Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (38 page)

When I present Girard's thesis to students, they are usually incredulous. They remind me that Sophocles has told this story as the account of Oedipus transgressions, transgressions hinted at by the Oracle, articulated more broadly still in the charge put forth by Tiresias, blind prophet who knows the truth, and ultimately validated by the entire plot, which produces all the missing evidence. What's not to believe? the students ask. And they are not wrong: Sophocles has told it this way. But just as the hints of sexual impropriety and virulence are to be found

in the story's interstices, so too are there disturbing signs of anarchy elsewhere in the text.

In particular, I have always been struck by the outright ferocity of Oedipus' attack on Tiresias and on Creon. He lambastes Tiresias as "wizard," as "scheming quack," as "pious fraud," and we know that the play is written at a moment when the Athenians are increasingly suspicious of the Oracle, of the claims of prophecy. Could Tiresias be a fraud? (If you, as Athenian spectator, were convinced that the Oracle at Delphi was corrupt—and many people felt it was—what would you make of its predictions? How would you assess Tiresias? Do you ordinarily think that blind men have special access to the truth?) As for Creon, Oedipus accuses him of backstabbing, of wanting to usurp the throne. Is this so implausible? Is he not a thoroughly political animal in the
Antigone?

Yes, we know that the Athenian public
knew
the myth, thus knew Oedipus to be declared the guilty party; and we too know the myth, know who is shown to be at fault. Yet, try for a moment to bracket this prior knowledge, to put yourself into this play at ground level, and to revisit these scenes of bilious recriminations. Try to imagine this story as open, not foreclosed. And then you see quite a spectacle: each of these hoary male honchos is duking it out with the other, because each one feels the net that is closing in. And that net is precisely the community's not-to-be-denied desire to find a responsible party. Folks are dying like flies. Why? Who is responsible? You can be sure someone will be
produced.
This is ultimately a theory about scapegoating as strategy for "cleansing" the public, and the ideological ramifications are quite fascinating.

In this light, plague is not simply the background mess that Thebes is in; plague is precisely the viral or bacterial version of slippage and erasure that Girard is at pains to articulate in political and philosophical terms. Plague is the physiological language and proof of human linkage and relation; plague is horrendously democratic and egalitarian in its dispensation, broadcasting publicly a new and surprising familial mesh

that puts paid to many of the cherished beliefs and fantasies of society concerning order, station, and hegemony. It is thus excruciatingly apt that Sophocles unpacked the strange history of Oedipus, redrew the topography of the king's life, displayed him to have been meshed in ways beyond his ken, revealed that his seemingly normative arrangements were actually transgressive. This is the illumination generated by the plague-text, and even though it traffics in disease, it is also wonderfully salutary, in that it fractures our conventional views about our dealings and schools us toward a more generous and emancipated picture of our place within the scheme of things as well as the place of others, others who are now seen to be inseparable from us.

I said that plague schools us toward a more generous view of our place because it positions us in an ecosystem we had not suspected. But the hallmark of the plague-text is its paranoia, not its generosity. Paranoia that the folks across the water, across the border, across the street, have brought the miasma into our midst. The very notion of the
barbarian
—so indispensable throughout history, denoting the Other wherever he is—seems to have been constituted as the toxic threat that we must combat in the name of preserving our collective health, our purity. There is no barbarian in the
Oedipus,
but Sophocles' plot is a call to arms, a fascinating display of civic cleansing, a determined campaign to lay this disaster on a responsible party. That is what communities do when disaster strikes. Who has caused this? is the clamor.

We also know something about the recurring answers that history provides us with. The oldest one, to be found over and over in the Old Testament, is: God is doing this, and He does it to punish you for your sins. Is this not Job's dilemma: you find yourself covered with boils, know that you are innocent of wrongdoing, and have to hear from your friends that God is punishing you for misdeeds. It is worth noting that Girard has also written about the story of Job, arguing that the very institution of medicine is on the line in this story since doctors should not intervene with illness or plague if they really thought it was God's will. As far back as Hippocrates, we have a denunciation of this view of ill-

ness as divine punishment. But the thesis is alive and well all over the world, including in the United States in some quarters when it comes to assessing AIDS.

