Getting Away From The Dark Side: Oedipus and Hamlet
One of the best commentaries on Sophocles’ hero, Oedipus, and the Vision of the play can be found in the Penguin Classics reprint: SOPHOCLES. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. The fabulous translation of these works by Robert Fagles has none of the self-conscious ‘classicism’ and ‘Ancient’ staginess of so many others. And the Introduction and Notes by Bernard Knox are so powerful, telling and true that you might wonder how you could possibly add to them and decide to just give up on the spot. (In that way, of course, you would be the opposite of Oedipus himself; you’d be avoiding the key human responsibility of making a truth your own out of the experiences time and fate and your own actions have brought upon you. ALL these terms combine and connect to make up the totality of human experience – Time links to Fate, Fate links to our own actions, independence and that which stands beyond our own free will combine to make up the totality of a human life.
Here is what Knox has to say about the continuing effect of OEDIPUS REX in modern times:
‘Sophocles’ play has served modern man and his haunted sense of being caught in a trap…as the model for a modern drama that presents to us, using the ancient figures, our own terror of the unknown future which we fear we cannot control – our deep fear that every step we take forward on what we think is the road of progress may really be a step toward a foreordained rendezvous with disaster.’
Knox wrote these notes in 1982. Global anxiety about climate change and environmental destruction was not widely felt at that time- but look how vividly now these words speak to us all. That phrase the road of progress carries with it now a sense of anxiety amounting, for many, to shock. It expresses our fear that what we are encouraged to see as the road of progress is taking us closer to foreordained disaster- this is right at the forefront of 21st century anxiety – global change, ‘fracking’, the polluting and degrading of the planet in the ungoverned panic of the industrial, mining and conventional energy corporates and their political barrow boys – the fear of some gigantic and irreversible consequence that destroys us all lies behind the endless terror films pumped out by Hollywood: the Terminator series, The Day After Tomorrow and the many others of the last twenty years, as well as the grand and beautiful film by Lars Von Trier, Melancholia – all these present us with the sense that we are straying in ignorance down a road to complete extermination not just of our species but of the planet itself.
Ignorance, passivity, blind determination and the failure to use our sense of what is really true, our ignoring of the Instinct we all have that what we are doing is destructive- all these terms spin up out of Sophocles’ drama of destruction, of ignorance and blind determination at work in the uncovering of a disastrous truth. Of ignorance and blind determination creating that disaster in the first place – because if Oedipus’ parents hadn’t been so determined on avoiding the fate predicted for them and laid down by the gods then it would never have taken place. Everybody knows the perfect trajectory of this play: that the further Oedipus is sent and then runs from his fate the closer he gets to it all the time. That is why, for Aristotle, this play is the perfect tragedy. And this is the Crux of the play: what is the relationship between human agency and Fate? Is man captive to a universe where all is determined for him? Or is he Free? There cannot be a tragedy unless he IS free. SO how is Oedipus a Tragic Hero if he fulfills a Fate already laid down for him by the gods?
This is huge issue. The force of Sophocles’ treatment of it has lingered in the Western mind for two and a half thousand years. Every one of us who ventures on it – every time we venture on it – we set sail on an ocean of as terrifying thought and dark feeling as that invoked at the beginning of the play by the Priest’s powerful image of the city of Thebes in its death-throes:
our ship pitches wildly, cannot lift her head
from the depths, the red waves of death…
We take a deep breath, reading this, knowing what sort of world we are about to enter. Sometimes the power of it is too much, too intense, so unrelenting in its pace and the terrible speed of the revelation, as one after another of those who know the truth are summoned to the scene of the play.
*
So, taking that deep breath, let’s make a start on the specifics of the play and its vision. And on the useful principle First things first, we will start with THE SPHINX.
(Note, all references come from the Robert Fagles translation)
One: THE SPHINX. In this play human agency,(represented by Oedipus, the first truly modern hero in most people’s reckoning) is on a collision course with forces beyond the control of any man or woman – the Divine as communicated through oracles and prophets, and the Alien-Irrational represented by the Sphinx that harsh brutal singer of line 46.
What is the Sphinx, the dark singer who haunts the edge of Thebes? That chanting fury(who) kept her deathwatch here(l.445) Take a moment to imagine her; she hangs over the little city of men, a deep and foul enemy, exulting in her power – she sings, she chants – over the helpless human world. The image of a monstrous enemy to human kind is thriving even in these advanced days. Look how it persists, transmitted through popular culture in films like Alien and Predator. Arnie, (our modern Oedipus???) when he sees the Predator in the first film of the series, asks, simply, from the simple heart of human recognition of what vulnerable beings we are on this, ‘our’ planet, as he looks at the merciless, insect-like/Samurai-like Antagonist
What are you?
