by May, Rollo
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:
O Owl of Wisdom, where do my birds sleep?
You must solve the riddle of my song or die.*
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,
Here we are ourselves with a vengeance;
Ourselves and nothing but ourselves.
We go full steam through life under the pressure of self.
Each one shuts himself up in the cask of self,
Sinks to the bottom by self-fermentation,
Seals himself in with the bung of self,
And seasons in the well of self,
No one here weeps for the woes of others.
No one here listens to anyone else’s ideas.†
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,
But if I connect with so many things,
I must stand for something, apparently,
have some value?
And if I stand for nothing,
Why then
do I suffer and weep?*
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.
Candles on the table! I’ll put out those candles!
[because] there’s no one who ever thinks of me.*
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.
This is what also often happens with our patients when they come to psychotherapy in this state of despair and emptiness. First there surges up in them a surprising amount of spite and envy (often put in the sophisticated form of cynicism) toward others’ loves and happiness. Obviously it does no good to moralize to the patient about this. They are full of envy and spite; they have been cheated, regardless of whose fault it was. Our moralism is not only ineffectual and unconstructive but wrong in a more important sense. For the patient’s envy and spite is the beginning of something positive, something that can be constructively used. It is an emotion that is sincere, for one thing; it is an emotion also that is strong for another. It comes out in Peer Gynt as the play goes on, as it does with our patients, that spite and envy can be a prelude to other more constructive emotions, and the spite and envy make available to the Peer Gynts a power that they did not have before. In due time with the patient we get to the most important question of all, “What do you yourself have to do with the fact that no one is waiting at home?”
Peer Gynt, of course, has everything in the world to do with his inner despairing conviction that no one is waiting with a candle at his table. The despair is a function of the contradiction in his subjective attitudes and is then projected on the outside world. For it is objectively inaccurate: someone is waiting for Peer Gynt, namely, Solveig, and on an intuitive level he knows it.* But Peer Gynt can’t allow this fact into his own consciousness, cannot “accept acceptance,” in Tillich’s pithy phrase.
Now they pass a ship that has been wrecked on a rock in the storm, and Peer Gynt has the urge to rescue the men on the stricken ship. When the captain refuses to turn the ship around to save the drowning men, Peer Gynt tries to bribe the sailors to rescue the men on the sinking ship. Here comes out not only some genuine statement of concern, but active commitment in its behalf. Peer hears the screams on the ship that is going down near them;
They’re screaming again. Look, there’s a lull!
You, cook! Will you try? I’ll give you money!†
Peer at last can hear the pain of others, can “weep for other’s woes.” As the other ship sinks, Peer Gynt speaks in soliloquy, “There is no faith left among men any more.” The story wrenches from him a profoundly gripping cry, “On a night like this our Lord is dangerous.”
Here emerges the daimonic in the service not of aggression and destructiveness but of awe and wonder. It is an entirely different mood from the time in Morocco when he commanded God to pay attention. It is a human being who stands
in awe of the significance of life and death and the portentous ness of their powers. With the closeness to death there comes an honesty—one can no longer take refuge in platitudes. The fact that Peer can experience this awe and wonder, this respect for Being, makes it also possible for him to affirm, as he does a few lines further, his human ties:
… A man can never be
Himself at sea. He must sink or swim with the rest.*
THE STRANGE PASSENGER
Now a character who is called by the curious name “Strange Passenger” comes up to Peer Gynt at the ship’s rail and puts a question to him, “Suppose we, for example, should strike on a rock and sink in the darkness.” Frightened, Peer responds, “Do you think there is a danger?” The Strange Passenger answers, “I don’t really know what I ought to say,” but he continues to remind Peer of the imminence of death. When Peer remonstrates, the Strange Passenger cautions,
But, my dear sir, consider. It’s to
your advantage.
I’ll open you up and let in the light.
I want to discover the source of your dreams.
I want to find out how you’re put together—†
This Strange Passenger is indeed a curious character. Peer, in angry “resistance,” disposes of him by calling him a horrible “scientist … you damned free thinker!” Does the Strange Passenger not have the role of the psychoanalyst? Even his language, though perhaps partially spoken in Ibsen’s jest, sounds like a prediction of psychoanalysis.
But most of all the Strange Passenger is Peer speaking to himself. In a profound sense this scene is an endeavor to show Peer Gynt’s awareness of what is going on in his consciousness in the hope that this may be the beginning of some reintegration.
Now we see several symbolic portrayals of the vicissitudes of the longed-for integration. In one scene we see Peer Gynt crawling up to a cabin in the woods, a cabin which he left. He soliloquizes, “The old boy’s had to crawl back to his mother.” Then comes the graphic scene in which he peels an onion, which is himself:
… You old fake!
You’re no Emperor. You’re just an onion.
Now then, little Peer, I’m going to peel you,…
That’s the shipwrecked man on the upturned keel …
And inside that is the digger of gold;…
And here is the Prophet, fresh and juicy:
… he stinks of lies….
… Living for ease and pleasure….
Surely I’ll soon get down to the heart?
No—there isn’t one! Just a series of shells.*
It turns out that in the hut toward which he is crawling he finds Solveig. She is singing, “I will wait for you, my love.” But Peer Gynt is not yet ready to accept a genuine relationship; he gets up saying to himself, “One who remembered and one who forgot.”
And the game can never be played again!
Oh, here was my Empire and my crown!†
He goes away with the realization that he must become more integrated before he can come back.