Susan Sontag has shown us how cubistic such speculations and witch-hunts can be, by remarking that the popular American conception of AIDS having started in Africa, "the dark continent," is matched by a countertheory among Africans (and others) that AIDS is an American export, a virus fabricated by the CIA for purposes of bacteriological warfare. (Note my predictable reference to Bombay and Tunis as possible origins of the disease you caught on your London-New York flight; what might the Africans or Indians onboard have to say?) We also know, to our horror and sometimes to our shame, many of the other answers that have emerged throughout history when people need a scapegoat: the Jews did it; the Gypsies did it; the Catholics or Protestants or Muslims or Russians or Americans or any other group you care to name did it. We call this paranoia. I want also to call it
plot
(in that familiar sense that there is a plot to get you, and in the larger sense that
plot
is about determining causality and responsibility).

We see this logic of cleansing the community everywhere we look. Plague plots abound. Consider what happens in all the detective stories and mysteries. To be sure, the most interesting ones retain some ambiguity and have the courage not to solve everything, but the ironclad formula is well known: at story's end, the criminal is produced (they call it "detected," "discovered," "indicted"). Remember Rougemont's view of plot: we absolutely need to believe that criminals and murderers are caught. Why? Because they'd still be running around otherwise; or, worse still, because they could be anyone, your neighbor, your spouse, yourself. Someone shot down or arrested rids us of this nightmare. This plot is tried-and-true because we crave the security it confers on our lives. Most stories offer a fairly seamless version of finding the murderer, the miasma—so seamless that we hardly question the possible fictive-ness of it, so seamless that we hardly see the spadework going on in front of our eyes, or the necessity for such constructions and plots. Sopho-

cles' play fascinates because he gives us a peek into Pandora's box, makes us glimpse the horror show that might just spill out if nobody is found responsible for this mess.

Plague brings out into the open the medical, diagnostic side of this equation. Medicine is as invested as the Oracle is in finding the culprit, in naming the origin of the disease. Diagnosis is not the
neutral
intellectual procedure science would have us believe; a cultural imperative to "solve" problems and to "produce" causes is also in play here. Doctors, especially in an "activist" medical culture like America, are notoriously uncomfortable with the idea of doing
nothing
(despite the recognized wisdom that says intervention may cause more harm than good). Blood work, imaging, tests: so many detection strategies for solving the mystery, pinning it (conceptually) on something. Remember the Sorbonne in the mid-fourteenth century: "conjunction of planets" was the best they could come up with, but you can be sure they had to come up with something.

The plague-text is also wise about flux and mobility, because its infection paradigm is an inherently mobile one, wrecking any fond ideas we might have about stasis or sanctuary; instead, it announces a regime of cancerous activity, in which we turn out to be carriers or receivers, even when we thought we were standing still (or "behaving straight"). This view of "traffic" likewise challenges our conventional views about boundary and hegemony, suggests that we do indeed have strange bedfellows. Oedipus found this out. And it is still being found out in Kush-ner's
Angels in America.
We need Sophocles, Defoe, Poe, Dickens, Antonin Artaud, Ingmar Bergman, Tony Kushner, and others to tell the story of plague, because they are all drawn to its kaleidoscopic reality, its depiction of the mobile stage we live on, seen at last as a
stage
where the fables of both body and body politic can be acted out. The artist, unlike the scientist or even the social scientist, ponders the jack-in-the-box surprises brought on by plague, sensing that the mix of intimate sexuality, violence, scapegoating, and public health is ultimately a cogent mix, requiring us to rethink our categories and norms.

