(gentle inspirational music) - Welcome, Aparna- - Thanks, Krishnan.

- to this Sunday afternoon.

It's nice to be talking with you again about a topic that we just touched on last time, namely the topic of family, right?

And, so I've been thinking about family, musing about the centrality of family in literature, especially literature in drama, novels.

You know, it's one of the biggest themes, even bigger than war, I think, you know, from "Oedipus," Aeschylus, "Oresteia," obviously Sophocles, but also in the East, you have the "Mahabharata" that is a family war, you have the rule of filiality in Confucius and the Confucian traditions, and all of these different traditions seem to recognize the family as a place of conflict.

- Yes.

- Right?

So the family is not taken for granted, it is a problem.

- Yes.

- It is a question, right?

- It's a problem.

it's a question.

- Yeah.

- It's fascinating because I think, often we think about the domestic space as simple, maybe even boring, and I think again and again, we see in our stories that it is the kind of locus of the most drama, the most tension, the most sort of self-actualization and self-destruction, all of those forces.

So it's always worth considering what's going on in the family.

It's such a tangle.

- Yeah, yeah.

And it's the aspect of life that usually no one tells us anything about- - That's right.

- until it starts to break, right?

- Yeah.

- And that's why almost all the classics that deal with family, from the Greeks on through Jane Austen, always deal with family when it's reached breaking point.

But before we go on, for the sake of viewers who might not remember very clearly what happened in Sophocles's "Oedipus," do you think you could summarize the story for us?

- Certainly.

So "Oedipus the King," the play by Sophocles, is based on the Greek myth of Oedipus, which would've been very familiar to Sophocles's audience, but here in this play, we begin by seeing Oedipus as the king of Thebes.

His subjects are being plagued by a kind of blight that's been cast over the city, and they're supplicating themselves to him and asking for help.

As it turns out, there's a curse over the city because, as we learn, there's blood guilt on Thebes.

And this is because someone whom Thebes is still harboring has killed the King Laius, who was in power before Oedipus assumed the throne.

So gradually over the course of the play, we realize, as Oedipus conducts an investigation of this mystery, he's trying to uncover who it was who killed Laius, and he finds out over the course of speaking to several different characters that it was him.

He killed Laius, who turns out to have been his father, and he also has married the widowed queen of Thebes, Jocasta, who turns out to be his mother.

So Oedipus realizes that he's unwillingly or he's unwittingly committed these crimes that are kind of the most heinous of human crimes.

And having been forced to confront that revelation, he gouges out his own eyes and sort of leaves himself subject to the fates that will go on to determine what else to do with his life, whether they kill him or let him live.

Also, in the course of the play, Jocasta realizes that Oedipus is the son that she gave up to be killed many years before, and she kills herself as well after that realization.

So at the end of the play, we're left with a complete tragedy.

Oedipus is being guided along by his daughters who are also his sisters, and it dawns on the entire family that there is nothing but doom and sickness and horror in all of their lives.

Very bleak play but a really central, I think, Greek investigation of a certain family drama.

- That is a marvelously concise and elegant encapsulation of the story, reminded me why Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought that "Oedipus" was one of the three perfect plots, the other two were Ben Jonson's "Alchemist" and Fielding's "Tom Jones."

- Mm.

- Wonderful.

So now let's go back to our central question.

So I'm not very interested in this question of why is it that this is so.

You know, it can't be for no reason that every time there's a family in literature, it's always because of some conflict, sometimes internecine, in the family, you know, some, and even in Jane Austen.

So for some reason in our daily conception of the family is a safe place, we've managed to repress the knowledge of that, right- - That's right.

- which literature reminds us of.

So, and I started thinking about this because you expressed excitement about "Oedipus."

- Yeah.

- And so I wonder if you could just say something more about, like what is it that excited you about "Oedipus" and this question of family?

