Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," The Anti-Aesthitic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983) 118. Jameson ties this "pathological symptom" of postmodern nostalgia and artistic "pastiche" to the "end of individualism"; yet he also finds that current cultural production "has been driven back inside the mind, within the monadic subject," where reality becomes merely "mental images of the world," as in the theatre of Plato's cave (114-18).

See Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill 1977) and Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" 1969, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

See Mark Fortier, Theory/Theatre: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1977) 132.

Soyinka was imprisoned in 1965 "for protesting a corrupt election," and again, for 27 months, mostly in solitary confinement, from 1967 to 1969 (Gates). On Soyinka's political activities, imprisonment, and writings during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), see Chidi Amuta, "From Myth to Ideology: The Socio-political content of Soyinka's War Writings," Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23:1 (1988): 116-129. He describes the "contradiction inherent in Soyinka's utopian conception of revolution . . . in his attempt to elevate myth into a vehicle for ideology and polity" (126), which also relates to his subsequent writing of The Bacchae (not mentioned by Amuta).

Cf. Thomas R. Whitaker, Mirrors of Our Playing: Paradigms and Presences in Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999) 212-14. He sees Soyinka's earlier play, written while he was in prison, Madmen and Specialists, as an "anticipatory, more successful satyr play" in relation to Soyinka's Bacchae as an "expansive but reductive version of Euripides' tragedy" (214).

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove, 1958) 13.

Artaud 82.

See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random, 1967) 36, 66, 82, and 104, where he describes: (1) the Dionysian "collapse of the principium individuationis," (2) the Dionysian rapture of the chorus (and audience) producing the Apollonian vision onstage, (3) the Dionysian as the "womb of music," and (4) the Dionysian as the "primordial mother." See also 64-65.

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill, 1964) 87.

Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) 3. Soyinka was also influenced in this view by his teacher at the University of Leeds, G. Wilson Knight. Cf. the use of Nietzsche in G. Wilson Knight, The Golden Labyrinth: A Study of British Drama (New York: Norton, 1962) 6-8. See also Ann B. Davis, "Dramatic Theory of Wole Soyinka," in Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, ed. James Gibbs (Washington D.C.: Three Continents, 1980) 147-157, and Whitaker 210.

Soyinka, Myth 4. Cf. Ulli Beier's view of modern, monotheistic Nigeria: "In order to become a Christian (or a Muslim for that matter) you must publicly denounce every aspect of your forefathers' culture and wisdom and religion. In the old days this even involved public burning of images" (Femi Abodunrin, Iconography of Order and Disorder: Conversation with Ulli Beier (Bayreuth, Germany: Iwalewa Haus, 1996) 28).

Soyinka, Myth 5. Soyinka himself grew up in a very Christian family, but was also influenced by his Yoruba grandfather. See Soyinka's autobiography, Aké: The Years of Childhood (New York: Random, 1981) 140, where he tells his grandfather what he has learned in his Christian home about Ogun: "the pagans' devil who kills people and fights everybody." See also Oyin Ogunba, "Ake as Background to Soyinka's Creative Writings," in Soyinka: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ogunba (Ibadan: Syndicated Communications, 1994).

Soyinka, Myth 4.

Cf. Derek Wright, "Ritual and Revolution: Soyinka's Dramatic Theory," Ariel 23.1 (Jan. 1992) 50, where he briefly suggests the combination of Artaud and Brecht in Soyinka's theory of ritual theatre--but as a problem, "a basic uncertainty." See also Ketu H. Katrak, Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy (New York: Greenwood, 1986) 52-55, for a more positive view of Brecht's influence upon Soyinka's work. And see Adebayo Williams, "The Mythic Imagination and Social Theories: Soyinka and Euripides as Political Thinkers," Okike 20 (1982): 36-44 for a Brechtian critique of Soyinka's The Bacchae, as "mythicizing" rather than historicizing.

On Soyinka's revision of Brecht's play, see Sander L. Gilman, "Wole Soyinka and Brecht: Creating the Other Within the World of Words", in Wahlverwandtschaften: Elective Affinities, ed. Willfried F. Feuser, Marion Pape, and Elias O. Dunu (Bayreuth, Germany: Boomerang Press, 1993) 41-56. See also Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 9-11.

