Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (16 page)

Art removes these blinders, puts the beast center stage. It shows us who we really are, as regards the body.
Beast
conveys something of the core alterity, independent volition, and occasional horror that characterize bodies. My other favorite term for this state of affairs is
monster.
Our bodies can be both monstrous and fantastic, and this unsettling view is to be found in the testimony of writers from antiquity to the present. Such writing is, you might say, "a return to basics," with the crucial corollary: these basics are a lot stranger than you may think.

FROM ANIMAL TO HUMAN: THE SOPHOCLEAN LEGACY

Let me start with the premier exemplar of Western humanism, Sophocles. In the
Oedipus
we find our most archetypal story about taking the

measure of the human. This man, Oedipus, vibrant king of Thebes when the Sophoclean version opens, comes to learn that all of his assumptions about who he was and what he did are egregiously wrong: the violent altercation and murder at the crossroads was a parricide; the queen-wife he sleeps with is his mother. It might seem that the theme of animality is not foregrounded, but the body's scale and frailties loom larger than first appears. Medicine itself is a major topos in the play: the city of Thebes is dying of plague, and Oedipus is repeatedly imaged as the savior-physician, the man who possesses the skill to exorcise the miasma from the community, to cleanse it of pollution. The Greek audience is fully aware that Oedipus is the man who delivered the city from the prior curse of the Sphinx, and hence he is expected to save it again.

Now, Sophocles has not elected to treat the episode with the Sphinx, but its significance is central to the story. We know the riddle that Oedipus answered: what is the creature that is on four legs in the morning, two legs at midday, and three legs in the evening? The confident answer, "MAN,"—infancy, adulthood, old age—is commonly understood as the supreme shorthand expression of Greek humanism, and many scholars, such as Bernard Knox, point out that all of the pathos and ambiguity of the play hinges, in some sense, on whether "MAN" solves the riddle. Man, it will be further noted, is the only living creature that changes its locomotion over time, via crawling, then walking, then leaning.

Much is at stake with this question-and-answer at this moment in ancient history. What the French call the "human sciences" are burgeoning at the time of Periclean Athens: mathematics, architecture, sculpture, agriculture, navigation, medicine, philosophy, historiography, tragedy. The ensuing story of Oedipus' knowledge-cum-ignorance calls into question the very claims of humanism. And those issues are richly materialized in the encounter with the Sphinx: this monstrous creature of fable—body of a lion, head of a human, later feminized— seems to me to stand for an earlier culture of animal gods (consider Egyptian or Assyrian deities), for a world in which the so-called human

scale, a scale tirelessly promoted by the Greeks, has little or no purchase.

It is worth recalling, at this juncture, the influential critique of the oedipal myth written by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. He is drawn to the insistent pun entailed in Oedipus' name: "swollen-foot." Here is literally the telltale sign of Oedipus' origins, his stint as exposed infant, cast out and tied at the ankles (by his father, Laius, who had been told by the Oracle that he would be slain by his son). But Levi-Strauss goes on to connect the name with that of both father and grandfather, Laius and Labdacos, meaning respectively "left-sided" and "lame" (traits further linked, in the ancient Greek mind, with abnormality in behavior, especially sexual behavior). Levi-Strauss's interpretation of the myth (which interests him in all its variants, not merely the elements Sophocles marshaled together for his play) is complex and fascinating, cued to key issues of procreation, over- and underrating of blood relations, and, central for our purposes, the slaying of monsters. From an anthropological perspective, the myth is
thinking
about some crucial biological and cultural issues having to do with the origins, nature, and comportment of bodies. The most intriguing touch comes from the emphasis on walking-problems that is signaled by the male names, a set of problems that Levi-Strauss finds (oddly) replicated in Pueblo myths concerning men born from the earth. With characteristic pithiness, the anthropologist sums up the problem as "difficulties to walk and to behave straight."

