Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2003

Between Lacanian and Yoruba Worlds

In his theory of ritual theatre, Soyinka refers to the three Yoruba worlds of the living, dead, and unborn, adding the "fourth stage" of cosmic/ritual passage as the transitional abyss between them, which theatre (re)presents. While working with individual patients in a very different cultural tradition, the Lacanian analyst also focuses on the dead and unborn worlds within living human minds. Psychoanalytic treatment evokes the transitional abyss between such worlds (also in Winnicott's sense of a transitional space and object, substituting for the maternal relation). Like Dionysus turning Pentheus to face his own fearful, perverse desires, and then to play out the sacrificial drive within him, the Lacanian analyst effects a ritual passage of the patient across a fundamental fantasy, to experience subjective destitution and identify with a primary symptom (sinthome) as the ultimate cure.(143) In Soyinka's ritual theory and The Bacchae, the Ogunian actor--whether playing Dionysus, the slave leader, Pentheus, or Agave--crosses the abyss of psychic dismemberment and rebirth, to effect a communal rite of passage [page 81] as well. The actor's character onstage becomes like the patient's ego in analysis, put into play to be dismembered and reformed. Spectators may also risk a radical transformation of their egos, to the degree that they empathize with, yet think critically through the cruel communion rite of The Bacchae, especially in Soyinka's Artaudian and Brechtian revisions of the ancient cathartic drama.

Dionysus' gestures and words, about an invisible iron chain that binds Pentheus, suggest not only the signifying chains of particular symptoms in sympathetic spectators, but also the "furnace" of the Real where such symbolic production begins and ends. That alpha and omega point can be discovered through the wordplay of free association between analyst and patient, as Paul Verhaeghe describes. "During analytic treatment, free association is governed by an underlying determination, resulting in a kind of automatic memory. Clinical practice demonstrates that this process of rememoration succeeds only to a given point, after which the chain stalls and stops".(145) Verhaeghe explains how such a stalling point is actually the aim of Lacanian analysis: "this 'full stop' of the symbolic, the point of causality 'where it doesn't work' concerns the not-realised, the un-born in the chain of signifiers. . . . The point where the chain stalls is the very point where the Real makes its appearance". Yoruba cosmology views the human psyche at death as passing from the world of the living to the world of the ancestors, where it eventually disintegrates, and then reforms in the world of the unborn, out of the same and yet other spiritual material, picking a specific "head" (personality) for its return to the living [page 82] world as a new child.(146) A similar process of disintegration and rebirth is performed by the Ogunian actor, according to Soyinka, for the sake of audience rebirth in the microcosm of ritual theatre. A similar process also occurs, with the help of the analyst, in the microcosm of the analysand's mind. Ego identity and the signifying chain, i.e., imaginary and symbolic orders, melt away at the "point of causality" in the Real. Yet that point is not only the edge of death and disintegration within the psyche; it is also the edge of the "un-born"(147) (or, in Kristeva's terms, of the semiotic chora).

Verhaeghe further explains that the endpoint of signification and imaginary desire (in the phallic order of jouissance) touches upon the terrifying Other jouissance of the body--of the loss of living ego identity in the body's death drive. Yet the drive of the individual towards dissolution is also a return to the eternal life of the body's materials, prior to human birth and its signifying chains. "The Real of the organism functions as cause, in that . . . it contains a primordial loss, which precedes the loss in the chain of signifiers. Which loss? The loss of eternal life, which paradoxically enough is lost at the moment of birth, i.e. birth as a sexed being".(148) The un-born in the chain of signifiers, traced within the patient's mind through psychoanalytic interpretation, parallels the Real point of loss within the patient's organism--the primordial loss of eternal life in the birth of an individual, sexed being. But the "subjective [page 83] destitution" of the Lacanian cure also parallels the dissolution of ego identity at death, at the climax of the body's death-drive jouissance. Although Lacanian theory, as a basis for various postmodern theories of subjectivity, does not involve any definite realms of existence beyond human life (and challenges the metaphysics of the Cartesian ego); it does render a cyclical model of life and death, within the mind and human organism, similar in some ways to Yoruba cosmology and to Soyinka's theory of ritual theatre. In all three philosophies, the patient, god, or actor has suffered a primordial loss of eternal life (of endless potentiality) in crossing from the unborn to the living world--as sexed being, orisa, or character onstage. But he or she ultimately crosses a fundamental fantasy of identity, into the transitional, "fourth stage" abyss, experiencing the terror of choral sparagmos between living, dead (eternal), and unborn worlds--as therapeutic, communal, or theatrical sacrifice.(149)

