Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2003

[page 35]

Mark Pizzato

Soyinka's Bacchae, African Gods, and Postmodern Mirrors

Characterizing our current postmodern era, Fredric Jameson has described the hollow nostalgia of cultural pastiche: "we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out of reach".(1) As we seek to reach a lost past and to find our cultural identity through the pastiche of pop images, we merely touch the "simulacrum" (as Baudrillard calls it) of mass-mediated reality. Along with the loss of history, always already screened by the hypertheatre of media images, both self and community seem reflectively out of reach. The only identities that count anymore are those on the TV or film screen, which we in the mass audience use as mirrors to see ourselves. But that ritual of recognition in front of the TV set or cinema wall exacerbates the hollowness of postmodern identity: one's desire is the desire of the Other even more through the screen's virtual realities. The loss of self (a Lacanian axiom of being human) becomes more apparent through the pseudo-community of electronic theatre, in the multiplex desires and split subjectivities of a mass audience without mass, as the flickering ghosts that we call "stars" whimsically orient our cathartic sympathies and fears. And yet, an uncanny sense of ritual sacrifice and choral identity returns through the Platonic caves of television, cinema, and live theatre today. As modern autonomous individualism shifts toward postmodern schizoid [page 36] characters, open-ended plots, and the "death of the Author,"(2) a new potential for audience co-creativity and transcendent deception is born.

Postcolonial cultures feel the loss of the past communal self--and its uncanny return--in a more specific way, caught between the postmodern lures of global capitalism, the modernist inscription of national identities, and the premodern heritage of tribal communities. This postcolonial "betweenness" (to use Homi Bhabha's term)(3) has been explored by Wole Soyinka, through his revision of violence in ancient Greek drama. In his play, The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, Soyinka returns to the roots of both European and African (Yoruba) theatre, combining Dionysian and Ogunian rites of communal passage, to involve a postmodern, postcolonial audience in the ancient sacrificial offering. The play was commissioned and performed by London's National Theatre in 1973, while Soyinka was in exile from his native Nigeria, after being imprisoned there (the second time, for over two years) due to his political activities.(4) While Soyinka takes his audience back in time to ancient Greece, he gives his Bacchae the premodern communal space of Yoruba ritual theatre--connecting the African and European, as well as the past and present, the popular and elite, within each tradition.(5)

[page 37] Bipolar Nostalgia

In the European tradition, the two modern theorists who most influenced the reinvention of ritual in spiritual and political directions are Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht. In the 1930s Artaud envisioned the actor as a transcendent scapegoat--as a victim "burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames"--for the sake of audience communion and catharsis.(6) Thus, the fragmentation of the modern alienated self (and of the hollow, schizoid, postmodern subject) might be cured homeopathically: by a sharing of pain, of the "violence of the thought"(7) , between actor and audience in Artaud's theatre of cruelty. This theory echoes Friedrich Nietzsche's psychohistorical view of the "birth of tragedy" in ancient Greece and his desire for ritual theatre's modern rebirth (in the late 1800s). Using Aristotle's evidence of Greek theatre emerging from dithyrambic ritual, Nietzsche saw a passionate Dionysian chorus singing and dancing in the orchestra, drawing spectators spiritually and emotionally into that choral "womb," where the shattering of their individual egos led to the rebirth of mythic identification on the Apollonian mask of the actor onstage.(8)

Brecht, on the other hand, saw a great communal danger in the lingering ritual temptation of Aristotelian mimesis--not only from the ancient to the modern stage, but also in the social theatre of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Brecht developed his epic theatre to counter [page 38] the loss of individuality in traditional mimetic identification: to stop the spectators of Sophocles' Oedipus (in Brecht's own example) from becoming an audience of "little Oedipuses".(9) Yet, there is also a tragic flaw in Brecht's desire for distanced, critically thinking spectators. The more they become individuated by his alienation effects, the less likely they are to come together for collective social change, which was the ultimate goal of his Marxist theatre and its anti-Aristotelian rituals.

