[[*]] Oral version in Transactions of the American Philological Association 122 (1992) 1-15. This version in Annals of Scholarship (special issue: Reinterpreting the Classics) 10.1 (1993; publ. 1994) 85-109.
[[1]] This paper in part of a longer study on the semiotics of prophecy in Greek literature. A version of it, compressed to suit the occasion, was presented as the presidential address at the 1990 annual meeting of the American Philologic al Association, and published under the title "Disauthorizing Prophecy: the Ideological Mapping of Oedipus Tyrannus" (Peradotto 1992). It was written and delivered before the publication of Frederick Ahl's thought provoking analysis, Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction (1991) in which some of the same arguments against the traditional reading are used. However, Ahl's study, not all of which I can espouse, has to do with the internal dynamics in which Oedipus is represented as an egocentric pa ranoid, "the very embodiment of Plato's tyrannical soul" (262), tragically predisposed to trust unsubstantiated evidence of his guilt, despite weighty grounds for doubt and his own first-hand experience. Ahl thus sees the play as a tragedy of self-delusion rather than of self-discovery. The present study is more concerned with the reception of audiences also predisposed to trust that evidence, the educational and cultural implications of just such a plot, and the rationale and devices of authorial control behind its construction. Ahl is here cited wherever I have found him lending support to this inquiry.
[[2]] This should not be read as an attack upon religion as such. But my analysis of the Oedipus Tyrannus in the body of the present study will demonstrate how much I am in sympathy with an essay of Jonathan Culler's, "Political Criticism : Confronting Religion" (1988.69-82), in which he challenges the immunity religion enjoys in social, political and educational arenas. In commenting on the position of religious discourse in our culture, he makes this observation: "Although in many respects we may have a 'godless', secular culture, as proponents of religion tirelessly tell us, religious discourse and religious belief seem to occupy a special, privileged place, as though it went without saying that any sort of challenge or critique were im proper, in bad taste" (p.71). Even more strongly: "The complicity of literary studies with religion today is a subject that has scarcely been broached but cries out for attention, not least because religion provides a legitimization for many reactionary or repressive forces in the United States and is arguably a greater danger today than ideological positions critics do spend their time attacking" (p.78).
[[3]] I speak here only of classical texts and of those who teach them. Whatever generalizations may be drawn from these remarks to a larger body of literature I leave for others to draw.
[[4]] This is no new problem. Twenty-five years ago, in a conference devoted to this very subject, Wayne Booth (1967:1) described the same phenomenon: "Though we may profess a happy relativism of goals, as if all knowledge were equally valuable, we cannot and do not run our lives or our universities on entirely relativistic assumptions. And yet we seem to be radically unwilling to discuss the ground for our choices; it is almost as if we expected that a close look would reveal a scandal at the heart of our academic endeavor." The "scandal," the discrepancy between the academy's "happy relativism of goals" and the concealed power relations by which it imposes meaning is explored relentlessly by Bourdieu and Passeron 1977.
[[5]] Paul de Man (1986.25-26) alludes to these unspoken assumptions when, in urging the teaching of literature "as a rhetoric and a poetics prior to being taught as a hermeneutics and a history," he concludes that this would require "a change in the rationale for the teaching of literature, away from standards of cultural excellence that, in the last analysis, are always based on some form of religious faith, to a principle of disbelief that is not so much scientific as it is critical, in the full philosophical sense of the term."
[[6]] Ours is a critical climate that no longer permits us honestly to ignore the relationship between artistic production and its social effect or blithely to invoke the notion of so-called aesthetic distance. Among others, Platonists at one end of the spectrum and Marxists at the other are united in consistently refusing to allow the aesthetic to appropriate "a zone of pleasure divorced in principle from ethical consequences" (Ferrari 1989.138). Terry Eagleton (1990.9) propounds a Marxist version of this by arguing that the aesthetic emerged as a theoretical category when art, at an early state of bourgeois society, became autonomous of the various social functions it had traditionally served. "It is this notion of autonomy or self-referentiality," he says, "which the new discourse of aesthetics is centrally concerned to elaborate; and it is clear enough, from a radical political viewpoint, just how disabling any such idea of aesthetic autonomy must be. It is not only ... that art is thereby conveniently sequestered from all other social practices, to become an isolated enclave within which the dominant social order can find an idealized refuge from its own actual values of competitiveness, exploitation and material possessiveness. It is also, rather subtly, that the idea of autonomy -- of a mode of being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determining -- provides the middle class with just the ideological model of subjectivity it requires for its material operations."
