Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

OEDIPUS IN VARIOUS GUISES (Sophocles, Seneca, Jean Cocteau)

As you may or may not have noticed on this blog, I sometimes indulge in rather strange adventures in reading. Recently, I took it into my head to read the selection of four of Seneca’s tragedies (translated by E.F.Watling) that is given in the Penguin Classics. All of Seneca’s plays are Latin re-workings of Greek plays by Sophocles, Euripides and others. So after I had read Seneca’s version of The Trojan Women, I read a translation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women. And after I read Seneca’s Oedipus, I read a translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (or Oedipus Tyrannus or Oedipus Rex if you want to fight over the title). The main translation of Sophocles that I read was by Robert Fagles (in Penguin Classics), but I checked some passages against E.F.Watling’s translation (likewise in Penguin Classics – and note that Watling is a master of both the Greek and Latin languages). On my shelves I also have the translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King by Don Taylor, but I gave up on it after about ten pages as it modernised the text to the point of being slangy, and the slang was now dated.

The Oedipus plays of Sophocles and Seneca set me thinking about this whole Oedipus tale and how it has become such common currency in Western literature and thought. So I pressed on and looked for other versions of the tale, winding up reading Jean Cocteau’s Oedipus play The Infernal Machine (in the English translation by Carl Wildman). Of course I did not read every version of the story that has been dramatised. I understand that John Dryden wrote an Oedipus play, but I’ve never sighted it. I am surprised that France’s greatest tragedian Jean Racine never wrote an Oedipus play, given that most of his tragedies were – like Seneca’s – re-workings of Greek dramas and legends (Racine’s Phedre, Andromache etc.). At the same time, I’m convinced that William Shakespeare was aware of some version of Oedipus even if he never wrote a play on the subject. In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Seneca, E.F.Watling points out how all of Seneca’s plays were translated into English in Elizabethan times, and many of them provided tropes found in Elizabethan tragedies. I look at King Lear and I find a sighted man, Lear, who is blind to the truth (as Oedipus is before he blinds himself) and a blind man who, like Tiresias, knows the truth (Gloucester, after he is blinded, knows the true character of his sons).

More to the point, though, Oedipus has become an archetype, in much the same way as Faust, Hamlet, Don Juan or Don Quixote. And ever since Sigmund Freud devised his theory of the “Oedipus Complex” (which very few psychiatrists and psychologists would now regard as a tenable hypothesis), the very name Oedipus has become a piece of pop coinage. Let me note some of the pop references to Oedipus which I have encountered over the years. In the 1953 musical film The Band Wagon, the manic impresario played by Jack Buchanan is seen starring in a production of Oedipus Rex, and later, in the ditty “That’s Entertainment”, he summarises the play’s plot as “a chap kills his father / And causes a lot of bother”.  The American musical prankster who calls himself P.D.Q. Bach (America’s equivalent of England’s Gerard Hoffnung) once recorded a spoof Wild West oratorio called Oedipus Tex, in which cowpuncher Oedipus Tex falls in love with Bobby-Jo Caster, queen of the rodeo. As we listened to this a number of times, some of my children took to singing along with its opening chorus “Howdy, folks, I’m Oedipus Tex / Guess you’ve heard of my brother Rex. / Yep, Oedipus Tex -  that’s what I said. / But my friends just call me Ed.” In 1976 Derek Jarman directed the film Sebastian, aimed at a homosexual audience and purportedly concerning Saint Sebastian, which, as part of its very camp aesthetic, had all its dialogue in Latin with English subtitles. Whenever its Roman soldiers swore, they said “Oedipus”, which the subtitles translated as “Motherf***er”. I’m sure you will be able to expand this list of pop-culture references, but I’ll add some personal notes. When he was in high school, one of my sons got the part of blind Tiresias in a school production of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. One member of the cast had to accuse Oedipus of being the “father-killer and father-usurper”. In all the weeks of rehearsal, other schoolboys would, at the crucial point, whisper the line as “father-killer and motherf***er” in the hope that the young actor would accidentally say it in a perfomance – but he never did. Coincidentally, one of my daughters had a minor role, as the mute character who leads Tiresias in, in a university production of another version of the play.

Okay, enough of all these modern tales – what about the three plays that I read?

