Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2003

Shards of Oneness

Through further changes in Euripides' drama, Soyinka expresses the revolutionary power of the abject chora within certain characters and their orisa aspects, as well as in the scenery and stage space. He shows the potential evocation of a choral space--or in his terms, of a "fourth stage," as transitional abyss between the living, dead, and unborn. Thus, the "Communion Rite," Soyinka's subtitle for his Bacchae, takes place not only in the altered tragicomic ending of the drama, but ideally between actors onstage, spectators offstage, and their lost ancestors and future progeny in the psychic community of performance. This may happen even in a secular context, although the play's premiere by London's National Theatre received very negative reviews.(46) The animist sense of theatrical ritual (articulated in Soyinka's essays) involves an intermixing of temporal worlds and spiritual identities that recasts the [page 50] drama in a distinctive African light,(47) especially as the ancient Greek characters appear to embody certain aspects of Yoruba orisas. Yet, here again the insights of Soyinka's intercultural ritual theory, through his retelling of Yoruba myth, can shed light not only upon his stage drama, or upon Brechtian alienation and Artaudian violence, but also on the social drama of lacking being between postmodern subjects.

In his "Fourth Stage" and Cambridge essays (of 1967 and 1973), Soyinka draws on Yoruba mythology, as well as Nietzsche's view of the Greeks, to craft a theory of ritual theatre concerning the purpose of sacrificial violence onstage. Soyinka finds the "origin of Yoruba tragedy" in the mysteries of the gods (orisas) Ogun and Obatala(48); but he also uses the Yoruba genesis myth of Orisa-nla. "Once, there was only the solitary being, the primogenitor of god and man, attended only by his slave, Atunda. . . . However, the slave rebelled. For reasons best known to himself he rolled a huge boulder on to the god as he tended his garden on a hillside, sent him hurtling into the abyss in a thousand and one fragments".(49) Soyinka himself analyzes this cosmic myth in terms of individual psychology: "the experience of birth and the disintegration of consciousness in death"--which he then relates to ritual and "the god's tragic drama," especially that of Ogun.(50) But I would like to extend his argument toward postmodern, psychoanalytic theory as well. In Lacan's theory of the "mirror stage," the infant at the age of 6 [page 51] to 18 months experiences a traumatic loss of its symbiotic oneness with the mother's body. This leads to a substitute illusion of its own whole ego in the mirror of the (m)Other's eyes and desires. Yet, the infant also experiences its uncoordinated body and unfocused libido as fantasies of a fragmented body (corps morcelé) contradicting the illusory wholeness of ego or of lost maternal oneness.

Soyinka's version of Yoruba genesis, regarding ritual theatre and tragic violence, might thus inform the common postmodern notion of split subjectivity. The subject in postmodern art and life is split by the desires of the Other, while rebelling against such desires--in others and in oneself--to create the illusory mask of an independent ego. In the Yoruba myth, the primal Being of Orisa-nla reflects the lost oneness of infant-mother symbiosis in psychoanalytic theory and the loss of, yet lure to recover, a shared, communal identity or an ideal, whole ego in the postmodern. According to the myth, the primal oneness of Orisa-nla shatters due to the rebellious spirit of the slave, Atunda (or, in other versions of the myth, the trickster god, Esu). In the parallel Lacanian parable, the infant experiences both the joyful wholeness and terrifying fragmentation of itself in the mirror of the (m)Other's desire, setting the stage for split subjectivity throughout life. This imaginary contradiction, covering the Real abjection of the child's initial alienation in lacking being, is reconfigured as separation from the mother's body by the symbolic order of language and law, the Name and No of the Father. As the rebelling ego becomes further alienated from its (m)Other and mirror image, it gains a momentary ecstasy of separate wholeness. But through words and prohibitions, it also experiences a terrifying fragmentation--as if Atunda smashed his own image in the mirror of Oneness, in smashing the primal god Orisa-nla. Thus, both humans and gods in Yoruba mythology, like the ego and the Other in Lacanian theory, are lacking being.

