Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2003

Blood Thirst

Early in his cross-dressing, Pentheus confesses to Dionysus that he has a "great thirst" for the wine and its illusions.(180) After he drinks more wine and becomes fully dressed in bacchic costume and wig, at the conclusion of the slave chorus's discussion of forces knotted in the blood, Pentheus has another vision. "I feel superhuman. I could hoist the whole of Kithairon / [page 93] On one shoulder--with valleys full of women / Despite their dancing and madness . . . yes?"(181) Similar lines appear in Euripides' text, but there Pentheus sees his current feminine costume. He even asks Dionysus if he looks like his mother, Agave.(182) In Soyinka's version, Pentheus hallucinates that he wears armor on his body and that his Dionysian thyrsus is a "sword." Pentheus' sinthome thus becomes manifest to the audience, if not yet to himself: through his vision of the god as a bull (that he had tried to sacrifice offstage), in his hallucination of himself wearing armor (though he wears a bacchic dress), and with his fantasy that he will lift a mountain valley, full of mad, dancing women. The king's symptomatic violence against the alien cult, even as he wears its costume and thirsts for Dionysian wine, shows the death-drive thirst within Pentheus' own blood that the god turns toward self-sacrifice, rather than the slaughter of others.

Dionysus then repeats the Ogunian casting of Pentheus: "Yes, you alone / Make sacrifices for your people, you alone. / The role belongs to a king. Like those gods, who yearly / Must be rent to spring anew, that also / Is the fate of heroes".(183) This is much more explicit than what Dionysus says to Pentheus in Euripides.(184) Soyinka's Pentheus is given more deceptive visions, yet also a more direct oracle of his sacrificial fate. He thus becomes more Oedipus-like in his complex hubris. It drives him into the very Dionysian dress, madness, and dancing that he tried to repress in his city. In fact, the scene ends (in another addition to Euripides' original) with Pentheus teaching Dionysus the bacchic dance--taught to him, he says, as a "new march" for his [page 94] troops, by a "famed drill-master" that he has already "imported." Soyinka's stage directions specify that the dance repeats the earlier moves in the comical Tiresias scene.(185) But it also may recall the ancient Greek chorus of young soldiers (ephebes) trained in military marching. Likewise, Pentheus leaves the stage as a dancing soldier in bacchic costume. He yells: "Death to the Bacchae!"--showing the audience the death-drive dance in the blood of the king, costumed for the sacrifice. Yet this reflects, too, the choral dance in the blood of the audience, the jouissance of the Other beneath their clothes and skins. Like Pentheus, theatre spectators enjoy superhuman illusions, as invisible voyeurs at the stage edge. And they share with him a rage for sacrifice, turned against others or into the Ogunian will for one's own death to have meaning.

As Pentheus' voice "dies off in the distance," Dionysus remains briefly onstage to show that his "is not entirely a noble victory".(186) This Dionysus, as in Euripides, exults in his turning of Pentheus' vengeful spirit toward sacrificial sparagmos. Yet Soyinka's translation of the god's final lines, invoking his spirit in the offstage Agave, gives a further Lacanian twist: "Agave, open your mothering arms-- / Take him. Mother him. Smother him with joy."(187) Pentheus will experience the smothering jouissance of the pre-Oedipal mother, as he travels from neurotic despotism (against the cult), through perverse voyeurism (in the pine tree), to the psychotic terror of overwhelming, disintegrating symbiosis within the chora (when his mother and the other bacchae tear him apart). But like Ogun crossing the transitional abyss between worlds, and like Soyinka's ritual actor sacrificed for the communal audience, Agave will give birth to a [page 95] new Pentheus, through this dismemberment--turning the tragedy into a divine comedy for those who, at least partly, believe.

