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His first claim to fame was the solution to a riddle that earned him a kingdom by sheer force of intellect. His second was a doomed attempt to escape the particularly gruesome fates of patricide and incest. With his first act, Oedipus saved the city of Thebes from the sphinx; with his second, he afflicted it with a plague. In his retelling of this myth, Sophocles reflects on the competing claims of three paths to knowledge: reason, revelation, and experience. Why can’t Oedipus’s brilliant mind save him from the enactment of a prophecy? Why might we be most vulnerable to the fate we’re most determined to avoid? Can we truly be free, or are our attempts to transcend the limitations of character central to its pathologies? Wes & Erin discuss Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode. Transcript 0:12 Wes: His first claim to fame was the solution to a riddle that earned him a kingdom by sheer force of intellect. His second was a doomed attempt to escape the particularly gruesome fates of patricide and incest. With his first act, Oedipus saved the city of Thebes from the sphinx. With his second, he afflicted it with plague. In his retelling of this myth, Sophocles reflects on the competing claims of three paths to reason, revelation, and experience. Why can't Oedipus brilliant mind save him from the enactment of a prophecy? Why might we be most vulnerable to the fate we're most determined to avoid? Can we truly be free? Or are our attempts to escape the limitations of character are central to its pathologies? Today we're talking about Oedipus Rex. This is Wes Alwan. 1:02 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, since there's an investigation afoot about, you know, the origins of COVID 19, and there are all these theories floating around about what the origins of the virus are. Did it come from a bat or a pangolin? This whole lab leak theory. I just want to float another possibility. I mean, how likely do you think it is that. I don't know, maybe the mayor of Wuhan doesn't know who his real parents are and he's made a huge mistake? I'm just saying, you know. 1:36 Wes: Yeah. Is it the mayor of Wuhan or is there a president of the world? I guess not, since the whole world has been plagued. 1:44 Erin: Thebes is most of the known world at that point. Right. But anyway, yeah, I'm just saying somebody should look into that. 1:50 Wes: I think the idea that we're being punished is a promising idea. Punished by the gods. What are we being punished for? 1:58 Erin: The Internet, podcasts? 2:01 Wes: Well, I think there's something to that. 2:03 Erin: YouTube, trolls. I don't know. 2:05 Wes: I think technology is part of the story. 2:07 Erin: You're already getting into an interesting area there, because I was thinking that just Oedipus was being punished, but you're suggesting the whole world is, or all of Thebes anyway, is being punished for. I guess it's being punished for housing incestual Patricider. 2:23 Wes: Are they just collateral damage or are they actually being punished to the extent that I think the punishment is generalized is just the extent to which I read it as a kind of Prometheus myth. Because here is Oedipus, this very clever guy who has come along and solved this riddle and he's done it. A lot is made of the fact that he's done it without learning. There's some question of whether he's done it with help from the gods or without help from the gods. That's sort of conflict in the text. There's a lot in the text that gives you the idea that he. It's his intelligence and his riddle solving ability that are the problem and the things that threaten to arrogate the position of the gods in a way. I read the crisis, the crisis in Thebes is created by Oedipus solving of the riddle. The minute he solves the riddle, something has actually gone awry. Of course, you know, literally we have to attribute all of this to ultimately to incest and these things are actually related. But psychologically, the most immediate precursor of the plague and all these problems is Oedipus's cleverness. His ability to simply, almost like a mathematician or a logician, to solve this problem in a world in which this problem should be solved or is more typically solved by appeals to revelation, to prophecy, to some sort of supplication to the gods, or appeals to the authority of tradition, to experience. But the solving of the riddle in a way is like an a priori exercise or an exercise in semantics or something very similar to math. Yeah, that's my kind of Promethean reading of all of this. 4:10 Erin: So I think that that is a really good observation. However, it makes me think of the fact that this prophecy about Oedipus sort of predates Oedipus himself. Right? Like Laios is told that if he has a son, that the son will. Like he tries not to have a son with Jocasta. Is that right? I don't remember fully the whole pre play longer myth. 4:31 Wes: So we just got confused about. Or I just got confused about whether it's Jocasta or Yocasta or Yocasta. Because, Erin, you've always heard it. Yocasta. I've always heard it. Jocasta. 