Oedipus at Colonus

"Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus is essentially about a struggle for “power over tomorrow.” Having spent years wandering in disgrace and near to death, Oedipus—whose “griefs exceed / the griefs of all mankind”—arrives on the outskirts of Athens. What follows is a struggle over his remains between Creon, the king of Thebes who replaced Oedipus, and Theseus, king of Athens. Creon wants to install the tomb outside his city as a kind of talisman which he believes will confer protection. But Oedipus insists that in death he would only bring “vengeance / rooted deep in your soil for all time to come,” and appeals to Theseus to bury him in secret. In return, he says, the power that would curse Thebes will be “the root of all your greatness, everlasting, ever-new.” Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So Oedipus, who represents “the power that age cannot destroy,” becomes a source of fascination. The parallel, for me, is with debates about safe storage of nuclear waste. There’s a real risk that anything we do to signal the danger of spent nuclear fuel will be lost on future generations, and instead be mistaken for treasure (think of the ineffective curses guarding the Pharoah’s tombs). In Footprints , I explore various incredible schemes designed to keep the waste safe from intrusion for 10,000 years. Perhaps the most fantastical was the semiotician Thomas Sebeok’s proposal for a ‘nuclear priesthood,’ responsible for conveying sacred knowledge about nuclear waste to future generations. Sophocles even seems to have anticipated this, when he has Oedipus instruct Theseus to only reveal the secret location of his tomb “to your eldest, dearest son, / and then let him reveal them to his heir / and so on through the generations, forever.” There’s hope of a good future in the play but also a warning against hubris. Oedipus does end up in the care of the Athenians, rather than rapacious Creon. And yet by the time the play was first performed in 401 BCE, five years after Sophocles’ death, Athens had fallen. Well, it’s likely there will be issues of translation. One of the problems of communicating the risks associated with nuclear waste is that all languages have a half-life. 10,000 years from now, perhaps a tenth of English words will still be current (if English is still spoken at all). Still, art has the capacity to communicate in spite of this. I was really enthralled by the announcement, late last year, of the discovery of the world’s oldest narrative art, painted on the wall of a limestone cave in Indonesia nearly 44,000 years ago. It shows thin, red-ochre stick figures hunting dwarf buffalo and wild pig. But some of the figures have animal traits—a bird’s head or a tail—which suggests that it’s a myth rather than the record of a real hunt. Or rather, that it’s a hunt that only took place in the imagination. We’ll never know what the myth was, but perhaps more powerfully we can still read in the painting the strength of the connection the artist felt with the animals she was depicting—so close, some were melded with human forms. That’s a message that ought to transcend time, I think."

"To each of these plays, one can easily substitute another piece by the same author which deserves much more our attention. For example, is the ethical fidelity of Antigone not much easier to identify with than the vicissitudes of the old Oedipus ? Are the doubts and procrastinations of Hamlet not infinitely more interesting than the endless narcissistic complaints of Richard II? Does the terrible burden imposed on the heroine of Claudel’s Annunciation of Marie not touch us much more directly than Sygne’s eccentric act in Hostage ? How can the minimalist staging of the Stalinist meanders in Measure Taken even compare with the wealthy texture of Brecht’s Galileo ? And, last but not least, does the sheer wit of Waiting for Godot not immediately eclipse the rather boring monologue of Not I?"