Tele-Visions

Soyinka's The Bacchae shows an Ogunian and Dionysian, ancient and postmodern, crossing of the fundamental fantasy and transitional abyss: from the individual egotism, voyeuristic desire, and partial phallic jouissance of Pentheus--along with that of other characters, the choruses, and the audience--to his/their Other (god-like) ecstasy and full jouissance, in his death-drive destiny offstage and his return as disembodied head, reborn through choral communion.(150) Soyinka's Dionysus prepares Pentheus for this sacrificial passage between [page 84] living, dead, and reborn worlds through two added visions, performed as dream-like mime scenes. After showing Pentheus the obscene mirror of his hypnotic hand, and the lack of being behind it, the god invites the king to see "the past and future legends of Dionysos".(151) The first mime shows a bridal procession in masks, with libations poured at the altar of Aphrodite and dancers entertaining the wedding party.(152) But when the groom sees the face of his bride, a mask of "horrendous, irredeemable ugliness," he (Hippoclides) performs a grotesque dance, in Dionysian fawn-skin, shocking the bride's father and dancing his wife away.(153) The bust of Aphrodite also changes to "the mocking face of Dionysus." The second mime shows another wedding, the biblical feast where Jesus changes water into wine, but Soyinka notes in his stage directions that Christ's "halo is an ambiguous thorn-ivy-crown of Dionysos".(154) Soyinka also specifies that the miracle is in response to the anger of a woman who sees another woman (Mary Magdelene?) annointing Jesus' feet. As the mime ends, Dionysus offers the same wine, from Christ's first miracle, to Pentheus.(155)

Feminist readers or spectators might be appalled at the use of these ugly and angry female characters to catalyze the magic of Dionysus, in Greek and Christian contexts.(156) [page 85] Christian audiences might also be shocked at the ties between Dionysus and the miraculous wine of Jesus. But these tele-visions exemplify Soyinka's Brechtian revision of Euripides, transporting the play beyond its original time period to connect with a postmodern audience, through sympathy and shock. And yet, such historifications also show the modernist aspect in Soyinka's work. They recall the mime scenes in his first play, The Lion and the Jewel (1959), which illustrate the struggle between traditional patriarchal values in African village life and European colonial influences. Even more like The Bacchae, Soyinka's later play about ritual sacrifice in the struggle of African and colonial patriarchies, Death and the King's Horseman (1976), shows men on each side putting women back in a subordinate place, after they have risen to a position of influence. The ruler Elesin manipulates Iyaloja, mother of the marketplace, to change his sacrificial rite, despite her warnings, so that he can first wed a beautiful girl already betrothed to her son. In the end he acknowledges that the girl influenced his hesitation to die, yet denies that she had any power over him. His son, Olunde, ultimately rejects the influence of the colonial administrator's wife, Mrs. Pilkings, although she had previously helped him to leave Africa and seek a European education. Her husband rejects her advice, too, in the end, as does Chief Elesin. However, in all three Soyinka dramas, groups of women working together show a feminine, if not feminist, power--a chora of rebellion, repressed yet returning with even greater force,(157) as in the mime scene dances of the bacchae-like choruses of African women in Lion and Death, mocking the illusory powers of men.

Soyinka purposely risks offending parts of his Bacchae audience with the mime scene revision of Christ's first miracle. The mime rebels against colonial repressions of African [page 86] religions and performance practices, by tying a Christian story to the Greek god of orgies and theatre. But Soyinka also makes explicit his provocation of postmodern feminists, when he describes the rage of the second woman in the mime: "Her angry gestures include the feminine logic (pace Fem. Lib.) that the wine shortage is related to the idle foot-anointer".(158) Thus, he may be evoking (beyond pace) the raging chora of women in his audience--as well as showing rage in this female and in the bacchae onstage. Even though Soyinka subordinates the original, female chorus by featuring a second, slave chorus and their leader, the playwright still finds ways to point, like and beyond Euripides, to the revolutionary choral power at the edges of the patriarchal sacrifice.