4:42 Erin: Right. 4:43 Wes: And your pronunciation is what it is in the actual ancient Greek. And I guess the way I've heard it is the Anglicization. Is that how you say it? 4:53 Erin: Yeah, the Anglicized version. 4:56 Wes: Yeah, the Anglicized version. So I guess we decided just to go with that. 5:01 Erin: Okay, so forgive me if I don't consistently say Jocasta. I'll try to. 5:04 Wes: Well, just say okay, then we'll go both ways. 5:07 Erin: Okay. Yeah. So you're highlighting, I think, what's a really interesting tension in the text because it does seem as though his riddle busting is the source of a lot of the problems. And yet at the same time, laios has this prophecy before oedipus is even conceived that if he does conceive a son, his child will kill him and marry his mother. I think that's the way the myth goes. Obviously Oedipus, from what I understand, was, you know, Sophocles version was based on this myth that everybody would have been common knowledge for everyone in Greece that had a very long history. 5:42 Wes: And I don't think there's too much variation in the way the myth was told as well. 5:47 Erin: I know that there's a slight difference as far as the actual origin of the curse that laios might have been involved in, or he might have sinned against the Greek values of hospitality, or he might have just conceived oedipus when he shouldn't have or when he was told not to. There's some variation about the precise origin of why this curse falls upon them. But what you're also making me think of is another really big tension in the text that bothers me, which is, is fate different from the gods? And what role do the gods have in fate? It's my understanding that they're actually two different forces in a way. Right. Because the gods can be moved by sacrifice, supplication, but fate can't be changed. Destiny can't be changed. 6:36 Wes: You know, it's that whole euthyphro dilemma named after the platonic dialogue, in which is something pious because it's loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods because it's pious? Or in early modern philosophical tradition, is the moral law just something that is the whimsical dictate of God, or is the moral law. The moral law, and everyone is subject to it, including God. So, yeah, I think it speaks to that sort of problem, this relationship between fatedness and the gods who can be moved. Are the gods in some sense subject to fate? And this is a. I think a play in which the rumination. There's a lot of rumination by the chorus. It's a play about religious doubt. I think the chorus gets very worried about whether or not. So maybe we can look at one of those passages. 7:29 Erin: Sure. 7:30 Wes: And by the way, I think. I think the best parts of this play are in the chorus, actually. Even though when I was younger and I read it, it's just like, get me to the plot. I just can't this chorus fluff get me beyond the chorus fluff Now. I even felt some of that on this rereading. But when I actually started to analyze what's going on with the chorus, I'm like, wow, this is quite amazing. So let's go to 463 to 512. And by the way, so I'm using the David Grene translation and you're using the Fitzgerald. 8:02 Erin: Yes. 8:03 Wes: Fitzgerald is very known for his poetic style. And actually I favored him when I was younger. Like, I memorized parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and I would always use the Fitzgerald because the alternative was the Lattimore, which is very dry but more literal. I spent way too many hours looking at all kinds of different translations and trying to decide do I want the poetic and tolerate the anxiety of knowing that Fitzgerald has thrown in a word that just isn't there in the ancient Greek, or am I just going to go for the dry literal? And I went for the dry literal. But you have the other side of things, so we can compare those, which I think is a good thing. And actually, Grene is not that bad. He's not all that dry. 8:47 Erin: No, I find the idiom to be really dated. 8:51 Wes: Yeah, yeah, it's a trade off. If you look at the ancient Greek, there are so many difficult decisions to make. You know, if you try to be faithful, you are just driven in the direction of syntactical clumsiness and dryness and things sounding very dated. It's really hard to avoid. Like, if I were translating this, you know, just. Just even the beginning children, young sons and daughters of old Cadmus, I'd be awfully tempted to do a very loose translation and get rid of any reference to Cadmus, which some translators actually do, to make sure that any of the outdated references that would have been meaningful for ancient Greeks but are not meaningful for us, I'd be tempted to replace them with something that had some actual import for us, because that drives the emotional power of the play. And for us, it just. It works against it. It's rooted in ancient Greek mythology, which is something that does not