I’ll deal with them in the order they were written, especially as Sophocles’ version (written in about 425 BC) is the canonical version. Scholars note that Aeschylus definitely, and Euripides probably, also wrote plays about Oedipus, but they are now lost, so Sophocles it is.

What I noticed most about Sophocles’ Oedipus the King is what a public play it is. It begins with a priest leading a delegation of citizens to beg King Oedipus to find a way of lifting the plague that is afflicting the city of Thebes. This is clearly a crowd scene and the fate of the city itself is a major concern. Something evil is affecting a whole people. Ultimately, parricide and incest are things that poison society and are regarded with complete abhorrence. The public nature of Oedipus’ tragedy is reinforced by the large cast of speaking characters, and the fact that political intrigue is a major part of the play - especially Oedipus’ suspicion that Jocasta’s brother Creon is just fabricating slanderous tales about him in order to usurp his throne.

Inasmuch as they involve a Chorus, nearly all ancient Greek plays have a “public” aspect, but in this play the Chorus not only makes general comments on fate and chance and the gods and how the story is progressing (although they certainly do that); but they also interact with Oedipus in what is obviously conversational dialogue which I cannot imagine passing between one character (Oedipus) and a whole univocal choric group. Clearly, individuals within the Chorus sometimes speak as single characters, again reinforcing the idea that this is a play about public concerns. Also, much of the action takes place in a public space, as in the episode where Jocasta tells Oedipus and Creon to stop quarrelling in front of the crowd, as it will create a scandal.

The other major point I noted is how skilfully and gradually Sophocles winds up the suspense and tension. Only bit by bit does Oedipus come to understand the truth about himself – that he has killed his father and married his mother. When Creon reports that the Delphic oracle made ominous statements about why the city suffers pestilence; when Oedipus first quizzes Jocasta about what sort of man her former husband King Laius was; when the Corinthian messenger comes with the news that Oedipus’ supposed father Polybus is dead, and then reveals that Oedipus was adopted by Polybus and Merope – in each of these cases Oedipus is still able to find credible reasons not to believe that he has killed Laius and married his own mother. Only when the ancient shepherd (who saved Oedipus as a baby) gives his testimony does Oedipus break down and realize he has violated two universal taboos. I assume an audience in ancient Athens would have already known the legend of Oedipus even before they saw this play. But if any of them didn’t, they could have been as absorbed in it as they would be by a complex mystery story.

Finally, of Sophocles’ play I note that there is little dwelling upon gore. Jocasta hangs herself offstage. Oedipus blinds himself offstage (though of course he does come back on stage blinded, with, I assume, bloody bandages or some such over his eyes to signal his blindness). The horror of both acts is conveyed, but the emphasis is on the moral horror that has been revealed, and the darkness Oedipus now experiences. As Oedipus gropes his way out of Thebes, the final Chorus tells us that no man can be considered fortunate until he is dead (or, depending on which translation you trust, no man can be properly judged until his whole life is known). Almost an existentialist statement – a man is the sum of his actions. As for the question that has caused endless arguments over the centuries – how guilty is Oedipus when he wasn’t aware of the sins he was committing? – that is never really examined in the play itself.

As it happens, I read Seneca’s Latin version of the story before I read Sophocles’, and my views on Sophocles’ play were sharpened by the comparison. Seneca’s Oedipus (written nearly 500 years after Sophocles, sometime in the 50s AD) follows the same general narrative arc as Sophocles’ play, and basically tells the same story. But it is a very, very different play. First, it is not as public a play as Sophocles’. If Sophocles commences with a crowd pleading with Oedipus, Seneca begins with Oedipus, at night and in private, delivering a long speech to Jocasta about the plague of Thebes and evil portents about his parentage and sins. Not only does this negate the type of suspense Sophocles was able to create, but it places us in a more private space where the suffering of Oedipus is much more important than the common good of the city. In this regard, be it noted that Seneca’s play has a much smaller cast. Seneca delivers information about Oedipus’ past quickly and without the gradual revelation Sophocles achieved.

