z8 Losing Touch with the Everyday Love and Language in The Wild Duck A Doll’s House shows how Nora finds a way out of her idealist and melo- dramatic scenarios towards the everyday, dramatized onstage by having her change into her everyday dress and launch into the deliberately non- spectacular conversation that ends the play. In A Doll’s House, then, the everyday stands for the realm in which words in a conversation begin to make sense, where we can manage to see that language—or, more precisely, our use of language—expresses us.1 In this chapter I shall show that The Wild Duck explores the connection between language and the everyday further than any other Ibsen play.2 The Wild Duck is Ibsen’s most moving play. In its harrowing exploration of a father who cannot even begin to acknowledge his true relationship to his daughter, The Wild Duck reminds me of King Lear.3 Given that the question of paternity is surrounded by doubt in The Wild Duck, Ibsen’s play also contains a reflection on the meaning of fatherhood. “Perhaps I am not really Father’s child,” Hedvig says; “Well, I think he could love me just as much anyway. Yes, almost more. We got the wild duck as a present too, and I love it so much all the same” (: ). In this masterly play, Ibsen turns the tragedy of Hedvig into a disturbing meditation on the connection between the ways in which words lose their meaning and the ways in which we avoid love. The Duck The eponymous wild duck plunges us straight into the question of the mean- ing of words. To its first audiences, The Wild Duck was utterly baffling. “The audience does not know which way to turn,” the Norwegian writer Henrik Jæger noted, “and from the current reviews it will get no wiser, for one newspaper says one thing and the other another” (: –).4 Foreign Losing Touch with the Everyday audiences did not find the play any easier to understand. “Browning was obscure.... But Browning at his worst is nought compared with Ibsen,” one British critic complained when the play opened in London in .5 The problem seemed above all to be the so-called symbolism of the wild duck itself. In Paris members of the first audiences at Antoine’s production quacked like ducks every time the poor bird was mentioned.6 The respected French critic Francisque Sarcey summed it up: “Oh! That wild duck, abso- lutely nobody ever, no, nobody, neither you who have seen the play, nor Lindenlaub and Ephraim who translated it word for word, nor the author who wrote it, nor Shakespeare who inspired it, nor God or the Devil, no, no one will ever know what that wild duck is, neither what it’s doing in the play, nor what it means.”7 As derision ceased and The Wild Duck became generally acknowledged as one of Ibsen’s greatest plays, critics went to the other extreme. Far from declaring the duck to be meaningless, they now uncovered ever more subtle layers of meaning in what they took to be Ibsen’s profound symbol. But, as Errol Durbach points out, this is simply to repeat Gregers Werle’s attitude towards the wild duck. “Ibsen, at the height of his power as a symbolist, assigns no portentous symbolic value whatever to the duck,” Durbach writes. “He merely presents it as the vehicle for the ridiculous duck-symbolism of Gregers, for whom all surface reality is a system of transcendental referents.”8 I agree with Durbach that the idea that the duck has to mean something is entirely of Gregers’s making. But that is because the word “mean” here is used in a rather special way. Otherwise it would simply be a mistake to blame Gregers for the incessant interpretation of the wild duck, since already in the first act, Håkon Werle, Gregers’s rich industrialist father, compares certain kinds of people to wild ducks: “There are people in this world who plunge to the bottom when they get a couple of shots in the body, and then they never come up again” (: ). But Sarcey was presumably not driven to intel- lectual despair by a simple simile, as if he could not grasp the idea that some of the characters are in some respects like the wild duck in the Ekdals’ loft. Thus old Ekdal has given up the struggle for life after being emotionally destroyed by a prison sentence; Hedvig is innocent, wounded, and fragile; and Hjalmar has, like the duck in her basket, grown contentedly fat in his narrowed circumstances. (The only person in the Ekdal family who has no relationship to the duck is Gina. I shall return to that.) “I do realize all that”, Sarcey might well have said to me had I tried to be helpful by pointing out these parallels, “but that’s obvious, something anyone can see. That’s not what I mean by the meaning of the wild duck.” To which I could reply that if one presses the meaning of “meaning” in this way, pretty quickly nothing Ibsen’s Modernism will count as the meaning of the wild duck. So the quest comes to seem hopeless. Sarcey’s despair about ever grasping the meaning of the wild duck, then, is fueled by a sense that to “understand” the wild duck must be to grasp something far deeper, altogether more meaningful, more mysterious, than any ordinary comparisons and parallels will yield. Literary critics have fol- lowed in his footsteps ever since. This is precisely Gregers’s attitude, too. To him, the wild duck cannot be just a wild duck, a bird that some people can be compared to; she has to be a sign of something else, something beyond the surface of everyday phenomena. As we shall see, Gregers is constantly gestur- ing towards a world of absolutes beyond the veil of appearances, thus reveal- ing that to him, ordinary life and everyday people, things and activities, are worthless unless they can be invested with some great metaphysical drama of sacrifice and forgiveness. If we get transfixed by the idea that the wild duck must be either a symbol or an allegory, or at the very least some special kind of really deep metaphor, we will fail to notice that the wild duck is just one element in Ibsen’s much wider investigation of language.9 The wild duck tempts us to repeat Gregers’s attitude towards meaning. Only if we can manage to resist that temptation will we be in a position to understand The Wild Duck. For the most import- ant question in The Wild Duck is not at all what the eponymous wild duck means (and certainly not what it “means” in a deep sense), but whether it is possible to hang on to meaning at all in a world full of self-theatricalizing cynics, skeptics, and narcissists, who all do their best to empty words of meaning. The loft: Photography, Theater, and the Negation of Theater The Wild Duck quite explicitly draws attention to the idea that the word “loft” might mean something else or more than it usually does, in the passage where Gregers asks Hedvig whether she is certain that the loft is a loft (see : ).10 Separated by a single wall, the Ekdals’ combined photographic studio and living room and the adjacent loft are on the same level on the top floor of the building in which the Ekdals live. While the attic studio in the fore- ground is light, the loft is dark, and the double doors between them must be opened to let in the light from the studio. In this way, the loft in the back- ground comes across as a photographic negative of the attic room in the Losing Touch with the Everyday foreground. Perhaps we could even think of it as an image of a camera, with the double doors functioning as the shutter letting in light on the negative. On the other hand, the double door opens more like a theater curtain than a shutter. “On the back wall there is a wide double door, designed to slide back to the sides,” Ibsen writes (: ). Inside the double door, moreover, there is something Hjalmar calls mekanismen (: ). The “mechanism” is released when Hjalmar pulls a cord: “from inside, a curtain glides down, the nether part of which consists of a strip of old sailcloth, and the rest, above, of a piece of tautly stretched fishing net. As a result, the floor of the loft is no longer visible” (: ). Falling down like a drop curtain, the “mechanism” lets in light while at the same time preventing the birds and rabbits from getting out. The invisible floor is not just a haphazard detail: a godsend to producers, it ensures that the wild duck and the other members of the menagerie will never actually be seen by the audience. This stage arrangement is structurally quite similar to that of the last act of Pillars of Society. The difference is that where Pillars of Society has a glass wall, The Wild Duck has an ordinary wall and a double door.11 In Pillars of Society, the space behind the glass wall is used for a brilliantly illuminated, spectacu- lar, theatrical, torch-lit procession. In The Wild Duck, however, the loft is mostly hidden from view. On the one occasion where the loft remains open to view for any length of time, Hjalmar and his old father are seen through the fishing net darkly, happily building a new path to the water trough for the wild duck.