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“May I Vanish from the Sight of Men”: Three Versions of Shame in Sophocles’

Oedipus Rex

Shierry Weber Nicholsen

October 2003

This essay was developed as part of an ongoing discussion with the cast of the Northwest Alliance for Psychoanalytic Study’s production of Oedipus Rex, which was staged in April 2004. Each performance was followed by a discussion with the audience, where the dialogue continued. Quotations from Oedipus Rex are from the performance script I prepared.

Introduction

The Oedipus is essentially a tragic analysis. Everything is already there, so it needs only to be extricated.

Schiller to Goethe, 1797

We all know that Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother, and that when he discovered who he had killed and who he had married, he blinded himself. But Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex does not show us the killing or the wedding. It shows us only the process by which Oedipus discovers “who he is” and it then reports two actions consequent upon that discovery: Oedipus’ mother/wife Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus stabs out his eyes. In addition to the killing and the marrying, two other less familiar parts of Oedipus’ story form part of the background of Sophocles’ play – Oedipus’ victory over the Sphinx and his accession to the throne of Thebes, and the fact that his mother and father tried to kill him shortly after his birth by having him abandoned on the mountain Citheron with his ankles pinned together.*

What is Oedipus to us? Freud first mentioned Oedipus in 1897, in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess. There he wrote that it had occurred to him that the reason audiences were so stirred by Oedipus Rex is that “the Greek saga seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes because they perceive his existence in themselves. Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy.” (Hillman, 96) Freud’s focus in that remark is on Oedipal desires and conflicts. But Freud went on to talk about Oedipus in The Interpretation of Dreams, and there he noted that the play proceeds in a manner similar to psychoanalysis: “The action of the play consists simply in the disclosure, approached step by step and artistically delayed (and comparable to the work of a psychoanalysis) that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius.” (Hillman, 92)

Indeed, as a clinician, it is hard to read Oedipus Rex without being reminded of a psychoanalysis, with Oedipus as the patient. We see Oedipus’ omnipotence and grandiosity, his resistance and denial, his interest in a quick fix and his demand for the answer, his bullying of the seer Tiresias and the old herdsman who knows something

*For those of you who have not recently read the play, a crude summary of what “happens” in it is included at the end of this essay.

about his birth. We see his shame and humiliation when he finally recognizes the implications of his material. But if look at Oedipus Rex an analysis, what are we to make of Oedipus’ self-mutilation at the end of the play? Was this perhaps a failed analysis?

Shame is the crux of this question. Oedipus’ self-blinding is an expression of his shame. Shame is intricately connected with the theme of vision that figures so prominently in the play. Something is visible which Oedipus does not want to see and does not want to be seen. The link between visibility and shame is already present with the blind Tiresias and Oedipus’ command that the murderer of Laius be shunned, but it becomes explicit and central as we approach Oedipus’ recognition. . As Oedipus starts to have an inkling that the man he murdered at the crossroads may have been linked to Laius, he says:

If this be the fate I was born to, one can only call the gods savage!

May I never see that day! May I vanish from the sight of men

Rather than see the taint of that disaster come upon me!

Shame is linked with Oedipus’ birth: A messenger from Corinth, Oedipus’ adoptive city, discloses that he had rescued the infant Oedipus. From what? asks Oedipus – and the messenger points to his deformed feet. “I have borne the marks of that shame as long as I can remember, “ says Oedipus. And when Oedipus needs to explain to the Chorus (who cannot bear the sight of him) why he blinded himself rather than killed himself, he says: “I could not bear to have eyes to see my father and my mother when I came to the house of death.”

What is Oedipus ashamed of? And how are we to understand his shame as the outcome of the analytic process we can imagine he has gone through? What is Oedipal shame and what can it tell us about Oedipal analysis? I will discuss shame in Oedipus in three somewhat different perspectives: First, as “sacrificial shame”: shame as violence taken upon the self as a way of handling a murderous context. Second, as “concrete shame”: shame as an ever-present reminder of a problem which has so far been taken literally and needs to be worked through – in other words, shame as a sign that the repetition compulsion is still in force. Third, “coming into shame”: shame as a recognition of limits, accompanied by a differentiation of fantasy and reality, internal and external worlds.

Sacrificial Shame

The emotion of shame is the primary or ultimate cause

of all violence, whether toward others or toward the self.

James Gilligan, Violence, 110

If we think of shame as a sense of unworthiness permeating the self seen through the eyes of others, it seems clear that Oedipus is ashamed of his very being. When the facts of his relation to his mother and father becomes inescapable, he cries out:

All come to light! All the prophecies true!

O light, may you never flood my eyes again!

I, Oedipus, damned in my birth, damned in my marriage,

Damned in the blood I shed with my own hands.

