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Bowing to the Wound: Philoctetes as a Tragedy of Compassion 2005

The wound is a special place, a magical place, even a numinous site, an opening where the self and the world may meet on new terms, perhaps violently, so that we are marked out and off, a territory assigned to us that is new, and which forever shifts our tracing in the world. The Wounded Body, 7.

I begin with a statement usually omitted from critical explorations of a literary work, namely, what I like about Sophocles generally as a dramatist and what I enjoy about Philoctetes especially. More than other poets and dramatists of his era, Sophocles is most interested in the body’s vulnerability and its tendency to be marked by the world. He also likes to pivot on the paradox that when the world wounds us, or we wound ourselves, such action ushers in a moment when we cross a threshold into a greater awareness of ourselves and others; therein lies a strange metaphysical strength in that knowing. Being wounded is a paradoxical action in tragedy, for it witnesses our vulnerable and easily extinguished nature even as it allows for a powerful force to surface that may not be riled otherwise.

Tragedy, we could affirm, is the genre of afflictions par excellence. It is also the most immediate and intimate of all literary genres, perhaps because of what its mytho-poetic figures call up. James Hillman, borrowing from C.G. Jung’s own insights on mythic realities, suggests that “these mythical figures, like my afflictions, are ‘tragical, monstrous and unnatural, and their effects upon the soul, like my afflictions, ‘perturb to excess’” (Revisioning Psychology 99). This sense of a shared affliction creates a strong bond between reader and action, certainly in Sophocles generally, but most poignantly in this action, in which a wound assumes the role of a character in the action even while it is a characteristic of the protagonist.

In Philoctetes, Sophocles teases our imaginations by having his Achaean warrior and leader brood in memory his injury on the island of Lemnos and thus is forced to forego fighting in the Trojan conflict. He suffers alone for nine years, accompanied by two opposing companions: a bow bequeathed to him by Heracles, a demi-god, on his funeral pyre, and a suppurating wound from a snake bite inflicted on him by a water snake at the temple of the nymph Chryse. He incurred the wrath of the snake when he trespassed and soiled the sacred altar of the goddess. Pollution once again prods the plot of Sophocles’ drama. The dramatist therefore asks us to imagine two organizing images: a wound that never ceases its painful assault on Philoctetes’ foot, which relentlessly oozes pus and gore from the injected poison, as well as an insufferable odor that emanates from it; the other is an object used to inflict wounds: Heracles’ bow. The wound and the bow are the residua of both “the female spirits of nature”.who also “were often the nurses of the gods” (“Nymphs” http://www.has.brown.edu/maicar/7NYMPHS.html 1) as well as the immortal, Heracles himself, who will appear at the end of the play to guide the more compliant Philoctetes to both healing and glory in the last days of the Trojan war. For the time being, however, in the opening lines of the play, divinities and spirits are both implicated in the pain and suffering of Philoctetes as he inhabits the wilderness of Lemnos, kills birds and small game with his accurate bow, and festers alone in resentment over his fate.

In all of his finest works, Sophocles refuses to allow us to forget that we are embodied beings, and that through them or by means of our flesh, we feel pain and confront suffering. Our own bodies can be and are generic: the particular body that inhabits the respective terrains of tragedy, lyric, comedy and epic are qualitatively different: they have their own unique lineaments and ligaments and therefore address the larger action of the poem through their own incarnated forms of expression; both the rhetoric and the poetics of flesh is generically unique, and can irreversibily infect and affect in a variety of ways the specific generic world with their presence. When we recall afflicted figures in literature, we see that their afflictions and dismemberments speak to the ethos of the characters as well as to their telos: Job, Jacob, Hephaestus, Achilles, Odysseus, Oedipus, Polynices, Dante, Ahab, Ishmael, Ivan Ilych, Hulga Hopewell, Ruby Turpin, Jake Barnes, Sethe, to name a few.

Such a powerful somatic reality, what cultural critic Morris Berman accurately labels “body literacy,” is often discarded in most disciplines’ explorations, even while the body’s presence has something to tell us about what he terms the “somatic” or ‘visceral history’ of a people” (110). I have suggested in an essay on Antigone that “how a poet imagines and conceives the body as a lived relationship with the world may have an essential sensate bearing on his/her choosing or discovering the pulsations of the world that are largely, if not exclusively, comic, tragic, lyric or epic in design” (“Of Corpses and Kings” 157). Joseph Campbell underscores the body’s importance when he asserts that “for me, mythology is a function of biology. ..a product of the soma’s imagination.. .The human imagination is grounded in the energies of the body” (3).

I pose the following questions: are the poets who have created these afflicted, wounded characters illustrating that tragedy is located first or at least, in the body and that the body speaks also to a wounded world? Is tragedy inside me that I set up, or am fated to stumble over? And what occasions it? May it be that tragedy is always in the world, and I may, because of misfortune, chance, choice, destiny, step into it, as into some polluted terrain where I lose my balance and my ballast in the process? Is tragedy an event, an experience or a condition? Can we “get at it” by witnessing the actions of another? Finally, does tragedy take us to the essence of Being, or does it merely brush up against their appearances in the phenomenal world? If tragedy is essentially about being wounded such that the order of something is punctured or penetrated, then what, if anything, is cleansed through its sacrificial action? Does tragedy allow some suturing or cauterizing of the wound, and if so, at what cost?

Closer to the island of Lemnos, Philoctetes subsists alone for almost a decade by alternately killing birds with his bow in order to maintain the barest subsistence, while he also cleans and dries the rags that blanket his wounded flesh, a wound that stubbornly and without ceasing suppurates and discharges its pus and stench. It is as if the body in its battle to cleanse itself from the poisons of the snake’s venom wishes to drain from itself more than physical toxins. In light of this instinctive action, we should ask: How does the wound shape Philoctetes? How does his woundedness contour those who come to him? Does the wound have its own speaking that flows out into the action we witness? Is it an opening, a mouth, or an aperture into another realm of being? How do those like Odysseus and Neoptolemos show their own form of woundedness through Philoctetes’ divine wound? My sense is that wounds have a voice and wish to be heard, have insights into themselves and into those who they burden. Tragedy is the genre of the expressed wound. Its action is complicit in both wounding and healing on several levels.

One could also explore what other forms of wounding took place within the time of Sophocles’ drama and what other offensive odors of pollution permeate the wilderness of his home there; to do so would reveal the deepest condition of the genre and of the community out of which it developed. Tragedy most especially illustrates an ineradicable link between physicality and metaphysics. Said another way, and pushing it a bit, genetics (nature) inevitably gives rise to genre (poiesis). Themythologist Joseph Campbell observes that mythology gains its inception in biology and, looping it back to some philosophical fundament, he writes that “mythology is the picture language of metaphysics” (“Bios and Mythos” 51). So we track backward for a moment—metaphysics—mythology—physicality—the body as emblem of the metaphysical in and through the mythological. Where affliction bleeds, within the wound is the promise of a cleansing, a katharsis—a term meaning both a clarifying and a cleansing of the wound in healing. This tragic terrain is the most afflicted of geographies.

