5. EUROPEAN MYTH

Let us back off for a moment from so strong a term as filicide with its death content and speak of the problem in other terms. The cultural roles function very much as masks, the masks of masculinity and femininity. The roles, like blinders, restrict our vision to those things, to that reality, which acculturated, civilized human beings are supposed to see. Those who succeed in dropping their masks and who survive our fear and calumny long enough to record or celebrate their new vision, we hail as geniuses. But we think the perceptions of genius are special and reserved to the "talented" few. Besides, the lives of geniuses indicate that they clearly are not normal. The possibility rarely crosses our enmasked consciousnesses that the special form of creative living which we glimpse in genius might in fact be the true human heritage which these masks are keeping us from enjoying.

Or: When filicidal behavior has ceased to have survival value, for us to continue to live and restrict our potential in the old ways is like a dancer trying to dance with a hundred pound weight attached to each foot. No one quite remembers why dancers attach hundred pound weights to their feet. It is never discussed. Now and then a dancer may appear who, because of unusual musculature or unusual will, manages an approximation of a pirouette. We in the audience gasp and applaud and tell our children and our grandchildren about it.

Or: A filicidal analysis of human behavior reveals that we are still acting as if we inhabit a frontier society, where our survival is threatened every second of every day and night, where instant obedience is required of everyone, where one mistake may be fatal not only to the individual but to the group, where there is little time for such luxuries as art, love, gentleness, or forgiveness. The internal and external barricades have to be manned at al I times; and the home fires have to be womaned and kept burning at all times. Who knows what monsters lurk in that outer darkness or worse, in the inner darkness we each carry about with us? In a frontier society the dangers are real and constant, and the persons who inhabit such a place rightly have little time for paying attention to anything except those dangers. Filicidal analysis of present day society and of the roots from which this society came indicates that while many great dangers are still present, the greatest of those dangers now is us, frightenedly clinging to the old ways of violence.

In our fear we have unwittingly changed this place carved out on the frontier from the haven and place of growth which we surely meant it to be into a prison. Just as my filicidal self is at bottom a defense mechanism, my filicidal civilization is also a defense mechanism, a gigantic prison-fortress. And thus many of our so-called revolutions--political, scientific, technological, religious, philosophical, artistic, economic--are revolutionary only in that they, as Krishnamurti puts it, help us to re-arrange the furniture in the prison. For in our sleep, our death, our masks, we do not even realize we are in prison. We believe there is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. Prison is all.

Perhaps we have to become thoroughly entrapped, almost totally immobilized, before we can become aware of the entrapment and figure out how we got this way and what we can do about it. In the Judeo-Christian myths we saw how our depiction of filicide was raised to a higher and higher level, as if it were necessary to avoid completely any individual sense of responsibility for our cultural entrapment. In what we may perhaps term modern times, say, the period beginning with the Renaissance, the intensification continues but in a different direction. Lately the movement of "blame" has been in the opposite direction. In the ancient past, the movement was from the individual to the cosmic. In the recent past, the movement has been from the cosmic to the individual. Antiquity sought to confirm the filicidal truth: The problem is me but the solution is outside of me. Modernity seems intent on restating the truth in a healthier, more accurate way: The problem is me and if there is a solution it begins with me. An ancient insight returns...

HAMLET

As we construct a civilization which slowly provides more security and more leisure, we find more and more voices speaking out concerning individual experience and individual perceptions of the nature of the prison and, even, of the possibility that something may lie outside these walls of culture, language, and role. Reports of the last kind are still rare today and are viewed for the most part with skepticism, suspicion, or hostility.

In the corpus of Shakespeare's works we find countless depictions of filicidal humanity running its individual and collective heads into the walls of the prison again and again. Following many frightened glimpses through and over the ramparts of the prison in the early plays, Shakespeare at the end of his career in The Tempest mounted the walls and stood for a time, looking unflinchingly out over a vast, almost entirely unexplored territory. What he saw there takes us far beyond the Renaissance, indeed far beyond our own present. For his world, like ours, remained blind to what might lie beyond the walls, though the sense of entrapment was growing rapidly even then. Hamlet will be our case-in-point.