At the exit of Pentheus and Dionysus, "part of the Chorus of Slaves set up a dog-howl, a wail of death," added by Soyinka to accompany the choral ode of the combined choruses.(188) During the howling and the ode, some of the female bacchae show the audience a "mime of the hunt".(189) Through this additional African dance drama, prior to the report of the sacrifice in the Greek text,(190) Soyinka allows the audience to participate more visually, through onstage mime, with the offstage ritual and maternal chora.(191) The rite is then repeated, from the choral mime to the officer's report, as from the offstage fiction to the Real within the audience's imaginings. In the report of the offstage violence (as in Euripides' version), the fir tree where Pentheus had been hiding is symbolically castrated from the earth, uplifted and torn down, with "the wrench of roots / From their long bed of earth and rocks".(192) Pentheus met a similar fate, according to the messenger, at the hands of his mother, Agave. "She seized the waving arms by the wrist, then / Planted her foot upon his chest and pulled, / Tore the arm clean off the shoulder".(193) Other limbs and body parts were then divided by the other bacchae, who playfully tossed "lumps of flesh," strewing "fragments" of Pentheus' body across the mountain valley that he had [page 96] envisioned as uprooting himself.(194) Soyinka thus gives a vivid account, like Euripides, of the ego illusions of Pentheus, his superhuman strength and voyeurism, being turned upside-down and inside-out, by the (s)mothering passion of the bacchae. But Soyinka takes that chora further than Euripides, connecting it with the joyful ego illusions and terrifying lack of being in his postmodern audience, through another communion rite.(195)

When Agave enters, she carries the head of her son on a thyrsus, as in Euripides' version, but the head is covered, according to Soyinka's stage directions, with gold ribbons.(196) In response to her joyful delusion, that she has hunted and dismembered a lion, and her praise to Dionysus for the inspiration, an old slave adds: "Yes, he is a great hunter. He knows / The way to a death-hunt of the self".(197) These lines, added by Soyinka,(198) express the death-drive knowledge and Other jouissance that Pentheus has now fully experienced, and that his mother is about to see, along with the theatre audience. But the way that the audience sees is also changed by Soyinka. He creates a dance around the disembodied head, as obscene Thing (in Lacan's sense of das Ding),(199) by first hiding it under golden ribbons and then turning it into a [page 97] fetish prop at the center of a May-pole dance.(200) As Agave turns the thyrsus, the bacchae dance around the unveiled head, chasing and catching "the ribbons as they unfurl and float outwards." (This dance of unfurling ribbons might also relate to the twirling costumes of Yoruba Egungun performers, as they incarnate the spirits of the dead.) Agave continues to be deceived, yet reveals more, at the center of this dance, to the audience. For her body is also a Thing, bearing an obscene jouissance, not yet fully revealed.

Kadmos, in extreme grief, then offers another Lacanian/Kristevan insight (added by Soyinka): "She should have known him!"(201) Here the audience may share, in a more and more Artaudian sense, the cruelty within both Agave's delusion and Kadmos' clear sight--the horror of a maternal chora that creates and destroys, through misrecognition.(202) But here there might also be a Brechtian twist, distancing the audience into social reflection: Kadmos "should have known him" better, too, before giving the rule of Thebes to his tyrannical, anti-Dionysian grandson. The violent repression of the Dionysian chora in Thebes--from the alienation of Semele (by Agave and her sisters), to Pentheus' fear of the alien cult, to his imprisonment of the god--became symptomatic of the tragic flaw in the city's patriarchy, despite Kadmos' and Agave's conversion to the cult. And the return of that repressed chora led to the final tragic sacrifice. The play in performance may challenge its audience with both an intimate Artaudian cruelty and a distancing Brechtian gest. For Kadmos then says of Pentheus' head, on the [page 98] thyrsus held by his mother, "I don't want to see!"--and the blind Tiresias asks, "What is it Kadmos?" Theatre spectators could be positioned to see more of the tragic horror, like Tiresias, through sympathy with the pain of Kadmos and Agave, yet also to look more critically at their hypocrisy, delusion, and willful blindness.