Soyinka's mime scenes return the postmodern spectator to a premodern tradition of dance drama, mostly repressed in the Euro-American literary theatre, but continuing in African (and Asian) ritual theatre with its more explicit sacrifices. The mime scenes in The Bacchae also express a postmodern excessiveness and incompletion, leaping out of history and plot.(159) They bear very little cause-and-effect connection to the rest of the play, except through the figure of Dionysus (in Aphrodite and Jesus)--and the motif of his wine, which appears in both scenes, and then is given to Pentheus by the god. Like the changing channels on a TV screen, these anachronistic scenes offer a shared, rememorative "free association," between the hypnotic tele-visions of Pentheus, under Dionysian treatment, and the metonymic viewpoints of the postmodern audience. Although the spectators might not be drinking Dionysian wine, they are probably lured, through the mime scenes, into desiring more theatricality, as Pentheus says: [page 87] "Can I see some more?"(160) Dionysus warns him: "Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality / Is your only safety." But then he adds: "reality / Awaits you on the mountains." That reality, of course, is the ironic opposite to safety: the rending apart of Pentheus body by his mother and other bacchae. The Real violence of that transitional abyss, or "fourth stage," occurs offstage from the play. But the chora that already fuels the mime scenes is located in the characters and players onstage, in the Real within their minds--and in the Real of the audience, at the fourth wall of the stage edge, co-creating the play's imaginary and symbolic "shadows." At those edges premodern African and Greek spirits commune with the postmodern Western psyches playing and watching. For, as Lacan says, "The gods belong to the field of the real"(161) --lost, impossible, and yet still influential.

Dionysus then offers Pentheus a view denied the theatre audience, for which the king will pay with his life. "Come with me to the mountains. See for yourself. / Watch the Maenads, unseen. There are risks / A king must take for his own people".(162) Pentheus agrees: "Yes, yes, this is true." As K. E. Senanu has argued, these added lines (about risks a king must take) mark a crucial change from Euripides' text.(163) Pentheus dies in the mountains not only through the Dionysian lures of intoxication and voyeurism, which stimulate his wish to watch the bacchae unseen. Pentheus also shows the kingly will to take that risk for his people, and thus to be sacrificed. This makes more sense of the play as a "communion rite" (its subtitle), because [page 88] Pentheus is not simply fooled into becoming a scapegoat.(164) An Ogunian, sacrificial drive within the king is evoked by an Esu-like Dionysus, through the tele-visions, the wine, and Pentheus' own voyeuristic desires. He may not know he is going to the mountains to meet his death, but he is willing to take that fatal risk for the sake of his people--to observe the cult in its deadly rite of sparagmos, instead of destroying them in war. Like the Ogunian actor leading others to cross the abyss between worlds, he and Dionysus(165) lead the theatre audience from the partial jouissance of voyeurism, to the Other jouissance of the body's death drive and the play's final rite of communion, when Pentheus' disembodied head spurts a blood that turns into wine.

When Dionysus offers Pentheus the chance to see the bacchae offstage, the king passionately replies: "I long / To see them at their revels".(166) Here again Soyinka's revision, while still set in ancient Greece, might connect with the postmodern spectator's desire to see more and more revels, especially of sex and violence, in today's hypertheatres of film, TV, and the internet. Dionysus gives Pentheus, through his magic wine and various tele-visions, the illusion of god-like omniscience--like the hyperreal hallucinations of postmodern viewers who spend many hours each day at media screens. Yet, the play also reveals such divine trompe l'oeil at the stage or screen edge, as masking the Other's choral jouissance, a sacrificial death drive within the body. Today's mass media spectators (and not just those who watch tele-evangelists) are lured into worshiping at the film/TV/computer screen, to see the revels of the Other. The mass audience thus becomes a pseudo-community, a chorus of partial jouissance, [page 89] avoiding a full awareness of the death drive already at work within the body, sacrificing much of a lifetime to dramatic entertainment and commercial detours, until it is too late--as for Pentheus atop the pine tree. But Soyinka's Pentheus, through the Ogunian spirit of Dionysus, might lead a media saturated, postmodern spectator to another kind of tele-vision, with a tragicomic, cathartic ecstasy (or Other jouissance) at the stage's edge.

Soyinka also changes the cross-dressing of Pentheus to an onstage act. Instead of appearing from the skene of his palace in a bacchic woman's costume and wig, as Euripides has it, the king is transformed before the eyes of the audience at the hands of the god. Rather than wearing the fawn-skin and wig as a disguise, Pentheus sees these as his armor and helmet.(167) Although he remarks that the metal feels unusually soft and light, Dionysus explains this as the effect of the wine he is drinking. Unlike Euripides' Dionysus, who takes Pentheus offstage for the costume change with vengeful glee, Soyinka's god nurses the illusion with onstage kindness, as well as with wine. As in the Yoruba myth of Esu's palm wine helping Obatala to create misshapen human forms, this Dionysus gently shapes the king's grotesque transfiguration.