The play begins with the notion that the murderer of Laius, Oedipus’ predecessor, is responsible for the plague that is decimating the city. Oedipus fears the “taint” of that disaster, and it has indeed fallen upon him – or been revealed to be his very essence. Oedipus is the one, the source of the plague. The Chorus, the men of Thebes, concur fully. They cannot bear to look at or speak with him. Oedipus has become the scapegoat in the ancient version familiar to the Greeks, whereby the most ugly and despicable person was chosen to be the pharmakos – the pharmaceutical scapegoat who was driven out of the city, supposedly bearing its ills with it (cf. Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 131).

From this point of view, Oedipus’ act of self-mutilation is a special act of violence in a history full of murderousness. We are shown Oedipus’ own murderousness. He is portrayed as an irascible man who threatens the people he is interrogating with death if they do not answer his questions. We learn that he met his father (unknown, perhaps, to either of them) on a crossroads and when his father’s herald tried to get him to make way, he struck the man, and when his father then tried to smash him on the head, he killed his father and all those who were with him.

It is not only Oedipus who is murderous. Parental murderousness is the very context of his life. Oedipus’ parents tried to murder him when he was three days old, The murderous violence in his father and mother does not end there. The story goes that when Laius and Oedipus met at the crossroads, Laius was on his way to consult an oracle to find out whether he had succeeded in killing his son – and then he tries again. Toward the end of the play, when Jocasta sees that the truth will come out, she runs into the palace and hangs herself. We may think of her suicide as, among other things, an act of violence toward Oedipus.

In the Odyssey, Homer describes Jocasta in the underworld:

[S]he descended through the gates of mighty Hades.

In the passion of her grief she made fast a noose for herself from the lofty roof-beam; and for Oedipus she left behind such endless woes as a mother’s avenging spirits brings. (134)

In the passion of her rageful grief, her grief for Laius, her husband, killed as she now knows by Oedipus, and her rage (we may imagine) the son who has violated her and destroyed the façade of their current life, Jocasta enacts a violence that redounds upon Oedipus. Oedipus runs after her in a rage and breaks down the door to her rooms. But when he sees her dead, he takes her body down gently and stabs his eyes out with the pins that held her gown – pins reminiscent of course of the pins that pierced his ankles. “No more!” he cries to his eyes as he stabs them. “You will look no more at the pain I have suffered, the horrors that are my doing!”

In this act, Oedipus takes upon himself not only his own violence but also the violence of his parents toward him, and he becomes the scapegoat for the city. Oedipus the grandiose savior of Thebes had no self apart from the city. Now he assures the Chorus that they need have no fear of touching him, because he is bearing all the guilt himself. Nor does he now have a self apart from his parents’ murderous wishes for him. As scapegoat, his earnest wish is to be expelled from the city. And where does he want to go? To Citheron, the mountain where his parents had him abandoned, to die:

Let me go to Citheron,

Where my mother and father willed that I should die,

And let me die there, as they willed.

Shame and literalism, or concrete thinking

[Oedipus’] fate moves us because it might have been our own,

because the oracle laid upon us before our birth

the very curse which rested upon him.

Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams

The oracular approach to the psyche defends against

its measureless depths (Heraclitus) with literalist measures.

James Hillman, “Oedipus Revisited,” 119

It is possible to read Oedipus Rex as the tragedy of concrete or literal thinking. The “place where three roads meet” – the crossroads at which Oedipus killed his father – serves as an emblem of the difference between concrete thinking and a capacity for reflection. If three roads meet, clearly there are choices, alternative paths. But for Oedipus and Laius, this crossroads became a point so narrow and closed that there was room for only one of them to live. The crossroads was a narrow place of anguish – as in angina, a narrowness that is a claustrophobic attack.

Oedipus’ murder of Laius leads us back to the play’s first attempted murder -- the murder of the infant Oedipus by his parents – and to the question of the “truth” of oracles, which plays such a central role in the drama. Oracular statements, like analysts’ interpretations, are notoriously ambiguous. They can be understood in more than one way – depending on the state of mind of the one to whom they are addressed. Heard literally, the oracle leaves no room for an internal world with its distinction between fantasy and reality. They refer to concrete actions. In fact, all the oracles in Oedipus Rex are understood literally. The oracles have proclaimed that the characters will murder and be murdered. Therefore, they take murderous actions to avoid being murdered, hoping to disprove what they conceive to be the literal truth of the oracles. As Hillman notes, “Taking action to avoid the prophecy fulfills the prophecy. Hence the feeling that oracles are inescapable, foredooming. But the doom is not in the prophecy; it is in the action taken when one hears the oracle literally.” (118)

Why would Jocasta and Laius be willing to kill their infant son, their first and only child? Like all the characters in OedipusRex, they refer their murderousness to the oracles they have received – and an oracle has told Laius that his son will murder him. Listening concretely, Jocasta and Laius cannot imagine that their infant son’s desire to kill his father might remain in the realm of fantasy, survivable both by him and by the parents who would be the objects of his Oedipal wishes. In their minds, the only solution is to try to kill the child before he literally assaults them.