Soyinka, "Interview," in African Writers Talking, eds. Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden (New York: Africana, 1972) 172-173. For a Brechtian critique of Soyinka, see Andrew Gurr, "Third World Drama: Soyinka and Tragedy," in Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, ed. James Gibbs (Washington D.C.: Three Continents, 1980) 144-45. Cf. Akaeke Onwueme, "Visions of Myth in Nigerian Drama," Canadian Journal of African Studies 25.1 (1991): 58-69, on the more Brechtian dramatist Femi Osofisan, in his differences from (and with) Soyinka and Femi Osofisan, "Tiger on Stage: Wole Soyinka and the Nigerian Theatre," in Theatre in Africa, ed. Oyin Ogunba (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1978) 151-176. See also Sandra Richards, Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1996) 17-27, 72-74 and "'Wasn't Brecht an African Writer?': Parallels with Contemporary Nigerian Drama," Brecht Yearbook 14 (1989): 168-183; plus Femi Osofisan, "Ritual and the Revolutionary Ethos," Okike 22 (1982): 74-75. For Soyinka's response to Osofisan's Brechtian critique of his theory of ritual theatre, see Art, Dialogue and Outrage (New York: Pantheon, 1993) 69-70. For Osofisan's earlier, more positive view of the elder playwright, see "Tiger." On the debate between the two dramatists and the subsequent revaluing of Soyinka by African Marxists in the 1980s, see Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 62-66.

Soyinka, Myth 63.

Soyinka, Myth 6-7. Cf. Whitaker 212-13. When asked in personal conversation (by a colleague of mine, Nefertiti Burton, on 3 Feb. 1999), Soyinka said that Artaud bore no influence on him.

See also Soyinka, "Drama and the Revolutionary Ideal," in In Person: Achebe, Awoonor, and Soyinka at the University of Washington, ed. Karen L. Morell (Seattle: University of Washington, 1975) 78-83 for a further critique of "audience participation" in avant-garde experiments and of "self-indulgent monasticism" in Grotowski's poor theatre.

This connection is most explicit in Soyinka's earlier (1969) essay, "The Fourth Stage," which appears as an appendix to the published version of his Cambridge lectures, Myth, Literature and the African World. See also Katrak 47-51.

Soyinka, Myth 140-141.

Soyinka, Myth 141.

See also Olaniyan 52, on Soyinka's disagreement with Nietzsche's "separation of music and language." See chapter 2 of Wiveca Sotto, The Rounded Rite (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1985), for a further comparison of Soyinka's and Nietzsche's distinct views of Dionysus. And see Sotto 175 on Soyinka's sympathy for the masses in his Bacchae as opposed to Nietzsche's contempt for slaves (and for Euripides' play) in The Birth of Tragedy.

Soyinka, The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (London: Methuen, 1973) xiv. Cf. Sotto, chapter 3, for a detailed comparison of Dionysus and Ogun, as "twin" brothers, regarding Soyinka's play.

Cf. Oyin Ogunba, "Traditional African Festival Drama," in Theatre in Africa, ed. Ogunba (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1978) 16-18, for a description of dramatic performance in the Egungun festival. See also Susanne Wenger, The Sacred Groves of Oshobo (Vienna: Kontrapunkt, 1991) 65-66.

See Edward Bruce Bynum, The African Unconscious: Roots of Ancient Mysticism and Modern Psychology (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999) and Jim Wafer, The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession on Brazilian Candomblé (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, 1991), on the various diasporic, Yoruba-related religions, especially Vodun in Haiti, Santaria in Cuba, and Candomblé in Brazil.

Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 80-81.

Cf. Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October 28 (Spring 1984): 125-133. See also Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997) 120-21.

Wole Soyinka, The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (London: Methuen, 1973) xiv. On the parts of Soyinka's Bacchae that refer to Idanre, see Sotto 76-100.

On Esu as the satirical source of African and African-American drama, see Femi Euba, Archetypes, Imprecators, and Victims of Fate: Origins and Developments of Black Drama (New York: Greenwood, 1989). His theory of ritual theatre, unlike Soyinka's (with Ogun), is "concerned less with the communicant-community, actor-audience participation . . . than with the 'epidemic' factor," in relation to Nietzsche and Artaud, as well as Esu (9-10).

Soyinka, Bacchae 1.

