Deinotaton Panton: The Most Dreadful of All. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Its Reception

Abstracts

Keynote lecture: prof. Bernd Manuwald (University of Cologne), Could Oedipus have become king of Corinth? Reflections on recent scholarship on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex

This lecture offers a critical overview of selected contributions to scholarship from the last decade on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, organized according to the following aspects: I. The issue of dating Oedipus Rex: Does the opening of the play allude to the plague in Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War? – II. The issue of the text: Is it the original ending of the drama, as composed by Sophocles, that survives? – III. The issue of Oedipus’ guilt: Is Oedipus in some way responsible for his fate? – IV. The issue of the interpretation of Oedipus Rex as a whole: Can one infer a general message from Oedipus Rex?

Session one: Power and Language

Jan Kucharski (Silesia University), Oedipus’ Freudian slips: language, kinship and tyranny

The Oedipus Rex takes the audience with its eponymous hero on a journey from blissful ignorance to dreadful knowledge. From might and abundance to frailty and ultimate lack. And yet, before his terrible fall, Oedipus is surprisingly frequently seen to struggle with something over which, as a solver of riddles (393-4, 1525), he would be expected to have absolute command: language.

Many of his statements are inadvertently false (since lying presupposes command over language), as the claim that he has never seen Laius (105); but these are relatively few. Much more frequently Oedipus’ words are laden with a hidden meaning, one concealed from himself and his interlocutors (but clearly intelligible to the external audience) as the observation that no one in Thebes is suffering (nosei) more than he is (60-61), which on the face of it displays the ruler’s concern over his city, but in reality exposes him as the most diseased (nosei) person within it. The most interesting among such ironic utterances are those where the hidden truth is seen to surface in the form of various infelicities which upset the superficial train of thought. In a celebrated example, despite hearing of many brigands (lestai) who allegedly killed Laius, Oedipus replies speaking only of one (124-5), even though later he insists on their greater number (842-844). Elsewhere, he refers to himself as Creon’s “kin” (sungenes) although at this moment he knows him only as an in-law (551). In a slightly longer exposition of his relationship with his family and with Laius (258-263), language fails him completely; as Finglass revealingly observes “the syntax that Oedipus employs is almost as complicated as the familial relationship that he falls so tragically short of expressing” (2018: 255).

Instead of offering yet another psychoanalytical reading of these blunders, this paper, despite what the title might suggest, will instead focus on their dramatic significance. It will be argued that Oedipus’ language, consistently focused on the question kinship, and consistently recoiling against the hero’s attempts to control it, not only betrays the familial corruption on which his prosperity is predicated, but also defies his tyrannical power which is said to control everything and to be closely linked with his extraordinary intellectual abilities (1522-1525).

Edmund Stewart (Nottingham), Tragedy and Tyranny: or why Oedipus is called “tyrannos”

This paper challenges the longstanding assumption that the word tyrannos is in Greek tragedy a neutral term and essentially a synonym for other terms signifying ruler. Tyrannos is not used simply to indicate an individual who possesses power but carries with it connotations of absolute or supreme power, fortune and wealth. This absolute power is understood to have the potential to lead to ruin and to vices commonly associated with tyranny, such as paranoia, greed and violence. Tyrannos is thus never a neutral term in tragedy because it signifies not a bad or illegitimate ruler, but rather one who has the potential to develop such characteristics.

Session two: Enigma and knowledge

Łukasz Berger (Adam Mickiewicz University), Deixis in the prologue of Oedipus Rex.

The aim of this paper is to apply the pragmatic theory of deixis to the philological analysis of the text of the first scene of Oedipus Rex. Based on this linguistic methodology, the aim is to reaffirm the function of the prologue in the context of the whole play. Sophocles' prologue opens with the entrance of Oedipus, who, marking his deictic centre (lat. origo), symbolically takes over the scene and underlines his real power over Thebes. The superior position of the protagonist suggested by the spatial references and the so-called social deixis, it seems, was intentionally contrasted with the role of the supplicants. This order of things, however, will undergo a radical change towards the end of the play.

Agnieszka Kotlińska-Toma (University of Wrocław), Poikiloidos Sfinx: the great absentee of Sophoclean plays

In surviving ancient dramas the figure of Sphinx does not appear on stage, although it was a character in several plays about which we have only scant information and several fragments (e.g. Aeschylus satyr drama Sphinx, Eubulus’ comedy Sphingokarion, and probably Theodectes’ Oedipus). However, a special case is Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, in which the absent Sphinx plays a de facto key role. In this article I would like to show how the incidents that had taken place before the events of the play influence the attitudes and actions of the characters in the drama. Hence, the primary goal of this paper is to prove the significance of Sphinx as a ‘great absentee’ - a creature, who - although absent - defines the atmosphere and behaviour of those who are present. Furthermore, the paper presents how Sophocles enters into a dialogue with Aeschylus and the tradition of depicting Sphinx in previous times and in his own days.

Session three: Philosophy and opera

Mateusz Stróżyński (Adam Mickiewicz University), Who’s your father? Oedipus and the fall of soul in Plotinus’ Enneads

Plotinus in his Enneads describes the fall of the soul into the sensible world by means of stories and images rather than by conceptual analyses. Plotinus uses the Orphic myth of the infant Dionysus and Titans to depicts the same process and an archetypal story of the “prodigal son” (found in Christian, Gnostic and Buddhist ancient sources as well), even if he transforms it into the story of the prodigal daughter. The most often commented myth, used by Plotinus, is that of Narcissus falling love with his reflection and not being able to recognize the true nature of this reflection. What hasn’t been given any attention as of yet, is his use of the Oedipus myth in a similar context, which is interesting given the structural affinities between the myths of Narcissus and Oedipus and the identity of its main theme: self-knowledge. This paper will examine the three passages in the Enneads which seem to refer to Oedipus and show how he comes to signify for Plotinus the soul which fallen into ignorance.

Piotr Urbański (Adam Mickiewicz University), Oedipus in (Italian) opera

It is widely believed that Igor Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio is the most important work dedicated to Oedipus, despite the fact that the libretto is written in rather poor Latin and contains numerous logical deficiencies. For the researcher of the reception of ancient texts, however, much more interesting are the librettos of operas from the 17th and 18th centuries, which had to struggle with the categories belonging to Greek tragedy (especially the problem of tragic guilt and tragedy) and the adaptation of the plot to the requirements of the lieto fine convention. Antigone by Thomas Traetta could thus end with the love duet of Antigone and Haemon, saved by the fact that - contrary to Sophocles - Creon arrived in time. I will try to answer the question about the possibilities of solving the plot’s finale in an article analyzing librettos of Italian operas whose title character is Oedipus.