Scene after scene now piles up as symbols of the lost self. A Button Moulder wants to melt down Peer Gynt in his casting ladle. Peer Gynt has never been anything, charges the Button Moulder, so why shouldn’t he be melted down? Peer Gynt protests, crying, “I have never been a real sinner,” and the Button Moulder rejoins, “That’s just the trouble,”
You aren’t what one could call a whole-hearted
Sinner. You’re scarcely even a minor one—…
… You are not virtuous either—…
A man needs strength and purpose to be a sinner. *
This last powerful sentence, this demonstration of the daimonic, Nietzsche would have loved. Peer Gynt would have amounted to more if he had been a real sinner. He now has to admit the truth of these judgments: “I just splashed about on the surface. … I have never been—? I could almost laugh!”And the Button Moulder later sums it up in this one proclamation: “To be oneself is: to kill oneself.”†
In this nadir of despair, Peer Gynt is told in effect that he is nothing. The gospel of “being one’s self alone” ends up in becoming nothing. The ultimate meaning of this myth, even more true today than it was in Ibsen’s day, is that all such narcissistic egocentricity leads to self-destruction.
But from the profound nadir of despair life shows us, as in Alcoholics Anonymous, the way toward a resurrection of the self.
… There are two ways in which a man can be himself.
A right way and a wrong way.
You may know that a man in Paris
Has discovered a way of taking portraits
With the help of the sun. Either one can produce
A direct picture, or else what they call a negative.
In the latter, light and dark are reversed;
And the result, to the ordinary eye, is ugly.
But the image of the original is there.
All that’s required is to develop it.**
The negative in the long run is essential to the positive—the original is there and what is necessary is to develop it, arduous as this undertaking may be.
Stumbling into the Troll King, to settle a long-ago score, Peer is assured that he has done well indeed in living up to the motto, “Troll, be thyself—and thyself alone!” Whenever they are writing a newspaper article extolling Trolldom, the troll adds, they cite him as their best example of one who really believed, “To hell with the rest of the world!” Peer gives Trolldom short shrift this time and hurries down the road toward Solveig.
In his experiencing of the abyss of heaven he sees a shooting star and is overcome with awe,
We flash for a moment, then
Our light is quenched,
And we disappear into the
… void forever.
Is there no one in the Abyss—
—no one in Heaven—!
He gradually calms himself and then speaks one of the most beautiful passages of the play:
How unspeakably poor a soul can be
When it enters the mist and returns to nothing!
O beautiful earth, don’t be angry with me
That I trod your sweet grass to no avail.
O beautiful sun, you have squandered
Your golden light upon an empty hut.
There was no one within to warm and comfort.
The owner, I know now, was never at home. …
Then let the snow pile over me,
And let them write above: “Here lies no one.”
And afterwards—let the world take its course.*
LOVE AND RESTORATION
This renunciation of the narcissistic self is the beginning of authentic selfhood. Now the Boyg who comes in for a final scene again repeats to Peer Gynt, “Always go around.” But Peer finally can now commit himself. “Ah! No! This time straight through.”*
He finally arrives back to Solveig. The poignant words they speak at the end are significant for us here:
PEER: Tell me, then!
Where was my self, my whole self, my true self?
The self that bore God’s stamp upon its brow?
SOLVEIG: In my faith, in my hope, and in my love.
….
PEER: My mother! My wife! O, thou pure woman!
O hide me in your love! Hide me! Hide me!
SOLVEIG: Sleep, O sleep, my dearest boy.
I will cradle you. I will guard you.
Sleep, O sleep, my love, my joy.
Sleep now, and rest.†
For some readers this ending will present a problem. Are we to assume that Ibsen is simply saying Peer Gynt goes back to mother? This is one conclusion that could be drawn, but it would be much too superficial. There is a great difference between the way Solveig relates to him here, and he to Solveig, and the way he related previously to his mother. Solveig waits for him out of her own choice and integrity, whereas the mother clung to him out of her deprivation. Solveig lets him come when he is ready to come, when he has gone through the experiences
that he must go through. These experiences make him finally able to love her.
Solveig is a symbol of the presence of some significant person in relation to whom it is possible for Peer Gynt to experience human ties and to love. Thus he too can at last become a self. Like the Strange Passenger, Solveig fulfills the role of the true human healer. A world of interpersonal relationship is made available in which Peer can at last experience and find himself. This world is characterized by consistency and has within it some person or persons who will accept Peer’s rejection without withdrawing, accept his anger without retaliation, and steadily value him for his own worth.
It is the combination of these characteristics which we call. presence. The Strange Passenger on the ship symbolized presence at the nadir stage in Peer’s development; he was willing to face with Peer the ultimate state of loss of being, namely, death. The function of the therapist, applying this myth to psychotherapy, is to provide a presence which constitutes a human world within which the patient not only can find the polarity of the I-thou relationship but within which he must find it.
This presence, and the making of such a world possible, is the function of Solveig in the drama. As Dante can survive the long vigil in purgatory and continue his journey into paradise when he meets Beatrice, so Peer Gynt can now continue his journey into human integrity and joy in his love for Solveig.
ELEVEN
Briar Rose Revisited
In a way this story tells that to be able to love, a person first has to become able to feel; even if the feelings are negative, that is better than not feeling. In the beginning the princess is entirely self-centered; all her interest is in her ball. She has no feelings when she plans to go back on her promise to the frog, gives no thought as to what this may mean for it. The closer the frog comes to her physically and personally, the stronger her feelings become, but with this she becomes more a person. For a long stretch of development she obeys her father, but feels ever more strongly; then at the end she asserts her independence in going against his orders. As she thus becomes herself, so does the frog; it turns into a prince.