Abstract
Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus closely, Tomkins’ concepts reveal that the affective structure of Oedipus’ personality leads inexorably to his downfall. While anger plays a crucial role in his script development, disgust legislates his tragedy. Prone to shame insult, the warrior Oedipus must respond with anger when his identity is threatened. He moves from ultimate respect as a warrior-ruler, as Rex, to his rejection as both a social- and self-disgusting object, the pharmakos, via disgust-contamination scripts due to the intrusion of abject humiliation. Pharmakos is distinguished from its typical but misleading translation, “scapegoat,” an innocent sacrifice. The pharmakos is ambiguous, both guilty and innocent, social contaminant and means of cure. Oedipus must confront how it feels to be looked upon with both disgust and fear by his people, while also being aware of his position’s injustice. This leads to miasma and suggests how the Ancient Greek concept of “pollution” is a social sublimation of the human universal expression of disgust with a moral valence.
But I account myself a child of Fortune,
beneficent Fortune, and I shall not be
dishonoured.
Sophocles, Oedipus
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Notes
- 1.
Again, I am adopting the simple title Oedipus rather than Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King, or Oedipus Tyrannus due to critical confusion concerning the most appropriate form. See Bernard Knox’s (1988) “Sophocles’ Oedipus” for an exposition of connotations of tyrannus (sometimes tyrannos ) and Charles Segal’s (2001) Oedipus Tyrannus (p. 6).
- 2.
See the works of Darwin , Ekman , Izard , Plutchik , Oatley and Johnson -Laird, and Rozin .
- 3.
Conventionally, dramas are cited by act, scene, and line numbers, but I have here opted to cite pages rather than lines due to inconsistencies between various translations, here primarily Grene’s. In subsequent notes, I will often cross-reference other translations in the interest of comparison.
- 4.
For more explanation, see the discussion of Tomkins’ thoughts on ideo -affective postures in Chap. 2 of this book. I am aware that in using the words masculine and feminine, Tomkins is in many ways reinforcing stereotypes, even while refuting their intrinsic nature. That is an important and necessary critique but outside of my purview here.
- 5.
In describing “healthy pride,” or what Francis Broucek calls “competence pleasure,” Nathanson counts three “necessary” conditions for its activation: “(1) A purposeful, goal-directed, intentional activity is undertaken while under the influence of the affect interest -excitement; (2) this activity must be successful in achieving its goal; following which (3) the achievement of the goal suddenly releases the individual from the preceding effort and the affect that accompanies and amplifies it, thus triggering enjoyment -joy” (1992, 83). Thus, by Tomkins’ logic, shame is experienced when there is an impediment to items two and/or three, such that one feels defeat, discouragement, and incompetence. Shame, of course, is also evoked in many other situations not directly concerned with pride.
- 6.
Oedipus is not really divided by scenes, though six implied scenes can be numbered by choral interludes.
- 7.
“There is an unclean thing, / Born and nursed on our soil, polluting our soil, / Which must be driven away, not kept to destroy us” (Sophocles; Watling trans. 1947, 28). Or: “Drive corruption from the land, / don’t harbour it any longer, past all cure, / don’t nurse it in your soil—root it out!” (Sophocles; Fagles trans . 1992, 661).
- 8.
A point of clarification: metaphor is used in the ordinary sense of figure of speech and representative paradoxical identification between different objects; trope, however, indicates a figure of thought, thus implicating cognition, sense perception, and memory that may or may not manifest in specific linguistic forms. I must also declare that this figure of speech versus figure of thought distinction is not my own, though I no longer know where I read it.
- 9.
Ancient Greek performances happened in stadiums with masks, thus placing an emphasis on “body language” and discourse. Facial affect is more viable in intimate modern playhouses . Knox’s (1989b) essay “Oedipus Rex” includes an account of a striking modern performance directed by Minos Volanakis, with particular insight into the Oedipus-Teiresias dynamic. The first notable adjustment was a “Brechtian rupture” in which the chorus removed their masks and spoke directly to the audience in English: “If such crimes go unpunished, why should I join the sacred performance” (137, my emphasis). The point was to emphasize that Greek tragedy was “a rite of divine worship, a celebration of the god Dionysus; if ‘religion is finished,’ what is the point of the performance?” (139). Next, with the help of Robert Mitchell, Volanakis created a stage design based on the labyrinth, which “has a special relevance to Oedipus: ‘Blundering detective and predetermined killer,’ he walks the ‘maze with its false turnings and blind alleys,’ which will turn out to be the labyrinth ‘where each step leads inescapably to the next.’ The only way out of the labyrinth is through the center,” where “dreadful knowledge” is waiting (140–1). Volanakis’ treatment of Tiresias is described as “spectacular and controversial” (145). When he enters, Tiresias is led inexorably around the labyrinth and finally faces the audience. His head is wrapped in a “white stocking mask” to represent the confinement of blindness. Then, during their confrontation, Tiresias’ final speech unambiguously identifies Oedipus for parricide and incest, but Oedipus must exit the stage without hearing what Tiresias says about him, otherwise, “how can he fail to make the connection?” (146). Finally, when Oedipus emerges from the palace bloody and blind, he is “wrapped from head to foot in a white robe, the head encased, like that of Tiresias, in a stocking mask”—an image evoking the “medieval leper”—in order to give “visual expression to a powerful motif strongly emphasized in the language of the play but quite alien to modern feeling. Oedipus is a source of pollution…. Even an ordinary murderer was thought to transmit miasma, a sort of stain, an infection; Oedipus is doubly and triply dangerous” (147–8).
