by William E. Cain
Wellesley College
Mark R. Anspach, ed. The Oedipus Casebook: Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, with a new translation of Oedipus Tyrannus, by Wm. Blake Tyrrell. Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture Series. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 2020. Pages xiv + 459.
Expertly edited by Mark R. Anspach, The Oedipus Casebook: Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus the King is an important contribution to the study of one of the greatest tragic dramas in the Western canon. It is an excellent resource for scholars, teachers, and students, and it will become an essential point of reference for examining the primary text, Sophocles, Greek tragedy, myth, ritual, and sacrifice.
The first part of the Casebook is the play itself, the Greek original on the left-hand page and a new translation by Wm. Blake Tyrrell on the right. The translation is briskly paced and riveting, and is supplemented by cogent annotations. Next are three sections of reprinted essays and excerpts from books, keyed to The Ritual Background, King and Victim, and Oedipus on Trial. The authors include, among others, Walter Burkert, René Girard, Terry Eagleton, Jan-Pierre Vernant, Michel Foucault, and Sandor Goodhart.
We are in the midst of a pandemic, and, in this context of suffering and death, Oedipus the King , c. 429-425 BCE, is all the more disturbingly resonant. It starts with the Priest’s report of a plague that is devastating Thebes:
The fever-bearing god,
A plague most hated, falls upon and strikes the city.
By him is the house of Cadmus emptied, and dark
Hades grows wealthy in wailing and lamentation. (27-30)
Sophocles has keenly in mind the plague that struck Athens in 430 BCE even as it was engaged in a wrenching conflict with Sparta. Perhaps a form of typhus, this plague came in waves for several years, killing as many as 100,000 people, one-third of the city-state’s population. Thucydides contracted the disease but survived—the great leader Pericles did not—and, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, he summarizes its effect on Athenian society: “The catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.”
As David Mulroy has observed, “the play’s action begins with a plague that forces Oedipus to search for a sinner whose presence is polluting the city and angering the gods. There is no evidence that earlier versions of the story featured a plague. It is a detail that Sophocles invented for his dramatization of the story” (Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, 2011). Tyrrell conveys skillfully the scope and scale of the plague, but the Greek is more vivid and unnerving. As G. O. Hutchinson has said, Sophocles at the outset renders the plague “with immense descriptive power. A multiplicity of misfortunes, stressed with abundant anaphora and other devices, are presented as all occurring at this time together…. Present verbs given an urgent sense of a continuous situation now” (“Sophocles and Time,” Sophocles Revisited: Essays Presented to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ed. Jasper Griffin, 1999).
Memorable as this description is, given by the Priest and reinforced by the Chorus, the plague in Oedipus the King is perplexing: its wounds and ravages are forcibly evoked at the outset, yet it then disappears from the characters’ experiences and memories. Charles Segal makes exactly this point: “Even before the midpoint of the action, the plague is simply forgotten. Oedipus’ search for his origins completely overshadows the sufferings of the city that have set the plot in motion. We hear of the plague for the last time when Jocasta reproaches Oedipus and Creon for quarreling in private while ‘the land suffers from such a disease’” (Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge, 2nd ed., 2001).
In her stimulating essay in the Casebook, Helene Peter Foley calls attention to this curious feature of the ending and tries to explain it: “All members of the cast, both chorus and protagonists, are distracted from the plague that grips the city by their concern with the fate of Oedipus as destroyer of his own house” (319). As the play winds down, someone should remember the plague. No one does. This prompts Foley to place the blame on Creon: “He ignores the issue of the plague and expresses no sense of urgency about taking immediate action” (319). But it is not Creon who ignores the plague. It is Sophocles who does, deliberately.
“Oedipus promises to solve the mystery and end the plague,” says the scholar-translator Robert Bagg: “He begins a passionate inquest which reveals, when all the facts finally fit together, that it is Oedipus himself who has caused the plague. It is he who is polluting Thebes with his presence: a man who has killed his father and incestuously loved his mother” (Oedipus the King, trans. 1982). But the facts do not fit together, nor are they clear. The main elements of the plot are the plague, the murder of Laïos, the parentage of Oedipus. These are connected, or seem to be, but, in the text itself, the fit, the relationship among them is not precisely defined and articulated.
