Bowman, 'Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9508
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9508-bowman-oedipus

@@@@95.9.24, Segal, Oedipus Tyrannus

Charles Segal, <i>Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits
of Knowledge</i>. Twayne's Masterwork Studies, series ed. Robert
Lecker. New York: Twayne Publishers (Macmillan), 1993. Pp. xv,
183. Fig. 5. $22.95, ISBN 0-8057-7979-5 (hb); $7.95, ISBN
0-8057-8029-7 (pb).
  Reviewed by Laurel Bowman -- University of Victoria
     lbowman@sol.uvic.ca

  The Twayne's Masterwork Studies series is dedicated to
providing introductions to the "classics" of world literature for
a target audience of non-specialist undergraduates. Professor
Segal's <i>Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of
Knowledge</i> is a useful contribution to this series, providing
exactly the sort of information a student encountering the play
for the first time will need and enjoy, and much to interest the
specialist as well. 

  The book is intended for the Greekless reader; necessary Greek
terms are defined and transliterated. A book of this kind cannot
enter extensively into the scholarly debates on interpretation
and style, and Segal does not do so. His treatment and notes
provide the information a non-specialist will need, and give
priority to content over form, myth over style or staging; though
all are discussed as occasion arises. The introduction includes a
literary and political chronology of Athens from 534 to 399 B.C.

  The first half of the book, "Literary and Cultural Context",
includes chapters on the historical and cultural background of
the play, ancient staging, and the reception, influence, and
different interpretations of the myth and the play. The last
half, "A Reading", is a running commentary on the play. Segal
concludes each section with a chapter derived from his article
"Time, Theater and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus",[[1]]
revised, adapted, and divided in two for this volume.

  The first and fourth chapters, "Historical and Cultural
Background" and "Performance, Theater and Social Context", give
the fifth-century B.C. context of the play. Chapter 1 gives a
brief account of the political and intellectual background. Segal
sketches the important aspects of the burst of artistic and
intellectual activity that occurred in Athens under Pericles, as
well as the immediate circumstances of the war and the plague,
and suggests possible interpretations of the play in this
context. Chapter 4 summarizes the setting, staging, and social
role of tragedy. Segal describes the various stages of the City
Dionysia and its function as a civic and religious festival in a
democratic society. The physical setting and the staging of
tragedy are briefly described, with emphasis on those aspects
unfamiliar to modern readers (eg. three male masked actors, a
chorus, the use of choral odes). He here discusses also the
sources of the myths used in Greek tragedy, and Sophocles'
manipulation of the expectations of an audience that knew the
myths and would appreciate the changes he introduced.

   The essential question "Why Read <i>Oedipus Tyrannus?</i>"
titles the short second chapter; I suspect most readers will turn
here first.  Segal answers, in part, that Oedipus' journey of
self-discovery and tragic knowledge makes him a hero of Western
cultural identity, but that the importance of the work lies even
more in its ability always to excite each new audience to ask
different questions and find fresh interpretations of the play.

  Chapters 3 and 5, "Reception and Influence" and "The Oedipus
Myth and its Interpretation", are densely-packed histories of the
reception, influence, and interpretation of the myth and the
play. Segal's discussion of other versions of the story, from the
epic cycle, through Seneca, to the 20th century treatments of
Gide and Cocteau, are at once informative and highly
entertaining. He surveys the differences in themes emphasized in
different ages--the helplessness and resignation to fate of
Seneca's Oedipus, the political emphasis of the seventeenth and
eighteenth century treatments by Corneille and Voltaire, and the
personal and psychological interpretations of nineteenth and
twentieth century writers--and includes details which will hold
his audience's interest and pique its further curiosity. In the
twelfth-century <i>Roman de Thebes</i>, for example, Segal tells
us that the sons of Oedipus trample his eyeballs into the dirt in
horror at his incest; Corneille introduced a comedic subplot (the
love of Theseus and Dirce) in deference to the tastes of the
contemporary audience; Laius' ghost, invented by Seneca, torments
Oedipus in most versions of the story thereafter until the
nineteenth century; and--my favourite aside--in Cocteau's <i>The
Infernal Machine</i>, Oedipus and Jocasta on their wedding night
"have just the conversation that readers .. often wonder about;
Jocasta talks of her lost child, and Oedipus gives an account of
the scars on his feet" (28). The final section of this chapter
discusses modern criticism, and provides a good brief
introduction to the 20th-century scholarship on the <i>O.T.</i> 

