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Sophocles Oedipus the King Antigone

Sophocles Oedipus the King Antigone. Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC).

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Sophocles Oedipus the King Antigone

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  1. Sophocles Oedipus the King Antigone

  2. Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC) • “Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its parts used separately in the various parts of the play; represented by people acting and not by narration: accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.” (ch. 6)

  3. Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC) • “Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its parts used separately in the various parts of the play; represented by people acting and not by narration: accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.” (ch. 6) • mimesis = imitation/representation. The goal of art, tragedy included, is to represent or imitate life.

  4. Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC) • “Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its parts used separately in the various parts of the play; represented by people acting and not by narration: accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.” (ch. 6) • mimesis = imitation/representation. The goal of art, tragedy included, is to represent or imitate life. • catharsis = purgation/purification. A trickier term, and much contested.

  5. Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC) • “Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its parts used separately in the various parts of the play; represented by people acting and not by narration: accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.” (ch. 6) • mimesis = imitation/representation. The goal of art, tragedy included, is to represent or imitate life. • catharsis = purgation/purification. A trickier term, and much contested. • pity and terror: this pairing of emotional responses is invoked again and again by Aristotle.

  6. Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC) • 6 key parts of a tragedy (in order of importance): • plot • character • thought • diction • music • spectacle • “Plot is the origin and as it were the soul of tragedy, and the characters are secondary.” (ch. 6)

  7. Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC) • The constituents of a “complex” plot: • A reversal in fortune (peripeteia) • 2. Recognition: “a change from ignorance to knowledge” (anagnorisis) • Maximum effect is achieved when these come together. • Also: • 3. Suffering: “a destructive or painful action, e.g. deaths in full view, agonies, woundings etc.”

  8. Aristotle and Oedipus the King • Sophocles’sOedipus the King an exemplary tragedy for Aristotle. • Reversal: King becomes outcast, saviour becomes foe, curser becomes cursed, husband becomes son… • Recognition: Oedipus discovers that he has killed his father and married his mother, Jocasta. • Aristotle: “in the Oedipus, the man who comes to bring delight to Oedipus, and to rid him of his terror about his mother, does the opposite by revealing who Oedipus is.” • **Reversal and recognition are intertwinned.** • Suffering Oedipus is blinded and exiled.

  9. Aristotle and Oedipus the King The structure of the tragic plot Solution/unravelling (denouement) Complication Jocasta’s suicide; Oedipus’s blinding and exile; Creon’s accession to the throne of Thebes. The plague; the Oracle’s words; Oedipus’s search for the murderer of Laius; Tiresias’s cryptic revelation of the truth; Jocasta’s telling of the history of her son and the circumstances of Laius’s death. Reversal/recognition Discovery that Oedipus killed Laius and that Laius and Jocasta are his real parents

  10. Aristotle and Oedipus the King • Tragedies, Aristotle argues, shouldn’t show: • The fall of a good man: “this is neither terrifying nor pitiable, but shocking” • The rise of a wicked man: “it is neither morally satisfying nor pitiable nor terrifying” • The fall of an out-and-out villain: “such a structure can contain moral satisfaction, but nor pity or terror”. • Rather, the tragic protagonist must be someone neither supremely virtuous nor supremely wicked who suffers “because of some error, and who is one of those people with a great reputation and a good fortune, e.g. Oedipus.” (ch. 13) • Hamartia • Literally, “missing the mark”; usually translated as “flaw”. Neither accident nor wickedness.

  11. Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw • What is Oedipus’s tragic flaw? • As Tiresias points out, Oedipus does not see clearly: • You call me blind, you jeer at me – • I say your sight is not clear enough to see • Who shares your palace, nor the room in which you walk, • Nor the sorrow about you… • Now • You have sight, but then you will go in blindness; • When you know the truth of your wedding night (200) • Sight and understanding are here inversely proportional.