Whereas the
Oedipus
is Sophocles' premier depiction of these matters, his later play, the
Philoctetes,
warrants further mention in this regard as well. As Edmund Wilson wisely argued long ago, Philoctetes' wound is inseparable from his bow, and we are meant to discover just how binding this sick man's connection with his society actually is. Fine. But we can hardly forget that Wilson's genial reading goes precisely
against the grain,
inasmuch as the entire plot flaunts at us the horror which illness produces, the societal disgust and rejection that the afflicted man produces. I am willing to admit that Philoctetes' special wound is over the top (smell, agony, godlike origin, etc.), but we cannot ignore the brutal social dynamic that set the stage for this play: quarantine this man! exile him! move him out of our midst!

Sophocles' plot entails a brave rethinking of this knee-jerk social mechanism, since it literally revisits this banished man, reconsiders the possible (utterly counterintuitive) utility of the diseased man who has been excised from the body politic. We must assume that the bitten, bleeding, infected Philoctetes had been seen earlier as precisely the miasma that the Greek social system is on the lookout for, almost as if the ideological immune system were brought into play so that the toxic invader can be exorcised. Wilson's handsome thesis has to tackle all of this.

Wilson argues the public utility of Philoctetes by valorizing the magic bow. But there is more to be said about the diseased man's em-beddedness in the culture. As if to give still more weight to this theme of civic membership, of widening our view of the polis, Sophocles has powerfully accentuated the father-son connection throughout the play. Hence, it is no accident that Neoptolemus is fatherless (this, against an insistent elegiac backdrop of dead older men—not only Achilles, but where is Ajax? where is Nestor? where is Patroclus? All are dead— which Sophocles rehearses as a form of "current events" for out-of-touch Philoctetes), and that, in this search for a father, Odysseus the master politician is rejected in favor of the sick man with the wound.

It is not merely a question of choosing Philoctetes over Odysseus, but rather a crucial drawing of family lines, a way of saying that the dis-

eased man, the miasma, is no lone wolf (as those who abandoned him turned him into) but a familialized figure, a meshed figure. This is not softness on Sophocles' part; it is part of the collective and social logic that governs this play, a collective logic that has been skewed by the early abandonment of Philoctetes, and which now must be set right by the play's plot. Family and state are reconceived here, showing us that the seemingly islanded sufferer is to be understood as part of a larger gestalt. This is what plague-texts do. We shall see more of it in the pages ahead.

PLAGUE, INDIVIDUAL FATE,

AND COMMUNITY RESPONSE: DANIEL DEFOE

In 1722 Daniel Defoe published, anonymously,
A Journal of the Plague Tear,
an account of the London plague of 1665 that poses as an eyewitness version of things (even though Defoe was all of five years old at that time). The year 1722 was a good year for this book, given that plague was raging in Provence and the English had reason to fear that it would cross the Channel. This report on pestilence is not as famous as either of Defoe's best-known books,
Robinson Crusoe
and
Moll Flanders,
yet it possesses the same kind of unflinching honesty and tell-it-like-it-is forthrightness that we find all too rarely in fiction. Defoe's single great subject is
survival,
whether it be as a shipwrecked man on a desert island or as a hustling female in early modern London or indeed as a sober citizen surrounded by plague. Defoe presents his material as a kind of warning, as seen through the eyes of his narrator H.F. and as nourished by a significant body of documentary information (some of it explicitly medical) that the voracious reader-author had absorbed. If the
Oedipus
can be read as a symptomatic text about stratagems for scape-goating when mass death occurs, Defoe's text places the real disease, actual plague, front and center. In its freshness and journalistic verve, this book is amazingly readable today, not only because the author describes in detail how the citizens of a great metropolis respond to devastating plague, but because it offers some provocative parallels with our own

fears about communicable disease and the paranoia it may produce. Alerted to the dangers of anthrax and smallpox, American readers in the post-September 11,2001, world have taken something of a crash course on these matters.