What can I say about Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex that has not already been said? Apart from the patricide and the infamous incest, this is an ancient tale of angst and overall calamity. But since I recently revisited it, this legendary tragedy hasn’t left my mind.

n  "Look and learn all citizens of Thebes. This is Oedipus.
He, who read the famous riddle, and we hailed chief of men,
All envied his power, glory, and good fortune.
Now upon his head the sea of disaster crashes down.”n

I felt after reading the play that there was not really anything that Oedipus could have done to get himself out of his destiny. In fact, it seems that the more he attempts to get out of it, the deeper he is immersed in its inevitability. It is simply that there was no way for him to avoid doing it all and facing his fate. After hearing of the prophecy he flees because he doesn't want it to come true, but there is a lot that he does not know and a lot that he is not being told. His parents, when told by the oracles decided to sacrifice him. But he was saved by the compassionate nature of humanity. Later on, his step parents also leave him in ignorance, and in hiding the truth they are also making the prophecy come true.

The theme as I see it, therefore, is of fate versus freewill. However, there really does not seem to be any freewill here. Every decision that Oedipus makes only brings the revelation closer to being fulfilled.

But to fully understand Sophocles work, you have to know that for the ancient Greeks the word "tragedy" didn't mean “a lamentable, dreadful, or fatal event or affair; calamity; disaster.” For them the idea of such a play, that had a certain and defined theme and structure, is about a person that because of a single tragic flaw becomes the victim of the gods. The specific purpose was called "catharsis", the audience watching the play should gain an emotional release that made your own trivial issues fade into insignificance. According to Aristotle’s Poetics “the complexity of the plot is established through reversal, recognition and suffering.” The tragedy is created, in part, by the complexity of its plot which leads towards the catharsis. The Chorus is crucial; its speeches are revealing. It is the cautious voice of collective wisdom. And from the very beginning of the play, the Chorus revealed the omen of disaster. This can all be summed up in the following lines:

n  "O god-
All come true, all busting to light!
O light- now let me look my last on you!
I stand revealed at last-”n

Oedipus is a passionate man, who asks questions and takes risks. Despite his flaws and his sins, Oedipus is good and always seeks the truth no matter how devastating. In the end, he accepts the responsibility for his actions, his fate and punishment. Does he have free will or the ability to choose his own path or is everything in his life been predetermined? Indeed, despite the prophecy, it can never be denied that Oedipus and his parents had made the choices, not the oracle or the Gods. Is the very idea of carving out your eyes, after discovering your wife is your mother in this incredibly packed tragedy that alleviates so much the enormous pain that seems so causeless? Is the existential angst finally satisfies by the human need to identify the guilty that alleviates our human sensation of utter, senseless and chaotic misery?

This is what torments us, being humans: we have free will but we can never control everything. Oedipus’s specific life events aren’t exactly relatable to any of us, but the sensations are not less pertinent. Aren’t we used to impending unconquerable doom? I ask myself, could ignorance lead us through hell? Oedipus Rex doesn’t make us only question the role of the gods (or whatever may decide our fate nowadays: politicians, the economy, the news, and even our own expectations!), but above all the argument of fate and destiny, and whether we are able to live without external powers deciding our chances. It also makes us question who we are; whether our personalities, or other personal characteristics, are a kind of destiny in itself.

Where's our human freedom? More important: do you feel a prevailing sense of inevitability, no matter what you do?! Why are we always being judged, by ourselves and by the world? If we try to transpose the play to today, many questions are still left with no definite answers. For certain, we can choose what we want to become. The curse is that our capacities are finite; we are not gods. What happened to Oedipus was the torture of being human, can we escape this curse?

Oedipus Rex is a literary masterpiece! Highly recommended!

Like a lot of Greek dramas this has scenes of violence that is described casually, which in itself is very unsettling.

It’s taken me several readings to get to grips with the point of this story. The story itself is a tragic domestic drama with a mystery, in today’s term this can feel too wordy where it’s taken me several reads and supporting reads for this to start making sense to me.

My favourite character has to be Jocasta, her part is small and can be very easy to miss, but I think it gives more layers to the action as it unfolds.

O que é que eu posso dizer sobre Rei Édipo?
Nada, ou melhor... Leiam

Well that was awesome.

¡Que buen libro ! Me alegra haberlo rescatado del cajón donde guardaba mis lecturas de instituto. Tiene mucha fuerza.