Cf. James Booth, "Human Sacrifice in Literature: The Case of Wole Soyinka," Ariel 23.1 (Jan. 1992) 7-24, who sees "a very modern (even 'postmodernist') unpredictability" in Soyinka's The Bacchae, but is critical of the play's revolutionary Dionysus: "the 'new order' which he provides is a matter of purified consciousness and transcendence, rather than coherent social reorganization" (19-20).

Soyinka, Bacchae 1.

Cf. the mime dance in the "market clearing" of Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), celebrating the (supposed) impotence of the village Chief.

Cf. Katrak 80: "Soyinka portrays the socio-political dimension of Dionysian worship in the set itself." See also B.M. Ibitokun, African Drama and the Yoruba World-View (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1995) 119-21. He relates the Yoruba gods Obatala and Ogun (whose powers, in Soyinka's theory, parallel Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian) to Kristeva's theory of the symbolic, patriarchal order and the semiotic, maternal chora. Ibitokun also relates this dialectic to Lacan's symbolic and imaginary orders, but neglects the Real there (119).

In lines from Euripides' prologue that Soyinka does not use, Dionysus says: "There by the palace is my mother's monument, / my poor mother, blasted in a bolt of light!" (Euripides, The Bacchae in Three Plays of Euripides: Alcestis, Medea, The Bacchae, trans. Paul Roche (New York: Norton, 1974) 79).

Dionysus makes reference to this family history in his opening speech of Euripides' (but not Soyinka's) The Bacchae: "Semele's sisters . . . mocked my birth, nor deemed / That Dionysus sprang from Dian seed. / My mother sinned, said they; and in her need, / With Cadmus plotting, cloaked her human shame / With the dread name of Zeus; for that the flame / From heaven consumed her, seeing she lied to God" (Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. Gilbert Murray (London: Allen and Unwin, 1904) 8). Cf. W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods (Boston: Beacon, 1955) 166-74, on this and related myths about "resistance" to the Dionysus cult in various localities.

See Myth 40, where Soyinka discusses the contraction of European theatre space, from ancient Greece to the Middle Ages, as opposed to the "fluid approach of African ritual space." Cf. Artaud, Theater 86 and 124.

Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 25-26, 46-47.

Kristeva, Revolution 50.

Near the end of his prologue, Euripides' Dionysus says to his bacchae: "Raise up the native music of your home: / the timbrels Great Mother Rhea and I invented" ( in Roche translation, 81).

Cf. William S. Haney II, "Soyinka's Ritual Drama: Unity, Postmodernism, and the Mistake of the Intellect," Research in African Literatures 21.4 (Winter 1990): 33-53. While analyzing Soyinka's ritual theory and A Dance of the Forests, Haney finds that his drama "provides an experience of the preverbal ground of language." But Haney relates this to the postmodern theories of Derrida and to the ancient Indian aesthetics of the Natyashastra, rather than to Kristeva's chora.

Kristeva, Revolution 79.

Kristeva, Revolution 79.

Kristeva, Revolution 80.

Cf. Albert Hunt, "Amateurs in Horror," Critical Perspectives 5 (1980): 113-115, who values the communal horror and rebirth in Soyinka's script of The Bacchae, but describes its premiere by the National Theatre (at the Old Vic) as showing: "the unyielding amateurism of British professional theatre. The company that presents Soyinka's play contains a drummer who can't drum, dancers who can't dance, and actors whose only concept of narrative acting is to begin every speech in the flat clipped tones that used to characterise British war movies, and then to rise in a gradual crescendo towards uncontrolled emotional wallowing" (114-15). See also Lahr's negative review, which blames the director more than the actors: "every ritual is empty of passion and purpose. The production is slick but silly" (John Lahr, Rev. of The Bacchae by Wole Soyinka, dir. Roland Joffé. National Theatre. Old Vic., London, Plays and Players 21.1 (Oct. 1973): 59). Lahr also blames Soyinka's adaptation, as turning tragedy "into tract." And see Robert Baker-White, "The Politics of Ritual in Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides," Comparative Drama 27.3 (Fall 1993): 377-398, who critiques the communion rite of blood turned to wine through a May pole dance at the end of Soyinka's script: "This unity cannot actually include the theater audience and cannot even approximate their inclusion as actively as the previous appropriations of gospel and music hall have done" (393). Cf. Whitaker 213-14.

