The Cry for Myth

by May, Rollo

  Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman presents a powerful myth for millions of Americans and for this reason is played time and again over television and on stages throughout America. At the end of the drama, after Willy’s suicide, a little group stands around his grave. His widow reminds the lifeless Willy that the last payment on the house was to be made that day, and cries out, “Willy, why did you do it?”

  But the older son sadly comments that Willy “never knew who he was.” Charley the neighbor tries to reassure them:

  Nobody dast blame this man…. Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake…. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream. … It comes with the territory.

  BIFF: Charley, the man didn’t know who he was.

  HAPPY, infuriated: Don’t say that!… I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have—to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him.

  BIFF, with a hopeless glance at Happy, bends toward his mother: Let’s go, Mom.

  When they leave Linda stays behind a moment,

  LINDA: I’ll be with you in a minute. Go on, Charley. He hesitates. I want to, just for a minute. I never had a chance to say good-by…. Forgive me, dear. I can’t cry. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t cry. I don’t understand it. Why did you ever do that? I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. A sob rises in her throat. We’re free and clear. Sobbing more fully, released: We’re free.

  Here we see a powerful presentation of a contemporary American myth, a myth which engulfs us all to some extent. For Miller is saying that we “don’t know who we are,” whether we are traveling salesmen, or selling our knowledge in universities, or selling new inventions, or selling junk bonds. We like to believe we have a “good dream … to come out number-one.” This drama, coming chronologically between the myth of Horatio Alger and the myth of the investments and junk bond salesman, paints a picture via the stage of the myth of millions of us, all of us wondering at some level “who we are.” As our question is mythic, so must our answer be mythic, which gives us some opportunity to feel that it will be a “good dream—to come out number-one.”

  The endeavor to find the myth of our identity is shown in the way we, like Willy, sell ourselves—our work, our ideas, our efforts, even as it involves, as with Willy, a shine on our shoes and a smile on our face. And we may find one way or another when our myths let us down, that “we never knew who we were.” But if our drama is like Orestes, or Willy, or any other, we still to some extent are waiting for Godot; we find nonetheless that we have lived our years, for better or for worse. We are salesmen, in search of our personal myths. Arthur Miller’s myth takes us all in and is a myth of the workaday world in the great crowd of ourselves and our countrymen.

  THREE

  In Search of Our Roots

  What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless other cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?

  Friedrich Nietzsche,

  “The Birth of Tragedy

  from the Spirit of Music”

  SURELY NIETZSCHE IS RIGHT: our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home, and one would indeed clutch for other cultures to find some place at some time a “mythic womb.” To be a member of one’s community is to share in its myths, to feel the same pride that glows within us when we recall the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, or Washington crossing the Delaware, or Daniel Boone and Kit Carson riding into the West. The outsider, the foreigner, the stranger is the one who does not share our myths, the one who steers by different stars, worships different gods.

  At a World Series game sixty thousand people join in singing the “bombs bursting in air,” and “our flag was still there,” the flag which waves “o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!” All these are part of the myths which make America a community. When the San Francisco 49ers won the football Super Bowl, there was such wild ecstasy in the city for two days and nights that a visitor from Mars would have thought the citizens had been engulfed by a mass psychosis. And the visitor would be right—it is a “normal psychosis.” The 49ers were not born in San Francisco: the players are “bought” from all over the country and have no loyalty except to their own job. But they do carry the powerful myth of San Francisco, a city in which 750,000 people dwell and to which there is established a mythic loyalty. All these behaviors illustrate the myths which hold us all together. In his perceptive book, American Myth/ American Reality, the historian James Oliver Robertson specifically defines myth as “that which holds us all together.”*

  In Hannah Green’s narration (see Chapter 1) we saw Deborah unable to participate in the common myths of her society, so she is forced to invent her own private community made up of such figures in the Kingdom of Yr as the Collect, Idat, Anterrabae, Lactamae. And we saw how effective Deborah’s mythic community was, for she fell into a deep sleep, protected by these mythic creatures, which assuaged her loneliness even though she was isolated from the society around her.

  In ancient Athens, Pericles proclaimed in his oration to the widows and children of the warriors who died in the Pelo ponnesian War, “These slain soldiers were proud to die for Athens.” The same holds true for other cities and countries which do not share the greatness of Athens. The city in which we grew up still wears a halo in our memory because there, for good or evil, we were born, we went through the experiences of youth, we fell in love, we identified with the workaday world, and so on. This myth goes far back to the time when we did owe our lives to the city behind whose walls, say of Mycenae or of Troy, there was a measure of peace and protection. In the medieval and ancient walled cities, one’s myths went as far as the wall but no farther.

  Indeed, in one influential school of psychoanalysis, the William Alanson White Institute, such famous psychoanalysts as Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and Frieda Fromm-Reich-mann held that psychological problems have their sources in people’s relation to the psychologically significant persons in their culture. Thus the myths which come up in therapy are crucially linked with home and culture.