C.G. Jung’s own exploration reveals a critical analogy between bodily instincts and archetypes, one serving as analogy of the other. His idea is that the instinctsare not vague and definite by nature, but are specifically formed motive forces which.. .pursue their inherent goals. Consequently they form very close analogies to the archetypes, so close, in fact, that there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, they are patterns of instinctual behavior. (CW9,191)

In such a dramatic condition as Philoctetes, we see through the instinctive body response of the wounded warrior to an archetypal condition as an aperture to a deeper recognition that the body’s afflicted and disruptive condition allows for and may even seduce one into. That the wound of Philoctetes is divinely instigated, a violating response to the sacred space of Chryse’s temple humanly trespassed and violated, and that he carries the bow of Heracles, places Philoctetes’ wound in both the heart of divine presence and in the center of nature’s spirits. No wonder he becomes so fond of, comforted by, and on such affectionate terms with the wilderness that encloses him on the island, a place now deserted but not desolate, despairing yet comforting. This setting of tragedy, of the terrain of suffering Jake Berry calls “a mythopoeic site origin,” which he defines “as the location of the mythic impulse prior to its establishment in a finite structure” (“Mythopoeic Site Origin” 417). I would add thatthe body itself is the other geography that, in its wounded nature, conveys a place of mythic origination.

Peter Hays points us to where this ligature between the wounded or mutilated body and tragedy coalesces: “in mythology pain was often a requisite price for knowledge. Mutilation often accompanied one’s ritual initiation into the sacred mysteries of the tribe” (126). He also observes, in line with Philoctetes’ intimacy and love of the island’s natural terrain, that “pain was also “the price that many individuals paid for initiation into secret mysteries of nature” (126). To be marked bodily in tragedy mirrors the paradoxical condition of being blessed and cursed simultaneously, to feel the limitations of nature and the boundlessness of divinity congress in the wound. Yet this same marking is the origination of a way of seeing and knowing that blesses as it curses and pains one as it cures; the wound may then be a mythic double helix of the tragic imagination.

The poetic body marked, mutilated, dismembered, bitten, poisoned, even dismembered, I have suggested elsewhere, reveals “how the flesh remembers and how it finds its language through the body and subsequently into the world.” (The Wounded Body 9). What wounding can uncover, as it does in Sophocles drama, is “a vital sense of the sacred, the holy—what might be called the numinous that haunts our flesh and can give voice to the transcendent” (9). Jung’s belief, Greek in its imag-inal thrust, is that “the body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche, and the soul is the psychological experience of the body, so it is really one and the same thing” (Vision Seminars 475).

The Memory of the Wound and the Bow

Sophocles’ Philoctetes includes in its recollection the history that unfolded before he reached and continued to suffer, now alone, on the island of Lemnos. Nonetheless, it is worth fleshing the story out prior to the action of the drama, for his wound, like all afflictions, contains both a memory and a future. Its genealogy returns us to divinity’s plot in human destiny. First of all, he is intimately connected with the death of Heracles, who wished to perform a sacrifice in the sanctuary at Cenaeon, in Euboea. Heracles sent his attendant Lichas to ask his wife Deianira for the shirt and robe that he once wore in his rituals (http:// hsa.brown.edu/-maicar/Philoctetes.html 2). Lichas, known for his long tongue, instead tells Deianira about the love affair between her husband and Iole, daughter of Eurytus, who is son of Apollo, splendid archers all. Eurytus is also known for having owned the bow which later became Odysseus,’ which he used to slay the suitors and recover his ravaged oikos. Heracles, his clothing poisoned by a toxin composed of the blood of a centaur, feels the poison seep into his skin; he abandons all hope of surviving. He is taken to Mount Oeta where he climbs atop a funeral pyre and asks all who pass by to put a torch to it so he may end his suffering. All refuse but Philoctetes, who serves Heracles’ request and lights the pyre, for which he is compensated by being given Heracles’ bow and arrows. Heracles is taken immediately into heaven, leaving no trace of his body after the immolation.

Years later, Paris arrives in Sparta and abducts Queen Helen, taking her to Troy. Many of the Achaean leaders, Philoctetes among them, swear an oath to Tyndareus to retrieve her. The army sails toward Troy but pauses on its journey to rest on the island of Tenedos. Here Achilles, disregarding his mother, Thetis’ prophecy, which warned him not to kill King Tenes or else “he would himself die by the hand of Apollo” (http://hsa.brown.edu/—maicar/Philoctetes.html), in anger slays him. To appease Apollo, the Achaeans offer him a sacrifice at the altar of Chryse, where Philoctetes violates her sacred precinct by profaning the soil of the shrine. For his transgression he is bitten by a water snake which appears from the depths to strike him. Instead of healing, the wound inflicted on Philoc-tetes disgorges a stench so terrible that Agamemnon, leader of the Achaeans, abandons his unwilling helpless warrior on the island of Lemnos. He is left little food, only a few rags but, most importantly, the bow and arrows of Herakles, gifts that sustain his life for almost a decade. These he uses to shoot doves that provide the barest sustenance for him on the uninhabited hard rocky island with a cave that provides him shelter.

Both the Achaeans collectively in Troy and Philoctetes individually on Lemnos, suffer for years. In the tenth year, Calchas prophecies that the Achaeans will not conquer the city until they have the bow of Heracles assisting them. His prophecy prompts Agamemnon to send Odysseus and Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, to claim the bow by any means. As Sophocles’ drama opens, the two Achaeans, having just arrived on the island, plan their strategy to recover the bow and sail immediately back to Troy and claim victory over the city. Lemnos, I would add, is an island in the northern Aegean Sea, and it was on to this island that Hephaestus was to have fallen and made lame when Zeus cast him out of Olympus; here he was nursed by the Sintians. Since then this uninhabited region has been sacred to Hephaestus, the wounded artificer, who makes a new shield and armor for Achilles at Troy.

In addition, the sons and daughters of Hephaestus by the Thracian woman, Cabiro, daughter of Proteus, were called Cabiroi; the Nymphs Cabiroides “were honored here and sacred rites were instituted for them” (http://www.has.brown.edu/-maicar//Lemnos.html). But now, at the time of the action of the play, Lemnos is deserted, untamed, isolated, harsh and marginal to all ships’ traffic. As a wilderness it offers sparse comfort to Philoctetes who suffers here, nursing himself and remembering his abandonment at the hands of those with whom he was prepared to fight and, if necessary, die. It is the terrain of tragedy, as is his wounded painful body. Both the harsh landscape and the wounded body are two dramatic ways in which Philoctetes remembers his treatment by the Achaeans.

The grand paradox of his suffering and painfully isolating nine years on Lemnos is that he is, according to a prophecy, the essential source of victory over Troy that the gods have chosen. Philoctetes joins two other figures who suffer wounds to their feet; the god Hephaestus, and the demi-god Achilles. All gather in our imagination to reveal a succession of afflictions that are mythic, historical and poetic. Each of them carries a different form of body woundedness with very different origins. With the arrival of Achilles’ warrior son, accompanied by the wily, persuasive and unscrupulous Odysseus, the island intensifies as a locus of Philoc-tetes’ heritage and destiny.

