ARTicles vol. 2 i.4a: Too Deep for Tears

Freud trivialized Oedipus. By focusing so narrowly on domestic melodrama, he let slip the power of myth. But Sophocles, by casting his net beyond the “family romance,” caught the majesty and mystery of Oedipus. It has become customary to refer to the play as Oedipus Tyrannus, indicating the play’s oblique defense of Athenian democracy. Sophocles dramatizes the danger of placing too much power in the hands of any one man: the health of the polis depends on a distribution of power and a system of checks and balances. The word “king” does not convey the fear of autocracy that the word “tyrannos” held for Athenians. Modern readers tend to concentrate on Oedipus’ personal struggle, overlooking the work’s political implications, but the tragedy is not only Oedipus’, it is also Thebes’. Some scholars point to Pericles and Aspasia as prototypes of Oedipus and Jocasta and see the play as a warning to Athens, which had undergone the terrors of a plague and would soon suffer defeat at the hands of Sparta. No less than individuals, powers and principalities, empires and dominions can bring about their nemesis through hubris. Like all complex works of the imagination, Sophocles’ play is open to various and contradictory interpretations. In the main, critics have approached it from four different perspectives. The most traditional see it as a drama of guilt and expiation. The play, they argue, presented at a religious festival for Dionysus, was written to prove that men must walk in fear and trembling before the gods. Oedipus errs through tragic flaws – temper and intellectual pride – and thereby deserves his punishment. Morally as well as physically we live in a cause-and-effect world governed by logos, an underlying world order. When humans, through freely willed acts, violate the fundamental principle of justice (dike), only a violent recoil can restore harmony. Oedipus’ fall stems from his moral failure. Opponents of this interpretation see Oedipus not as a victim of his flaws but of Apollo. Apollo sets the trap that destroys him. These critics contend that the Victorian notion of tragic flaw came from misreading Aristotle. The word he uses, hamartia, means an error of judgment, or “missing the mark.” It does not refer to an inherent character trait. Nothing Oedipus does merits his punishment – a catastrophe that engulfs not only Oedipus but Jocasta, their guiltless children and the people of Thebes. In Aeschylus’ version, the sins of Laius call down a curse that destroys his house, but Sophocles reduces human guilt. The oracles did not alert Laius until after Jocasta had conceived, and Sophocles has Oedipus kill Laius in legitimate self-defense. Moreover, his anger at Teiresias, while ill-considered, can be explained by his concern for the welfare of Thebes. Teiresias withholds information that could lead to the city’s salvation. As for his pride, Oedipus behaves no differently from other epic heroes, who unabashedly vaunt their virtues. In addition, he is pious. He flees Corinth to avoid sin and sends Creon to Delphi to consult the oracle. His subjects love him. Oedipus is a kind and just ruler, a good man brought low by the inexplicable blows of fate. The final choral ode takes Oedipus as representative man and reminds the audience that human happiness is fragile: the days of one’s glory are, by the laws of Apollo, the god of life, numbered. Tragedy can strike at any moment, and no one can escape his portion of sorrow. Oedipus’ fall is an awareness that the gods are not with him. Anthropological critics interpret the play as recording the conflict between two different periods of social and psychological evolution. The myth records the passage from a protopsychic stage of culture, in which individuation had not yet occurred, and a dawning awareness of the importance of the individual soul or psyche. Oedipus’ fall is a fall into consciousness of self, of a private self separate from social role or totemic symbol. This cultural shift is repeated in every individual’s life at that moment when his consciousness becomes aware of itself as a person, separate from mother, separate from the surrounding world. This self-reflecting consciousness brings with it a foreknowledge of its own destruction. Self-awareness is an awareness of the limits of self, of the end of self, of death. All tragedy, writes Unamuno, comes from this fall into consciousness. Also inscribed in the play is the conflict between, on the one hand, primal taboo – which when violated disrupts the cosmos, results in physical pollution, and demands violent retribution – and, on the other hand, a more enlightened ethical and legal code which takes into account motive and intent. According to primitive taboos, Oedipus is guilty. He killed his father and married his mother, two heinous crimes. The plague is a physical manifestation of this pollution. Blood guilt must be purged with blood. According to the more advanced concepts of Athenian jurisprudence, however, Oedipus, acting