Oedepis Rex

Oedepis Rex by Sophocles.

Original 1937 Time review for Cocteau's adaption (including set descriptions, etc.).

Christian Bérard, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1932
Mural for Jean Cocteau’s flat, Paris

This play is perhaps the hardest-to-look at, harshest, eeriest dramatizations of Fate as well as one of the clearest articulations of it and the earliest. One looks into crime and the despair of the world, and through the maze of accusations, despair, evidence and hunches, at the end of the journey, one finds oneself. In this, the plot is almost dream-like.

For Freud, this play is the statement of the primal taboo and its punishment: a man kills his father to bed his mother. In how Sophocles describes fate we see, also, something like what for Freud would become the unconscious: this terrible crime is committed while hidden from Oedipus' (the perpetrator's) concious knowledge. And yet one can read Freud through Sophocles as well: one looks too hard at Freud's theory, and one sees only Freud. The theory dies and withers away.

Unlike in Freud, Sophocles' Fate is also a trap of external riddles and prophecies. Everything is laid bare in advance. The struggle to cheat Fate's inexorable bureaucracy is often the fulfillment of its miseries. What we call plot, though in meticulous evidence here as each move by Oedipus furthers the revelation of his guilt, leading to his ultimate punishment, is less to uncover what is true, but to be drowned in truth, destroyed by it. The tendrils of fate and plot affix to Oedipus like strands of quicksand to a drowning man. One does not, with knowledge, cheat death.

Greek drama keeps close to a religious, ceremonial practice. One senses in the elevated, poetic invocations and liturgical recitations of the chorus that this crime is ritualistically reenacted to address similar, uncanny signs of doom in the present. In this, the fate of Oedipus also resembles agrarian ceremonies where the fertility god is ritually sacrificed to appease the dying fields.