Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy: Individuality and the Psychological

SEAMUS HEANEY’S THE CURE AT TROY: INDIVIDUALITY AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MATTHEW M. DEFORREST the goal of anyone writing a play is to create a cast of characters universal enough to be able to evoke a feeling of sympathy from members of the audience while keeping them individual enough not to be labeled stock characters by reviewers. The struggle to maintain this balance in The Cure at Troy is made diYcult by Seamus Heaney’s attempt to create a version of Sophocles’ play which does not limit itself to the immediate events of the Trojan War. Heaney intentionally tips this balance in favor of the universal rather than the individual. The choice, however, is demonstrated by the portrayal of the characters and not in the story. In the play, Heaney “. . . attempted to present the conclusion as the inevitable culmination of an honestly endured psychological crisis rather than the result of supernatural intervention.”1 This shift of focus to the psychological not only allows for a broader view of the play, but also makes the characters more iconic.2 Heaney provided a brief summary of the background and action of the play for the Field Day playbill just quoted from: [The play] sets before us the predicament of the outcast hero, Philoctetes, whom the Greeks marooned on the island of Lemnos and forgot about until the closing stages of the siege. Why did they cast him out? Basically, it was because a festering wound had made him physically repugnant to them. On his way to Troy, Philoctetes had visited the shrine of a nymph called Chryse and been bitten there by a snake; the snakebite then grew so malignant that his smell and squeals of pain proved intolerable to his comrades who simply abanTHE CURE AT TROY: INDIVIDUALITY AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL 126 1 Field Day Theatre Company, Playbill: The Cure at Troy (Dublin: The Abbey Theatre, November 5, 1990). 2 I deWne the term “iconic” to mean a representation or personiWcation of an idea or concept . In this context, iconic characters represent ideas devised to explain a part of the whole of the internal psyche. doned him and sailed on to the war. But the fates had decreed that Philoctetes and his invincible bow would be instrumental in the Greek victory over the Trojans, and a prophecy Wnally compelled them to return and sue for his support. Sophocles’ play begins when Odysseus, the Greek political operator par excellence, arrives on Lemnos, under orders to bring Philoctetes back to Troy. His helper in this enterprise is to be a son of the Greek hero Achilles, a youth called Neoptolemus, whose temperament and morality are deeply at odds with those of his senior oYcer. The conXict between the young man’s sense of personal integrity and the older man’s code of loyalty and solidarity initiates the drama, which goes on to enact itself in the consciousness of Philoctetes himself: in him and around him Sophocles locates an argument about the diVerent consequences of outrage and obligation.3 Heaney’s focus on the psychological conXict, located by him “in the consciousness of Philoctetes,” drives the reader and the viewer of the play to focus on the ideological stances taken by the characters. These stances, which diVer on a fundamental level, allow the characters to be iconic while maintaining distinct personalities. The dynamic of the characters, as they maintain their separate ideological viewpoints, may be understood in the terms of Freud’s and Yeats’s psychological systems. These three main characters—Neoptolemus, Philoctetes, and Odysseus— correspond to the three main Freudian components of the psyche: Philoctetes corresponds to the id, Odysseus to the ego, and Neoptolemus to the superego. These correspondences are further reinforced by the set used by the original Field Day production of the play in which Philoctetes’ cave was located in the head of a fallen statue. Philoctetes’ painful wound and marooning force him into an animalistic state. He is described by the Chorus as a “wild man,”4 and as: Out in the open always, Behaving like a savage. Nothing but squeals and laments. Nothing left but instincts. Howling wild like a wolf. (CT 13) THE CURE AT TROY: INDIVIDUALITY...