What is on that thyrsus changes a great deal from Euripides' to Soyinka's Bacchae. Kadmos takes it as the glaring sign of a cruel paradox (in lines added by Soyinka): "Dionysos is just. But he is not fair! / Though he had right on his side, he lacks / Compassion, the deeper justice".(203) Here Soyinka offers a more critical, Brechtian view--even of Dionysus, who does not reappear at the end of this play as he does in the original. Euripides' Dionysus returns to give a vengeful moral against Pentheus and Kadmos. But Soyinka's god remains absent from the stage. Kadmos thus expresses a more postmodern, existentialist despair at the lack in the Other--lacking fairness, compassion, a deeper sense of justice, and a responsible presence. In Euripides' play, Dionysus returns to explain the violence represented by Pentheus' decapitated head and the remaining body parts brought onstage by Kadmos. "This man has found the death which he deserved . . ."(204) Dionysus also puts the blame on Kadmos, and predicts further suffering for him and his wife, Harmonia, as they both will be turned into snakes, yet will eventually "live among the blest".(205) They are also put into exile from Thebes at the play's end. In Soyinka's version, however, a more Brechtian and Lacanian view is offered to the postmodern audience. According to cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, the final stage of Lacanian psychoanalysis involves "subjective destitution." The subject experiences "the nonexistence of the [page 99] big Other; he accepts the Real in its utter, meaningless idoicy; he keeps open the gap between the Real and its symbolization".(206) Kadmos' bitter statement about the lack of compassion in Dionysus, plus the god's absence at the end, opens this gap between the Real event offstage in its meaningless violence and the symbolization onstage of a meaningful rite of spring, through the bacchic dance around Pentheus' head on the May-pole. Through the subjective destitution of Kadmos, and the lack of Dionysus, the audience may also see this gap and experience a Brechtian alienation effect, a distancing awareness of symbolic and Real.

Soyinka's Dionysus is lacking as a god, like the Yoruba orisas, especially Ogun. That orisa sacrificed himself for others by crossing the abyss between worlds; but he also slaughtered his human subjects in a drunken rage after they made him king. Dionysus, like Ogun, loses his compassion and lacks any balance in his sacrificial rage, according to the alienated Kadmos, a former follower of the god. But when Kadmos takes his daughter out of her Dionysian trance, to be alienated by the horror of her own brutality, a further, Artaudian twist is added to this Brechtian questioning of the god's cruelty. Agave's acceptance of the chora's destructiveness leads to a final creative moment, as the Ogunian presence of Dionysus returns to the stage, through the shards of her son's body.

Like a Brechtian director, Kadmos separates Agave from her trance and character hallucinations. He tells her to look at the sky and asks if her view has changed. She replies that it seems clearer and brighter, with a "red glow of sunset, a colour of blood".(207) He then asks what she feels inside. She says, "a sense of changing. The world / No longer heaves as if within [page 100] my womb." Kadmos has helped his daughter to detach herself from spirit possession and communion with the Dionysian chora: from her former, superhuman strength (like Pentheus' delusion), her destructive creativity, and her feeling that the entire world outside her was inside her womb. Then Kadmos requests that she look closely at the head on the thyrsus. At first, she insists it is still a lion; next, she sees a slave.(208) At last, she finds her son--in the head on the thyrsus and in the other pieces on the bier, as Kadmos tells her how Pentheus died. Tiresias tries to provide her with consolation in the belief that "our life-sustaining earth" demanded such sacrificial bloodshed "for her own needful renewal".(209) While this relates to the logic of patriarchal sacrifice in many cultures,(210) as with the Aztecs who fed both the sun and the earth with human hearts and blood, it also makes sense regarding the maternal chora, as Agave experienced it: the blood-thirsty world (and blood-red sky) heaving within her own womb. Tiresias then describes the Artaudian space of choral cruelty that he and Kadmos found offstage, on the sacrificial mountain, relating also to the Real within the audience's imagination: "blood that streamed out endlessly to soak / Our land. Remember when I said, Kadmos, we seem to be upon / Sheer rockface, yet moisture oozes up at every step? Blood, you replied, blood. His blood / Is everywhere".(211) But Kadmos repeats his Brechtian questioning of such sacrificial logic and fate: "Why us?" Then Agave gives an Artaudian response, placing her hands on the grotesque death mask of her son: "Why not?"

At this moment the theatre itself is transformed into a bacchic choral space. "The theme [page 101] music of Dionysos begins, welling up and filling the stage with the god's presence".(212) Here Soyinka brings onstage the experience of the chora that remains offstage in Euripides' version, offering the audience a vision from within the heaving womb that Agave had described. First, a "powerful red glow" illuminates Pentheus' head and bathes the stage; then "from every orifice of the impaled head spring red jets." Agave, who had been holding the head, screams and clutches the ladder beneath it. In this bloody show of light and scenery, the world Agave had earlier perceived as heaving within her womb is now displayed, through the pieta of her body and her son's decapitated head. The blind Tiresias asks again, as when he first had a sense of the head onstage: "What is it Kadmos?" Kadmos replies, still in Brechtian detachment: "Again blood Tiresias. Nothing but blood." Yet Tiresias finds more, as with the bloody rocks on the sacrificial mountain, where he found a "life-sustaining earth." Tiresias touches the red fluid, sniffs and tastes it, and says, "No. It's wine." All the characters then drink from the jets of blood as wine, participating in the Artaudian dream, as Agave "tilts her head backwards to let a jet flush full in her face and flush her mouth."

