Sophocles
Oedipus the King
Antigone
Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC)
“Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has
magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its parts used separately in the
various parts of the play; represented by people acting and not by narration:
accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.”
(ch. 6)
Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC)
“Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has
magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its parts used separately in the
various parts of the play; represented by people acting and not by narration:
accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.”
(ch. 6)
mimesis = imitation/representation. The goal of art, tragedy
included, is to represent or imitate life.
Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC)
“Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has
magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its parts used separately in the
various parts of the play; represented by people acting and not by narration:
accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.”
(ch. 6)
mimesis = imitation/representation. The goal of art, tragedy
included, is to represent or imitate life.
catharsis = purgation/purification. A trickier term, and much
contested.
Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC)
“Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has
magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its parts used separately in the
various parts of the play; represented by people acting and not by narration:
accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.”
(ch. 6)
mimesis = imitation/representation. The goal of art, tragedy
included, is to represent or imitate life.
catharsis = purgation/purification. A trickier term, and much
contested.
pity and terror: this pairing of emotional responses is invoked again
and again by Aristotle.
Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC)
6 key parts of a tragedy (in order of importance):
•
•
•
•
•
•
plot
character
thought
diction
music
spectacle
“Plot is the origin and as it were the soul of tragedy, and the characters are secondary.” (ch.
6)
Aristotle on Tragedy: Poetics (c. 335 BC)
The constituents of a “complex” plot:
1. A reversal in fortune (peripeteia)
2. Recognition: “a change from ignorance to knowledge” (anagnorisis)
Maximum effect is achieved when these come together.
Also:
3. Suffering: “a destructive or painful action, e.g. deaths in full view, agonies, woundings
etc.”
Aristotle and Oedipus the King
Sophocles’s Oedipus the King an exemplary tragedy for Aristotle.
Reversal:
King becomes outcast, saviour becomes foe, curser becomes cursed,
husband becomes son…
Recognition:
Oedipus discovers that he has killed his father and married his
mother, Jocasta.
Aristotle: “in the Oedipus, the man who comes to bring delight to
Oedipus, and to rid him of his terror about his mother, does the
opposite by revealing who Oedipus is.”
**Reversal and recognition are intertwinned.**
Suffering
Oedipus is blinded and exiled.
Aristotle and Oedipus the King
The structure of the tragic plot
Solution/unravelling
(denouement)
Complication
The plague; the Oracle’s words; Oedipus’s search for
the murderer of Laius; Tiresias’s cryptic revelation of
the truth; Jocasta’s telling of the history of her son
and the circumstances of Laius’s death.
Jocasta’s suicide; Oedipus’s
blinding and exile; Creon’s
accession to the throne of
Thebes.
Reversal/recognition
Discovery that Oedipus
killed Laius and that Laius
and Jocasta are his real
parents
Aristotle and Oedipus the King
Tragedies, Aristotle argues, shouldn’t show:
•
The fall of a good man: “this is neither terrifying nor pitiable, but shocking”
•
The rise of a wicked man: “it is neither morally satisfying nor pitiable nor terrifying”
•
The fall of an out-and-out villain: “such a structure can contain moral satisfaction,
but nor pity or terror”.
Rather, the tragic protagonist must be someone neither supremely virtuous nor
supremely wicked who suffers “because of some error, and who is one of those people
with a great reputation and a good fortune, e.g. Oedipus.” (ch. 13)
Hamartia
Literally, “missing the mark”; usually translated as “flaw”. Neither accident nor
wickedness.
Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw
What is Oedipus’s tragic flaw?
As Tiresias points out, Oedipus does not see clearly:
You call me blind, you jeer at me –
I say your sight is not clear enough to see
Who shares your palace, nor the room in which you walk,
Nor the sorrow about you…
Now
You have sight, but then you will go in blindness;
When you know the truth of your wedding night (200)
Sight and understanding are here inversely proportional.
Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw
What is Oedipus’s tragic flaw?
According to the Chorus, he has overreached in seeking greater knowledge and perfect
happiness:
Oedipus aimed beyond the reach of a man
And fixed with his arrowing mind
Perfection and rich happiness. (233)
Your own mind, reaching after the secrets
Of gods, condemned you to your fate. (237-8)
At the end of the tragedy, the Chorus state:
Remember that death alone can end all suffering;
Go towards death, and ask for no greater
Happiness than a life
In which there has been no anger and no pain. (244)
Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw
The Sphinx’s riddle:
What is it that walks on four legs in the
morning, on two at noon, and on three in
the evening?
Oedipus’s correct answer:
A human.
Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864)
Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw
What is Oedipus’s tragic flaw?
Final irony: through his overwhelming suffering Oedipus does exceed the limits of the
human.
