The Cry for Myth (21 page)

Ibsen then raises the corollary question in
Peer Gynt:
How can one become human? Our problem here, as in understanding any myth, is to go through this regressive side, represented by the trolls and the archaic creatures, to the
integrative
side. As will be indicated in a later part of the play, this can be done only by
responding
. What Peer Gynt cannot do in all his seducing, in all his running around the world, in all his bragging, is
to respond to another human being
. To make a relationship, to exercise empathy, to build. All of this is part of genuine relating to another person, which Peer cannot do.

Before we go further into the play itself, let us look more specifically at Peer Gynt’s relationship with women. Peer Gynt cannot stay with Solveig, even though he knows she loves him and he knows, at least later on, that he loves her. Love is not what he wants. He wants rather to feel “free,” like a man wandering at the end of the infinitely elastic and extensible umbilical cord, with the woman always waiting back home. The musician Grieg in his
Peer Gynt
suite shows Solveig spinning and singing as she awaits Peer Gynt in her little cottage. If she were not waiting at home, if she did not “stay put,” the
umbilical cord of course would break, and the alleged “freedom” would then vanish.

Thus the Peer Gynts in life never solve the paradox of
freedom by giving oneself
. Their freedom is not even a freedom
from
something: it is a simulated freedom, with mother always in the wings. Hence their compulsive activity: they must always be trying to prove something to the woman, whether she is present or fantasied, and at the same time they are always running away from her. In Kierkegaard’s terms, the Peer Gynts try to
be
themselves without ever
choosing
themselves.

Several interesting exchanges illustrate this dilemma. Rather early in the play, Peer Gynt says as in fantasy to Solveig, “My princess! Now at last I’ve found and won her! Hey! Now I’ll build my palace on firm, true ground!” and he seizes an axe to build. Into the clearing comes an old woman, who says, “Good evening, Peer
Lightfoot.”
Lightfoot refers to Peer’s predilection for running from ship to ship, pier to pier, if I may be permitted the pun, never getting, staying, or even arriving, any place.

PEER:
What? Who are you?

WOMAN:
Old friends, Peer Gynt.

My cottage lies nearby. We’re neighbours.

PEER:
Oh? That’s news to me.

WOMAN:
As you built your house, mine rose beside it.

PEER
(turns): I’m in a hurry—

WOMAN:
You always were, lad.
*

This perpetual hurrying is an expression of his dilemma of needing to appear free of the woman while he is always tied to her. The Boyg says about Peer, “He was too strong.
There were women behind him.”
And Peer asks Helga to tell Solveig, “I only meant—ask her not to forget me.” What the Peer Gynt type wants is not women or love, but to have women behind him, always at home, the base of the umbilical cord.

We notice that the person with this myth
appears
to have a great deal of feeling; he emotes continuously and copiously. But it is not hard to see that he does not have real feelings at all. The women Peer Gynt purports to love—Ingrid, and later Anitra—these he gives up with the snap of a finger. There is no real relationship at any point in his life. His feelings go off like firecrackers: we see a big show, and it as quickly fizzles out. His action is empty: none of his many motions becomes
emotions
. Peer Gynt runs
all over the world but always stays in the same place
.

Peer Gynt
seems
sexually to have whomever he wishes, from Ingrid the bride through the troll girls, et al. But when a person is characterized by such compulsive activity, he never can stop or even slow down. There are two reasons for this: first the compulsive activity itself allays and narcotizes his anxiety. Second, the person, if he were to slow down, would have to confront himself, and this would make him most anxious of all. The important point is that the compulsive activity is never action
for its own sake
in the Peer Gynts, never
action for pleasure, power, or joy
. It is action in the service of flight; he is running hard to avoid confrontation with himself.

We find in the beginning of therapy that patients of this Peer Gynt pattern are often sexually very potent. But the potency turns out to be on an unsound basis which cannot last: pleasing the Queen as a gigolo. Later on such a patient, when he becomes more integrated, may go through a period of impotence. He cannot understand why the therapist may regard this impotence as a positive sign. The impotence is typically an uncovering of the damaged structure underneath, and as we stated earlier about myths as structure, it gives one a chance to change the faulty myth.

The genetic origin of this pattern lies in infancy in a particular and powerful relationship with the mother. Peer Gynt’s father had been a drunkard, as the gossiping people on the country road indicated, and now was dead. The mother elevated
Peer Gynt to the throne of the father, overtly when the father died, but covertly while the father was living. It is an Oedipus pattern not in the sense that the little boy wants his mother or chooses her, but he is shoved onto the throne in the role of prince consort. The mother is the one who puts the crown on his head. But this makes him actually a slave monarch. It is something like the pattern that Adler used to understand better than he described—the pattern which he called the “spoiled child syndrome.” By this he meant a spoiled child and a broken child at the same time. This syndrome particularly emerges from the Victorian period, as we will indicate later.

We next find Peer in Morocco, where he becomes rich and influential. He practices the slave trade, having worked out a nice system of sending idols to primitive nations and then missionaries to correct the idols. He sends Bibles and rum to the heathen, keeping these well balanced so there is nothing to get in the way of his acquiring riches. He then proclaims, “I must be myself entirely,” and proceeds to discourse on what this is.

The self for him, thus, exists on the
archaic
, infantile level of selfhood. The world of relationship, the complex, fascinating, difficult, endlessly new, this world is rich in demands but copious in rewards. In short, this world of people is wholly omitted from Peer’s life. The secret, he says, lies in always avoiding commitment:

PEER:
… The key to life

Is simply this. Close your ear against

The infiltration of a dangerous serpent.

