The Laius Syndrome, Or the Ends of Political Fatherhood Silke-Maria Weineck

The Laius Syndrome, or the Ends of Political Fatherhood Silke-Maria Weineck Cultural Critique, Number 74, Winter 2010, pp. 131-146 (Article) Published by University of Minnesota Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.0.0063 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/374647 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] THE LAIUS SYNDROME, OR THE ENDS OF POLITICAL FATHERHOOD Silke-Maria Weineck Reading Oedipus has never strayed far from the political: his story is, after all, the story of the rise and fall of a city, and even those readings that appear to disregard the polis altogether, presenting him as a Wgure of solitary desire, feed off and into theories of law, com- munity, and violence. Psychoanalysis is the best example of that. None - theless, something changed drastically when Freud turned Oedipus Tyrannus into Oedipus Teknon, when the king becomes Wrst and foremost the child, and the father turns into Wrst and foremost an object of fantasy. This essay seeks to recuperate the Wgure of tragic paternity as a foundational trope of democratic politics. To Sophocles, Oedipus was very much king and father: in the Wrst lines of the tragedy, he ad dresses the citizens as “children,” and in its last scene, Antigone and Ismene are violently wrenched away from him. And yet, while Oedipus’s king - ship has certainly been subject to debate, his paternity—symbolic and familial—has largely gone neglected. In the long history of classical reception, Oedipus has been read as either the universal subject or, after Freud, as the universal son as universal subject. And because Oedipus has exerted an identiWcatory pull matched, perhaps, only by Hamlet, post-Freudian subjectivity has become Wlial through and through. Who would want to, or dare to, speak in the name of the father these days?1 Returning once again to Oedipus and his family will illuminate a gap in the long reading of a narrative that has given prominence and urgency to classical reception like only a handful of other ancient texts. This gap opens in the elision of paternity as the political trope that gov- erns the story of Oedipus’s family. I will argue that the same history that has turned a blind eye to Oedipus the father created a shadow Cultural Critique 74—Winter 2010—Copyright 2010 Regents of the University of Minnesota 132 SILKE-MARIA WEINECK space of paternity that was Wlled by the Wgure of Laius as an unreal- ized presence. Sophocles introduces him through Creon: “Laius, my lord, was the leader of our land before you assumed control of this state.” Oedipus responds emphatically that he knows it well (exoida), and adds, in the well-known ironical twist, “by hearsay, for I never saw him” (ll. 104–5). Ever since Sophocles banned him from the stage, Laius has re - mained the one we know by hearsay, the one we never see. He exerts his power through the speech of others, always evoked, never pre- sent—unlike Hamlet’s father, he never stakes his claims himself. Soph - oclean Laius, then, easily lends himself to Lacanian readings as the quintessential absent father, powerful not despite but because of his death, and it is no accident that Lacanian paternity can only be artic- ulated on the basis of Oedipal Wliality. But while modernity has had little time for Laius, he must have been a prominent Wgure in antiquity. He left relatively few traces in the extant literature, but we know of quite a few lost texts that engaged him: Aeschylus’s tragedy Laius, Euripides’ Chrysippus (a play that probably staged Laius’s rape or abduction of his host Pelops’s favorite son), the epic poems Oidipea and Thebais, to name a few. We have a suggestive but inconclusive remark in Plato’s Laws; some fragments from the Theban tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides;2 and brief accounts such as the following lines in Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Library, a mythography from the early Christian era: He [Laius] resided in Peloponnese, being hospitably received by Pelops; and while he taught Chrysippus, the son of Pelops, to drive a chariot, he conceived a passion for the lad and carried him off. (Apollodorus, 3.5.5) Sir Richard Jebb, in his late-nineteenth-century commentaries on Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus, several times refers to “the curse called down on Laius by Pelops, for robbing him of his son Chrysippus” (Sophocles). The entry for “Chrysippus” in a German standard refer- ence work, Der kleine Pauly, refers to “the legend of the abduction