An Approach To The Tragedy Of ‘Oedipus The King’ By Sophocles
Oedipus means “swollen feet” It is unlikely that this was the name her parents gave him. Had they given him one, too, to whom, as soon as he was born, they had destined to die? This name is the sign of a mark, of a stigma that Jocasta curiously will not recognize when she is married and she has plenty of time to lovingly walk over the physical characteristics of her husband. This name will not arouse any suspicion or shudder in her, nor will the young age of her husband, elements that, however, are in perfect congruence with her well-known prophecy. Didn’t she ask him about her past? Willingness to forget, not to know, not to see, even if we are in the theater?
It is true that life, through a brutal husband, had robbed her of a son, the only one she had been able to have until then. Although the myth has had little echo in her protests at the time, everything suggests that this episode may have made her less tolerant of the idea of having her later achievements stolen.
Change over time, assumed here in Jocasta’s psychology, serves precisely what it aims to avoid: repetition. Beyond her personal status as a mother and wife, her action illustrates the implacable irony of fate: the subjective will to avoid destiny is at the most direct service of its fulfillment A perfectly tragic and dead-end device, in which opposites are exchanged with disconcerting ease and pass so fluidly through each other. A perfect rope that uses your body weight to tighten around your neck.
Revisiting Oedipus the King
Oedipus, since before he pierced his eyes, has swollen feet. What swelling are we talking about? As Claude Lévi-Strauss points out, the myth contains many discreet but insistent references to the characters’ disturbed relationship with the earthly element. The enigma of the Sphinx deals with the number of supports available to Man to distinguish himself from the Earth, from which he comes and to which he will return at the end of his life. The place of knowledge and the great Other, Delphi, where the navel of the world is located, is in direct contact with the divinities and the most primordial telluric forces. When he returns from Delphi and meets that arrogant old man who will not give him an inch, Oedipus will be very reluctant to let himself be trampled.
The swelling of the feet is a turgid eroticization, a symptomatic hysterization. It is the very organ that allows displacement, that allows transfer, that is marked by inflammation. These swollen and perforated feet will however take him to different places that will constitute the geography of his destiny: Thebes and its royal palace as a starting point, then Mount Cithaeron, Corinth, Delphi, the road as an intermediary space between the human world and the wild world, the Sphinx, and finally Thebes and its royal palace, the last and princely place, which will have the privilege of being placed before the gaze of Athenian spectators on the slope of the Parthenon hill.
And that is why the Athenian spectator comes here, to look Theatre, from the Greek thea, “to look at” and tron, meaning “place”, theatron is “the place from which one looks”. But look at what? It is the pure mystery of limpidity.
“Tonight, dear spectator, an action that is frankly promising for your scopic drive will be proposed: tonight it will be incest and patricide! You wanted a spectacle, you will have it. You will be served the primordial scene, you will see what you yourself once thought you saw. No particular effort is required on your part, you just have to let yourself go along the slope of the excellent education you have received: you are asked to sit, be quiet and observe, nothing more. The transfer will occur by itself.”
The proposal seems tempting and ideal to attract the idle stroller and the distinguished worldly person, which will allow the latter to later explain to the former what there was to see in what they both saw.
“Except, dear viewer… Has anyone ever told you that promises are made to be kept, or has this idea occurred to you alone? Because of your desire to see, I fear that you are on the way to becoming frustrated. In Instead of the promised display of violence and eroticism you will only get a long discursive echo: of the blade that cuts the flesh, of the last ray of light that escapes from the victim’s eye when he understands, of the moans that come from Jocasta’s impure bed and Oedipus, you will only have the more or less false stories that the characters tell each other when they opportunely cross the steps of the royal palace, and before you, to stop for a moment and tell each other their antics.”
It is not so long ago, however, that in the time of Sophocles, a few decades ago at most, the theater had not yet differentiated itself from its ceremonial and religious native soil and he had not yet framed the savagery of the bloody rite with the Apollonian regulations, which seem to us, from a distance, the very essence of theatrical art.
In that era of proto-theater, there was no character differentiated from the community, nor dramatic action, only a chorus, a stage hypostasis of the public that, agitated with songs and dances, came to the ceremonial place to celebrate the god of drunkenness and chaos. Dionysus, who presides over dance and movement, overflowing to excess, wine and blood, a god foreign to the Greeks, an eccentric god from Asia, was the object of a seasonal cult in Athens. Songs, dances, wine, music and drunkenness, prayers, songs and dances, flutes, screams, drums, trance, sex and sacrifice.
At the moment of greatest intensity of collective tension, at the most sacred moment, the culmination of the ritual and its climax: the sacrifice of the goat. The goat in Greek is drinksand oide It’s the song. Oidè drinksthe song of the goat, the tragedy The shed blood that soothes and calms the primordial horde that renews the founding act, the sacrifice that atones, and this goat that was only there because he had done nothing to anyone and could not take revenge on anyone.