Most egregiously, Seneca likes to dwell on gore and sensational verbal effects. When Tiresias arrives to tell of visions he has seen and oracles that have been divined, he gives a long speech on the eyes and guts of animals that have been torn out to read the auguries. Later, Creon reports the raising of the ghost of King Laius, with two-thirds of his long speech being scene-setting filled with the dark, daunting woods, the screeching of night-owls and so forth. Then there is the denouement. Offstage, Oedipus does not blind himself with the pins of Jocasta’s brooches (as happens in Sophocles’ play). Instead, he rips his eyeballs out with his bare hands, meaning that the Messenger who reports the tale to us dwells in detail, in his long speech, on blood, oozing empty eye-sockets, squelchy eyeballs falling on the ground and other things close to sheer Grand Guignol. Then Jocasta kills herself on stage, not by hanging, but by stabbing herself in the belly (womb) to atone for the incestuous children she has borne.

As for the Chorus, there is little of the conversational to-and-fro between Chorus and characters that there is in Sophocles. Like all the characters in the play, the Chorus speak in long, uninterrupted speeeches – orations in fact. There has been much discussion as to whether Seneca’s plays were ever intended for performance, because they all follow this pattern of long orations rather than dialogue. Therefore they are often dismissed as exercises in rhetoric, or closet dramas intended to be read to a private audience. I admit to enjoying some of Seneca’s oratorical bombast, and recently some of his plays have been performed successfully. But as far as ancient renderings of Oedipus’ story go, this is very inferior stuff to Sophocles.

And so, leaving the ancient versions of the tales, we come to Jean Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, written in 1932, first produced in Paris – by the able actor-director Louis Jouvet – in 1934. A decade earlier, Cocteau had adapted a version of Oedipus the King, but The Infernal Machine is his last, and best-known, word on the matter.

In four acts, the play covers the whole career of Oedipus in Thebes, from his defeat of the Sphinx through his marriage to Jocasta to (17 years later) his discovery of the truth about himself. Only the last act, much the shortest of the play, deals with the revelation of the truth and Oedipus’ downfall, so all of the dramatic matter of Sophocles and Seneca is squeezed into the final few pages.

As soon as this play begins, we know we are in the realm of game-playing as much as the realm of drama. Each act is introduced by a scene-setting “Voice” – that is, a narrator who directly addresses the audience. The play thus opens with a synopsis of Oedipus’ whole life, including his downfall, so there will be none of the suspense of general revelation. Instead, the play will be a commentary (or satire?) on a well-known story. The “Voice’s” opening oration ends with the words “Spectator, this machine you see here wound up to the full in such a way that the spring will slowly unwind the whole length of a human life, is one of the most perfect constructed by the infernal gods for the mathematical destruction of a mortal.” In other words, Cocteau’s view of Oedipus’ destruction is that it is a matter of sheer determinism or predestination.

Something funny is going on as soon as Act One proper gets going. It begins with two soldiers on night watch on the walls of Thebes, summoning their superior officer to confirm that the ghost of the recently-killed Laius has appeared. This is such an obvious crib of the opening of Hamlet that we are meant to congratulate ourselves on seeing the likeness. Much of the play incites such self-congratulation, including the way Tiresias (especially in Act Three) is presented as a foolish and garrulous court-councillor, very much in the mould of Polonius.

There is no accident in the pairing of Oedipus with Hamlet. Cocteau had read the influential essay published in 1923 by Sigmund Freud’s British colleague Ernest Jones, which argued that Claudius in Hamlet is really a substitute father-figure for Hamlet, and Hamlet’s battle to “save” his mother Gertrude is a manifestation of the Oedipus Complex. So The Infernal Machine is a piece of cultural feedback – the Oedipus Complex being imposed upon the original story of Oedipus. When Jocasta and Tiresias appear in Act One of The Infernal Machine, they are presented as twittering socialites. Jocasta at once gets a crush on one of the handsome young soldiers, showing she has a taste for younger men, and when the ghost of Laius appears, Jocasta can neither hear nor see it (like Gertrude in a crucial scene in Hamlet).