These bipolar, Artaudian versus Brechtian, spiritually introverted or politically extroverted, communally cathartic or individually alienated ideals of modern theatre can be understood in a new light through the postcolonial views of Wole Soyinka. In his Cambridge lectures of 1973, Soyinka developed his theory of African folk theatre's ritual space. Through Nietzsche, Soyinka relates the current Yoruba tradition to "European antiquity . . . [where] man did, like the African, exist within a cosmic totality, did possess a consciousness in which his own earth being, his gravity-bound apprehension of self, was inseparable from the entire cosmic phenomenon".(10) But that chthonic connection in ancient European theatre was lost, says Soyinka, through the Judeo-Christian "transference of the underworld to a new locale up in the sky, a purgatorial suburb under the direct supervision of the sky deities".(11) Soyinka adds that a similar loss of chthonic theatre can be seen in modern Africa: "in the drama of the gods in [page 39] contemporary Christian-influenced societies of the African world".(12) Soyinka relates this historical loss of the earth gods grounding ritual drama, in premodern Europe and modern Africa, not only to theological colonialism, but also to a "profound transformation [that] has therefore taken place within the human psyche".(13) Here Soyinka suggests both an Artaudian desire (in Nietzschean terms) to unearth the lost psychic horizon of ritual theatre and a Brechtian concern with the political dominance of thought, self, and audience by an imperial, mimetic ideology.(14) In fact, in the 1970s when these theories were articulated, Soyinka not only adapted The Bacchae in an Artaudian/Nietzschean vein (in 1973), he also rewrote Brecht's Threepenny Opera as Opera Wonyosi to cast a critical, gestic depiction of African leadership (in 1977).(15)

While Soyinka's theory of ritual theatre parallels Nietzsche's and his plays combine the spiritual and political ideals of Artaud and Brecht, the Nigerian dramatist has carefully distinguished himself from these European paradigms. Soyinka said early in his career (1962) [page 40] that he admired the "liveliness and freedom" of Brecht's theatre, but disagreed with its "didacticism".(16) In his 1973 Cambridge lectures, Soyinka mentions Brecht just briefly, praising his "regenerative social goal".(17) While not citing Artaud directly, Soyinka does mention various European and American theatre artists influenced by Artaud: Jerzy Grotowski, Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, the Living Theater, and the Performance Group with their Dionysus in 69.(18) But Soyinka refers to these artists somewhat disdainfully as "the current white avant-garde . . . groping towards the ritual experience (alas, only too often comically misguided)."(19) Regarding Nietzsche, Soyinka makes an elaborate bridge between the Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of theatre's ancient Greek parturition and his own view of the Yoruba gods (orisas), Ogun and Obatala, as the mythic sources and continuing, dialectical energies of African [page 41] ritual theatre.(20) However, while noting "Apollo's resemblance to the serene art of Obatala," Soyinka distinguishes the two: "Obatala the sculptural god is not the artist of Apollonian illusion but of inner essence".(21) And Soyinka's Ogun is not just Dionysian; he is "a totality of the Dionysian, Apollonian and Promethean virtues".(22) Soyinka thus describes his gods of theatre as parallel to, yet distinct from Nietzsche's:(23) "Obatala is the placid essence of creation; Ogun the creative urge and instinct, essence of creativity." Soyinka even calls Ogun the "elder brother to Dionysus," in a note at the beginning of his version of The Bacchae.(24)

If the African god Ogun is a more ancient source of theatre than the Greek god, why does Soyinka rewrite a drama about Dionysus, calling his version: The Bacchae of Euripides? Who appears in Soyinka's play, is it Dionysus or Ogun, Euripides' characters or Soyinka's? Are they Greek or African? Who is sacrificed through the masks of Soyinka's Pentheus and Agave? I believe that Soyinka's revision of this drama and his contemporaneous theory of ritual theatre not only connect a modern Nigerian in exile to his European hosts and audiences. His work not only relates ancient Greek theatre to older African gods. It also speaks to the hollow nostalgia of the postmodern subject, whose loss of autonomous individuality marks the potential return of ritual spirits and communal identities in both the Euro-American and African theatre [page 42] traditions.

Although Soyinka's dramatic and theoretical revisions of ancient Greek sacrifice were written a quarter of a century ago, near the beginning of our current postmodern era, he has recently shown (in a talk given in February 1999) his continued interest in diagnosing the collective "neurosis" of American society. As a foreign spectator, Soyinka laments the compulsive fads, self-exhibitionism, and masochism of Americans "stripping themselves bare for the entertainment of others"--for which he prescribes, especially for African Americans, the traditional healing of African ritual, such as the Yoruba Egungun festival, where dead ancestors appear through actors' masks to counsel the living toward "social reconciliation," through a therapeutic "interpenetration of vitality" between the various planes of existence (the worlds of the living, the dead, and the unborn).(25) These are the same cosmic stages that Soyinka articulated in his earlier (1967) theory of ritual theatre, where he added the "fourth stage" of the transitional abyss between the other three, crossed by the god Ogun--a living tradition in Yorubaland (and in much of Latin America),(26) unlike the loss of Greek gods and rituals in Europe.

