Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (37 page)

PLAGUE'S MASTERPLOT:
OEDIPUS THE KING

Sophocles' play opens with a medical emergency. We are positioned in front of a palace with closed doors, and out of them emerges the king with his "tell-tale limp," to face the procession of priests and suppliants

seeking to put a stop to the plague that is decimating Thebes. The old priest describes its plenitude: crops wither, cattle die, women perish in childbirth, children are stillborn, fever is everywhere, "black Death" luxuriates. Oedipus commiserates with the Thebans, his "children," acknowledges that they are "sick to death," and claims that he is even more sick than they are because his spirit grieves for the entire city. The seeds seem planted for the key individual-polis equation.

But Sophocles wants us to realize that this battle is with death itself, death imaged by the Chorus as an invading god, a god of fever and disease who breaks into the human subject. Apollo "the Healer" is urged to save them: "Drive him back!—the fever, the god of death / that raging god of war / not armored in bronze, not shielded now, he burns me, / battle cries in the onslaught burning on— / O rout him from our borders!" Then follow a series of wild and desperate pleas to the other gods in the Greek pantheon: Zeus is begged to "thunder Death to nothing"; Apollo comes in for a second request, to smite them with his "showering arrows"; Artemis, the Huntress, is beseeched to "ride Death down in pain!"; and Dionysus closes the list, urged to come with his "face aflame with wine" and his "raving women's cries," to "burn that god of death that all gods hate!" (218-222).

There is something fierce and primitive in this entourage of deities who are begged to take up battle and repel the invader who is annihilating the community, against whom none of us is "armored in bronze," none of us "shielded." The mystery being explored here is that of massive and invasive disease, of the specter of extinction that will erase Thebes, and it is important to remember these vital matters, to keep them in the front of one's view, before getting too absorbed in psychological and epistemological subtleties. Plague points to apocalypse.

Sophocles'
Oedipus
can be said to stand as our masterplot in this arena, because it prophetically posits mass death and infection as the resonant background for its famous issues of sexual transgression and self-knowledge. It is surprising how little attention has been paid to the medical theme in the
Oedipus,
other than pointing out that the king is

significantly referenced as the community's "doctor," the man who is supposed to heal the sick polis. The doctor metaphor ranks as one among many of the Greeks' civilized accomplishments which the play is calling into question. We need to understand the Theban plague here as dreadfully collective, in that the entire community is sick, is contaminated. Greek tragedy frequently centers on the detection and purgation of evil—the miasma that must be uncovered and exorcised—and catharsis itself, the aimed-for, purgative effect that the tragedy (according to Aristotle) was supposed to generate in the Athenian public, is a pharmacological term. Put most reductively, Aristotle implies that seeing the
Oedipus
performed has a therapeutic effect on the Athenian public. But what about the therapies needed within the play itself? Why are the people sick? How will they get well? We know what Tiresias has to say about these issues: a murder and a murderer are concealed in the community, and that is why plague has struck. Is it so simple?

Denis de Rougemont once said that we should inquire of every plot what particular labor it is performing, or indeed what particular fiction it may be confirming. One can say of the
Oedipus
that it is devious indeed along these lines, that it is at war with itself, inasmuch as the overt key to the play—Oedipus is responsible for everything—offers a quick fix for all its echoing problems about disease, death, sexual relations, political order, community behavior, and the like. I say "devious," because Sophocles himself gives us all the ammunition we need to be suspicious here, to query whether indeed "Oedipus" is the sole and satisfying answer to all these puzzles. What, in other words, is being shored up, sustained, by the play's whodunit scheme, which ascribes everything to the king's transgressions? No Western text has received more commentary than this one, and the most influential interpretations look, willy-nilly, into the can of worms that Sophocles has opened, enabling us to gauge how
strategic
the story is, how it seems to be wise about the damage potential its plot possesses.