Não vou fazer nenhuma análise em profundidade desta obra pois para o tamanho do texto, nomeadamente o conflito principal em causa, já foi tudo tão amplamente dissecado que será impossível dizer algo de novo. Por isso expressarei apenas breves notas sobre a minha experiência de leitura.

Há muito tempo que tinha intenção de iniciar a leitura dos textos dramáticos da antiga Grécia, mas tal como aconteceu com Shakespeare, fui sempre protelando, porque as peças teatrais escritas não são propriamente o meu forte. Tenho dificuldade em aceitar aceder a uma obra que no estado escrito é apenas parte de um todo. Contudo, quando li Shakespeare e agora Sófocles, fui surpreendido pelos textos, pela sua capacidade de me demover. Sei bem que falo de peças não apenas de grande qualidade mas capazes de ultrapassar o teste de séculos e milénios.

Assim e se Édipo era para mim um personagem amplamente conhecido, pelo modo como invadiu o imaginário ocidental, não sei se por graça de Sófocles ou das tontices de Freud, a peça acabou por me surpreender exatamente no modo como se destaca da descoberta do conflito principal. Quando iniciei a leitura senti-me algo desmotivado por ver tanta discussão — sobre o filho que mata o pai e casa com a mãe — tentasse eu aceder à obra onde quer que fosse, em que edição fosse. No entanto Sófocles vai muito para além da trama, ela está lá, ela tudo faz mover, e de certo modo confere a Aristoteles razão quando este afirma que é a trama mais importante que os personagens, mas é Sófocles que acaba a demonstrar o contrário. Ou seja, se o conflito está lá, se o enredo empurra os personagens para uma espécie de precipício dramático, continuam a ser os personagens quem decidem saltar ou não. Sófocles centra-se nesse ponto, em buscar o modo como reagir a algo que conhecíamos de antemão, e executa de forma trágica, como não podia deixar de ser numa tragédia.

Assim, digo que se me incomodou toda a dependência dos deuses e dos adivinhos, não deixou de me impactar a decisão final de Édipo pensada para ter efeito tanto nesta vida como no além. É um clímax digno da catarse de Aristoteles, e que explica bem o receio que Platão tinha de ver a República manipulada pelas artes.


"The blind Oedipus commending his children to the Gods", 1784, de Bénigne Gagneraux

Uma nota final para a questão do incesto. Vivemos uma época de grande liberação sexual, o que tem vindo a abrir espaço para a defesa do incesto entre adultos (cf. "Impunidade" HG Cancela). Em defesa destas visões muitas vezes enunciam-se os nossos antepassados gregos e romanos pela sua liberdade que teria sido, mais tarde, castrada pela igreja. Contudo, do que se pode ler nestes textos, é que se existia maior liberdade sexual ela estava muito longe de uma anarquia moral.

What's interesting about fate, and what's different from our world and Oedipus's, is that "fate" doesn't really exist in our world. No real oracles go around telling you you're going to sleep with your mother. Instead, it's a philosophical device. On one side you've got "free will" (traditional very Western, very American even with the idea of the individual going forward), and on the other side you've got your fatalists (see my mom and her Vietnamese cosmology [is that the word? Whatever, I’m going to use it], in which the people who are around you are literally born to be so because of the debt you owe each other in the present, owed in the past, and/or will use in the future). I'm not really a fan of philosophy, and as far as I'm concerned the goodness of each approach is only to be judged by how useful they are to a specific person in a specific situation (and place and time).

I say that there is no fate in our world, but that's not really true. What separates fate from free will is foresight, and there's plenty of that in our world. A cancer patient (like my aunt) being told she has six months to live. One step lower on the surety scale, my remaining aunts and my mother living under the knowledge that they're likely (what, like 50/50 chances) to get this dubious inheritance from their father (oh hey! Antigone, didn’t see you there). Or even to the much lower level of common sense, like stock markets: what goes up so precipitously, without merit, is likely to come down just as precipitously.

What’s interesting about Oedipus, is at first glance the prophecies within are so abhorrent, who wouldn’t react in horror to the idea of killing one’s father and sleeping with one’s mother? But at second glance, is it not common sense, is it not true for all families that one day the son will surpass the father, one day the father will fall and the son will take the father’s place? Is it not true men will judge their relationships with women against that first relationship with their moms?

