THE THIN KING trespass of the Oedipal
m. evans
Oedipus: Stranger:
What is the site, to what God dedicate? inviolable, untrod; Goddesses, dread brood of earth and darkness, here abide. ...The Gracious Ones.
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, translated by F. Storr.
The story of Oedipus, a tragic trilogy in form similar to that of the Promethean trilogy, is a powerful story that has delighted the minds of many great theorists. Freud, an exemplar of this, has contributed a vast psychoanalytical interpretation of the story to strip psychoses bare of their disguising masks. The Oedipal Complex, where a male child is rival to his father in relation to his mother, is most thoroughly played out in the Sophoclean drama albeit with a necessary blindness, or repression to use Freud’s term, where the protagonist, Oedipus, is unable to recognise himself in his predestined foretold fate. However his fate lays beyond Freud’s vision, in the event of subjectivisation Oedipus becomes that which was before his destiny. Oedipus flees the oracular vision of his destiny given him by the Oracle of Delphi in an attempt to flee his future, an inevitable future, ironically to which his fleeing takes him. He runs from the light of the foretold future, casting a shadow before him as he does so, which slowly extinguishes in the blissful ignorance of creating a new life in a new city. However, as a sickness descends upon his new kingdom, the remedy of which being the true identity of Oedipus, his ignorant wandering finds him facing the sunset of his being. He has finally and unwittingly circumvented the life of Oedipus he never desired to be, through fleeing from the light of the future, he runs headlong into it, backwards into the now.
The condensation of Oedipus’ future into the now comes at the end of the second drama; the moment where Oedipus gouges out his eyes. It would be too simplistic to accept that the act is the result of an encounter directly with truth unveiled. Upon recognising that he had fulfilled the prophesy of killing his father and marrying his mother, for which he fled his childhood home, his very blindness was blinding. Oedipus’ life had been lived blindly; every attempt to enlighten him repressed, and only upon the fulfilment of the presage would this repression reveal itself. “So alien to our consciousness are the things by which our unconscious mental life is governed.”1 Or, as Nietzsche would put it: “He was life with blind eyes; then he became death with waking eyes.”2 What Oedipus seeks to save in his beloved city is exactly that which he has a conflict in determining. In his flee from the oracle he attempts, at every turn, to interpret from the world a vision of himself that is both meaningful and antithetical to the prophesy. A vision that concretes himself as his own Oedipus, not the Oedipus of the repulsive oracle, but a vision of himself authored by himself. The tragic force of this blinding scene is the realisation that Oedipus self-authored his life in congruence with the oracle, that he had misinterpreted himself and his life until that point, and that it was necessary to do so. In this reading of the myth Oedipus recognises his responsibility in determining and becoming the Oedipus he was destined to be. 1. Freud, ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’ in Freud: Art and Literature Volume 14, Penguin Freud Library, Penguin Books, London, 1990. pg. 449. 2. Nietzsche, as found in Alenka Zupancic’s, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003. pg. 109.
Though he blinds himself as an act of punishment the very blinding figures as a demonstration of the complicity between himself and the oracle. Consistent in Greek drama was the personification of foresight as the blind; Triestas, the blind prophet who reveals to Oedipus the origin of his birth, is consistent with this. Oedipus’s self-blinding figures as a mark of foresight, the ability to see clearly into the future, as a comportment of the oracle unto himself, where the two become one. The opening scene of Oedipus at Colonus presents Oedipus finally finding a resting place after wandering a long time due to his self-banishment from Thebes.1 He and his daughter are met by a farmer who alerts them to their trespass on a sacred site, the site governed by the Three Graces. The Three Graces are the Three Fates – one that weaves the thread of life, one that measures the thread, and one that cuts the thread. Together they determine the lives of men, the life of Oedipus. His trespass and refusal to move from their land is a significant gesture signifying his return to origins, his return to the site of the oracular seed from which he was born. 1. Please refer to Shadows Cast by a Thin King.
The poetic return is a metalepsis, “a trope reversing trope” that brings “forth the possibility of extending both space and time.”1 Sophocles uses the trope defensively to elongate the life of Oedipus as a character who can develop no further. Oedipus becomes the “still centre of a moving world” (T. S. Eliot) where his tragic story is further played out through his lineage, his children. Oedipus is left alive solely to foretell and see echoed in reality the tragic fulfilment of his prophetic vision of his children. He assumes the very same figure of the oracle that foretold his future, the figure that he cursed and fled from only to fulfil. He is resigned here to the burden of his foresight, similar to the imprisoned Prometheus upon Mount Caucus, and awaits both its fulfilment and his death.
