Illness as Metaphor, Chronotopes, and the Need for Narrative Humility
In Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, a plague ravages Thebes as divine punishment for an unpunished crime—the murder of the eponymous king’s predecessor.
Two and a half millennia later, illness remains a metaphor in Robert Icke’s buzzy retelling of the Freud-genic tragedy, now on Broadway after a West End run last fall. Susan Sontag, who cautioned that portraying disease as a symbol of social decay can stigmatize patients, would likely disapprove. (Perhaps, apotheosized on Mount Olympus, she cursed Lesley Manville, who plays Oedipus’s wife and—spoiler alert—mother Jocasta, with an illness; Denise Cormier filled in when I saw the production.)
At curtain rise, on a stage-wide video screen, Oedipus (a charismatic and commanding Mark Strong)—reimagined as a politician on the cusp of electoral victory—tells a throng of eager reporters and supporters: “The civic body is ill. And that isn’t… chemicals in lakes—it’s us; we’re sick… The water got poisoned, and we got used to the taste.”
Economic inequality and xenophobia abound, as do rumors surrounding the death of Laius, the former ruler and Jocasta’s former husband. And so Oedipus promises to open an investigation. This off-script announcement exasperates his campaign manager and brother-in-law Creon (John Carroll Lynch), but Oedipus is steadfast in determining what happened. In Icke’s adaptation, probing the metaphorical plague is less a divine mandate and more a political act of narrative control. And, as Oedipus doubles down on transparency, what he uncovers about a fateful crossroads unravels his sense of self.
The truth of Oedipus’s identity is old news for most viewers, and we know that he is going to win. Yet Hildegard Bechtler’s set—an office with a hodgepodge of furniture, TV screens, and a clock counting down until the release of the election results—cultivates a palpable sense of uncertainty.
The successful set embodies Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, or the inextricable fusion of time and space in literature. The literary theorist cites the road as one example of a chronotope. Social divisions such as class, nationality, and religion collapse, and time unfolds unpredictably through chance encounters rather than routine.
In Oedipus, as election night comes to a close, movers strip the campaign headquarters bare, transforming the space into a chronotope that mirrors how our hero is stripped of everything he once believed about himself. The ticking clock heightens the temporal pressure, heralding the landslide victory while portending the inexorable revelation that Oedipus did what every little boy dreams: killed Dad and married Mom.
Bakhtin also argues that chronotopes allow abstract ideas about philosophy, society, and cause and effect—say, the limits of free will and the illusion of power—to “take on flesh and blood.” Oedipus highlights the vital role chronotopes play in narratives, even if the coda transports us to the start of the campaign, undoing everything.
And even if much of the script doesn’t sparkle. For instance, Jocasta telling Oedipus “You’ll be the death of me” and calling him “baby boy” feels heavy-handed. Modern updates to Oedipus’s family dynamic have mixed success. The parts of adoptive mother Merope (Anne Reid) and daughter Antigone (Olivia Reis) are a welcome addition and expansion, respectively, bringing understated humor and wisdom. On the other hand, Icke casts one of Oedipus’s sons, Polyneices (James Wilbraham), as gay and the other, Eteocles (Jordan Scowen), as unfaithful. This framing raises an uneasy question: Are we meant to read queerness as a moral transgression on par with infidelity or incest? (Sontag, who was bisexual, probably wouldn’t be thrilled by this either.)
Icke’s greatest writing, however, is Jocasta’s hesitatingly revealed, harrowing backstory: She was only 13 when Laius raped her and forced her to abandon the resulting child. Jocasta recalls the delivery in visceral detail: the fluorescent lights of the hospital, the newborn Oedipus’s mucus-slick body. But she is denied the opportunity to share her traumatic account on her own terms; in his relentless quest for answers, Oedipus forces her long-hidden narrative, precipitating the discovery of their true relationship.
Narrative medicine emphasizes that this kind of listening can be destructive to both patient and listener. Indeed, Jocasta kills herself, and Oedipus gouges out his eyes with her heels. (Not very healing.)
Some narrative humility would have served Oedipus well. As Sayantani DasGupta writes, “narrative humility acknowledges that our patients’ stories are not objects that we can comprehend or master, but rather dynamic entities that we can approach and engage with, while simultaneously… engaging in constant self-evaluation and self-critique about issues such as our own role in the story.” With greater narrative humility, Oedipus might have better seen Jocasta—and himself.
Icke’s Oedipus teaches us that listening must be humble, ethical, and emotionally attuned; had it been so, perhaps the drama’s seemingly inevitable ending could have been averted.
Oedipus, through Feb. 8 at Studio 54 in New York; oedipustheplay.com.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 84-258.
DasGupta, Sayantani. “Narrative Humility.” The Lancet, vol. 371, no. 9617, 2008, pp. 980-981. thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2808%2960440-7/fulltext
Web image from Sonia Friedman Productions Limited.
