Oedipus: Rex or Tyrannus?

No spoiler alert needed here!

• Oedipus play the quintessential work of dramatic irony

• irony embedded in the work’s structure; significance of characters words/actions clear to audience but not to the character

• Is there ANYBODY that doesn’t know what Oedipus has done??

A brief synopsis: OEDIPUS THE KING (OF THE ROAD)

ONCEPON ATIME LONG AGO IN THEBES IMKING. OEDIPUS DAKING.!LVMYMRS. LVMYKIDS. THEBENS THINK OEDDY ISCOOL. NOPROBS.! OKAY MAYBE THEREZZ 1LITL1. MOTHER WHERERU? WHEREAT MYDAD?!NOCALLZ NEVER. HAVENOT ACLUE. INMYMIND IWNDER WHOAMI? IMUST!FINDEM.! JO MYWIFE GOES, "OED DONT USEE? WERHAPI NOW LETITB." IGO!"NOWAY. IAMBOSS. DONTU TELLME MYLIFE. INEED MYMOM. II WILLL!FINDHER. FIND BOTHOF THEM."! SOI START SEEKING DATRUTH ABOUT WHO IAM. ITGOEZ ULTRAAA!SLOWE. THE SPHYNXS RIDDLE WAS ACINCH BUT NOTTHIZ.! SUDNLEE WEHEAR SHOCKING NEWS. WHEN IWASA TINY1 THISGR8!4SEER SED IWOOD OFF MY ROYAL OLDMAN THEN MARREE MYMAMA. SICKO!RUBBISH, NESTPAS? WHOWHO COULDBE SOGONE? STIL MOMNDAD SENT!MEEEEE AWAY. MEE ABABI AWAAAY.! NOWWWWW GETTHIZ. MANY MOONS GOBY. IMEET THISGUY ONATRIP.!WEDOO RUMBLE. WHOKNEW? ILEFTMY POP ONE DEDMAN.! UGET DAFOTO. MAJR TSURIS. JOJO MYHONEE, MYSQEEZ, MYLAMBY,!MIAMOR, MYCUTEE. JOJOY IZZ MYMOMMY.! YEGODS WHYMEE? YMEYYME? LIFSUX. IAMBAD, IAMBADD, IMSOBAD.!STOPNOW THIS HEDAKE. THIS FLESH DUZ STINK. ITZ 2MUCH PAYNE 4ONE2C.!TAKEGOD MYEYES!!AIEEEEE!!!!By Daniel Nussbaum: (a retelling using 154 of the more than 1 million California personalized license plates registered with the state's Motor Vehicles Bureau)

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• Sophocles (ca 495—ca 406 BCE)

• wrote 120 plays • only seven survive in

full form • Oedipus generally

acclaimed the greatest work of Attic (adj/noun) tragedy

• yet won only second prize on its debut at City Dionysia 429 BCE

Some influential readingsThis play contains the essential elements of tragedy as developed in my Poetics. Here, it is the hubris of the hero that leads him to commit a tragic error leading to a reversal of fortune in which he finally sees his folly. The audience witnesses the hero’s pathetic fate and experiences a cleansing of their own fear and pity called catharsis.

Whoever can force from nature its secrets is themselves outside nature and awaits an unnatural fate. But let us not trust what we find on the surface of tragedy. The genius of Sophocles lay in the poetic representation of the terror of existence in its Apollonian form (the stage) while preserving the Dionysian drive to excess suffering. Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified (BT)

Freud: the death of all other readings

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Oedipus must lose his complex to be complex

''We cannot begin to appreciate the meaning of Oedipus if we continue to think that Oedipus was oedipal,’' philosopher Jonathan Lear !recent criticism: real point of the story is the violence of fathers, the inevitable perversity of nature, the authoritarianism of the state and the patriarchal roots of society !Oedipus not a man to be pitied for his unconscious crimes and guilt !e.g. He can be seen as the victim with no reason to feel guilty !most essential fact is NOT his relationship to Laius and Jocasta but their cruel abandonment of him !other non-Freudian from feminists: Oedipus' relentless pursuit of answers to life's riddles is typically male !and the “hero” becomes king by killing a female dragon (the feminine is monstrous to Oedipus) !! 8

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Oedipus and the Sphinx: painting by Gustave Moreau first exhibited at the French Salon of 1864: oil on canvas

Why does this simply plotted play have staying power?

• central theme: the ambiguous nature of knowing represented in play as a whole and Oedipus

• Oedipus a walking (limping) paradox • weakest and most vulnerable in exactly the

places where he feels strongest and most able • e.g. exchange between Oedipus & Teiresias pp.

