5
The Place of Death: ‘Oedipus at Colonus’

AS IS well known, Sophocles’ Theban Plays were composed neither as a trilogy nor in narrative sequence: Antigone was written first, probably around 442–441 B.C.; Oedipus Tyrannos some twenty years later; and Oedipus at Colonus shortly before Sophocles’ death in 406. Yet despite the divergence of biographical chronology from mythical-narrative coherence, the relations between the three plays are more significant than the epithet Theban might suggest. Although there is no unity of time and place in the composition of the three plays, the place-name of the city, Thebes, stands for a commonality of concerns that is more than just thematic. At the same time, there is a finality to the last-written play that belies or, rather, complicates its intermediary position in the chronological progression of the story of the decline and fall of the house of the Labdacus, founders of Thebes.

Oedipus has come to Colonus—Sophocles’ birthplace—to die. And yet, before dying, he will present his death as a “gift” (1. 577) to his hosts. How does death come to be a gift? Here, at least, by being staged in a very singular manner, namely, as a secret. Only Theseus, ruler of Athens (which includes Colonus, its “brazen threshold,” l. 57), who has welcomed and protected Oedipus, is to “know” the secret, but in a way that will enable it to survive and protect its guardian, Athens, from the perils of time and the destruction of war. By keeping the secret—keeping it secret—and by transmitting it to his “chosen heir,” Theseus will enable Athens to thrive.

Oedipus comes to Colonus, then, not just to die there but to bestow upon the city the gift of his death. In order for this death to be a gift, however—which is to say, to have the power of being transmitted through its effects—it must be kept secret. Not the fact that it has taken place, but rather the particular place it takes. This place must remain unseen, invisible, unknown to all save one: Theseus alone, as King of Athens and Colonus, is permitted by Oedipus to witness his passing, and thus his final resting place. Only so, Oedipus claims, can the gift of his death protect Athens, not just against the ravages of time, but specifically against the “Dragon’s brood”—which is to say, those who, like Oedipus himself, are said to have sprung from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus, founder of Thebes.

This secret brings with it a no less enigmatic question: How or why should the secret of Oedipus’ final resting-place—which is to say, the place of his death—have the power to protect a city, Athens, better than any military or political alliance ever could? What, in other words, allows Oedipus to make the following promise:

O son of Aegeus, I will unfold that which shall be a treasure for this thy city, such as age can never mar. Anon, unaided, and with no hand to guide me, I will show the way to the place [khron] where I must die. But that place reveal thou never unto mortal man—tell not where it is hidden, nor in what region it lies; that so it may ever make for thee a defence, better than many shields, better than the succouring spear of neighbors.

But, for mysteries which speech may not profane, thou shalt mark them for thyself, when thou comest to that place alone; since neither to any of this people can I utter them, nor to mine own children, dear though they are. No, guard them thou alone; and when thou art coming to the end of life, disclose them to thy heir alone; let him teach his heir; and so henceforth.

And thus shalt thou hold this city unscathed from the side of the Dragon’s brood. (II. 1518–32)1

What is it about keeping the place of his death secret that can lead Oedipus to make such claims? What is it about this secret that can continue to exercise a power of fascination when the particular historical circumstances, which may or may not have motivated Sophocles to write these lines, have long since lost their relevance? If there is an affirmative answer to this question—one which can be articulated without “profaning” the “dread mysteries”—must it not be sought in the relation between death and place, between the secret and the polis, between sight and sound, stage and spectacle? Between a certain theatricality and its ability to touch? These are some of the suspicions and questions that will be addressed in the following pages.

But in what way? What is involved in “addressing” a question and, in particular, the kinds of questions just described? Is “addressing” a question the same as “answering” it? Are the questions raised by the secret of Oedipus’ death, by the way in which that secret is staged, questions that can be answered the way Oedipus himself solved the riddle of the Sphinx and thereby became the tyrannos as which we first encounter him? Or do Sophocles’ Theban plays in general, and Oedipus Tyrannos in particular, show that “answering” a question is only one way of responding to it? Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx, but his response only prepares the way for other questions, questions that cannot be answered by a simple name because they do not entail a simple object. This is what Oedipus has to learn the hard way, beginning with his meeting with Tiresias: he must learn that what he is asking about involves, not a determinate object “out there,” but rather his own over-determined position, which is never simply reducible to a sum of identifiable events. In this sense “myth” is at work in these plays, but in a manner fundamentally different from the meaning of the word as used by Aristotle in his Poetics. In Sophocles’ Theban plays, by contrast, “myth” designates a network of reference that has no simple beginning or end, and that therefore cannot be taken in at a single view or a single sitting. A certain number of “facts” are of course revealed in the course of Oedipus Tyrannos, but they never add up to a single, self-contained, meaningful story. Precisely the “end” of Oedipus—his death—is left ambiguous by its “mythical” transmission (and “myth” here is as much a question of “transmission” as it is of “narrative,” in the sense of the telling of a finished story). Certain variants have Oedipus dying in Thebes, others in exile.2 Significantly, although Oedipus at Colonus clearly inscribes itself in the latter tradition, it repeatedly has Oedipus commenting upon his status as an exile, first in his confrontation with Creon:

In the old days—when, distempered by my self-wrought woes, I yearned to be cast out of the land—thy will went not with mine to grant the boon. But when my fierce grief had spent its force, and the seclusion of the house was sweet, then wast thou for thrusting me from the house and from the land—nor had this kinship any dearness for thee then. (II. 765–71)

And later, in the even more bitter meeting with his son Polyneices:

villain, who when thou hadst the scepter and the throne which now thy brother hat in Thebes, dravest me, thine own father,into exile, and madest me citiless, and madest me to wear this garb which now thou weepest to behold, when thou hast come unto the same stress of misery as I. The time for tears is past: no, I must bear this burden while I live ever thinking of thee as of a murderer. (II. 1355–62)

Contrary to what one might expect, the rewriting and redefining of the ambiguous mythic tradition here, far from imposing a timeless scheme, introduces the significance of temporality, albeit in a different sense from that presupposed by Oedipus in his solving of the riddle of the Sphinx. This riddle, as it is generally reported, can be “solved” only by comprehending the multiplicity and alterations imposed by time as properties of a single, self-contained, nameable subject: “man.” The sense of time, however, that is deployed in Oedipus Tyrannos and that is explicitly addressed in Oedipus at Colonus cannot be “contained” or “comprehended” by a single name, concept, or story: hence the need, not just for a “secret,” but for a “keeping-secret.” Only the “keeping” of the secret confronts the challenge of “time” as it is staged in this play, which is to say, as a medium of change exceeding all comprehension and containment.

Thus in the passages quoted Oedipus justifies his fury against Creon and Polyneices by referring, not to some eternal, timeless transgression, but rather to something far more practical and temporal. When I needed exile, Oedipus bitterly tells his son and brother-in-law, it was denied me; when I needed repose, I was banished. This tends to de-heroicize Oedipus by demonstrating his subjection to a medium—time—that can never be appropriated by a subject as the element of its self-realization.

Yet such efforts at appropriation are never entirely abandoned, either. What ensues is a tension that surfaces in an exchange between Oedipus and Ismene, who has come to bring him the latest news from Thebes:

Oedipus. What are they? [the oracles] What hath been prophesied, my child?

Ismene. That thou shalt yet be desired, alive and dead, by the men of that land, for their welfare’s sake.

Oedipus. And who could have good of such an one as I?

Ismene. Their power [krat], ’tis said, comes to be in thy hand.

Oedipus. When I am naught, in that hour, then, I am a man [anr]? (II. 388–93)

Oedipus’ ironic conclusion about what it takes to become “man” recalls his response to the Sphinx. Anr is not simply the same as anthrpos, human. First of all, it is gendered, and thus no longer refers to a creature that speaks “with a single voice.” Second, the Greek word anr connotes a temporal reference—” a man in the prime of life” state Liddell and Scott3—and is thus defined with respect to the very temporal change that Oedipus’ response to the Sphinx sought to subsume. The riddle, as legend has it, described a single creature that apparently possessed incompatible attributes: biped, triped, and quadruped, all at once. What Oedipus had to surmount, in order to figure out the riddle, was the expectation that what it described was a static, self-identical creature, as distinct from one that changes with the passage of time. The question of unity or continuity in change is thus concentrated in the attribution to the creature of a “single voice.” All of this remains implicit in Sophocles’ plays, and yet is permanently presupposed by everything they stage. The question that emerges from that staging is how a voice can remain “one” while “at the same time” being “more than one.” It is a question that Oedipus himself foregrounds when he explains to Theseus that time leaves nothing unchanged and that this is precisely the problem both men and polities have to confront:

Kind son of Aegeus, to the gods alone comes never old age or death, but all else is confounded by all-mastering time. Earth’s strength decays, and the strength of the body; faith dies, distrust is born; and the same spirit is never steadfast among friends, or betwixt city and city; for, be it soon or be it late, men find sweet turn to bitter, and then once more to love. (II. 608–15)