As Soyinka puts it: "The shard of original Oneness which contained the creative flint [page 52] appears to have passed into the being of Ogun," as did other shards into other orisas.(51) "Yet none of them, not even Ogun, was complete in himself. There had to be a journey across the void to drink at the fount of mortality. . . . But the void had become impenetrable." For this void between the divine and human worlds was also the "abyss" of lacking being, the "disintegration of consciousness," where Orisa-nla was originally shattered. Ogun, however, "with an instrument which he had forged from the ore of mountain-wombs, . . . cleared the primordial jungle, plunged through the abyss and called on the others [the various orisas] to follow".(52) Ogun thus becomes the source, for Soyinka, of ritual theatre--of the tragic-heroic drive to sacrifice oneself for communal benefit, as he plunges into the transitional abyss between worlds, reenacting the alienation, lack, and fragmentation of being, to reconnect the divine and human shards of primal Oneness (corresponding to the Other jouissance of the "subject as drive" in Lacanian theory).(53)

Although the other deities did follow, Soyinka says: "Only Ogun experienced the process of being literally torn asunder in cosmic winds or rescuing himself from the precarious edge of total dissolution by harnessing the untouched part of himself, the will".(54) Soyinka directly relates this mythic act of Ogun, his individual sacrifice for the "strengthening of the communal psyche," to the reenactment of birth and death, oneness and fragmentation in theatre.

Soyinka's description of divine possession in Yoruba ritual theatre might be regarded by postmodernists as specific to that culture and his reference to the "universal" might be rejected as modernist essentialism (or primitivism). But I hope to demonstrate that Soyinka's argument, from a quarter century ago, serves as a vital connection between European poststructuralist psychology, modern Nietzschean and Artaudian desires, and the premodern wisdom of African ritual performance.

Alienated, Psychic Communities

Soyinka's postcolonial revision of ancient myths and ritual sacrifices reveals a blind spot in postmodern theories of theatre that celebrate audience co-creativity through the "psychic polyphony" of spectator experiences and cultural diversities.(56) His sense of a potential cosmic theatre of divine and human figures--of living, dead, and unborn stages, with the transitional abyss between them of psychological alienation, lacking being, fragmentation, and rebirth--is [page 54] missing in the antimetaphysical secularism of most postmodern theories. But there is, in current performance, a parallel yearning for communal wholeness as a ritual effect, especially through the theatrical lure of ego identification with the alienated hero onstage or onscreen. In the popular theatre of film and television, this paradoxical phenomenon becomes even more apparent. Mass-audience desires cling to the star actor, who promises each fan a mirror-stage illusion of transcendent individuality--through collective imitation.

Postmodern media stars offer a cosmological theatre of mythic personas, masking the loss of traditional relations with the dead and the unborn. We may be "condemned," as Jameson puts it, to perceive past and future--or, more intimately, our dead and unborn relatives--through the cultural pastiche of pop imagery and stereotypes. But the dead and the unborn still exist, at least as unconscious relations, shards of memories and dreams at the edges of our present living world.(57) Sometimes they affect us more directly, crossing the abyss of lacking being in the Real--like Soyinka's heroic orisas and ritual actors--to appear through the imaginary and symbolic theatre of pop imagery and stereotypes. Like rhythmic, preverbal drives from the abject, semiotic chora, our past and future relations may interrupt the symbolic order of language or patriarchy with violent, revolutionary meanings.

Often in the mass media, there are melodramatic projections of good against evil violence (a paranoid-schizoid "splitting" in the Kleinian, object-relations sense). But Soyinka's Ogun, like Nietzsche's Dionysus, evokes a more tragic awareness of evil and violence within oneself. Ogun is not simply a Christ-like, Promethean martyr. He is not a just purely benevolent victim of violence for the love of man. He is also the Yoruba god of metal and [page 55] warfare.(58) One of the traditional praise-chants (oriki) for Ogun is translated by Soyinka in his theory of theatrical sacrifice: "Salutations O lone being, who bathes in rivers of blood".(59) Soyinka also recounts a Yoruba myth about Ogun's drunken violence while leading his people in war: "during a lull in the battle, our old friend Esu the trickster god left a gourd of palm wine for the thirsty deity. Ogun found it exceptionally delicious and drained the gourd to the dregs".(60) When the battle resumed, "the carnage was greater than ever before. But by now, to the drunken god, friend and foe had become confused; he turned on his men and slaughtered them. This was the possibility that had haunted him from the beginning and made him shrink from the role of king over men." The Yoruba gods are not perfect like the Christian God,(61) nor whimsically abusive like the ancient Greek gods. The orisas are divine agents and helpers to humans, but they also make mistakes. They are not simply melodramatic heroes or villains; they are tragic figures of human psychology and African culture (mixing with Catholic saints in the postcolonial diaspora).(62)

The fragmentation of both Orisa-nla and Ogun in the transitional abyss between worlds, [page 56] which Soyinka describes as Ogun's own double trauma,(63) parallels the infant's alienation and separation from the (m)Other, according to Lacanian theory. These two rites of passage produce psychotic and perverse traits in all neurotics, and create the fatal structure of psychosis and perversion if each stage is not completed well.(64) Thus, all human beings are tragically flawed with schizoid and violent symptoms--although this hamartia is often masked through the melodramatic projections of postmodern mass culture.

