Reading Proust, walking round museums and art galleries, listening to Beethoven, will not necessarily save us from such a fate. It may indeed be that such activities only reinforce our indifference (‘In the room the women come and go,/Talking of Michelangelo’). Sadism, on the other hand, at least in the form practised by Mlle Vinteuil, like the masturbation explored a few pages earlier, represents a striving to escape the solitary confinement of indifference, a wild strategy to force an apparently indifferent world to touch us, if only for a moment. Unfortunately it can never truly succeed, for it is always we who instigate it and what we need is precisely the opposite: it is for the world to touch us, unawares. Thus it has to be repeated, over and over again, in ever more desperate and ineffectual efforts. But then how are we to act once we have fallen into the solitude of our lives, once the aura which had lit up the world and which we had, until one fateful moment, taken for granted, seems to have been lost for ever? Are we to wait, like Chaplin's flower-girl, for that miracle which may never happen? Or is there some other way in which we can help it into being, a less melancholy, less desperate way?
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: