Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2003

[page 68] The Villain's Will to Sacrifice

King Pentheus arrives, enforcing phallocentric order, right after the phallic slapstick scene. Soon, he accuses Tiresias of fomenting rebellion (as Oedipus does to the same character in Sophocles' play). In his Cambridge lectures, Soyinka mentions this moment in his own version of The Bacchae and describes Pentheus as "properly opposed to the presence and activities of the god Dionysus in his kingdom".(105) Why properly? Because Soyinka has added the initial ritual procession with Tiresias as false scapegoat. This lends a greater validity to the subsequent critique of the priest by Pentheus (though he has similar lines in Euripides' version):(106) "Another god revealed is a new way opened / Into men's pockets, profits from offerings. / Power over private lives--and state affairs".(107) Despite such accusations, Tiresias eventually expresses a tragic sympathy and fear for the young king, as in Aristotle's formula for audience catharsis. "I pity Pentheus / His terrible madness. There is no cure . . ."(108) No cure from his madness, that is. But there is a Lacanian cure for Pentheus through his madness, through embracing his sinthome (fundamental symptom)--shown in Soyinka's play by the Ogunian conversion of Pentheus in later scenes. His self-sacrifice, as personal cure, might then create a vicarious, communal cure for the watching audience, in Aristotle's sense of catharsis, to the degree that spectators have pitied and feared his fate, following the lead of the prophetic analyst, Tiresias.

Pentheus already demonstrates a symptomatic projection--and avoidance--of the self- [page 69] sacrificial drive within him, through his fears of slave revolution, of bacchic madness, and of the blind Tiresias gaining power "over state affairs." These threats give him the ostensible right, as with similar dictators throughout history (in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere) to extend the violent repression, as social superego, against "the rot and creeping / Poison in the body of the state".(109) When Kadmos reminds him of the terrifying sparagmos of his cousin Actaeon,(110) the king again displaces any fearful awareness of his own drive and similar fate, by desiring the same for Dionysus: "I thank you for suggesting a most / Befitting fate for that sorcerer when we find him".(111) This reaction by Pentheus is not given in Euripides' play (although his Kadmos also mentions Actaeon). Soyinka twists the irony even further to foreshadow Pentheus' own path toward a tragic fate, in his violent judgment for Dionysus, whom he misrecognizes as a mere "sorcerer." Pentheus is not just a melodramatic villain, or a simple antagonist to Dionysus. He becomes a tragic hero--falling into sacrifice due to the hamartia of his hubris (the error in his judgment through pride). Yet along with this Brechtian side of the Aristotelian model, showing the ruler's tragic flaw and fate as mistaken social choice, Soyinka also shows the rightness in the misstep. As the Artaudian "plague" of Dionysus spreads throughout Pentheus' kingdom,(112) he will be transformed by his own errors in repressing it, becoming infected with its Ogunian drive, through the bacchic elders (Kadmos and Tiresias) and through the maternal chora of Agave, converted virgins, foreign maenads, and slaves.

[page 70] This is not easy to see in Euripides' version. But Soyinka's tragicomic, Afro-European twists position the voyeuristic desires of the theatre audience, watching the Dionysian rites throughout the play, as pointing to the offstage climax of Pentheus' violent fate, when he watches the bacchae from the pine tree, and then becomes their sacrificial victim. The abyss between divine and human worlds, crossed by Ogun in the Yoruba myth and by the Ogunian actor in Soyinka's theory, thus finds its parallel in the choral abyss at the edge of the stage, at various points in the play. As already mentioned, Soyinka's slave chorus and leader offer the audience a voyeuristic preview of Pentheus' Ogunian fate. Although the slave leader moves his community in the opposite direction from Pentheus' choice for his city, toward embracing rather than repressing the Dionysian cult, they both become sacrificial scapegoats, through the bacchic goat-song (tragodoi). But Soyinka shows the sparagmos of the slave leader onstage, putting the theatre spectators, a priori, into Pentheus' ultimate offstage position as phallic (tree seat) voyeur of the violent, ritual chora. At some level the audience shares Pentheus' contradictory character--his repressive superego (not wanting to allow too much ecstasy of those others onstage) and his voyeuristic id (wanting to see more of the others' passionate rites)--even before his heroic ego appears onstage in Soyinka's drama. The wisdom of Tiresias' joking prophesy and the comic relief of Kadmos' phallic thyrsus also set up the entry of Pentheus, as superego voyeur, mirroring the audience in his trip through Dionysian hallucinations to the Real fate of his drive--with a final, tragicomic vision added by Soyinka, which may show each spectator's fatal drive as well.

Pentheus is still a villain in Soyinka's drama, willing the sacrifice of others, until his Ogunian conversion to sacrificing himself for the sake of the community. In another added scene, after the slave leader's sparagmos and the elders' slapstick routine, Pentheus not only [page 71] rejects the warnings of Kadmos and Tiresias (as in Euripides), he also slaps an old slave so hard that he "knocks him flat".(113) This sudden response of explicit, onstage violence to the old man's timid questioning of the king's order--about whether he really wants to destroy "the hut of the holy man" (Dionysus)--evokes the sympathy of the audience for the slave as victim, and fear of Pentheus as villainous. Yet, it also previews Pentheus' own tragic fall, through his self-destructive drive, and the audience's complicity in willing that eventual sacrifice.

That future fall of Pentheus to the choral power of the bacchae (offstage) is also foreshadowed in the surprising, bacchic power of the slave chorus, extending the old slave's questioning of Pentheus into outright defiance (onstage). "We are strangers but we know the meaning of madness / To hit an old servant / With frost on his head . . ."(114) The slave leader goes even further than his chorus, becoming possessed with the god, as in his earlier scene of being like a "black hot gospeller".(115) Here his chant moves from "Dionysos shall avenge this profanity" to "I have drunk the stars. . . . And yielded to the power of life, the god in me," and even further to speak in the god's voice: "I am Dionysos".(116) The chorus of other slaves intones with him (until his final movement of personal identification): "repeating each line after him, as if this is a practised liturgy. Pentheus's face registers horror and disbelief as he recognizes the implications of this".(117) One implication is of a potential slave rebellion. But another may be the dawning recognition by Pentheus of the god within him as well, of the Ogunian life and death drive that Dionysus personifies and the slave leader then describes. "I am the life that's trodden [page 72] by the dance of joy / My flesh, my death, my re-birth is the song / That rises from men's lips, they know not how. / But also, / The wild blood of the predator. . . ." In the mirror of the slave leader's choral communion with the god, Pentheus might see his own subsequent transformation from being the vengeful predator of Dionysus to becoming the prey itself, as vessel of the god's death, dismemberment, and rebirth. In the larger ritual of the play's performance, Soyinka's Ogunian actors might also lead the audience in a transformation from vengeance and voyeurism to tragicomic awareness of split-subjectivity, as predators and prey of the sacrificial spirits in our mass media.(118)

Spectators' Desires

According to Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink, "The pervert seems to be cognizant, at some level, of the fact that there is always some jouissance related to the enunciation of the moral law. The neurotic would prefer not to see it, since it strikes him or her as indecent, obscene".(119) Soyinka's Bacchae evokes a greater awareness of perverse desires and jouissance in both the moral law and its theatrical enunciation, even for neurotics who might prefer not to see. Through additional scenes of choral violence onstage, his Bacchae summons the cruel, voyeuristic desires of the theatre audience, creating an Artaudian vortex at the stage edge. But then, in a Brechtian twist, the play also distances the audience, through the sadistic morality and voyeuristic foolishness of Pentheus (introduced by the comical prophesies of his elders). These [page 73] gests reveal the spectators' own contradictory desires while watching the play: to morally repress and yet voyeuristically glimpse the obscene, bacchic rites offstage.

At the slave leader's identification with the god's voice ("I am Dionysos") and the chorus's desire to join him ("Lead us--!"), Pentheus interrupts their revolutionary fervor with a quick, castrative threat: "I'll cut out the tongue of the next man to utter that name Bromius or Dionysos!".(120) Then the abject figure of repressed choral power appears again onstage, this time as a captive, bound and surrounded by soldiers. But he immediately defies Pentheus' command himself: "Who calls on Dionysos!" Not only does Soyinka add to Euripides' drama the slave chorus, their leader's identification with the god, Pentheus' verbal threat, and Dionysus' own violation; the Nigerian dramatist also puts a Brechtian twist to this rebellious scene. The stage direction reads: "There is a dead freeze of several moments."(121) This semiotic freeze--showing a tableau of Dionysus and his followers, bound by, yet defiant against Pentheus--interrupts the momentum and introduces a shift in the character of the orisa-like god. Rather than rage against his repressive captor, as the slave chorus had begun to do, Dionysus will put on a serene, Apollonian mask. He will lead Pentheus and the theatre audience towards further tableaux and pantomime dreams (added by Soyinka), setting up historical parallels from ancient Greece to tribal Africa to New Testament Palestine, thus involving the postmodern lures of cinematic and televisual voyeurism--through this initial still shot, which suspends the action and increases the desire to see more.

After the freeze Pentheus inspects his prisoner, as his officer reports the "miracle" of how [page 74] the offstage, imprisoned bacchae have "shed their chains".(122) As in Euripides' version, Pentheus continues to misrecognize Dionysus as merely a priest or sorcerer of the cult. Dionysus, now an Esu-like trickster god (similar to Euripides' character), plays along with many double entendres, such as: "The god himself / Initiated me." This also begins his Obatala-effect on Pentheus, luring the ruler into Apollonian dreams, through Dionysian drunkenness, which will ultimately lead to his own malformation in deadly, choral rebirth. Even now, Dionysus initiates Pentheus by invoking the king's curiosity about the cult,(123) then reacting critically: "Will you reduce it all to a court / Of inquiry? A fact-finding commission such as / One might set up to decide the cause / Of a revolt in your salt-mines, or a slave uprising?".(124) Soyinka thus connects the ancient Greek ruler, in his voyeuristic desire for judicial control, to the postmodern spectator--through this implicit reference to the governmental commissions and juridical news media of today's Europe, Africa, and United States. But Soyinka will also show his theatre audience more of the ancient ritual sacrifice, to answer Pentheus' question: "You say you saw the god? What form / Did he assume?".(125) Unlike most of today's theatre, film, and TV, this play will take its audience into the Real, obscene drive of choral sacrifice, beyond the formal tricks of voyeuristic desire and superego repression.

Before Pentheus gives a castrative cut to the "girlish curls" of the god,(126) as in Euripides' drama, Soyinka adds a verbal image of the bacchic cult's mountain rituals. His Dionysus offers [page 75] this as a metaphor for the theatre of the mind, being revealed to the king and the postmodern audience through onstage and offstage rites. "Think of a dark mountain / Pierced by myriads of tiny flames, then see / The human mind as that dark mountain whose caves / Are filled with self-inflicted fears. Dionysos / Is the flame that puts such fears to flight, a flame / That must be gently lit, or else consume you." Thus, the onstage cutting of each lock of the god's hair gains a new meaning, especially since the cutting is done directly by the king in Soyinka's version.(127) It symbolizes the self-inflicted wounds of fear and abject rage that Pentheus already suffers within his own mind--and will suffer further at the hands of his bacchic mother and chorus on the mountain offstage.

For now, Pentheus has projected the fear of his own jouissance upon the evil Other and he seems to be gaining power over the foreign god in the castrative gestures of cutting Dionysus' hair and taking away his phallic thyrsus. But the ruler's vengeful rage toward moral order will become--through his own acts of voyeurism and transvestism--a self-immolating drive. Eventually, his own ecstatic, choral flame will put to flight the myriad fires of perverse fears within Pentheus' mind, as he becomes more and more consumed by the intoxicating visions, wine, and role-playing that Dionysus will offer to him--and through him to the theatre audience. Hopefully, however, those spectators will experience a "gently lit" and beneficial sweep of the Dionysian flame, in the ritual catharsis of their "self-inflicting fears," through the Ogunian sacrifice of Pentheus and of the actor playing him. If so, Pentheus will not merely be sacrificed in some offstage fictional space, but also in the Real of the audience, in the dark mountain of its human minds, as communal chora.

Of course, the way the cathartic flame plays through the audience depends a great deal [page 76] on the performance of the drama and its co-creation in different spectators' minds. Some may watch in a more Brechtian, critically distanced way, and be only singed into self and social reflection. Others may become more fully inflamed with Artaudian cruelty, leaping Ogun-like into the fourth stage abyss of their own lacking being, between living, dead, and unborn worlds. But Soyinka increases the likelihood of that collective flame as a communion rite, by reshaping the abject chora of the next choral ode. "As Dionysos is chained, his Bacchantes begin a noise, a kind of ululating which is found among some African and Oriental peoples and signifies great distress, warning, or agitation".(128) This non-verbal echolalia(129) increases and spreads from the foreign female chorus to Soyinka's additional slave chorus, "swelling into deafening proportions."

Instead of Euripides' single chorus of female maenads, calling for the mythic Dionysus to descend from Olympus and take vengeance on Pentheus, Soyinka creates a choral dialogue between bacchantes and slaves, beginning with their infectious, pre-verbal, ululating cries. Although Euripides' chorus describes the "male womb" of Zeus through which Dionysus was born,(130) Soyinka's double chorus of males and females becomes the dithyrambic (twofold) chora, as their abject ululations shift into chthonic birth pains. First, their semiotic breathing resonates with the thundrous earthquake that precedes the god's reappearance.(131) Then they give birth, as collective womb, through the choral chant that Soyinka adds between the lead [page 77] bacchante, repeating the word "earth," and the group's one-word responses: "Earth . . . Swell . . . Earth . . . Grow . . . Earth . . . Move . . . Earth . . . Strain . . . Earth . . . Groan . . . Earth . . . Clutch . . . Earth . . . Thrust . . . Earth . . . Burst . . . Earth . . . TAKE!"

Dionysus returns through this choral thunder and earthquake--appearing, as at the beginning of the play, in the chora of his dead mother's tomb (but this time with flames around his feet). Euripides' Dionysus returns with a violent, raging voice: "Let the earthquake come! Shatter the floor of the world!"(133) However, Soyinka's Dionysus resurrects calmly, in contrast to the terror of his chorus: "Why do you tremble? / Look up. Look at me . . . All is well".(134) Rather than a vengeful Dionysus, in fierce command of the lightning: "Consume with flame the palace of Pentheus!";(135) this Dionysus presents an Apollonian, Obatala-like serenity, explaining to his chorus how he escaped imprisonment and fooled Pentheus: "With ease. No effort was required".(136) And yet, Dionysus also reveals his Esu aspect to the chorus, telling how he tricked Pentheus, by evoking the king's rage and destructiveness. "I made the sick desires / Of his mind his goal, and he pursued them. / He fed on the vapors of his own malignant hate, pursued and roped mirages in the stable . . ."(137) Then Dionysus describes his own actions as a separate persona (like the orisas Ogun and Sango), destroying Pentheus' palace through earthquake and lightning. "That moment came Dionysos. / He shook the roof of the palace of [page 78] Pentheus. . . . Razed the palace to the ground, reduced it / To utter ruins." This exposition by Dionysus is very similar to Euripides' version. But Soyinka's Bacchae will show more onstage of the Esu-like trickery of his Dionysus, bringing out further Obatalan delusions through a drunken Pentheus, which will focus the Ogun-like death drive of the king toward his ultimate offstage sacrifice. In this way the play also warns the audience about its sacrificial drives in the mirages of today's Dionysian screens.

Signifying Chains and Imaginary Mirrors

After Pentheus returns to the stage, a herdsman gives another foreshadowing of the king's fate (as in Euripides), describing the sparagmos of cows offstage by the Dionysian bacchae, including Agave.(138) This spurs Pentheus' desire to see the women in their wild state--first as a warrior, then as a transvestite and peeping Tom, under the spell of Dionysus. But Soyinka adds several mime scenes, delaying the cross-dressing of Pentheus, and further teasing out the voyeurism of the theatre audience. Soyinka also changes how Dionysus casts his spell on the king, showing a mirror-stage magic and symbolic logic to the god's semiotic, choral power. Rather than simply convincing Pentheus to wear a women's dress and the bacchic ornaments as a disguise, Dionysus first warns his Lacanian subject of the signifying chains that structure his unconscious desires, and then shows him the hypnotic, therapeutic imagery that "loosens" such chains.(139)

"You Pentheus . . . are a man of chains. . . . You breathe chains, talk chains, eat chains, dream chains, think chains . . . molten iron issuing from the furnace of your so-called kingly [page 79] will".(140) This iron chain metaphor relates not only to the Ogunian aspect of Soyinka's Dionysus, and its sacrificial force in Pentheus, but also to the signifying chains issuing from the unconscious furnace of every human mind, producing particular, characteristic symptoms, according to Lacanian theory. The chain issues, too, from the chora of maternal loss (in Kristeva's theory), as indicated by Dionysus' subsequent words and gestures: "It has replaced your umbilical cord and issues from this point".(141) Dionysus touches Pentheus on the navel and turns him gently around and around. "[It] winds about you all the way back into the throat where it issues forth again in one unending cycle." This imaginary chain may symbolize the moral restrictiveness and violent rage of Pentheus' ruling character. Yet it also illustrates the chain of specific signifiers structuring each human character onstage, and each person in the audience, giving meaning and symptomatic repetition to the choral lack of being in their breathing, talking, eating, dreaming, and thinking.

Dionysus then uses his hand in a different gesture, which offers Pentheus (and similar Lacanian subjects in the theatre audience) a mirror stage revelation, pointing to the Real behind the ego image and its perverse reflections, toward the navel of the dream or signifying chain. According to Soyinka's stage direction, Dionysus "holds his hand before Pentheus' eyes, like a mirror".(142) Here the Other's gesture not only captures the king's ego in a mirror stage trance; it also shows Pentheus his own perverse image and the Real lack of being behind it. "Look well in the mirror, Pentheus. What beast is this? Do you recognise it? Have you ever seen the like? In all your wanderings have your eyes ever been affronted by a creature so gross, so unnatural, so obscene?" Then Pentheus "shakes off his hypnotic state, [and] tries to snatch the 'mirror' but [page 80] clutches at nothing." The god has shown him that the grotesque immorality of others, which he has struggled so violently to repress, is actually his own beastliness as he fears it--the desire of the Other in the king. Yet this obscene desire of gross, Dionysian creatures, whether expressed by the bacchae or repressed within Pentheus, is merely a mirage of phallic jouissance, repeating the moral chains of signification in a perverse way. Dionysus thus gives Pentheus a glimpse of the nothingness that drives him toward sacrifice--toward an Other jouissance of the body and of other Yoruba worlds. But this glimpse of Real lack behind the mirage may also be cathartic for postmodern Euro-American spectators, even those raised in the mass media's virtual realities.

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.