  12. Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw • What is Oedipus’s tragic flaw? • According to the Chorus, he has overreached in seeking greater knowledge and perfect happiness: • Oedipus aimed beyond the reach of a man • And fixed with his arrowing mind • Perfection and rich happiness. (233) • Your own mind, reaching after the secrets • Of gods, condemned you to your fate. (237-8) • At the end of the tragedy, the Chorus state: • Remember that death alone can end all suffering; • Go towards death, and ask for no greater • Happiness than a life • In which there has been no anger and no pain. (244)

  13. Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw • The Sphinx’s riddle: • What is it that walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three in the evening? • Oedipus’s correct answer: • A human. Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864)

  14. Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw • What is Oedipus’s tragic flaw? • Final irony: through his overwhelming suffering Oedipus does exceed the limits of the human. • More than mortal in your acts of evil. • More than mortal in your suffering, Oedipus. (237)

  15. Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw • If Oedipus could not have avoided his fate, how can we hold him to be flawed? • E. R. Dodds(1966): • No human court could acquit Oedipus of pollution; for pollution inhered in the act itself, irrespective of motive … Oedipus accepts responsibility for all his acts, including those which are objectively most horrible, though subjectively innocent. (43, 48) • Terry Eagleton (2003): • It is surely perverse to find a drama’s deepest value in the fact that its hero accepts responsibility for what is palpably not his fault. Perhaps there is a hint here of the public-school ethic of sportingly taking someone else’s punishment for them. Oedipus is certainly a sacrificial scapegoat, who will finally come to assume the burden of the community’s sins. (33)

  16. Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw • The “scapegoat mechanism” • Coined by Kenneth Burke in Permanence and Change (1935), and elaborated by Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred (1972). • For Girard, the scapegoat is a violent solution to the problem of violence: • Communal violence projected onto a single individual, who is held responsible for strife and discord. • His or her death/expulsion a means of regenerating communal bonds and restoring peace. • All of this must occur unconsciously. • How might this conception of the scapegoat change our understanding of catharsis?

  17. Sophocles’s “Theban Plays”: • 1. Oedipus the King (c. 430 BC) • 2. Oedipus at Colonus(c. 406 BC) • 3. Antigone(c. 441 BC)

  18. Antigone and the limits of Aristotle’s theory • Who is the tragic protagonist of Antigone? • Antigone • Reversal? She is already the victim of misfortune: her brothers’ deaths and “the curse of Oedipus” (255). • Recognition? She fully understands what she is doing – and its implications – from the outset: “I am doing only what I must” (258). • Flaw? Law-breaker? The Chorus accuse her of stubbornness: “Like father, like daughter: both headstrong, deaf to reason! | She has never learned to yield” (269).

  19. Antigone and the limits of Aristotle’s theory • Who is the tragic protagonist of Antigone? • Antigone • Do the gods assist her? Of Polyneices’s second burial, the Sentry states: • A storm of dust roared up from the earth, and the sky • Went out, the plain vanished with all its trees • In the stinging dark. We closed our eyes and endured it. • The whirlwind lasted a long time, but it passed; • And then we looked, and there was Antigone! (267)

  20. Antigone and the limits of Aristotle’s theory • Who is the tragic protagonist of Antigone? • Creon • Flaw? Like Oedipus, he resists the will of the gods; like Oedipus he scorns Tiresias for his words of warning. As Tiresias’s states: • You have kept from the gods below the child that is theirs • The one in the grave before her death, the other, • Dead, denied the grave. This is your crime… (287) • Recognition? He does see the error of his ways but what difference does this make? Nothing is discovered. • Reversal? His son and wife die but he suffers neither death or exile. He remains King.

  21. Antigone: love versus the law • Creon embodies the state and its laws: “The State is the King!” (277) • Antigone embodies love (as does Haimon, in a different way). • At centre of the play, the Chorus sing an ode to love. Nothing sentimental here! • Love, unconquerable • Waster of rich men… • Even the pure Immortals cannot escape you, • And mortal man, in his one day’s dusk • Trembles before your glory. (280)

  22. Antigone: love versus the law • Agon that opens the play:

  23. Antigone: love versus the law • Agon that opens the play • Antigone: “Words are not friends” (271) • Chorus, at the end of the tragedy: “Big words are always punished” (295)

  24. Bibliography • Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). • Burke, Kenneth, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (New York: New Republic, 1936). • Dodds, E. R., “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex,” Greece and Rome, 13.1 (1966), 37-49. • Eagleton, Terry, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). • Hall, Edith, “The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E. Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 93-126 • Girard, Rene, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1977). • Williams, Raymond, Drama in Performance, rev. edn. (London: Penguin, 1968), 7-31.

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