As soon as Freud, using the Oedipus story, points out the universality of the intense, unfaced hostilities present in the members of the nuclear family, it becomes obvious to us all. We see those hostilities in our own lives and in works of art and in myths much more recent than those of the Greeks. In Hamlet Freud found a confirmation of his interpretation of Oedipus. He observed that Hamlet suffers from the same problem that afflicts the Greek hero, namely an Oedipus complex. Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, is in love with her brother-in-law, Claudius. They conspire and kill Hamlet's father, the king. To Hamlet, goaded by his father's ghost, falls the task of revenge.

What again reveals Freud's own unrealized entrapment in filicidal reality is the fact that he finds in Hamlet's paralysis, in Hamlet’s inability to act forthrightly and take revenge, a confirmation not merely of the Oedipus Complex but of the stasis of human, Oedipal behavior. He found, in other words, a confirmation of what he took to be the fact that human nature does not change. If we look now beneath the Oedipal layer of Hamlet's behavior and explore his filicidal problems we find a revealing change has occurred. Compared with the filicidal behavior we noticed in the ancient myths, in Hamlet we find a pronounced tightening of the restraints which filicide places on us. In other words, we find evidence that the neurosis is getting worse. The primary cause of Hamlet's paralysis is not Oedipal, it is filicidal. The sense of entrapment is growing.

For Freud the main difference between Oedipus and Hamlet was the fact that Oedipus acted unconsciously while Hamlet must act in full consciousness of what he is doing. He is paralyzed because, acting in his official role as prince (heir to his real father), he must hate and take revenge on his surrogate father (the murderer of his real father) and, far worse, on his mother. The Oedipal analysis, of course, assumes--accurately--that Hamlet is in fact in love with his mother and hated his father. But his mother and her lover have, before the play begins, already done that which any Oedipal son (that being all of us sons) secretly and desperately wants to do: they have killed Hamlet's father. Thus, the Freudian reading continues, he now finds himself in a very tight spot where, as prince, he must take revenge on the one person he loves, namely, his mother. Oedipally, it is the conflict between Hamlet the son and Hamlet the prince which paralyzes him. Other hatreds are also present which grow out of the Oedipal conflict. Hamlet must on a deep level hate his mother for having done to his father that which he was unable--for whatever reason--to do. He must also hate her for having doubly betrayed him. When she removes the object of his Oedipal jealousy by murdering his father, she does not fly to Hamlet’s loving arms but gives herself to another "father." And somewhere in all this emotional negativity he presumably has added another fillip of hatred toward his father for having been so stupid as to allow himself to be murdered in the first place. The result is that Hamlet cannot decide what to do, and when he at last decides, he is so confused that he botches the job, and everybody, including himself, gets killed.

Freud found the source of all that hatred in the basic Oedipal complex. The murderous action of the play, according to Freud, stems from the fact that the Oedipal son loves his mother and is jealous of his father. As in the Freudian reading of the Oedipus story, this interpretation is based on the unstated assumption that the two males, Hamlet and his father, relate to each other from the beginning only in a negative and competitive way. As with Oedipus, a filicidal reading of Hamlet reveals the presence of other forces.

We noted how Oedipus' life, with its reliance on violence as the appropriate solution to major problems, was determined by the attempted filicide committed on him by his parents. Whether the terrible deeds of his life are done consciously or unconsciously, the violent nature of those deeds is determined by the heritage of violence into which Oedipus is initiated as an infant. Like all filicidal sons, Oedipus is being controlled throughout by the hand of his dead father. So too with Hamlet. The difference being that Hamlet is forced to become aware of the fact that he is being controlled by the hand of his dead father. Hamlet is humanity becoming partly aware of the entrapment of filicide. The initial action of the play is the appearance of his father's ghost, who commands Hamlet to act and take revenge for his murder. Even in death his father reaches out and continues to shape and control Hamlet’s life. Thus we see that, while the initial act of filicide may be confined to one proto-scene early in the life of the individual, it is, in its effects on our behavior, timeless. As long as we continue to heed the filicidal imperative, Control, as the only viable way of life, we are as trapped as Hamlet.

His father's ghost says to him what all parents say to all children in one way or another: Do this violence and all will be well. The implied specifics in what his father's ghost says to him are these: I committed a grievous patriarchal sin--I made a mistake. I trusted your mother and I trusted my brother and sure enough, the worst happened. Now it is up to you, my son, to prove that you are a man worthy of my name. I let the situation get out of control. It is up to you to regain control. We both know the only way to do that is through violence. The challenge to Hamlet from his father's ghost is the same challenge which all filicidal children face in times of crisis: Be the father-mother-parent that I was supposed to be but was not.