“We don’t remember very well what happened last night in the theater… It’s because we have been a little altered as subjects of the unconscious and we tend to retain only certain elements of chaos. Some people claim to have seen the god dancing, and I’m not far off to believe them.”
What remains of all this in the King Oedipus of Sophocles a few decades later, once the transfer operation of the rapid evolution of this cultural practice was completed? What does the viewer see of this Greece that has just entered its classical age before falling just as quickly into its decadence? Everything revolves around the investigation that Oedipus carries out and of which he is unaware that he is the object. The viewer already knows this, since he has prior knowledge of the myth. It is not what will or will not happen that interests you, but how things will happen. See Oedipus, at the precise moment when “the twenty hits him” and when the concomitant sound of the student’s understanding escapes him. Being there in front of him and contemplating in his eye the reflection of what he sees in that precise moment with the eyes of his mind: his entire life in one fell swoop, his destiny, so clear and evident.
The impossible to see, the impossible to say, which will be resolved in the passage to the act of removing one’s own eyes. What a curious character this spectator is, how has he exhausted his gaze? If you are prone to philosophical questioning, as was fashionable at the time, you can even ask yourself various questions such as: “What is looking?” But what is it that comes to be judged again, what is it that comes to be repeated? What does the viewer come for? The purging of emotions, the discharge through fear and compassion, abreaction? Is this viewer passive or active? Visual perception is conscious, but the motor actions of visual accommodation are unconscious. Is it about imagining the real of that symbolic?
There is a demand to see, or a demand to see, in the viewer, which is much more interrogative than argumentative, and which is echoed in the work by a demand for knowledge on the part of the characters. This knowledge is a phallic object, whether you have it or you don’t. The lack of it is a dominant characteristic of its mode of appearance. It is never unequivocal: it is never completely assured, nor is it completely denied, even if only in a fragmentary way, to those who do not seek it, such as the shepherds who are summoned to appear during the investigation. Sometimes it is assumed absolute, as when it emanates from the oracle, but it is always suspected of being invaded by its opposite, of being contaminated by ignorance when embraced by a singular subject.
Its opposite, moreover, is not so much ignorance as error, which is the belief in the possibility or effectiveness of its consummated possession. It is the object of an anxious search, it is a matter of life or death. If we think of knowledge as a place and not as content, we could place it at all costs in the stands, in the spectator who already knows the entire story, if it were not for the strange ability he has to forget everything he knows at the moment in which that the theatrical illusion takes effect. One could equally attribute omniscience to the author, to the Sophocles-type, and assume that he knew what he was doing.
He certainly knew a thing or two, but attributing omniscience to him is nothing more than an assumption that says a lot about our propensity to hang this omniscient knowledge on culturally valued figures. On stage, this knowledge is embodied as an allegory in the fantastic character of the Sphinx and in an enigma whose unresolved solution is equivalent to death. Hybrid monster, it’s a figuration of Oedipus’ desire through the prominent breast that he never received from his mother, through the claws and fangs that promise him all the scratches and loving devourments. Unbridled savagery of the oral impulse, the kiss of death.
The young adult Oedipus believes himself to be very clever for having known how to decipher the enigma, for having returned safely, like Ulysses, from this excursion to the confines of the monstrous, through the dangerous meanderings of the feminine. His narcissism undoubtedly finds satisfaction and dream in the idea that he is a hero. Nothing and no one, during a long period of calm, contradicts his certainties. The thirst for knowledge has found a place to rest in an error.
But evils return and anguish awakens the characters from a life whose scope they thought they had measured. They need to know again, to be sure, we must leave for Delphi, the place of the oracle and the great Other, the eminent place of the humble request for Knowledge. Delphi, a religious sanctuary of mysterious prophecies, is also the place where another story echoes in the distance, similar to that of Oedipus: Zeus, son of Cronus, whose birth is also bathed in a prophecy that states that he would dethrone his father. A father who, to frustrate the prophecy, is not much more cunning than Laios and devours all the children that his wife gives him. A mother, Rhea, who, to save her last son, replaces him with a stone. The father who swallows it and spits it out is the omphalos, the navel of the world. The son grows up and dethrones the father, etc., etc. The saga of the Olympians, the titans, the entire Greek cosmogony, before them the moiras and in the last stage, the first beginning, the Chaos that very soon, here in Delphi invoked through all the gods who are its emanation, He is going to take a poor mortal in his hands.
Where is the knowledge? Where do you have to go to get it? Whom to invoke to receive it? How to purify yourself to welcome it? How to strengthen yourself to take it? How to use cunning to set a trap? It is not enough to say that absolute knowledge is a fiction for it to dissipate, nor is it enough to denounce it to dissolve it. It will constantly rise from its ashes and the subjects deprived of plenitude will become a phallus. A different and perhaps somewhat more realistic attitude to change the data of the problem could consist of asking from what place and in what direction we are looking for it, whether with swollen feet or not.