The prophecy given to Oedipus and to his birth parents is a sensationalist version of the common sense truth for all families (even to those where the son cannot so literally inherit a father’s throne). And the real-world response to that un-sensational real-world dilemma is: “Hey, one day I’m going to die, and I’m going to try and leave the world(kingdom) in the hands of a good human being” (& “I’m going to teach my son to treat the women he loves with respect” & “I’m going to be good to my father while he’s alive and a really good person when he’s gone”).

You might say I’m unfair in comparing Oedipus to an unchangeable fate (cancer, though for most people, I don’t think killing one’s baby is really an option on the table… but we’ll get back to that). No, my aunt couldn’t change her rapidly-growing tumor, but she could change the way she went out. She took hold of her finances for the first time in her life, she aired her grievances towards her husband (and the frightful in-laws) and her children instead of stewing in them, she tied up her inheritance to provide for her youngest through college, she got the death she wanted (at home and with Buddhist rites), all so she could live her remaining months in peace, and die in peace, instead of continuing to live (practically a lifetime) in sorrow. Is it fair she died so young? Is life fair?

My mom doesn’t know if she’s going to get cancer in 4 years, but she’s you know, de-stressing her life, selling the house, doing things she wants to do, and going in for all her medical tests. No, it’s no magic trick to see one’s future, it’s magic to decide what to do about it. It’s easy to get desperate and anxious to change one’s fate, hey, how else do you think those snake doctors make a living… It’s not always easy to see the difference between trying to ‘master your fate’ and trying to make the best of it/just being proactive/smart.

I say sensationalist, but that’s not really true—you needn’t look far—when there’s a real shortage of women in the world (China and India are the real places of impact, though considering how much of the world population is from those two countries, it is effectively, a world impact) due to selective-gender abortion and female child abandonment (told you I’d get back to it). The ‘making the best world’ response (from parents, and from governments/society) is to educate girls, give them the same chances as boys, give them a world where women can be as useful to their families as men. The ‘master your fate’ response has created increased demand for sex-trafficking (and increased forced marriages and honor killings). Of course people want to escape “fate”, it is so human (and what makes the play so human)—of course, whether you call if “life” or “gods” or “fate”, it isn’t fair, but how much of it is really “fate” and how much is it our (humans) own choices?

And if we think the answer is to try ignorance, how can we try ignorance (no foresight)—people spend their whole lives trying to know, trying to make the world make sense (and we make gods and science to try and make sense of it for us) and it really is for the best psychics are really charlatans, because we got plenty of foresight on our own thanks, we just don’t know what to do with it (can’t ignore it either, see global warming). As the alcoholics/Christians say: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,/Courage to change the things I can,/And wisdom to know the difference.”

Basically what I’m saying is Sophocles is pretty genius, and Freud as usual gets it half-right, half-wrong.

El complejo de Edipo es lo único que yo conocía de esta obra, sin haberla leído todo mundo sabemos sobre la lectura que se le ha hecho desde el psicoanálisis. Pero también está el tema de que Edipo está buscando a un culpable que resulta ser él. Es muy fuerte como historia, una tragedia que me parece súper moderna, y esa idea, el enemigo está dentro de tí, tiene un gran simbolismo, que me parece importante, y en todo momento presente, actualísimo.

Orhan Pamuk'un Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın'ında fazlasıyla spoiler okumuştum. Yine de merakla ve keyifle okudum.

".. son gününü görmeden hiç kimseye mutluluğa ermiş demeyin! "

2500 yıl önce yazılmış bir eser olmasına rağmen sadeliği ve akıcılığı hoşuma gitti. Thebai üçlemesinin ilk kitabı. Diğer kitaplar Antigone ve Oidipus Kolonosta. Eser aynı zamanda Sigmund Freud'un "Oedipus Kompleksi" kuramının esin kaynağıymış. Orhan Pamuk'un Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın kitabında da değindiği söyleniyor. Kaderinden kaçmaya çalışan kişinin beyhude çabası çok güzel işlenmiş. Bir çırpıda okunabilen kısa ve sarsıcı bir tragedya.

یک تراژدی به تمام معنا فوق‌العاده! واقعاً آدم نمی‌دونه چی بگه درباره‌ی نمایشنامه‌ای که 2500 سال پیش نوشته شده و انقدر حرفه‌ای داستان‌پردازی شده و انقدر دیالوگ‌هاش قویه! شدیداً توصیه می‌شه خوندنش!

Sure, poke your eyes out. Like that's going to help with anything.