Whereas Oedipus was able to resolve the riddle of the Sphinx by invoking a notion of time that could be subsumed under the ostensibly self-identical and generic name man, the conception of time he here deploys no longer would permit such an unequivocal response. Far from imposing continuity and constancy upon temporal change, the notion of “man” has no particular privilege in the account just cited. Time as here deployed imposes nonidentity and disunity, not just upon “man,” but upon all the powers of the “earth,” including those of the “body.” “Man” no longer provides a generic solution to the riddle of time. But the response of human beings to what is more of a quandary than a riddle is distinctive. The second Chorus of Antigone had already summed up this situation: “Yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come: only against Death shall he call for aid in vain” (II. 359–60).4

Man bends all to his sway, with the notable exception of mortality. And the implication, both in Antigone—where this Chorus must be read as an implicit rejoinder to Creon’s classically political “state of the union” address—and here, in Oedipus at Colonus, is that political organization must be measured against this insurmountable and defining limit of human existence. As distinct from the riddle of the Sphinx, the destiny that has led Oedipus to Colonus allows no simple or straightforward “resolution.”

Oedipus has come to Colonus in order to find the place of his death. This is almost the only assertion about this play that can be advanced unequivocally. Hence, the aptness of the title. The hero it names is no longer defined in terms of a political attribute or property, for instance, as a tyrannos, but rather in terms of a location. Or rather, given the events that take place, or fail to take place: in terms of a dislocation.

Oedipus describes himself as “cityless [apolin]” (I. 1357). Although this is first of all a description of his immediate situation, it also applies to his life more generally. Oedipus, whose birth was already a transgression, has never really had a city, a family, a place of his own. And so, unlike Odysseus, he has no “home” to return to. His “exile” is therefore not an exceptional situation that he has encountered: it was there from birth, indeed, from before birth. If his situation is to be taken as in any way exemplary of the larger problem of human finitude and of its political implications, it is related to this “innate” lack of a native place. Oedipus is always defined with respect to a place and to places that are neither natural nor native to him. This allows him to exemplify one of the traits traditionally associated with place itself, for instance by Hegel, who emphasizes the indifference of place as such to that which it contains and thus also to itself insofar as it is determined by its content.⁵ The place that Oedipus is looking for will thus, in a certain sense, be both profoundly his and at the same time also profoundly indifferent to his being-there, its negation rather than its accomplishment. The place where Oedipus is most at home is the place where he finally ceases to be.

In its paradoxical relation to its content and definition, every place as such is a place of death. A place only “is” in referring to somewhere else, to “another place.”6 This self-referential separation from itself makes any place, as place, intrinsically transmissible. But what it transmits is its own secret alibi, the “secret” of its separation from itself.

Oedipus appeals to this power of place; he mobilizes it, sets it into motion, through his promised gift to Theseus. Only by mobilizing the secret transmissibility of place, of a movement that “stays the same,” stays “in one place” even while splitting that place and imparting it elsewhere—only such a mobility and mobilization can hope to withstand the deleterious effects of time, as Oedipus describes them to Theseus:

And if now all is sunshine between Thebes and thee, yet time, in his untold course, gives birth to days and nights untold, wherein for a small cause they shall sunder with the spear that plighted concord of today; when my slumbering and buried corpse, cold in death, shall one day drink their warm blood, if Zeus is still Zeus, and Phoebus, the son of Zeus, speaks true.

But, since I would not break silence touching mysteries, suffer me to cease where I began. (II. 617–25)

The vampirelike act of his corpse described by Oedipus here appears to refer to the defeat inflicted upon the Thebans by the Athenians at Colonus, in 410 or 407. More generally, the political “message” he will transmit to Theseus toward the end of the play seems related to the sense of crisis that prevailed around the time the play was written, beginning with the defeat of the Athenian expeditionary force in Sicily in 413, and culminating with the occupation of the city by the Spartans, one year after Sophocles’ death, in 404.⁷

And yet, if such historical references can help to explain why the portrayal of Oedipus as a ster, a savior, might have appealed to an Athenian public increasingly pessimistic in its struggle with Sparta and thus deeply concerned about its immediate future, they do not address the more specific question of how Oedipus can attribute such political power to the keeping-secret of his burial place.⁸ The interpretation of the play must hinge on this question, however, since here the problem of finitude and singularity develops a significance that goes beyond the immediate scope of individual existence and becomes political.