Is this not precisely the challenge posed by humanism: to replace a regime of monsters or animals, four-footed creatures, with a new concept and scale, man, the creature that may be four-footed at birth (on all fours) and three-footed in old age (on a staff or cane), but who is defiantly two-footed, erect and in fighting form, in his noontime. Oedipus' two disastrous actions in being an erect fighter—murdering his father and procreating with his mother—hardly constitute humanism's finest moment, and cast considerable doubt about man's successful passage from the animal to the human.

Let's now consider another Sophoclean play, the later and lesser known
Philoctetes,
which seems to continue the same meditation about man and beast. But the coloration of this play is much darker than
Oedipus,
as if the bright claims made for human knowledge and doing—after all, Oedipus does finally assume the burdens of his deeds, does achieve a stunning sort of self-possession—had been proven hollow. This story is set during the Trojan War, and its title character, Philoctetes, has been abandoned on a desert island, some ten years earlier, by the Greek cohort heading to Troy, abandoned because, when visiting the temple of the goddess Chryse, he was bitten in the foot by a venomous serpent, guardian of the shrine.

This wound turned out to be so noxious and unbearable, with its bleeding, its stench, and its unhealable nature, that the Greek warriors could not bear his presence among them, and ditched him on the island. But now, ten years later, the Oracle has explained to the Greeks that the Trojan War cannot be won without the participation of Philoctetes, because he is the possessor of a magic bow, given to him by Heracles, and this is what is needed for victory. To implement this policy, two Greeks are sent to the island to convince and retrieve Philoctetes and his bow: the wily Odysseus (whom Philoctetes hates with a passion only equaled by his hatred for Agamemnon and Menelaus, those leaders responsible for abandoning him) and the young Neoptolemus, son of the dead Achilles. Their job is to lie to the wounded man and trick him into coming back with them. The moral core of the play appears located in Neoptolemus' refusal to engage in such realpolitik, and we can hardly miss the paternal dimensions of this struggle: who will the young man without a father follow: the cunning Odysseus, or the suffering and bitter Philoctetes? What stuns us and stays with us in this play, however, is not the moral dilemma faced by the young man; it is the intensely, tragically physical depiction of Philoctetes and his fate.

If Levi-Strauss focused our attention on the problems of walking and behaving straight in
Oedipus,
Edmund Wilson taught us to rethink
Philoctetes
in his memorable essay "The Wound and the Bow," in which

he argues that the play is concerned with the role of the gifted in society, drawing the conclusion that the artist—be he ever so wounded or damaged or marginalized—nonetheless turns out to be indispensable for the society at large. The wound is inseparable from the bow; you can't win the war without reclaiming the sick Philoctetes. There is an appealing social dialectic at work here, a sort of ecosystem that jars traditional thinking by valorizing the sick and wounded.

More recently, the play has been examined as our premier depiction of what chronic pain is like: namely, it becomes a world you inhabit, from which no exit is conceivable. In this light, the very topography of the play is eloquent, for pain is an island; pain is exile. Sophocles is relentlessly social in his perspective, and this play shows us what kind of bitterness and misanthropy result from sickness and pain. Pain dehumanizes. Not just its sufferer, but all those around him as well. Sophocles dwells at great length on the desolation of Philoctetes' life, and in a number of brutal scenes we actually witness the outbreak of pain, the festering wound that opens up its mouth to issue its blood:

philoctetes
(collapsing to the ground):

I'm done for . . . no use trying to hide it.

Oh! Oh! ... it goes through me like a knife.

I'm done for, boy . . . it's come for me now . . .
(racked with agony)
Pfff!

Your sword, if you have it. . . For God's sake, boy.

Cut off my foot! Off with it! Quick!

O son, O son! O let me die. neoptolemus: What is it? So suddenly coming upon

you . . . These terrible cries . . . philoctetes: You know! neoptolemus: What is it? philoctetes: You know . .. neoptolemus: Tell me, what is it?

philoctetes: You must. . . Ah!

neoptolemus: It tortures you . . .

philoctetes: Torture ... I cannot tell you . . . O for pity!

neoptolemus: What can I do?

philoctetes:
(recoveringa little):

Don't leave me now. There's nothing to fear.