Ever the ambivalent critic of psychoanalysis, Hillman argues that it is not only the Thebans in the play, but psychoanalysis as well, that displays this kind of literalist thinking. There is a good reason why Oedipus’ rather brutal interrogative methods remind us all of an analysis, he says. In this sense the psychoanalytic method is an Oedipal method. The word method comes from the Greek word for road (hodos), Hillman reminds us, and psychoanalysis can be taken just as literally as Oedipus and Laius conceived the crossroads on which they met. Oedipal psychoanalysis aims to shed light on what is dark, to make it clear and defined. “It is not… the contents of the [Oedipus] myth that keep analysis Freudian. It is the method. Analysis is oedipal in method: inquiry as interrogation, consciousness as seeing, dialogue to find out, self-discovery by recall of early life, oracular reading of dreams.” (Hillman, 130) Visibility and literal truth are seen as one and the same. “All come to light! All the prophecies true!” cries Oedipus when he realizes the truth.

From this point of view – psychoanalysis as practiced or received literally -- Oedipus Rex shows us not so much a courageous search for the truth as an anxious search for a concrete answer. Oedipus became King of Thebes on the basis of his ability to guess the Sphinx’ riddle. Think how Oedipus now approaches the question of the plague. Hillman details his methods: the citizens call upon him as a quasi-omnipotent leader, and he acquiesces. There is an appeal to the gods, the oracles, and the seer for a definite diagnosis. Oedipus decrees that the problem person is to be killed or expelled. This approach ends up bringing Oedipus himself down in shame. As C. G. Jung commented, “ Oedipus . . . fell victim to his tragic fate because he thought he had answered the [Sphinx’] question” (Collected Works 10, par. 714).

Considered in terms of concrete thinking, shame marks the beginning of Oedipus’ story -- Jocasta and Laius’ attempt to murder their son -- as it marks the end. It is a visible somatic shame with two concrete or bodily locations: his feet at the beginning, his eyes at the end. Both are pierced by pins: his ankles are damaged by having been pinned, and the damaged feet are a mark of shame to him. Oedipus blinds himself with the pins which have held Jocasta’s gown. In the play, both the ankles and the eyes are referred to as arthra – joints, as in arthritis; cruxes, one might say. What is the connection, or the difference?

We may think of the concrete bodily shame as an ever-present memory of a traumatic rejection, a way of carrying violence in the self, perhaps to be externalized in violent action, perhaps to be finally worked through. Oedipus is lame. Imagine Laius on his way to consult the oracle to find out if his son is really dead. He meets a man at the crossroads who is lame – perhaps the association comes instantly. He tries to kill the man. For Oedipus too, meeting a man to whom he is “in the way” and who tries to kill him, the traumatic memory may arise immediately. He kills the man. The concrete shame has been passed on through an external action.

At the end of the play, when Oedipus finally takes on both his birth and his guilt, he becomes ashamed. The shame moves from his feet to his eyes. He becomes the scapegoat, as we saw earlier. But we may also think of him as coming into a shame that is not concrete, a shame that has a different meaning – perhaps a depressive rather than a persecutory shame. This shame is associated with the possibility of righting what is unnatural and the opening of an internal world with its distinctions between fantasy and reality, public and private, and the generations. In this sense Oedipus Rex is about coming into shame.

Coming into Shame and Burying the Dead

Oedipus’ shame . . . can only be ascribed to his imaginative

experience of that which puts an inviolable limit to his seeing.

Seth Benardete, The Argument of the Action, 135

As Bion pointed out in his treatise on maintaining morale in London in the face of German air raids, failure to bury the dead is the sign of supreme civic demoralization. Oedipus Rex begins with citizen petitioners begging Oedipus for help with the plague, which has wrecked the fertility of Thebes. The dead – barren fields, stillbirths, victims of plague – presumably lie about everywhere. But once the oracle has turned Oedipus’ attention to the search for Laius’ murderer, there is no further mention of the plague. When Oedipus comes into shame, however, when he returns from the palace where he has found Jocasta hanged and stabbed out his eyes, he asks Creon to bury Jocasta. This request can be understood as bringing the plague to an end and initiating mourning. it represents the end of the plague (and, presumably, the beginning of mourning). Now the blind Thebans can start to bury their dead. In Benardete’s words, “Faced with the Thebans’ invincible ignorance and undefiant impiety, the gods found that Oedipus was indispensable: he charged Creon with the task of burying Jocasta.” (134)