That’s all he says. It’s a fascinating moment. He’s not aggressive; he’s not even, in this moment, afraid. He’s full of wonder; he’s (momentarily) amazed, being forced, for the first time in his consciousness, to step outside his unthinking assumption, the one we all share, that we are at the centre of life, that we are the centre of the ‘real’ world, that what ‘we’ are defines the world and describes reality. We’ve had this one in our systems from the beginning of consciousness. It’s there in Greek thought and then, with the Renaissance, it’s been kicked it into the centre of the official frame of ideas: see what Hamlet says in the speech already quoted in the essay on Meursault (‘What Meursault Knows’) you know, the Speech he makes to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act 2, Sc. Ii… What piece of work is a man…..the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals…
It doesn’t seem as if this is so far different from the world that Oedipus sees in the Thebes he rules and hears described back to him in the opening oration of the Priest: a land submissive to the gods in religion and belief but very much a world of men, women and children. The Priest evokes this human-centred world:
Rule! he begs Oedipus, ‘rule a land of the living…Ship and towered city are nothing, stripped of men…alive within it, living all as one. (ll. 66-70)
It is Oedipus who has brought this shift about, who has turned what was a wasteland governed by a monster, into a human kingdom – devout, pious, aware of the divine law of the gods, but human. The new blood,Oedipus calls the huddled citizens, devastated by plague, famine and black Death ,‘the new blood of ancient Thebes.’ He hasn’t just restored an ancient kingdom – he has created a new order, something recognizably modern, a city state, a ‘land of the living’ which is now under threat from something much older, something Alien.
Two. ORDER & DISORDER:
in his first reactions to the news that Creon brings from the Delphic oracle we can see that for Oedipus there is hardly any gap between what the gods decree (and what their Oracles announce, no matter how mysterious and opaque it seems at first to be) and what a man who is a King can do. This is what he says at ll. 150-151
I’ll start again – I’ll bring it to light myself!
Apollo is right, and so are you, Creon…
BUT Creon has come back babbling, reverting to a more primitive awareness of the nature of human existence as a result of his encounter with the Oracle. He holds up rationally enough for most of the scene of his return but, as Oedipus questions him
about the past and the death of the previous King, Creon’s tone seems to get wilder; the past takes hold of him as he remembers the days before Oedipus brought human order to the world:
The singing, riddling Sphinx (he chants)
She…persuaded us to let the mystery go
And concentrate on what lay at our feet..
It reminds us of the moment in Harry Potter when the Minister of Magic, Fudge, sees Voldemort with his own eyes. ‘He’s back! he says, in horror and disbelief (showing yet again how popular culture still carries these ancient ideas of a non-human enemy, these atavistic ideas – that is the word we want. Look it up and make it your own.) It could be said here, in Oedipus Rex, at this moment: ‘She’s back!’. Because what we realize (as did the contemporary audience) – something that none of the characters as yet knows – is that in her cunning, in her inhuman recognition that the terrible curse of the line of Cadmus is to be fulfilled the Sphinx has previously encouraged the Thebans who are leaderless after the death of Laius against tracking down his murderer. This is so that when Oedipus turns up in Thebes he can assume his father’s throne and marry his own mother, the widow and bring about the curse imposed by the gods.
Score to this point in the history: Sphinx 100. Thebans and Oedipus Nil.
She has died, but she has not been obliterated. And she returns as a vivid and terrifying evocation when the true story is revealed, illuminating the whole history in its terrible light. At line 1320, after the Chorus, wailing in grief and horror has chanted its terrible threnody (another word you need, look it up)
O the generations of men
the dying generations – adding the total
of all your lives I find they come to nothing…
does there exist, is there a man on earth
who seizes more joy than just a dream, a vision?
…I count no man blest
Next the Chorus brings the image of the Sphinx back before us, defeated but ineradicable, a force that is always there in the imagination ( a modernist might say she is a permanent Archetype in the Unconscious)
the virgin, claws hooked
like a bird of omen, shrieking death-
She is the indestructible element that battles against the forces of human reason and conscious good. She is older than us; she is chthonic, as old as the earth itself.