The Cry for Myth (20 page)

Another reason the drama speaks profoundly to us is that it comes out of the period of our immediate forefathers. It was written in 1867, the period following hard upon the time of Kierkegaard, the period that gave birth to Nietzsche and to Freud. As these other prophets spoke
out of
the nineteenth but
to
our twentieth century, this drama is about the essential problems that contemporary man in the twentieth century has to face.

Running through
Peer Gynt
in the myth and in Ibsen’s drama is the theme of the lost self and the arduous process of recovering it. Ibsen put it well—and he meant it as simply and profoundly as he said it—“The issue is how to be yourself.” It sounds very much like Ibsen’s fellow Scandinavian, Kierkegaard, and we immediately wonder how much Ibsen was influenced by Kierkegaard. One of his translators, Michael Meyer, says that Ibsen read little of Kierkegaard and understood less. But, remarks Meyer astutely, many authors have been influenced unconsciously by writers whom they only partially understood. I shall go further and propose that many authors are influenced
more
by writers they only partly understand than by those they fully comprehend, for the former
leaves unfinished business going on in one’s mind. The most powerful influence is that which grasps us as a totality, on levels Jung would call the collective unconscious. Kierkegaard is so close to everybody in our twentieth century that it is often hard to see him. Living and writing in Denmark just twenty years before this play was born, Kierkegaard has an influence on people in echoes that are intimate, personal, and subjective. The lost self is the central theme in Kierkegaard: his greatest condemnation is directed to the “conforming citizen.”

The drama opens with the young Peer Gynt, now the braggart, telling his mother that he rode a buck into Gjendin Edge, down the glacier, over the cliff, and down the precipice. At first his mother believes him and is seized with anxiety, but then she catches on that Peer is bragging again as he always does.

Then Peer Gynt starts off to the wedding of his old girl friend, a celebration to which he has not been invited. Ibsen presents immediately in the play the broken self-esteem that is characteristic of this type of man and how vulnerable he is to humiliation. On the way down the country road toward the village where the wedding is to take place, Peer says to himself:

He hears people coming and hides among the bushes beside the road. Some guests carrying gifts go by on the way to the wedding talking about him. The man remarks, “His Dad was a boozer and his ma’s a ninny,” and the lady rejoins, “It’s no wonder the lad’s a good-for-nothing.”

His face red with shame, Peer gives a forced toss of his head, “Well, let them talk. That won’t kill me.” He then lies down on the grass nursing his wounded self-esteem and looks up at the clouds and fantasizes:

It is important not to confuse Peer Gynt with the Walter Mitty pattern. There is nothing Walter Mittyish about this kind of man; the Peer Gynt types are genuinely talented. They are swashbuckling, true; but they use their strength—real as it is—in the hit-and-miss way that Peer Gynt exemplifies. He is a strong man speaking out of a broken self-esteem and trying to find himself, as Peer Gynt will presently tell us in many ways, despite the fault (I use that word meaning a deep crevice in the ground) in his self-image. These men never amount to anything not because they don’t have talent but because they
are always a reflection
. Their myth is constructed as a consolation. Somebody else has the power for their validation and not they themselves. They are like an automobile in which the motor spins but is always unengaged with the rest of the car.

Arriving at the wedding, Peer Gynt meets Solveig, who, though still a girl, is destined to come back into the play as the heroine. Peer experiences a strange ecstasy, a subterranean charge in this first meeting:

He begs Solveig to dance with him in phrases that sound sincere for almost the only time in the first half of the drama. She refuses, but she is obviously touched deeply with sympathy for Peer. Though he goes back to his bragging to the other young men (“I’ll ride over the lot of you like a storm/The whole parish shall fall at my feet!”), he can never forget Solveig throughout the drama. One learns in psychotherapy that there is in everyone, no matter how distorted in neurosis or psychosis the person may be, this spot that is genuine, honest, humanly responsive—this center of the capacity to love. At this point Peer’s soul was touched.

At the wedding there are arguments; the young men try to get Peer Gynt and the blacksmith to fight, but Peer backs off, having just been beaten by the blacksmith a few days before.

Then Peer Gynt runs off with Ingrid, the bride, an example of the dramatic seductions of which this type of man, with his particular way of using sex purely as a tool, is so capable. He carries her up the mountain, where he seduces her and then, despite her pathetic begging, he pushes her away with, “Oh, shut up” and “Go back where you came from!”

Now he must leave the country under pain of execution, and he begins his wandering. He meets three troll girls, who taunt him with the challenge to make love to all three of them at once. Peer answers, “Try me and see!” and proceeds to accomplish this act.

We see in our patients in therapy how this kind of man perpetually goes through this pattern of behavior,
seduce and leave
. He has a powerful need to keep mother at home waiting for him, and then he can stretch the umbilical cord as he wanders
about the earth, always tied to his mother. The Peer Gynt men are the sexual athletes. But all this potency is performed in the service of the figurative Queen: if the troll girls command, he must perform. There is then no relationship; it is a triumph and a leaving. Yevtushenko sees this lack of relatedness as basic for,

These men don’t want relationship; on an apparent level they want triumph. But in a more profound sense, what they want, and struggle so hard to achieve, is the power to be still a concern in the Queen’s eye, to force her to acknowledge their significance. The flexing of the muscles is purposed to prove to the Queen that they are strong. The upshot is that they remain dependent on mother no matter how far from home they go.

