Heracles vs. Bob Dylan

Recall Edmund Wilson's "Yet it is also decreed that he shall be cured when he shall have been able to forget his grievance and devote his divine gifts to the service of his people." Whitehead’s ironies, particularly in having the consultant expect but not experience a recovery from his pain when he devotes his creative gifts to the service of his own people, suggest that the novel, like much recent Sophocles criticism, disavows the Wilsonian view. David Gates, a big fan of Apex Hides the Hurt, learned in a 1997 interview the perils of the romantic assumption that a creative person has been granted insight by illness:

Bob Dylan is fifty-six. Last May, when he almost died –of a viral infection in a sac around the heart . . . the death scare reminded us that Dylan is a major cultural figure –and that we won’t always have him with us. But for Dylan himself, deep thoughts about mortality had to take a back seat. “Mostly I was in a lot of pain. Pain that was intolerable . . . ”

As with Neoptolemos, it is the observers of the anguish who found it to generate insight. The sufferer himself did not find that pain automatically provided transcendence; and no Heracles descended from heaven to help him make sense of his pain. Now, the consultant of course does associate his pain with insight and possibly even with his ability to connect with historical suffering; but the novel ends up reminding us that, however much power we attribute to our words and our stories, however much we expect that "There must be obedience in this," nature and the body are outside the reach of the power we have over language.