- Yeah, I mean, I just reread "Oedipus" recently for freshman seminar, and we have only one night on "Oedipus" and I felt that I just really needed more time, as always, with the text and was kind of carrying it around with me throughout the week afterward hoping students would wanna talk about it more, because I think, you know, on a first pass kind of interaction with "Oedipus," it's easiest to kind of hone in on his specific character, him as an individual who's marked by pride, by kingship, and by this fateful journey that seems to kind of only involve his own flaws.

But I think that there is a very significant problem that exceeds him as an individual and pulls in necessarily his parents, his wife, who's also his mother, and his children and the real tragedy is kind of about all of these players and the mess that they all are in together.

So Oedipus's particular tragedy or particular journey as a character is only kind of one facet of that, and I've been thinking about kind of what goes wrong in this family specifically because it's at once so horrible and so foreign to our experience, the kind of greatest of all horrors, that Oedipus kills his father and sleeps with his mother, and it's not something that directly, we have a kind of identification with.

But somehow the visceral kind of character of that horror, I think tells us something very deep about our own experience of family.

And so when I think about kind of what goes wrong in "Oedipus," it seems to me that the seed of the problem is with Laius and Jocasta making this decision to kill their son.

They've had, they've gone through the kind of natural experience of generating this phase of life that is inevitable, necessary, perfectly, kind of, in keeping with the regular function of the universe, but then because of the prophecy that they hear, that this son will rise up to kill them, they decide to kind of undo the action that they took, that was natural, and kill him so that he can't replace them.

And so to me, this seems like a real misunderstanding of what it is to be a parent, to bring a child into the world at all, because it sort of is a kind of inherent acceptance of your own mortality and your own replacement in the world, in your own role.

So for Laius, the fact that he's a king means that it's incumbent on him to have an heir and to be replaced by that heir.

It's part of his vocational duty as well as his kind of human duty.

So the fact that he is so resistant to that replacement and that Jocasta also is unwilling to abide that seems to then bring about a punishment that's visited not primarily upon them but upon their child.

So there's this way in which the sins of the father are visited upon the child and this happens again with Oedipus that because of what he's done, unknowingly, his children and their future are completely compromised.

So the whole line is cursed, everybody is kind of doomed because of this one failure to understand, I think, in some important way, what we are, what we're committing ourselves to by entering into the family.

- Entering into that cycle of generation.

- That's right.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, so you're saying in a figurative way, the child will kill the parent.

- Yeah, right.

- Yeah.

But I'm thinking, so in a way, you're saying that one of the issues about Laius and Jocasta is that they take the prophecy literally?

- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

- Right?

And we know from ancient oracles that you don't have to take them literally, many of them are riddles.

And in fact, the very Greek of this text is riddling and enigmatic, right?

More so, well, translations have to smooth it out, but the Greek is extremely compact and riddling, so it's very striking that they do take it literally.

- Right, because I think if one took it figuratively that your son will kill you, it could just mean nothing more than the circle of, the kind of normal natural cycle of life will continue as it has for everybody else.

But I think that that part of what's so anxiety inducing about the prophecy for them is the specific political role that they have also as king and queen and that kind of feature of their existence, it seems, is complicated by occupying the role of parent.

I think that's the case with Oedipus too.

Oedipus occupies a strange position as a son, I think, because he's a king.

So he, at the very beginning of the play, addresses the suppliance among his citizens as his children, and he also, I think they refer to him as first among men.

There's this sort of sense that Oedipus has come into the world fully formed, and he has for his people because he showed up, he solved the riddle of the Sphinx, and he assumed the throne at a time when the people of Thebes were dealing with a power vacuum and a curse and all kinds of difficulties.

So he has taken on the role of a father for this political system but that involves this sort of self-authorship and self-sufficiency in his own identity that I think makes no room for the fact that he was generated from somewhere, he came to be over some process, and that feature of his past and of his self seems to be what somehow he can't accept.

So the idea that he could kill his father and he could sleep with his mother, somehow that prophecy unhinges him.

And I wonder how much that has to do with kind of wanting to totally reject a real relationship with parents in the first place.

- Yeah, he wants to be his own man, right?

- Mm-hmm.

Right, exactly.

- Right, so you're suggesting that sleeping with his mother is a figurative way of saying, "I'm gonna be my own dad."

