Disease as transformative change

The role of disease in this transformative process is worth highlighting. More than once, it is a disease that sets in motion the transformative process. Deteriorating health and changes in behaviour will eventually become so dramatic that the individual is set very far aside from the rest of the group and therefore it is almost possible to speak of a transformation. There certainly is, if not a transformation into an animal, a change in appearance, in behaviour. Within the space of social appreciation and interactions, a change takes place that is equivalent to a real transformation (also sometimes called 'naïve' transformation). The cause for Philoctetes' abandonment – and similarly of Electra's – is not the straightforward fact of an illness, but the illness' uncanny implications. Electra exhibits symptoms that one might say match Hippocratic descriptions of epilepsy or the sacred disease. Philoctetes' wound, despite medical men's best efforts, is not healing well, and Philoctetes' pain is out of control. For Freud, it is precisely this that defines the uncanny: when doubts grow as to whether a living person might perhaps be dead, or inversely whether a dead person perhaps is alive, the uncanny takes hold.

Freud gives the example of an epileptic fit, how it grabs a person and gives rise to the impression of an automatic process.

Such a psychological process is at the heart of the estrangement which Sophocles portrays again and again between diseased and tragically tainted individuals and the community around them.

The excuse that Philoctetes' loud moaning was disrupting the prayers conceals a deeper fear: firsty of catching the same disease.

Secondly, fear and abhorrescence may be psychological reactions to Philoctetes' strange and unclassifiable state just in between life and death. By his illness, Philoctetes (and so too Electra, Oedipus, Ajax, or Heracles) comes to represent and personify the illness itself, which inhabits him like a parasite and is threatening to take over his life. The community looks for reasons to disown him or her and, as some have said, to re-assert its own identity, its limits of what or who can be included, and what can not.

Remonstrances made by the victims of this estrangement are almost futile. We have discussed above how Oedipus in Oedipus Coloneus adopts an accusatory tone against those who have excluded him, and Philoctetes does similarly.

In all the extant plays, Sophocles rarely slips into the un-realistic, fantastical, or surreal and naïve metamorphoses are rare. There is the evidence from Tereus and Inachus suggesting that Sophocles by all means did elaborate the literary motif of animal metamorphosis. However, just as much it is observable in the extant plays how Sophocles employs realism, only to play with the symbolic plane and the allegorical meanings of realistically described events. In Antigone, Polyneices appears to continue to have the power to cause havoc in Thebes, even as a dead man.

There is, certainly, the question of social appurtenances and the morality of burying him; but at the same time, there is something else: the putrefaction of his corpse just outside the city gates is a public health hazard, quite prosaically. Tiresias angrily tells Creon that he must have it buried. The corpse is emitting an airborne infection, a contamination that is causing all manner of damages in the city. Particles of Polyneices' rotting flesh have been carried into the city by the winds, blowing contaminated dust into Thebes, and bits of flesh have been ferried inby birds who have

been in contact with the corpse. In this way, the unburied remains of Polyneices spread ill health, folly and doom in the city. So realistically portrayed is this process, it is in fact compatible with the Hippocratic theory of miasma as airborne infections. Thus Sophocles' text is, in one sense, hyper-realist. But hyper-realist detail does not preclude metaphoric meaning from existing in the same place. Of course it is true that Philoctetes actually has a disease. On the other hand, his disease is only truly significant when it is contemplated as an allegory of all that is feared and abhorred, and absolutely impossible to absorb within society. It is this undercurrent of symbolic meaning that ties together many of the figures in similar schemata, not only with regard to their involvements with disease, but also with regard to their fall from grace in the community, beholden to expose some fundamental social dynamics and the tragic side of social fears.

In Trachiniae, a metaphorical way of speaking about Heracles' sex drive as a disease gradually melts into a not at all metaphorical narration of Heracles' fatal disease. The disease of Heracles in Trachiniae is explainable from a socio-historical point of view (in fact, two interpretations are competing: that he succumbed to corrosive acid used in clothes dye, and that he died of an epidemic disease such as the bubonic plague). However, so intricately is this disease tied up with Heracles' love life that it would be impossible not to notice its highly symbolic meaning. This symbolic meaning unfolds in parallel to the literal meaning of his sickness. The two planes of meaning converge at times so closely that it is difficult—and perhaps not necessary—to distinguish between both avenues of reading. The determinism of Heracles' literal disease seems to advance in unison with the determinism of his misplaced erotic energy. The symbolic disease of Eros has, by

the end, entirely melted into the course of a physical disease. Both end at the same time. Even more so in the Theban plays, symbolic and actual meanings of disease converge to an infinitesimal degree, as was discussed above. Through the medium of an illness that can as much be symbolic as it is actual, characters go from man to beast. They are turned from a valued member of society into a rejected character who seems beast-like and horrific, or, worse, monstrous.

Subtle and understated sets of suppositions drive these conceptualizations, not in the style of a full-blown metamorphosis or supernatural event, but in a kind of mutated version of the transformation myth, where the poetic memory of various monsters, dragons and their hybrid cognates from Greek mythology rears its head in the tragic character's profiling. This is how myth and fiction enter the portrait of a social reality.