The audience or reader might choose, of course, not to take the tragicomic drink, even vicariously. The spectator could experience Brechtian detachment at this scene, seeing it as obviously rigged through the ladder and head props--so not a true Dionysian miracle. (However, those spectators expecting Euripides' tragic finale could also experience the uncanny A-effect of the familiar made strange.) A gestic feminist might critique the bloody scene as reveling in the patriarchal fear and oppression of women, through the addition of onstage cannibalism (as omophagia) to the offstage sparagmos. A Christian critic may be repulsed, seeing a sacrilegious parallel to the Last Supper, where Jesus gave wine to his followers to drink as his holy blood. A Lacanian might sense the Real in its utter, meaningless idiocy. Other spectators [page 102] could reject the scene itself as idiotic. Soyinka takes the risk of offering his audience a "communion rite" that is postmodern and premodern, Brechtian and Artaudian, Lacanian and Kristevan--Greek, Christian, and Yoruba. In doing so, he may touch upon the political power of the dead and unborn worlds even in mass-mediated psyches. For today's mass audience involves not only millions of minds put into a ritual trance before film and TV screens, but also split and multiple subjectivities in each of those minds, with the desires of Other gods and ancestors flashing in the synapses--and the Other's death-drive jouissance pulsing in the blood. Ultimately, the Other, as God or gods, may not exist for many in the Lacanian postmodern. But the desires, drives, choral cruelty, and violence--within and between lacking human beings--certainly do. That Dionysus still demands a theatre of sacrifice, in the Real as well as on the stage or screen.

The antistructural communitas(213) at the end of Soyinka's Bacchae leaves many questions open for a postmodern, postcolonial audience. If the sacrifices of Pentheus, Agave, and Kadmos are cathartic in a Yoruba sense, through Ogunian actors "strengthening the communal psyche",(214) then how will that new community and its psyche(s) be restructured? How will the theatre audience not only participate in the communion rite, but also extend it beyond the theatre's walls? Communal psyches are capable of great violence toward individuals and toward other communities, as Europeans, Africans, and Americans have demonstrated throughout history and in recent decades. Yet physical acts of violence also begin in the cruelty and alienation suffered by individual minds--in the self-pity and fear that can lead to a more destructive catharsis beyond stage and screen rituals (as in "ethnic cleansing," for example). [page 103] Aristotle, Artaud, and Brecht all offer the hope that drama, written and performed with the right homeopathic dose of violence, in the proper form of sacrifice, would cure the communal psyche from its tragic repetitions. But they developed their theories in a European tradition, from ancient to modern, that stressed the individual freedom of certain souls to act. Current postmodern and postcolonial theories question that classical, Cartesian, Enlightenment, imperialist legacy. On the other hand, traditional African cultures view each person as having multiple souls or psyches(215) --a view with some affinities to postmodern, anti-Cartesian theories of subjectivity, especially those influenced by Lacan's revision of Freud.(216) Thus, Soyinka's revision of ancient violence in The Bacchae offers valuable sacrificial connections, not only between vastly different cultures, or to the past worlds of the dead within them, but also to the Other of the living in the present theatre of the communal psyche--and to the unborn in the global village of the future. But that present and future communal theatre is being shaped more and more by the global mass media, with screen edges, creases, and monsters touching upon the Real as sacrificial chora. How do certain violent fantasies onscreen perpetuate or alleviate the aggressivity of real life: demanding fetishistic submission to the sacrificial apparatus of the media marketplace and provoking mimetic acts of aggression--or providing a sacrifice of such melodramatic habits of thought (reconstructing the fantasies that we live by) through a more tragic kind of catharsis? This will be the crucial issue in the chapters ahead, with direct examples of screen mirages, choral edges, and Dionysian/Ogunian drives in film and television-- [page 104] involving the mass audience as Pentheus-like predators and prey in melodramatic or tragic ways.

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.