In the Euro-American tradition of theatre, Nietzsche, Artaud, and Brecht exemplify specific modes of struggle with modern alienation and the loss of communal identity. But the psychoanalytic insights of Jacques Lacan can be used to extend those modern theories toward the postmodern condition of our collective neurosis (and its perverse or schizoid traits)--in [page 43] which the "desire of the Other" structures the illusion of ego that masks our "lacking being," in a mass-mediated, consumerist society. In this social drama (to also use Turner's anthropological terms), a cosmic, liminal, "anti-secular" dimension is neared even in the most secular rituals of breach, crisis, and redress(27) -- such as the ordinary buttressing of mass audience identity through the worship of film and TV stars, as they act out social horrors and identity crises. In the pages that follow, I want to suggest how the Afro-European"stage drama of Soyinka's The Bacchae relates to the Euro-American social drama of the postmodern loss of self as autonomous ego, and yet also shows the potential return of communal, chthonic, and cosmic identity through a new theatrical awareness.

A Space for the Other Bacchae

Soyinka's title, The Bacchae of Euripides, suggests the influence of ancient Greek desire in his playwriting: the other dramatist's prescription of Soyinka's bridge between the African and European traditions. But Soyinka also subverts the dominance of the European tradition in postcolonial Africa with the note of mimicry(28) in this title: his play is obviously not The Bacchae of Euripides. Although Soyinka cites two English translations of the Greek play (Arrowsmith and Murray), from which he has admittedly "borrow[ed] phrases and even lines" in creating his own version, he also notes that he has borrowed lines from his own "passion poem" (Idanre) about the Yoruba god Ogun, whom Soyinka then calls the "elder brother of Dionysos".(29) In his [page 44] Bacchae Soyinka articulates the spirits of various Yoruba gods behind the mask of Euripides' (and Nietzsche's) Dionysus. Soyinka manifests the shifting desires of a trickster figure, of the Yoruba god Esu, as Dionysus manipulates his human worshipers and his nemesis Pentheus toward a sacrificial rite of revenge.(30) Soyinka also shows the Nietzschean characteristics of Apollonian serenity and Dionysian violence, of both Obatala and Ogun, in his Dionysus--who first appears: "Relaxed, as becomes divine self-assurance but equally tensed as if for action, an arrow drawn in readiness for flight".(31) Most significantly, in relation to the postmodern Lacanian subject and Soyinka's own ritual theory, he alters Euripides' revenge plot to show the erotic/death drive of Ogun crossing the fourth stage abyss between living, dead, and unborn worlds--driving through the human characters' tragic actions, which benefit the entire, choral community in the play's new, tragicomic ending.(32)

Building this extended sense of community from the beginning of the play, Soyinka adds a second chorus of slaves to the bacchae of Euripides' drama. This community of slaves is first seen at work in the play's opening images and eventually becomes a chorus of Dionysus' worshipers. It is also reflected in a related community of the dead, according to Soyinka's initial stage directions. The background is "lined by the bodies of crucified slaves mostly in the [page 45] skeletal stage".(33) In the foreground "dim figures of slaves" (the eventual chorus) labor upon a threshing-floor against the palace wall, in a "cloud of chaff . . . flailing and treading . . . [with the] smell and sweat of harvest," as Dionysus emerges from the tomb of his mother, Semele, to speak of revenge. Dionysus thus arises, like the Nietzschean actor, out of the womb of earth and death. This creates a double "space of becoming," in Kristeva's sense of the abject, semiotic, maternal chora. The threshing-floor with its chaff cloud reflects the historical origin of Greek theatre's Dionysian orchestra in the threshing-floor of the agora (market place). But Soyinka shows the original ritual space of his added chorus in the working area of slaves, juxtaposed against the Apollonian palace of Pentheus and the abject bodies of dead slaves, left as semiotic warnings against rebellion.(35)

Soyinka includes Euripides' mythic setting for the start of The Bacchae: the choral space of Semele's tomb, representing her cosmic abjection.(36) (She was consumed by lightning when her lover Zeus appeared to her in divine form, although this story of her death, and of her son's divinity, was not believed by most of her human family.)(37) It is out of this maternal chora that [page 46] Dionysus first appears, returning to Thebes as the spirit of revolution and familial revenge. But Soyinka's additional layers of death and abjection--through the scenic chora of crucified and laboring slaves, as well as Semele's tomb--reframes the high drama of gods and mythic heroes to remind the audience of the mundane suffering of the lower classes (as in in Brecht's revision of Shakespeare's Coriolanus). The opening scene of Soyinka's The Bacchae thus shows both Artaudian and Brechtian techniques, through a specific African sense of flexible ritual space(38) (which Artaud also desired) and the gestic performance of colonial slave labor (à la Brecht). Both of these dramatic choices serve to set up the cosmic, yet political theatre of Ogun's drive to cross the abyss between the dead and the living--as that orisa comes in the figure of Dionysus to possess both his followers and his enemies, especially Pentheus and his mother.