Pollution, Divinity and Destiny

Edmund Wilson, writing one of the most imaginative essays on this play, suggests that Philoctetes “is a man obsessed by a grievance; he is to be kept from forgetting it by an agonizing physical ailment” (427) which in another place he calls a “mystery” (421). As such, Philoctetes is not unlike the former slave woman, Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved who remembers her past through the haunting presence of the ghost of her slain daughter, a presence which wounds her deeply. Philoctetes’ own ulcerated foot, Sophocles reveals, has an equivalence for his own unyielding, unbending nature, one which through the deceit, then guidance of Neoptolemus and finally the god Heracles himself, he surrenders to a higher purpose and destiny. In the wounding itself is laden something superhuman, some selecting out by divinity, as well as the memory of a transgression and an abandonment, which serve as vehicles for destiny itself.

The paradox of the wounded body is analogous to one inherent in tragedy: the wound opens up, allows something to escape, to be heard, to find a presence and to elevate the suffering that it demands on to a higher level of being. Tragic action may be a witness to the possibility of divinity in our mortal nature precisely because we are able to be afflicted, wounded, and suffer. Where Philoctetes violates a divinity in nature marks exactly from whence he receives his wound at the same time he draws that divine nature into himself through the affliction. The source of the wound, Chryse’s guardian snake, connects the poisonous bite to the most intimate relation to the earth, to the natural order, and to divinity simultaneously. Wounds allow a trafficking back and forth, in and out, so two worlds normally separated by skin and society now converse with one another.

To be wounded therefore, “is to be opened to the world; it is to be pushed off the straight, fixed, and predictable path of certainty and thrown into ambiguity, or onto the circuitous path, and into the unseen and unforeseen” (The Wounded Body 13). The wound will afford Philoctetes another way of seeing, prompted now by the spirit of nature itself, Chryse, for both her voice and her eye seep through the wound in the pain he suffers. This natural order in which he has been engulfed within and even comforted by, transports the action to the nature of one’s own person. The wounding will shift from Philoctetes to Neoptolemus as the wound ‘s orbit widens to include the latter’s conflict with his own heroic nature.

As the drama opens, Philoctetes expresses his outrage at being left behind with only the most basic sustenance. He discharges venom as he obsesses over being abandoned. Such rage at his treatment is also part of his destiny; his is a sacred outrage. Something sacred in the natural order inhabits the bite of the snake that both wounds and initiates Philoctetes, much like the tusk of the boar both wounds and initiates the young Odysseus on his inaugural hunting expedition, or the white whale wounds and initiates Ahab into both a rage and a vengeance that cannot be quelled without destroying his ship and all but one soul on board the Pequod.

But in this drama, the wound ripples out to include the pollution of deceit, shame, and the loss of one’s honor by violating or even wounding one’s essential nature: what is natural to one’s being and what is most conducive not just to winning glory but to garnering part of a larger heroic tradition. To violate such a condition is to suffer the deep gash of a wound, which is Neoptolemus’ fate as well as his freely-chosen decision once he enters the island, a place between home and Troy and therefore liminal in its lineaments. Pollution takes the form of deceit and the shame of the loss of honor that stems from violating one’s essential nature, what is natural to one’s being. More than the fields of Troy, Lemnos is his tragic locale where the deepest truth of his own heroic nature will be tested. Pollution, wounding, being afflicted is central to tragic action, or to the condition of tragedy. Pain, suffering, wounding, abandonment are qualities that qualify one to enter the tragic abyss or at least to allow one to peer over its dark and craggy lip.

In Sophoclean tragedy, Bernard Knox writes, “the hero faces an issue on which he cannot compromise and respect himself still.Surrender would be spiritual self self-destruction, a betrayal of physis” (The Heroic Temper 36). Greater than epic are the consequences of tragedy; they move us to the violation of the natural, human and divine orders themselves, all of which express themselves through different wounded apertures.

Odysseus tells Neoptolemus as they land on the island and begin the search for Philoctetes: “This is where I marooned him long ago,/...his foot diseased and eaten away with running ulcers. (ll. 4-6). They find his cave and outside it Neoptolemus locates the remnants of clothing the injured warrior uses to bandage his wound: “And look some rags are drying in the sun/full of the oozing matter from a sore” (38-39). The site of these rags marks the locale where the other wounding appropriately begins; it has found its sore spot, where the offensive odor of self-betrayal, even self-mutilation, begins when Odysseus, accomplished at deceit, tells the young son of Achilles with a tongue coated with duplicity: “Ensnare/the soul of Philoctetes with your words” (56-57).

The word “ensnare” suggests an animal that needs trapping. Such a word carries in Odysseus a disdain for Philoctetes, and so makes it easier for him, who is just following orders, he admits earlier to Neoptole-mus, to steal the bow by deceit through the clever move of a polluted tongue. Yet as with all the carefully chosen language in the drama’s action, there is a truth to his words, for as Knox claims, so many of Sophocles’ heroes are “described in terms of wild animals” and even Philoctetes cautions Neoptolemus not to fear his wild appearance (The Heroic Temper 43). One recalls the earlier tongue of Lichas that leads to Heracles being poisoned by the clothing covered in centaur’s blood, as these filthy rags of Philoctetes and the sharp deceitful tongue of Odysseus begin to poison the physis of Neoptolemus; the myth begins to be reenacted within a new setting but with an old affliction.

Wounding One’s Nature with Words

Odysseus conveys to Neoptolemus his rationale for deceiving Philoctetes out of Heracles’ bow. Admitting that such duplicitous behavior “is not your natural bent” (78), nonetheless Odysseus persuades Achilles’ son by directing his attention to glory and victory:

But the prize of victory is pleasant to win.

Bear up: another time we shall prove honest.

For one brief shameless portion of a day

give me yourself, and then for all the rest

you may be called most scrupulous of men. (80-85)

But the order of pollution, even its nature in tragic action, is to move from the source of the affliction to infect the entire body’s action, and then, dischargeing outwardly, to infect an entire world order. What Odysseus calls for is a contained pollution with little collateral fall out; he assumes, perhaps that its long-lasting effects will be minimal or nonexistent. But the odor of such a self-infliction Neoptolemus already senses as he smells a certain corruption in Odysseus’ method:

I have a natural antipathy
To get my ends by tricks and stratagems. (88-89) .
I would prefer even to fail with honor
than win by cheating. (94-95).

To which Odysseus’ tongue moves more quickly and deceitfully to seduce him: “You are a good man’s son./I was young, too, once, and then I had a tongue/very inactive and a doing hand” (96-97); but Odysseus has learned that “everywhere among the race of men/it is the tongue that wins and not the deed (98-99). Even more than the bite of the snake, the tongue ushers in the deepest wound, one that suppurates with shame and keeps Neoptolemus from acquiescing to such a strong-tongued opponent. Far from being tongue-tied, he forcefully questions Odysseus:

“Do you not find it vile yourself, this lying?”