The "will" to pass through violent fragmentation and rebirth, which Soyinka describes as the essence of Ogun and the spirit of tragic theatre, can also be related to Lacan's version of the Freudian erotic and death drives as being one drive toward the suffering and joy of ecstatic jouissance. But the painful, overwhelming joy of the drive's direct aim is usually avoided by the subject's meandering desires(65) --sometimes represented in Yoruba myth by the trickster god Esu. For Esu not only diverts Ogun's will with palm wine, he (or the wine itself)(66) performs that trick also upon the creative god, Obatala--another name, Soyinka tells us, for the primal oneness that was once Orisa-nla.(67) While the creator, Obatala, was "moulding human beings," says Soyinka, he drank too much palm wine.(68) "His craftsman's fingers slipped badly and he moulded cripples, albinos and the blind." From a postmodern, Lacanian view, this Yoruba myth not only explains the imperfection of certain human bodies. It also relates to the [page 57] misrecognition (méconnaissance) that all human minds experience in the mirror-stage formation of the ego and later in life through the desires of the Other. The mask of ego slips on the subject's face, in the theatre of everyday life, like the disabled body slipping in Obatala's creative, yet drunken fingers--as the postmodern subject is formed, yet misrecognized by others whose views and desires still determine the actor's identity.

Each Yoruba god that Soyinka mentions in his mythic theory of ritual drama corresponds to a specific aspect of Lacanian subjectivity, and thus points to the potential of theatre as homeopathic remedy for the violence within human minds and societies. (1) Orisa-nla's shattering in the void shows the fragmentation and lacking being of the subject in the mirror of the (m)Other as lost, primordial Oneness. (2) Obatala's drunken errors, while moulding new human bodies, illustrate the misrecognition of the subject in the mask of ego formed by the Other's desires. (3) Esu's tricks with palm wine reveal the diversions of desire between subject and Other, producing painful symptoms to avoid the ecstasy of the drive. (4) Ogun's willful disintegration and rebirth, through the abyss between the worlds of the living, dead, and unborn, depicts the violent jouissance of the drive in the subject's ultimate, tragicomic submission to the cycles of life.(69) Soyinka bridges the Yoruba tradition of ritual theatre to various modern European visions: to Nietzschean sacrifice (beyond good and evil), to Artaudian totemism (as individual transformation), and to Brechtian alienation (for social change). But Soyinka also shows a potential for tragicomic communion through revolutionary stage violence--in the Yoruba spirit of Orisa-nla, Obatala, Esu, and Ogun--rather than the simple, good and evil projections of melodramatic vengeance. This involves, even for a postmodern audience, the choral communities of the living, the dead, and the unborn: the desires of the [page 58] Other through which each ego is shattered and reborn many times in a person's life.(70)

Tragicomic Twists

In his version of The Bacchae, Soyinka changes Dionysus' opening monologue to reveal an Ogunian spirit, thereby twisting Euripides' melodramatic revenge plot to stress the initial, tragic abjection of the protagonist.(71) "Thebes taints me with bastardy. I am turned into an alien, some foreign outgrowth of her habitual tyranny".(72) Here Soyinka may be expressing, through his Dionysus, an exile's bitterness against Nigeria's tyrannous military leaders, who had jailed him for two years, shortly before his writing of The Bacchae. (Euripides also wrote his Bacchae in exile.)(73) Soyinka may also be showing, with the added slave scenery and chorus, a postcolonial rage against Europe's habitual tyranny and slave trading in Africa. Yet, Soyinka reveals an Ogunian will to transcend the melodramatic rage of the vengeful Dionysus, by embracing divine alienation and fragmentation--as in the Greek myth of Dionysus Zagreus, the dismembered Dionysus.(74)

