An approach to the tragedy of 'Oedipus Rey' by Sophocles
Oedipus means "swollen feet". It is unlikely that this was the name given to him by her parents. Had they given him one, moreover, who, as soon as he was born, had been 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 have plenty of time to lovingly walk around the physical characteristics of her husband. This name will not arouse in her any suspicion, any shudder, any more than the young age of her husband, elements that, however, are in perfect congruence with the well-known prophecy. Didn't she ask him about her past? Will 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 stolen a child from her, the only one she had been able to have until then. Although the myth has had little echo in her protests of her then, everything suggests that this episode could have made her less tolerant of the idea that her later achievements were stolen from her.
The change in the course of time, assumed here in Jocasta's psychology, serves precisely what he tries to avoid: repetition. Beyond her personal case as mother and wife, her action illustrates the relentless irony of fate: the subjective will to avoid destiny is at the most direct service of its fulfillment. A perfectly tragic, dead-end device, in which opposites interchange with disconcerting ease, passing so seamlessly through each other. A perfect rope that uses the weight of the body to tighten around the neck.
- Related article: "Greek Theatre: history, characteristics and works"
Revisiting the Oedipus-Rex
Oedipus, since before piercing his eyes, has swollen feet. What swelling are we talking about? As he points out Claude Levi-Strauss, the myth contains many discreet but insistent references to the disturbed relationship of the characters 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 came 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 won't give in to him one bit, Oedipus will be very reluctant to let himself be stepped on.
The swelling of the feet is a turgid eroticization, a symptomatic hysterization. It is the organ itself that allows displacement, that allows transfer, that is marked by inflammation. These swollen and perforated feet will, however, take you to different places that will constitute the geography of your destination: Thebes and its royal palace as a starting point 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 his royal palace, last and princely place, which will have the privilege of standing before the gaze of the Athenian spectators on the slope of the hill of the Parthenon.
And that's why the Athenian spectator comes here, to watch. Theatre, from the Greek thea, "to look" and tron, which means "place", theatron is "the place from which one looks". But look at what? It is the pure mystery of limpidity.
"Tonight, dear spectator, a frankly promising action will be proposed for your scopic drive: tonight it will be incest and patricide! You wanted a show, you'll get it. The primordial scene will be served to you, you will see what you yourself once thought you saw. No particular effort is required on your part, you just have to let yourself be carried away by the aware of the excellent education you have received: you are asked to sit, shut up and observe, nothing else. The transfer will happen on its own."
The proposal seems tempting and suitable to attract the idle walker and the distinguished worldly, what that will allow the second to explain later to the first what had to be seen in what both they 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'm afraid you're on your way to becoming frustrated. Instead of the promised display of violence and eroticism you will only get a long discursive echo. From the blade that slits the flesh, from the last ray of light that escapes from the victim's eye when she understands, from the moans that come from the impure bed of Jocasta and Oedipus, you will only have the more or less false stories that the characters tell each other when opportunely crossing the steps of the royal palace, and before you, to stop for a moment and tell each other their turpitudes".
It was 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.
At that time of the proto-theater, there was no character differentiated from the community, no dramatic action, only a chorus, a scenic hypostasis of the public that, agitated with songs and dances, went to the ceremonial place to celebrate the god of drunkenness and the chaos. Dionysus, who presides over dance and movement, overflowing to excess, wine and blood, a god alien 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, shouts, 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 drinks, and heard is the song drinks heard, the song of the goat, the tragedy. The spilled blood that soothes and calms the primordial horde that renews the founding act, the sacrifice that he atones for, and this goat that was only there because he hadn't done anything to anyone and couldn't take revenge on him. nobody.
"We don't remember very well what happened at the theater last night... It is because we have been slightly 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 am not far from believing 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 ignores being the object. The spectator already knows it, 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. To see Oedipus, at the precise moment when "twenty falls on 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 at that precise moment with the eyes of the mind: his entire life at a stroke, 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 gouging out his own eyes. What a curious character is this spectator, how has he exhausted his gaze? If you have a penchant for philosophical questioning, as was the fashion at the time, you may even ask yourself various questions such as: "What is looking?" But what is it that comes to be judged anew, what is it that comes to be repeated? What is the viewer coming to? The purging of emotions, the discharge through fear and compassion, the abreaction? Is this viewer passive or active? Visual perception is conscious, but the motor actions of sight 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 spectator, which is much more interrogative than rebellious, and which is echoed in the work by a demand for knowledge on the part of the characters. This knowledge is a phallic object, you have it or you don't have it. The lack of it is a dominant feature of the mode of appearance of it. It is never unequivocal: it is never fully assured, nor is it fully denied, even if only in the form of remnant, to those who do not look for it, such as the shepherds who are summoned to appear during the investigation. Sometimes he is supposed to be absolute, as when he emanates from the oracle, but he is always suspected of being invaded by the opposite of him, of being contaminated by ignorance when he is embraced by a singular subject.
The opposite of it, moreover, is not so much ignorance as error, which is the belief in the possibility or in the efficacy of consummated possession of it. It is the object of an anxious search, it is a matter of life and 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 whole story, if it were not for the strange faculty that he has of forgetting everything he knows at the moment when the theatrical illusion takes place. 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 he says much of our propensity to hang this omniscient knowledge on culturally valued. 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 is a figuration of the desire of Oedipus through the prominent chest that he never received from his mother, through the claws and fangs that promise him all the scratches and loving devours. Unbridled savagery of the oral impulse, the kiss of death.
The young adult Oedipus thinks he is very smart for having been able to decipher the enigma, for having returned safe and sound, like Ulysses, of this excursion to the confines of the monstrous, through the dangerous meanders of the female. His narcissism no doubt finds satisfaction and sleep 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 error.
But the evils return and the anguish awakens the characters from a life whose scope they thought they had measured. They need to know again, to be sure, they must leave for Delphi, the place of the oracle and of the great Other, the eminent place of the humble request for Knowledge. Delphi, religious sanctuary of mysterious prophecies, is also the place where another story resounds in the distance, similar to to that of Oedipus: Zeus, son of Cronos, whose birth is also bathed in a prophecy 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, Rea, who, to save her last child, replaces it 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 Fates and in the last stage, the first principle, the Chaos that very soon, here in Delphi invoked through all the gods that are the emanation of it, is going to take a poor man into its hands mortal.
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 get stronger to take it? How to use cunning to set him up? 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 will become a phallus for subjects deprived of plenitude. A different attitude and perhaps something more realistic to change the data of the problem could consist of asking oneself from which place and in which direction one is looking for it, whether with swollen feet or not.
