True Heroes, False Hoaxes, and Nietzsche’s Will to Power: Bludgeoning the Truth of Coronavirus with a Narrative of Perversion; or how the Beaches Were Kept Open in Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws
Among heroes whose adventures are recorded in the literary canon, Oedipus is exemplary. He travels to the gateway of Thebes where the Sphinx holds the people of the city captive. In answering her riddle, the Sphinx faints or alternatively, throws herself on some rocks. Oedipus frees Thebes and “restores the world,” thus, achieving the ultimate objective of the hero-task. But, when the restoration of the world is achieved, its renewal ensured, has the hero truly come to the end of his journey? What if, instead, as in Oedipus Rex, the world falls into chaos again. Contrary to Campbell’s traditional conception of the adventure, Sophocles dramatizes in Oedipus Rex an articulation of the hero’s path not as a journey forward in time towards rebirth and resurrection but one that goes backwards to reveal the unfathomable truth about Oedipus himself which, in a narrative of revelation, has caused a second upset of the world.
The fictional chaos of Thebes in Oedipus Rex metaphorizes the real-world upheaval which began in the US on January 20, 2020, when the CDC confirmed the first case of COVID-19 in Washington State. Since that initial scientific apprehension, however, the status of the virus in the United States has become and continues to be contested terrain which not only hosts the denial of is its own lethal potential to cause quantifiable death, but, furthermore, destabilizes how truth itself is ascertained and secured. If Oedipus Rex is exemplary of a narrative of revelation which results in the surfacing of truth, namely, that Oedipus himself is the defilement causing chaos in Thebes; the truth of the coronavirus has been subject, instead, to an inversion and/or perversion of the narrative of revelation which has selectively favored its status as a hoax perpetrated by institutions to “control and rule the world.” That is, the rhetorical strategies unique to the narrative of revelation have been mobilized for a purpose contrary to its form – namely, to inculcate verifiable truths as falsehoods and entrench unsupported lies as the truth.
Drawing on the theoretical framework in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil combined with a reading of Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws, this article will seek to track how the rhetorical strategies underpinning the narrative of revelation can be used as a tool to upend truth in favor of a lie in order to reify traditional hierarchies in all forms – i.e. the Will to Power. In the case of coronavirus former President Trump networked the facts of the virus not in a narrative of revelation which would have empowered the American people against COVID-19; but, rather he perpetrated politically motivated untruths in a narrative of perversion. That is, he “revealed” falsehoods as truth with the intent of aggregating power to himself and his allies. Trump’s narrative of perversion constituted a potent negation of the virus’ measurable consequences for Americans and as such functioned as the ultimate conduit for Trump’s Will to Power. But, even a given narrative of perversion, like the one grafted onto COVID-19 perpetrating it as a “hoax,” must activate elements of observable reality in order to have social purchase; thus, this article will demonstrate how the narrative of perversion eventually yields to truth through the disjoining of false rhetoric from facts, especially when the consequence is death. The narrative of perversion failing to anticipate the material accretions of fact-based experience becomes constitutive of its own unraveling and is ultimately displaced by the rhetorical forms subtending the narrative of revelation and truth.
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