Cf. Ogunba, "Traditional," on the animist beliefs of African ritual drama: "a hill or a tree is not just an object; it has a spirit, and true knowledge, it is believed, lies in not only knowing such a spirit, but in being able to communicate with it or control it. . . . [Thus] the drama is spirit oriented . . . to reflect the spirit behind things" (11-12). See also Soyinka, Myth 10: "Traditional [Yoruba] thought operates not [in] a linear concept of time but a cyclic reality," which he relates to the worlds of the living, dead, and unborn as being both older and younger than one another, paradoxically. And see 145: "Continuity for the Yoruba operates both through the cyclic concept of time and the animist interfusion of all matter and consciousness."

Soyinka, Myth 140.

Soyinka, Myth 27.

Soyinka, Myth 28.

Soyinka, Myth 28.

Soyinka, Myth 28-29. One might say--using Kristeva, Nietzsche, and Lacan--that Ogun plunges into and emerges from the semiotic chaos of the chora, armed with the maternal phallus as Dionysian thyrsus, thus reconnecting the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic orders of human and divine worlds. See also Soyinka, Myth 158-59, on parallels between Ogun's opa and Dionysus' thyrsus.

See Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) 107, 120, and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) 213-14. Fink describes the goal of Lacanian treatment, "beyond neurosis," as the patient ultimately "sacrific[ing] his or her castration to the Other's jouissance" (Lacan, Écrits 323; qtd. in Fink, Lacanian Subject 72).

Soyinka, Myth 30.

Soyinka, Myth 30-31. Cf. Whitaker 211: "Soyinka himself, as an actor and director, has gained some reputation for an ability to unlock the subliminal, and, even when his plays use not African but Greek, Brechtian, or absurdist masks, they remain close to a theater grounded in trance."

On "psychic polyphony" see Marvin Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) 95-109. See also Fortier 90-91.

Cf. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia, 1988) 4-5, on the "shards" of historiography that come back "on the edges of discourse"--along with the "presence of the dead that has organized (or organizes) entire civilizations."

Cf. Migene González-Wippler, Tales of the Orishas (New York: Original Publications, 1985) 16, on Ogun: "he is said to be responsible for car and railroad accidents where blood is shed." See also Robert Farris Thompson , Flash of the Spirit (New York: Random, 1983) 52-53.

Soyinka, Myth 27.

Soyinka, Myth 29.

See Ulli Beier on Obatala's drunken mistakes in forming human beings: "he takes full responsibility for all his creatures; unlike the Biblical god who is perfect. To explain imperfection and evil in the world Christianity had to invent the devil" (Abodunrin 43).

Soyinka relates Ogun's originary fragmentation and heroic passage through the transitional abyss (where Orisa-nla was shattered) to both human psychology and the African diaspora. "It is this experience that the modern tragic dramatist recreates through the medium of physical contemporary action, reflecting emotions of the first active battle of the will through the abyss of dissolution" (149). In a footnote, Soyinka adds: "Or again the collective memory of dispersion and re-assemblage in racial coming-into-being. All these, and of course the recurring experience of birth and death, are psycho-historic motifs for the tragic experience: the essence of transition." See also Olaniyan 44-45. For a chart of the names of Yoruba gods in various Latin American countries, corresponding to certain Catholic saints, see Bynum 326-27.

Soyinka, Myth 153: "the first time, as part of the original Orisa-nla Oneness."

Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) 194-195.

See Fink, Clinical 211, 241.

Soyinka only refers to the wine, but see Euba 8, on the potential role of Esu in this myth.

Soyinka, Myth 16, 152.

Soyinka, Myth 15.

Cf. Ulli Beier's statement: "In Yoruba life tragedy and comedy are not separated. Look at Sango--the most tragic of orisa is also the greatest joker" (Abodunrin 54).

The paradigm for this, in African ritual theatre, includes both communal participation and individual spectatorship. See Ogunba, "Traditional" 15-16.

Cf. Katrak 49, on the Yoruba and Greek myths in Soyinka's ritual theory (but not specifically about his Bacchae): "Both gods, Ogun and Dionysus, entered the human community as outsiders and had difficulty being accepted."

Soyinka, Bacchae 1. Cf. the direct announcement of symbolic identity in the two translations that Soyinka used (changed to semiotic abjection in his own version). Murray translates Euripides opening lines: "Behold, God's son is come unto this land / Of Thebes, even I, Dionysus . . . " (7). Arrowsmith renders this with even more patriarchal certitude: "I am Dionysus, the son of Zeus, come back to Thebes, this land where I was born" (161).

