Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

254 Pages·2006·1.14 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Sophocles’
OEDIPUS REX
Updated Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Oedipus Rex,Updated Edition
©2007 Infobase Publishing
Introduction ©2007 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form
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ISBN-13:978-0-7910-9309-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed.
p. cm.—(Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9309-3 (hardcover)
1. Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. 2. Oedipus (Greek mythology) in
literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series.
PA4413.O7S66 2006
882’01—dc22 2006025276
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Contributing Editor: Allison Stielau
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Oedipus: Ritual and Play 5
Francis Fergusson
On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex 17
E.R. Dodds
The Innocence of Oedipus:
The Philosophers on Oedipus the King, Part III 31
Thomas Gould
Introduction to Oedipus the King 71
Bernard Knox
Speech and Silence: Oedipus the King 91
Rebecca W. Bushnell
Oedipus and Teiresias 105
Frederick Ahl
Introduction: What Is a Father? 141
Pietro Pucci
The Oedipus Rex and the Ancient Unconscious 155
Martha C. Nussbaum
vi Contents
Knowingness and Abandonment:
An Oedipus for Our Time 183
Jonathan Lear
Life’s Tragic Shape:
Plot, Design, and Destiny 205
Charles Segal
Chronology 225
Contributors 227
Bibliography 231
Acknowledgments 235
Index 237
Editor’s Note
My introduction emphasizes the guiltlessness of Oedipus and, by Sophoclean
extension, of most of us. Thomas De Quincey said that the true answer to
the riddle of the sphinx was not Man, but Oedipus himself.
Francis Fergusson sees Oedipus as a ritualistic scapegoat, but one who
is more dramatic than theological, while E.R. Dodds urges us to understand
an ultimate nihilism in the play, akin to the vision of Samuel Beckett.
Thomas Gould rightly insists that Oedipus is innocent, and thus allows
the drama its cleansing function, after which Bernard Knox concludes that
Oedipus had only one freedom: to choose the truth, by finding it out for
himself.
In Rebecca W. Bushnell’s interpretation, Oedipus attempts and fails (as
we all must) to write his own story, while for Frederick Ahl the envious and
hostile Tiresias nevertheless helps the hero to realize the truth.
Pietro Pucci, founding himself on the Post-Freudian convention that
fatherhood itself is a fiction, calls into question also the possibility of truth,
in the play or beyond.
The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum suggests the pragmatic exis-
tence of an “ancient unconsciousness,” and she calls for a confrontation
between this archaic understanding and both Kleinian analysis and cognitive
psychology.
In an intricate defense against “Freud-bashing,” the Freudian philoso-
pher Jonathan Lear shrewdly reminds us that the fantasies of Oedipus are not
Oedipal, but concern his fear of lowly birth.
vii
viii Editor’s Note
Charles Segal concludes this volume by judging the labyrinthine nature
of Sophocles’ tragedy to be endlessly paradoxical, because the unriddling
hero confronts the truth and his own death as one fused entity.
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
Whether there is a “tragic flaw,” a hamartia, in King Oedipus is uncertain,
though I doubt it, as he is hardly a figure who shoots wide of the mark.
Accuracy is implicit in his nature. We can be certain that he is free of that
masterpiece of ambivalence—Freud’s Oedipal complex. In the Age of Freud,
we are uncertain what to do with a guiltless Oedipus, but that does appear to
be the condition of Sophocles’ hero. We cannot read Oedipus the Kingas we
read the Iliadof Homer, where the gods matter enormously. And even more,
we know it is absurd to read Oedipus as though it were written by Yahwist,
or the authors of Jeremiah or Job, let alone of the Gospels. We can complete
our obstacle course by warning ourselves not to compound Oedipus with
Hamletor Lear. Homer and the Bible, Shakespeare and Freud, teach us only
how not to read Sophocles.
When I was younger, I was persuaded by Cedric Whitman’s eloquent
book on Sophocles to read Oedipus as a tragedy of “heroic humanism.” I am
not so persuaded now, not because I am less attracted by a humanistic
heroism, but because I am uncertain how such a stance allows for tragedy.
William Blake’s humanism was more than heroic, being apocalyptic, but it
too would not authorize tragedy. However the meaning of Oedipus is to be
interpreted in our post–Nietzchean age, the play is surely tragedy, or the
genre will lose coherence. E. R. Dodds, perhaps assimilating Sophocles to
the Iliad, supposed that the tragedy of Oedipus honored the gods, without
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