19th century Hamlet and his father's ghost.

Hamlet is plunged into five long acts of wrestling with his fairly sensitive and gentle soul. Notice what has happened in the two thousand years since Oedipus. As civilization provides us with more security and leisure, it also prolongs that period of life known as youth. We have more and more time before we become fully committed, mature adults behaving as normal, filicidal adults are supposed to behave. Hamlet is the first prominent literary creation to speak out of the experience. His voice as he struggles with the problem of violent action versus unmanly inaction is the first echo--however faint--we have from the childhood heritage of humanity. In the famous soliloquy we are listening to the voice of an aging child whose filicidal proto-scene has not yet ended. When he says:

To be or not to be...

what he is actually saying is:

To be in the way it seems I have to be, or not to be at all.

That is the filicidal question:

To control, or not to control--which is the same thing as to cease to exist.

Hamlet is trapped. He looks around and nowhere can he perceive any behavior which might indicate that you can do anything else but control if you want to survive. Even the escape of insanity (Ophelia) ends in death. Hamlet is the filicidal child becoming aware of what has been done to it, becoming aware of how severely its options and choices have been restricted. So effective is filicide and so convincing is the propaganda of filicidal civilization (otherwise known as "reality") that we easily share Hamlet's conclusion that there are only two choices: control, or die. The play appeals to us so strongly because we are trapped in precisely the same way that Hamlet is trapped.

Hamlet is even deprived of the one, classic option open to the Oedipal son, that of patricide. He can't kill his father because his father is already dead. Thus Hamlet is the filicidal child learning that patricide, in whatever form, is a false solution. It may yield short-term victory--Oedipus has the ambiguous pleasure of becoming his mother's husband--but in the long-term the father's lesson of violence prevails and you wind up dying from your own poisoned sword.

Whitehead was surely correct in his observation that all Western philosophy is only a footnote to Plato. Wittgenstein explained how this was so when he pointed out that we in the West are trapped in the fly-bottle of language. I would suggest that we are also trapped in the behavioral fly-bottle of filicide. With Hamlet we begin to become aware of that entrapment as we see that all filicidal action, however well-intentioned, leads only to one end: destruction, of others and of self.

Hamlet obviously was not your typical patriarchal heir. Even in this age of relative security and leisure, few of us reach the age of chronological maturity with sufficient contact left with our potential for gentleness and nonviolent living that we even begin to question the filicidal life laid out for us. Most of us are willing and eager to pick up the reins of control from the preceding generation of father-sons and mother-daughters. As long as there are new worlds for us to conquer and control, we can most of us quite successfully ignore the fact that we are living our dead parents' lives.

One thing that will reduce us patriarchal men to unmasculine tears is the realization that there are no new worlds to conquer. Hamlet wept, but not because there were no new worlds to conquer. Hamlet wept because on some near-conscious level he saw the tragic pointlessness and meaningless repetitiveness of all compulsive conquering and controlling. Even as he wept, other males less sensitive to the filicidal dilemma were finding a vast new world to conquer and control, the world of nature. It turned out to be a world which would keep us happily and profitably occupied for the better part of four centuries.

FAUST

Science is the way of knowledge based on the predictability of predictability. As such, science is the most sophisticated expression of our desire to control. A few centuries ago we finally began to realize that things are generally more responsive to attempted control than are people. People, even in the best of circumstances, may unpredictably turn recalcitrant and upset the most carefully laid plans; the difference between the appearance and reality of French civilization will serve as an adequate example for the thoughtful reader. To take a somewhat less baroque example, let us consider the problem of government.

Government is a science only to those who teach it. To those who practice it, it is an art, and to those who must live under it, a mess. Let us narrow our focus further. Even in trying to control oneself, one can never be sure that there is not some monstrous irony hidden in the shadows of one's past which may emerge at any time and upset the whole applecart.

But with that "other" which we call nature--ah, such splendid predictability! What a fine example nature sets for us frail humans. We call the knowledge of how to control nature "science," a word which itself means "knowledge," as if that knowledge were the only knowledge worth having. And science itself has an adjunct way of knowledge called "technology," which is the way of applying the knowledge of how to control, called "science."

