Oedipus and Tiresias

OEDIPUS AND TIRESIAS From the curious ambivalence which is characteristic of his special brand of enlightened 'neo-classicism', Voltaire, when he was a prisoner in the Bastille, wrote his (Edipe with the explicit intention to do a better job than Sophocles - whom he both honoured as a great poet and treated with unmistakable disdain, as a representative of a less enligh tened civilization whom he could hope to surpass - exposing in the process the bad taste of the theorists of classicism, who followed Aris totle in seeing in Sophocles' Oedipus 1yrannus the tragedy par exceUence. When, five years later, (Edipe appeared in print, he added, by way of introduction, a number of letters in which he criticized both Sopho cles and himself. He felt that the principal mistake of his own play was the choice of its subject, which apparently offered too little material for a complete tragedy. "Regulierement la piece d'CEdipe devrait finir au premier acte. II n'est pas naturel qu'CEdipe ignore comment son predecesseur est mort." Voltaire himself had found a way out by attributing Oedipus' not having investigated the matter at the time to his consideration for Iocaste's grief. He tried to expand the possibilities of his sujet by intro ducing Philoctete, a former lover of Iocaste, who could be suspected of having killed Laius - an intervention he later regretted. His criti cism of Sophocles' play focuses on the observation that Sophocles, in order to give his play the desired length, had to accept a number of improbabilities: both Oedipus and Iocaste had to be considerably less intelligent than can be made palatable to an enlightened audience. "Tant d'ignorance clans CEdipe et clans Iocaste n'est qu'un artifice grossier du poete, qui, pour donner a sa piece une juste etendue, fait filer jusqu'au cinquieme acte une reconnaissance deja manifeste au se cond, et qui viole les regles du sens commun, pour ne point manquer en apparence a celles du theatre." So, according to Voltaire, there are several points in Sophocles' play where the tragedy should and could have ended. One of these is the Tiresias scene. When Oedipus has summoned Tiresias 0/oltaire thought it absurd that the only eyewitness, mentioned by Creon in verse u8, was not called forth immediately), in verse 449 ff., the seer tells him exactly what the situation is. In Voltaire's summary: "C'est vous qui etes le meurtrier de Laius. Vous vous croyez fils de Polybe, OEDIPUS AND TIRESIAS roi de Corinthe, vous ne l'etes point; vous etes Thebain. La male diction de votre pere et de votre mere vous a autrefois eloigne de cette Thebe; vous y etes revenu, vous avez tue votre pere, vous avez epouse votre mere." "Tout cela", says Voltaire, "ne ressemble guere a l'am biguite des oracles: il etait difficile de s'expliquer moins obscurement; et si vous joignez aux paroles de Tiresie le reproche qu'un ivrogne a fait autrefois a <Edipe, qu'il n'etait pas fils de Polybe, et l'oracle d'Apollon qui lui predit qu'il tuerait son pere et qu'il epouserait sa mere, vous trouverez que la piece est entierement finie au commen cement de ce second acte." As with most of Voltaire's criticism of Sophocles, his objections to the Tiresias scene were prompted by his predominant need for "vraisemblance" and his ingrained aversion to "absurdite". What dis turbs him is that any spectator who is prepared to use his common sense, would, at several points in the play, be able to draw conclusions that are not drawn by the characters themselves. Therefore, both the plot and the characters failed to convince the philosophe, who felt that not using one's common sense is perfectly unnatural. For Voltaire, the explanation of Sophocles' failure is to be found in the fact that dramatic art in its initial stages simply was unable to achieve the perfection of a Corneille or a Racine. Even Euripides falls short of his standards, though he would have welcomed him as a col league: Euripides would have been, he says, "le plus grand des poetes s'il etait ne clans un temps plus eclaire." It would be simplistic to reject this critical attitude towards Sophocles by referring to the excessive self-confidence of the period of 'Les Lumieres', which discovered Pro gress, and paid the price of grossly overrating the possibilities of reason in general, and of one's own reason in particular. What does appear striking is that, in the documents that relate to his <Edipe, Voltaire seems totally unaware that there is more to writing a tragedy than just devising a plot which meets contemporary standards of uraisemb/,a,nce and offers room for the expression of elevating feelings and a number of elegantly versified lumina ingenii the audience will remember. It is the more surprising that 19th and 20th-century scholarship, despite its growing awareness of the characteristics of Greek tragedy, seems to have found no adequate response to Voltaire's criticism of the Tiresias scene. T. von Wilamowitz - whose seminal study of So phocles' "dramatische Technik" made many German scholars rethink their interpretation of the plays - started the discussion. He resembles Voltaire in finding it "ganz unbegreiflich, da8 Oedipus von allem was .

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