Sophocles: 496-405 B.C.

Oedipus the King = Oedipus Rex (Latinized) = Oedipus Tyrannos (Greek)

VERY BRIEF WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT:
For Friday: The Paradox of Oedipus: list as many ways as you can think of in which the figure of Oedipus in this play embodies a paradox, that is, a conflicting doubleness. Here are two to get you started. He is both the "stranger from Corinth" and a "native of Thebes"; he is both the legitimate king (son of the previous king) and the illegitimate king (killer of the previous king, son of the current queen).

[Theories of interpretation, reminder: historicism, euhemerism, allegory, aitiology. Euhemeric reading of Oedipus?]

1. Images: the story of the Oedipus Rex, as told by Sophocles.

2. The Paradoxes embodied in the figure of Oedipus

3. The "meaning" of the Oedipus Rex:

a. Man cannot escape Fate (a common folktale pattern: Thompson-Aarne type 931)

b. The conflict between human and divine intelligence. Limits of human intelligence. Paradox of the oracle: every step away from fulfilling the prophecy is a step towards fulfilling the prophecy. But what would have happened if they had believed the oracle? Paradox, since the logical consequence seems to be that if they had believed, trusted in, the oracle, then it would not have come true-- an impossibility in this world view. A paradoxical world in which you must disbelieve in order for the word of the gods to become true, where the blind see, and the sighted are blind-- this sort of truth, incomprehensible to the end, seems to inform the Sophoclean notion of divinity. Dark, riddling nature of divine intelligence, which is beyond the limits of human understanding.

Myths as products of the psyche: Modern Mythmakers?

Strong emotional impact of myth: how to account for it?

Sophocles creates the CANONICAL version of the tale of Oedipus through the force of his drama. But what then carries such force? Why is it that "Oedipus" remains a household word so many hundreds of years later? That is, what interpretative strategies might help account for our strong reactions to this tale?

1. Freud and Oedipus

• Plato: to logistikon = Freud: das Ich = ego

Plato: pure rationality = true happiness (man)
Freud: part of the id altered by reality

• Plato: thumos = Freud: das Ueberich = superego

Plato: (noble part of our being)
Freud: part of the intelligence which can be made the ally of the ego: internalized from the parent's (super)ego
Essential conflict here: Plato thought this wonderful, since it can control people too dumb to be philosophers through proper upbringing; Freud saw superego though as a chief cause of unhappiness. Socrates' voice.

• Plato: to epithumetikon= Freud: das Es = id

Plato: (many-headed, snakey part of our being); Plato allies with dreams and tragedy ]

• ego: part of the id that is most in contact with external reality and immediately controls behavior, handles the conflicting demands of id & libido on the one side, the superego on the other, and external reality on yet another. Agent of repression. Mostly conscious, but not wholly: Freudian slips, e.g. Develops from the id. Rider & horse analogy.
  
• id: that which is alien to the ego, and purely unconscious: part of the psyche assoc. with instinctual impulses and demands for immediate satisfaction of primitive needs. Quote, p. 73. Timeless nature of the id: "after the passage of decades they behave as though they had just occurred."
  
• superego: "heir to the Oedipus complex" (p.79). "Conscience". Not present at birth, quote p. 62. The development of the superego, Freud goes on to say, occurs exactly at the moment when the child gives up the Oedipus complex (p. 64): "the heir of that emotional attachment which is of such importance for childhood." The development within the child's own psyche of these elements of moral severity forces him to give up the fixation of hatred for father and sexual desire for mother that informs his earliest memories.

• The Oedipus Rex (and by extension all truly great, classic myth able to speak over centuries) speaks to our primordial memories, to the id, which (you recall) contains a timeless memory of our deepest passions from childhood, and specificly of that time before the development of the superego when we experienced strong feelings of infantile sexuality unrestrained, and esp. when we experienced these strong feelings of hatred for father and sexual impulse toward mother so important for our psychic development.
  
• The artist (who is "not far removed from neurosis" and is "oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs") transfers all his emotional energy (libido) toward fantasy. But he also possesses the understanding of how to work over his daydreams to make them less personal, and to make it possible for others to share in the enjoyment of them. In making his daydreams accessible to others, the artist thereby allows others to share in his source of consolation from his repressions.
  
• In the specific case of the Oedipus, Freud found that the artist had located a daydream of central importance. (And this is the passage where in 1900 Freud "announced" his discovery of the Oedipal complex-- a critical discovery, as we've seen, since it intimately relates the development of the superego.) Quote, p. 262. [This in the "Interpretation of Dreams": but note that in all cases but mother lust and parricidal impulse the dream is covert, a transformed message; these only are as they seem in dreams because "the dream-censorship is not armed to meet such a monstrosity"(!)]

So: "deep-structure" analysis. That is, the strong effect of tragedy is not rooted in anything very obvious, such as the themes brought out in the poetry, the experience and contemplation of the suffering figure, and so forth, but rather by its linkage into "deep structures" in our brain or psyche.

Perhaps central in all this is what seems to be a factual difference between ancient and modern perceptions, and ancient and modern audience reaction: that is, that we often psychologize where the ancients see external forces operative, forces like divine power, moral and societal order. Dionysus "in us" means to us madness and irrationality; to them, yes, madness and irrationality but also that Dionysus is, literally, a divine force "in us". Divine retribution, to most ancients, would have meant just that: you make the error (hamartia, in Aristotle's terms, wrongly translated "flaw"), the god arranges just recompense; but to us this is bound up strongly with moral guilt, and the divine justice is often read as though metaphorical for what we (our superego, in Freud's terms) feel should happen to someone who makes this sort of error=sin.

2. Lévi-Strauss, Structuralism, and Oedipus the King

"Structuralism": the structural theory of myth, proposed by the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Myth is one mode of human communication, similar to (and a product of) language, but also different in important respects

Just as the elements of language (sounds = "phonemes") are meaningless in isolation, and only take on meaning in combination with other phonemes, so also the elements of myth (the individual narrative elements, the persons or objects) are meaningless in themselves, and only take on significance through their relation with each other. It is not therefore the formation of the narrative that is significant, but rather the underlying structure of relations that determines the real "meaning" of a myth.

Variant versions of a myth may show changes in surface meaning, but the structure and basic relationships will often remain constant.

Myths typically revolve around the mediation of extremes for binary oppositions which are fundamental to the society of the mythmaker: such as kinship relations, or the nature/culture antithesis. "Mythical thought always works from the awareness of opposition toward their progressive mediation."

Human perception (i.e., the way the physical brain works in interpreting the world around us) is, according to Lévi-Strauss fundamentally binary. Humans, because of the binary brain, perceive the world in terms of sharp contrasts-- hot and cold, bitter and sweet, raw and cooked (=nature / culture), life and death. The contradictions we perceive in the world we naturally mediate by telling stories that bridge these contradictions in the world around us.

The "structure" that determines the meaning is usually an unconsciously formed one. That is, most authors or reproducers of a myth will be unaware of the meaning that a structuralist interpreter like Lévi-Strauss will assign to them.

The example of Oedipus (excerpt from Structural Anthropology: handout)

[Cf. Powell, Classical Myth, pp. 638-9.]