Odysseus: “Not if the lying brings our rescue with it.”

Neoptolemus: How can a man not blush to say such things?” (107-09)

At this point the son of Achilles moves more deeply into the island as a place of suffering, being tested with a wound at least as potentially lethal as is Philoctetes’ affliction. Shame is his wound which he is not yet prepared to accept fully, for he knows not the consequences; but there is in this exchange between Odysseus’ forked tongue—a deceitful and deeply wounding speaking—and Neoptolemus being stung by it, a doubling repetition of the boundary violation that initially brought the snake to attack Philoctetes. The purpose of this shame, for Odysseus, is to win by guile the weapon which wounds: the bow of Heracles. An alternation of wills originates the moment when Neoptolemus falls victim to the seductive tongue of Odysseus, who tells him: “You shall be called a wise man and a good [sic]” (119) to which he replies: “Well, then, I will do it, casting aside all shame” (120). But shame is no more capable of being cast off as was the poison clothing worn by Heracles or the wound suffered for so long by Philoctetes. Shame, if left untreated, has the capacity to wound deeply and permanently.

As Neoptolemus yields to Odysseus’ deceit, Philoctetes, dragging his infected foot behind him, enters the action directly and immediately illustrates his unyielding nature, an antidote certainly to the surrendering of honor and truth to one’s own nature that Neoptolemus has just suffered. As the relation between Achilles’ son and the wounded Greek deepens, their roles will reverse: Neoptolemus, newly-shamed but determined nonetheless to win back his sense of honor and to heal his own self-wounding, becomes most fervid in his relations with Philoc-tetes, who is eventually persuaded at play’s end by the voice of Heracles to yield his willfulness. The wound of Philoctetes mutates into a wound of shame; that link, behind Neoptelomus’ shame and Philoctetes’ outrage, binds them in the tension of tragic awareness. The pain of the lat-ter’s wound is transformed into suffering in the former’s soul. What both need for healing is knowledge as yet unavailable to either. Herein lies both the tension as well as the condition of tragic being.

Heracles’ bow expands as a metaphor at this juncture in the action; both figures are like the two ends of the bow that is bent through the tension of the string, a rich metaphor of the human tongue and to the condition of yielding. Shame now is the festering wound carried directly to the heart of Achilles’ son, whose father, newly-slain in Troy (by Paris’ arrow finding his vulnerable foot), embodies and furthers the virtue and the unyieldingness of a heroic code of conduct. It is natural as well as rhetorically appropriate that Philoctetes be wounded by the mouth of the snake and Neoptolemus by the mouth of Odysseus. Both tongues are forked. Violation and affliction ensue from the guardian of the nymph’s sacred geography and the inviolate sacred place of the soul of Neoptolemus.

The respective mouths of animal nature and human order reflect Sophocles’ mythical method for playing with the origin of these two characters’ respective myths. They are both wounded by the mouth, one with poison and the other with the toxicity of words. Hank Lazer speculates that “if we take ‘myth’ to its root word, muthos, mouthing, won’t all modes of mouthing have something of the mythic to them?” (“Poetry and Myth” 403). Tragedy’s fundamental action concerns a wounding into knowing which has its genesis in a painful intrusion both physical and psychic; one suffers in tragedy and this suffering often begins in the mouthing of a knowledge that afflicts one ontologically; the scar from such a wound gathers as well around words both heard and overheard.

The chorus’ own voice ushers in Philoctetes by wondering how he has existed for so long with so little, there on “his crag at the edge” (147). Pitying him his suffering, the chorus muses on his isolation without human community, “with spotted shaggy beasts for neighbors./His thoughts are set continually on pain and hunger./He cries out in his wretchedness;/there is only a blabbering echo,.(187-89). Mythically, his neighbor is Job. It may also include Adam, according to Northrop Frye, who suggests that “the tragic hero is typically.half-way between human society on the ground and something greater in the sky.. .The tragic hero hangs between heaven and earth, between a world of paradisal freedom and a world of bondage” (Anatomy 207). Suffering hardships but not yet gaining awareness that the cure of the wound is in the wounding itself, is also true of words mouthed. Such is the suppurating condition of not knowing that companions the affliction.

The wound is also the means by which the nymph Chryse, “bitter of heart,” exacts her retribution for violation; however, at the same time the wound is accompanied by the bow. The bow and the wound are two of the most compelling images of tragedy’s sustained dynamic tension: armed with the bow, especially that of a divinity, one gains power and deadly accuracy. The wound disarms and makes one almost helpless and certainly most vulnerable. In addition, the wound links Philoctetes even more forcefully with the animal world and the bow with a cultural one, both of which intensify the drama’s energy. In the years spent alone he has become, like an animal, intimate and conversant with the earthly objects that comfort him: rocks, caves, trees, birds, precipices.

These objects in nature have taken on their own lives as companions. They have cared for him. When he finally abandons the island for Troy, his farewell to these earth objects is deeply felt. He laments their loss as faithful companions; they never deceived him. David Green emphasizes how deep is Philoctetes’ “love for inanimate or inhuman things,” including his bow, the wilderness, his cave, the birds that inhabit the island and the beasts that surround his dwelling. This is the terrain of Chryse, one which he has learned to love and which “he masters in his lonely struggle for survival” (45). These two images thus create a fierce tension in the drama that has analogous connections to the fundamental tragic tension that comprise tragedy’s nature and is resolved only by yielding in love, whose embodied expression is compassion.

The Wound and Shame

When Philoctetes first appears, one of the first of his utterances is: “Friendliest of tongues!/That I should hear it spoken once again” (234-35) as he seeks out a human community both to hear and to be heard by as he relates to them his oozing outrage and his unbending nature. He recounts the shame of those who put him ashore, including Odysseus, as his story spills out of him to the young Neoptolemus: “I must drag my foot,/my cursed foot, to where the bolt/sped by the bow’s thong had struck down a bird” (287-89). He then observes to his listener that he has spent nine years on the island dying, “with hunger and pain feeding my insatiable disease” (312-13), existing in the barest and scarcest of worlds, stripped of all but his wound and the bow. His wound, he admits, has its own appetite, its own needs, and they are what Chryse has visited on him—pain and hunger. Some quality of being is being purged in this existence underscored by scarcity and austerity.

In the time of his incubating affliction, another time has arrived: the right time for the tragic action to wound Achilles’ son, which now begins to fester in him. The tension from here to the end of the action is constant, with Neoptolemos negotiating between the words of guile uttered by Odysseus and the bilious language of Philoctetes, whom he will soon promise to take home with him. Some deep connection to Being is reached at this moment in Philoctetes’ telling. He is a heated emblem of what Miguel de Unamuno refers to as a man who “has “plumbed the depths of their own misery, of their own apparent insub-stantiality, their own nothingness, and then, having turned their newly opened eyes to their fellows” (150), he gains great satisfaction when “he relates his woes to whoever is moved by the narrative. He wants to gain compassion, love” (151). This observation of Unamuno’s finds flesh in the wound of Neoptolemus; it acts like an antibody to the poisonous persuasion of Odysseus’ words that convince Neoptolemus to throw off all shame for a moment in order to steal the bow.