- Right, exactly.

- Right, yeah.

- And so it is exactly what comes to pass, that which he wished for, becomes reality in this horrible way.

- Yeah, yeah.

So I'm thinking, okay, Thebes, right, so lots of strange things happen in Thebes.

It's a very weird city, and the people in Thebes behave weirdly.

I'm thinking not only of this play but other plays like "The Bacchae."

And so I'm wondering, what would you say to somebody who said, "Well, weird things like this happen in Thebes.

I don't see why it's universal."

- Mm, mm-hmm.

- Right?

- That's a great question.

I think that that would be fine if it weren't for the fact that Oedipus really does strike a chord.

And I think, I mean, it newly does for me every time I read it, but even my students, kind of just the level of animation, the level of buzzing in the room that night that we read "Oedipus" speaks to some real, something that's uncomfortable but true.

that surpasses being Theban in some important way.

I think, you know, the way that the curse is manifesting itself in Thebes at the beginning of the play is really striking, that children are not being born or they're being born dead and the mothers are gray haired, they're wailing.

So there's a complete kind of perversion of maternal roles, of children's roles, birth and death are being conflated together in this horrible, perverse way, and the city can't kind of write itself back onto that cyclical, natural path.

And I think that, you know, despite that not necessarily being an experience that we share in, there is something that we fear in that.

- So it begins with that atmosphere of anxiety.

Right?

- That's right.

- There's a blight and there has to be a cause for the blight, and there's a pervading sense of guilt.

- Yes.

- It seems, right?

We must have done something.

Somebody must have done something.

- Right, exactly.

- Yeah, yeah.

And that comes from not having had closure.

- Yeah, right.

- Right.

- Right, and I don't know entirely, I mean, for the citizens of Thebes, I don't know sort of what that means for them or what kind of guilt they're feeling that isn't just displaced guilt because of the killer of the king.

Some of it seems like it must be their own responsibility and I'm not sure, I'm not sure where that lies.

I mean, it might have something to do with kind of helping Oedipus achieve this illusion of self-authorship.

- Yeah, and they forget the death of the old King.

- Right.

- Right, the old king goes, he dies- - That's right.

- you know, and then this new guy comes along who saves them from the Sphinx and then they make him king and Laius is forgotten.

He's even forgotten by his wife, right?

The first thing she sees, in her words, is then I saw you coming along Oedipus and you look just the same age of that my son would've been and you look just like Laius, you know, and so, and she marries him but nobody follows up on the question of what happened to Laius, you know.

So it's like a bomb sitting there, you know, ticking all this time until there's a miasma, you know, that provokes everyone saying, "Okay, let's look for this.

Laius was murdered.

We have to find the murderer now."

- Yeah, so that seems like maybe, figuratively too, there's a kind of forgetting of their father and replacement kind of without any real, without any reflection about what that means and looks like for the family that is Thebes.

I wonder too about the Sphinx.

I mean, the Sphinx is such a strange creature to plague the city because her riddle is about the roles of man at different times of day but stages of life.

So the Sphinx asks, you know, what walks on four legs in the morning and two legs in the afternoon and three legs at evening, and Oedipus is able to answer this question and say that it's a man who crawls in the morning, who walks aright in the afternoon, in the prime of his life, and then who walks with a cane in his old age.

Somehow he has this knowledge of the natural progression that man is supposed to go through over a single lifetime, but nobody in the city seems to know that progression.

And I wonder what that means that somehow, that cycle is not present to them as citizens.

- Right, I mean, Thebans were originally born from the dragon's teeth sowed by Cadmus, right?

- Aha, I didn't know that.

- Right, so they came out of the ground (indistinct), you know, so it's already a city that is in some ways cut off from the generative cycle- - How fascinating.

or denies it in myth.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- Right, and then, you know, there's a way in which I wonder if the riddle of the Sphinx reflects how Laius and Jocasta also deny something through their own story of Oedipus.

So they have this prophecy that they receive that Oedipus, when he grows up, will kill his father.

