Considering Ibsen's Peer Gynt

Last year I planned to read 50 Plays and write a response to each one. I read far less than 50 and only wrote one response. But I figure I might as well share it with you so here it is.

Described as a play in five acts, Peer Gynt is very much an episodic narrative with the ongoing fantastic encounters of our ‘hero’ heading inexorably to the final conclusion where, Faust-like he gets an unexpected reprieve.

Structurally, the play can be divided more into three than five. The first three acts are adventures in Peer’s youth where he meets Solveig and culminating in his mother’s death; the two together seem to drive him to flee the country. The fourth act is a sample of Peer’s adventures overseas while the fifth act is his return home in old age and his attempt to run from fate (O Sinner Man, where you going to run to?)

The episodes in the first phase all follow on one after the other, but there are jumps in time thereafter, which seems slightly incongruous. I can see this play working better in three acts; condensing the first three and possibly expanding the last two.

In the end this is very much a moral tale but the moral is to be yourself, whatever your lot. Peer’s various adventures are driven by his desires but also by his willingness to mould himself to the situation. When mistaken for a prophet he becomes a prophet; when asked to be a troll he’s fine with that until he learns it’s forever and he can’t roam. Being trapped, or rather accepting his situation and living it, is something Peer is unwilling to do. He loves Solveig in a fashion but the permanency drives him away – especially without his mother to hold him in place.

The fantastic nature of the adventures and Peer’s willingness to accept them all without surprise drive the action on in an entertaining fashion. His justifications and swift about-faces also keep the tone light, with the lot of Solveig and Aase’s death the only real points of drama.

The fifth act has a more didactic feel to it than the first four as Peer’s life draws to an end and he must finally face up to who he is – which is no-one as he has never been himself. There’s a lot of moralising which slows it down somewhat, but the final few scenes with the Button moulder flow quite quickly and echo Everyman.

In all it’s a light entertainment that pushes a message too hard at the end when it might be better left to example. The structure could be greatly condensed to strengthen it and make the jump in time between Act 3 and Act 4 less jarring. I suppose interval would be had in between but the story should allow for no interval.

What’s noteworthy in light of my ideas of narration are Peer’s speeches between his adventures. These are again quite fantastical but he drives the creation of a whole world through his imagination. He becomes an emperor in his own mind or an historian who is again an emperor but through manipulation of history; trees take on different aspects, he becomes an onion he is peeling. The speeches are illustrative and symbolic and tell us as much of the real story and nature of the play as the scenes themselves.

Tasmanian Reading, Genre Issues & the Nature of Horror

Okay so I went away for a couple of weeks to explore Tasmania with my wife. I had hoped to do little entries here via the app, but very early on I realised mobile coverage down there is terrible in most places so it never happened. I did keep a journal however and I will sporadically type the entries up and post them here for those who are interested.

For now I just want to mention the reading I did while I was down there. The bulk of it was catching up on Nightmare Reader No 1 and the issue of Lightspeed Magazine I got as a bonus for backing Nightmare on Kickstarter (it was the October 2010 issue). I started with Nightmare and it was more than worth my paltry $3 pledge, which is a bad way of saying it was a solid literary journal with great stories. The one that’s stayed with me the most is Afterlife by Sarah Langan, which uses ghost children and ‘crossing over’ to present a tragic picture of very real woman whose non-supernatural plight was the genuine cause of distress if not horror.

Which leads to the interesting article at the back of the journal, The Other Scarlet Letter by RJ Sevin, discussing just what Horror is as a genre and why so many people shy away from the word. It essentially argued that the word has become tied to the schlock-horror side of the genre so people tend to assume anything else that might be described that way shouldn’t be. It made me think about how I view or have viewed Horror as a genre and I certainly used to connect it with schlock and gore; I only read my first Stephen King novel last year because to me he was the guy behind those B-grade movies I had no interest in seeing. How wrong was I?

I then moved to the idea that Horror was a strange subset of SF and Fantasy as any story within it would belong to one of them. This is further blurred by figuring out where the line between SF and Fantasy actually lies, sometimes it’s clear but others are almost indistinguishable. Hence Neil Gaiman can win major awards for all three genres for the same book. Genre is weird, and infallibly malleable. So now I tend to be a bit more open-minded on the subject.

