Excerpt: Oedipus and Agency
by Sarah Nooter, Professor in the Department of Classics and the College at UChicago
Photo of Kelvin Roston, Jr. by Joe Mazza
Oedipus represents the best and worst of all that is in us. The worst of Oedipus is clear: he killed his father and married his mother. No good. Looking to these biographical (if fictional) facts, Sigmund Freud proposed a psychoanalytic complex that comprised our deepest sources of shame and named it after Oedipus. Vladimir Propp and Claude Lévi-Strauss saw in the blueprint of Oedipus’ life a universal story told everywhere in every tale: birth, murder, marriage, difficulty, death.
So where in Oedipus is the best of us? This we may find in Sophocles’ brilliant play itself. Let us pause to consider Oedipus and agency. When one teaches the play Oedipus Rex to undergraduate students, one tends to get caught up in this question: how can we say that Oedipus had agency—and thus responsibility or blame—for his taboo actions of murder and sex, when he committed them unknowingly, when he in fact tried as hard as he could to avoid committing them? What story would there be here if not for a nefarious Apollo, pulling the strings at every point, sending the hero reeling from the oracle at Delphi and into the belligerent path of his father, then the inevitable bed of his mother? There would be none of this but for the intervention of Apollo. For we find no meaningful agency in Oedipus in these deeds, nor would the Greek audiences have sought it here. But what good to us is a hero who is a pawn?
But the action of the play: here is where we see in Oedipus the very opposite of a pawn. Here we find an instantiation of ideal agency, and what I have called the best in us. What is Oedipus’ action? Is it discovery? What drives him—god, necessity, circumstances? No. What drives him is only the need to know. By the end, this need has become the need to know himself. Let me back up. Recall that the famous father-murdering and mother-bedding precede the play by some years; they are narrated, not performed. What motivates the action of the play initially is a plague, sent to Thebes by Apollo. In order to handle this crisis, which is killing the Theban people and rendering the land barren, Oedipus attempts to figure out the cause of the divine displeasure behind the plague. But then things take a strange turn as character after character tries with all their means and might to dissuade Oedipus from carrying his investigation forward: first the prophet Tiresias, then Oedipus’ wife Jocasta, and finally the shepherd who saved him as a baby. What these three characters share is that they know, or come to know, the truth about Oedipus before he does. And their reaction to the truth—out of love for Oedipus—is to try to bury it. For the truth, as they understand it, will destroy him.
Read the full article here.
Performances of Oedipus Rex run November 7 to December 8, 2019 at Court Theatre. Get tickets →