Lancelot Schaubert's Reviews > Sophocles: Oedipus Coloneus

Onward through Sophocles! As THE SUPPLIANT MAIDENS by Aeschylus was a "Me Too" play for our time, so too it felt remarkably providential to read OEDIPUS AT COLONUS while our nation — and world — confronts the dark heart of police brutality. For indeed Creon — Oedipus's uncle and brother — comes to take away those he has no right to take.

We also have the seedbed of Antigone here: the worry over her father living out his days in peace while her brothers — his sons — squabble over the realm. We see a sort of sacred grace to her posture: to see the lesson of suffering as the virtue of patience, to have — generally — a hopeful disposition for everything that has happened.

One of the most remarkable things we discover is just how WISE Ed's become since the arrogance of his beginning: now, for him, the wise speech _is_ sight. And for a man who clawed himself to blindness in shame, that's saying something. But even the wise speech foretells of foresight itself: of the ways that he may close his weary life far from the strifes of power. In shelter and succor for such a vexed man.

But his sons won't leave him alone and come — those who betrayed him, their father — to appeal for his ruling in their squabbles. He abstains and, still penitent from the regret of the shames he could not control or know, he grows wiser still in the quests for power, money, pleasure, fame that men so foolishly seek. And rid of all, he becomes something like a Obiwan character (or, honestly, vice versa considering the Star Wars mythos) — taken like Enosh in Genesis for his deference (not my will, but thine), in his yearning to be cast away from the secondary desires of men, who wants not the boons of Creon and others all too late in his exile, "As if a man should give thee no gift, bring thee no aid, when thou was fain of the boon; but after thy soul's desire was sated, should grant it then, when the grace could be gracious no more: wouldst thou not find that pleasure vain? Yet such are thine own offers unto me — good in name, but in their substance evil."

And in refusing to accept evil offer after evil offer, he affirms the negative introverted side of the transformation he began in the positive extroverted side of him.

Antigone is seized, unjustly, by Creon and Theseus of Athens shows up in force. And even when Creon tries to show Oedipus's patricide in the prior book as just cause for the kidnapping, Oedipus calls him out: would you stop and ask for a genealogy of a man who attacked you? Oedipus points out that these proximate goods (not even great gains by his post-fall assessment) gotten by wrongful arts are soon lost anyways. So he has no need of them and basically calls down curses on his uncle.

In the end, we find even his faults — his FATAL FLAW — can be healed, subverting Aristotle and many besides. No one should crave to live longer than they do, we find, but rather seek a "fitting" span of life as opposed to, say, a Bilbo who ends up feeling like butter spread over too much bread. Oedipus is taken not in tragedy, not swallowed by the earth or stricken by lightening, but whisked off so gently and wonderfully by the gods that we in modern times might well call him a saint by the end: one who walked with God.

OTHER QUICK NOTES:

1. The women, his daughters, are called "men, not women, in true service" and the sons are called "aliens, not sons of mine." It's yet another instance in antiquity of the word "man" being genderless and of "woman" being specific — mankind is always a diverse and inclusive term, womankind is always a restrictive term. And therefore daughters can rise to the virtue of manfulness and men can fall short. Because manfulness is a virtue and manliness is an aesthetic. This is repeated over and over again. And recalls the line from Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art:

Nor do I want to be stuck in the vague androidism which has resulted from the attempts to avoid the masculine pronoun. We are in a state of intense sexual confusion, both in life and language, but the social manipulation is not working. Language is a living thing; it does not stay the same; it is hard for me to read the language of Piers Plowman, for instance, so radical have the changes been. But language is its own creature. It evolves on its own. It follows the language of its great artists, such as Chaucer. It does not do well when suffering from arbitrary control. Our attempts to change the words which have long been part of a society dominated by males have not been successful; instead of making language less sexist they have made it more so. Indeed, we are in a bind. For thousands of years we have lived in a paternalistic society, where women have allowed men to make God over in their own masculine image. But that's anthropomorphism. To think of God in terms of sex at all is a dead end. To substitute person for man has ruined what used to be a good theological word, calling up the glory of God's image within us. Now, at best, it's a joke. There's something humiliating and embarrassing about being a chairperson. Or a chair. A group of earnest women have put together a volume of desexed hymns, and one of my old favourites now begins: “Dear Mother-Father of personkind.” No. It won't do. This is not equality. Perhaps we should drop the word woman altogether and use man, recognizing that we need both male and female to be whole. And perhaps if we ever have real equality with all our glorious differences, the language itself will make the appropriate changes. For language, like a story or a painting, is alive. Ultimately it will be the artists who will change the language (as Chaucer did, as Dante did, as Joyce did), not the committees. For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone."

Reminds me of St. Catherine of Siena:

"What made you establish man in so great a dignity? Certainly, the incalculable love by which you have looked on your creature in yourself! You are taken with love for her; for by love indeed you created her; by love you have given her a being capable of tasting your eternal Good."

2. The phrase "shalt thou hold this city unscathed from the side of the Dragon's blood" is so evocative.

3. We meet the watcher — the hound of hell.

4. Antigone leaves to go to her homeland, setting up the retaliatory killing and burial rights of the next play.

Enjoyable, but hard at times. Having trouble focusing, but the crepuscular sleep patterns is making for a solid hour of focus between first and second sleep at about 3am - 4am by candlelight. Gets me in the mood.

Call me a romantic, if you'd like, and I'll just nod. Cheers folks.