After all, the stories in Lightspeed are technically SF but the ones in that issue had a bigger impact on me in terms of horror and mental disturbance than the actual horror stories in Nightmare. Particularly the reprint of Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back by Joe R Lansdale, which was a post-nuclear war story of a man wracked with incredible guilt featuring creatures that cross zombies with Triffids in that the plant kills you then takes over your body … yeah. It gripped me, with both hands and freaked me out. Then there was the man trapped in space forced to rationalise cannibalising his cryogenically frozen crew mates and so slowly went mad (in The Taste of Starlight by John R. Fultz). That was peculiar and chilling but his failure to even consider other options (there was at least one I can think of) weakened the whole impact for me.

On a completely different note the other thing I read during the holiday was JM Barrie’s play A Kiss for Cinderella, which I found at the Salamanca Markets for $2 (a 1937 hardback edition, $2, who was I to pass that up?) I wasn’t really sure what I was in for when I started it but I don’t think I was counting on it being as good as it was nor raising interesting questions in my head. I can’t even decide how to classify it, more problems with the whole question of genre.

It’s about a young woman in London during the Great War who is secretly looking after a group of orphans by scraping away and working at what she can. She’s one of those heart-of-gold waifs with an infectious charm that you expect from the man who gave us Peter Pan’s Wendy. She meets a policeman who is under the suspicion she’s helping Germans (only one, a four-year-old orphan so he doesn’t mind) and of course the two fall in love in that awkward Edwardian British way.

There’s a bit more to it than that including a delightful dream sequence where she fulfils her Cinderella persona, but I don’t want to get into the plot. The interesting thing for me was how Barrie had presented the script. It didn’t simply have dialogue and stage directions, it had narrative within stage directions so anyone reading the script is privy to information not presented to anyone merely watching a performance of it. We’re told of how the policeman met JM Barrie and discussed with him the question of true love for instance. We also understand why the dream sequence goes the way it does which would not be evident without his comments.

Of particular importance is the end however. It could be taken to be the expected happy ending but for one of these comments in the stage directions which is almost entirely ambiguous but seems to imply a very bitter twist to the whole thing. Which would give anyone mounting the play a big decision to make. It’s not a method I think I’ll ever employ but it’s certainly an interesting one and kept me thinking about something I might otherwise have glossed over as a light entertainment.

Keep dreaming!

A Promethean Symphony

So I've been thinking today about my playwrighting and where it's going/hasn't been going. Aside from numerous personal factors, I think one reason so little happened for as long as it didn't, was that I can never seem to produce anything that would be deemed a full-length play. This strictly speaking shouldn't really matter - Samuel Beckett only wrote one, his first. After that his works got shorter and shorter as he tried to produce a pure theatrical image. However, outside festivals of 10-minute plays and the occasional special event of one-act wonders there's little call for shorter works.

But I've also realised I'm not interested in writing a long play. I have stories to tell and theatrical images to attempt, and my style of telling these stories is generally very quick. My longest play actually suffers from its size I think - that and it has a light and a dark side that don't mesh.

What does excite me is an idea I've tossed around in my head a few times but until now never gotten fully into. Basing my works on other structures borrowed from other mediums. I got the idea listening to classical music - well Romantic probably but that's a pedantic argument - and the prevalence of short pieces in collections. Three Sketches; Two Poems for Orchestra, etc. Why not turn a shorter piece of mine into a 'movement' of a greater work?

So comes my idea to write A Promethean Symphony. My first movement is Prometheus Rebooted, an Andante if you will as it does move along fairly slowly and isn't high on the action front. It will be followed by three more movements, I haven't figured out what, based on the general nebulous theme of Promethean/Frankenstonian lore.

I've also come up with the plan to finish part one of the first book of The Scarlet Ring by the end of this month, work on one or two movements of the symphony in October then get into NaNoWriMo before finishing both works over December/January. I should get back to Five-Fingers too ... hold that thought.

Keep dreaming!

Goals and Plans

So I have a couple of plans in mind and I'm going to commit them to this blog to make sure I stick with them. There's one about my playwrighting and one about The Scarlet Ring.

The thing with the playwrighting is I did actually finish two one-act pieces this year and since then both have sat on my computer not bothering anyone or finding out if they're any good - let alone trying to come to life on the stage. So the plan is a play reading picnic in the park.

