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Play
It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot II. Plot-Story Ratio of Sophokles' Oedipus Tyrannos Sophokles' Oedipus tyrannos is the classic example of how the plot reconfigures and tragically re-enacts the pre-existing story. 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 determined 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 transfiguring the old mythic material through the newly invented devices of the Greek theatre. His choice of plot, not the story, established the tragic status of the play. The story was well known: Though Laius and Jocasta were warned by Apollo a son would prove fatal to them, 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. Entering Thebes, he is rewarded with the hand of the Queen, Jocasta, thereby becoming '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 gather and shape it's elements into a new, terrible significance within the 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 non-rationaal, primordial myths through the rational structure of the newly evolved theatric conventions. Through the agency of the plot the story becomes not a record of arbitrary 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. A swift sequence of confrontations leads Oedipus to discover his true identity while learning he is the criminal he set out to unmask and punish. His situation is not tragic until he is brought to 'see' these past events as he re-enacts them in the present. The past events are terrible but are tragic only by being known, tragically re-experienced 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. These are relived from a new, clarifying perspective as a horrifyingly determined sequence
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; the Theban servant, the
Corinthian shepherd and Oedipus gather once more 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 story supplies the details of what he will come to know:
the plot dramatizes the tragic agon of his knowing. |
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