- 10.
- 11.
Richard Janko (1987) and Amélie Rorty (1992) both point to Aristotle’s argument that good tragedy teaches effective, balanced judgement, emotion, and thought. An Aristotelian prescription might thus read: “See here Oedipus; his natural emotional balance is upset and thus he is unable to think properly. Be not like him. Know thyself.”
- 12.
“Messenger: That story of pollution through your parents? / Oedipus: Ay, that, sir; that, my ever-present torment” (Sophocles; Watling trans . 1947, 53). Or: “Messenger: And you’d be covered with guilt, from both your parents. / Oedipus: That’s right old man, that fear is always with me” (Sophocles; Fagles trans. 1992, 686).
- 13.
- 14.
Gershen Kaufman shows how a “powerlessness-affect-stress cycle” can so magnify negative affect as to produce endocrine changes leading to dangerous consequences, including “violence, suicide, psychosomatic illness, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and addiction” (1989, 52–3). Léon Wurmser provides an illuminating case of a shame and narcissistic-rage combination that leads to self-destructive tendencies (1981, 71, 106).
- 15.
In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud sensed the combination in which the melancholic represents the ego “as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable [shame]; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished [disgust]” (1989, 584). In losing self-respect, the melancholic suffers a loss of the self as ego-object or narcissistic object. Suicidal impulses derive from sadism toward a hateable other, a person “usually found in his immediate environment,” but turned into a “conflict due to ambivalence” (588).
- 16.
“Show me a man whose happiness was anything more than illusion / Followed by disillusion. / Here is the instance, here is Oedipus, here is the reason / Why I will call no mortal creature happy ” (Sophocles; Watling trans. 1947, 59). Or: “… does there exist, is there a man on earth / who seizes more joy than just a dream, a vision? / And the vision no sooner dawns than dies / blazing into oblivion. / You are my great example, you, your life / your destiny. Oedipus, man of misery—/I count no man blest” (Sophocles; Fagles trans . 1992, 692).
- 17.
The formal ordering of the plastic, sculptural world is the Apollonian in Nietzsche’s (2000) The Birth of Tragedy, in contrast with the musical intoxication, enchantment, and abandon of the Dionysian. The Birth of Tragedy is not included in this book’s theory of tragedy section because it represents less a theory of tragedy than an aesthetic theory that incorporates a polemical examination of metaphysical conditions for tragedy’s origin. He then moves to critique the decadence of his modern German culture with its foundations in the excessive Socratic rationalism, exemplified by Euripides, that destroyed the mythical basis of genuine tragedy.
- 18.
“… having commanded / All men to cast away the offence, the unclean, / Whom the gods have declared accursed, the son of Laius, / And, having proved myself that branded man, / Could I want sight to face this people’s stare? /… I would not rest / Till I had prisoned up this body of shame / In total blankness” (Sophocles; Watling trans. 1947, 64). Or: “Now I’ve exposed my guilt, horrendous guilt, / could I train a level glance on you, my countrymen? /… I’d wall up my loathsome body like a prison, / blind to the sound of life, not just the sight” (Sophocles; Fagles trans. 1992, 697).
- 19.
In 1966, Thomas Gould immediately responded to Dodds with “The Innocence of Oedipus: The Philosophers on Oedipus the King.” He defends the “naive reader” (1988, 50) who interprets the play as involving fate or a “tragic flaw.” Resting his defence on an ambiguity in the word “responsible” (52), the tragic hero can be the gods’ victim and fated, and morally flawed, and be accountable for choices. But only “special men,” in Sophocles’ view, “are systematically prevented by divinity from pursuing their own goals” (57). At core, Gould and Dodds were having a metaphysical debate.
- 20.
This dichotomy becomes the basis of Derrida’s (1981) “Plato’s Pharmacy” in which the term pharmakon is rendered in translation sometimes as “remedy,” sometimes as “poison,” but also “recipe,” “drug,” and “medicine.”
- 21.
Regarding the “Cambridge Ritualists,” see Goldhill (1997), “Modern Approaches to Greek Tragedy.” In this context, see also René Girard’s, “Doubles and the Pharmakos: Lévi-Strauss, Frye , Derrida , and Shakespeare.” He suggests that Frye is “cognizant of the sacrificial displacement that constitutes certain literary genres. In his eyes, the element of substitution makes literature more civilized than sacrifice” (2004, 103).
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Lucas, D.A. (2018). Case Study One: Sophocles’ Oedipus. In: Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94863-8_4
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