Odysseus, meanwhile, has left before Philoctetes even appears, leaving Neoptolemus to meet alone with the wounded warrior and an opportunity for him to tell his own story to Philoctetes of how he was cheated out of his father’s weapons at Troy after Achilles is slain, and of how they were given to Odysseus, who promised never to part with them. In a sense, the stories of each are expressions of their deepest wounds that find animated expression through the body in words and afflictions. Purging through narrative is the first stage of a possible healing, if it is to occur. The wound as a presence seems to fold back on itself in story, as Neoptolemus begins to realize a mimetic intimacy between his story and Philoctetes’ that centers on the wound and the bow. Like the tension gained by the bow as its two ends bend to one another, trying to touch by means of the string’s strength, so do these two stories bend towards one another—even yield to one another’s hearing—so that both may yield and bend away from their earlier wounds.

It is as if each figure moves around the lip of the wound of the other. I want to explore in a moment the status of the bow when it is unstrung and when it is strung and to suggest a poetic relation between the bow strung and the tongue’s curvature in speech. So deeply does Sophocles imbed tragedy in the body that all would appear to emanate from the afflicted parts and from what has the capacity to inflict pain—human speech itself—as well as how it can heal in the telling of stories that allow two to plot their futures together.

The tension grows when Philoctetes pleads with the same intensity of passion as did Odysseus earlier, to take him home, even if it means entombing him deep in the hold of the ship. He calls to Neoptolemus for pity, citing that “meanness is shameful, decency honorable./If you leave me it is an ugly story” (474-75). Incubating within Neoptolemus through the words of Philoctetes and the chorus’ voice is a deepening sense of his own shame that, like Philoctetes’ wound, begins to suppurate: “I should be ashamed/to be less ready than you to render a stranger service” (524-25) he admits as much to himself as to the chorus. Philoctetes, elated, turns then not to escape, but to pay homage to the earth, to his natural dwelling that has sustained him throughout a decade of suffering:

Let us go, boy. But let us first kiss the earth,
Reverently, in my homeless home of a cave. (531-32)
.Necessity has taught me, little by
little, to suffer and be patient. (537-38)

Their desire is then to sail from Lemnos, but they cannot because the tide is out. They must yield to the natural order with its own perennial rhythms as Philoctetes has done for almost a decade. Waiting and yielding to nature is an action evident throughout the drama. The orders of nature and divinity situate the human order between them; such a human order must come to be or to remain fluid around the wound.

There is an herb, Philoctetes tells Neoptolemus, that he wants to fetch from his cave before they leave, for it gives relief from his pain. This is the first mention of some natural tonic that has to some degree appeased his affliction, one that appears directly on the heels of the sailor, disguised as a trader, who has informed Philoctetes of the prophecy that Troy cannot be conquered until he is persuaded to accompany Odysseus and his men in order to assure victory for the Achaeans. But just at this juncture, when his future begins to gain coherence, Philoc-tetes is attacked by the pain in his wound, a witness, he anguishes, of Chryse’s presence. Neoptolemus asks him: “What is this thing that comes upon you suddenly,/that makes you cry and moan so?” (752-53) to which Philoctetes, afraid of being abandoned because of his increasing agony, pleads with him: “Do not be afraid and leave me./She comes from time to time, perhaps when she has had her fill of wandering in other places” (756-59).

The pain, however, becomes so intense that Philoctetes turns the bow over to Neoptolemus for protection but also as a way of staying connected to his good will and his oath to take him home: “the blood is trickling, dripping murderously/from its deep spring. I look for something new,/It is coming now, coming. Ah!” (782-86). Sophocles’ artistic genius in many of his plays is to describe that node, often through the body and through language, in which a bursting of some boundary, often including knowing and the flesh together, is necessary, a kind of emotional and intellectual explosion so that the parts which have been hidden or are simmering just below the surface of the skin and below the level of full conscious awareness may erupt and scatter, thereby unleashing and releasing insufferable tension in the dramatic action. One never forgets the exploding swollen corpse of Polynices in Antigone, or the exploding realization of Oedipus as he hears the servant’s story of Oedipus slaying his father.

Such is the case here with the wound. Philoctetes’ wound howls to break its boundaries further, boundaries which have been collapsed for almost ten years, but are now redoubling their efforts to gain greater freedom. The body as container is incapable of holding back the spirit of Chryse, whose confines have been violated and who now seeks expression through the wound. Chryse’s semi-divine presence as a spirit of nature in the wounded nature of Philoctetes captures in her intensifying the pain associated with the affliction what Bernard Knox believes is a poetic element included most frequently in Sophoclean tragedy: “The gods are presences felt at every turn of the action.and by some mysterious poetic alchemy we are made to feel.that the gods have more concern and respect for the hero, even when…he seems to fight against them, than for the common run of human beings who observe the mean” (6-7).

Here the boundaries are pushed or punctured even further as a parallel embodied action to the wish by Philoctetes to return home. The skin tears open, the festering wound pushes farther into the world as its stench carries its presence well beyond eyesight. Like any crucial violation of divinity and humanity, it cannot be contained to that one incident, as Odysseus tried to convince Neoptolemus earlier was the case; no, it spills into the collective myth and alters it, as Oedipus’ afflicted origins and polluted life spill across the land, bleaching the natural order of all attempts at regeneration.

The paradox is that the wound’s relentless wrath moves Philoctetes and Neoptolemus closer to the divine Heracles’ impressive persuasive presence whose voice as a powerful antibody soothes the wound of Philoctetes. The wound ushers in his presence, but only by suffering beyond mortal limits is the god invoked: pollution does indeed call up the presence of divine power and persuasion as well as mortal boundaries of pain. But first Heracles appears as a remembered image and as a presence analogous to the symbol of the bow, the gift received by Philoctetes for his generosity.

Crippled by the pain’s intensity, Philoctetes pleads with Neoptole-mus to place him on a funeral pyre in a gesture of pity, as Philoctetes himself served the son of Zeus before, and then to become the keeper of the bow, which will be handed down in another act of compassion for the suffering of another. The change in the heart of Neoptolemus is evident in his response to the suffering man: “I have been in pain for you; I have been/in sorrow for your pain” (805-06) which acts as a salve to the suffering Philoctetes. The wound’s discharge finds its analogue in the empathic response of Neoptolemus who begins to become Philoc-tetes to the latter’s Heracles. The drama that acquired the bow is repeated and renewed in the act of serving another. Charles Segal writes eloquently of the play that in this moment “a spirit of heroic generosity still radiates from the bow” (122) and is passed down, like a scepter from king to prince.