If we modern men are gods, and surely we are, ruling the world of women, children, and nature by unquestionable, which is to say, divine right as we do, then science and technology are our two most valuable divine servants. Is it any wonder that we have more and more turned our patriarchal backs on the clamor of the masses--the women, the children, and the lazy heathens of the rest of the world, as we isolated ourselves in our laboratories, our factories, and our offices where in peace and quiet we could ferret out the secrets of nature, building machines based on those secrets, and sell those machines for profit so that we might ferret out more secrets, build more machines to sell for profit, etc.? Even today you will find us referring to nature in the feminine. But nature is not an easy woman. She does not yield her gifts to just any suitor. To him who perseveres, to him who proves himself not only her equal but her master, her bounty is endless, her womb of a size and fecundity to match that of the infinitely long penis of our filicidal hubris. The myth of science is the basic modern myth: we treat nature like one of our own children.

If by the time of Hamlet we had reached a half-conscious awareness of our filicidal predicament, we had as a race also reached a kind of restless accommodation with the iron hand of our dead parents on our deadened selves. It is no surprise that, thus reduced to little more than filicidal automatons, we would turn to the world of inanimate objects as our proper sphere of activity. For creatures limited to a mindless, repetitive acting out/re-creation of past behavior patterns, nature offers great solace, and in the bargain yields countless fascinating secrets. Western philosophies of life have generally been marked less by joy than by a certain sense of resignation and fatalism. From that sort of view to the scientific view of nature as one vast, if complex, machine was a tiny step, and a very gratifying and consoling one. How easy it is to find ourselves mirrored in nature, no matter what kind of self-image we have. Trapped within the mask of filicide, we could no longer perceive mystery, and we could no longer conceive of anything except that which we could talk about with our filicidal language and its accurate reflection of our immersion in linear time and linear causality. (A comes before B and causes B, which comes before and causes C; therefore C comes after A and is caused by A.) We turned to and embraced a cosmic determinism, which we conveniently found reflected in nature, with a fervor, passion, and enthusiasm which, I suspect, none of us knew we had left in us. It had been so long since we had resigned from the world of the freely living and creating.

We took up science with the best of intentions--to make the world safe for humanity. Blinded by our filicidal fear and hubris we continued to neglect the somewhat more difficult task of making humanity safe for the world. During our four scientific centuries we have realized a number of those good intentions, either actually or potentially. Actually, in such concrete accomplishments as the control of certain diseases. Potentially, in the development of our technological skills to the point where we now could feed, clothe, and house the world, if we just would.

In the scientific context, the theory of filicide explains why we won't, by showing that science itself, when pursued with blind compulsion, is in essence a filicidal act done to nature, the same filicidal act which we do to our children. Filicidal science as we practice it is, to coin a word, reicide: the murder of things. Now, even as the whole beautiful, reductive structure of science and technology begins to collapse on top of us, as the force and violence we have used to extract and apply the laws of nature begin to turn on us, we still fail to see any relationship between the external tragedy and the internal, hidden lives of all humans. To be sure, religious voices of doom fill the land with reminders of our inner corruption, but they wish us only to exchange our submissiveness to science for our older submissiveness to the superannuated gods of their secularized religions. Filicidal humanity is like a compulsive rapist who can see no connection between his external violence and the darkly confused quality of his inner experience.

For example, the theory of filicide illuminates the following irony. The three laws of thermodynamics, articulated in the nineteenth century, are one of the capstones of patriarchal science. The second of those laws, the so-called entropy law, states in effect that the universe is running down ("entropy" means "turning in on itself"), The universe is perceived as a gigantic heat-energy machine. It became clear to observers of that machine that energy was constantly being consumed in the various activities and transformations so apparent in the universe. It was also clear, the observers felt, that there was no external source of additional energy. Therefore the heat-death of the universe must be inevitable. Eventually all these particles, atoms, and molecules so busily rotating and vibrating will reach a state of maximum disorder in which all activity will cease and the universe will be at rest. Creatures whose lives are firmly rooted in death, who can find meaning only in action, and for whom life itself is a losing struggle against death, can obviously find only death when they observe things outside of themselves. As we noted at the outset, at the end of filicidal history is, literally, nothing. At the end of filicidal science we also find nothing--surcease, total paralysis at absolute zero.