How does a “secret” become political? Oedipus himself warns against a too facile attempt at interpretation: “But, for mysteries which speech may not profane, thou shalt mark them for thyself, when thou comest to that place alone” (II. 1525–26). A singularity is involved in the secret that does not lend itself to a certain type of communication, through universalizing discourse. Theseus will have to follow Oedipus to the place of his death in order to receive the secret he is to keep and then transmit, in a “whisper,” to his chosen successor. It was doubtless in response to this admonition that Karl Reinhardt concluded his interpretation of the play by warning against any attempt to resolve such a secret into discursive transparency:

Oedipus’ tomb and the mystery that attaches to it will preserve Athens from the hubris and from the decline of so many cities. The devastation of the city by the “descendants of the dragon,” if it takes place, would be a result of the city’s “excess.” But how can the mystery possess such a power? And what must its nature be for it to be effective in this way? Let us not succumb to the temptation of wanting to analyze the Mystery: If its meaning is to be accessible to us, it must be in the light of the poem as a whole, not on the basis of this or that external detail. Whatever the secret may be, it in any case implies that one possess knowledge of Oedipus, of his violence in suffering, of his curses as of his blessings, and also of his integration into the ritual.9

Reinhardt’s warning only displaces the question: How, after all that Oedipus has undergone, can one simply appeal to a “knowledge,” either of “the poem as a whole” or of Oedipus”? Is it not the very status of any such “whole,” whether that of the “poem” or of a life, that this play irrevocably calls into question?

To approach a secret—which, as Benjamin emphasizes, must be sharply distinguished from a puzzle or riddle—is not to equate it with a “fragment,” that could, together with other such pieces, fit together to form an intelligible whole. Rather, it is to confront the complicity of distance with a “veil” that can never simply be raised: “The riddle [or puzzle: das Rätsel] is a fragment, which, together with another fragment that matches it, makes up a whole. The secret [or mystery: das Geheimnis] has always been associated with the image of the veil, which is an ancient accomplice of distance. Distance appears veiled.”¹⁰

The place where this complicity of distance with the veil is perhaps most powerfully—which is to say, paradoxically—revealed is the theater, in which the curtain is raised but never simply disappears, and whose ancient resource, as discussed in the previous chapter, Benjamin describes as “the exposing of the present [die Exponierung des Anwesenden].” Oedipus, we should recall, undergoes such exposure as an infant and remains marked by its effects in his body, his name, and his destiny. A homeless exile, he is utterly exposed to and dependent upon foreigners, and this situation determines the way in which his passing will be staged. Whether Benjamin, in writing of such Exponierung, had Oedipus or any other of the expelled and exposed ancient heroes, such as Moses, in mind, will have to remain an open question. What is unquestionable, in any case, is that Benjamin’s determination of the podium as the stage of such “exposing” finds a correspondence in the initial scene of this play—one that is all the more uncanny because of its historical distance.

Benjamin characterizes contemporary theater as being more determined by the “stage” than by the “drama.” This stage, which, as Benjamin conceives it, no longer constitutes a radical separation of (profane) audience from (sacred) actors, he describes as a “podium.” If, as Benjamin insists, contemporary theater can best be approached from the vantage point of the stage rather than that of the drama, and if he characterizes that stage as a “podium,” already at the beginnings of Western theater a kind of podium is present. This is how a contemporary critic describes Oedipus’ initial encounter with a group of aged “inspectors” who have come from Colonus to inspect the sacred grove where Oedipus initially sat himself down:

The stage soon ceases to be a place on which Oedipus acts autonomously and becomes instead a place on which the chorus deploys him… . The chorus bids Oedipus to stop and not to move his foot outside “this platform of living rock” (192). “Platform,” the standard term for the raised place where a speaker stood in a public assembly or in a law court, may be here a metaphor for the raised stage on which Oedipus and Antigone are seen or it may even be a theatrical term.11

This occurs shortly after Oedipus has been discovered by the Chorus, at which point, Edmunds notes, “the stage becomes a stage in relation to the orchestra” (p. 50). The “platform” [here, “bmatos”], is Benjamin’s “podium”: the place where one “steps” onto and places one’s “feet,” not in order to go anywhere, in the sense of moving from one place to another, but rather to “move” others, to set them into motion, to mobilize. Through the peculiar history of his “feet” and the “steps” they have taken, Oedipus has always been involved in a singular relation to movement: first, by having his feet pierced and marked for life; second, by committing the fated and fateful deed of killing his father at a triple crossroads, where ways come together, but where all ways are blocked, in a kind of impasse, to be opened only by an act of violence; third and finally, in his answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, which also refers to feet and which he is able to “resolve” only by finding a way to comprehend the different feet and their differing movements within the scope of a single name and concept, namely, man.