  Chapter 5 summarizes tellings and interpretations of the myth
from Homer on. Segal begins with an account of the different
versions of the myth from Homer through to late fifth century
B.C. drama. The section "Riddle, Kinship and Language" relies on
a structuralist approach to analyse the family relationships, and
discusses the linked ambiguities in family ties and language.
Segal continues with a brief history of the nineteenth and
twentieth century interpretations of the myth. After a brief
survey of earlier interpretations, Segal devotes the bulk of this
section to a compelling reading of Freud's influential reading of
the play as a coded expression of the "Oedipus Complex". Segal
finds his reading simplistic, but argues that the play is a good
model of the psychoanalytic process, in that it dramatizes the
gradual unfolding of coded unconscious knowledge to the conscious
mind. He concludes the chapter with a discussion of more recent
interpretations by Levi-Strauss, Vernant and Girard. A short
chapter follows on "Oedipus and the Trials of the Hero", in which
Segal explains the general pattern of the hero-myth--the hero
discovers his true birth, kills the monster, gets the girl, and
rules the kingdom--and shows how it is turned into tragedy simply
by inverting the order; Oedipus performs all the requisite tasks,
but unfortunately discovers his true birth last. 

  Segal's reading of the play, which occupies the second half of
the book, divides the play into three segments, by chapter:
"Crisis of the City and the King" (1-677), "Discovery and
Reversal" (678-1185), and "Resolution: Tragic Suffering, Heroic
Endurance" (1186-1530).  Segal combines a discussion of the text
with comments on staging, when these will be illuminating to a
reader unfamiliar with ancient Greek conventions. For example,
when the messenger from Corinth mentions Oedipus' pierced feet,
Segal explains that as the actor playing Jocasta was wearing a
mask no change in facial expression was possible; but the actor
might still have shown a reaction to this information with a
gesture of some kind, e.g., by throwing up his hands. Segal pays
close attention to the ambiguities of language throughout the
play, explaining the Greek where necessary--for example, the puns
on Oedipus' name, which he translates as "know foot" (i.e.,
knowing the riddle) and "swell foot". There is a particularly
interesting discussion of the difficulties of translating the
dense connotations of the Greek, to illustrate which Segal quotes
four different translations of the phrase "TEKOU=SA TLH/MWN,"
(1175; p. 131). His clear explanations of the implications of the
Greek text where they affect his interpretation add greatly to
the interest of the book, and may persuade some readers to learn
the original language. 

  A summary of Segal's interpretation of the play cannot do it
justice, as it excels precisely in close readings of the language
of individual passages. He discusses questions of
characterization, context, and language as they arise, and
emphasizes throughout the linked ambiguities in family
relationships and language, and the consequent tragic gap between
human understanding and divine knowledge. Segal's treatment of
the last scene of the play, which he recognizes as difficult for
the modern audience, is particularly useful. Segal argues that
Oedipus is here seen struggling with his new self-knowledge,
rather than committing suicide in shock and despair, as Jocasta
does. He analyses the ways in which Sophocles heightens the
audience's expectation that Oedipus will commit suicide, and
argues that his continued survival is rendered more emphatic
thereby. Oedipus thus serves in the last scene of the play as the
model of a man who has both knowledge of the human condition, and
the strength to accept and endure it. 

  Chapters 7 and 11 form a pair. Ch. 7, "Life's Tragic Shape:
Plot, Design and Destiny", concludes the section on "Historical
and Literary Context". Here Segal analyses the narrative pattern
of the play and its effect. The story in the <i>O.T.</i> is in
essence told backwards; almost every crucial event in the action
has already happened. The reverse structure of the narrative
reflects Oedipus' motion geographically, towards his birthplace,
and intellectually, in his quest for knowledge. The reverse
narrative pattern of the play is shown also in the function of
the oracles, which confuse time. Most of the oracles have already
been fulfilled, but are interpreted by the characters as
predicting the future; some are yet to be fulfilled, but in an
unexpected way; only the audience (and the gods) see the entire
pattern at once. The oracles govern the circular motion of time
in the play, turning it constantly back towards origins and the
past. Segal concludes this chapter with an analysis of ways in
which the staging of the play also reinforces the reverse order
of the narrative; knowledge arrives from the synthesis of past
events in present time, before the audience's eyes. 