in ignorance and self-defense, is morally innocent. These approaches to the play converge on the central problem of religion – the mystery of evil – and the central question of philosophy: is man free? If we are not free, to what extent can we be held accountable for our acts? If Apollo, symbol of life, lays a snare for Oedipus at his birth, who bears the guilt, and what does this imply about the nature of the god and his laws? The vocabulary of this debate changes from age to age and from discipline to discipline – free will, grace, predestination, heredity, environment, determinism, sociobiology – but the question remains, and nowhere has it been posed with such power as in Sophocles. Critics with a philosophical bent see Oedipus as an existential allegory. His search for the criminal becomes a search for the self. Oedipus, who guessed that the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle was man, now has to answer a greater riddle: what manner of man am I? The detective story to find the killer of a king becomes a psychological quest. What the twenty-first century admires most in Oedipus is his intellectual courage. When Teiresias and Jocasta warn him not to continue, he presses forward. “Let it be known!” he shouts – I must know who I am. From the moment he knows who he is, he also knows what he is, and his tragedy begins. It is this refusal to retreat from lucidity, no matter how painful, that earns Oedipus a place in Albert Camus’ pantheon of “absurd” heroes in The Myth of Sisyphus. The universe may not respond to the human need for radiance, clarity and unity, but Oedipus, alone and exiled, finds in himself the strength to endure. Oedipus resonates deeply with us. Ours is an age of anxiety. In many ways the cultural and spiritual crises of our time parallel the upheavals in fifth-century Athens. “We now know,” wrote Paul Valéry in La Crise de l’Esprit, that “civilizations are mortal… The circumstances that could bury the works of Keats and Baudelaire in a grave with those of Menander are no longer inconceivable. They are in the newspapers.” Joseph Wood Krutch argued that it is no longer possible to write tragedy because man has lost faith in himself. Perhaps that explains why more than ever we need Oedipus. When Sophocles wrote Oedipus, Athens was passing through a moment of doubt and self-doubt. From having saved Greece from Persia, she had begun to impose her will arrogantly on the other Greek cities. But her empire crumbled rapidly. In addition to political and military reverses, advances in philosophy, science, mathematics, and jurisprudence led many to question the Olympian gods as an adequate way of explaining the universe. Hippocrates started to diagnose diseases by distinguishing one syndrome from another. Scientists devised a new physics based on atoms and set forth a theory of evolution tracing man’s origin to ocean slime. “Man,” declared Protagoras, “is the measure of all things.” But what is man? What is his place in the universe? The old answers no longer seemed adequate. Could reason rather than the old myths make sense of the world and our lives? It was a cultural revolution the likes of which the world has never seen again. If the old gods do not exist, who or what rules the universe? “A whirlwind cast Zeus out and now reigns supreme,” exclaims Pheidippides in Aristophanes’ The Clouds. It was an age of uncertainty and anxiety, not unlike our own. The intellectual doubts of that age come to a head in Jocasta, whom literary critics, focusing on Oedipus, often overlook. From many points of view, however, she is the most interesting character in the play. Many had come to distrust Delphi – after all it had favored Persia over Greece and forged oracles circulated widely. In the play, which turns on oracles, Jocasta begins by questioning the god’s priests. She ends by questioning the god himself. “As for prophecy,” she declares, “I would not look left or right because of it. … Chance rules life.” The gods and her relationship to them do not motivate Jocasta. What matters to her are human relationships, the welfare of those she loves. Sophocles pits her as a foil against Oedipus. She can face the frightening possibility that chance and a whirlwind rule the universe, but she cannot live if her human connections are destroyed. In the Poetics, Aristotle cited Sophocles’ play as the prime example of tragedy and used it to prove the superiority of drama over other literary genres. Now, 2,400 years after its premiere, Oedipus continues to stir us and stir us deeply because it defines the human condition with wisdom and compassion, dramatizing feelings that lie too deep for tears. Oedipus is a myth that still tells the truth. Arthur Holmberg, Associate Professor of Theatre at Brandeis University, is Literary Director of the A.R.T.. This essay appeared in Readings on Sophocles, a collection of essays with selections by C. M. Bowra, Werner Jaeger, Edith Hamilton, H. D. F. Kitto, G. M. Kirkwood, Bernard M. W. Knox, and Robert Fitzgerald.