8 The Lesson of the Hand (2)

Colonus is said to have been Sophocles' birthplace, so that in Oedipus at Colonus, written when he was past eighty, the playwright is, among other things, celebrating the place where he was born. But at the same time he is celebrating the place which had been the central focus of his life, the Dionysian stage. Like Chaplin in City Lights he chose a blind protagonist, but he did so not to provide laughter or to jerk the tears of his audience, but to lead them to an exploration of the relations between those who watch a spectacle and the hero of that spectacle, between clinging and letting go, between the human body and the space it inhabits.

The aged Oedipus, who had blinded himself on learning that he had killed his father and begotten children on his own mother, has been cast out of Thebes and has arrived here, where we first see him, led by his devoted daughters, Antigone and Ismene. His first words put the theme of place squarely before us:

Tell me, Antigone – where have you come to now

With your blind old father? What is this place, my child?

She answers him not with a name but with a description:

   Here, where we are,

There is a kind of sacred precinct …

There is a seat of natural rock. Sit down and rest.

We must bear in mind that the Athenian stage is a clearly defined circular space, bare of props, fully visible to every member of the audience. As they wait for the play to begin, seated in the rising circular tiers, it is only a potential space, to be transformed into whatever the playwright wishes simply by virtue of his words playing on their imaginations. This play thus begins traditionally enough by setting the scene. What is startling is what Oedipus' blindness is already doing to the tradition. It is he, not just the audience, who is being informed about the locus of the play, and we are going to watch him, as he moves slowly round it, trying to relate what he feels with his outstretched hand to what he is told. In this way the audience, too, is made to experience the circular space it knows so well in quite a new way.

A man appears, a local countryman. He is horrified by what he sees: ‘Sir, before you ask me any question, come from that seat. That place is holy ground.’ Oedipus insists that this is where he was meant to come, and asks again: ‘What is this place?’ The countryman explains that it is Colonus, and, after repeating that it is sacred, adds:

It is not such a place as is famed in song and story,

But its name is great in the hearts of those that live here.

Like Colonus, the space where these plays were performed in Athens at the Festival of the Greater Dionysia was a kind of sacred space. No one knows exactly how it was viewed by the citizens of Athens. It was clearly not a place, like a temple, where rituals were enacted; but neither was it the completely desacralised space of our modern theatres. The theatre stood within the sanctuary of the god Dionysus, at the foot of the Acropolis, and the front row of seats consisted of marble chairs reserved for magistrates and priests, the central chair being that of the priest of Dionysus. The theatre was used not only for dramatic spectacles but for ceremonies of all kinds and even for meetings of the Assembly. Thus the plays performed there must have had a sacred and ritualistic quality which even the best modern productions cannot hope to emulate. Sophocles has thus elided two spaces, neither of which is ‘famous in legend’, as was the site of Apollo's shrine in Delphi, say, or even that of the Battle of Marathon, but both of which live in the hearts of those familiar with them: his native Colonus and the space in which the play is being enacted. Both are, ‘here, where we are …’.

Oedipus knows this is where the gods have meant him to come for his final act, though neither he nor the audience yet know what form this will take. Now he begins to feel out by touch that space which the audience has so often looked at and with which it must think that it is thoroughly familiar. The effect of this, as with the climactic scene in the Chaplin film, is to make us experience it for the first time and to make us feel with our bodies the mystery of theatrical representation, where a space is always two things at once (except in Waiting for Godot perhaps):

OEDIPUS Give me your hand.
ANTIGONE Here, father …
OEDIPUS Further yet?
CHORUS Further.
OEDIPUS Again?
CHORUS Lady, lead him; you understand us.
ANTIGONE Feel your dark way as I lead you, father …
CHORUS Stay now: you need not come beyond that slab or rock.
OEDIPUS Here?
CHORUS It is far enough.
OEDIPUS I may sit?
CHORUS To your left, there's a jutting ledge, low down.
ANTIGONE I'll show you, father. Carefully now –
OEDIPUS O dear!
ANTIGONE One step at a time. Lean on my arm.

It is a slow and painful progress, but for the audience a strangely releasing one. In an almost ritualistic fashion Oedipus touches the different parts of the stage. And it is not just any man who is doing this, but a man whose terrible destiny has led to his becoming polluted and therefore a sacred presence. We must also, of course, think of the aged Sophocles ritually touching every corner of the stage which has been his life as he prepares to take his leave of it.

But the play has only just begun. Oedipus, we will discover, is merely passing through this space (and we must remember that these plays had no such thing as a ‘run’). He is, as it were, merely leaving a trace of his presence here before moving on. But ‘on’ is precisely where we cannot follow him, for it is not a place and not exactly a state. It is ‘where he will go when he has left this place’, and what that might mean the play will in due course try to convey to us.

Before that we witness a battle of wills as first Creon and then Oedipus' son Polynices try to persuade and then, when that does not work, to force Oedipus to return to Thebes with them, for an oracle has said that the side in the fratricidal civil war now raging there which holds the sacred body of Oedipus will be victorious. But Oedipus stands firm, and he is protected by Theseus, who rules over Colonus and Athens, and who ensures that Oedipus will do what he wishes and what the gods have told him, that is to wait here in Colonus for their call.