  Chapter 11, "Inner Vision and Theatrical Spectacle" concludes
the book. Segal here builds on his earlier discussion of
theatrical self-consciousness, with reference to the exodos.  The
most violent scenes, the killing of Laius, the death of Jocasta,
and the blinding of Oedipus, are all hidden from the eyes of the
audience, and played out instead in their imagination. The
emphasis in the messenger speech is similarly on what the
messenger himself couldn't see--because the doors to the chamber
were closed; because all eyes were drawn to Oedipus; because
Oedipus was standing in the way. The audience's imagination is
thus drawn through two filters--what they cannot see, and what
the messenger could not see--towards the terrible things that
cannot be seen in the wedding chamber of Oedipus and Jocasta.
Segal argues that the sexual aspect of Oedipus' actions is
emphasized in this speech. Oedipus demands a sword--a weapon of
penetration--and bursts in the double doors of the chamber,
"double" as a signifier of the double marriage, the twice-sown
womb. When he lays Jocasta down and takes the pins from her
recumbent body he is undressing her, as he did on their wedding
night in the same room. Thus the final thing the messenger 'can't
see', the thing that is too horrible to see, is an act which
recalls the original incest; and Oedipus, who does see,
immediately cancels out his own vision by blinding himself. The
events narrated in the exodos thus recapitulate the major events
of Oedipus' life. Sophocles' use of terms for vision in this
scene also call attention to the theatrical context in which the
story is being enacted; the audience is presented with a double
narrative, of what it sees and what it is told, and its own
(in)ability to see is emphasized in both. 

  The original audience responded to the spectacle, Segal
concludes, whereas modern audiences, approaching the <i>O.T.</i>
as a written text, respond to the psychological and private
dimension; but the play can support both interpretations, and
many others. Segal's interpretation itself privileges
twentieth-century existentialist and psychoanalytic concerns, and
can of course be contested at many points. But, as Segal would be
the first to acknowledge, no reading is definitive, and his is
not intended to be. The ability of his lucidly-phrased and
challenging interpretation to provoke debate in the classroom and
elsewhere is not the least of the virtues of this book. 

  The notes provide the information beginning readers will need,
without overloading them with details, and generally lead the
reader to other Greek authors rather than to secondary literature
on the point in question. For example, Segal comments that the
"interior space" of the house was the area generally allocated to
the female in Greek tragedy and culture; his note here (165 n.2)
cites Pericles' funeral oration (Thuc. 2.45.2) rather than the
secondary literature on women's space in tragedy or life in
ancient Greece. The select, annotated bibliography provides a
useful guide to the student who wants more information; works
cited range in date from 1893 (Jebb's edition) to 1992 (Pucci's
<i>Oedipus and the Fabrication of the Father</i>), but
concentrate on critical literature published or translated into
English from the 1950s to the 1980s.

  <i>Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of
Knowledge</i> succeeds admirably in what it sets out to do. The
great strength of this book is the clarity of its exposition of
the background, context, and later influence and interpretation
of Sophocles' play. A great deal of disparate information,
together with a thoughtful and challenging interpretation of the
play, is here presented in a format and language easily
accessible to the non-specialist. I recommend it particularly for
undergraduate courses in tragedy or Greek literature in
translation. Students reading the play in Greek will likewise
find the book a useful introduction to the context, performance,
and scholarship on the <i>O.T.</i> 

  Errata: "Thebes" is printed for "Corinth" (77); the order of
Sophocles' and Euripides' deaths is inverted in the chronology
(xiv).



NOTE

[[1]] Charles Segal, "Time, Theater and Knowledge in the Tragedy
of Oedipus", <i>Edipo: Il teatro greco e la cultura Europea</i>,
ed. B. Gentili and R. Pretagostini (Rome 1986), 459-84.