Lowell Edmunds, to whose perceptive analysis of Oedipus at Colonus as a play that stages its own theatricality I have already referred, points out that Oedipus, when confronted by the Chorus in this scene, owns up to his presence in the forbidden holy shrine with the following words: “‘This is that one,’ he says, and he adds, ‘I.’ The whole sentence is: ‘This is that one—I.’” The phrase, he observes in a footnote, anticipates the phrasing Aristotle will use in section 3 of the Poetics as a “formula for mimesis”: “This is that.”12 As I have already tried to show,¹³ Aristotle’s use of the phrase subordinates it to a conceptual logic of predication: “This individual is a so-and-so,” as Else renders it.¹⁴ This scene, however, demonstrates a difference between Aristotle’s subsumptive logic of demonstration and the theatrical function of Oedipus’ words. Oedipus first takes the position of the Chorus, when he describes himself to the others as “This is that one.” Then, however, he proceeds to relativize that position by adding: “I.” Oedipus’ words condense, in a single if divided phrase, the division constitutive of all theatricality and of its spatiality: a division that at first sight seems to be between the “they” and the “I,” then goes on to reveal itself as dividing each of those two instances from itself. Thus Oedipus at first portrays himself from the viewpoint of those who are inspecting, or spying upon him, but also looking at him, as an audience. But at whom are they looking, and just who is this “they”? The latter is split between Chorus and audience, and that split could be extended to the audience “itself.” On the other side, the “I” of Oedipus remains an I that is split between “one and more than one,” between what it “is,” what it has been, and what it will be. And it is this split, as we will see, that will constitute the “secret” and its power to be both more and less than itself, in becoming the object of a transmission, of a tradition, and indeed, of a way of relating to others—what I have elsewhere called “parting-with”—that could found a new sort of polity. Insofar as he is destined to exemplify the potential power of such “parting-with,” Oedipus is raised above those who seek only to identify him, to put him in his place and thereby to secure their own places.

What is that place? For Oedipus it can only be a place of death. But what is a place—or the place—of death? It is in the light, however obscure, of such a question that the specific localization of place comes into focus or, rather, into play. It comes into play because in being specified, the topographical significance extends far beyond the limits of the particular historical situation described. Commentators have long insisted, understandably, on the importance accorded throughout this play to local determinations.15 Indeed, Edmunds sees the play as, in part at least, an “apology” for Colonus, which had come into disrepute with the majority of Athenians as the site of the “assembly at which the 400 came to power” in 411 B.C.¹⁶ For a period of about four years, the 400 imposed an oligarchic regime upon the city of Athens, before they themselves were deposed and democracy restored. In this situation, the very positive portrayal of Theseus and the insistence upon the close ties binding Colonus to Athens must, according to Edmunds, be judged to reflect an “apologetic” intention on the part of the author, while also explaining at least some of the considerable inscription of local detail in the description of the sites.

However, once those very limited historical conditions have passed, such details can continue to signify powerfully only to the extent that their significance transcends the circumstances in which they originated. Only thus can Oedipus’ last day be anything but a huge bore on the stage. It is certainly not heroic and, with the possible exception of the two confrontations with Creon and Polyneices, not very dramatic, either. Even if the situation were designed as an apology for Colonus, and perhaps for the oligarchs, even at the time, and all the more so since, such an apology could only have been effective to the extent that it could draw upon forces and desires that far transcend such limited historical interests.

What, then, could such details signify other than the attempt to rehabilitate the locality of Colonus from the onus of its association with the restoration of oligarchy? The text provides a number of clues. From his very first words, Oedipus, who of course cannot see where he is or what is around him, asks Antigone insistently, and with some impatience, to describe and identify the particular place they have reached. Edmunds points out that at first Oedipus asks about the topos or khros he has reached. When he learns that he is in a sacred grove dedicated to the Eumenides, he recognizes that he has arrived at the spot prophesied by Apollo, who foretold that “when I came to a last region [khron] … I would find a seat [hedran] of the dread goddesses.”17 Hereafter Oedipus will use the word khra constantly (fourteen times), instead of the words topos and khros. Against these generic terms for place, khra suggests both “a last place” and a “region” pertaining to a larger territory, a city. This relationship to another place is thus at least double. On the one hand, it refers the outlying district of Colonus to the city—the polis, Athens—of which it is a part. On the other hand, as a “last place,” khra refers to another place, the underworld, of which the Eumenides are the (often furious) guardians. There is, however, another word that sums up this double function of khra: the Greek word used by the very “stranger” Oedipus interrogates about his whereabouts: the word is hodos, and it is commonly translated as “threshold”:

Oedipus. What then is the place that we have entered?

