Oedipus: Rex or Tyrannus?
No spoiler alert needed here!
• Oedipus play the quintessential work of
dramatic irony
• irony embedded in the work’s structure;
significance of characters words/actions
clear to audience but not to the character
• Is there ANYBODY that doesn’t know what
Oedipus has done??
A brief synopsis: OEDIPUS THE KING (OF
THE ROAD)
ONCEPON ATIME LONG AGO IN THEBES IMKING. OEDIPUS DAKING.!
LVMYMRS. LVMYKIDS. THEBENS THINK OEDDY ISCOOL. NOPROBS.!
OKAY MAYBE THEREZZ 1LITL1. MOTHER WHERERU? WHEREAT MYDAD?!
NOCALLZ NEVER. HAVENOT ACLUE. INMYMIND IWNDER WHOAMI? IMUST!
FINDEM.!
JO MYWIFE GOES, "OED DONT USEE? WERHAPI NOW LETITB." IGO!
"NOWAY. IAMBOSS. DONTU TELLME MYLIFE. INEED MYMOM. II WILLL!
FINDHER. FIND BOTHOF THEM."!
SOI START SEEKING DATRUTH ABOUT WHO IAM. ITGOEZ ULTRAAA!
SLOWE. THE SPHYNXS RIDDLE WAS ACINCH BUT NOTTHIZ.!
SUDNLEE WEHEAR SHOCKING NEWS. WHEN IWASA TINY1 THISGR8!
4SEER SED IWOOD OFF MY ROYAL OLDMAN THEN MARREE MYMAMA. SICKO!
RUBBISH, NESTPAS? WHOWHO COULDBE SOGONE? STIL MOMNDAD SENT!
MEEEEE AWAY. MEE ABABI AWAAAY.!
NOWWWWW GETTHIZ. MANY MOONS GOBY. IMEET THISGUY ONATRIP.!
WEDOO RUMBLE. WHOKNEW? ILEFTMY POP ONE DEDMAN.!
UGET DAFOTO. MAJR TSURIS. JOJO MYHONEE, MYSQEEZ, MYLAMBY,!
MIAMOR, MYCUTEE. JOJOY IZZ MYMOMMY.!
YEGODS WHYMEE? YMEYYME? LIFSUX. IAMBAD, IAMBADD,
IMSOBAD.!
STOPNOW THIS HEDAKE. THIS FLESH DUZ STINK. ITZ 2MUCH PAYNE
4ONE2C.!
TAKEGOD MYEYES!!
AIEEEEE!!
!
!
By Daniel Nussbaum: (a retelling using 154 of the more than 1 million
California personalized license plates registered with the state's Motor Vehicles
Bureau)
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• Sophocles (ca 495—ca
406 BCE)
• wrote 120 plays
• only seven survive in
full form
• Oedipus generally
acclaimed the greatest
work of Attic (adj/
noun) tragedy
• yet won only second
prize on its debut at
City Dionysia 429 BCE
Some influential readings
This play contains the essential elements of tragedy as
developed in my Poetics. Here, it is the hubris of the
hero that leads him to commit a tragic error leading to
a reversal of fortune in which he finally sees his folly.
The audience witnesses the hero’s pathetic fate and
experiences a cleansing of their own fear and pity
called catharsis.
Whoever can force from nature its secrets is themselves
outside nature and awaits an unnatural fate. But let us not
trust what we find on the surface of tragedy. The genius of
Sophocles lay in the poetic representation of the terror of
existence in its Apollonian form (the stage) while
preserving the Dionysian drive to excess suffering. Only as
an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world
eternally justified (BT)
Freud: the death of all other
readings
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Oedipus must lose his complex
to be complex
''We cannot begin to appreciate the meaning of Oedipus if we continue to think that
Oedipus was oedipal,’' philosopher Jonathan Lear
!
recent criticism: real point of the story is the violence of fathers, the inevitable
perversity of nature, the authoritarianism of the state and the patriarchal roots of
society
!
Oedipus not a man to be pitied for his unconscious crimes and guilt
!
e.g. He can be seen as the victim with no reason to feel guilty
!
most essential fact is NOT his relationship to Laius and Jocasta but their cruel
abandonment of him
!
other non-Freudian from feminists: Oedipus' relentless pursuit of answers to life's riddles
is typically male
!
and the “hero” becomes king by killing a female dragon (the feminine is monstrous to
Oedipus)
!
!
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Oedipus and the Sphinx: painting by Gustave Moreau first exhibited at the French Salon of 1864: oil on canvas
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Why does this simply plotted play have
staying power?
• central theme: the ambiguous nature of knowing
represented in play as a whole and Oedipus
• Oedipus a walking (limping) paradox
• weakest and most vulnerable in exactly the
places where he feels strongest and most able
• e.g. exchange between Oedipus & Teiresias pp.
43-4
• fate v. freedom, exile v. inclusion, civilization v.
savagery, and incest obvious themes but
derivative of this central paradox
Seeing and (not)Knowing
p. 27-28
!
Saw Laios without seeing him
!
