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| Ibsen's 'Enemy of the People' - scene from a 2014 production staged in Singapore |
Introducing K. Das’ nostalgic account of
his boyhood encounter with Pearl Buck’s The
Good Earth (Books Page, Jan 4), the editorial note asked the question: “How
many of us remember the first book we read as we stood on the threshold of
adulthood?” I remember mine, read 34 years ago, very vividly. The book was a
minor work by of the world’s major writers. It struck me so deeply that 34
years later, I could recall it as if I had only read it yesterday. I can even
remember the book as a distinct physical entity; the size, shape, colour of the
cover (yellow and white with the title in black type), the name of the
publisher (Heinemann), and I sometimes fancy I could still recall the special
smell of the paper too.
Before writing this piece, I got hold of a
copy from the university library to check my memory against the text. Reading
it again after so long, it was quite amazing how much I could anticipate, not
so much the story (that was nothing) but the dialogue. And my memory these days
isn’t quite what it used to be. I can think of a number of reasons why the book
had such an impact on me. I acquired the habit of reading very late – not until
my late teens. Until then, I was totally uninterested in books. I was about 16
when I opened up the thing; and proved to be the one that seduced me into
becoming a lover of its kind for life.
Why this particular book, and not other
encountered at about the same time? The subject and theme of the book had a lot
to do with it. It was what you might call an “adult book,” about adults and
with an “adult theme.” And I, being a late developer, encountered it at just
the right time, when my mind was beginning, somewhat belatedly, to awaken.
Unlike many compulsive readers, my first “real book” wasn’t Alice in Wonderland, Grimm or Andersen
(all of which I only read for the first time as an adult discovering them
together with my children). My childhood was almost totally unblessed by the
presence, the sight and smell of books. My father was an avid reader but of nothing
other than newspapers; the only book in the house, other than school texts, was
the Quran. I therefore had no childhood so far as reading was concerned. The
first real book I read was also the first important book encountered as I stood
“on the threshold of adulthood.”
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| Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) |
The book was a play by the 19th Century
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It’s called An Enemy of the People. Compared to the plays which Ibsen is best
known to the world – Ghosts, Hedda
Gabler, The Wild Duck, The Master Builder, Peer Gynt – An Enemy of the People is, considered strictly as dramatic work,
very minor. But to me, 34 years ago, it was a sheer masterpiece and
thematically a real eye-opener. It was probably the first play I ever read; and
I rather like the idea that a play with such a ringingly ironic title, An Enemy of the People, should have had
such an impact on my adolescent mind. Looking back from the vantage point of my
half-century, and succumbing for a moment to the temptation of the pretentious,
I wonder if there wasn’t an element of “provincial prophecy,” and ironic too,
in that teenage encounter between the Norwegian apostate,” whose controversial
plays like Ghosts drew the wrath of
his countrymen on him, and the kampung
boy from Malacca who at that age had only one conscious notion concerning
the purpose of education – to obtain the passport to social success and thus
become “one of them.”
An
Enemy of the People (written in 1882, and first
performed in Christiania the following year) is about a “water crisis” not
unlike the one my poor old Malacca had to suffer for so long only recently. The
“water crisis” in the play is the catalyst of the moral drama of integrity
versus corruption, truth versus lies, courage versus cowardice, moral
independence versus spineless conformity, the lone individual versus the
compact majority. It tells the story of Doctor Thomas Stockmann, the medical
officer at a small Norwegian spa, who discovers that the Baths, on which the
prosperity of the town and the power of the ruling class depend, are
contaminated. Being a man of integrity, charmingly full of faith in his fellow-men
and naïvely stubborn in some ways, it is obvious to him what is to be done. To the Mayor, who happens to be his brother, what is obvious is something else
entirely. He knows what making public the doctor’s discovery would mean – to
his position as Mayor who was responsible for the actual construction of the
Baths and the way the pipes were laid, and to the prosperity of the town
especially of the middle class to which the Mayor belongs.
The editor of The People’s Herald and his printer are at first on the side of the
doctor. But it is hinted fairly early in the play that their motives are
dubious, as events subsequently prove. In the name of public opinion, they turn
overnight from being the would-be champions of integrity and accountability to
being the leaders of the pack that hounds the doctor.
The play, in part inspired by two actual
incidents, was written at a furious speed, without the usual lengthy period of
gestation characteristic of Ibsen’s writing habit. He was obviously in an
uncompromising mood, the speed of the writing dictated by red-hot fury at and
contempt for the mass mind; the mob hysteria in the Press that greeted the
publication the previous year (1881) of Ghosts,
a play essentially about servitude to meaningless conventions, must have
haunted the writing of An Enemy of the
People. The state of mind in which the play was written probably accounts
for the relative crudity of its dramatic development, the use of some rather
heavy-handed ironies (dramatic as well as verbal) and the simplistic
characterization of some of the secondary characters (Arthur Miller when asked
to do his own American version of the play in 1950, at a time when the freedom
and integrity of the American theatre itself was under threat from the tyranny
of the mob, felt compelled to reword the play to strengthen its dramatic
texture.)
But, crude and simplistic though the Ibsen
play may be in some ways, that very crudity is paradoxically part of its
appeal; it has the rawness and immediacy of passionate commitment, of the
thrill of taunting topicality, minimally mediated by the distancing refinement of
art. Perhaps, innocent as I was of art on the fateful day 34 years ago, Ibsen spoke
to my adolescent self with a directness that went straight to the hati (liver) of my mind.
I can still remember quite strongly the
innocent thrill with which I thundered to the kerbaus (water buffalos) in the kampung
sawah (paddy fields) Doctor Stockmann’s passionate declaration of faith in
spiritual elitism that concludes the play: “The strongest man in the world is
the man who stands alone.” (Miller’s version of the line is much better: You
are fighting for the truth, and that’s why you are alone. And that makes you strong
– we are the strongest people in the world … (Crowd noises build) And the strong must learn to be lonely.”) I
thundered the line to the kerbaus as
if it was a revelation just granted me, quite unaware of its implications in
the actual world. Perhaps that was the moment when my mind became contaminated
by the foreign virus of arrogance and plain speaking. I was naïve then, and the
naïvety perfectly answered to Stockmann’s own brand of naïvety, one that moved
from the populist, with its faith in the “compact majority” and the so-called
“progressive and independent Press,” to its opposite: an elitist arrogance or
hubris, an utter contempt for the forever changeable mass mind and the equally
changeable “liberal Press.” (An Enemy of
the People really makes the words “liberal” and “progressive” sound quite
obscene.)
But naïve though Doctor Stockmann is at the
beginning of the play, and disturbingly elitist he may perhaps be at the end,
he remains essentially a character the intelligent and sensitive reader can
empathize with. He dominates the play with the sheer energy of his passion – naïvety,
arrogance and all. And it is worth noting that, unlike many fighters for a
cause, Stockmann isn’t shy of what his puritanical brother would call
“hedonism” and self-indulgence”; he loves good food and drink, and loves to see
others enjoying themselves. In some ways, Stockmann is Ibsen himself, one of
the world’s most uncompromising playwrights. It is no wonder that the role is
the favourite of Stanislavsky, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest
actor-directors.
29 January 1992
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