by May, Rollo
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:
How fair she is!
I never saw such a girl! She dropped
Her eyes to her shoes and her
white apron,
And clutched tight to her
mother’s skirt,
And carried a psalmbook
wrapped in linen,
I must look at that
girl.*
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,
… people insist, and I can’t cope with it,
that I’m no good,
have so few ties with life.*
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.
The flight along Gjendin Edge—
It was all a fake and a lie! …
Sporting with crazy wenches—
A bloody lie and a fake.
But he cannot confront this directly. He pushes it out of his mind and again gives himself over to grandiose fantasies.
Peer Gynt thou wast born to greatness
And to greatness thou shalt come!†
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,
never to care
For the world beyond our frontier.
Renounce day and the things of light.
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.
I’ve taken a tail, that I’ll admit;
I’ll gladly swear that a cow is a woman:
But: The fact that you can’t go home
The way the book says …
I’ll never put my consent.*
The King then demands that Peer marry his daughter since Peer, having had sexual desires toward her, has already impregnated her.
You human beings are all alike
You think that desires don’t matter.
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 frontie
rs.
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 interdependence, 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.
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.
My self—it is the army of wishes, appetites, desires,
The sea of whims, pretensions and demands. …
All that swells here within my breast
And by which I, myself, exist.*
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 yourse
lf.
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,
In short, I am master of the situation….
How fine to set oneself a goal
And drive one’s way remorselessly towards it!
To sever the bonds that bind one to one’s home
And friends.†
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.