The demon comes from time to time

After letting me alone for a little while.

(188-189)

Back and forth we see the collapse of speaking and knowing. We all know that language is better for some things than others, and that it is devilishly hard to find words to convey feelings and sensations. Pain ranks high here. And terrible pain, as in torture, quite simply cancels out language altogether, as Elaine Scarry has brilliantly argued in her book
The Body in Pain,
Sophocles is merciless in his emphasis on the human wreckage and havoc caused by pain, the revulsion and twistedness it brings and leaves; and readers quickly sense that there is no way this bitter, broken man is going to return willingly to Troy, once Neoptolemus has told him the dirty truth about their mission, no matter what the Oracle has said. Sophocles is obliged to bring the dead Heracles back on stage, a deus ex machina of the first order, if this mess is to be cleaned up and this man with his bow to be put back into circulation.

What does this fable tell us about bodies? Edmund Wilson properly focused on Philoctetes' magic bow as the integral counterpart to the stinking, unhealing wound, but I want to return our sights to this injury. Wounded by the serpent, guardian of the shrine, Philoctetes appears to have encountered the mark of the god. But what the play thrusts at us, through its unremitting depiction of pain, suffering, and despair, is the elemental truth that Philoctetes has encountered
the mark of the beast.
This festering wound, demon that comes "from time to time," that spreads its dark blood and poison and foulness and makes life unbear-

able for all parties, is unmistakably somatic, of the flesh. We see here the mark of the beast in both senses: the serpent beast that wounded Philoctetes, but also the marked human creature itself, carrying its wound as primary constituent of identity, as signature. Sophocles is exposing the scandal of flesh—not unlike what he did in
Antigone,
where so much hinges on getting dead flesh into the ground before it rots—and he makes us see that the body has a dreadful priority in human affairs.

Why not go further and say that the wound is originary with life—the somatic explosion or accident that is waiting to happen, the physiological liability that we are—and not some kind of occupational hazard that could occur if you trespass on the goddess's shrine. Customary medical logic views the body as whole and intact until the onset of disease or decay. Even as a layperson, I have some appreciation for what a miraculously complex and harmonious system the body is, how intricately ordered our biological and physiological arrangements are. Yet—and this may well be a sign of my aging—I have an ever-sharper sense of the body's mortality, its vulnerability to disease, its inevitable entropic journey toward death. If we can see the
Philoctetes
along these severe lines, as a play that offers a troubling and moving account of what it is like to live in a body, measuring the dehumanization that attends pain and injury, and presenting the body itself as essentially a locus of agony—pleasure is inconceivable in this scheme, real though it may be in our better days—then we may regard it as a dark sequel to the
Oedipus.
The first play hinges, as we saw, on the ability of humans to walk and behave straight. In factoring in the wound of Philoctetes, we may now conclude by saying that Sophocles tends to imagine humanism as the Walking Wounded, as a kind of defiant bid for agency in a somatic, animalistic scheme that will not have it.

To call Homo sapiens the Walking Wounded may seem like a bleak view of the classical legacy, but it has the tonic virtue of underscoring how astonishing the trajectory from animal to human actually is, how stubbornly real and authoritative the body is and remains, no matter

how glittery our mental and moral achievements may be. And it helps us toward a more balanced view of the uneasy coexistence between soma and spirit that is with us from cradle to grave. That coexistence is, in itself, a fascinating story, filled with sound and fury, a story that seems to require the imagination and vision of the artist if we are to see its fullest dimensions. Art is there, in Kafka's words, to chop through our frozen sea, by which he meant, to pierce through the thickness of routine and habit, the dulled torpor of complacency. Kafka himself was thinking of spiritual vistas when he wrote those words, but I do not hesitate to apply his dictum to the affairs of the body, to its strange and unacknowledged rule over us. As we think through these matters via the testimony of writers and artists throughout history, we will encounter in many different guises the Sophoclean double legacy: the body as animal, the body as wound.