Coincidentally, at the same time that the exiled Soyinka presented his version of Euripides' ancient Greek drama in London, Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian immigrant in Paris, was using Lacanian psychoanalysis to revise Plato's ancient Greek philosophy of the chora, an enclosed mythic space for the becoming of ideas, objects, and art (in his Timaeus). Kristeva redefined the chora as a revolutionary, maternal space of preverbal language and emotion within literature, culture, and the mind, repressed (or "abjected") by the patriarchal, symbolic order--yet providing the foundation for that order and disrupting it in uncanny ways. Kristeva based her revision of Plato's myth on Lacan's theory of the "mirror stage": the human infant's loss of preverbal symbiosis and "semiotic motility" with the (m)Other, as mirror of ego identity, [page 47] through the intervention of the paternal symbolic, the Name and No of the Father.(39) Rather than emphasize the Oedipal desire to return to the lost maternal body through patricidal rebellion, Kristeva stresses the power of that choral space of loss, mourning, and abjection--a lingering womb and tomb within each subject's mind and in human society, which bears the potential for violent rebirth. "In 'artistic' practices the semiotic--the precondition of the symbolic--is revealed as that which also destroys the symbolic . . . [as] the semiotic chora within the signifying device of language".(40)

Soyinka's artistic revision of The Bacchae--in just its opening stage directions--shows a striking example of Kristeva's theory. His Afro-European depiction of choral space and ritual, of slave death and labor, along with the tomb of Semele, the mother, signifying her death and prior labor, reveal a semiotic, abject, maternal chora in the background of Dionysus' drama, as he returns to Thebes to destroy the symbolic order of Pentheus. But Soyinka also does some deconstructing of orders here, through creative re(at)tribution. He recalls a deeper origin of European ritual theatre (and of the Christian crucifix) in his initial scenery for this drama "of Euripides." He unearths the fluid choral space of abject slaves and mother earth goddesses(41) --that was encrypted by ancient Greek civilization, its sky-gods, and its fixed orchestral space (where all choral odes were performed by young male soldiers). Soyinka's African view thus offers a postcolonial vision of ancient European theatre space that parallels Kristeva's postmodern view of the maternal chora in art, language, and the theatre of the mind.(42) Soyinka [page 48] does not just repeat Greek theatre architecture with his revision of Euripide's drama. Instead of placing the orchestra as a circle for the bacchic chorus, between heroic characters and audience (as in Nietzsche's nostalgic vision), Soyinka recenters the revolutionary chora in chthonic stage space. He shows its semiotic motility between the background line of slave skeletons on crosses, the foreground threshing-floor of slave labor, and the tomb of Semele out of which the dithyrambic (twice-born) Dionysus emerges to begin the play.

Kristeva's first book mentions, if only briefly, the liminal edge in ritual theatre, where "the subject crosses the border of the symbolic and reaches the semiotic chora"--crossing a border that sacrifice re-presents onstage.(43) This "reenacting of the signifying path" opens the stage and subject "to the motility where all meaning is erased".(44) Here Kristeva refers to African rituals (of the Dinkas in Sudan) and to the ancient origins of European theatre. "The Dionysian festivals in Greece are the most striking example of this deluge of the signifier, which so inundates the symbolic order that it portends the latter's dissolution in a dancing, singing, and poetic animality." One can see in the opening moments of Soyinka's The Bacchae, even before Dionysus speaks, a Dionysian and African deluge of visual, acoustic, and olfactory signifiers (including the "smell" of the harvest). This eventually threatens to subvert the Olympian and Christian symbolic orders--to release the colonized chora of the mother (goddess), through her son's sacrificial revenge and the play's choral dancing, singing, and bacchic animality. In Kristeva's terms: "art takes from ritual space what theology conceals: trans-symbolic jouissance, the irruption of the motility threatening the unity of the social realm [page 49] and the subject".(45)

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.