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NOTES

The Clever Dog and the

Problematic Hare
JOHN H. ASTINGTON

Gregers Werle, said 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 "something 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 Duck 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 his 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 quite 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 sense - 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 audience will think of the various examples of the "Death and the Maiden"
images that they may know, whether in Renaissance prints or in nineteenthcentury revivals of the motif. They can't see Hedvig's picture but they have

Modem Drama, 36 (1993) 578

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 has 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 it too revives a traditional emblematic interpretation of the hunt. It seems unlikely that Ibsen knew the
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 Margarita 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. It 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

580

JOHN H. ASTINGTON

Woodcut from Margarita Philosophica, 1508 edition (Basel)

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

The Clever Dog and the Problematic Hare

581

"How cheerfully on the false trail they cry! I 0, this is counter, you false
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 insufflctent understanding of its complexities.
The print also has an interesting bearing on a play more recent in date than
The Wild Duck, Tom Stoppard's Jumpers. It is even more unlikely that
Stoppard knew the picture before writing his play, 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 throughout ,the play, stops one corporeally fairly early in the action.
". Thumper may ~ a victim of a false Theory of Descriptions. As a representative - 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 Reisch. 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 question) 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 demonstration concerning speedy Falsitas and plodding Veritas, providing in the skewered 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 the traditional
weapons of Logic, ,George arrives at a ludicrous and moving demonstration
of their status as Insolubilia.
NOTES
I

"The Will and Testament of Ibsen," Partisan Review (1956); reprinted in Henrik

Ibsen, ed. James McFarlane (Harmondswonh, t970), 273-80, 274.

All quotations are from the translation of James McFarlane, Ibsen : Plays (Oxford.
t971 [1960]).

3 "Clever Dogs and Nimble Spaniels," presented at Third International Emblem

Conference, Pittsburgh, August 1993.