Trauma and Tragic Form

Essay review of Rudolph Binion, Sounding the Classics: From Sophocles to Thomas Mann. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 1997. ISBN 0313304580, viii, 160 pp.

As ravenous bees to summer meadows do informed readers descend on the classics. But unfortunately the scene of pleasure is in disarray, trampled over by botanists, lepidopterists, amateur field biologists, and a few straying big-game hunters — all otherwise known as humanists, critics, and guardians of the canon. The table where these worthies assemble to deliver their reports and dispute over their findings has expanded with every generation. Such is the dilemma facing a serious reader of the classics today. One can either squeeze into a place at the table and add one’s modest contribution or, in understandable desperation, make a clean sweep of the board and essay a fresh gaze at the subject. Rudolph Binion, historian and humanist, who has written a seminal psychohistorical study with Hitler Among the Germans (1976) and delved into humane letters with Soundings (1981), opts for the latter.

This being a difficult trade-off, the results must necessarily be mixed, succeeding better in some areas than in others. The boldness of the enterprise is matched by a vigorous, idiomatic, quizzical prose style that probes through anomalies for fresh insights but in places gets trapped in its

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own Baroque densities.

Binion’s rationale for a “fresh inquiry” into a baker’s dozen of Western classics is to locate a key subtext hitherto unnoted by previous generations of scholars and readers. This, he also refers to as an “undertheme” which doubles with the “express theme,” complements it, and enhances the given work’s status as a classic (pp. 3-4, 147). The enterprise may sound a might arbitrary or unduly reductive, especially to contemporary scholars pumped up on postmodernist theory — Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” “belatedness,” and “strong readers” spring to mind. It’s hard to get around the experience that major literary works proffer not only a multiplicity of overt themes but an equally disconcerting array of elusive underthemes. Pushing the envelope of relativism, one could suppose there are as many subtexts to the great works as there are readers; thus in the Norman Holland school of readers-response: “Hamlet is my most famous creation.” It seems that what literature is about is determined by what we are stimulated by it to reconstitute in our idiosyncratic psyches. To paraphrase Pogo, “We have met the text and it is us.”

For the classical humanist, Oedipus Rex, for example, is about the perplexity of the most blessed ending up the most accursed, the irony of the detective solving a crime by apprehending himself, the paradox of blindness and insight rendering character somehow both free and fated. For Freud the tragedy was complex — in several senses. Not only did it seem to confirm in action what he was discovering in wishes, or that the interplay of desire and disavowal operated like the dream and secondary elaboration, but that the onstage action unfolded like a psychoanalysis with the hero’s evasions, denials, and projections all operating like a patient’s resistances that eventually yield to self-recognition. For Rank, the mythic substructure is part of a universal substratum of heroic origins in accord with Freud’s family romance; for Roheim, it dealt with the covert crime of matricide (Jocasta hanging herself before Oedipus reaches her with sword drawn); for John Munder Ross and other contemporary American analysts, it’s about Laius’s murderous impulses toward his son, with a homoerotic subtext which Oedipus thwarts by parricide; for Hays, it embodies the Jungian archetype of the limping hero; for another, it’s about Jocasta scripting with the aim of securing spousal revenge via the offspring; for others, it plays with primal scenes (the Sphinx and Teresias focusing the creative quest for origins).

For Binion, it is about the subject’s repeatedly reliving the “traumatic exposure” incurred by Jocasta’s handing over her three-day-old infant to a shepherd who then passes him on eventually to a second royal family. Coming of age, Oedipus repeats the original trauma by abandoning his adopted parents on the word of the Delphic oracle and, I gather, undoes the original damage by blindly murdering father and marrying mother, though as Binion shows they all should have known better. The play itself, in which the hero mutilates himself and sentences himself to exile, is a second enactment of the trauma.

All told, Binion’s is an ingenious reading of the tragedy’s hidden import and deserves its place among other readings, without, of course, replacing them. Certainly, his subtext clarifies much of the obsessively driven quality of Oedipus, but simply reliving one’s painful past, as in an analysis, is defensive, while Oedipus endures to internalize his aggressive drives by blinding himself when his murderous rage has been pre-empted by Jocasta’s suicide. “It was Apollo who made me do it!” he cries, adding, “but my hand delivered the blow.” In Francis Ferguson’s tragic rhythm of purpose-passion-perception, it is the awareness of guilt as well as, or more than, traumatic reliving that motivates the hero’s blinding plus self-banishment and thereby transforms the victim into a person.