[[7]] This is not to say that there is nothing unacceptable in his essay. Given the nature of the subject and the dramatic changes that have occurred since it was written, there is much that will not stand. Booth would, I am sure be among the vanguard of his own critics. (Among other things, he would now be the first to insist that for "man," especially in his title, we must read "human being".)
[[8]] Booth's own The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) was, of course, a landmark in this development.
[[9]] Gorgias is reported to have called tragedy a deception, *apate* (Plutarch, Moralia 348c). Can the case be made that Gorgias (especially in the Encomium of Helen) and Sophocles (most explicitly in the Philoctetes) actually share a common view of language as the instrument for profoundly affecting a malleable soul? See Segal 1962.112.
[[10]] Institutionalization of whatever kind, in this case of Athenian tragedy and tragic performance, tends to obscure the arbitrary sources of its authority. By contrast, the sophists, being, as Bourdieu and Passeron put it (1977.62), "teachers who proclaimed their educative practice as such (e.g. Protagoras saying 'I acknowledge that I am a professional teacher -- *sophistes* -- an educator of men') without being able to invoke the authority of an institution, could not entirely escape the question, endlessly posed in their very teaching, which they raised by professing to teach: whence a teaching whose themes and problematics consist essentially of an apologetic reflection on teaching."
[[11]] So, for example, another perspective on Sophocles' play --what Borges would call the "counterbook" of the present argument -- would be to show how it confirms the limitations of reason, of empiricism, of skepticism. A bibliography of conflicting interpretations of the play (up to 1977), arranged in several useful categories, can be found in Hester 1977.
[[12]] See Godzich 1989.xiv.
[[13]] I am compelled to cite Bourdieu and Passeron (1977.x) to express my own sense of frustration over how some readers may misconstrue my remarks: "Setting aside the incongruous option of devising an artificial language, it is impossible to eliminate completely the ideological overtones which all sociological vocabulary inevitably awakens in the reader, however many warnings accompany it. Of all the possible ways of reading this text, the worst would no doubt be the moralizing reading, which would exploit the ethical connotations ordinary language attaches to technical terms like 'legitimacy' or 'authority' and transform statements of fact into justifications or denunciations; or would take objective effects for the intentional, conscious, deliberate action of individuals or groups, and see malicious mystification or culpable naivety where we speak only of concealment or misrecognition."
[[14]] In the same passage he refers to this as "successful falsifying" (YEUDH= LE/GEIN W(S DEI=) and even explains its secret as a *fallacia consequentis* (PARALOGISMO/S), e.g.: If A, then B. Given B, therefore A (which, of course, is false).
[[15]] Or "while he was looking at it" (QEWROU=NTI 1452a9)?
[[16]] Poetics, beginning of chapter 25. Cf. also chapters 9 and 15. "Historical actuality" and "scientific possibility," of course, possess their own particular brands of verisimilitude, differing from "public opinion" only in degree of self-monitoring, systematicity and consistency.
[[17]] Unless, perhaps, we follow, as I am disinclined to do, a "medical" interpretation of *catharsis*, understood as the controlled and safe release of pent-up emotions otherwise harmful to community welfare. Stephen Halliwell (1989) identifies a source of tension in the Poetics in the imperfect attempt to demarcate the art of poetry analytically from the art of social conduct, and yet at the same time to insist that tragedy (for Aristotle the poetic art par excellence) is the re presentation of a morally serious action. Aristotle's preoccupation with intelligibility and his virtual rejection of any central role for religious modes of understanding or explanation lead, Halliwell argues, to a "virtual obsession with the integrated structure" of represented action based on probability and necessity, and ultimately to the exclusion of the ethically pre-eminent agent from tragedy, for the suffering of such an agent would be irrational and unintelligible, the product of accidental factors. As a result, "in the case of tragedy," Halliwell insists, "the rationalizing thrust of the theory brings it into implicit conflict with the religious assumptions of the genre's mythical material" (173).
[[18]] "Logique volontairment degradee" (Barthes 1970.179).
[[19]] On this point, see Ducrot and Todorov 1979.74.
[[20]] Here Oedipus disregards, in a way that troubles *our* sense of verisimilitude, a fact that seems to touch him rather more closely: the similarity between Laius' oracle and his own. Is this perhaps a sign of two stages of composition, the one in which it is the likeness in the oracles that upsets Oedipus, and a second in which it is the likeness in the locale of the killing that moves the action forward?
