Finished Peer Gynt a few days ago. Towards the end, the play really falls off the map. Peer started off by relating fantastical and purportedly fictional journeys to his mother, then travelled far and wide into the fantastical Middle East, before heading back to Norway only to fall into the fantastical realms of what I sumise must be death. He gets shipwrecked, and, while he bobs around in the tempestuous sea, he fights to stay afloat in the flotsam, even going so far as to fight other sailors off his piece of debris and sending them to their watery graves. The play takes a turn into another dimension decisively, when, in the middle of a debate over who should let go and allow the other to live, one of the survivors, a mysterious and unidentified figure, tells Peer not to worry: he will not die in the middle of Act 5.
The identity of this character will doubtlessly be interesting to consider, but at the time the unprovoked and unexpected shattering of the fourth wall grabbed my attention. After this, Peer wanders past a series of what I can only call tableaux, that present what I surmise to be alternative endings to his life. In the middle of a charred field through which a wildfire had raged, Peer meets the enigmatic Button Moulder, who claims to have been sent to collect Peer's soul for recycling (to use a modern word). As the reasoning went, Peer was regarded by the Maker as a defective product, having done all he could to avoid the purpose he had been made for (what that purpose actually is, I cannot venture to guess; this is Peer Gynt, not Moses). So, his soul would be melted down to join the pool of other rejects to form the raw material for new souls.
Peer revolts against the notion of this deep affront to his principle of life; after congratulating himself frequently throughout his life on managing to remain completely "himself", he balks (understandably, if not justifiably) at the notion of his self being mixed with other, less distinguished selves. So, rather than succumbing to this fate, he sets out to find evidence that he had been a distinct and unique personality that deserves to be preserved for all posterity. Failing this, he tries to find evidence of extreme sin on his part, starkly raising the question of whether it is perhaps better to be a notorious evil-doer than a nondescript lukewarm personality. And in an even more bizarre reversal, the devil himself refuses to take him to hell, judging Peer to be unworthy of damnation.
Despite all this, Peer manages to find solace in an unlikely place - though in hindsight it really seems pretty obvious, even clichéd. He stumbles onto the hut he had built in the forest in his youth, where he had left a girl he had promised to marry. Now an old lady, it turns out that she has been waiting for him to come back all along. She offers the protection of her love and, bizarrely, ends the play by singing a lullaby last sung by Peer's late mother before she passed away. Now, if we accept that Peer is actually dead or near death in the last Act, then Solveig (the girl) is thus only reunited with Peer in the afterlife - which has all the usual connotations of tragic cheated youth and unrequited love. But what I can't figure is her partial transmutation into his mother, a kind of Oedipus twist at the end. What is the point?
Nevertheless, the bewildering ending notwithstanding, Peer Gynt was a play that was fun to read. I reckon more footnotes and references would have been useful, but even in itself, the texture and detail of the imagined scenes are rich and cloying. I cannot imagine how the play could be staged practically, calling as it does for scenery as diverse as the Sphinx, a sinking ship and a burned forest. But as a work of literature, as a poem cut up into dramatic lines, as verse presented in script form, it is not bad, even though it is presented in translation from the original Norwegian. After finishing it, there is a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, the kind of satisfaction that comes from finishing a good piece of writing, a delight in the use of good language that is quite independent of what message the piece actually carries.
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I look at the things that I have done over the past few days, and ask myself what I was motivated by. I would like to think that partly all this was rooted in a genuine desire to do something worthwhile, in a spirit of idealism, altruism and selflessness. But I cannot get past the fact that this impression is fashionable sort of self-image to have these days. Within this assessment is a certain degree of advertisement of myself to myself, I think. And I find that it is more truthful to attribute the works of mine own hands to a more selfish desire: a yearning to be remembered.
You wake up everyday, and every day is a fight against being forgotten. The French put it aptly: oublier - oblivion. There must be an etymological link there. In this fight, you try to leave as many artifacts as possible, so you can have proof that time has actually passed, and has actually passed productively. The ultimate aim is to leave an impression in that most unstable of mediums, the memories of other people.
Is there anything that is more powerful than shared memory?
Also, I guess, there is a certain desire to add your own small effort to the larger pattern of human existence, to lend your strength to a bigger cause and thereby give your own life a purpose that is distilled from the larger purpose of humanity. Okay, maybe not in such dramatic terms, but you get what I mean. To be part of something larger, to be part of a perpetuation of human growth; this is a desire borne of a hope that a part of your history will be preserved when it is invested in the human legacy.
And so, we leave a past, and we hope to leave a future too. These are our meagre weaponry arrayed against the voraciousness of time.
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