Oedipus Reborn in Washington, DC

The events in Washington bring to mind Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Purloined Letter,” which epitomizes the human drama of desire, gender, and generation that psychoanalysis has mythologized as the Oedipus complex. Though I am unable to make a systematic comparison in the space allotted me, I will make some comments about recent events with Poe’s brilliant story in mind.

Kenneth Starr occupies a place equivalent to Poe’s investigator, the defender of order swept off course by his own desire. While other details of the Lewinsky Matter differ from Poe’s story in that it is the President—not the Queen—whose affair with the Intern threatens his own power and there is an absence of the conspiratorial personage of Poe’s minister, the compelling parallels are the vicissitudes of desire, power, and powerlessness that continue to characterize human drama.

Each character in this extraordinary Washington theater work-in-progress plays out and exceeds a role fraught with power and powerlessness. The Leader of the Free World (President Clinton), the last superpower potentate upon the planet, falls prey to his own sexual predilections, thereby moving from a position of dizzying power and desirability to becoming a mere furtive quarry for his enemies. His phallic moment has come and gone. The Intern (Monica Lewinsky) also rises from youthful anonymity to a position of unimaginable potency as she alone can fulfill the desire of the most powerful man in the world—only to fall quickly into a position of abandonment, ridicule, humiliation, and terror. She becomes “that woman” who has lost her name and is driven from the White House, betrayed by lover and friend, hunted by detective Starr.

The Queen in this story (Hilary Clinton) moves from a pitiful position of cuckolded wife toward a strange and irreplaceable dignity. She becomes a mysterious figure of womanly power beyond the reach of ordinary sexual discourse. And, of course, there is Starr, that most dangerous and ridiculous detective whose own passion, never mitigated by ordinary loneliness or lust, becomes the most destructive engine in the entire plot. No longer a guardian of the order he was hired to protect, Starr becomes jackal and hyena, so burdened by his own murderous desire that he would destroy a government in the dubious name of sexual and moral purity. The House Judiciary Committee, too, finds itself moving all too speedily from protestations of solemn, Constitutional dignity into purely partisan malice and vindictiveness. This drama transforms its participants into helpless advocates of impossible positions.

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Of course, there are many other places in this elaborate structure: voyeuristic, moralistic, apologetic, etc. And perhaps none of us can keep from falling periodically into the grip of competing waves of desire. At one moment, we might pity the President as victim of an intrusive investigatory machine (“Doesn’t the poor man deserve some personal privacy?”). At another, we might become enraged at him as a symbol of supreme paternal deceit (“How could he lie so often and so blatantly to so many of his closest advisers, to his friends, to his family, and to us?”). Some of us sympathize with Monica as the intern treacherously seduced by her boss who should have known better, or we vilify her as a selfish schemer ready to destroy a Presidency for the sake of her adolescent fantasies of romantic conquest.

We are inexorably drawn into the drama, just like its protagonists. Only the collective Greek Chorus of the American consensus has appeared to maintain some steadiness of perspective like Poe’s ideal investigator: a sense of proportion, of humor, and even a refusal to plunge willy-nilly into any single passion. Each of us carries our personal scars from the family drama of generation and gender deeply embedded in our subjectivity, so it should be no surprise that this story keeps grabbing hold of us as players in the eternal oedipal theater. What is most to be learned as the Lewinsky Matter begins to fade into history is that the fundamental drama of the Father and the Mother and the Son and the Daughter, in all of its possible permutations and unconscious swings of significance, remains alive and well at this moment near a new millennium. For those who think Freud is dead, or outdated, or less useful than he was a century ago, I would say: it is time to take another look.

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