[[21]] Like Knox 1957.38-41, and Dodds 1966.42-44.
[[22]] See especially Goodhart 1978.
[[23]] Charles Segal (1981.345), speaking of Philoctetes' rigidity compared to Ajax's, says "Here the old world, open to communication with the new, proves ultimately educable, albeit only through a miracle from the gods." That is a very big "albeit," for the "miracle" completely overturns the outcome of the credible logic of character development and interaction in Philoctetes and Neoptolemus. Philoctetes has been no more open to communication with the new world than Ajax was, and if any education can be said to occur, it is by the kind of simplistic divine (which is of course to say, authorial) interventions disdained by Aristotle.
[[24]] The quote is from Charles Bernstein (1986.90), who gives the name "imagabsorption" to this process. Karlheinz Stierle (1991.116), gives us a picture of what is missed in theatrical performance but occurs in the *study* of texts: A reader who studies the text does not only follow a linear and continually unfolding sense, he is multifariously engaged in trying to penetrate the meaning of a text through repeated readings and to include all of its aspects within the context of a single act of understanding. But he is also conscious of the insoluble difference and contradictory tendencies of language and speech, speech as a dynamic unfolding of verbal acts and as a remaining textual trace.
[[25]] In a letter to D'Alembert, cited by Bernstein (1986.199).
[[26]] The heart of my argument is the correspondence between the act of narrative composition and the nature of prophecy: my insistence that what is represented as the agency of Apollo in the play are compositional decisions of the author quite distinct from those compositional acts that constitute the motivation of his human characters. The failure fully to grasp this led one of my colleagues (his view would not be untypical) to discount my analysis on the grounds that the OT "subscribes to the idea that the things that happened to Oedipus involve a divine intervention." This begs the question in at least two ways. (1) The OT does not so much *subscribe* to the idea, it *creates* it, or perhaps better *fabricates* it; at very least, it * sustains* and *nourishes* it. The interesting challenge is to demonstrate *how* it does this, which is, as I have suggested, by fairly consistent, not altogether obvious compositional choices. (2) To speak of the concept of "divine intervention" as if that were an uncomplicated linguistic event, a simple literary *representation* of something "given", whether from our point of view or a fifth-century Athenian point of view, seems like an irresponsible refusal of the philosophical/scientific perspective I am bringing to the play.
[[27]] Compare Propp's remarks (1983.83): "Prophecy in itself is not part of the complication of the plot. Though it occurs at the starting point of the narrative, it is actually a product of the end. Prophecy does not determine the outcome; rather the outcome determines the prophecy."
[[28]] For a more detailed analysis of this process, particularly with respect to Homer's Odyssey, see Peradotto 1990.41-47.
[[29]] On this point, see especially Prado 1984 and Sell 1991.
[[30]] See Burrell and Hauerwas 1976.75-116, esp. 90.
[[31]] The view of the rational and the scientific espoused here may best be understood by resort to a clear distinction Roy Bhaskar (1986.72-73) makes between "(a) the principle of *epistemic relativity*, viz that all beliefs are socially produced, so that knowledge is transient and neither truth-values nor criteria of rationality exist outside of historical time and (b) the doctrine of *judgmental relativism*, which maintains that all beliefs are equally valid in the sense that there are no rational grounds for preferring one to another. I accept (a), so disavowing any form of epistemic absolutism, but reject (b), so upholding judgmental rationality against a- (and/or ir-) rationalism. Relativists have mistakenly inferred (b) from (a), while anti-relativists have wrongly taken the unacceptability of (b) as a reductio of (a)."
[[32]] Compare Merrell (1992.146): "Some form of trust in reason and the validity of argumentation is a matter of fact. If we deny this trust, our pen will be paralyzed: we will not reasonably be able to reason about the impossibility of reason."
[[33]] This play is the only version of the Oedipus legend in which Creon assumes the Theban throne immediately after Oedipus' self-blinding. And as Ahl (1991.262) is right to emphasize, Oedipus' self-punishment and voluntary abdication only escalate his city's troubles and precipitate a series of events that lead to its ultimate defeat and subjugation.
[[34]] On this point, see Christopher Prendergast 1986 especially 246. He sums the matter up sensibly when he observes that "there may be limits to the activity of rule breaking, beyond which it collapses into the fundamentally unmanageable or even into sheer unintelligibility" (p.75). For a good introduction to the problems of defining rationality, see Max Black 1986.
[[35]] Cited in Neher 1975.179.