The bow is metonymic of the entire code of heroic largesse; coupled with the wound, this pair of symbols links nature to civilization and mortals to divinity as well as to the great tradition of heroic deeds imbedded in the communal memory of Neoptolemus, Philoctetes and the entire Greek psyche. The seeds of Philoctetes’ healing are planted as well in Neoptolemus’ response, whose own presence to suffering transforms him into a heroic figure first through the deep wound of his shame, and now through the image of honor and heroism in the suffering man’s ability to suffer and still pay homage to the gods. He becomes much more deliberate and unyielding in his ability to honor himself by honoring another’s suffering through the act of compassion.

Called forth at this instant is the heroic ideal of compassion given perhaps to characters in tragedy that have, as Unamuno makes clear, “plumbed the depths of their own misery” (151). As Philoctetes calls on the Earth to take him and so allow his suffering to end, Neoptolemus, sounding in his words more mature, resolute and more akin to a physician than to one who promised to take Philoctetes from the island, speaks of the wound’s condition: The sweat is soaking all his body over,/and a black flux of blood and matter has broken/out of his foot. Let us leave him quiet, friends,/until he falls asleep. (822-25).

At no other time has the wound been so fierce in expression as it transports Philoctetes to the abyss of life and death in the pain of its discharge. The sweating suggests a fever trying to break, an infection coming to its destructive limits before subsiding or cascading into some level of healing. Perhaps the chorus provides the best word to apply here—”Ripeness that holds decision over all things/wins many a victory suddenly” (836-37 my emphasis). The wound has ripened into a form of knowing expressed most cogently by Neoptolemus as his focus shifts from the bow, the object of Odysseus’ obsession, to the man Philoctetes himself: “His is the crown of victory, him and the God said we must bring./Shame shall be ours if we boast and our lies still leave victory unwon” (841-42 my emphasis). Like the dramatic trajectory of the Oedipus tragedy, the focus telescopes from the “many” to the “one,” and perhaps from the broad and mythic tradition of the heroic to its embodied, historical, enfleshed and festering suffering of one person.

When Philoctetes awakens from his sleep, a sense of blessedness surrounds his words. He has for the moment been purged or at least given a respite from his anguish: “Blessed the light that comes after my sleep,/ blessed the watching of friends./I never would have hoped this,/that you would have the pity of heart to support/my afflictions” (867-71). His vocabulary is crucial at this stage of his turn to a more healing presence: his speaking is characterized by the words “Blessed,” “pity,” and “hope.”

Nonetheless, Neoptolemus remains in his original shame, for he carries with him the earlier oath sworn to Odysseus to help steal the bow from Philoctetes. Now, however, he regrets having compromised his own nature, which becomes clear to him as Philoctetes mirrors his own heroic nature. Neoptolemus’ words pollute his will, and he finds himself in that tragic state of needing to choose between violating his words both to Odysseus and to Philoctetes because he has promised the latter, deceitfully once again, to take him straight home from Lemnos rather than to Troy where his destiny of being both healed and victorious awaits.

Philoctetes senses the wandering words of Neoptolemus and assumes they are because of his own foul-smelling wound. But Neoptolemus has already taken that disgust into himself and recognizes the odor of his own polluted nature:

Philoctetes: Is it disgust at my sickness? Is it this That makes you shrink from taking me? Neoptolemus: All is disgust when one leaves his own nature And does things that misfit it. (899-902)

When Philoctetes calls on the honorable nature of the young man’s father, Achilles, and through that name, to the tradition of the heroic ideals embodied in such a figure, Neoptolemus immediately feels the sharp point of the wound of self-betrayal: “I shall be shown to be dishonorable:/! am afraid of that” (904-05). Caught between two allegiances, one of which carries the stench of dishonor, Neoptolemus feels the increasing pain of his condition and asks that most tragic of questions that often arises out of a moral checkmate: “Zeus, what must I do? Twice be proved base,/hiding what I should not, saying what is most foul?”(907-08). The foul wound and foul words now cluster around and even engulf both heroes. What has been hidden is now revealed through the tongue and the wound. Pollution is pervasive, and even necessary for there to be even a possibility of cleansing, not unlike the mire that Hamlet found himself within as he sought to purge Denmark of its foul moral miasma. And in his condition, Neoptolemus begins to suffer on a level he could not have imagined. He suffers both for himself in his vulnerability and for Philoctetes in his helplessness; one feels the tension increase as the emotional tautness of the bow of the tragedy increases.

The word “pollution,” Dudley Young explains, has its own paradoxical nature. It “points to something essentially bad, even horrible; and yet, because its root meaning is ‘a coming into presence of the usually absent divinity,’ it also carries an ambiguous shadow” (232). The paradox of the wound, he goes on to affirm, has the capacity to cure or kill, or even “to kill as it cures.” He shows that our word for pollution is from” the Latinpollure=to defile, but close by is pollere=to be powerful.” Pollution may then include and embody “an injection of strength which disorders” (232).

In another section he adds to our understanding of the action of Philoctetes by exploring the wordpharmakos, the Greek word for scapegoat, which “like the dirtying katharma that also promises cleansing, katharsis, is essentially ambiguous, akin to pharmakon, a poison that may be a cure” (302). One might not discover a more inclusive image for tragedy itself. Such an understanding will find its way deeply into the play, when the sons of Asklepios, with their dual, balanced and intertwined snakes of healing around the caduceus reveal the paradoxical nature of the snake’s poison, which is both poisonous and curative, as the wound of Philoctetes expresses.

The suffering of Philoctetes, however, is not yet completed, for he has given the bow to Neoptolemus out of good faith and to honor him for agreeing to take him home. But he senses that Neoptolemus is split in his own mind and is not to be trusted, so he pleads for the bow to be returned. With no response from Achilles’ son, Philoctetes turns again to that harsh terrain which has been both austerely present and consistently comforting all these years; the earth’s rocky crags and often fierce geography provide him a most basic solace:

Caverns and headlands, dens of wild creatures,
You jutting broken crags, to you I raise my cry—
There is no one else that I can speak to—
And you have always been there, have always heard me,
Let me tell you what he has done to me. ((934-38)

Suffering the wound from Chryse’s snake that arises from the chthonic nether regions below the earth, Philoctetes has in-corporated the nature nymph into himself through the wound. He has grown intimate with the landscape and it has returned his affections by offering him a clarity of vision—a seeing through the wound—that he never before possessed. Now, instead of violating the spirit of nature, which brought forth the wound, he harmonizes with it. He is, in a sense, in his own nature, which is why he is so wounded by Neoptolemus, whom he knows has violated his. So not only is the earlier event—Heracles bequeathing the bow to Philoctetes for lighting the funeral pyre—repeated here, but the earlier violation is as well, and Philoctetes, having suffered into this way of knowing, can witness it and be stung by its sharp fangs once again.

