The heart is in the highlands...

THE HEART IS IN THE HIGHLANDS BUT WHERE IS THE MIND?


A tentative psychological commentary to the play of William Saroyan “My Heart`s in the Highlands”.

The play “My Heart`s in the Highlands” by William Saroyan was published in 1939 being one of the first if not the first of his plays.
Another of his plays, “The Time of Your Life”, was published the same year, received the Pulitser Prize and overshadowed “My Heart`s in the Highlands”, which, in our opinion, did not receive sufficient critical attention.
Our commentary has been written on the basis of the Russian translation of the play, the original text being unavailable to us. Therefore all the English-language references are made in our re-translation from the Russian.
The epigraph of the play is the poem of Robert Burns, who wrote:
“My Heart`s in the Highlands but I am below myself..”
The action of the play takes place in a small Californian town in August- November 1914.
The nine-years old boy Johnny lives in an old secluded house with his father and grandmother.
The Father is an unsuccessful poet, who considers himself one of the greatest poets of his time but no journal accepts his works. He has no money to pay for the scantiest food needed to him and his family, not to say about paying the rent for the house.
The Father induces Johnny to go to the shopkeeper to beg for some food on credit. But the shopkeeper is also very poor and hesitates to give food without cash.
The hunger of the family is temporarily alleviated when the old actor McGregor, who has run away from the old people`s house, comes on the stage.
McGregor plays the melody to the song ‘My Heart`s in the Highlands” to a group of neighbors, who are delighted and bring some food in gratitude.
But another misfortune is not far off.
The owner of the house where the family lives has not received the hire for three months and rents the house to another tenant.
The father and his family go away, ignorant where to direct their steps.
The play ends with the words of Johnny:
“Papa, I do not blame anybody but something is wrong somewhere.”
Despite a lot of realistic details, one should not look at this play as a realistic representation of the American  life at some definite place and time. It is rather a parable, although a parable with much realistic depth. (Such, for example, are the works of Dostoevsky.)
Parables of this kind need much commentary. (Remember how much criticism has been written on Dostoevsky.)
But what is essentially in need of commentary in the play “My Heart`s in the Highlands”?
The plays of W.Saroyan are often compared with music.
The main chord in this play seems to combine primarily the Father, Johnny and McGregor.
We do not know if the Father is really a talented poet, although the scanty citations from his verses in the play cast doubt upon it.
But certainly his ways to get his poems published are not rational: he stubbornly sends them to journals, invariably gets refusals and does not try to ascertain the real causes of these refusals.
“Despicable and wretched people”,- says the Father about those persons who refuse to publish his verses.
But it is worth noting that he says it in the same utterance in which he rightly condemns the beginning war in Europe. (It was the beginning of the 1st World War, and it is not fortuitous that the action of the play takes place just at this time.)
“Let you shell from your miserable cannons,- says the Father,- you will not kill anything. Poets will be always in this world.”
And in his other utterance about the War:
“They are out of mind again.”
The shopkeeper who at last gives the family some food on credit  asks Johnny:
“Why does not your Father work as other people?” “Everybody must work in America.”
Johnny answers:
“The Father works twice as much compared with common people.”
But then why cannot he get any recompense for his work?
Another man of art insufficiently adapted to circumstances in the play is McGregor.
But in difference to the Father he manages to get food as a recompense of his art: he plays  the melody to the song “My Heart`s in the Highlands” and the grateful listeners bring food to him and the family of Johnny, with whom he temporarily lives.
McGregor enters the stage playing his pipe and saying that his heart is in the Highlands.
The Highlands in the play are definitely a symbol of all the good, ideal and free from the contradictions of life, a symbol of a real home of man. It appears further that McGregor, as later the Father, understand the Highlands as the transcendent world, which could be reached only through death.
Johnny: ‘Can man really come home only in this way?”
The Father: “Only so”.
But, on the other hand, McGregor wants to become one of those who live after his death and after his real death one can hear a weak and remote sound of his pipe.
The minds of the characters in the play are full of contradictions: they suffer and do not know how to reconcile the ideal strivings (the Highlands) and their real life (the World below).
And William Saroyan does not seem to know it either.
Moreover, W.Saroyan does not even propose any definite concept and term subsuming all the contradictions of his characters and society. At the time when the play was written no such concept and term existed.
