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Play
It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot
II. Plot-Story Ratio of Sophokles' Oedipus Tyrannos The classic example of how the plot reconfigures and tragically re-enacts the pre-existing story, is Sophokles' Oedipus tyrannos. The story or myth of Oedipus, in a number of versions, long preceded Sophokles' play and was well-known to his audience. The story was capable of many plot choices; the plot determining which elements of the story the dramatist will bring into significant being. Sophokles selects from the various versions those aspects serviceable to his tragic plot, while rendering the old mythic material aesthetically significant through the new aesthetic devices of the Greek theatre. It was his choice of plot, not the story, that established the tragic status of the play. Sophokles' contemporaries probably arrived at the theatre with a good idea of what the Sophoklean tragic plot and themes would be, intrigued mostly as to how he would adapt his new subject - the story - to the theatrical demonstration - the plot - of those core themes. The story was well known: Though Laius and Jocasta were warned by Apollo a son would prove fatal to Laius, Oedipus is born. To frustrate the prediction the royal parents give him to a slave to destroy by exposing him on Mount Cithaeron. Taking pity on the child, the slave hands him over to the care of a shepherd from Corinth, who gives the infant to the childless king and queen of Corinth, Polybius and Merope. They raise him as their son and heir. Years later, a drunkard at a feast accuses Oedipus of not being their son and, though assured by his 'parents' this is not true, he goes to Delphi to ask after his true identity. Apollo's oracle does not answer this question but makes the horrible prediction that Oedipus will kill Polybius and marry Merope - at least this is what Oedipus hears as the atrocity against his parents. He decides not to return to Corinth but to recreate himself abroad. He encounters a violent old man at a crossroads and, in anger, kills him and his retinue. After confronting the Sphinx menacing Thebes, he destroys her by answering her riddle and, entering Thebes, is rewarded with the hand of the Queen, Jocasta, becoming King, or tyrannos, of Thebes. Over the years he creates a family: two sons and two daughters. In contrast to the narrative methods of e.g. Shakespeare and Brecht, none of this story is presented on-stage. What we focus on as theatre audience is not the story, which occurred in extensive and arbitrary time and space outside the play, but what the plot will make of this story - how it will regather and shape it's elements into a new, terrible significance, within the tightly confined time and space of the stage performance. The arbitrary and wide-ranging details of the story are summoned to the tribunal of the plot's logical, forensic structure.. A violent, irrational past is revisited through Oedipus' newly alerted rational consciousness: much as the Athenian audience re-encounters its primordial myths through the rational discipline of the newly evolved theatric conventions. Through
the plot's agency, the story becomes, not a record of arbitrary and
disconnected actions performed over extensive time in the past but a
terrifyingly condensed, logical, and inexorable agon of unfolding tragic
knowledge enacted now in the immediate present of the performance.
Oedipus, through a swift sequence of confrontations, is led to discover
his true identity while simultaneously learning he is the criminal he
set out to unmask and punish. Oedipus' actions are not tragic until
he is brought to 'see' them as he re-enacts them: The pre-existing
events Oedipus comes to know are terrible; but they are tragic only
by being known. Past events (i.e. the story) are tragically
reconfigured as scenes in the mind's eye: the drunkard at the feast,
the visit to the Oracle at Delphi, the encounter at the crossroads with
the intemperate Old Man: all relived for the first time not as an arbitrary
but as a connected sequence from a clarifying new perspective. Even
more startling, the plot re-enacts the story's core past events:
Tiresias' seemingly wild and senseless charge that Oedipus does not
know his own identity repeats the drunkard's taunt in Corinth; the Delphic
Oracle answers Oedipus once more, with a new riddle; Oedipus wrathfully
confronts his uncle, Creon, seeking his death, as he had confronted
his father. Oedipus the Theban servant and the Corinthian shepherd regather,
at the conclusion of Oedipus's search for identity, as they did long
ago on Mount Cithaeron when Oedipus was an infant and his identity was
about to be created. The play is a tragedy, not because of the actions
Oedipus performed, but because, through mental re-enactment, he comes
to know he performed them and for the first time sees their dreadful
configuration. The story supplies the details of what he will
come to know: the plot dramatizes the tragic agon of his knowing. |
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