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Oedipus Tyrannus. J. Svoboda 1963. Plan of session. A history of readings, including Aristotle’s The play and its lasting power The search for the past and its mapping in space Key spaces in Oedipus Tyrannus Oedipus as part of a universal order The ending of the play.
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Oedipus Tyrannus J. Svoboda 1963
Plan of session • A history of readings, including Aristotle’s • The play and its lasting power • The search for the past and its mapping in space • Key spaces in Oedipus Tyrannus • Oedipus as part of a universal order • The ending of the play
a history of readings, their validities and limitations • Aristotle and the eternal influence of the Poetics: catharsis, hamartia • Reception of hamartia as ‘fatal flaw’ in the Renaissance => a story of power, guilt and punishment • Oedipus and the constraints of the inevitable:19th and early 20th cent German scholarship => fate, freedom and responsibility • Freud and the subconscious • Ritual pattern of expulsion and purification (1930s ritual turn) • Knox and the ‘heroic temper’ (1960s): magnificent self-destruction better than petty compromise • 1990s: the hero as ‘elite’ at odds with democratic ideology • ……………………………………………………………… • A detective story: OCR
the play and its lasting power • Oedipus as Everyman; a reversal of fortune that can happen to anyone • The stories we believe about ourselves and our lives, when it all comes crashing down • A point in life with an effect so radical as was place where ‘three roads meet’ for Oedipus • Not ‘message’, as such; a story that constitutes, somehow, an enlargement of sensibility • Ironic pronouncement in view of the play’s canonical status: ‘I, Oedipus, whose fame is known to all the world’ (v. 8) Chorus after hero’s realisation (1193-6): With your fate before me, paradigm (παράδειγμα) before me, yours, Oedipus, I boast nothing human blest (trans. Taplin 2017)
‘Mapping out’ the past • The whole play is about reconstructing and understanding the past; permeated with the language of searching, finding, seeing, knowing, understanding • Oedipus’ search into the past and shedding light is marked by emblematic uses of space • In order of realisation: Thebes, plague and death => the place where three roads meet => Cithaeron as the place that preserved him as a baby => the house: metonymy of the bedroom of his parents and womb of his mother • ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ etymology and word play: Oid- (swell) + pous(foot) or oid- (~eid) (know, see) + pou (WHERE)
The violated earth /motherof thebes(opening scene) Oed. 22-30
The violated earth /motherof thebes(choral entry song) Oed. 170-85
Mount Cithaeron in Oedipus’ life Oedipus’ wish for the end of his life: Oed. 1449-54 • Mountains as spaces of mythical primordial beginnings and endings
Why is space important? • Spaces are, as shown, key in the text (and everywhere in Sophocles) => we need to understand them • Play about identity, origins and life-journey • It is very easy to misconstrue a play like Oedipus so readily connected with questions about fate and the gods - Thinking about space helps us ‘zoom in’ with different tools => Let us not think only in relation to an abstract ‘divine’, fashioned in our own modern (largely monotheistic, and Christian, in particular) concept of divinity => Let us not strip Sophocles’ cosmology from its own context, which was religious but also philosophical • Sophocles’ ‘interconnected universe’: Charles Segal (the greatest scholar on Sophocles), Tragedy and Civilisation, Sophocles’ Tragic World, Oedipus Tyrannus; cf. Oudemans and Lardinois, Tragic Ambiguity) • Oedipus (and humanity) is explored as part of such a universe, a wider, ‘cosmic order’; not just Oedipus and the gods / and his fate; space as philosophical metaphor
Sophocles’ depictions of landscape … are also integral to the tragic world that frames the doomed lives of his protagonists. They express his profound sense of the interconnectedness of all parts of the world. • Segal, Sophocles’ Tragic World
Fate, gods and responsibility See Dodds’ article ‘On Misunderstanding Oedipus’; see also intro by Taplin 2017 Greek, not Christian, understanding of these notions Largely, free agency and decision-making shown by characters But a certain cosmic order is understood to be operative at the same time (embodied largely in the divine - incl. oracles - but also in nature, in the ‘cosmos’) THE TWO ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE • Humans’ place in the cosmic order: Oedipus’ life-journey is a paradigm, and says more about humanity (and its place in this order) than about the divine
The ending of the play • In one of the most iconic scenes of the history of Oedipus’ modern productions, in the finale the hero was seen climbing the seemingly endless staircase of J. Svoboda’s set (Prague, 1963): unforgettable image of suffering and endurance Indeed, the play (e.g. Teiresias’ words earlier) makes one believe that Oedipus’ death will be connected to Cithaeron
The ending of the play • This is also what we see Oedipus explicitly asking at 1449-54 • Women of Trachisends with the hero’s ascent onto mount Oeta for his death and apotheosis • Oedipus at Colonus ends with the hero’s descent into the grove of the Eumenides and his apotheosis and yet this is not what happens in Oedipus Tyrannus… (if the surviving ending is authentic)
The ending of the play • Scene with Oedipus, and children Antigone and Ismene • At the orders of Creon, parting from children and exit into the house. What is the dramatic effect of this exit? • Mystifying, open endings of Sophocles that make the audience search for meanings. • Emphasis on no end to sufferings, and hero’s endurance. • Connotations of house-space: womb of his mother; love-making space of his parents and of himself; space of death (cf. Jocasta’s suicide) in tragedy in general; space embodying the curse of the Labdacids, perennially blowing a tempest for the family • Foreshadowing of mirror-ending of Oedipus at Colonus?