of the beautiful Chrysippus” and informs us that “since the Thebans didn’t punish the transgression, Hera sends them the sphinx and has Laius and his house destroyed through Oedipus’s fate” (1:1169). The corre- sponding entry for Laius, oddly enough written by the same scholar, tells us that Pelops “cursed his son’s abductor to remain childless or THE LAIUS SYNDROME 133 to die by his son’s hand” (3:454). Both entries mention other myths according to which Chrysippus was killed by his half-brothers Atreus and Thyestes at the instigation of his mother, Hippodamia, who hated him, and the Laius entry notes that “the curse . probably did not originally belong to the Theban legends” (3:454).3 Laius, then, could have been treated along heterogeneous lines, and the very paucity of sources would have put little restraint on the collective imagination. And yet, during modernity, there is hardly anything at all, and certainly nothing remotely comparable to the in - tense engagement with Oedipus. Surely, during the hundreds of years we have spent thinking about Sophocles’ Oedipus, the act of patri- cide—one of modernity’s foremost political tropes—has never been far from anybody’s mind, whether the readings that have emerged from this history center on the sphinx or on incest, on knowledge, desire, fate, or the polis. Its victim, however, barely appears. For the most part, he is simply the (“the”) father and dead by his son’s hand, invisible and beyond both analysis and blame—yes, he exposed a new - born infant to what must have seemed certain death, but that story is related without condemnation in a play notably bursting with anger, regret, and reproach. Always already off stage, it appeared as if he did not need to be imagined, as if “hearsay” could tell us all we needed to know. As one of the purest literary instances of a powerful presence in absence, to most of Oedipus’s readers, the Wgure of Laius needed neither image nor description. When he Wnally does reappear, however, it is as the dark father of a child’s worst nightmare. Hugo von Hofmannsthal brings him to life in 1906, in Oedipus and the Sphinx, and Laius enters the stage as a nasty old man. Oedipus has just killed the king’s herald in self-defense, and Laius, furious at the death of his old servant, will not accept Oedi- pus’s humble offer to make amends, but instead threatens to torture and kill him. Oedipus asks, aghast, “With what murderer’s hands do you reach into the world? Who are you?” Laius replies: An old man who had to see an old man die like a dog under your hands. But you shall pay! I will send you down, draped in torments and amongst the dead he will encounter you and will feast on the sight and will bless me for it. (56, my trans.) 134 SILKE-MARIA WEINECK Much can be said about this passage and the play as a whole, but for my purposes here it is enough to note that Hofmannsthal’s Laius is the voice of the old men, all the old men. Still alive, he already speaks for the dead, in the voice of a murderous antagonism too virulent to die with them—it is the voice of the father as dreamed in the dark by the Freudian son. Here is how Hofmannsthal has Oedipus see him: Your voice is hatred and torment. You never had a child, You are of the infertile ones, Your sad wife, dust in her hair, Has lain before the gods night and day— Let me pass, let me go! (56–57) Hofmannsthal’s vision of Laius is both extraordinary and representa- tive of modern fatherhood: extraordinary because he imagines him at all, gives him the voice he has lacked for so long, even if it is little more than a snarl; thoroughly modern because Laius, even if Oedipus with somewhat heavy-handed irony accuses him of infertility, appears through the encounter with the Oedipal son. He is little more than a pure obstacle on the road to selfhood, and a singularly unappealing one at that. Pier Paolo Pasolini, too, shows us a deeply disturbing Laius, even though he is now a young man, recently married, and wearing the uniform of the fascists. Stealing into the room where his son is lying in his crib, Laius stares at the infant, his face a mask of petulant rage. On the screen, his thoughts Xash in writing: “You are here again to take my place and rob me of all I have. [looking to Jocasta] She, the woman I love, already you steal her love” (Oedipus Rex 1967).4 Later, we see him viciously squeezing the infant’s feet, soon to be bound tightly by ropes, as if not even Pasolini had the nerve to show an actual piercing. Such Wctional treatments join seamlessly with scholarly ones.

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