COTTON:
What serpent, my good friend?

PEER:
A little one that is most seductive.

The one that tempts you to commit yourself.

The art of success is to stand free

And uncommitted amid the snares of life.

To know that a bridge always remains open

Behind you.
*

In the next scene Peer, standing on the coast, looks out and observes that his friends are stealing his yacht. For a moment he is tremendously shocked. He cries for God to help him—he forgets God’s name and only after some thought remembers it—instructing God, “Now listen carefully.” And of course nothing happens: the friends make off with the yacht and Peer is left stranded on the seashore.

Pondering his grandiose plans as he wanders anew through the desert, he comes upon an emperor’s camp, with horses, jewels, and clothes waiting at hand. Appropriating these, Peer now proclaims himself a prophet. Here Anitra comes on the scene and dances, both in the drama and in Grieg’s music. He tells her, as an aid to seducing her, that he is a prophet sent by Allah, but this time the seduction doesn’t succeed. Riding off on his horse, Anitra abandons him as his friends have done.

Like a typical Victorian, Peer than proclaims the clichés all over again,

Now Peer is beginning to lie to himself, a common plateau which precedes the breakdown in a typical neurosis.
Ibsen is indeed one of the group of persons in the last of the nineteenth
century, including Nietzsche and Freud, who produced the great psychoanalytic revolution
.

We then find Peer in Egypt before a statue of Mennon, the god of the morning. The statue is trying to say something to him:

The riddle means that Peer has sealed off his soul and he must unseal it or die. He pays no attention.

Next Peer arrives at an insane asylum. He is introduced in the hospital as “the prophet of self”—a man who is himself in everything. The director takes him through the hospital and announces that Peer Gynt is going to be the new director. Peer Gynt avers, “Here, as far as I can make out, the thing is to be beside one’s self.” The director assures him that he is mistaken, and goes on to describe the inmates of the hospital as follows,

Peer Gynt and the patients in the mental hospital have this in common: they cannot weep for the woes of others, they cannot respond or experience sympathy, they have no ear for anyone else’s ideas. The fundamental human bond is lost. Yevtushenko correctly sees that the Peer Gynt type is the person who has “so few ties with life.” He states, in contrast, the other side on the basis of his own struggle and experience,

Now in the hospital there is a fellah with a mummy strapped on his back. It stands for the past not in the sense of mommy but the mummy of the grandiose dead self—“King Avis”—which still clings to this man. The fellah asks Peer how he can make people see that
he
is King Avis (i.e., he himself is the dead, archaic element strapped on his back). Peer Gynt answers, “Hang yourself,” with the idea that, dead, he’ll look like the mummy. The fellah goes and does it. Peer says to another man, “Cut your throat,” and the man does so. This is a vivid presentation of the truth coming home to Peer that to
be only yourself you become the victim of everybody else’s whim
. A powerful paradox indeed!

Peer Gynt becomes frantic. He sees that these people “are themselves and nothing but themselves” and realizes that this is what he has all his life tried to be. It is the first time in the play that Peer gets any genuine insight. He is at last aware that he is now the ultimate of the empty self—he is aware of the bankruptcy of the central and basic myth in his life.

He cries, “I am a blank sheet of paper that no one will write on” and “I’m whatever you wish.”
†
The dilemma of being yourself by way of the drive to be admired and to be taken care of consists of getting your identity as a self from what others want and direct. This now makes the circle full: Peer ends up “I’m whatever you wish.”

THE VALUE OF DESPAIR

At this point we generally meet this kind of person in psychotherapy. It is not by accident that Ibsen has Peer Gynt in a mental hospital here. We can almost literally hear the cracking of the timbers as Peer Gynt’s structure of myth collapses to the ground. In his own words his whole life up till now has been a “fake and a lie.” The state of despair that is characterized by the realization that he simply has no self, has no center, is similar to the disintegration of self-world relationship in schizophrenia. It is a terrifying experience, and the fact that everyone has it to some extent does not make the despair any less terrifying.

At long last, Peer Gynt wakes up to the fact that he is not the master of himself at all. He knows now that somebody could say to him, “Jump into the Nile and drown yourself,” and he might well do it. This is the state of despair and emptiness which Tillich terms literally the fear of non-being.

It is a sad spectacle as we remember Peer’s exuberance at the opening of the drama; we see the hulk of a man who was “destined for greatness, a man who rides a horse with a crest of shining silver and four shoes of gold, trailing a cloak of scarlet silk.” Now we see the pathetic corpse of a myth which never worked!

After this realization of despair, we find Peer on a ship bound back to Norway. Becoming aware of the sailors who are with him on the ship, Peer suddenly wants to give money to the poor sailors—his first appearance of a genuinely generous impulse in response to the needs of others. But then he learns that these sailors have wives and children waiting for them back home, while “there is no one waiting for old Peer Gynt.” Spite and envy now surge up in Peer, weeping for a lost time.

The problem of
spite
is exceedingly interesting in that it releases bitter hatred, aggression, and a desire in him to erase the sailors’ human bonds; he wants “all their love destroyed!” This surge of hatred and aggression against persons who have done him no harm whatever may seem surprising. But at least it is genuine, the first strong, genuine emotion that Peer Gynt has had in the whole play. The anger at least tells us Peer Gynt feels something directly.