  THE PASSION TO FIND OUR HOME

  One member of our mainly mythless century, Alex Haley, set out to find his own myth and reported his search in his book, Roots. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Haley took Nietzsche’s advice literally, “man stripped of myth … must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities.” In the spiritual maelstrom of slavery, with its unimaginably humiliating injustices, two of which were forced breeding and requiring slaves to take the names of their owners, the psychological identity of the slaves was routinely crushed. In the Old Testament the cruelest punishment Yahweh could wield against human beings was to “blot out their names from the book of the living,” like the communist countries where history was rewritten to make it say certain individuals never existed and create the phenomenon of the nonperson. This robbing a person of identity, this destruction of his or her myth, is a spiritual punishment which threatened the human character of the slaves, even though their humanity persisted under the most brutal conditions, as in their folk songs.

  In his yearning to find his own roots, Alex Haley writes, “I had to find out who I was…. I needed to find meaning in my life.”* All Haley knew was that his ancestor in Africa, Kunta Kinte, then a stripling, went down to the river to make a drum. The boy was ambushed, knocked unconscious, and, when he came to, herded with other blacks like cattle onto a ship by slave-runners to be sold on the block in cities of the American South. How can one believe he is human
if he has no roots? As Haley looked back, the refrain kept running through his mind, I-must-find-out-who-I-am!

  It is fascinating to see that these are almost exactly the words of Oedipus in Oedipus Rex written twenty-three hundred years ago, “I must find out who I am and where I came from.” In both figures, Haley and Oedipus, having a myth of their past was crucial to having a present identity and, if the truth were known, crucial to having a future as well.

  How does one explain the fact that more American people turned their television sets on to see this drama of Roots than any other program in history? Is not the reason that in America so many of us are rootless? The ancestors of most of us, for example, came as immigrants in the nineteenth century to escape starvation in the potato famine in Ireland, or the foreclosure of mortgages in Sweden, or the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They courageously chose to leave their myths behind. Congratulating themselves on being free and without roots, these Americans nevertheless suffered an endemic feeling of loneliness, a prodding of restlessness which de Tocqueville mentions time and again as he points out that this causes us to move from city to city following a wanderlust that imprisons our souls. Our clinging to cults and our narcotic passion to make money is a flight from our anxiety, which comes in part from our mythlessness.

  On the ship, Alex Haley chose to sleep each night in the hold of the boat to relive as closely as possible what his distant ancestor had been forced to do. Suddenly in his imagination the whole story “broke,” as such creative ideas do, and he knew how he would present the book. The myth came to life. Later he held in his hands the bill of sale transferring the slave, Kunta Kinte, from one master to another, and he could only stare at it and mutter, “My God!”

  This book and the television program it fathered, this example of the search for one’s myth, set loose an active movement, even if short-lived, among all sorts of people in America to find their own special roots. Children of immigrants from Holland and Poland and all of Europe, in trips to the lands that had once been the homeland of their ancestors, pored over death certificates and the engraving—hoary, weather-beaten, and mostly illegible—on gravestones in foreign cemeteries. All of this was in the hope, sometimes rewarded and sometimes not, of finding some roots, “be it among the most remote antiquities,” as Nietzsche asserts. In Haley’s case, it is the poignancy of the ancestors, such as Kunta Kinte, which makes its core something to cherish and to love no matter how painful the process of discovery. Typical for a myth, cruel facts are welded together with beneficent facts into a pattern which we can cherish and call our own. We could define psychoanalysis as the search for one’s own myth. How healing is such a myth to the person who can find and live with it!

  This myth of our past, this source, is a point of reference which we can revere. Unlike the Flying Dutchman, the mythic ship which could never take refuge in a port, we have found our past; and this itself is a guarantee of some port in a possible future.

  MYTHS AS CELEBRATIONS

  “Life in the myth is a celebration,” wrote Thomas Mann. The myths of community are generally happy, joyful myths which enliven us; they mark the holidays, or holy days. We salute each other with “Merry Christmas,” or “Happy New Year.” The holy days which draw us together in carnivals, such as Mardi Gras in New Orleans and in Mediterranean and South American cities preceding Lent, are times of overflowing color and mythic mystery. Then it is permissible to love everyone and to abandon oneself to the spontaneity of the senses. Good Friday and Easter are the celebration of the eternally amazing myth of the crucifixion of Jesus and the resurrection of the Christ, Passover as the original Last Supper, all blended with the celebration of the newborn beauty in the blooming of lilies, the tender time of newly grown grass and plants and other loveliness which breaks through the crust of the earth in spring.

