Oedipus Old and New

Oedipus was the ideal hero for classical Athens, a solver of riddles intent on discovering secrets. And the Sphinx was the perfect monstrous adversary. It’s no surprise that the story became one of the most famous myths of the ancient and modern worlds.

In her recent brief monograph, Oedipus and the Sphinx, Almut-Barbara Renger argues that the Sphinx is multiply liminal: “No other figure could bring the many thresholds (occidental/oriental, Egyptian/Greek, human/animal, masculine/feminine) to be so impressively and so multifariously” (44). In Sophocles, the riddle of the Sphinx becomes the riddle of the hero himself, as he stands “face-to-face with the Other who is his double,” a warning tale about the danger of rational humans falling into dimorphic bestiality. To reach self-realization, to realize himself as human, Oedipus must pass this monster of the threshold.

Everyone knows of Freud’s appropriation of the legend. Jean Cocteau’s version, in his play La Machine Infernal, is less famous. Renger explains that Cocteau set himself in direct opposition to Freud. While Freud wanted to bring light into the darkness, Cocteau aimed “to bring night into day,” to create woks that “belong to the night in plain day” (65). In contrast to Freud’s scientific aspiration to bring everything to light, Cocteau wanted to play along the edges between the conscious and unconscious.

Cocteau also criticized Freud for marginalizing and trivializing religion (66), and this became a prominent theme of his retelling of Oedipus. The play is full of “transits between the visible and invisible, inner and outer worlds” (75), and the characters fall into disaster not because of inevitable fate but because of their insensitivity to the world beyond their senses. In Cocteau, Odeipus becomes “a petty and self-centered figure bent on power and glory” (77), finally a pitiable child. 

If Sophocles’ play stood as a warning against hubris, Cocteau’s play, which was “avec Sophocle contre Freud,” was a parable for modern secularists blind to unseen beauties and deaf to silent melodies.