[page 59] The Zagreus myth, of Dionysus torn apart by other vengeful gods, is mentioned by Soyinka in his ritual theory(75) --and by Tiresias, the bacchantes, and the slave leader in his Bacchae.(76) But it is Pentheus, not Dionysus, who is physically dismembered, as in Euripides' original.(77) The ancient Greek rite of sparagmos, the tearing apart of a live human or animal body, is manifested in both plays through the offstage dismemberment of Pentheus by his mother, Agave, while she and the Theban women (as another chorus of bacchae) are possessed by the vengeful spirit of Dionysus. And yet, Soyinka shows Dionysus, from the beginning of the play, as fragmented in character--a tragic hero, rather than a simple, melodramatic force of revenge.(78) Although Dionysus does bring vengeance, through "the blood and breasts" of his "wild-haired" bacchantes, he first appears as a character torn between his divine and human, native and foreign aspects, when he emerges from his abject mother's tomb in the opening scene.(79) Thus, Soyinka focuses on the Ogunian element of the Dionysus myth: not only the dismembering, but also the transformative passage between worlds by both Dionysus and Pentheus, for the sake of communal rejuvenation.

[page 60] Soyinka's Dionysus arrives in Thebes already dis-membered: alienated from his membership ties to homeland and human family, "a scapegoat of a god," as he calls himself(80) --rather than as Euripides' triumphant avenger. Instead of threatening Thebes, the African writer's Dionysus expresses his jouissance calmly, to the modern postcolonial audience, through a paradoxical, all-inclusive logic. "I am the gentle, jealous joy. Vengeful and kind. An essence that will not exclude nor be excluded. If you are Man or Woman, I am Dionysos. Accept." He then describes his Dionysian spirit as an objective force, detached from any personal motive of revenge. Instead of explaining his mythic family drama, as in Euripides' play, this Dionysus tells the story of an erotic/death-drive "it" (or Freudian id, das Es) as chthonic seed. (Some of the place names he uses have a particular resonance for us in the twenty-first century.)

The motive of Soyinka's Dionysus is not the simple revenge of a melodramatic family feud, but a complex, tragic drive, like that of Ogun. He will sacrifice himself, accepting the role of scapegoat, not only to turn the tables on Pentheus, but also to reconnect the psychic worlds of living, dead, and unborn (or of symbolic, Real, and imaginary, in a Lacanian sense). As Soyinka's plot proceeds, Dionysus will unite the abject spirits of the dead and living slaves in the [page 61] opening scene--while returning his diasporic, postcolonial cult of bacchae(82) to their mythic motherland and unborn fate.

After his prologue, this Dionysus stays onstage (unlike Euripides' who exits). Standing "still, statuesque," he then becomes invisible to other characters who enter in Soyinka's added scenes of ritual procession and revolutionary desire.(83) First, a herdsman enters and talks with the slave leader (from the group at labor), remarking on the distant, approaching sounds of Eleusian priests and vestal virgins, chanting in procession. But as the leader and other slaves drink from a jug of wine brought by the herdsman, they also talk about overthrowing that ritual order, which uses slaves as scapegoats, as whipping boys.(84) The herdsman explains that the scapegoat's blood must be shed to "cleanse the new year of the rot of the old or the world will die".(85) But the slave leader complains that this is class abuse:(86) "the rites bring us nothing! Let those to whom the profits go bear the burden of the old year dying." The herdsman replies by pointing to the crucified skeletons as signifying the fate of "rebellious slaves."

The statuesque figure of Dionysus onstage, watching invisibly like the theatre audience, becomes an imaginary/symbolic lens to reflect and refocus the abject suffering of living and dead slaves, their ritual submission as scapegoats, and their rebellious energies.(87) When the [page 62] Eleusian procession arrives, however, another catalytic figure appears in the role of scapegoat. The priests and vestals are followed by an "Old Man" being whipped by others in procession.(88) He turns out to be the blind seer, Tiresias, and he collapses to his knees as the procession approaches the slave group. Dionysus saves Tiresias from further lashes, by revealing himself then in a lightning flash. After the priests flee and the vestals and slaves convert to Dionysian enthusiasm, Tiresias reprimands the ritual floggers for their overly enthusiastic participation in the onstage violence. "Blind, stupid, bloody brutes! Can you see how you've covered me in weals? Can't you bastards ever tell the difference between ritual and reality. . . . Symbolic flogging, that is what I keep trying to drum into your thick heads".(89)

