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The Last Scene of the Oedipus Tyrannus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

George Gellie
George Gellie*
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Extract

When Oedipus rushes into the palace at line 1185 of the Oedipus Tyrannus we have a sense of dramatic fulfilment which, most people would say, is about as much as one play can offer. The process of getting us to this moment of climax has been so satisfyingly managed and our emotions kept at such tension before the instant of release that it is hard not to feel overwhelmed when the resolution of so much theatrical energy takes effect. We are tempted to ask no more of the dramatist: he can do what he likes with us, provided that he does it gently and recognises that our resources of pity and fear have been drained by what we have been through.

So it has been customary to regard the part of the play that follows 1185 as a leisurely declension from the high point of the discovery to the flat land of acquiescence: no new material but an absorption of the old, a gradual accommodation to the horror of the revelation. In keeping with this view the critical literature has often found very little to say about this closing scene. Yet there is evidence enough that the scene is something more than a winding-down. Its very dimensions should set us wondering. That Sophocles should use almost a quarter of his playing-time, not to clinch something in his final scene, but to offer unproductive and undemanding comment on a now played-out play, looks like dramatic and poetic waste. In fact the material of the scene takes us not down but up. There is a design at work that lets the play grow again. Oedipus finds his way back into the world and it is not hard to chart his progress through a number of stages that are separable and display a distinct identity, each of them contributing a little more to the cumulative effect. The play is really doing another kind of building towards another kind of climax. Immediately after the discovery there is a flatness of exhaustion, but from that low point the dramatist works to generate new tensions and excitements around the figure of Oedipus. When he and his daughters meet the play is back on high ground. To change the image, the progress of Oedipus could be compared with the return of a deep-sea diver from the ocean bed; he pauses at one pressure-level after another, getting used to the new conditions, and then proceeds to the next holding-station on the way to the surface.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , January 1986 , pp. 35 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1986

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References

1. Perrotta, G., Sofocle (Milan 1935), 217f.Google Scholar, finds the scene ‘prolix’, ‘too long’. For him, ‘the true tragedy is over’. Livingstone, R. W., ‘The Exodos of the Oedipus Tyrannus’, in Greek Poetry and Life (Oxford 1936), 158Google Scholar, says of the scene: ‘On most readers of the play it makes little impression.’ Dain-Mazon, , Sophocle (Paris 1958), ii.66Google Scholar, sees the end of the play as nothing but lamentation. Vickers, B., Towards Creek Tragedy (London 1973), 512Google Scholar, calls it ‘that long cry of disgust’. Others believe that the scene may even have damaged the play. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U., Griechische Tragödien (Berlin 1904), i.25Google Scholar, claims that the last scene is too grisly for a modern audience and that the failure of the play to win first prize may mean that the original audience too found it offensive. Reinhardt, K., Sophokles, tr. F. and H. Harvey (Oxford 1979), 130Google Scholar, finds in this play especially the characteristic of Attic tragedy of ‘luxuriating in horror, of investing terror with a kind of voluptuousness’.

2. Counting the lines in discussions of the play is a very crude way to establish a critical emphasis, but it brings home the imbalance in a striking way. Norwood, G., Greek Tragedy (London 1920Google Scholar) devotes 102 lines of his plot summary to the section 1–1185, 9 lines to the section 1186–1530. Sheppard, J.T., The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles (Cambridge 1920Google Scholar), uses 69 pages to comment on the earlier section, 5 pages to comment on the later. In Post, L.A., From Homer to Menander (Berkeley 1951Google Scholar), the ratio is 4 pages to 8 lines; in Kamerbeek, J.C., The Oedipus Tyrannus (Leiden 1967Google Scholar), 11 pages to 24 lines.

3. For a strong statement of this view, see Knox, B.M.W., Oedipus at Thebes (New Haven 1957), 185–96Google Scholar. Knox argues for ‘the recovery of Oedipus, the reintegration of the hero’ in the last scene. He maintains his position in Sophocle (Fondation Hardt, Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 29: Vandoeuvres-Gerieve 1983), 178Google Scholar.

4. Vickers (n.1 above), 519ff., has a good section on the emphasis placed on the incest. Cf. Burton, R.W.B., The Chorus in Sophocles’ Tragedies (Oxford 1980), 176Google Scholar.

5. Cf. Winnington-lngram, R.P., Sophocles: An Interpretation (Cambridge 1980), 177CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘It was a challenge to the art of Sophocles to make it [the blinding] other than a sensational anti-climax…’

6. Burton (n.4 above), 180, remarks that the trimeters are ‘flat, dull, and at times banal’, by this means the poet ensures that ‘attention is focussed on Oedipus’.

7. For a discussion of the convention, see Greenwood, L.H.G., Aspects of Euripidean Tragedy (Cambridge 1953), 131ffGoogle Scholar.

