Most students these days don’t know Sophocles from the sophomore slump. But chances are they know Oedipus, or at least the Oedipus complex.
Not that they’ve read “Oedipus Rex,” or even seen it performed on a stage, but Sophocles’ enduring mama’s boy remains as much a part of pop culture today as Achilles’ heel thanks to Freud, Jim Morrison, silly songwriter Tom Lehrer and television serials. A young man wants to kill his father and/or sleep with his mother? How “Sopranos.” Not to mention “Desperate Housewives.”
“It’s true that when I teach the play to college students today, they don’t know anything about it,” said associate professor John Gibert, who chairs the classics department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “If they know something about the Oedipus complex, it comes from their Intro to Psych courses.
“After all, we have 2,000 psychology majors here at CU, and only 65 classics majors. In psychology, this idea has held on as one of the basic chapters in the study of family dynamics. It’s impossible to avoid it.”
The irony is that Freud missed the point, at least as it related to the 2,500-year-old source play. Sophocles’ Oedipus never felt any primal urges toward his mom or pop. He was abandoned at birth in a failed attempt to circumvent a terrible prophecy that he would grow up to kill his own father and marry his mother. So in carrying out its will, he was an unknowing pawn.
The far more interesting psychological angle of the play, which will be staged by the Denver Center Theatre Company beginning Thursday and is the subject of two symposiums headed by Gibert in Denver today and in Boulder on Monday, has been less examined:
When Oedipus learned that he in fact carried out the prophecy, what motivated our wretched king to confront his crimes by stabbing out his own eyes?
“To me, the more interesting aspect is his ultimate expression of free will,” said director Anthony Powell. After all, the most powerful man in Thebes has been exposed instead to be fate’s boy-toy. That is, until he blinds himself with a pair of brooches.
“Oedipus argues on behalf of free will right up until the end,” Powell said. “He goes, ‘OK, I guess the gods can do what they want to me – but I am the one who dashed out my eyes.’ That’s the only thing he has any control over, so he does it.”
It also bears mentioning that Oedipus’ relentless pursuit of the awful truth about who killed former King Laius saved his city from a deadly scourge.
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Freud forever co-opted Oedipus in the early 1900s when he began devising all kinds of phallic complexes to explain not only our psychosexual behaviors but the psychological significance of the cigar (just ask Bill Clinton). He not only posited the theory that all boys experience the repressed desire to murder their fathers and marry their mothers, he interpreted the phenomenon as a necessary way of resolving their many infantile psychosexual issues. He also theorized that it was normal because every little boy eventually wants to take his father’s place.
Lehrer had fun with this notion when he suggested that what Tyrone Guthrie’s somber 1957 cinematic adaptation really needed was a catchy theme song (“I’d rather marry a duck-billed platypus than end up like old Oedipus Rex”). Today you can’t turn on the TV and not see a hot mom, a slug of a dad and a subsequent Oedipal reference as automatic as a laugh track.
“I do think it’s still a big part of our collective unconscious,” Powell said. “For instance, I remember reading it in an intro to theater-history class at UCLA, and the teacher’s matrix was a Freudian view of everything. The thing that hit me when I read it is that it’s really a cosmic whodunit.
“The fun – if you can call it that – is in watching this guy strip away everything until he finds the truth, even though he’s going to destroy himself in doing so. That’s certainly what makes it stageworthy.”
“Oedipus Rex” is also stageworthy, Gibert added, because it is perhaps the most accessible of Greek tragedies. It can be played straight, as it was first performed in 429 B.C., and as it will be by Powell, with masks and all of its mythological and theological pageantry intact. Or it can easily be done as a present-day allegory.
“The story taps into so many current psychological, philosophical, theological ideas that any manner of interpretation or adaptation is possible,” Gibert said. “There is virtually nothing you can’t do with it, so that contributes to its staying power in the theater.”
At its heart, modern audiences identify with the story’s sensationalism. It’s escapism, and it is soap opera. It’s no coincidence, Gibert said, that the two most enduring Greek tragedies are “Oedipus Rex” and Euripides’ “Medea,” in which a mother kills her two children to maximize her punishment of a philandering husband.
When Andrea Yates drowned her five children in Houston, she was labeled a modern Medea, though doctors later attributed her psychosis to postpartum depression (“O your heart must have been made of rock or steel, you who can kill with your own hand the fruit of your own womb”).
“I don’t know that my students get often hung up on the specific crimes in ‘Oedipus Rex,’ which is interesting because they do when they read ‘Medea,”‘ Gibert said. “A lot of students really get stuck on the thought of killing children, whereas they don’t seem to become as fixated on the thought of someone killing their father and sleeping with their mother. They accept somehow that it belongs to a different psychological plane, or that it’s some kind of metaphor about the human condition.”
Many audiences who are overwhelmed by the demands of modern life identify with Oedipus: Here, even a great man can be revealed to be powerless against the whims of fate.
“Anyone feeling a prolonged bout of helplessness can identify with Oedipus,” Gibert said. “But it’s important to counter that with the fact that he does exercise power and choice. It’s not just about him being in the grip of (omnipotent) forces. It’s also about him commanding his destiny and driving it forward.”
Powell addressed the issue in rehearsal. “We asked this question: ‘Why is this man a heroic figure?”‘ he said. “It’s because he will find the truth no matter what, even though it is going to – and does – destroy him.
” But you have to remember there comes a certain point where he kind of knows what’s up, and he continues, because he’s got to save his city. The truth is all-important to him, even if it brings about his own destruction.” (“How dreadful the knowedge of the truth can be when there’s no help in truth!”).
“Right after he’s blinded himself, the messenger comes out and says, ‘But he’s saved the city. The curse is lifted.’
“So he did the right thing. And that right there just makes you think about our world leaders today. The question is just hanging there: ‘Where are the heroes like that today? Where are they?”‘
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com .