Like the blood cells rushing to heal a wound, trauma draws on emergency energies of the ego to alleviate or undo passively experienced pain by an active reliving — but the tragic art enlists all the creative resources. More than victim, the tragic hero is also beleaguered agent, and in classic drama the implications are unlimited and inexhaustible, still. The critical response then is never either/or, but always both/and — for at some point that ever enlarging table of scholars addressing the classics needs to be reconvened. Binion does a fine job of interrogating Oedipus — what did he know, when did he know it? And the more I think about the total action, the more impressed I am by its pervasive ambivalence, keyed not only by the incest taboo and the many opposing word-pairs, but by key actions. Laius wants to have Oedipus slain, so he hands him over to Jocasta instead of seeing to it himself; she wants to have him exposed, so she turns him over to a shepherd instead; Oedipus, who wants to walk away from his fate but walks into it, loves his

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parents but kills the one and is poised to do the other in — it’s as if all three get what they want but cannot admit it, which returns us to Aristotle’s terror and pity, and to that elusive classical quality of stasis, equipoise, or balance. By demonstrating how the overwritten flaw of pride (hubris) explains less about the hero’s blindness and reckless overreaching than the underwritten pattern of early trauma, Binion shows how perilous is that balance.

Unquestionably, ancient plays of ritual revenge for sexual or physical abuse resonate with moderns, and given the psychohistorian’s interest in parenting modes as interpretive keys for stages of cultural evolution, so well codified by Lloyd deMause, one understandably turns to these works as psycho-archeological sites for clues to former practices. Tales are always retellings, plays are reenactments, but they also always subsist in oblique, derivative, and symbolic forms — never as direct reflections of a specific act or set of actions. Careful probing may turn up a hidden core of conflict that may contain traces of abusive parenting consistent with the historical epoch. In late antiquity, parenting encompassed modes of infanticide and abandonment, so that fantasies of revenge for physical or sexual abuse may enter the creative process and shape it variously. “Electra’s obsessions about killing her mother,” for example, may be seen as a “legacy of her extremely abusive childhood,” including exile as a form of maternal abandonment (Jeff Richards and Jean M. Goodwin, “Electra: Revenge Fantasies and Homicide in Child Victims,” Journal of Psychohistory (1994) 22:2: pp. 213-222). With these events occurring later in her childhood, Electra’s revenge is better planned and more focused than Oedipus’s blind and seemingly random flailings (which yet reach their mark). Another daughter of Greek patriarchy, Iphigenia, is willingly sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon, at Aulis to appease Artemis and fill the sails of the Greek warships bound for Troy. In Euripides’ version, she is rescued at the last moment and whisked away by divine intervention. Subsequently, she turns up among the Taurians as the priestess presiding over human sacrifices to the gods, thus suggesting her actively repeating the trauma she had suffered passively. Conveniently displaced, her compulsive revenge does not disrupt official patriarchy, but in a dream she returns to her father’s house and her former bedchamber, where after the house collapses save for a single column she hears a human voice: “then, observing this ministry which is to slay strangers, I besprinkled him as for death, and I wept.” The voice, it turns out, belongs to her long-lost brother, Orestes.

Although revenge reappears as dramatic form in Elizabethan revenge tragedy (notably Hamlet) and persists as a motive in popular films, it cannot be directly equated with any period or parenting mode, and may be fueled as much by indeterminant narcissistic injuries as by actual abuse.

Ultimately Binion’s readings fall on the side of literary criticism’s close textual analysis rather than on advancing psychoanalytic or psychohistorical overviews. Though I have slighted his pieces on St. Matthew’s Gospel, on Dante’s lustful lovers, on Tristam and Isolde, on King Lear, and others, they are all heartily recommended. Throughout, the scholarship is solid; the book itself is well edited and handsomely produced; and the readings are always stimulating.

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