So it's something like in his two-legged time of life, Oedipus will kill Laius, but they pierce his ankles as a baby.

I think he's just a few days old at this point.

But even if we were to say that he were a crawling baby who would be on all fours, there's a way in which they force him now to be not on all fours even though that is the time of life that he's occupying.

- Right, 'cause he's maimed.

- He's maim.

His legs are pierced and tied together so that he basically, he would have maybe his hands and then one other limb.

He's already maybe in the old man stage of life at that point, and they forced him into that position by misunderstanding that in his baby stage, the four-legged stage, he has somehow the power or the threat of the two-legged stage.

So somehow all those phases of the Sphinx seemed to be knotted together by that decision that Laius and Jocasta make, and that is a perversion that has to have consequences.

- And then perversion is, as you're describing it, an escape from acceptance of the natural cycle, the cycle of life and death.

- That seems right.

That they're not letting Oedipus's life play out over the course of the full day.

They're somehow trying to make him an old man and kill him on in the morning of his life because they're so afraid of the noon time phase of his life in which he'll have the power of a man.

- Yeah.

So do you think the cause of the action is anxiety?

'Cause I'm thinking it's their anxiety about being replaced and later on it's his anxiety about being illegitimate, of not wanting, and I'm thinking about the other anxieties, you know.

So at first, I was wondering if Laius's attempt to kill his son is like the archetype of the older Greek gods killing and eating their children, right, Cronus and Zeus, where the archetype is of the older generation devouring the younger generation to stop time from going on, right?

There's not gonna be anyone after me, so I'm gonna kill them all.

And this is an archetype of the father, in a way, right?

So nothing's gonna go on.

The mother, on the other hand, the different archetype is that the mother is going to stop life from going on by reabsorbing you, you know, right?

So you have the sense of the infantilizing mother.

You know, in psychology, you have the devouring mother, the mother who prevents the child, castrates the child, prevents them from becoming a full human being.

And so Jocasta and Laius might be extreme examples, kind of literal examples of those that then feed into that kind of the other archetype of the man who becomes his own father.

- Right.

- Right, that becomes, I'm my own guy, no one gave birth to me, right?

So I'm wondering if those archetypal relations are actually happening or if the action is created by anxiety about them.

- Yeah, I think, to me it feels like maybe it's more of an anxiety and then the mythical sort of setup comes to pass as a result of the anxiety that it was meant to forestall.

So, because Jocasta, it would seem to me that her initial action is not one of intentionally reabsorbing the son.

She is aligned with Laius in killing the son and in fact gives him over to be killed, to be exposed on the mountain, but it seems to be this later development, unbeknownst to herself, that she ends up in this position of being the consumptive mother.

So it seem that the kind of self-conscious motivation is not quite aligned with the ancient model but then the ancient model is a kind of result.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But her conscious intention is interesting, right?

Because here comes this guy who is old enough to be her son and who looks like her husband, right?

Wouldn't a human being ask questions, right, before sleeping with him, right?

So there's an element of repression there.

- Mm-hmm, certainly.

- Right?

I mean, part of what I'm wondering with this line of thought is that the anxiety that the play contains and that fuels its action is actually what gives it its resonance to an audience, right?

- Right.

- So it's not so much that the facts are universal, because the facts might not be realized yet, right?

But we all have anxiety about the father's gonna kill us, the mother who's gonna reabsorb us, you know, the life being prevented.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- That feels very true, yeah, and this is a way of seeing those horrors play out, kind of writ large and horrendous that you can't help but get caught up in the story because the anxieties are so vivid.

- Yeah, yeah.

Even Oedipus, I mean, what you're saying helps me because about a third of the way through, the question of who kills Laius gets focused on the question of how many murderers there were, right?

And in the early part of the play, a number of times, several people actually mentioned murderers, plural, and Oedipus then replies, "We've got to get this murderer."

- Yeah.

- Singular, right?

- The singular.

- So then they have to find the person who's the witness, who can say how many people murdered Laius, because if it was multiple, then you know that Oedipus was innocent.

(gentle inspirational music)