Freud's famous analysis of the play spells out, along libidinal lines, just how serious the real disease might be, since the actions of the king

are now said to express the patricidal and incestuous desires of all male children. To be sure, this interpretation makes the story emblematic, but at what cost? You will note just how utterly this reading distrusts the central character, turns Oedipus himself upside down, since he has no ostensible longing for his mother and he kills his father by accident. Or so it seems to him; Freud—and every psychiatrist after him—would answer (suavely), "But of course he doesn't 'know' he wants to do these things; these desires are unconscious; the proof that they are all-powerful is that he does their bidding anyway." It hardly needs to be said what a cruel and prophetic reading this is. Of course you don't know what you are doing; your libidinal drive is running the show, and you are not even supposed to know it (that is what good repression is all about, yes?).

Moreover, one wonders where Freud got the idea. Perhaps he just paid attention to the text itself. At a key moment in the play, Jocasta herself assures Oedipus that there is nothing new or worrisome about this matter of would-be incest, since our dreams have long confirmed such longings: "And as for this marriage with your mother— / have no fear. Many a man before you, / in his dreams, has shared his mother's bed. / Take such things for shadows, nothing at all—" (1073-1076). Every time I read these lines, I wonder why it is that Freud became famous by cribbing them, since most folks assume, of course, that Freud alone saw that we dream of incest. Sophocles obviously knew it twenty-five hundred years earlier,
but
he has Jocasta scoff at such intuitions, as if, yes, dreams contain such desires, but there is nothing to worry about. Just shadows.

What is going on here? Are these tidings shocking only for Freud (and for the straitlaced Viennese culture that he lived in, that contributed to who he was), whereas they do not daunt Jocasta or Sophocles or the tougher Athenians of Pericles' time? Or should we interpret Jocasta's calming remarks as an effort to put out the fire, to explain away something quite virulent about sexual desire? For Oedipus himself, the murder at the crossroads and the subsequent copulation in the royal bed are unrelated events, but for us, in retrospect, they seem to come to-

gether in disturbing ways, as if murdering the older man were somehow the key to the boudoir, as indeed Freud implies. Murder as key? Murder as index?

Furthermore, classicists have investigated the muffled issues of homosexuality and rape that are coded in the Oedipus myth, notably in connection with Laius, Oedipus' father, and his father, Labdacos, each of whom is figured (in other variants of the myth) as brutal and coercive, each of whom is strikingly
marked
physiologically, one "left-sided" and one "lame"—as coded in their actual Greek names—as if to signal something aberrant in the patriarchal line itself. Laius in particular is said to have exerted sexual violence on Chrysippius whose subsequent suicide led to a curse on Laius, damning his house to extinction, and from this comes Laius's "left-handed" sexual relations with Jocasta in order to avoid insemination. Apparently Laius, drunk, failed to maintain "homosexual" arrangements with his wife, planted a seed in her, and hence received the Oracle's plot-enabling prediction that he will be murdered by his son. Sexually speaking, this story has lots of baggage. And remember Levi-Strauss's insistent emphasis on issues of "walking and behaving straight," his theory that the myth is
thinking about sexuality.
If you put these markers together, you begin to see a parade of figures whose sexuality turns violent, cannot be confined to the norm, wreaks havoc on the body politic. Could there be a link between the many sexual disorders of the myth and its background of plague?

What link, you might say? Plague, after all, is about dying. Think again. One of the most fascinating texts I know in this area is the incendiary thesis put forth by the French theatrical visionary Antonin Ar-taud, in the 1930s, in his highly influential
Le Theatre et son double {The Theater and Its Double).
Artaud's lead essay is entitled "Theater and the Plague," and in it we find this striking depiction of what happens to a community when plague strikes it:

The last of the living are in a frenzy: the obedient and virtuous son kills his father; the chaste man performs sodomy upon his neigh-

bors. The lecher becomes pure. The miser throws his gold in hand-fuls out the window. The warrior hero sets fire to the city he once risked his life to save. The dandy decks himself out in his finest clothes and promenades before the charnel houses. Neither the idea of an absence of sanctions nor that of imminent death suffices to motivate acts so gratuitously absurd on the part of men who did not believe death could end anything. And how explain the surge of erotic fever among the recovered victims who, instead of fleeing the city, remain where they are, trying to wrench a criminal pleasure from the dying or even the dead, half crushed under the pile of corpses where chance has lodged them. (24)