43-4 • fate v. freedom, exile v. inclusion, civilization v.

savagery, and incest obvious themes but derivative of this central paradox

Seeing and (not)Knowing

p. 27-28 !Saw Laios without seeing him !Teiresias v. Oedipus: relationship between seeing and knowing reversed

Light and En(lighten)ment

• Oedipus as much a tragedy of enlightenment as a personal tragedy (Oedipus after all never existed)

• enlightened human reason the thwarted hero • the notion that enlightened reason is losing it universal

appeal is a familiar story for modernity • but it’s a story that begins (or is already present) here • Oedipus (and Jocasta) are models of autonomous

rationality: emancipated, fully self-constituted subjects

• especially true of Oedipus who sees his lack of identity as a strength

And the tragedy of enlightenment?

“Either enlightenment increases our autonomy, responsibility, and liberty or the very technologies of truth meant to secure such achievements conceal the workings of power from us precisely when we believe ourselves to be wholly emancipated beings” (Christopher Rocco, Tragedy and Enlightenment, 1997) !Is enlightenment to be celebrated as “a process of self knowledge”? Or should enlightenment be exposed as a “strategy of subjugation”? !An essential paradox at work in the play

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Oedipus is us• Enlightenment sheds light on a subject (makes clear) !• obviously the language and experience of light and darkness (seeing and not seeing) saturate Oedipus !• this is amplified by a piece of word play in the title !• Oedipus = swollen feet !• but it also sounds like “I know” or “I have seen” !• Oida: to see: to say I know something is to say I see it (to bring things to light/Apollo) !• but Oedipus, able to master all things, even nature, with one glaring exception: himself !• another play, Antigone, applies this condition explicitly to humanity itself ! 14

Political dimensions and context (some mythical back-story)

Cadmus and the founding of Thebes !Situates action in the context of polis life

The polis

• Emerges circa 900 BCE • No exact number available (158 according to

Aristotle) • Most were small (between 300 to 700 households) • Athens vast by comparison • Wide variety of constitutions • But always premised on idea of close communal life

(mutual advantage) • No clear separation of public/private life • Life saturated by politics

Aristotle

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god” (Politics) !Zoon Politikon

Background assumption of Athenian life

Oedipus: Beast or god?

Oedipus appears to regard himself as wholly self-sufficient (a god?) !to be fair, he gets some encouragement (p. 25: Priest of Zeus, “You are a man, not a god… BUT….” !Or is he a beast? !but it is the outcomes of his well intended acts not his intentions that are monstrous (note: he is a murderer, so what’s up with that?) !Ultimately he has to leave as per Aristotle

Oedipus: King or Tyrant?

• play was originally titled Oedipus Tyrannus

• T-word is used toward latter part of the play but obliquely, by the chorus (p. 62)

• some suggestions that he is becoming paranoid and accusatory as the plot unfolds

• but is he a tyrant?

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How would a Sophoclean audience understand a tyrant?

• someone who rules without law, looks to own advantage rather than that of subjects, and uses cruel/extreme measures against own people as well as others

• modern definition of the tyrant rather different: e.g. oppressive, arbitrary, wielding absolute power, unrestrained by law or constitution and possibly a usuper

• do any of these things describe Oedipus? • not at first: read opening lines • Oedipus may turn out to be a tyrant (at least

technically) but he’s not wholly self-serving 21

In fact, is he not a saviour? (and twice?)

• some readings of the play describe Oedipus as an ironically self-offered scape-goat

• relies on a known practice of ritualistic sacrifice or exile of a human victim: the pharmakos

• chosen as a symbolic outsider • exiled during times of crisis (typically plague) to

bring purification • societal catharsis (same function as tragedy itself

for Aristotle) • this victim was typically a slave, criminal, or cripple • by the play’s end, Oedipus is at least 2 of these

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Leviticus 16,10: Law of Atonement

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After the cleansing, the live goat was brought to the high priest. Laying his hands on the scapegoat, the high priest was to “confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites – all their sins – and put them on the goat’s head. He shall send the goat away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place; and the man shall release it in the wilderness” (vv. 21-22)

And what about Athens• Bernard Knox suggests Oedipus’s original title tyrannus may refer as much to Athens as its lame scapegoat !• calls Oedipus “a symbolic representation of Periclean Athens,” resembling “that imperial city’s self-taught, self-made, and unaided ability to seize control of the environment, bending and forcing it to comply with its human designs” (Knox, intro. to Three Theban Plays, Penguin 1984)

• but along with the power and splendor of Athens comes an implied critique of its attempted mastery of nature, its love of its own achievements, its daring and reckless foreign policy, its turning away from traditional religious values, etc. !• raises tantalizing possibility that the audience was watching an enactment of its own tragic condition !!

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