Oedipus — Zoom out
As much as the Oedipus with whom we are most familiar is the one fixed by Sophocles, the character’s life extends far beyond the tragedy with which it has become marked. Homer (The Iliad, Book IV and The Odyssey, Book XI), Aeschylus (Seven Against Thebes), and Euripides (The Phoenician Women) had already treated of man and destiny. Since, Seneca, Corneille, Hofmannsthal, Péladan, Gide, Eliot, Cocteau, Stravinsky, el-Hakim, and Pasolini are but a few of the signatures borne by the reworkings of story and theme. As the reiterations multiply, no matter the era, genre, or medium, what we have come to identify and value the most are their distinct variations in recasting dramatically, politically, and psychologically the fate with which we all have been presumably doomed. Whether tragic, banal, satirical, joyous, or prudent, the story’s components remain more or less the same. What differs, what gives them their qualities as tragic, banal, satirical, or what not, are the ways in which they are woven, the distances and juxtapositions they inhabit, the relations they endure and produce, and, in turn, the relations they provoke for their audiences to endure and produce.
Lest we assume that it is only we that are familiar with the plot and its details, that it is only we for whom form has come to eclipse content, let us not forget that the tragedy’s first audience was well acquainted with the myth and its major detours, partly through its cultural surround, which included the above mentioned pre-Sophoclean sources, and partly through Sophocles himself. Antigone, as the last installment of the three Theban tragedies and the thematic conclusion to the accursed family’s travails, was the first to be conceived and executed (in 441 B.C.E.). By the time Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus were produced (in approximately 426 B.C.E. and 405 B.C.E. respectively), the Athenian theatregoers were already well apprised of history and fate. To borrow from Aristotle his Poetics terminology, Antigone’s dénouement, her change in fortune, was possible only in light of her complication, i.e., in light of her family’s story in its entirety up until the point at which the play that bears her name begins to unfold; Antigone’s complication became the source and raw material upon which Sophocles could draw for his two remaining plays’ dénouement. And if, in spite of all of this, some theatergoers were still unaware of the plot and its outcome, they would have most likely treated the performance as much a detective mystery as a tragedy.