Whereas Freud considers the act of self-blinding as revealing the horror an adult experiences when facing with revulsion his own repressions2, I believe the blinding is a willingness to see, a mark of blinding blindness so as to comport oneself to the ‘unhidden’. The strength with which he issues his self-punishment is the same strength he invokes to face himself as himself, the event of his subjectivisation, the finding and being Oedipus. The use of a pin that holds together the clothing that veils his dead mother/wife’s body is the weapon he employs to abandon his eyes. The pin figures at the innocent thing that holds in place the veils of appearance, its use as the instrument that undoes those veils a poetic reversal, a hyperbole, which foreshadows the metalepsis of the trespass 1. Harold Bloom, ‘The Map of Misprison’ in A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York 2003. p 102. 2. Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams Volume 4, Penguin Freud Library, Penguin Books, London, 1991. pg. 366.
Oedipus’ liberation from blindness, his subsequent hermetic wandering, and his final resting at the site of his conception constitute a theory of the ‘return of the dead’. Oedipus embodies the same oracular knowledge that had bestowed its warning to him of who he was and from which he ran. He has travelled full circle to bestow his knowledge of the tragic future that awaits his children. He is a child of the oracle, just as his children are kin of his. Where Freud’s analysis ends, I want to continue with an analysis which sublimates his figure of the oracular vision as the repressed desires of id into the heightened figure of the ‘eternal return’. Oedipus trespasses on the ground of fate as a returning son, an ephebe of his precursors, and becomes the precursor to his sons, and daughter, after him. In poetic work metalepsis is related to the psychic defences introjection, “the incorporation of an object or instinct so as to overcome it, and projection, the outward attribution of prohibited instincts or objects to an other.” “Metalepsis tends to be either a projection and distancing of the future and so an introjection of the past, by substituting late words for early words in previous tropes, or else more often a distancing and projection of the past and an introjection of the future, by substituting early words for late words in a precursor’s tropes. Either way the present vanishes and the dead return, by a reversal, to be triumphed over by the living.”1 The metalepsis in the Oedipal trilogy substitutes blind Oedipus for the visionary oracle, the early for the late, upon the very site of fate, the three Graces.
1. Harold Bloom, ‘The Belatedness of Strong Poetry’ in A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York 2003. p 74.
This model, composed of cubic white plaster blocks is a poetic composition invoking the imaginative projection of forms that could be, caught inside the blocks, whilst also invoking an image of ruins echoed from ancient decaying sacred sites. Plaster, as a material, is both a modern and a classic material, especially the lime-based plaster used here for it light reflective qualities and aged watermarks. Lime-based plaster ‘blooms’ over time with exposure to moisture and temperature changes whilst maintaining its structural integrity. In this work I assume the role of the modernist ephebe, playing with modernity’s supreme white blocks ‘blooming’ as I form, in advance, a projection of my final work.
Perceiving, etymologically associated to the gathering or grasping of something, is, via the German term Erblickens, a looking back and through what is first formed through the looking, “i.e. forming in advance, modelling. This pre-modelling perceiving of being, of essence, is already bound to what is projected in such a projection.”1. Although there is a dimension of play within the work, for which I appeal to Derrida and his revelation that the limits and terms of play reveal a structure and its “contradictorily coherent” “center [which] is not the center”2 the ‘pre-modelling’ of this work opens itself to analysis with the innocence of a dream. As with Freud’s bounty in the interpreting and analysis of dreams to reveal the psychoses at their source, this work marks an impression of the projected final work and is bound, by way of disguising the kernel of its conception, to the final idea, the conceit of light, that is object of this body of work, and its source. 1. Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, Continuum Books, New York, 2002. pg. 52 2. Jacques Derrida, ‘Sign, Structure and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ in Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980. pg. 279
By way of this process I place myself, as a designer, in the figurative position of the early Oedipus, blindly authoring a preconception toward the final work. However, in possession of my analysis of the tragic trilogy, I take this role for its reversing metaleptic power, and thereby with a kind of lighted security in blindness. It may be interpreted as a kind of research-throughdesign, and this may be so in terms relating to its initial function and subsequent revision, however I mean to retain the veils of disguise that shroud this piece so as to be able to recognise them in the repetition of the process. Design, like truth, may be secured not necessarily through development but perhaps analysis. In design, a number of precedents make available an analysis that interprets a persistent idea, however disguised or muted, like the analysis of a dream. For this a certain amount of time, consideration and revision is necessary to unlock the secrets that stare blindly back from the work. This work marks a turn that leads directly to the final design, much like the plague upon Thebes lead to directly to Oedipus’ true identity and, in sympathy with his struggle for truth, the works Of Wax and Feathers and Material Ignis may be considered struggles-throughpre-modelling. A struggle, that in advance, knows it cannot know, not yet.
Something might be true, even if it were also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existence that to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction. The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, [shaded], falsified. 1 1. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Penguin Books, London, pg. 37.