Further, he knows that without the bow, which has a divinely-inspired deadly accuracy, a bow handed from Apollo to Heracles that does not suffer the frailty of hamartia, but rather hits its mark every time, Philoctetes will die of starvation. He is put into the same position as Neoptolemus was earlier: “I have been deceived and am lost. What can I do?” (948-49). Instead of addressing Zeus for guidance, as did Neoptolemus, Philoctetes once again turns for solace to the one character he feels has never and would not ever, deceive him, the places of the natural order herself. “Two doors cut in the rock, to you again,/again I come, enter again, unarmed./Here in this passage/I shall shrivel to death alone” (952-55). He utters the cry of desolation and hopelessness that echoes across time to King Lear’s naked woeful cries of nothingness on the heath: “Then I am nothing” (951) and “I am nothing now” (1030).

At the same time, Neoptolemus senses in his own soul the anguish of Philoctetes and his own emotional condition, like the wound of the afflicted man, intensifies in a kind of sympathetic response: “A kind of compassion,/a terrible compassion, has come upon me/for him. I have felt for him all the time” (965-67). I believe that there is a shifting through the wound or by means of the wound for him, such that shame gives rise to or is transformed through the pain of the oozing affliction, into compassion, itself a form of heroic generosity, akin to what his father conveys to Nestor and to Agamemnon at the end of the Iliad. His father moves into this realm in part through the grief he experiences at the loss of Patroclus, mortally wounded by Hector, but wearing the armor of the hero Achilles.

Miguel de Unamuno profoundly develops the conviction that in order to love everything, to feel a pity and a compassion for all that lives, “you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything” (152). He suggests further: “we pity, that is, we love only that which is like us, and thus our compassion grows, and with it our love for things in the measure to which they are discovered to be in our likeness” (153). As our awareness grows, so too may our compassion, “for all consciousness is an awareness of death and suffering.Con-sciousness.is participated knowledge, and it is co-feeling, and co-feeling is compassion” (153). Sophocles’ drama not only engages a poetic exploration of a movement from wounding to healing, but it also opens a profound vision of how compassion develops in the soul through a deep witnessing to the suffering of another. Witnessing Philoctetes suffering bends Neoptolemus from shame to compassion with the same intensity as the wound itself bends Philoctetes to its literal pain.

Philoctetes knows the inner conflict in Neoptolemus and feels a growing compassion that seeps into his soul. He therefore upbraids him his “foul lesson” which he hopes he will abandon in choosing once again to honor his word as Achilles’ worthy son. He turns once again to the natural order and sees in “my steep and rugged precipice here” (1000) an escape from pain through suicide, to become literally nothing. Just at this instant Odysseus appears to wrench the bow from Neoptolemus and leave Philoctetes at the very moment the shifting psyche of Neop-tolemus is about to dedicate himself to honoring Philoctetes’ wishes to return home.

As the crippled man withdraws once more into the cave, its opening reminiscent of both a mouth and an open wound, Odysseus admonishes Neoptolemus to leave with him, especially worried that “Your generosity/may spoil our future” (1067-68). The younger man complies but feels the pity rise in him, knowing in his own shame what honorable action is required. The chorus, comprised of the men under Neoptole-mus, lacks this moral vision. Seeing only Philoctetes’ stubbornness, it blames him for condemning himself: “It was you who doomed your-self,/man of hard fortune. From no other, from nothing stronger, came your mischance” (1092-93).

Bow and Tongue

Without compromise is Philoctetes, but Sophocles is also interested in the contours and the pitfalls of remaining steadfast vs. being stubbornly obstinate against bending to the invisible demands of ananke. Charles Segal perceptively observes that like many tragedians of Greece, but none with the scope and intensity of Sophocles, this playwright finds a visual image “which expresses in the condensed, evocative way of symbols, the major concern of the work” (114). Symbols, in other words, are efficient and economical ways to transmit a quality, character or condition from one realm to another. The symbols highlight what the Greeks believed about “aenigma.” All things for them, James Hillman writes, “had a second sense, symbols, oracles, mysteries, secrets...Each problem contains a secret, is the emblem of a secret or, better said, is a secret emblem, secretly an emblem.” (“Culture and the Animal Soul” 13). These emblems like the bow, the wound, the tongue, are ways into the aenigma. And considering Joseph Campbell’s observation in The Power of Myth that “there is more reality in an image than in a word” (61), then something must be made of the bow and the tongue, the latter as much a part of the action as is the afflicted foot. Certainly the bow, as it is touched by Neoptolemus and then taken by Odysseus, contains the heroic ideals and the traditions from which they sprung.

As he comes into an awareness through his compassionate bending towards Philoctetes’s suffering, Neoptolemus knows that he must return the bow to him, and then to bend to the suffering man’s will, but freely, and out of compassion. He reclaims the bow from Odysseus and takes it to Philoctetes in his cave, where he confronts, not surprisingly, a shower of abuse from the despairing and unbending man. Neoptole-mus’ response is curt and decisive: “Do not curse me any more./Take your bow. Here I give it to you.” To which Philoctetes: “What can you mean? Is this another trick? “(1282-87). Then, instead of making himself the referent, Neoptolemus elevates his action to Olympus and divinity’s presence: “No. That I swear by the holy majesty/of Zeus on high!”(1288-89). The critical moment occurs right here, as Odysseus, not to be denied, rushes in at the instant when Neoptolemus hands over the bow—and for a minute this trinity faces off as Philoctetes loads the bow with an arrow to slay Odysseus but is deflected by Neoptolemus.

He is the pivotal figure between them, assimilating the bow, the wound, nature, divinity and his own heroic temper. He tells a frustrated Philoctetes, as Odysseus flees: “This is not to our glory, neither yours nor mine” (1305). Wounding Odysseus will wound them both in the deeper layers of their being, where honor dwells. While Odysseus interprets the bow as the signal to victory, and Philoctetes understands the bow as his means to survival as well as a token of his past connection with the now deified Heracles, Neoptolemus now understands the bow as the emblem of a heroic tradition that must not be polluted, wounded or violated, for it will then fester and suppurate in the Greek soul.

I have suggested elsewhere something of the wounded body that seems applicable here because it constitutes part of Neoptolemus’ shifted awareness of Philoctetes: “The wounded body is sacred in some deep level of its existence;.The wound is a gift; it may be a witness to a god or a goddess working in the wound. The wound may be the violent presence of the numinous” (The Wounded Body 7). I also connect it to language and here I think Sophocles imagines the tongue and the bow together. Both have the capacity of wounding deeply.

Philoctetes refuses to compromise. He will not bend. Yet when we imagine the bow itself as unbending—that is, unstrung—it is worthless. Left stringless it is not only unyielding but absent any force. But when the bow bends to the wishes of the string, it gains its strength in and through the tension of opposition. So the bow gains its strength and even its entelechy in bending to the string. The bow bent into a curve at the insistence of the string that itself pulls its ends towards one another is for me the symbol for the nature of the archetype in its tension of opposites. The bent and strung bow is an archetype. The bow wishes to be upright and straight—that is its desire; but when it gives way to the string’s demands, its tension consists in wanting to return to what it considers its natural bent, so to speak. Yet the string insists that it yield. This is the image of Philoctetes specifically, but it might also serve as one insistent image for tragedy generally. Philoctetes must yield, and even though his own mind resists it because of his outrage, he learns to bend, like the bow, in order to follow the instructions of Heracles, give power to the Greeks, heal himself, and win the glory it is prophesied is both his right and his destiny.

