Authors: Rollo May
The Cry for Myth (5 page)
But from here on Sartre puts his own interpretation on the ancient myth. He has Orestes engage in an argument with Zeus, who had been till that time in the play a bronze statue at the back of the stage. Zeus now steps down from his pedestal and tries to persuade the youth not to go ahead with his planned matricide, which will cure Argos of its guilt-infested doldrums. Zeus stands for the power of the Nazis, the generals who might be marching past the theater at that very moment. How do you stand against authoritarian orders when you are a conquered people under the heel of the Nazis in 1944?
Zeus cries out in the drama that he created Orestes and all other human beings, and therefore Orestes has to obey his orders. Orestes’ resounding answer to Zeus must have invigorated the French audience, “But you blundered—you made me free!”
Angry, Zeus causes the stars and planets to whirl through the skies to exhibit his great power in the creation of the heavens. Then he challenges the youth, “Do you realize what despair lies in wait for you if you follow the path you are on?”
Orestes answers with a sentence which inspires us with some of the power it had in Paris in 1944, “
Human life begins on the far side of despair!”
The universe may not be just or rational in Sartre’s view, but men and women can affirm the freedom of human beings in the face of tyrants. “Orestes is the Resistance hero,” as Hazel Barnes puts it, “who will work for freedom without remorse even though he must commit acts which will inevitably bring death to some of his people.”
†
Great dramas, like
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
, speak to the hearts of all of us. By the same token they remain in our memories as myths, year in and year out, giving us an increasingly profound appreciation of our humanness. Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
is such a drama. It is a tender and profound myth which grips us in its depths of contradiction; it possesses the same poignancy as Nietzsche’s parable, “God is dead.” The characters of the drama wait for a myth which says we are in the absence of the gripping character of the drama.
This search for meaning in life, this quest in an age when one waits forever for God, is suffused with tenderness in our common perplexity at being human. When Estragon says to Vladimir, “Well, shall we go?” and Vladimir answers, “Yes, let’s go,” but the stage directions state, “They do not move.” This profound myth shows the depth of our human uncertainty; we live as in a sleepwalk. Norman Mailer wrote of this drama that the doubt concerns the “moral … basis of Christianity which was lost with Christ.” And the London
Times
speaks of this drama as “suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity … [with] stabs of beauty and pain.”
*
Though the myths of Orestes and Oedipus were written in that brilliant burst of civilization in ancient Greece, there are similarly powerful myths from the Hebrew tradition—Adam and Eve awakening to consciousness, Jacob wrestling with the angel, Isaiah and the Suffering Servant, ad infinitum. These two sources of ancient myths, the Greek and the Hebrew, are the “mother” and “father” of Western civilization, and we will forever be indebted to them.
In his
Death of a Salesman
, Arthur Miller shows us again the mythic drama and the playwright’s concern for the issues of
right and wrong. Miller asserts that the great bulk of contemporaneous theater on Broadway
trivializes
drama: it produces gross entertainment without confronting the great issues of life and death which cry out of the Creek dramas and Biblical tales. What I have called existential crises Miller describes as psychic situations:
What we take away from the Bible may seem like characters—Abraham and Isaac, Bathsheba and David—but really, they’re psychic situations. That kind of storytelling was always fantastic to me. And it’s the same thing with the Creeks. Look at Oedipus—we don’t know much about him, apart from his situation, but his story bears in itself the deepest paradoxes in the most adept shorthand.
*
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.
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”
S
URELY 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.
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.