  These holy days gather around them through the ages the mythic character of eternity. We get from them a sense of union with the distant past and the far off future. Christmas—literally, a mass for Christ—has become blended with the myth of the Germanic and Nordic tribes of Northern Europe, and hence we have such symbols as the Christmas tree with all its glitter and with the presents emblazoned around it. The gradual process of accretion, of absorption and merging of local myths with the myths from the religious past, gives the holy day this aura of eternity. The myth of Christmas is a prototype of the birth of the hero, as Otto Rank writes, describing the baby Jesus in the crib in a stable with the Wise Men following the star in the east and bringing gifts. The myth implies that we are wise if we too participate in the spirit of giving.

  Rituals are physical expressions of the myths, as in holidays and the sacraments of religion. The myth is the narration, and the ritual—such as giving presents or being baptized—expresses the myth in bodily action. Rituals and myths supply fixed points in a world of bewildering change and disappointment.* The myth may be prior to the ritual, as it is in the celebration of Holy Communion; or the ritual may come first, as with the Super Bowl triumph of the 49ers. Either way, one gives birth to the other. No self can exist as a self apart from a society with its myths, whether that society is a concrete reality or a subjective construct like Deborah’s Kingdom of Yr.†

  In Europe the community’s myth is symbolically emblazoned by the churches in the towns and cities. High over the collection of houses, which are built close together for protection, there rises the Cathedral of Chartres or the great spires of Cologne, bolstered from outside by flying buttresses and informed inside by mythic Bible stories. These Biblical myths led the person gazing upon them to the adoration of the Most High God and other Christian myths which everyone in the village knew by heart. The church was there for all to see, the custodian of the heart and spirit of the community, the central symbol around which its myths were woven. In the villages of New England there is a similar overarching symbol of the myth of the community. When driving through Vermont or New Hampshire, one comes to the center of the village and sees the “common ground,” a large square of green grass with the village church towering at one end as though its simple beauty in Puritan white gives an eternal blessing to the town.

  Hence for the citizens of the city-state, exile was a powerful threat in ancient and medieval days. One had to surrender his mythic center when he was exiled from his city, where he was immersed in the language and the ethics which were the veins and arteries of myths and hence the society. Exile generally destroyed the psychic life of the person exiled; he was broken literally by being without a country. But exile might in rare cases force the exiled person into a greater surge of creativity, a sublimation one could call it, as it did with Dante and Ma chiavelli. Dante was forced by his exile from Florence to re-experience his myths in solitude, out of which there came his magnificent poem, The Divine Comedy. And without Machiavelli’s exile, The Prince may never have been written.

  The presence of constructive myths is a product of the cultivation in citizens of the need for compassion, especially for the stranger. It was a great step in the ancient history of the Israelites when, in their Book of Leviticus, they placed the law, “Thou shalt judge the stranger [read: person of different myths] by the same laws as thou judgest the children of Israel.”

  The presence of a home, a place where one is listened to, where one can feel “at home,” is essential to healthy myth. Many of our patients in therapy find that their neurotic problems are related to their never having had a home where they were listened to. Ronald Laing tells of his session with a little five-year-old girl who never talked. Brought to his office by her parents, she came into the inner consulting room and sat down on the floor like a “miniature Buddha,” so Dr. Laing described her. He sat down opposite her in the same way. She moved her hands this way and that, and Laing followed, moving his hands in the same way. The whole hour passed without a word being uttered but with their merely going silently through this tiny replica of a tribal dance. At the end of the hour they got up and the little girl left. But sh
e then began talking with her parents. He learned later that the parents had asked her what had happened in that room, and she had retorted, “None of your business.”*

  Children who do not talk may be showing, like the above child, that the milieu into which they are born is hostile, cold, inhospitable. One response to this is not to become part of it by refusing to talk. Others suck their thumbs for interminable periods or in other ways show they have to have something to be close to, if not a home at least a pet or a doll which carries some mythic meaning.

  Such is the necessity of having a community, a home where we can feel we belong, a family where we will be protected and in which we can feel some intimacy. Without a myth that makes a child part of a community, a home which gives warmth and protection, the child does not develop in true human fashion. As Dr. Rene Spitz demonstrated several decades ago, orphans who are never mothered tend to withdraw into silent corners of the crib, and ultimately some of them literally die from lack of love.

  To have friends and a family you can call your own, whether in reality or fantasy, is not only a desideratum; it is a necessity for psychological and spiritual as well as physical survival. We all cry for a collective myth which gives us a fixed spot in an otherwise chaotic universe.

  WHERE HAVE ALL OUR HEROES GONE?

  The myth of the homeland is symbolized by the hero, upon whom are projected the highest aims of the community. Without the hero the community lacks a crucial dimension, for the hero is typically the soul of the community. Heroes are necessary in order to enable the citizens to find their own ideals, courage, and wisdom in the society. “Society has to contrive some way to allow its citizens to feel heroic,” said Ernest Becker. “This is one of the great challenges of the twentieth century.”* We hunger for heroes as role models, as standards of action, as ethics in flesh and bones like our own. A hero is a myth in action.