Obviously the laws of thermodynamics have a certain validity. Our understanding of them has made it possible to build a fairly reliable refrigerator (although the laws behind the construction of a reliable digital watches continue to elude us). The point is that such laws, when interpreted to have absolute, universal, and eternal validity, are clearly an externalization of the dead lives led by the men who derived and interpreted the laws. Certainly one of the more encouraging signs in the modern age has been the occasional note of confused humility sounded lately by this or that mandarin of twentieth century physics.

To bring the entropy argument a bit closer to home: The energy problems of the late modern era served as confirmation in more than one quarter of our fatalistic theories of nature. Sure enough, the world was running down. We failed to see that there might be a significant connection between the energy crisis and such other end-of-an-age phenomena as the catastrophe of Vietnam (where filicidal patriarchs could not find the internal energy to do the classic, dirty job of unrestrained war once again), the death of God-as-we-have-known-and-feared-him, and certain confusions in other areas of civilized reality.

Those of us who are well settled into that reality and have a strong vested interest (otherwise known as "personality") in its continuation are frightened by a growing sense of helplessness (who is in control here?) and frightened again as we observe disturbingly large amounts of creative energy in persons who seem to be behaving in at least partial disobedience to the old ways, such as those persons whom we see in various ethnic, political, and sex-role liberation groups. Where does their energy come from? Could it be that there is more than one universe? Could it be that not all universes suffer heat-death?

We don't formulate such questions. We choose rather to fight, thereby to demonstrate to those persons and to ourselves that, by God, we still have it in us to control as well as our ancestors did. As we fight, we find even in our death throes a confirmation of our worst fears rather than finding reason to re-examine our most basic, hidden assumptions about ourselves.

Where the old institutions show some signs of life, we read the signs only as a further contribution to the general, growing chaos. Organized science throws up an uncertainty principle. Organized religion makes some spasmodic moves in the direction of seeing sex as something other than dirty. Capitalistic government hints at an awareness that hunger may not necessarily be divine punishment for Original Laziness. Communist government hints at an awareness that freedom of speech might actually aid the realization of production goals, and so on. But cowering in the filicidal darkness we keep our eyes closed to doubly shut out the light. We thus ignore even the occasional signs of growth, or we recoil in terror before them if we do take cognizance of their existence--popular reactions to the gay movement being a case-in-point.

We are now so completely immersed in a death-oriented civilization that it is almost trite to speak of that fact. If not trite, then hopeless. Hopelessness is, after all, the very goal our filicidal, familial, religious, scientific selves are most comfortable with. Perhaps the real filicidal imperative is coded. Perhaps when we say, Control, what we actually mean is, Do everything you can to try to control but you know of course that you're going to lose in the end anyway. The purest of the sciences--mathematics and physics--unite to give us a planetary time bomb in the form of thousands of nuclear warheads scattered about the globe. And the official journal of the scientists who created that time bomb conveniently provides a clock on its cover. The hands of the clock are dutifully adjusted backward or forward a few seconds each issue so that we may have some idea of how close we are to the nuclear midnight when all the bombs go off. Scientists and others who try to do something about the nuclear Armageddon are labeled un-American, un-Russian, un-Chinese, or whatever, and lose their security clearances--or worse.

In the first seventy-five years of the twentieth century we kill well over one hundred million people in wars and we persist in seeing ours as a civilization of progress. An American president releases the most devastating bombing raids in history and describes them as the beginning of a generation of peace.

Surrounded by humanly inflicted violent deaths, we take note of the fact but find in it only confirmation of our worst fears and beliefs concerning ourselves. In such a world, we conclude with exemplary fatalism, you can't trust anybody, not even yourself. All you can do is try to exert maximum control at all times. Those deaths were the other person's fault, the fault of all those other persons known as the enemy. A hundred million deaths only offer convincing evidence of how dangerous and widespread the enemy is.

As long as we remain trapped within the narrow confines of our filicidal personalities with their one goal of perfect control, we will continue to find adequate enemies "out there," whether in the form of animals, things, or people.

Thousands of years of fiIicidaI behavior at last got us to the place emotionally where, in Hamlet, we could fairly accurately depict the death-like paralysis in which we exist. As we embraced the scientific way of knowledge with some very good intentions, we were simultaneously continuing our flight from the inner truth about our filicidal selves. The more attention we paid to controlling the world of things, the less attention we paid to our responsibility for knowing or not knowing ourselves for what we are. The intensification of the filicidal paralysis brought with it an intensification of the patriarchality of our civilization, of our very reality, in the rise to power of the bourgeoisie. To be born female came more and more to mean that one was born into slavery. If born a woman in the right place, at the right time, with the right skin color, you might have a life of quite comfortable slavery, but it was still a life of slavery. To be born male came more and more to mean that one was born into the ruling class.

