Thought and Structure in Sophoclean Tragedy
By Robert D. Murray, Jr.
From Sophocles: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Thomas Woodward. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966.
Because we are men of the twentieth century and not of the fifth century b.c., there are obviously many obstacles between us and a proper confrontation of Greek tragedy. Not the least of these roadblocks is the fact that as men of the twentieth century we have been exposed often to a critical doctrine that does not meet the facts of the case. This doctrine paralleled and perhaps even stimulated by movements in music, the fine arts, and philosophy, informs us that we are stumbling into an intellectual bog if we try to look for moral or meaning in a literary work. The projection of a moral view is not centrally a function of the work of art; after all, if one wishes to convey meaning and morality verbally, this end can be accomplished most precisely and unambiguously through the precision of prose discourse. Poetry, perhaps since Dante, has seldom been regarded as the best vehicle for earnest and profound communication of significant ethical and religious views.
A Greek of the fifth century would, of course, have felt very differently about the matter. He would not have objected at all to the presence of morality, didacticism, even "messages" in poetry, and especially the drama. Indeed, he felt that moral instruction was a vital and valuable function of tragic drama, in particular, and that the voice of the poet was the voice of morality and wisdom as well as of beauty. Indeed, it was an habitual tendency of the Greek mind to identify beauty and good, or rather to accept this identification without any question (in any dictionary of ancient Greek, the adjective kakis will be translated as "beautiful, good, genuine, virtuous, noble, honorable"; its opposite, kakos, as "ugly, cowardly, base, bad, evil"). This attitude is clearly reflected in the fifth-century view toward any form of art; that which is beautiful must be' morally good,’ and that which is evil must of necessity also be ugly. Aesthetic pleasure and moral instruction are truly one and inseparable, a unity soon to be recognized by Aristotle in his recurrent emphasis on the moral character of the kind of agents fitted for tragic drama, and in the more ethical aspects of his catharsis. To sum up, the Greeks of the fifth century and well into the fourth were convinced that poetry, especially tragedy, is essentially moral; that there is meaning in the drama, and that meaning is closely related to the aesthetic impact of the whole. Thus, to the contemporaries of Sophocles, a poet was expected to express a view of life, even a "message." Had he not done so, he would have failed his audiences. Had they thought he had not done so, he would not have won prizes in the Theater of Dionysus. But did Sophocles truly play the game within the rules established by his cultural tradition? Did he instruct as well as delight, adorn charm with wisdom? Do the tragedies embody an earnest view of life, or are they only exciting and superbly devised re-enactments of impossible situations, designed to absorb our emotions for a couple of hours, and send us out the aisles in some kind of limp and exhausted state of purification?
Agreement on this issue, in our time, appears to be out of reach; the spectrum of Sophoclean criticism has broadened noticeably in recent years. Let C. M. Bowra speak for the moralists:
The central idea of Sophoclean tragedy is that through suffering a man learns to be modest before the gods. . .. When [the characters] are finally forced to see the truth, we know that the gods have prevailed and that men must accept their own insignificance.
In short, for Bowra, the essence of each play of Sophocles, is a message urging humility and piety. The poet wants to teach us something important, and lie does it effectively. For the formalists, A. J. A. Waldock answers the moralists with appealing indignation, in his discussion of the Oedipus Tyrannus.:
we know little of Sophocles' religion. When we sum up what we know of his beliefs we find them meagre in number and depressingly commonplace in quality.. .. He believed that there are ups and downs in fortune, and that men are never secure. . . . There is religion in the Oedipus Tyrannus, but it is not all crucial in the drama. . . . There is no meaning in the Oedipus Tyrannus [italics mine]. There is merely the terror of coincidence, and then, at the end of it all, our impression of man's power to suffer, and of his greatness because of this power.