Stranger. All that I know, thou shalt learn from my mouth. This whole place is sacred; awful Poseidon holds it, and therein is the fire-fraught god, the Titan Prometheus; but as for the spot whereon thou treadest, ‘tis called the Brazen Threshold of this land, the stay of Athens; and the neighboring fields claim yon knight Colonus for their primal lord, and all the people bear his name in common for their own. (II. 52–60)

The place that Oedipus has entered, the grove of the Eumenides, is overdetermined by its relation to two other terms: the “brazen threshold” and the “stay of Athens,” as well as to one other, here not explicitly mentioned, “threshold.” This is how R. C. Jebb glosses their relationship:

Somewhere near the grove of the Eumenides, but not within the stage-scene, was a spot called “the threshold” of Hades—a steeply-descending rift or cavern in the rock, at the mouth of which some brazen steps had been made… . From this spot, the immediately adjacent region (including the grove) was known as “the brazen threshold.” … Linked by mystic sanctities with the Powers of the Underworld, this region of the “brazen threshold” is called … the stay of Athens: a phrase in which the idea of physical basis is joined to that of religious safeguard.18

If the “brazen threshold” where Oedipus finds himself is called “the stay of Athens,” that is by virtue of its relation to the unmentioned threshold marking the border separating (and joining) the living and the dead. The Greek words for “brazen threshold”—khalkopous hodos—already contain part of Oedipous’ not so proper name: pous. The region that he entered, and that he transgresses, is part of his name and his destiny: one that involves the “feet” taking “steps,” even and especially those that lead into forbidden regions. Not for nothing did the riddle of the Sphinx raise the question of walking and its relation to the one who walks. Oedipus’ destiny thus leads him to thresholds that can neither be avoided nor simply traversed.

This destiny, however, cannot be discussed strictly in terms of a purely individual history: it must be seen in the context of the myth that Sophocles inherits, but also transforms. To recapitulate an argument made in the preceding chapter, with respect to Oedipus Tyrannos: The curse that strikes Laius and his descendants forces them, and above all, Oedipus, to confront the dilemma of finitude without the usual compensations of family or politics. Neither familial nor political collective can, for Oedipus and his children, provide a “solution” to the quandary of mortality. The house of Labdacus will perish, and the polity founded by it will fall into disrepair. Such a fate can in no way, as Oedipus never tires of reminding his listeners, be justified from the moral viewpoint of retribution:

Tell me, now—if, by voice of oracle, some divine doom was coming on my sire, that he should die by a son’s hand, how couldst thou justly reproach me therewith, who was then unborn—whom no sire had yet begotten, no mother’s womb conceived? And if, when born to woe—as I was born—I met my sire in strife, and slew him, all ignorant what I was doing, and to whom—how couldst thou justly blame the unknowing deed? (pp. 969–75)¹⁹

Without the consolation of survival through familial succession—survival of the paternal name—the name Oedipus is thus called upon to signify the enigma of mortality stripped of its usual social supports.

However, the exemplarity of Oedipus resides not only in the way he is forced to confront the enigma of singularity without recourse to family or city. Rather, what is unexpected is the manner in which this confrontation with singularity shows itself to be eminently theatrical. The “topography” that plays such a manifest role in this play is a scenic topography. Oedipus acknowledges himself to be an “I” only with respect to the eyes of others, exemplified in the Chorus, knowing all the while that its perception of him can never fully accord with his own sense of self. The divergence of or distance between these two perspectives, which, however, remain inseparable from one another, marks the sites of this play as irreducibly theatrical: as stage, “platform,” or podium—a place to set one’s feet, a place to be seen, and yet not necessarily understood. A place that moves, but that is never simply a springboard for a change of place. In this sense, the khra where Oedipus finds himself is both “last place” and “threshold,” always gesturing somewhere else and yet at the same time a place beyond which one cannot go.

The problem is that this “threshold” does not lead anywhere, if by “anywhere” is meant another place that could be reached by a movement away from the “threshold,” a place that could be located, situated, given firm borders and a univocal determination. In this sense, the threshold, which is the site of a passing, is at the same time also a dead end.20 As such, it adds a new dimension or chapter to the riddle Oedipus believed he had answered in his response to the Sphinx. This time, Oedipus sets (mutilated) foot in a place whose name (“bronze-footed”) suggests that its “feet” are as enduring as Oedipus’ are time-bound. But how do such bronze feet move? Are they slower or quicker than those of the one-, two-, and three-footed creature in the Sphinx’s riddle? Or is their movement of a radically different sort?