8. It is a strange order anyway, as is noted by Vellacott, P., Sophocles and Oedipus (London 1971), 246Google Scholar. Of course the play demands that Oedipus remain on stage. But the sequence chosen by Sophocles is a little puzzling. It goes: (a) Creon brings the children to Oedipus (as is made clear by 1476f.) but for the moment leaves them off stage, (b) he orders the defiled Oedipus indoors; (c) he has the children brought out to Oedipus. Why include stage (b) at all, if not to expose Creon’s small-mindedness and lack of authority?

9. On the unchanging stage-personalities of the two men, see Davies, M., ‘The End of Sophocles’ O.T.’, Hermes 110 (1982), 274ffGoogle Scholar. He believes that Creon remains circumspect and that the overbearing Oedipus remains incapable of learning anything from the play’s events. I prefer the account given by Kirkwood, G., A Study of Sophoclean Drama (Ithaca, N.Y., 1958), 132Google Scholar; he claims that the dramatist’s purpose in maintaining the contrast between the two men is to ensure ‘continued domination (dramatic, that is) by the tragic hero’.

10. Cf. Sheppard (n.2 above), 169: Oedipus’ love for his children ‘lends comforting beauty to the final development of the composition’; also Kamerbeek (n.2 above), 23: the scene ‘adds a nuance of personal tenderness to the generally grim pathos of the end’.

11. Cf. Dawe, R.D., Oedipus Tyrannus (Cambridge 1983), 225Google Scholar. Lattimore, R., The Poetry of Creek Tragedy (Baltimore 1958), 90Google Scholar, hints at the same answer: ‘What was the sword for? The question is left flying in the air as Oedipus sees Jocasta, already dead.’ Livingstone (n.1 above), 159, believes that Oedipus contemplated suicide but then abandoned the idea.

12. Lattimore (n.11 above), 90, notes that Sophocles ‘seems to contradict himself’ when Oedipus calls his daughters into his arms. Similarly Taplin, O., Greek Tragedy in Action (London 1978), 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘I am unable to account with any confidence for the apparent contradiction between Oedipus’ terrible pollution and all this contact with others, bodily contact as well as visual and aural exposure.’ Gould, T., Oedipus The King (Englewood Cliffs 1970), 157Google Scholar, finds Creon’s thinking inconsistent: he wants to hide away the defiled Oedipus, yet then lets him embrace his daughters. Cf. n.8 above.

13. Cf. Segal, C., Tragedy and Civilization (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 246Google Scholar: ‘Against the enormity of the pollution this last gesture of human contact and human love is, by its very naturalness, momentous.’

14. Jebb, R.C., The Oedipus Tyrannus (Cambridge 1883), 190Google Scholar, has the children enter after 1470 and that has been the normal staging and editorial practice. Dawe, R.D., Studies on the Text of Sophocles (Leiden 1973Google Scholar), i.264, has the children enter with Creon at 1422. The difficulty with this is that for some time after Creon’s entry the play has business to look after that is quite independent of the children. They are not mentioned in the text until 1459. If Sophocles had allowed the children to make their surprise appearance at 1422, every eye would have been dragged to them. The play’s attention would have gone along one track, the audience’s attention along another. The dramatist makes sure that that will not happen: Oedipus starts talking of the children at 1459, of the two girls at 1462, begs for them to be sent to him at 1466 and hears them weeping at 1471 as they come on stage. Eye and mind are redirected by slow stages towards the new entry.

15. Ronnet, G., Sophocle: Poète Tragique (Paris 1969), 121Google Scholar n.1, believes that Oedipus could not speak so crudely about the incest with girls of an age to understand; she suggests that they are ‘three years, perhaps four years old’. It is notoriously difficult to make sense of the time-scales of the three Theban plays, but there seem to be arguments against the use of very small children in this scene. Oedipus claims that the male children are capable of looking after themselves; his main worry for the girls on stage is with their marriage prospects. The level of address is just too mature for the very young, and one could worry too about staging the blind man’s embrace of two small children. But the age, size or susceptibility to shock of these children are not things that should concern us too much. They have not been brought on stage so that we can take the measure of their sensitivity.

16. As Perrotta (n.1 above) 219, puts it: ‘The very horror of the incest seems to be cancelled, the incest itself seems almost redeemed.’

17. For recent discussions of these lines (and doubts as to their authenticity) see Taplin (n.l2 above) 45f., and Hester, D.A., ‘The Banishment of Oedipus’, Antichthon 18 (1984), 13–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hester picks up a nineteenth century suggestion to make the case that O.T. 1515–23 have been ‘adjusted’ to accommodate O.T. to O.C. on the occasion of a double production. I believe that Oedipus’ return into the palace (Hester’s main reason for rejecting the lines) is the only possible ending to the play, whether in these lines or others.

18. See e.g. Kitto, H.D.F., Greek Tragedy3 (London 1961), 177Google Scholar, and Poiesis: Structure and Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1966), 215Google Scholar; Davies (n.9 above), 272f.

19. Mackail, J.W., Lectures on Greek Poetry (London 1926), 149Google Scholar.

20. Cf. Ronnet (n.15 above), 67, who suggests that the exceptional nature of the prologue, with its suppliant group distinct from the chorus, may even have been dictated by the epilogue. See also Dawe (n.11 above), 22.