about trails, hounds, and foxes are everywhere apparent, and are parodied in

the detective-mystery framework of the plot: George searches for Thumper

as Bones searches for McFee; George, who starts hares in his lecture through

out ,the play, stops ·one corporeally fairly early

in

the action.

". Thumper may a victim of a false Theory of Descriptions. As a represen

tative - presumably -

of

the genus

lepus timidus

he is named, whether

affectionately or ironically, after a cartoon version of the American jackrabbit,

lepus campeslris.

As a European hare Thumper is neither a thumper nor a

jumper - although he appears to be something of a climber - but principally

a fast and elusive runner, a quality which yields his symbolic significance, for

Aesop as for Reisc

h.

But he is certainly a victim

of

George's investigations,

and as symbolic Problema he is laid low fairly quickly, although George

himself is unaware until the very end of the play of his fatal logical prowess.

In

Reisch's picture Logic is armed with a bow labelled Questio" (the ques

tion) and a quiver of arrows called "Argumenta," or arguments. George's

arguments seem to be going nowhere, but his arrow, missing the target of

disproving (or proving?) Zeno 's paradox, unites with the Aesopian demonstra

tion concerning speedy Falsitas and plodding Veritas, providing in the skew

ered corpse

of

Thumper a pathetic emblem if not

of

the existence

of

God,

then of the need for his existence. Dotty has located the real set of problems:

thos e of change, loss, and death.

In

attacking them with th e traditional

weapons of Logic, ,George arrives at a ludicrous and moving demonstration

of their status as Insolubilia.

NOTES

The

Will and Testament

o Ibsen

, Partisan Review (

1956);

reprinted in Henrik

Ib

sen

ed.

James McFarlane

(Harmo

ndswonh

, t970), 273-80, 274.

2 All quot tions re from the translation

o

James McFarlane,

sen

Plays (Oxford.

t971 [1960]).

3

Clever

Dogs

and

Nimble

Spaniels,

presented at Third

International

Emblem

Conference,

Pittsburgh, August

1993.

clever dog

Documents