In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Literature and Medicine 22.1 (2003) 102-115



[Access article in PDF]

Afterword:
Infection as Metaphor

Arnold Weinstein


The sometimes apocalyptic realities of contagion and infection have exercised people in both literature and medicine for thousands—thousands—of years. Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year chronicles the events of a disease that has been the fellow traveler of human civilization since time immemorial. Testimonies about the plague are to be found as far back as in Boccaccio and as recently as in Camus. Consider that the archetypal text about western aspirations and anxieties, Sophocles's Oedipus the King, takes place quite significantly against a backdrop of plague. Thebans are dying like flies, and Oedipus is repeatedly imaged as the community's doctor, the man who saved Thebes once (by solving the riddle of the Sphinx) and is now expected to do it again, to do it in ways that are unmistakably medical. His job is to locate the miasma, the pollution, and to exorcise it from the body politic.

There is nothing serendipitous about the plague context and its bearing on the central issues of epistemology and self-definition in the Oedipus. René Girard argued, many years ago, that the Greek play is one of our premier examples of blurred boundary lines, of scandalous slippage, inasmuch as Oedipus's two fateful transgressions—parricide/regicide and incest—constitute taboos that are at once political and sexual. They display a kind of horrendous "traffic" about lines of station and family that turn culture into chaos. 1 But if we go one step further and factor issues of infection and contagion into the mix, then we see a bacterial version of Girard's thesis at work: plague would be the ultimate blurring of lines, the great leveler that announces, "You do not know whom you killed at the crossroads, you do not know who is sharing your bed, and you do not know who is transmitting death to you via plague." Epidemics are dreadfully democratic.

Girard theorizes not only the presence of contagion but also its mechanisms, arguing that a community responds to plague by immediately [End Page 102] marshaling its forces to seek or produce the contaminant, theagent responsible for such random horror. With Girard's help, we are in a position to see the remarkable early scene among Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias in which Oedipus's guilt is hinted at ever more distinctly, as something quite different from the emerging indictment of Oedipus that it is usually taken as, but rather as a social tug-of-war, as a work-out in sacrificial logic, in which these three male power figures slug it out to see which one of them will take the blame for the plague. This may be thought a wacky, against-the-grain reading, if we stick to the familiar lines of the myth—after all, the Athenians, like us today, knew that Oedipus (and his concealed crimes) was responsible for this mess. But it is a brilliant reading from anthropological and social health perspectives, because it brings the play in line with what history has shown us over and over: plague produces a violent community response by which a scapegoat is found/constructed as origin of the disease. Needless to say, God is the most predictable origin of the scourge: God as angry God, displeased with the antics of either his people or others, and the divine-wrath-etiology model has been operational from the Book of Job on to some contemporary responses to AIDS in our own time. (It is worth noting that Hippocrates rejected this concept long ago; in fact the very logic of medical intervention is grounded on this rejection.)

Often enough, however, these matters are quickly politicized, as Girard implies they are in the Oedipus, so finding a credible "source" and settling other kinds of scores tend to blend into each other. A glance at history shows us some of the usual suspects for such scapegoating: the Jews, the Gypsies, the "Other" in all his or her manifold guises. Once we are prepared to attend to the wider figurative reaches of this logic, we...

pdf

Share