By adding this ritual and its violent, yet comic twists (plus a subsequent dialogue between Tiresias and Dionysus), Soyinka draws out the symbolic, imaginary, and Real strands of sacrifice connecting dead and living slaves, foreign and local bacchae (including the vestals), and the main characters in the drama, in their subsequent sacrificial drive. The slave leader uses Ogun's iron (c)ore symbolism to express his will to join the chora of Dionysian revolt, even if it means the shattering of familiar ritual orders: "not with / The scapegoat bogey of a slave uprising / But with a new remorseless order, forces / Unpredictable as molten fire in mountain wombs".(90) Tiresias then shows the symbolic and imaginary conceits of his role as scapegoat in the ritual procession. Not only does he insist on "symbolic flogging," but he also confesses to Dionysus that he wears a fawn-skin under his clothes to protect his own skin from the lashes.(91) [page 63] And yet, when pressed by Dionysus as to why he chose the scapegoat role, Tiresias gives two reasons that reveal the Real, social and personal dimensions beyond such theatrical tricks. The terms he uses also echo today's postcolonial conflicts in Africa and the perverse turns of postmodern culture. First, Tiresias says he wanted to save Kadmos and Thebes from a real revolution by taking the slave's place as scapegoat: "the situation is touch and go. If one more slave had been killed at the cleansing rites, or sacrificed to that insatiable altar of nation-building . . ."(92) But next, Tiresias admits that he wanted the real experience of pain: "I have longed to know what flesh is made of. What suffering is. Feel the taste of blood instead of merely foreseeing it. Taste the ecstasy of rejuvenation after long organising its ritual".(93) Dionysus promises Tiresias that "Thebes will have its full sacrifice," hinting at the Ogunian plunge of Pentheus by the end of the play. But the old priest already begins to sense the symbolic, imaginary, and Real convergence--through "a small crack in the dead crust of the soul." At the distant sound of the bacchic chora, his "veins race," and at the prompting of Dionysus, the old blind man joins in the dance.

After Dionysus leaves, the bacchae arrive, enthusiastically seeking him. But in Soyinka's version the slave chorus also returns and the two choruses converse, through their leaders, sharing their Theban abjection and Dionysian ecstasy. "Fellow aliens," says the slave leader to the foreign women, "let me ask you--do you know Bromius?"(94) This question, from the local slave chorus to the bacchae who have arrived in Thebes with Dionysus (Bromius), suggests that "knowledge" of the god has an internal source: the chora of alienation experienced by each of these subcultures, whether in diasporic wandering or colonial enslavement. Soyinka's double [page 64] chorus then chants an "old hymn to godhead" that involves an explicit tie to African culture and cosmology.(95) "Tribute to the holy hills of Ethiopia / Caves of unborn, and the dark ancestral spirits. / Home of primal drums round which the dead and living / Dance".(96) Not only are the worlds of living, dead, and unborn evoked here, but a reference is also made to Ethiopia (as in Dionysus' prologue) where ancient Yoruba culture may have begun, according to legend, before migrating to west Africa.

Soyinka then relates the ecstatic song and dance of his double Dionysian chorus across time as well as place, to our own century. Their music, according to his stage directions, is like "the theme-song of Zorba the Greek--with its strange mixture of nostalgia, violence, and death".(97) The slave leader turns into a rock star in "the emotional colour and temperature of a European pop scene." More specifically, he has "the lilt and energy of the black hot gospellers." He and the chorus both become "physically possessed . . . as would be seen in a teenage pop audience." Soyinka thus joins the ancient to the postmodern, and the European to the African chora of revolutionary ecstasy. But this added scene of Dionysian violence also foreshadows the ultimate, offstage sparagmos of Pentheus. The chorus of women and slaves rush at their leader and tear his clothes. Then "a sudden human wave engulfs him and he is completely submerged under screaming, 'possessed' lungs and bodies." By adding this ecstatic musical scene of "self-release",(98) Soyinka offers his audience a prior, symbolic and imaginary experience to apply during the play's final Ogunian sacrifice, kept offstage as in Euripides' original--to make that [page 65] mortal offering Real, through the spectators' own imaginations, participating communally, as another chorus.

