Four Major Plays, Volume II [Mass Market Paperback]

I intend only to review one play of these four, An Enemy of the People. As for the Signet editions and their translations, well, in terms of paper and print, you get what you pay for. You can carry them in your jeans pocket, but don't wait too long to read them, lest the paper yellows and crumbles in your fingers.

An Enemy of the People is Ibsen's most explicitly political play, and the one that critics refer to most often when attempting to pin down the playwright's political stance. The fourth act of the drama consists chiefly of Doctor Stockman's spontaneous ranting and raving against the tyranny of the majority - the democratic mass of ignorant and short-sighted ordinary people who have failed to accept his advice. "The majority is never right!" he declares; "That's one of those social lies that any free man who thinks for himself has to rebel against.... all over this whole wide earth, the stupid are in a fearsomely overpowering majority..... The right is with me, and the other few, the solitary individuals. The minority is always right." Later in his tirade, he continues: "I'm thinking of the few, the individuals among us, who've mastered all the new truths that have been germinating. Those men are out there holding their positions like outposts, so far in the vanguard that the solid majority hasn't even begun to catch up..." Such anti-democratic, anti-liberal declarations have earned Ibsen a reputation among some critics of being a prophet of fascism -- he was in fact Hitler's favorite playwright -- but a careful comparison will show that Doctor Stockman sounds a good deal more like a character in an Ayn Rand novel than like the 'hero' of Mein Kampf. Listen to Stockman's last words, at the end of act five, standing in the middle of his vandalized clinic and confronting a ruined career: "I've made a great discovery!... the strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone!"

Recent audiences seem disposed to take Stockman at his own estimation. The BBC adaptation of Enemy transposes the danger to the community that Stockman has discovered from sewage contamination of the Spa to chemical pollution, and portrays Stockman as a staunch monitor against environmental catastrophe. It would, I think, be quite easy to rewrite Ibsen's play as an outcry of alarm against the deniers of global warming. But frankly, I don't think Ibsen had anything so obvious and unambiguous in mind. Perhaps I'm just reluctant to accept the idea that a great playwright could be a total fool. The play is clearly not about pollution, but about the 'balance' of values between the exceptional individual and the ordinary throng.

Doctor Stockman, by his own evaluation, is the exceptional individual, and for the moment at least the embodiment of the "prophet without honor in his own country." However, the play is rife with clues that we the audience are not required to accept Stockman's self-assessment. First, of course, any rash madman can proclaim himself a genius, and Stockman is plainly a bit of a madman. He has, after all, put himself and his family in dire straits. He's also, by his own admission, remarkably naive for an "exceptional" mind -- utterly blind to the possibility that others might have other understandings than his. He loudly declares his indifference to public opinion of his personal worth, yet in fact he is painfully susceptible to the doubts of others about his motives and hysterically committed to vindicating his "honor'. In the end, he'd rather 'be right' - in his own mind - than 'do right'. His bizarre father-in-law, in fact, provides him with the chance to do something concrete - not without struggle and cost, but effectively for the best interest of the community - to take on the pragmatic task of cleansing the Spa of disease organisms. The mere possibility that the community might suspect him of self-interest, however, throws him into a tizzy of abnegation and isolation, and the scary scheme of 'educating' his sons and a few other children essentially as disciples of his proto-Objectivist philosophy. Stockman may be totally right about the hazard of pollution and yet be recognized as a quixotic megalomaniacal crank, a man of no possible use to his community.

What then did Ibsen intend? After all, in Peer Gynt he'd already expressed his horror of everything mediocre; Doctor Stockman would have no reason to fear the "button-maker" who comes to recycle the 'souls' of ordinary men. But "An Enemy of the People" is too rich in irony and tragicomedy to be another affirmation of libertarian individualism. It can only be coherently read as proof of the futility of the 'superior' outsider. It's just a quick half-turn from Doctor Stockman to Ralph Nader... or to my own Harvard classmate Ted Kaczynski.

Four Major Plays, Volume I (Signet Classics)

An Enemy of the People

Dr Stockman: "The whole Bath establishment is a whited, poisoned sepulcher. I tell you - the gravest possible danger to public health! All the nastiness up at Mollidol, all that stinking filth, is infecting the water in the conduit pipes leading to the Reservoir.
(Pointing to letter) Here it is! It proves the presence of decaying organic matter in the water; it is full of infusoria. The water is absolutely dangerous to use... either internally or externally." (An Enemy of the People, Act I)

Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People" tells the story of a conscientious man of science, Dr. Stockman, who, as the public health official for his town, feels duty bound to report scientific evidence of disease; and the burgomasters and civic leaders who see his warnings about pollution of the new public baths as a negative factor in the city's progress. The play can be read as a corollary on global warning, dependence on oil, or conspicuous consumption and Wall Street Greed. Or, as Arthur Miller interpreted it in his 1950's adaptation of Ibsen's play, a commentary on the folly of popular opinion: expressly, the public hysteria over McCarthyism.

HOVSTAD: The man who would ruin a whole community must be an enemy of society!
DR. STOCKMANN: It doesn't matter if a lying community is ruined!... You'll poison the whole country in time; you will bring it to such a pass that the whole country will deserve to perish. And should it come to this, I say, from the bottom of my heart: Perish the country! Perish all its people!

Ibsen is a tragedian in the tradition of the Greeks, Marlowe and Shakespeare. His language may be a bit stilted for today's tastes, but his message is still relevant.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews  4.5 out of 5 stars