At this point in the drama Peer Gynt glimpses for a moment what he is doing, sensing his phoniness and the contradiction in his self-esteem.

But he cannot confront this directly. He pushes it out of his mind and again gives himself over to grandiose fantasies.

As he wanders on, he meets the daughter of the Troll King, whom he bewitches with his sweet tongue. They ride on a huge pig, which they pretend is a “bridal steed,” to the Troll Kingdom.
He is told by the king that if he stays and marries the princess, who will be the queen, he will become the Troll King and inherit the kingdom as her dowry. This is a literal presentation of the point we made above: the man is enthroned not by his own power but by virtue of his relation to the Queen.

THE MEANING OF TROLLDOM

The myth of
Peer Gynt
consists of the counterposing of human beings and trolls, subhuman beings who live in the dark under the earth and represent exclusively the animal side of human nature. As mythic creatures, trolls are often conceived as dwarfs and fabled to live in caves. The Troll King asks Peer, “What is the difference between Troll and man?”

PEER:
NO difference, as far as I can see.

Big trolls want to roast you, small trolls want to claw you.

It’s the same with us, if we dared.

TROLL KING:
True. We’re alike in that, and more.

But morning is morning and night is night,

And there is a difference nevertheless.

I’ll tell you what it is.

Out there, under the shining vault of heaven,

Men tell each other: “Man, be thyself!”

But in here, among us trolls, we say:

“Troll, be thyself—
and thyself alone.”
*

All the difference hangs on that little word “alone.” It means, according to the Troll King,

According to the translator of this drama, it means, “To hell with the rest of the world.”

The trolls have eyes that are squinted; Peer must give up seeing things straight, for the vision of the trolls is distorted. Trolls live in the dark, and they see the pig on which Peer rode into the troll camp as a steed, and see his wench as “queen.” Peer accepts the tail which they pin on him, as the Troll King continues his instructions, stating that the trolls live by pure senses and the “old Adam is safely kicked out of doors.” To all this Peer agrees. But when he is told that he can never leave the encampment, Peer demures.

The King then demands that Peer marry his daughter since Peer, having had sexual desires toward her, has already impregnated her.

When he refuses, they set upon Peer, flaying him with the aim of killing him. As he succumbs to their blows, he falls to the ground crying, “Help, Mother, I’ll die!” Church bells then ring far off, and the trolls flee in a turmoil of howls and shrieks. Again Peer is rescued by mother.

Let us consider that crucial word, the central term in the original precept, “alone.” The troll precept is the ultimate statement of individualism; it is Ibsen’s view of the central myth of modernity. Quite apart from what individualism meant in the earlier centuries of the West, and especially in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in this country, it is now a statement of the failure of human life. It is the genius of the
creative dramatist, Ibsen, that he predicts the future and sings the death knoll of hyper-individualism.

The individualism that was a noble value in early centuries of our period and elicited in people a courageous self-reliance and a “healthy” independence has, in our anxiety that our modern civilization is crumbling beneath us, deteriorated in the second half of the twentieth century into the motto of Fritz Perls, “I do my thing, you do your thing … and if we don’t meet it can’t be helped.”
*
Ibsen is saying, with the insight of the poet, that the “self alone” is the person who seduces Ingrid and then scorns her after the rape when she, weeping, clings to him. The “self alone” is the essence of the narcissistic personality, which we have described in
Chapter 7
. The troll insistence on “not caring … about what goes on beyond our own borders” in our nuclear age spells the ruin of our world and our civilization. Whatever one thinks of the Christian tradition, the Troll King here logically throws it overboard, for it has stood, despite its failures, for brotherhood and for concern about the others who
are
beyond our frontiers.

The precept, “Be thyself
alone
,” describes the egocentric self, a self without world, a self without love. The ideal is to be unrelated to everyone else, offensively independent. It is a self without
inter
dependence, narcissistic to the core. It is to try to be a self only on the level of wish without will or decision or responsibility.

The trolls are subhuman mythological creatures who psychologically are the archaic elements in the myth. Ibsen himself remarks in the introduction to his play that the “trolls are within the man himself.”

Everything that I have written is most minutely connected with
what I have lived through, if not personally experienced; every new work has had for me the object
of serving as a process of spiritual liberation and catharsis; for every man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs. That was why I once inscribed in a copy of one of my books the following dedicatory lines:
To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul, To write is to sit in judgment on oneself
.
*

The troll always “goes round,” never goes straight through anything. This comes out in Peer Gynt: he keeps repeating throughout the first half of the play, “I am the master of the situation,” which sounds like personal power, an echo of the Victorian, “I am the master of my fate.” But it is in reality the statement of the Victorian man who manipulates himself in the same way one does coal cars and factories.