Again, a parallel might be drawn not only to Yoruba myth, but also to postmodern media spectatorship. The film or TV viewer "sutures" the illusion of a complete diegetic world, closing the gaps between editing cuts (or channel changes) by imagining the full fiction offscreen.(168) The film/TV spectator identifies in complex ways with various characters, male and female, cross-dressing as it were, by imaginatively entering and filling out the flat figures [page 90] onscreen.(169) In showing the transvestism of Pentheus onstage, Soyinka reflects to the audience their own ritual inhabiting of film or TV scenes and stars. Dionysus fastens the bacchic costume on Pentheus as if it were armor, like the media audience suturing their own illusion of prophylactic voyeurism. But this comic gest also reveals the edges of terror and sacrifice in Pentheus' body--akin to the lacking being and bodily jouissance of today's mass audience.

As Dionysus, "his mouth full of pins and clips," finishes the onstage dressing of Pentheus for sacrifice, the king hallucinates two suns, two Thebes, and the god with a bull's head.(170) This Artaudian double vision is close to that described in Euripides' original text,(171) but Soyinka adds a further conversation between the slaves in the chorus, which bears postmodern meanings as well. Like Lacan who relates "the gods" to his concept of the Real, and Kristeva who connects repressed mother goddesses to her sense of the chora, the slaves discuss certain psychic "forces not ruled by us".(172) The old slave calls them: "Dionysos? Or--Nothing. / Not even a word for these forces. / They lack a name." But the slaves, in chorus, attempt further potential terms: spirits, gods, principles, elements, currents, laws, eternal causes. These terms suggest the Lacanian paradox of the symbolic and imaginary orders producing (and structured/subverted by) the Real, although the Real is inaccessible to imaginary and symbolic representation. Kristeva also finds a signifying process in the semiotic, maternal chora, prior to and repressed by [page 91] symbolic, patriarchal law.

Soyinka's slaves struggle to describe such choral powers: "they are born in the blood / Unarguable, observed and preserved before time . . . It is knotted in the blood, a covenant from birth".(173) Lacan describes the Real, imaginary, and symbolic orders as tied in a Borromean knot of interlocking rings.(174) With regard to personal symptoms, Lacan also defines a fourth order, as the knotting of the other three.(175) This is the sinthome, a fundamental symptom structuring the subject's desires and drives (the "they" of the chorus as an "it")--through particular intertwinings of symbolic law and sacrifice, imaginary perceptions and fantasies, and Real losses.(176) The Lacanian cure involves an identification with the sinthome,(177) which can also be seen in Soyinka's play as the slave chorus transforms its view (and perhaps the audience's) of Pentheus in the care of Dionysus. Of course, the blood-cum-wine of the king and god will become even more significant in the final scene, providing a tragicomic climax to the sharing of voyeuristic desires, superego repressions, and sacrificial drives throughout the drama--between the various characters, the choruses, and the audience.

But already Pentheus' hallucination of Dionysus as a bull, while he is being cross-dressed [page 92] by the god and drinking his wine, recalls the king's earlier, offstage attempt to kill the imprisoned god, as he says himself. "Inside, I went this way with my head / Then, that way--back, forward--back. It was / Almost a kind of trance. I dreamed I stabbed / A bull. A minotaur. Was that you?"(178) Dionysus responds, "I am whole." Yet the king's past attempt to dismember the imprisoned god, remembered now as Pentheus is dressed for his own sacrificial dismemberment, also relates to the infant's mirror-stage illusions of both ego wholeness and fragmentation (and to the Yoruba myths of Orisa-nla and Ogun). As a therapeutic re(dis)membering, it parallels the subjective destitution of the Lacanian patient, who crosses a fundamental fantasy to find his or her particular lacking being in the sinthome.(179) In Soyinka's Yoruba vision, that crossing of a psychic abyss would involve the forces knotted in the blood of the audience--in the Real jouissance of the death drive, circulating throughout their bodies as well as in the synaptic patterns of their unconscious minds. The structuring of that "blood" and nervous energy (or libido) is also socially constructed, and thus shared to some degree by actors and audience in the blood/wine communion at the play's end.

Mark Pizzato, PhD, teaches theatre history, playwriting, play analysis, and film at UNC-Charlotte. His book, Edges of Loss: From Modern Drama to Postmodern Theory, focuses on the drama of Eliot, Artaud, Brecht, and Genet (Michigan, 1998). He has completed a second book, Theatres of Human Sacrifice: From Ancient Ritual to Screen Violence, and has published articles on theatre, film, and ritual studies in various journals.