I will not conceal the fact that Artaud's vision has been thought by many sane people to be unhinged. Moreover, his interests go beyond liberated sexuality, when he goes on to claim that plague is as much a spiritual as a somatic phenomenon, that its "transmission" is far more mysterious than any scientific theory would suggest. In his essay, we learn of a viceroy of Sardinia who
dreams
that plague (in all its dreadful physiological virulence) has come to his shores and infected the kingdom, and who then learns that a ship, the
Grand-Saint-Antoine,
coming from Baghdad, has asked for permission to dock; incredibly enough, the viceroy obeys the warning of the dream and denies passage to the ship, which then goes to the mainland and delivers its actual pestilence. Are dreams a viable form of knowledge? Did the plague "contact" the viceroy?

We know that the doctors of the University of Paris were under significant pressure to account for the origin of the Black Death that hit Europe in the mid-fourteenth century; their best explanation (after a major conference) suggested a conjunction of planets. When plague came to London in 1665, the planet theory was again trotted out. People did not understand
infection,
could not grasp the fact that the fleas fed on the sick rats and then transmitted the disease to the humans. Such traffic

was not visible. But, in modern times, in the 1930s, Artaud tells us that the bacteriological explanations are insufficient, that something deeper and larger is binding people, traveling via dreams and thoughts. His world is
networked.

What most strikes us in the rendition of plague behavior that Artaud offers is its
revelatory
power. Here is a profoundly theatrical model: when plague strikes, the curtain goes up, and we now see a carnival-esque vision of society, a metamorphic tumbling of forms, in which everything you thought you knew (about others, about yourself) goes up in smoke. Small wonder, then, that he claims plague as a kind of "patron saint" for theater, plague as the perfect analogue for the stage, plague as a desirable moment of truth, causing "the mask to fall," revealing "to collectivities of men their dark power, their hidden force" (31-32). Artaud sees the virulence of plague as
beneficial
for the theater because it renews contact with the Dionysian and the divine; at the risk of sounding perverse, it would seem that plague (according to Artaud)
clears the air,
cleanses our sights, removes the dross, exposes our true relations. (It hardly needs to be said that the revelatory view of art put forth in much of this book has some parallels with Artaud's vision.) In the plague-text we see at last the collective dimensions of illness, not only collective illness (plague, epidemic) but also the social responses, the antics of a social group facing death.

The plague-text is profoundly keyed to the epistemological energies of narrative, so that the search for the cause of the disease is inseparable from the name of the transgressor, the secret of his act, the story of his life. The community wants this story told, wants to put a name and a face onto its catastrophe. And the storytelling itself would seem invested with strange healing powers, as if the emerging narrative of Oedipus' life-in-time were oddly therapeutic. The fuller coordinates are at last being graphed. It is odd that the king's life story might function as Thebes' talking cure. Why should this be so, if not because these quests are, at every level, zeroing in on the polis's own dirty laundry? It is a

question of public health, in that the society cannot get well until larger stories get told, and the concealed ills and crimes are not only brought to the light but
recognized as the community's business.

But the unavowable aspect of the community's business, perhaps its driving force, is the push for closure: the play's relentless detective work is in the service of a speedy mass cure. That is what this plot is doing. Its job is to explain (away) plague by nailing it on the king.

Consider, in this light, the anthropological thesis about the
Oedipus
developed by Rene Girard, whereby the plot is reconceived as a contest among the three head males—Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias—to see which one of them is to take the rap for Thebes' problems. Girard provocatively argues that the play's fateful breakdowns—parricide and incest—are actually instances of fateful
blurring,
instances where key lines of demarcation and prohibition are erased so that sexual appetite strides across family borders and anger leads to political murder. This is bad news for any society, a small step away from pure chaos, for chaos results when sexuality and violence are no longer "channeled." Oedipus' errors are a formula for social nightmare; and the primary concern "behind" the play, the true rationale for its plot, is to reinstate boundaries, to put a stop to the flux of violence that erases difference. Killing your father, killing the king, sleeping with your mother: these acts erase the sacred lines of familial, social, and political order. According to Girard, the Greeks were terrified of just such calamities, and the unstated purpose of the play is to show the way out, by putting the blame entirely on one man, Oedipus, and thereby "innocenting" the community.