However, just after this tragic preview, Soyinka twists his plot into a comic scene of vaudevillian slapstick, vulgar jokes, and prophetic wisdom, with Tiresias and Kadmos, who have come out of hiding, after witnessing (like the theatre audience) the violent choral passion and the slave leader's narrow escape. With the mad Dionysian chorus now gone, but their energy still lingering, the old men show their "new vitality".(99) While preening in their fawn-skin costumes and ivy-wreath crowns, they joke about whether Dionysus is circumcised, and (with Judeo-Christian, postcolonial irony) about how many slaves' foreskins it would take "to make a Bacchic smock".(100) They also compare their new imaginary and symbolic egos, in the mirror of Dionysian choral ecstasy, with the resistant ego of Kadmos' grandson, King Pentheus. "If you held out the mirror of longing to him, he will utterly fail to recognize his own image or else he'll smash the mirror in anger".(101) The grammatical shift in this sentence spoken by Tiresias, from subjunctive to future tense, shows that he is not just posing a hypothetical event ("if you held"), but prophesying actual events in the play ("he will"). Pentheus will fail to recognize his own image in Dionysus and he will try to smash that mirror in anger. (Later, his mother, Agave, will also misrecognize him, as he spies on her and the other bacchae; then smash him like a mirror while he wears their Dionysian costume.) Through the terms of Tiresias' oracle, Soyinka makes the violence of the play more a matter of tragicomic fate, rather than melodramatic revenge, especially in relation to Yoruba myth and Lacanian theory.

The old men in this scene, as comic characters embracing Dionysian vitality, are the [page 66] mirror images of their young king's fierce repression of that same power, yet eventual submission to it and its costuming, in subsequent scenes. Like the infant in Lacan's mirror stage, the comic jouissance of the old men, as egos reborn through the desire of the Dionysian Other, also reflects the erotic/death drive at the cutting edge of their joyful mirror. The drive's alienation and fragmentation, masked by their jokes, will be acted out through the sacrifice of Thebe's phallic leader, well beyond circumcision and castration. En route to that fatal meeting with bacchic violence, Pentheus will "fail to recognize his own image." He will dress in a fawn-skin, thinking that it is his own armor, while drunk with the wine of Dionysus.

The terms of Tiresias' prophesy relate to both postmodern theory and Yoruba myth: to Lacanian méconnaissance (ego misrecognition) in the Other's desire and to Obatala's drunken creativity in misshaping human forms. Prior to wearing the costume, Pentheus will rage against the Dionysus cult, as a "mirror of longing" held out to him, fulfilling Tiresias' prophesy that "he'll smash the mirror in anger." Yet this again speaks to the abject rage of the schizoid, postmodern subject, whose Real terror of fragmentation--behind the multiple masks of imaginary egos and symbolic superegos--erupts as aggressive id, in fantasy or reality. Likewise, in the Yoruba tradition advocated by Soyinka, the originary smashing of Orisa-nla, as mirror of primal Oneness, must be ritually reenacted by the Ogunian actor, crossing the transitional abyss between worlds, becoming dismembered and reborn for the sake of the communal audience. And this is precisely how Soyinka recrafts his Pentheus, through the mirror of Dionysus as Ogunian Other. Soyinka's Pentheus is not just a victim of vengeful tricks; he converts to the Dionysian spirit with his will to see, and thus becomes, the sacrifice. In the same mirror that he has smashed and misrecognized himself, he finds his ultimate, sacrificial identity (or Lacanian sinthome) as both spectator and actor who is shattered.

[page 67] Before that second arc of the tragicomic plot begins, Soyinka concludes its initial arc (of Dionysus' entry into Thebes and plague-like infection of chorus, slaves, and elders) with symbolic slapstick. Like the satyr play as dessert to ancient Greek tragedy, but with a modern, Brechtian gest, Soyinka shows a comic perversion of the prior sparagmos of the slave leader and the future dismembering of Pentheus in the "music-hall" scene of Kadmos' farcical castration.(102) The retired king tries to magnify his reborn Dionysian ego through a new invention: a telescopic thyrsus as walking stick. But when he demonstrates this phallic prop of his upper-class stylishness, before the blind Tiresias as his audience, the stick collapses and Kadmos falls to the ground. Of course, when he straightens it out and tries again, it collapses again. And again, a third time. Then Tiresias tells him to put it back in his trousers.(103) Beyond the slapstick joke, Tiresias offers some more prophetic advice, relating to both Kadmos and his grandson, Pentheus. "When you step into the dance you'll lose all your silly notions. You accept, and that's the real stature of man." Thus, the satyr scene of Kadmos' trick phallus foreshadows further plot twists, through the Esu-like magic of Dionysus.(104) These eventually lead to Pentheus' acceptance of an Ogunian role and its sacrificial climax: his tragic fall from the phallic pine tree into the transitional abyss (offstage), to be torn apart by his mother and other bacchae. Yet in Soyinka's revised, tragicomic ending, the dead Pentheus finds new life onstage, through the "real stature" of his decapitated head on the bacchic May-pole, in the final step of the communal dance.

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.