Teiresias v. Oedipus: relationship between seeing
and knowing reversed
Light and En(lighten)ment
• Oedipus as much a tragedy of enlightenment as a
personal tragedy (Oedipus after all never existed)
• enlightened human reason the thwarted hero
• the notion that enlightened reason is losing it universal
appeal is a familiar story for modernity
• but it’s a story that begins (or is already present) here
• Oedipus (and Jocasta) are models of autonomous
rationality: emancipated, fully self-constituted
subjects
• especially true of Oedipus who sees his lack of identity
as a strength
And the tragedy of
enlightenment?
“Either enlightenment increases our autonomy,
responsibility, and liberty or the very technologies of
truth meant to secure such achievements conceal
the workings of power from us precisely when we
believe ourselves to be wholly emancipated
beings” (Christopher Rocco, Tragedy and
Enlightenment, 1997)
!
Is enlightenment to be celebrated as “a process of
self knowledge”? Or should enlightenment be
exposed as a “strategy of subjugation”?
!
An essential paradox at work in the play
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Oedipus is us
• Enlightenment sheds light on a subject (makes clear)
!
• obviously the language and experience of light and darkness (seeing and
not seeing) saturate Oedipus
!
• this is amplified by a piece of word play in the title
!
• Oedipus = swollen feet
!
• but it also sounds like “I know” or “I have seen”
!
• Oida: to see: to say I know something is to say I see it (to bring things to
light/Apollo)
!
• but Oedipus, able to master all things, even nature, with one glaring
exception: himself
!
• another play, Antigone, applies this condition explicitly to humanity itself
!
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Political dimensions and context (some
mythical back-story)
Cadmus and the
founding of
Thebes
!
Situates action in
the context of
polis life
The polis
• Emerges circa 900 BCE
• No exact number available (158 according to
Aristotle)
• Most were small (between 300 to 700 households)
• Athens vast by comparison
• Wide variety of constitutions
• But always premised on idea of close communal life
(mutual advantage)
• No clear separation of public/private life
• Life saturated by politics
Background assumption
of Athenian life
“Man is by nature a social animal; an
individual who is unsocial naturally and not
accidentally is either beneath our notice or
more than human. Society is something that
precedes the individual. Anyone who either
cannot lead the common life or is so selfsufficient as not to need to, and therefore
does not partake of society, is either a beast
or a god” (Politics)
!
Zoon Politikon
Aristotle
Oedipus: Beast or god?
Oedipus appears to regard himself as wholly self-sufficient (a god?)
!
to be fair, he gets some encouragement (p. 25: Priest of Zeus, “You
are a man, not a god… BUT….”
!
Or is he a beast?
!
but it is the outcomes of his well intended acts not his intentions
that are monstrous (note: he is a murderer, so what’s up with
that?)
!
Ultimately he has to leave as per Aristotle
Oedipus: King or Tyrant?
• play was originally titled Oedipus
Tyrannus
• T-word is used toward latter part of the
play but obliquely, by the chorus (p. 62)
• some suggestions that he is becoming
paranoid and accusatory as the plot
unfolds
• but is he a tyrant?
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How would a Sophoclean
audience understand a tyrant?
• someone who rules without law, looks to own
advantage rather than that of subjects, and uses
cruel/extreme measures against own people as
well as others
• modern definition of the tyrant rather different:
e.g. oppressive, arbitrary, wielding absolute
power, unrestrained by law or constitution and
possibly a usuper
• do any of these things describe Oedipus?
• not at first: read opening lines
• Oedipus may turn out to be a tyrant (at least
technically) but he’s not wholly self-serving
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In fact, is he not a saviour? (and
twice?)
• some readings of the play describe Oedipus as an
ironically self-offered scape-goat
• relies on a known practice of ritualistic sacrifice or
exile of a human victim: the pharmakos
• chosen as a symbolic outsider
• exiled during times of crisis (typically plague) to
bring purification
• societal catharsis (same function as tragedy itself
for Aristotle)
• this victim was typically a slave, criminal, or cripple
• by the play’s end, Oedipus is at least 2 of these
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things
Leviticus 16,10: Law of
Atonement
After the cleansing, the live goat was brought to the high priest. Laying his hands on the
scapegoat, the high priest was to “confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the
Israelites – all their sins – and put them on the goat’s head. He shall send the goat away into the
wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all their
sins to a remote place; and the man shall release it in the wilderness” (vv. 21-22)
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And what about Athens
• Bernard Knox suggests Oedipus’s original title tyrannus may refer as
much to Athens as its lame scapegoat
!
• calls Oedipus “a symbolic representation of Periclean Athens,”
resembling “that imperial city’s self-taught, self-made, and unaided
ability to seize control of the environment, bending and forcing it to
comply with its human designs” (Knox, intro. to Three Theban Plays,
Penguin 1984)
• but along with the power and splendor of Athens comes an implied
critique of its attempted mastery of nature, its love of its own
achievements, its daring and reckless foreign policy, its turning away
from traditional religious values, etc.
!
• raises tantalizing possibility that the audience was watching an
enactment of its own tragic condition
!
!
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