On this and other historical parallels, see Lefevere who mentions that both plays were written against the background of colonial wars, invading gods, and a dispossessed populace, André Lefevere, "Translation: Changing the Code: Soyinka's Ironic Aetiology," in The Languages of Theatre, ed. Ortrun Zuber (Oxford: Pergamon, 1980) 133-134.

See Joseph Kaster, Putnam's Concise Mythological Dictionary (New York: Putnam, 1963) 178: "in the Orphic recension of the Mysteries of Dionysus, Zagreus is the child of Zeus and Persephone. Through the jealousy of Hera, the child Zagreus was beguiled by the Titans, who tore him to pieces and proceeded to devour him. Zeus then appeared on the scene, and blasted the Titans with his thunderbolts. He succeeded in saving the heart of Zagreus, and gave it to Semele to eat, and from her and Zeus the divine child was reborn as Dionysus." See also Guthrie 44-46, on the name Zagreus as connecting Dionysus to an earlier form of the god Zeus in Crete, with similar rites of omophagia (eating raw).

Soyinka, Myth 158.

Soyinka, Bacchae 11, 14, 15.

Cf. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977) 250-51, regarding Dionysus' role as "executioner" in Euripides' play, yet as "victim" (or scapegoat) of the sparagmos at other moments in his career.

Cf. Victor Castellani, "Everything to do with Dionysus: Urdrama, Euripidean Melodrama, and Tragedy," in Melodrama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 2, on Euripides' Bacchae as "melodramatic" from Dionysus' view and "that of his aunts and his nymph-allies." See also Ira Hauptman, "Defending Melodrama," in Melodrama 284.

Soyinka, Bacchae 1-2.

Soyinka, Bacchae 1.

Soyinka, Bacchae 2.

Cf. Soyinka, Bacchae vii, on the historical spread of ancient Dionysian cults "in the wake of the wars of Greek colonialism."

Soyinka, Bacchae 2.

Soyinka, Bacchae 3.

Soyinka, Bacchae 4.

See also Soyinka, Bacchae x: "What the class-conscious myths of Dionysos achieved was to shift the privilege for the supply of scapegoats to the classes which had already monopolised all other privileges."

In his analysis of Euripides' Bacchae (in the introduction to his own), Soyinka also sees that ancient prototype as representing a slave and urban working class revolt: "the message is clearly subversive. For The Bacchae is not a play of accommodation but of group challenge and conflict" (ix). Yet, Soyinka makes that aspect much more explicit in his version through the added slave chorus and its leader.

Soyinka, Bacchae 5.

Soyinka, Bacchae 9.

Soyinka, Bacchae 8.

Soyinka, Bacchae 10.

Soyinka, Bacchae 11.

Soyinka, Bacchae 12.

Soyinka, Bacchae 15.

Soyinka, Bacchae 16.

Soyinka, Bacchae 17-18.

Soyinka, Bacchae 18.

Soyinka, Bacchae 19.

Soyinka, Bacchae 23.

Soyinka, Bacchae 22.

Soyinka, Bacchae 24.

Soyinka, Bacchae 25.

Soyinka, Bacchae 26.

The walking stick joke, putting Kadmos on all fours yet giving him a Dionysian rebirth, might also recall the Sphinx's riddle that Oedipus solves. Soyinka shows the old man in all three stages of life, with two legs, then three, and four--and two again as he joins Tiresias in the dance.

Soyinka, Myth 12.

See Murray's translation: "Yes, you want still another god revealed to men / so you can pocket the profits from burnt offerings / and bird-watching" (165).

Soyinka, Bacchae 29.

Soyinka, Bacchae 34.

Soyinka, Bacchae 27.

Kadmos says to Pentheus: "remember / That dreadful death your cousin Actaeon died / When those man-eating hounds reared / By his own hands savaged him, tore him / Limb from limb for boasting that his prowess / In the hunt surpassed the skill of Artemis. Do not let his fate be yours" (Soyinka, Bacchae 34).

Soyinka, Bacchae 34. A little later, Pentheus clarifies that he plans to stone Dionysus, as the "nearest fate I can devise to Actaeon's / Piecemeal death at the jaws of his hunting hounds" (Soyinka, Bacchae 35).

