Thirteen
notes on “The Seduction of Oedipus”
1
From what Jocasta says she might well have known about it all along.
In any event “I love you, I know what is good for you”
sounds more like a mother’s voice than a lover’s. However
one reads it, it could have included a seduction scene.
2
The “documentary fallacy”, i.e. the idea that such and
such could have taken place if it were real, opens an interesting
set of questions. An example in Oedipus would be, for instance,
why didn’t Jocasta remark on his mutilated feet,
or the fact that he probably looked like Laius and/or herself.
3
The “causality gap” widens and narrows according to
the exigencies of meaning and the logic of the plot. In the plastic
arts, this does not exist as there is no causality due to the
compression of time.
n.b. Causality I take to mean the epistemological glue that binds
the real. David Hume pointed out that we never experience
it. It is that habit of thought that out of necessity binds sequence,
making sense of time. Causality may turn out to be the invention
that retards entropy par excellence.
4
It is in the causality gap that the seduction of Oedipus operates.
It is in this gap that sphinxes exist and blind hermaphrodite seers
couple with oracles that work. It is also the place where Oedipus
has a foot fetish, the product of his deformity; where the lion,
the eagle and Janet Leigh have a horrible threesome in the “Birth
of the Sphinx”; and where Mick Jagger plays Apollo, the god
of light and music, the master of ceremonies.
5
Metaphors are always fusions of opposites. The sphinx is only credible
in the meta- real of “Oedipus Rex” The birth of the
Sphinx happens offstage because the fusion of opposites is a plastic
affair. The actual fusion cannot take place in front of
us, follow any causal sequence, meta or otherwise. It is the will
to form that we are dealing with, and with it we find ourselves
in that strange place where language fails. As Wittgenstein said:
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”.
6
Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief” can only
work if there is a meta-causality at work, and that meta-causality
must be consistent. Inconsistencies have been met with criticism.
Voltaire’s own “anxiety of influence” may have
been the driving force behind his contempt for the Sophoclean version,
but in any event, he uses the documentary fallacy as leverage to
rewrite the play. Among other things, he shortens the time line
between Laius’ death and the play; he felt that fifteen years
was too long for the issue of Laius’ murder to come and three
would be more reasonable.
7
The plot belongs to Sophocles and the audience. It is the workings
of the metaphor, the mechanics of causality. The characters
cannot know the plot as it belongs to the next order of magnitude,
in very much the same way we cannot "know" the plot of
our own lives but get glimpses from time to time that there is another
magnitude of will at work. Oedipus and Jocasta, in finding out the
truth, come to know the plot. They in fact come to realize God.
8
In the meta-world of the play, Oedipus isn’t surprised at
all by the facticity of the sphinx, because in his world there are
sphinxes. So why can’t you fuck your mum? Because all
things must be causally consistent and therefore morally
consistent, except for the things that have already been
formed, as they obey the will from a different order of magnitude.
Off-stage becomes a euphemism for this other order.
9
That I shouldn’t have sex with my mother is pretty clear to
just about everyone, so that can’t be the reason why Jocasta
and Oedipus are made to suffer such terrible retribution. In other
words, the idea that Sophocles is telling us not to do this, or
that it symetrises the plot don’t quite do it. If I begin
to think of Sophocles as a person, rather than “Sophocles”,
I wonder what his superego would have said about leaving this incest
as is. After all, the oracle didn’t say that having married
his mother, she would kill herself and that he would blind himself.
The retributions are not the result of the causal necessities of
the plot. They must then be the result of some other necessity,
and might that not be a moral necessity?
10
Is the plot then the machine that balances out the forces of the
Id and the Superego? It is only through the plot that Sophocles
can force a balanced outcome that we can all live with: after all,
who’s to say that he personally couldn’t care less,
or, worse, would have liked the idea of the incest.
10a
The rewrites of the play suggest a very strong link between the
moral values in the play and the moral values of the day, which
would be the cultural super-ego, the natural super-ego, the communal
super-ego, the super-ego that would belong to the “crowd”.
10b
Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” was written just after
the carnage of the Peloponesian war, and the horror of Jocasta’s
hanging and Oedipus’ blinding occur off-stage. It was enough
to know what was happening; the audience didn’t need more
of what they’d just gone through. In Seneca’s Roman
reworking, Jocasta’s death and Oedipus’ blinding take
place on-stage. In Dryden and Lee’s Elizabethan play we see
a much more sexualised version: “I love you differently than
wives love husbands. When I hold you in my arms, it is like holding
my child”. Dryden and Lee also surpass Seneca in gory details;
Oedipus’ children stamp on his eyes as they fall out of his
head.
10c
During the enlightenment Voltaire cleans up the story and glosses
over the horrors. In the twentieth century, the century of “crisis”
and sexual liberation, André Gide writes a play in which
mummy knew all along. In Cocteau's “La Machine Infernal”
the whole second act takes place in the bedroom, and finally, in
British actor and playwright Stephen Berkoff’s play, having
found out the truth, Oedipus and mum decide they like that way.
11
Jean Jacques Rousseau made an interesting observation when he said
that the rise in the technologies of a civilisation are directly
proportional to its moral decline. One could parallel the rewritings
of “Oedipus Rex” with the rise of technologies and a
greater and greater desire for the visceral, which some might see
as moral decline. Except for a reverse during the enlightenment,
the flow is pretty consistent with the general moral attitudes of
the times. Voltaire, the most celebrated playwright of his day,
probably suffered from a Bloomian anxiety of influence around Sophocles.
The tidying up of the carnage is very much in line with the artistic
codes in theatre, painting and social mores. in the final decades
leading up to the French Revolution.
12
Entropy in the moral sciences: Entrophy and the second law of thermodynamics
state that all closed systems move toward disorder in time.
13
The moral entropic retardant is the superego, as it literally forbids
behaviour that leads toward disorder. Is not Kant’s Categorical
Imperative the perfect retardant. I use the term retardant because
entropy is a cosmic law and can never be overcome. Our technologies
allow us only to retard its effects, e.g anti-aging health care,
addiction research, checking the maxim of your actions against some
entropic set of consequences should you make it a general law, etc….
This series was begun in
2001.
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