Some Profane Variations on a Tragic Theme

Abstract

I PROPOSE TO DISCUSS in this paper' two plays which give, in very different ways, non-tragic, even profane, treatment to themes derived from the most profound of all Greek tragedies, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus. The fate of Oedipus, doomed by Apollo's oracle before his life begins to commit in ignorance (before his play begins) his dreadful deeds of parricide and incest, is too well-known to need elaboration here. So, too, is the terrible cohesion of that Sophoclean plot in which the all-too-probable decisions and reactions of the King mesh with the helps, the hindrances, the chance (or it is chance?) appearances of other characters, to lead inexorably to the necessary, Apollo-driven discovery of what he is. I repeat a few of its major features now only to draw attention to certain basic elements from which our two other plays take their source . .. and their departure. The plague on Thebes is to be lifted only when the murderer of Laius is found. King Oedipus, riddle-reader and city-saviour par excellence, first among men in matters human and divine (33-34), takes on his people's cause. His imperious personality drives the action of the play before it: insults to the reluctant, close-mouthed Teiresias lead to the prophet's accusation that Oedipus himself is the murderer; fury and fear lead Oedipus to the hasty accusation of Creon as the suborner of Teiresias and this, in turn, leads to the appearance of mother-wife Jocasta to make the peace between them. Sympathy, maternal and protective, leads Jocasta to tell a tale which she thinks must assuage forever Oedipus' fear that prophets and oracle speak truth. There was an oracle to Laius (I will not say from Phoebus) that he would die by his own son's hand... (711-713), and so she tells the oracle-refuting tale that Laius was slain by robbers long after that son was exposed to die. A detail in that story -a quite gratuitous detail-triggers Oedipus' memory and soon he is telling Jocasta (the one most worthy, above all, to hear it, 772-773) not only how he himself slew a man at the place where the three roads meet but also (gratuitously again!) how he came to be at such a place: how he had left his royal home in Corinth in fear of an oracle that he would slay his father and marry his mother. And so Oedipus tells Jocasta his oracle as Jocasta has told him hers: the two halves of the same truth are there, confronting mother and son, drawn from each by the sympathetic bond between them. But each gazes at his own half only, and only the audience connects.