People will gather, some volunteering to read, others just coming to enjoy the event and join the discussion, then while a picnic lunch is eaten the two plays will be read out. Then as we digest the food everyone who wants to can give some feedback on the plays. That should at least give me the basis for a second draft. That's the plan. A date will be set soon and people will be invited via Facebook, so if you're interested watch that space. It'll be in Sydney in case you're not.

Plan two. I've decided to give NaNoWriMo a go this year. That's the National Novel Writing Month, where you sign up and challenge yourself to write 50,000 words of a novel in November. The idea is to start a new novel, I don't want to do that but I do want to face the challenge properly. Bit of an issue when I've already started but I have a plan.

Before this came up I had divided The Scarlet Ring into three parts (not the trilogy but three sections of book one). So the plan is to finish part one before November and do parts two and three as the challenge.

January Running Down

As we bid farewell to Janus for another year I figure it's time to consider the first month. The biggest highlight for me would have to be the Dresden Dolls' concert; it started with a far too short set by The Jane Austen Argument, those two are such beautiful souls and talented musicians. Then came the Bedroom Philosopher with his line of musical comedy and self-deprecating humour that tickled my fancy; but of course the Dolls themselves rocked out the house for a long time. Seeing them work together on stage, the level of communication and trust between them was as amazing as the music itself. And seeing Brian Viglione play drums is entertainment in itself.

In terms of my writing the year is off to a shaky start but it's still a start. The tale of Five-fingered Jack is developing in bursts and is the first completely new creation of 2012. Working on it has also confirmed my process involves some planning ahead and some improvising. More improvising around a set plan so I at least have a destination and some waypoints so I don't get lost.

With that in mind I've also started chapter outlines for novels; one was more practice than anything and probably won't be written, the other is for a novel I started years ago and long ago stalled. I also started writing descriptions of places as background work for the story. I might not use whole passages as written but having them gives me something to go off when using the places and helps me develop them in my head as well. The city of Esst, for instance, has gone from a hazy blob of streets with a port to a home of ruffian merchants, religious pariahs and a husband and wife who own an inn in a cave by docks at the base of a cliff in a secluded harbour off the Grey Seas.

The idea of reading 50 plays this year is also off to a rough start. Ibsen's Peer Gynt opened the account and led me into a strange tale of a man who'll be anything other than himself. The fantastic stories he invented or was involved in actually reminded me of Five-fingered Jack to some degree so there was that sense of synchronicity which often haunts me when my writing is going well.

Other than that I only managed two short works by Ferdinand Arrabal, a Spanish playwright who fits in to the post-Absurdist school if you believe in such things. Fascinating works; Guernica is an anti-war story but without the heavy-handed sentimentality or didacticism you might expect, and The Labyrinth is a metaphor, possibly, for life that denies easy interpretation and shows the absurdity of human existence quite clearly.

In other reading however I encountered Thomas Love Peacock for the first time. He was a friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley to give you the timing and wrote short satirical novels in a vaguely Gothic Romantic bent that lampoon the genre and German philosophy and society of the day all in the most charming an inoffensive way. The characters in Nightmare Abbey are hilarious send-ups of various stock types and social stereotypes. I mention this, partly to recommend Peacock, but also because of how I found him, which was on the internet looking for things for my e-reader.

While I do love physical books and the tangible experience of reading from them, I've found the e-reader a wonderful addition. It means I can read at times I wouldn't normally, so I'm reading more; but it also means I'm finding things to read I wouldn't have otherwise. I haven't gone to the shop sites and bought e-books; I've gone to the sites which have free e-books because the texts are in public domain. The University of Adelaide has one which has provided me with numerous texts and from its lists of authors I've discovered names like Peacock as well. There are also books it's hard to find physical copies of these days and ones I probably would've put off interminably if I had to rely on paper and ink alone. So for anyone still in a flap about e-books not being as good as the real thing, well that may be, but you're missing out on a world of reading never before so open.

A final comment, while the technology of e-readers is a wonderful development, the casual games of Facebook are not. They're distracting and I really must be better at avoiding the temptation of 'just a quick game of Bubble Brew' ...

On to February my friends – and remember, it's the month of the dead according to ancient Romans, hence the name.