A “threshold” is not simply another species of living creature, if indeed it is a creature at all. A “threshold” that is “bronze-footed” would imply, not a movement between places, from place to place, but a movement of place. Can places move?

As Oedipus approaches his end, he, at any rate, begins to move differently. He no longer asks to be led by Antigone, but instead follows the “light” he cannot see but nevertheless feels : “O light, no light to me, mine once thou wast, I ween—but now my body feels thee for the last time!” (II. 1549–50).

Oedipus “touches [haptetai]” the light that he cannot see with his body (demas) or, rather, he is touched by it—he feels the light touching his body and follows it toward the night of Hades. “Touch,” which replaces “sight” for Oedipus, here becomes what it always has been: a way of experiencing separation through contact. Through touch, the “veil” that Benjamin associated with the “secret” is staged—not, however, without paradox, since in theater touch is generally excluded. Oedipus touches (and is touched by) what he cannot see, while the audience sees what it cannot touch. As he approaches the end, however, Oedipus suddenly refuses to be touched: “My children, follow me—thus—for I now have in strange wise been made your guide, as ye were your sire’s. Only—touch me not—nay, suffer me unaided to find out that sacred tomb where ‘tis my portion to be buried in this land” (II. 1542–46). One must renounce a certain kind of touching and being touched in order to approach a separation that is beyond distance and that hence cannot be overcome by an embrace or a caress.21

Oedipus thus begins to move, on his own, with his own swollen feet, moving toward the spot where “brazen feet” tread—and thus he moves off the stage, out of sight. But not without a parting word left to resonate behind him: “Blessed be thou and this land [khra] , and thy lieges; and when your days are blest, think on me being-dead [memnsthe mou thanontos], for your welfare evermore [eutukheis aei]” (II. 1554–55, translation modified).

What, exactly, is Oedipus asking here, in return for his benediction? His words anticipate the parting words of another former king to his child: “Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me!”²² What King Hamlet is asking of his son may be far from clear, but its object is relatively well defined: Do not leave unavenged the murder of a father, the betrayal of a husband, the usurpation of a king. By contrast, the admonition of Oedipus is far less transparent. It is not for his sake that he asks not to be forgotten, but for those who do not forget: for his children, for Theseus, for Athens. Just how such mindfulness could benefit Theseus and Athens is left unsaid. But a clue can perhaps be glimpsed in Oedipus’ formulation. Previously we have discussed the close connection of the present participle to the ambivalent temporality of theatrical staging. Here, however, just before he leaves the stage, Oedipus’ last words—in direct discourse—invoke, not the present participle, for he is speaking of a time in which he will no longer be present, but the aorist. To this future, the simultaneity of enunciated and enunciation that characterizes the present participle will no longer apply. The supplication to be mindful of someone who is no longer alive suggests, however, that a different kind of relationship is possible. Wherever there is a “participle,” there is a relationship between the participating parts. To understand the kind of relationship, and temporality, that Oedipus’ words suggest, a remark of the classicist, Leo Meyer, is helpful. Discussing the general nature of the aorist participle, he argues that it first of all shares the characteristics of participles in general, “which is to say, to designate an act with which no sentence can as yet be considered to be complete.” Having thus described the trait common to all participles, he goes on to distinguish aorist from present participle in terms of their respective articulation of time: “Unlike the present participle, which entails duration, [the aorist participle] designates something in respect to which the temporal duration that it involves is either irrelevant or considered to have lasted only a very short time.”23 To retain the form of the participle—being dead as distinct from “the dead,” as Jebb translates it—is to suggest a state of (non)being that with respect to the living subject is no longer simultaneous, but with respect to those Oedipus implores to be “mindful,” will be.

Such remembering begins shortly thereafter with the appearance of the messenger, who recounts Oedipus’ death. His story reveals what is perhaps the ultimate and aporetic function and appeal of all narrative: that of recounting the “end” and giving it “meaning.” What the messenger recounts is never the end as such—Oedipus’ death—but only its approach and effects. By contrast to the passion of Christ, the death of Oedipus is deliberately shrouded in darkness and never represented or recounted “as such.” The most the messenger can recount is the effect that this death had on the one person who witnessed it, Theseus:

But when we had gone apart, after no long time we looked back; and Oedipus we saw nowhere any more, but the king alone, holding his hand before his face to screen his eyes, as if some dread sight had been seen, and such as none might endure to behold. (II. 1648–52)

All the messenger could witness, when he turned around and back again, was yet another witness, Theseus, shielding his eyes. Oedipus is described neither as dying nor as disappearing, but as abruptly gone. Between his being there and his being gone there is no continuity, no smooth transition, but a gap, a gash, a cut, as when de Gaulle’s motorcade passes by in Godard’s Breathless: First there is the motorcycle escort in front of the limousine, then the cut, and finally the motorcycle escort bringing up the rear. Oedipus’ death never takes place as a visible, visualizable, or determinable event. Yet something has happened or, perhaps more precisely, something is going on, even if just what and where it is going can only be gauged through the tension between anticipation and its aftereffects.