But now they seem to exist: it is universal masochism in a broad sense of the word, beyond eroticism.
This new concept subsumes the drives and behaviors harmful to the bearer of them.
We shall not dwell much upon the general subject of masochism in this paper, as it has been considered in more detail in our paper “Self-Sabotage, Masochism and the Fate of Humanity”.
But we should like to emphasize the universality of masochism understood in this way.
There are ho “bad” and “good” characters in the conventional sense in the play. The antagonists of the positive characters appear to have positive traits too, while their “bad” behaviors are often explained by unfavorable circumstances.
All- the “positive” as well as the “negative” characters- are in constant and generally unsuccessful struggle for better adaptation and self-realization.
Is this struggle hopeless? Not always and entirely so.
Johnny manages at last to get some food from the shopkeeper. McGregor` music makes his listeners to weep and kneel. And even the poems of the Father have good effect on his readers and listeners sometimes.
But how could these transient successes be strengthened and combined to change entirely the general situation in the play and, broader, in our civilization generally? ( We believe that the present-day crisis of our civilization was prophesied in the play.)
The universal character of masochism demands universal efforts against it.
There is an increasing body of facts showing that every person has some, possibly holographic, connections with all the universe and especially with other people. Cf., e.g., (Hartmann,T., 1997).
Therefore “you must not make great actions in order to change the world: you must preponderantly change yourself”. (Hamilton D.R., 2011, p.110).
Possible means of fighting masochism are shown in the play “My Heart`s in the Highlands” in abundance. Especially well depicted is the prominent part of narcissism, imagination and art.
Narcissism (excess love to oneself) may lead to the loss of rationality as vividly shown in the play by the character of the Father.
But do not let the reader wonder that narcissism is enumerated by us as a positive factor. It is really so in certain limits and situations, as has already been shown by modern psychology and as it was earlier anticipated in the brilliant play “Queens of France” of another splendid American writer Thornton Wilder.
The positive part of narcissism, imagination and art was emphasized earlier by H.Marcuse, who also wrongly searched for political upheavals as a lever for creating a new unrepressive civilization.
We hope alternatively that the main missing pivotal factors could be found by the scientific study of aggression and love as a force antagonistic to aggression (“the fate of destrudo, the energy of the destruction impulse, depends on the fate of the libido”), the latter being broadly understood as the energy of the life impulse.
The characters of the play “My Heart`s in the Highlands” are very aggressive with various, mostly good, motives (and consequently with a change of function) or without any apparent motive at all. Cf. the scene of the shopkeeper trying to catch a fly.
It seems to have been shown, especially in some modern psychotherapies, that aggression, helpful as it could be momentarily, could also if unrestricted have mighty long-term pernicious effects incl. on the bearer of aggression himself.Сf.(Balint, M.,1965, p.125)
New ways of counteracting harmful aggression must and can be found.
The overcoming of the developing crisis of humanity demands not only psychological but also many economic, political, ecological, social and cultural measures. We have been dealing in this paper only with the psychological vistas and these only in so far as they are, directly or indirectly, connected with the discussed play of W.Saroyan.
 ,No doubt W.Saroyan himself did not envisage our psychological considerations in this commentary of ours. But  great art often transcends the intentions and views of its author.
Finishing our short commentary we should like to admit that we have not dealt with the great aesthetical values of the play.
A character of another play of W.Saroyan says:
“…the function of art is to see things in a more sanguine light than seen at first.”
The play “My Heart`s in the Highlands’ is a magnificent achievement of this kind.
Art is used in modern times as a quasi-religious means to convey the general sense of reality, beyond words and explanations. This is emphatically stated with respect to the play “My Heart`s in the Highlands” by W.Saroyan in his preface to the play.
But, in our opinion, the acceptance of this general sense of reality does not intrinsically preclude a search for cause-and-effect relationships as attempted in our commentary. Possibly these different approaches may become complementary.

  REFERENCES
1. Balint M. (1965)The Benign and the Malignant Forms of Regression. In New Perspectives in Psychoanalysis (Ed. by G.E.Danials) N.Y.- L.: Grune&Stratton.
2. Hamilton D.R. (2011) It`s the Thought that Counts (Russian translation: Sanct Petersbourg: Ves).
3. Hartmann T.(1997) The Prophet`s Way.
4. Rogovoy B.S. Self-Sabotage, Masochism and the Fate of Humanity. (Manuscript).