Now Waldock's reaction is surely a needed response to the ultra-moralistic notion that Sophocles was driven by an urge to warn his contemporaries that they should not be rash or proud lest a vengeful heaven strike them down, and eager to communicate this unusual advice, act in open code in the story of Oedipus. But, as so often, reaction becomes overreaction; it is hard to believe, with the extreme formalist, that the playwright was little interested in attitudes and values, but only in dramatic or even theatrical display; that any meaning is a parergon, coincidental to brilliance of structure, and without organic relationship to form. What sensitive audience could view the Oedipus Tyrannus and leave the theater not wondering why this man had to suffer what he suffered, and why the gods played the role they unquestionably played? (No degree of post-Verrallian ingenuity can dismiss the entrance of the Corinthian messenger, an instant after Jocasta's prayer to Apollo, as sheer coincidence.) In fact, to accept the formalist attitude without qualification is to accuse Sophocles of a serious artistic blunder—he has compelled his audience to absorb itself in ethical and spiritual considerations that have little or nothing to do with his genuine dramatic aims) He has diverted the attention of the viewer from dramatic form and power to unintended commonplaces.
To return to Waldock. He regards the Tyrannus, produced perhaps in 428, as a superb exercise in structure, a moving masterpiece of theater, an intricate piece of machinery designed to startle, dazzle and shock (perhaps a little like the self-destructive machines that have recently been exhibited in our contemporary museums), but as having no serious meaning.
Some twenty-two years later, Sophocles died, just having written his last play, Oedipus at Colonnus. Was this another experiment in structural virtuosity, without any bard center of meaning? To a degree, says Waldock; now the old Sophocles, attracted by the theme of the death of Oedipus (comparably old, in poetic terms) was faced with the necessity of stretching out, with dramatic or near-melodramatic tensions, a story that did not really contain enough stuff for a play. Within certain limits, the theme seems to dictate structure, but exciting inventions are needed to keep the plot going. Thus the involvements (Creon, Polyneices) in the central portion of the play, where the main theme, the apotheosis of Oedipus, seems to stutter and fairly grinds to a halt. The scholar's argument seems reasonable. If it is right, we must conclude that much of the Oedipus at Colonus is compelling theater, but not highly serious, organically unified drama.
An amusing myth has invaded and established itself in certain areas of the academic world: that Sophocles composed a Theban trilogy; Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. This despite the odd fact that the production of the third preceded the first by about thirteen years, that the second followed the first by about twenty-two, and that the problems of the Antigone are in many ways so alien to those of the later plays. I suspect that the intrusion of the myth has persuaded many teachers besides myself to raise a storm warning for our students: "beware of interpreting any one of the Theban plays in terms of another." This signal of danger is surely soundly displayed. But in the case of the two Oedipus plays, the warning may lead to excessive caution. While a much older Sophocles wrote the Oedipus at Colonus, it was surely a Sophocles who recalled vividly the dramatic problems lie had struggled with in the Oedipus Tyrannus, and who might well expect the mature element of his audience to remember the form and impact of the earlier play.
A comparison of the structure of the two later Theban plays strongly suggests that this supposition is accurate. To a startling degree. the Oedipus at Colones seems to mirror the formal design of the Oedipus Tyrannus, and to reverse it in minor fashion. In the O.T, Oedipus is seen at the outset as fully endowed with the tight of reason, mature, admired, independent of others, while "This notion has been proposed by, among others, S. M. Adams, Sophocles the Playwright but in meaning, not structure. It had presented a solution to the Sphinx's riddle, had offered as answer a definition of man. But that definition had been two-dimensional, only grandeur et misere; the magnificence of reason, and mortal frailty. The lacking third dimension is projected, largely by structure, in the final play. It resides in the mystically felt and logically undemonstrable spiritual transcendency of man, the quintessence of his being, not to be found in his confident rationality or in the magnitude of his suffering. Of course the conflict between reason and passion is fundamental to the third and higher characteristic, and leads up to it by a dialectic stated dramatically in the O.C. But the O.T. had failed to make fully clear this ultimate synthesis of the basic and paradoxical elements of his nature.
By the conscious reversal of structure in the Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles shows us that he was not merely playing a clever formal game, or creating virtuoso variations on a theme of his earlier years. Rather the structural inversion points to a deep rethinking of serious ethical, even metaphysical attitudes. As critics we may not share those attitudes, we may possibly think them shallow, we may find them to be not much more than commonplaces of the Athenian tradition. But however we may evaluate his thought, we have no license to dismiss it as unintended or inconsequential to the emotive effect of his theater. Structure and thought are inseparable in the seven plays; to stress one element and disregard the other is a decision of Solomon, a dismemberment of the living work of art.
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