And now, with Creon and Polynices despatched, the call comes at last. Now it is time even for Antigone and Ismene to let go of their father:

The hand of the God directs me.

Follow, my children.

It is my turn now to be your pathfinder,

As you have been to me. Come. Do not touch me.

Leave me to find the way to the sacred grove

Where this land's soil is to enclose my bones.

This way … This way … Hermes is leading me,

And the Queen of the Nether world. This way … This way …

Dark day! How long since thou wast light to me!

Now ends my life for ever …

And so he leaves our sight, followed by his new-found protector, Theseus, to whom he had earlier said:

No, no: I am a man of misery,

Corrupt with every foulness that exists!

I cannot let you touch me. No, you shall not!

No one but those on whom it lies already

Can bear this heavy load with me. Stay then

And take my thanks, so. And be kind to me

Henceforth, as you are now.

Sophocles has reserved his greatest coup for the last. As always with this profoundly conservative and deeply innovative writer, what he does is simply to take a basic convention of the Athenian stage to unexpected lengths. Just as we were made to experience the sacred space of Colonus and of the tragic theatre through Oedipus' groping and polluted hand, so now we are made to experience that which this space is ultimately designed to celebrate, the meeting of man and god, not through something we see, not even through the kind of rich Shakespearean evocation of that which we do not see, like Edgar's ‘description’ of the cliffs of Dover for us and his blind father, but through a triple denial of the act of seeing.

In most Greek tragedies the audience does not witness the death of the hero but listens as a messenger arrives and tells how that death has occurred, a death which he himself has witnessed. In this play the messenger returns, but only to tell us that what he saw was not a man dying but a man shielding his eyes from the sight of another man passing away. ‘People of Colonus!’ the messenger begins, ‘I am here to say that the life of Oedipus is ended. And there is much to tell of all that I saw happen.’ And what he saw was this:

When we had gone a little distance, we turned round and looked back. Oedipus was nowhere to be seen; but the King was standing alone holding his hand before his eyes as if he had seen some terrible sight that no one could bear to look upon; and soon we saw him salute heaven and earth with one short prayer.

And in what manner Oedipus passed from this earth, no one can tell. Only Theseus knows. We know he was not destroyed by a thunderbolt from heaven nor tide-wave rising from the sea, for no such thing occurred. Maybe a guiding spirit from the gods took him, or the earth's foundations opened and received him with no pain. Certain it is that he was taken without a pang, without grief or agony – a passing more wonderful than that of any other man.

It has become commonplace in modern productions of these plays, to have the messenger mime the terrible events he is reporting, as though no director could bear to let an actor merely speak to the audience for more than a few seconds without the need for some kind of action on stage ‘to hold the audience's attention’. Sophocles blocks off this possibility straightaway, for what the messenger sees and reports is not some frightful or even wonderful event but something so simple that most dramatists would instantly dismiss the possibility of making it the central feature of the climactic scene of a play: a man holding his hand up before his eyes. Of course the messenger too feels the need to embroider, to try to enter the mystery, and he adds that Theseus held up his hand over his eyes ‘as if he had seen some terrible sight that no one could bear to look upon’. But this only reinforces the audience's sense that at some point, and rather sooner than later, interpretation has to stop. All we have, after all, is a man standing before us and telling us about another man standing some way away from him, shielding his eyes with his hand, as though to protect himself from something ‘not endurable to see [oud anaschetou blepein]’.

And yet that event, triply removed from us as it is, is far more moving than any death on stage could ever be. For such a death is always riddled with falsity. That is why when we are presented with a death on stage we tend, while watching, to think about the quality of the acting or the subtlety of the lighting, about anything in fact but what is purportedly taking place before our eyes. This is not because it is too painful but because something in us revolts at the falsity of what we are being asked to witness. Falsity partly because death is so clearly not taking place, since death is unique and irreversible and we know that this one will take place again and again in the same way at the same time on the following night; but also because, even if it were actually taking place, we, who can only sit in our seats and watch, recognise that we could not be adequate to it, that we are not really there.

A massacre is an event; death is not. That is why we are not embarrassed – though we will be horrified – at watching news-reel of a massacre, but feel deeply uneasy about watching the last moments of an individual being filmed. Suicide, on the other hand, is an event, and therefore inherently dramatic, as Shakespeare sensed when he wrote Othello's great last speech. Death, ordinary death, however, cannot be dramatised, only told, as the Bible tells it: ‘Then Jacob died, being old and full of years, and he was buried …’.

The way Oedipus at Colonus lets go of its protagonist, on the other hand, moves us with a liberating force. We, who have seen the blind Oedipus groping his way about the stage before us, and who, because of his blindness, have found ourselves inhabiting his body as we never do that of Agamemnon or Oedipus himself when still king, now find ourselves parting from him, and so from ourselves, in a way that is both natural and ungraspable. But the point is that we are not being asked to grasp it. Sophocles has found a way of allowing us to give our assent to that which must be because he has protected Oedipus at the end not only from the rapacity of our gaze but also from the workings of our imaginations. The terrible necessity of loss is made bearable, but neither tamed nor falsified, because Sophocles has succeeded in writing a play in which, to adapt a famous remark about Waiting for Godot, we are made to recognise how, for each of us, as for Oedipus, everything happens just once.