SOPHOCLES' OEDIPUS AND CONFLICTS OF IDENTITY IN POST-COLONlAL CONTEXTS

Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is an investigation of past events and identities that are apparently unknown but are partly suspected and partly suppressed. The past history of Oedipus is something that is also present; it has to be confronted. Ironically, the impact ofFreud's psychoanalytic theory on modern conceptionsof Oedipus has sometimes been used to claim that it is not easy to rewrite or adapt Sophocles' play in the context of modern politica! debates.I. Yet the performance history of the play attests to its potential for radical politica! and social critique.2 Adaptations of Sophocles' play in the last fifty years have built on its potential to say the unsayable and have explored culturally and politically dangerous or contmversial materiaL Important examples include Ola Rotimi's The Gods are not to Blame (1968) in which the play became an analogue for the internal conflicts in Africa, especially the Biafran war. More recently, Rita Dove's The DarkerFace of the Earth (published 1994, frrst performed at the Oregon Festival in 1996 and subsequently at the Royal National theatre in London) set the story in an ante-bellum cotton plantation in the southern states of the USA and explored the institution of slavery as the souree of poll u ti on. Incest was replaced as a focus by miscegenation.3 In film, the Columbian production Edipo Alcalde (Mayor Oedipus, with screen-play by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabtiel Marquez, relocated the story in present-day war-torn Columbia with the country's civil strife corresponding to the Theban plague. Thus the performance history of the play defies cultural stereotyping and exemplifies rewriting in the context of the moment.


SOPHOCLES' OEDIPUS AND CONFLICTS OF IDENTITY IN POST-COLONlAL CONTEXTS Lorna HARDWICK
Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is an investigation of past events and identities that are apparently unknown but are partly suspected and partly suppressed. The past history of Oedipus is something that is also present; it has to be confronted. Ironically, the impact ofFreud's psychoanalytic theory on modern conceptionsof Oedipus has sometimes been used to claim that it is not easy to rewrite or adapt Sophocles' play in the context of modern politica! debates.I. Yet the performance history of the play attests to its potential for radical politica! and social critique.2 Adaptations of Sophocles' play in the last fifty years have built on its potential to say the unsayable and have explored culturally and politically dangerous or contmversial materiaL Important examples include Ola Rotimi's The Gods are not to Blame (1968) in which the play became an analogue for the internal conflicts in Africa, especially the Biafran war. More recently, Rita Dove's The DarkerFace of the Earth (published 1994, frrst performed at the Oregon Festival in 1996 and subsequently at the Royal National theatre in London) set the story in an ante-bellum cotton plantation in the southern states of the USA and explored the institution of slavery as the souree of poll u ti on. Incest was replaced as a focus by miscegenation.3 In film, the Columbian production Edipo Alcalde (Mayor Oedipus, with screen-play by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabtiel Marquez, relocated the story in present-day war-torn Columbia with the country's civil strife corresponding to the Theban plague. Thus the performance history of the play defies cultural stereotyping and exemplifies rewriting in the context of the moment.
The play has proved no less fertile as a field for debate by theorists and critics. Charles Segal has pointed to the ways in which Sophocles' play has come to be regarded virtually as a souree for the Oedipus myth as well as a version of it.4 Levi-Strauss has analysed the myth in terms of its mediation of opposites, Vernant has grounded it historically as a treatment of politica! excess and tyranny. Girard has focused on the myth's exploration ofviolence and its controL There have also been discussions that use the myth itself to critique or extend Freudian theory. Lacan has related the Freudian notion of the unconscious to the discourse of the Other which is misunderstood or denied by the conscious self. Deleuze and Guattari have offered a critique of 'the imperialism of Oedipus' as an influence on every area of life, including politics and global economie power. s Against this background of performative and theoretica! diversity, I propose to examine the potential of the play for the identification, interrogation and transformation of fissures in national, cultural and moral senses of identity in relation to post-colonial situations. Because each post-colonial history is different I have chosen to focus in some detail on the forma!, linguistic and contextual aspects of one example, the Oedipus written by David Greig and staged by theatre babel in Scotland in 2000, directed by Graham McLaren. The theme of this conference in Gent invites us to read Oedipus as a way into discussion of cultural differential thinking. This theme suggests reflection on differential thinking within cultures as well as between them. It opens the way to questioning monolithic notions of culture and to the identification of points of stress and starting points for realignment. An understanding of this kind of cultural differentiation, of sensitivity to uncertainties and dilemmas and to the masking of the past in the present may perhaps lead to communication across cultural groupings as well as within them.