One more step with the bow. The string restrains the bow in its yielding and herein lies the bow’s strength, its use as a weapon and its accuracy: the tauter the string, the great accuracy and deadliness does the bow acquire when the fork of the arrow rests in it. No longer limp, but now taut and powerful in its obedience to the string’s demands is the bow’s existential condition. And this, the bow comes to know, is its true nature: to yield to the string and in this taut yielding to gain its power and, perhaps even its usefulness in the world that it serves. The rigidity of the string is matched only by the bending, yielding nature of the bow—a true harmonious and proportionate tension of opposites that constellates the archetype. I would travel one more step here and suggest that in this provocative image of Sophocles are the two archetypal actions that comprise tragedy: gaining possession of strength and power by the act of yielding; what is limp and without strength gains power in the tension with the bow. The bow, in one regard, passes its strength to the string even while the string supports the bow in its bending or yielding force. When the two work in harmony, something new is gathered up, a tremendous tension, that allows the arrow to fly, to find its mark, and to avoid the hamartia, a cardinal sin in archery and a fatal flaw in tragedy.

Sophocles imagines the tongue and the bow together because both have the capacity to wound deeply when bent. Much the same dynamic is incorporated into the human tongue mentioned so frequently throughout the drama. It asks us to remember “Lichas of the long tongue and short wits” who brings with him the garments saturated with poison to Heracles, which poisons him by soaking through his skin. The tongue, lying flat in the mouth, is without power; but when it bows, bends, assumes a curving shape to form words, it gains incredible power to wound—but also to heal. It is like the snake itself, capable of wounding, healing, and even healing by wounding. The tensile strength of the tongue is not unlike the tensile strength of the bow when it bends to the string or the tensile strength of the snake as it bends, bows, in order to move. Words are formed only when the tongue rises up in the mouth, curves and forms the words that may have a multitude of intentions.

I would add the tongue to the other symbols, the wound and the bow, as another way of seeing the bodily genesis of tragedy: myths out of the mouth, tongued into the world as story, as memory and as destiny. Like wounds, our words can cut both ways; for Sophocles the power of words to create, invent, shape, change the world, or change our perception of it, is as much a part of the plot, the mythos of the drama, as the deeds that bear on Philoctetes.

Neoptolemus now replaces the chorus as a voice of wisdom and moderation to the seething Philoctetes and insists that he surrender his anger:

Your anger has made a savage of you. You will not/accept advice, although the friend advises/in pure goodheartednes. (1320-24)

You are sick and the pain of the sickness is of God’s sending/because you approached the Guardian of Chryse,/the serpent that with secret watch protects/her roofless shrine to keep it from violation. (1326-29)

Then Neoptolemus not only returns Philoctetes to the genesis of his affliction but pushes him toward the future by pleading that he accept healing at Troy under the ministering of “the Asclepiadae,/who will relieve your sickness; then with the bow and by my side, you will become Troy’s conqueror” (1332-34). To his admonition Neoptolemus adds:

Now since you know this, yield and be gracious.

It is a glorious heightening of gain.

First to come into hands that can heal you,

And then be judged pre-eminent among the Greeks...(1342-45)

The wound’s violent eruptions of pain reveal how deep is the inability of Philoctetes to yield, to give up what has sustained him for almost 10 years and which is no longer needed. So from the chorus, to Neop-tolemus, and finally to Heracles’ embodied presence, the persuasive energy increases. He stands above Philoctetes’ cave to announce that he comes from his realm of the dead, not to force Philoctetes to bow to his will but to serve him towards his own healing.

It is to Heracles that the heroic tradition is reinstated, given its language again and imaginatively remembered. Heracles informs him that what he has suffered “must be your suffering too,/the winning of a life to an end in glory,/out of this suffering” (1421-24). But he must go with Neoptolemus for the two of them together will, “like twin lions hunting together,” protect one another as Philoctetes is destined to be healed, then slay Paris and return to his own home with great rewards, some of which must be dedicated to the memory of Heracles’ funeral pyre and “in memory of my bow,” 1432) which has sustained his life for a decade. Reminiscent of the end of Oedipus at Colonus, Heracles ends his prophecy with this warning:

keep holy in the sight of God.

All else our father Zeus thinks of less moment.

Holiness does not die with the men that die.

Whether they die or live, it cannot perish. (1441-44)

Heracles returns Philoctetes and Neoptolemus to a source that lies beyond the heroic tradition, one which gives it its energy and its form. Holiness is what Philoctetes violated, which led to his wounded isolation and resentment; but that same wound takes him into divinity’s presence as powerfully as did his pollution.

The play’s last lines are Philoctetes’ affectionate and deeply nostalgic sentiments to the craggy hard earth that gave him solace and nourishment for so long. He lived a life of scarcity, living by and on nothing, punctuated only by the excessive odors and fluids of his wound. It is to this spirit of the earth that he asks for a safe voyage. The end plea is to the “all-conquering/Spirit who has brought this to pass’ (1466-67). Completing the circle from wounding to healing, the action ends as the Chorus announces in the final lines that all on the island should leave only after praying to “the nymphs of the sea/to bring us safe to our homes” (1470-71) and thus gives proper homage to Chryse and her snake protectors who arose from the waters initially to inflict the wound on Philoctetes who had violated her home. Nature and his own heroic nature find a respite, even a reconciliation. Mutual rage at violation are appeased, even purged.

Praising the source of the wound, remembering implicitly the original violation and receiving the blessing from the source of the wound is the reconciliation that tragedy leads to if one is open to yielding to its profoundly powerful but invisible forces buried deep in the natural order. Perhaps the spirit of tragedy has its home in the chthonic regions below the natural order; these comprise the deeper verities that guide the lives of mortals every bit as much as the sky gods on Olympus. Philoctetes is Sophocles’ encomium to the forces of Nature, to Physus, the origin and cradle of conscious knowing itself, and that, with the human body as its most forceful and compelling analogue, it is from whence all knowledge emanates.

Tragedy’s fundamental action is a revelation of the woundedness of the world, something of the marked, blemished, displaced, and homeless. Tragic action is restorative: some essential part of our nature is retrieved. An abiding impulse resides within us to retrieve it is part of our nature, along with direct and powerful affinities in the created order.

Notes

Berry, Jake. “Mythopoetic Site Origin: Rediscovering the Genius Loci.” Mythosphere: A Journalfor Image, Myth, and Symbol. Vol. 1, Issue 4, 1999. Ed. William G. Doty. New York: Gordon and Breach. 417-28.

Berman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Campbell, Joseph. The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimensions of Fairy Tales, Legends, and Symbols. New York: HaperPerennial, 1990.

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