The whole process of patriarchality reached a climax in the creation of the bourgeois household, with its nuclear family nestled snugly into a vast set of laws designed to protect the rights of the master of the household as he lorded it over his wife and children. Our successful demonstration of our cleverness and potency through science and technology enabled us to create a patriarchy whose near-perfection rivaled that of the Old Testament sages.

In the myths of the modern age, those of, say, the last two centuries, women have almost totally disappeared from view. So securely did we have women locked away in the bourgeois castle that, when a female figure does surface in one of the modern myths, she does so in the most bizarre and extreme way. An analysis of these myths reflects this gross sexual imbalance. In a world as intensely and compulsively and frightenedly masculine as this one, it is no surprise that the filicidal myths that world has created are also intensely and compulsively and frightenedly masculine.

* * *

The closer we come to the present, the greater the difficulty in selecting the significant myths. It is the stories that we tell and re-tell and then tell again that are, as it were, a dead give-away. They are the ones most likely to contain truths about ourselves that we are not quite ready to face openly.

If we want to delve beneath the handsome surface of filicidal science, one story presents itself as the obvious candidate, that being the Faust legend, with its countless re-tellings. Of these the grandest is Goethe's epic version, in which we find an aging scientist so desperate for knowledge that he is willing to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for the real knowledge which has eluded him in the laboratory.

Goethe's Faust suffers from the same shortcoming, in filicidal terms, which one encounters in many of our greatest literary creations. Author and characters are so submerged in filicidal reality that they can show us everything except themselves and thus ourselves as well. With insight and beauty Goethe reveals to us Faust's insatiable desire for knowledge. The dilemma, as Goethe puts it, is that Faust in his desperate striving has done a great deal of good (developing a cure for the plague, for example), but he has never found contentment. In the pact with Mephistopheles Faust observes that he has never experienced a moment which was so nearly sufficient to his needs and desires that he would have wanted that moment to extend itself in time. If Mephistopheles can enable Faust to experience such a moment, Faust is quite willing for him to have his soul. Whatever his degree of filicidal blindness, Faust is at least aware that the control gained from science is only another fleeting illusion. To that extent he already stands outside of filicidal reality as the epic begins.

Emil Jannings as Mephisto

For some 12,000 lines we follow this strange pair through all the worlds, visible and invisible, as Mephistopheles tries to seduce Faust into contentment. It is a grand tour of the universe, through sex, witchcraft, the spirit world, everything. But nowhere does Faust find the knowledge to make him content. At the end they return to earth and Faust turns to philanthropy. He applies his knowledge of science and technology to a land reclamation project in the Netherlands.

At last he stands looking out over the pastoral scene he has helped create from an area which was once the bed of the ocean, and he says to Mephistopheles that the sight almost might make him say to the moment of viewing: "Tarry a while." "Might," indeed. Mephistopheles overlooks Faust's hedging use of the subjunctive, decides that he has won, and prepares to whisk Faust off to hell--only to be interrupted by God. It turns out the dice were loaded from the beginning, against Mephistopheles. We learn that God understands and approves our incessant struggle to control. It is man's nature, God says, to strive, and as long as man strives, he will err. At the end of Faust's--and our--long road of suffering lies only forgiveness, not damnation. God forgives Faust and admits him to the glories of heavenly surcease, or whatever.

In a sense Goethe's epic depiction of the human situation thus transcends the killing limits of filicidal self-hatred. It is in fact the same humanitarian place of compassionate understanding which in some way, sacred or secular, we all want to believe exists as a kind of ultimate reality, the place where even without knowing all, we can forgive all. It is much the same place where Oedipus winds up in Oedipus at Colonus, the sequel to Oedipus Rex. We keep alive the truth concerning the possibility of mercy in much the same way we keep alive other truths we cannot yet face. Goethe says that, yes, forgiveness comes finally, but to reach that end we have no choice but to suffer and to cause suffering through the long years of our controlling lives. Goethe's view may be somewhat more hopeful than, say, that of Shakespeare, but it is still focused on the compulsive striving for control which characterizes filicidal behavior. The problem for Hamlet was: control or die. For Faust the problem is: control and then die. Not just die, but die happy.