What Sophocles does is akin to a technique that Stephen Greenblatt has identified in Shakespearean drama:
Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity. This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations. (Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, 2004)
In his Oedipus, c. 55 CE, Seneca handles the ending differently. Jocasta, on stage, stabs herself to death with a sword, and the blinded Oedipus says:
All you with bodies burdened by disease
and fighting for your lives, I leave this place.
Look up! For even as I move away,
a gentler spirit animates the sky.
Whoever at death’s door somehow lives on,
let him now gulp great draughts of oxygen.
Go offer hope to those resigned to die;
the pestilence leaves Thebes along with me.
Destructive Fates and sickness’ trembling fear,
wasting, black plague, dementia—come here,
be my companions! All to me are dear. (trans. Rachel Hadas)
The plague will cease because Oedipus, who precipitated it, is departing from the city.
The ending is similar in Voltaire’s Oedipe, 1718. Oedipus has blinded himself; Jocasta is alive, soon to take her own life. The High Priest speaks:
A happy calm is warding off the storms
A most serene sun is rising above your heads.
Contagious fires are no longer lit.
Your tombs which were opening are already shut.
Death is fleeing and the god of heaven and earth
Is announcing his blessings through the voice of thunder. (trans. Frank J. Morlock)
In contrast, in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King the plague might or might not end. There is no mention of it one way or the other.
Through reports from the outside, and recollections from Jocasta, Oedipus has learned about his origins. But has it been proven that he killed Laïos? He might have—he thinks he did. On the other hand: the evidence is more in his mind than it is in the text. John Jones states that Tiresias functions as the authority we should rely on: he is “a prophet; he speaks for the god and his words disclose the hard bedrock truth of the situation” (On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, 1962). But Sophocles does not reveal “the hard bedrock truth.” The other characters are seeking to establish it and believe that they do, and, as readers and theater-goers, we do versions of the same. We know the myth of Oedipus and import this configuration of relationships into the text so that the action of the play confirms it. But Sophocles gives no definitive answers to the questions he raises. I am reminded of Roland Barthes’s reference, in an essay on Michel Foucault, to “une question cathartique posée au savoir, à tout le savoir.”
From this perspective, the most provocative essays in the Casebook are by Girard, Goodhart, Anspach, and Frederick Ahl. For Girard—who analyzed the Oedipus myth and play on a number of occasions—Sophocles’ text is a deep exploration of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating:
The only distinction between Oedipus and his adversaries is that Oedipus initiates the contest, triggering the tragic plot. He thus has a certain head start on the others. But though the action does not occur simultaneously, its symmetry is absolute…. At first, each of the protagonists believes that he can quell the violence; at the end each succumbs to it. All are drawn unwittingly into the structure of violent reciprocity—which they always think they are outside of, because they all initially come from the outside and mistake this positional and temporary advantage for a permanent and fundamental superiority. (246-247)
Ultimately, according to Girard, “Oedipus fails to fix the blame on Creon or Tiresias. Creon and Tiresias are successful in their efforts to fix the blame on him. The entire investigation is a feverish hunt for a scapegoat, which finally turns against the very man who first loosed the hounds” (256).
The person who indicts Oedipus most harshly (and luridly) is Oedipus himself. As Anspach astutely comments, “not only does Oedipus accept without question that he has married his mother, he instantly assumes that he has murdered his father as well” (236). Someone must be guilty, and all converge on Oedipus—a remorseless enactment of scapegoating that he takes part in. He is determined to know the truth and concludes he has found it. But, as Ahl indicates, his truth may not be the truth. Like others, he hears what he wants to hear (427).
In the accounts of Laïos’ death, there is a potent ambiguity. Was the crime perpetrated by one man or many, by a murderer or murderers? (See lines 99-149, 292-293, 308, 715-716, 842-854.) “What is striking,” Goodhart contends, “is not only that Oedipus may not be the murderer of Laïos, but that there is a curious insistence in the play that the murderers of Laïos may be many” (399). “Rather than an illustration of the myth,” he maintains, “the play is a critique of mythogenesis, an examination of the process by which one arbitrary fiction comes to assume the value of truth” (412; Anspach, 239).