Cf. Artaud's essay, "The Theater and the Plague" (Theater and Its Double 15-32).

Soyinka, Bacchae 36.

Soyinka, Bacchae 37.

Soyinka, Bacchae 18.

Soyinka, Bacchae 38-39.

Soyinka, Bacchae 38.

Cf. Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute -- or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (London: Verso, 2000) 43-44, on the "passage from tragique to moque-comique" in the postmodern: "there is a horror so deep that it can no longer be 'sublimated' into tragic dignity, and is for that reason approachable only through an eerie parodic imitation/doubling of parody itself." Cf. Jacques-Alain Miller, "The Desire of Lacan and His Complex Relation to Freud," Lacanian Ink 14 (Spring 1999): 19, on the passage from Freudian tragedy to Lacanian comedy.

Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis 190.

Soyinka, Bacchae 39.

When including The Bacchae in his Collected Plays, Soyinka added: "Hold for between thirty and forty-five seconds, sixty if possible" (Wole Soyinka, Collected Plays, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) 265). He also removed a footnote about a possible "Interval" (intermission) at this point (Bacchae 39).

Soyinka, Bacchae 39-40.

Pentheus says to Dionysus: "Your answers are designed / To make me curious" (Bacchae 42).

Soyinka, Bacchae 41.

Soyinka, Bacchae 43. Soyinka's wording here is taken verbatim from Murray's translation of Euripides (174), although the rhythm of the line break changes.

Soyinka, Bacchae 44.

This is similar to Arrowsmith's translation (175-76), but different from Murray's, where "soldiers cut off the tress" (30).

Soyinka, Bacchae 46.

See Julia Kristeva, "Within the Microcosm of the Talking Cure," in Interpreting Lacan, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) 37-38: "in echolalias, intonations, irrecuperable ellipses, asyntactical and alogical constructions--in all of these divergences from codified discourse . . . the semiotic chora appears. . . ."

Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. by William Arrowsmith, in Euripides V (New York: University of Chicago, 1959) 178.

Soyinka, Bacchae 51.

Soyinka, Bacchae 52-53. In Soyinka's script, the first bacchante repeats the word "earth" and the chorus responds with each active verb.

Euripides, trans. Arrowsmith 180.

Soyinka, Bacchae 54.

Euripides, trans. Arrowsmith 180.

Soyinka, Bacchae 54.

Soyinka, Bacchae 55.

Soyinka, Bacchae 60-61.

Soyinka, Bacchae 66. Cf. Segal 287, on Euripides' Dionysus, whose "play on and with words . . . creates a mirror for language that reflects the hidden [Lacanian] Other."

Soyinka, Bacchae 65.

Soyinka, Bacchae 66.

Soyinka, Bacchae 66.

See Jacques-Alain Miller, "On the Semblance in the Relation Between the Sexes," in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) 26.

Paul Verhaeghe, "Subject and Body: Lacan's Struggle with the Real," The Letter: Lacanian Perspectives on Psychoanalysis 17 (Autumn 1999): 93.

Verhaeghe, "Subject and Body" 93-94.

See Ulli Beier's account: "before you enter this world, you are led into a 'garden of heads'. You are made to pick you own head, your inner head (ori inu), that is your destiny" (Abodunrin 46). Cf. Anthony C. Buckley, "The Secret--An Idea in Yoruba Medicinal Thought," in Social Anthropology and Medicine, ed. J.B. Loudon (London: Academic, 1976) 411-12.

Cf. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts 23: "the unconscious is manifested to us as something that holds itself in suspense in the area, I would say, of the unborn." See also Paul Verhaeghe, "Causation and Destitution of a Pre-ontological Non-entity: On the Lacanian Subject," in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus (London: Rebus, 1998) 169-70, on Lacan's theory of the unconscious as being of the order of the "unborn," of limbo, of the "not-realised," as a process "always situated at the border"--in contrast to the romantic ("Gothic") concept of the unconscious as "the basement of the psyche."

Verhaeghe, "Subject and Body" 99. See also Paul Verhaeghe, "The Collapse of the Function of the Father and Its Effect on Gender Roles," in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) 147.

See Soyinka, Myth 158, where he refers to the "pessimism" of Nietzsche's Silenus: "it is an act of hubris to be born. It is a challenge to the jealous chthonic powers, to be. The answer of the Yoruba to this is just as clear: it is no less an act of hubris to die. And the whirlpool of transition requires both hubristic complements as catalyst to its continuous regeneration."