More than mortal in your acts of evil.
More than mortal in your suffering, Oedipus. (237)
Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw
If Oedipus could not have avoided his fate, how can we hold him to be flawed?
E. R. Dodds (1966):
No human court could acquit Oedipus of pollution; for pollution inhered in the act
itself, irrespective of motive … Oedipus accepts responsibility for all his acts, including
those which are objectively most horrible, though subjectively innocent. (43, 48)
Terry Eagleton (2003):
It is surely perverse to find a drama’s deepest value in the fact that its hero accepts
responsibility for what is palpably not his fault. Perhaps there is a hint here of the
public-school ethic of sportingly taking someone else’s punishment for them. Oedipus
is certainly a sacrificial scapegoat, who will finally come to assume the burden of the
community’s sins. (33)
Free will, Fate, and the Tragic Flaw
The “scapegoat mechanism”
Coined by Kenneth Burke in Permanence and Change (1935), and elaborated by Rene Girard
in Violence and the Sacred (1972).
For Girard, the scapegoat is a violent solution to the problem of violence:
•
•
•
Communal violence projected onto a single individual, who is held responsible for strife
and discord.
His or her death/expulsion a means of regenerating communal bonds and restoring
peace.
All of this must occur unconsciously.
How might this conception of the scapegoat change our understanding of catharsis?
Sophocles’s “Theban Plays”:
1. Oedipus the King (c. 430 BC)
2. Oedipus at Colonus (c. 406 BC)
3. Antigone (c. 441 BC)
Antigone and the limits of Aristotle’s theory
Who is the tragic protagonist of Antigone?
Antigone
Reversal?
She is already the victim of misfortune: her brothers’ deaths and “the
curse of Oedipus” (255).
Recognition?
She fully understands what she is doing – and its implications – from
the outset: “I am doing only what I must” (258).
Flaw?
Law-breaker? The Chorus accuse her of stubbornness: “Like father,
like daughter: both headstrong, deaf to reason! | She has never learned
to yield” (269).
Antigone and the limits of Aristotle’s theory
Who is the tragic protagonist of Antigone?
Antigone
Do the gods assist her? Of Polyneices’s second burial, the Sentry states:
A storm of dust roared up from the earth, and the sky
Went out, the plain vanished with all its trees
In the stinging dark. We closed our eyes and endured it.
The whirlwind lasted a long time, but it passed;
And then we looked, and there was Antigone! (267)
Antigone and the limits of Aristotle’s theory
Who is the tragic protagonist of Antigone?
Creon
Flaw?
Like Oedipus, he resists the will of the gods; like Oedipus he scorns
Tiresias for his words of warning. As Tiresias’s states:
You have kept from the gods below the child that is theirs
The one in the grave before her death, the other,
Dead, denied the grave. This is your crime… (287)
Recognition?
He does see the error of his ways but what difference does this make?
Nothing is discovered.
Reversal?
His son and wife die but he suffers neither death or exile. He remains
King.
Antigone: love versus the law
Creon embodies the state and its laws: “The State is the King!” (277)
Antigone embodies love (as does Haimon, in a different way).
At centre of the play, the Chorus sing an ode to love. Nothing sentimental here!
Love, unconquerable
Waster of rich men…
Even the pure Immortals cannot escape you,
And mortal man, in his one day’s dusk
Trembles before your glory. (280)
Antigone: love versus the law
Agon that opens the play:
Antigone
Ismene
LOVE/FAMILY
“I will bury the brother I love.”
(257)
LAW/STATE
“The law is strong, we must give
in to the law.” (257)
ACTIONS
“Creon is not strong enough to
stand in my way” (256).
WORDS
“the new law forbids it” (256)
“I will keep it a secret, I
promise!” (257)
Antigone: love versus the law
Agon that opens the play
Antigone
Ismene
LOVE/FAMILY
“I will bury the brother I love.”
(257)
LAW/STATE
“The law is strong, we must give
in to the law.” (257)
ACTIONS
“Creon is not strong enough to
stand in my way” (256).
WORDS
“the new law forbids it” (256)
“I will keep it a secret, I
promise!” (257)
Antigone: “Words are not friends” (271)
Chorus, at the end of the tragedy: “Big words are always punished” (295)
Bibliography
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
Burke, Kenneth, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (New York: New Republic,
1936).
Dodds, E. R., “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex,” Greece and Rome, 13.1 (1966), 37-49.
Eagleton, Terry, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
Hall, Edith, “The Sociology of Athenian Tragedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek
Tragedy, ed. P. E. Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 93-126
Girard, Rene, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University, 1977).
Williams, Raymond, Drama in Performance, rev. edn. (London: Penguin, 1968), 7-31.