have the same deep emotional significance for us as it would for them. 9:51 Erin: Yeah, I think that any great text needs to be retranslated for each generation. And I think that the self consciously high syntax that he's using, I believe that the Fitzgerald is actually older than the Grene, or they're roughly the same age. But I just think that the Fitzgerald, much less self consciously produces a very beautiful text. And I allow a lot of liberty in translation. Things don't bother me ultimately, because you're not just reproducing perfectly exactly what's in the Greek, you have to create something that's beautiful in its own right. So I tend not to be bothered by those types of smaller changes, which is a liberty that I have for not knowing Ancient Greek at all. So I'm not bothered by it, as 10:33 Wes: you'll find out, for certain things, I like to know what's there in the Ancient Greek just because it drives the interpretation. It tells you what the playwright is doing. So, for instance, in the Grene translation, this fourth and fifth lines, the town is heavy with a mingled burden of sounds and smells, of groans and hymns and incense. Okay, so this is a difficult translation problem, because what Sophocles is doing in this is he's saying that different sensory modalities are actually woven together. So in the Ancient Greek, it's clear that he's doing something very interesting. He's telling us that sounds and smells somehow have interpolated each other, which is very important in a play that. Where incest features. Right. Because incest is about a breakdown in boundaries between things that should be bounded and separated. So that's the way Grene gets at it. Other translators, sometimes they just abandon the attempt to try to get at that interweaving of different sensory modalities. So Fitzgerald, for instance, the breath of incense, rises from the city with a sound of prayer and lamentation. He hasn't abandoned that task, but he's been a little more subtle about it. So the with is meant to give you a sense of this connection between the smell and the sound, almost as if the sound is coming from the smell. So that's just one example of the type of things I think about when looking at translations, but I've never been able to come down on one side or another. So when I was in school doing the Aeneid, in Latin class, I'd have one poetic translation and one literal translation, and then the Latin, and of course the Latin. I was practically hopeless, right? And I'm still hopeless now. Like reading Oedipus and referring somewhat back to the Ancient Greek, I'm like, I'm going to translate this for myself. I can do it. I just need a dictionary and five minutes. And I'm like, yeah, it's not possible. But, yeah, I was hopeless in Latin class. So we did our translations while referring back to these other translations. And I had always had to have one poetic and one literal next to me at all times. 12:52 Erin: Six years of Latin, baby. 12:54 Wes: You did six years? Yep, I did four years, yeah. 12:58 Erin: Oh, so you probably know as much as I do. 13:01 Wes: Yeah. I taught Latin at a community college at one point, but. 13:04 Erin: Oh, then what are you talking about? 13:06 Wes: No, I'm not. I'm not proficient. Last night I was looking up, is there a way for me to become fluent in ancient Greek? Can I go to a place where people are actually speaking it? 13:16 Erin: Oh, my gosh. 13:17 Wes: Do they have any programs where you can just immerse yourself in it and, like, so I can just ramp up quickly, you know, I did two years in undergrad, and then I did a year or two in grad school at the University of Texas would have. Which had, like, I think, the number one classics program in the country. And I got a B in Herodotus because I hated sitting there with a dictionary. And Plato I could do, but Herodotus might as well have been a different language. And then I'm like, this isn't even one language. This is multiple languages. Because the civilization spans, you know, thousands of years, essentially. So, I mean, biblical Greek is not Platonic Greek is not Herodotus's Greek. 13:57 Erin: So my mom made me learn ecclesiastical Latin. Yeah, not that big of a difference, but. Oh, boy. 14:03 Wes: Yeah. Well, it's got to be somewhat easier, right? 14:06 Erin: I don't know. Sure. 14:08 Wes: Yeah, I don't know either. Anyway, so. All right, we got that interlude out of the way. We were talking about religious doubt, which I think is one of the big themes of the play. So if we go to 463 to 512 roughly, for the chorus. So I call this section Prophecy versus Proof. Teiresias and Oedipus have just had a big fight. And Teiresias has told Oedipus that, you know, he's the one who's the murderer. And the chorus now starts to fantasize about the culprit in a sympathetic way. Strophe says he should run. The gods are after him. The antistrophe says, fantasizes sympathetically and says he must be lonely. He's out in the woods, he's running from justice and…
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