Reimagining Ibsen’s Women in Will Eno’s Gnit: Language and the Everyday

The sepia photograph on the cover of the American edition of Will Eno’s Gnit (2013) shows a cowboy walking away from the viewer, a suitcase in one hand and a long, coiled length of rope in the other. This iconic silhouette is leaving us, heading down a muddy path into an overcast rural landscape. The image conjures up mythic and forlorn thoughts of the frontier, the freedom and loss of the unattached drifter, and the emotionally bruised or stunted American male of so many depictions. It is a fitting image for what the back cover describes as Eno’s “faithful, unfaithful, and willfully American misreading” of Henrik Ibsen’s sprawling 1867 drama, Peer Gynt. This “misreading” of Peer Gynt is both a flippant exercise in condensation and a morally serious homage. Gnit is an extremely funny play, as Eno is the playwright who inspired the term “stand-up existentialism,” but it is also a mournful look at loneliness, regret, and the difficulties of language and human connection. Eno’s version maintains an earnest ethical purpose with regard to a central theme in Peer Gynt: that the self is realized not in an abstract search for autonomy or authenticity, but in concrete relations and commitments to others. Peter Gnit evades responsibility, love, and community in search of a grandiose, but fatuous notion of self-discovery. Like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Peter Gnit takes a detour through life, following his erotic whims and hunger for greatness around the world,