The essays by Girard and the others are compelling. But they falter in a crucial respect. Each implies or declares outright that Oedipus is not guilty. This is what Girard’s insights into religion and culture require—the victim of scapegoating is innocent. As he has argued elsewhere, New Testament revelation brings to light the truth behind Greek myth: “Le récit évangélique refute non seulement la culpabilité de Jesus mais tous les mensonges du même genre, par exemple celui qui fait d’Oedipe un donneur de peste parricide et incestueux” (Quand ses choses commerceront, 1994). But Sophocles does not present this conclusion, and, when we voice it, we are making a judgment that in its speed and certainty resembles the one that Oedipus propounds and clings to. We affirm his innocence; he affirms his guilt. As for Sophocles: he is, intentionally, non-committal.
Perhaps there were many murderers or bandits. Perhaps there was only one. Or, the murderer may be the man among the many who did the actual killing. Oedipus could not be the killer, but he could be. Scapegoats are innocent, except when they are not.
There is another complication that Girard overlooks, and it is expressed in the first words that Oedipus speaks, in his opening address to the afflicted of Thebes: “I have come myself, / Oedipus, called renowned in the estimation of all” (lines 7-8). In these lines, rivalry is not between two persons, as Girard’s classic formulation posits, but between Oedipus and himself—that is, the accomplished and acclaimed person he is and his own conception of the person he must become in the future. Being the renowned Oedipus fills him with pride but is a burden to him too: the person he has to imitate and transcend is himself.
The Priest praises Oedipus as “most powerful in the estimation of all” (line 40). Tyrrell’s repeated “estimation” shows the mirroring of Oedipus’s eminent sense of who he is and the identity by which others celebrate his uniqueness. He triumphed over the monstrous Sphinx, solving the riddle: “What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?” He thereby liberated Thebes, was honored with the kingship, and received Jocasta’s hand in marriage. The Priest says to him: “Come, best of mortals, restore the city again” (line 46). Oedipus’s mimetic competitor is himself. This is his desire and predicament, a maddening one.
Oedipus must be as good or better than the man he became and is. As the action unfolds, this demand on himself, which he generates from his awareness of how he is seen by others, grows intolerable. What Oedipus does, is to resolve this crisis by avowing—before all of the evidence is in, and before it can be sifted through and scrutinized—that he has done the dreadful deeds. Everyone agrees to this, as they should not but as they must. As Girard says, “the firm conviction of the group is based on no other evidence than the unshakable unanimity of its own illogic” (257).
In his essay in the Casebook on scapegoat rituals in ancient Greece, Jan Bremmer tells us that in the myths he has assembled and explicated, the scapegoats “spontaneously” offer themselves: “Such behavior is the rule…. The victims always sacrifice themselves voluntarily” (173). This is the choice, paradoxically fated and free, that Oedipus makes. At once, he is Oedipus, the rival, and the scapegoat, the one who is sinfully different and who therefore must be excluded.
Oedipus, infamous, soon will be exiled. He merits this punishment because he is, he asserts, “most hateful to the gods.” He piercingly states the sentence that Creon should impose: “Send me abroad, away from here” (line 1521). But “most hateful” means singularity, prestige and renown as well as shame. For “my ills, my misfortunes / no man except me can bear” (lines 1414-1415).
In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus is extolled for his gift of prophecy, and, we are informed, he died a death nearly divine:
It was some messenger
sent by the gods, or some power of the dead
split open the fundament of earth, with good will,
to give him painless entry. He was sent on his way
with no accompaniment of tears, no pain of sickness;
if any man ended miraculously,
this man did. (lines 1883-1889, trans. David Grene)
This is the man who, at the close of Oedipus the King, had resolved the mimetic crisis he embodied by embracing his guilt for crimes he may or may not have committed. He blinds himself. We cannot take our eyes off him.