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Ch. 16: The Tragic House of Laius: Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle
Where Aeschylus was a young man at the birth of Athenian democracy, and came to be a
playwright as Athens fought and defeated Persia, and became a great regional power, Sophocles
grew up in the wake of all that. He saw Athens at its height, but also saw it during its
involvement in the catastrophic Peloponnesian War, almost living until the end of that war that
Athens lost. He is considered by many scholars to be the pinnacle of what Greek (i.e.
Athenian) dramaturgy could be. And the Greek comic playwright, and contemporary,
Aristophanes, depicts him very favorably in his play, The Frogs in which Dionysus goes to the
Underworld following the death of Euripides and Sophocles to find a decent playwright to come
back to Athens. In that play, Sophocles is considered the best, but he is too pious to leave
Hades, and so Aeschylus and Euripides compete to see who gets to be brought back to life and
save Athenian drama. He took part in Athenian politics as well as writing over 100 plays, of
which only 7 survive.
The Oedipus plays are not a trilogy. They were not written to be performed together and the
narrative arc of the three plays would be Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, but
Antigone was performed first (c. 441 BC) and Oedipus Rex coming later (sometime between
429-425) and the Oedipus at Colonus coming last – it was actually performed posthumously in
401 BC.
Of these plays, the best known (in fact it is the best of all Greek drama) is the Oedipus Rex
(aka Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus the King or King Oedipus). The Latin title comes from the
practice of giving ancient works Latin titles in European universities. The Latin title, together
with the English titles, loses the force of the Greek title. A tyrannus (“tyrant”) in Greek is not
necessarily a bad ruler (what the word largely means for us) – a tyrant can be a very good ruler,
and the tyrant Pisistratus, though some hated him, was responsible for a lot of cultural
developments in Athens. A tyrant is a person who is king, not by birth, but by public
acclamation. In Oedipus’ case, he took the throne of Thebes following his acclamation by the
people after his solving the riddle of the Sphinx, thus ending her threat. In truth, though, he
was not really a tyrant, but a basileus (the equivalent of King or Rex), the son of the previous
king. So the title plays on the fact that he is really the king by birth, not just by acclamation, and
that fact when it comes out will be his undoing.
Both Freud and Jung made much of the play. Freud’s concept of the “Oedipus Complex” (a
term he didn’t use) comes from his reading of the play – for Freud, all male children are drawn
to their mother as infants, because mom provides them with comfort and sustenance, but they
hate their fathers, who come and take mom away. In a normal development, the male will learn
to bond with his father and then play that paternal role when his own time comes. So the
incestuous leanings we may have as children is something that doesn’t stay – as we grow older,
we let go of those desires, at least if we are healthy. Jung spoke of the “terrible mother,” who
had a stranglehold on her male offspring, so that the male did not grow up and move on (which
is necessary).
The ancient philosopher, Aristotle, also had a lot to say about this play, which he considered
the epitome of Greek tragedy. His theory of tragedy, the Poetics, singles out this play as the
ideal tragedy – it observes the three unities of time, place and action. It follows a person of
prominence who, through some harmatia (“flaw” or “error”), suffers some disastrous change of
circumstances (peripeteia – “reversal”).
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In some respects, I think that Aristotle is mistaken in seeing these as ideals. And I believe that
his sense that Oedipus has a tragic flaw in his pride that causes him to keep investigating when
everyone else advises him against it. Oedipus cannot give up the investigation – and that, I
maintain, makes him heroic. He is investigating the death of Laius not just for himself, but to
save the city from the plague that has hit it. Were he to abandon the search, it is possible that
he could continue to live in ignorance of his past, but at great cost to the city. He’s right about
the peripeteia, which is clearly a strong part of this drama – the chorus emphasizes their final
speech when they point out that Oedipus was judged the happiest of all men, and witness his
great fall, so “call no man happy until he is dead; until then, he is only fortunate.”
I like the points that H and P make regarding Apollo in the play – they suggest that Apollo does
not cause any of the action. He only predicts what will happen. It takes the efforts of the
humans involved to make them happen. And so, he is not responsible for what happens. Still,
it is the oracle that sets the action in motion, and, so he perhaps has some blame in all
this. Oedipus is not to blame, in the Greek mindset, for what happens. He kills Laius, but he
was provoked and could argue something like self-defense, even if he took it to the
extreme. And his living in sin with mom – that was something that happened out of ignorance.
The theme of riddles and investigation play a large role in this play. Oedipus is acclaimed as the
great riddle-solver, as he solved the riddle of the Sphinx, and he proves a certain dogged
determination to get at the answers in this play. He is not aware of some bigger riddles, such
as “who am I?” or “what does it mean to be a human?” lessons he only learns after suffering.
The Oedipus at Colonus was not only the last play that Sophocles wrote (at age 90), but it
features importantly in a suit brought against him by his sons. They wanted to get at his
property, and so tried to have him declared insane. Supposedly, his only defense consisted in
reading some of the passages from this play, and the jury was won over to find for the
defendant. I’m convinced that some of the vitriol that Oedipus utters at his sons was written
with his own sons in mind. In this play, Oedipus, after having wandered around the Greek land
as a blind beggar for about a decade, comes to Athens, to the neighborhood of Colonus, where
there is a shrine to the Eumenides (the Furies, converted to forces for good), and he finds
welcome. There was a shrine to Oedipus in Colonus, the area of Athens where Sophocles
grew up and lived. And so, he no doubt felt some kinship to this strange figure and, in writing
this play, brings Oedipus’ life to an end together with his own. This does not seem like a
tragedy, as we might understand it from Aristotle. There is no peripeteia in the play. Oedipus
is already a blind beggar. In this play, he is taken by the gods which story suggests why there
would be a shrine to him in Colonus. It does not have an unhappy ending, but a rather
miraculous ending. The play also gives Sophocles the chance, late in his life, when Athens is
about to collapse due to the war, to depict an ideal king in the Athenian hero, Theseus.
The Antigone, as a tragedy, does feature a peripeteia for the figure of Creon, who begins the
play as king, with all hanging on his every word, but ends with a greatly deflated Creon. He’s
still king, but has lost his son and wife. He learns a lesson from all this, which would suggest
that he is the real tragic hero of the play. Antigone herself does not learn anything. She does
not develop. She is an heroic figure, and can be seen as both a hero impersonator, daring to do
things that would be done by men, and the bride of Death.
I find it interesting that the Antigone is compared to Romeo and Juliet, in that we have a bride
(or fiancée) who is discovered dead (by mistake in Romeo’s case) and the groom then killing
himself because he cannot live without his love. The story we have here of Antigone is not
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what we have in other accounts, where Theseus gets involved in forcing Creon to bury the
enemy war dead, or to give their bodies up for burial.