Cf. Verhaeghe, "Subject" 114: "With the other enjoyment, the subject disappears into a larger whole, . . . the eternal life, the Zoe of the classical Greeks. The subject itself is, as a subject, dead in this 'eternal life.' With the phallic enjoyment, the end product is always separation, the preceding symbiosis is broken through, dies, but the subject acquires the Bios, his or her reduced existence."

Soyinka, Bacchae 66.

Soyinka, Bacchae 67.

Soyinka, Bacchae 67-68. Cf. Senanu, who mentions that this story is taken from "Heredotus" (110).

Soyinka, Bacchae 68.

Soyinka, Bacchae 69.

Cf. Davies, for a critical view of female characters in Soyinka's plays, not including The Bacchae. But see also Elizabeth Hale Winkler, "Three Versions of The Bacchae," in Madness in Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 226. In comparing Soyinka's Bacchae with two feminist versions of Euripides' play (Rites, by Maureen Duffy, and A Mouthful of Birds, by Caryl Churchill and David Lan), Winkler praises Soyinka's drama for being more emphatic about political rebellion.

Cf. Ogunba, "Ake" 8-10, on the Egba women's uprising of 1946 as an event in Soyinka's childhood that influenced his own personality and later writings. See also the final chapters of Soyinka's autobiography, Aké 177-230.

Soyinka, Bacchae 68-69.

Cf. Biodun Jeyifo, Introduction: "Wole Soyinka and the Tropes of Disalienation," in Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1988) xv-xvi, on the poststructuralism of Soyinka's essays about the African world. "Even Soyinka's choice of Ogun as Muse and tutelary spirit goes to the heart of his 'post-Negritude' break with 'classical' Senghorian synthesis without conflict or contradiction, for Ogun is the very embodiment of paradox, conflict and contradiction."

Soyinka, Bacchae 69,

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978) 45.

Soyinka, Bacchae 69.

K.E. Senanu, "The Exigencies of Adaptation: The Case of Soyinka's Bacchae" Critical Perspectives 5 (1980): 111. Cf. Euripides 195 (lines 912-16).

Cf. Senanu 111: "it is such an acceptance that makes meaningful the transformation of the end of the play into a celebratory rite of communion, symbolizing rejuvenation instead of the threnos for irretrievable loss we have in Euripides."

Cf. Dennis Duerden, The Invisible Present: African Art and Literature (New York: Harper, 1975) 97-104, on parallels between Ogun and Dionysus--with Pentheus as a "carrier" for community evils (even in the original myth), like Tiresias at the start of Soyinka's Bacchae.

Soyinka, Bacchae 70.

Soyinka, Bacchae 73.

For a summary of Lacanian film theories of the "suture," and its application to Hitchcock's Psycho, see Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) 200-23.

Cf. Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988) 192, on "psychic bisexuality in film spectatorship"; Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 5, on male viewers identifying with screen females; and Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992) 152-56, on the fluidity of feminine spectatorship. See also Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997) 80-84.

Soyinka, Bacchae 76.

Cf. Euripides, trans. Arrowsmith 195-96 (lines 918-23).

Soyinka, Bacchae 77.

Soyinka, Bacchae 77.

See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge (Encore), 1972-73, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998) 123-126, and François Regnault, "The Name of the Father," Reading Seminar XI, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) 72.

See Ragland, Essays 146.

See Zizek, Sublime 75: "Symptom as sinthome is a certain signifying formation penetrated with enjoyment: it is a signifier as a bearer of jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense. . . . [It] is literally our only substance, the only positive support of our being, the only point that gives consistency to the subject."

See Anne Dunand, "The End of Analysis (I)" and "The End of Analysis (II)," Reading Seminar XI, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Find, and Maire Jaanus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) 243-249 and 251-256. See also Zizek, Sublime 75: "The analysis achieves its end when the patient is able to recognize, in the Real of his symptom, the only support of his being."

Soyinka, Bacchae 76.

See Zizek, Sublime 124: "'beyond fantasy' we find only [death] drive, its pulsation around the sinthome. 'Going-through-the-fantasy' is therefore strictly correlative to identification with a sinthome."

Soyinka, Bacchae 73.

Soyinka, Bacchae 78.