What is there, then, “not to forget”? Antigone responds: “And at the last a sight and a loss that baffle thought are ours to tell… . We can but conjecture” (II. 1676–79). Lowell Edmunds glosses this remark: “Her words attest to the unnarratability of the event that, in the context of the messenger’s speech, signified also the extra-theatricality of the event.”24 If the messenger’s narrative attempts to palliate and supplement the limits of the stage, its own limitations return us to a power of theatricality that is specific neither to theatrical representation as such, nor to narrative: the power of putting the other on the spot. Whether as audience or spectator, listener or reader, the addressee is called upon to bear witness to a turn of events that as such can never be seen. This and only this constitutes theatricality as medium (as distinct from genre). A spot that entails a turn of events can also be called a “threshold.” Its brazen steps trace a path that can be neither avoided nor traversed.

But without becoming an object of knowledge, it can be remembered. And this memory can be handed down from generation to generation—like a place that is both well known and also unknown. A place that is both inaccessible and unavoidable.

Not the memory of his person but of this inaccessible and secret place will, according to Oedipus, protect the polis against its enemies better than all shields, armor, and allies could ever do. The security of the “homeland” will thus depend upon its willingness to live in the shadow of an uncanny place it will never be able to call “home.”

Although what is narrated is not shown on the stage, the “cut” that it depicts—this word is to be understood as literally as possible—stands in for the abrupt turn of events—turn of the event— that constitutes theatricality as medium. Whether as the nonconvergence of the “that one, I,” or as the “threshold” at whose limit theatrical events take place, the messenger’s tale points to a happening that divides the place it “takes” while “moving” it somewhere else. This division or cut defines the place of death as one that, however concealed it may be, remains potentially, if grimly, theatrical. And vice versa. Theater, as a medium that cannot be contained in a story, involves a space that always tends to be a place of death. Or rather, a place where life brushes up against being dead. Whenever any thing or event takes place theatrically, it tends to be split between a glance that mistakes and an agent that dissimulates.

It is in the chiaroscuro of this strange “cut” that the “gift” promised by Oedipus to Theseus and to Athens must be read. Oedipus’ parting admonition, “Do not forget me being dead,” plunges Antigone into despair. How can she remember him properly without being able to mourn at his grave? But what if “not forgetting” were not quite the same as remembering, but rather a form of letting go as a way of staying with, in the sense of “never forgetting to forget” that Paul de Man read out of (or into) Hegel.25 Not forgetting, as distinct from simply remembering, would entail the paradoxical connotation concealed behind the ostensible familiarity of the expression parting with. To part with requires a nonsacrificial giving up as a way of relating to. Oedipus does not sacrifice himself, and yet he asks that his being dead not be forgotten. Not to forget Oedipus “being dead” would, however, involve, not simply recalling an image or an event that has taken place, but rather repeating a cut that divides, and in dividing articulates—a cut that, in parting, im-parts. As a singular event, such a cut would be situated in a determinate place. By virtue of that same singularity, its place would never be representable as such but only in its effects, in the traces it leaves behind. Like a secret, it endures only so long as it is “kept.” “Not forgetting Oedipus being dead” would thus entail the keeping (of a) secret of a place, but of one that, like khra and as hodos, is constitutively split, divided, separate from itself, and thus whose being, like that of everything singular, only “is” in being transmitted, moved elsewhere. This is the medium that in imparting, parts with. It is always associated with a singular place and a singular person, but it is never identifiable with either of them as their property or attribute: they only serve as caretakers, watching over it and handing it on.

What passes thus from hand to hand is more like a swollen foot than a clenched fist. Oedipus’ place of death is singularly inaccessible. It is inaccessible as a result of what happens, and does not happen, there. Death will have taken place, while at the same time never visibly happening. Like the place itself, it is always on the move, although never simply going anywhere.

Oedipus claims that such a gift can protect Athens better than shields, armies, and allies. Protect against what? Against the ravages of time? Against the effort to translate singularity into a question of homeland security? In any case, the singular is never simply a question of the home or the nation, as Antigone (will have) reminded Creon, who will have forgotten how not to forget the place of death.