Act Two is taken up with Oedipus, who only now appears on stage, and his encounter with the Sphinx. Far from being a loathsome monster, the Sphinx is a beautiful young woman who converses with Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the dead, and who allows other travellers, such as a “Matron” and her child, to pass by unmolested. She is interested only in snaring handsome men and she is so eager to snare Oedipus that she gives him the answer to her riddle before she asks it. Oedipus, a naïve 19-year-old virgin, rejects her advances, perhaps showing that older women would be more to his taste. When the Sphinx allows herself to be “killed”, Oedipus spends some time considering how he could carry her body into Thebes in order to produce the greatest dramatic effect. He is concerned with play-acting and posing. He is not a tragic hero. (I at once think of Cocteau’s novella Thomas the Impostor, in which a young man becomes a hero simply by playacting as a hero.) This act, with its insistence on theatricality and elaborate stage effects, is typical of Cocteau’s arch and camp aesthetics.

But it is in Act Three that Cocteau shows his hand and reveals where his real interest in the play lies. Staged in their bed chamber, the whole act is taken up with Oedipus’ and Jocasta’s wedding night. An empty cradle is situated next to Jocasta’s bed, just in case we forget that they are mother and son. She is an ageing coquette. He is a gormless, muscular youth. In taking Jocasta, Oedipus says he has always craved “a motherly love” and he has been saving himself for such a love. He also says that he finds in Jocasta “a beauty that has weathered tempests”, and when he’s half asleep he addresses Jocasta as “mother”. As well as continuing to ogle the young soldier stationed outside their bedroom on guard duty, Jocasta momentarily recoils in horror when she sees for the first time Oedipus’ scarred feet. She intuits that he is her son; but she goes ahead with love-making anyway. Her incest is a conscious choice. And in the final act, Cocteau has her returning as a ghost and telling Oedipus “my child, my little boy… things which appear abominable to human beings, if you only knew, from the place where I live [the Underworld], if only you knew how unimportant they are.” Meaning, I assume, that aberrant sex is simply a trivial whim and no cause for worry.

The brief final act, compressing all the matter of the classical dramas, reminds me of the aphorism that tragedy played at high speed will always have the impact of farce. Ultimately, Cocteau’s play has been concerned with “taking down” the classics and turning high tragedy into domestic comedy. Typical is the running gag in the play whereby Jocasta keeps tripping over her long scarf, so that we can chuckle knowingly in the sour awareness that she will eventually hang herself on her scarf.

The Infernal Machine was a popular play in its day and was produced to acclaim in New York, London and other places as well as in Paris. Its set- and costume-designs were much of its appeal – especially in the effects which allow the Sphinx to transform from beautiful young woman to monster in Act Two. One can understand how modern and “daring” and avant-garde it might have seemed nearly ninety years ago. But its appeal has faded, it is rarely revived, and its text now reads like a combination of the haughty dismissiveness of Aldous Huxley and the brittle twitter of Noel Coward.

At this point I could launch into a tirade on Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) as the popinjay who dabbled in many art forms without becoming master of any, and whose chief appeal was his camp style, in which he had nothing of substance to say. But I’ll refrain from this. I have seen all the films which Cocteau directed and scripted, from Blood of a Poet to The Testament of Orpheus, and I have seen the film adaptations of his work that were directed by others, such as Les Enfants Terribles; and in them I have found much delightful visual style and much real wit – so I will not belittle their creator.

But I will say that an Oedipus play without a strong consideration of the moral issues is no Oedipus at all. I read Sophocles’ original rendering of the story much as I read the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his own son, but at the crucial moment stays his hand. The story (despite some twittering one now finds among neo-atheists) is a strong fable against human sacrifice, which was ever afterwards abhorrent to the Jewish people. In similar fashion, Oedipus the King is a strong moral fable against the taboos of incest and parricide. Without this moral underpinning, the story has no particular meaning.

New Zealand Footnote: I was aware that at various times some New Zealand writers have had a crack at versions of, or heavy allusions to, ancient Greek drama, myths and legends, but none so much as James K Baxter, whose work is awash with (and sometimes drowned in) classical references. At pp.167-170 of Volume 3 of the Complete Prose of James K Baxter (reviewed on this blog), you can find Baxter’s introduction to two of his Greek-derived plays, The Sore-Footed Man and The Temptations of Oedipus. But as it happens, the former does not refer to Oedipus at all, despite its title; while the latter deals with Oedipus’ later years and his relationship with his daughter Ismene, and not with the most familiar story about him.