See Euripides, trans. Arrowsmith 196-97 (lines 925-26 and 945-46).

Soyinka, Bacchae 78.

Cf. Euripides, trans. Arrowsmith 198: "You and you alone will suffer for your city. / A great ordeal awaits you. But you are worthy / of your fate" (lines 963-64).

Soyinka, Bacchae 79.

Soyinka, Bacchae 79.

Cf. Euripides, trans. Arrowsmith 199: "Agave and you daughters of Cadmus, / reach out your hands! I bring this young man / to a great ordeal" (lines 973-74).

Soyinka, Bacchae 79. The ode, in both Soyinka and Euripides, refers to the offstage bacchae as "hounds of madness." See Soyinka, Bacchae 80, and Euripides, trans. Arrowsmith 199 (line 978).

Soyinka, Bacchae 80.

Soyinka (Bacchae 84-86) copies parts of the report verbatim from Arrowsmith's translation (202-205), but the reporter's name is changed from Messenger to Officer.

The ode of Soyinka's bacchae (81), like Euripides' (in Arrowsmith 199, line 999), refers to Pentheus' spying as "profaning the rites of the mother of god."

Soyinka, Bacchae 85.

Soyinka, Bacchae 85-86.

Soyinka, Bacchae 86. Soyinka's lines are very similar to the translation in Arrowsmith 204, but the voice of Pentheus, pleading for recognition from his mother, within the Messenger's account, is omitted.

Cf. Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' Bacchae (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) 188n46, on the "possibility" of ritual omophagy--the eating of Pentheus by his mother and the other bacchae--in Euripides' play. Segal also states that Agave's isolation and tragic awakening at the end of the play "symbolizes" the separation of drama from ritual (263). If so, then Soyinka's play returns this drama to a ritual chora with its final, added "communion rite."

Soyinka, Bacchae 87.

Soyinka, Bacchae 89.

In Euripides the chorus responds, "Our king is a hunter," stressing the irony of the hunting trophy that Agave holds on her thyrsus (Euripides, trans. Arrowsmith 207, line 1193).

See Zizek, Sublime 71. He defines the Thing, in Lacan's revision of Freud's das Ding, as "the material leftover, the materialization of terrifying, impossible jouissance" (with reference to the wreck of the Titanic). See also 79, where Zizek defines the "maternal Thing which then functions as a symptom--the Real of enjoyment" (referring to the monster in the film, Alien). For a critique of Zizek and Lacan's Real Thing, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex," (New York: Routledge, 1993) chapter 7. She is unwilling to accept the fundamental paradox of the Real as both lack and substance (198-99).

Soyinka, Bacchae 90.

Soyinka, Bacchae 92.

Agave also boasts, while holding the head she thinks is a lion's, caught by herself and the other women: "Tell me / Do you know of any greater than the power / Of our creative wombs?" (Soyinka, Bacchae 90-91).

Soyinka, Bacchae 93. Cf. Euripides, trans. Arrowsmith 210 (lines 1249-51): "Justly--too, too justly--has lord Bromius, / this god of our own blood, destroyed us all, / every one."

Euripides, trans. Arrowsmith 216.

Euripides, trans. Arrowsmith 217.

Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verson, 1989) 230-231. Cf. Dunand, who describes the subject's destitution, in the Lacanian cure, as a realization that "the Other is barred . . . entailing a loss of fundamental references" (255). See also Fink, Clinical 208-9, on the "headless subject" as the aim of Lacanian treatment.

Soyinka, Bacchae 93-94.

Soyinka, Bacchae 94-95.

Soyinka, Bacchae 96.

Cf. Soyinka's introduction to his Bacchae: "The Dionysiac is present, of course, in varied degrees of spiritual intensity in all religions" (vii).

Soyinka, Bacchae 97.

Soyinka, Bacchae 97.

Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982) 45.

Soyinka, Myth 30.

See Duerden 66, on the four souls in African psychology (summarizing the work of Parrinder, Talbot, and Durkheim): the "oversoul" of language and state belonging, akin to the Freudian superego; the partrilinear soul of clan lineage; the matrilinear soul of "body essence"; and the existential or spiritual soul. See also Bynum 192 and G. Parrinder, West African Psychology: A Comparative Study of Psychological and Religious Thought (London: Lutterworth, 1951) 40, 54, 77, 123.