My framework for this paper is therefore four-fold: 1) Sophocles' play, with its outsider/foreigner who is not and its mystery of self-discovery is a rich field for exploring modern crises of identity and self-recognition-politica! and cultural as wellas psychologicaL 2) Modern staging of Greek drama is a significant means of exploring postcolonial situations. Greek drama is both tainted and empowering through its place in colonial education and yet paradoxically is liberated from that context through its exploitation by post-colonial writers. Recent research on post-colonial writing and classica! material has ·challenged facile identification of Greek culture with the value systems of its appropriators, Western or otherwise, and has drawn out the distinctions between Greek humanism and colonial cultures.6 3) Colonisation and Decolonisation have many phases. 'Decolonisation of the mind' , to borrow the term used by Ngugi wa Thiong' o, may begin while physical colonisation is still in place. 7 Equally, the process may be hard and long-drawn out, continuing long after liberation. Decolonisation of the mind is important among both the colonisers and the colonised and also those who occupy the space between. 4) When comparing souree text and adaptation, the forma! conven ti ons are as important as the myth and the director-led aspects of staging. It is the interaction of the form, language and context of performance that gives tragedy its capacity .for radical critique.
Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is a prime· example ·of a text of central cultural dominanee (it underlays the Aristotelian paradigm for Greek tragedy) which nevertheless becomes the vehicle for eliallenging dominance. In translated and adapted form it has become a roetaphor for the fraught discovery and exposure of enslavers and colonisers. Here, I want . to focus on a less obvious aspect of the play's capacity as an agent for the decolonisation of the mind and to suggest that among the certainties challenged by Oedipus are those of unexainined politica! and cultural origins and of easy distinction between colcmisers and colonised. The play was a central text for the showcase in Glasgow, Scotland, in the year 2000, when three leading Scottish playwrights were commissioned (supported by a grant from the National Lottery) to adapt Greek tragedies as a mark of the flourishing of theatre arts in the years before and following Scottish devolution.
Devolution of mostaspectsof self-government in Scotland came about after the referendum of 1997 and the elections of 1999 as aresult of which the Scottish Parliament was reconvened after a gap of almost 300 years. The previous Parliament in the Scottish capita!, Edinburgh, had been subsumed in the Westminster ParHament in London after the Treaty of Uni on in 1707 (The Uni on of the· Crowns had taken place a century earlier when James VI of Scotland became J ames 1 of England after the death of Queen Elizabeth 1).
Devolution and the reconvening of the ParHament were marked by celebrations of Scottish culture and identity and a re-examination of socio-politica! assumptions. The three classica! plays chosen for the festival and gathered together under the title Greeks were Sophocles' Electra ( adapted by Tom McGrath), Euripides' Medea (Liz Lochhead) and Sophocles' Oedipus the King (David Greig). The Glasgow-based company theatre babel performed all three over a week in the Old Fruitmarket, a converted warehouse in the centre of the Merchant Quarter of Glasgow, Scotland's industrial city and formerly known as the second city of the British Empire. The week culminated in an evening performance when all three plays were performed, beginning with Oedipus. As the director Graham McLaren put it, 'Politically Scotland is changing and with the millennium the world is changing. N ow is the time to be defining what it is to be, not ju st a Scot in Scotland but what it is to be human in the world .. .. Oedipus is as closetoa universa! text as you'll get. It starts off with the simple mystery of who kil-I 1 379 led Laius but finishes up by asking absolute questions about what it is to be human'.8 However, between the mystery of the of the killer and the questions about the nature of the human, David Greig's adaptation explored ambivalences about identity which were both hlstorical and contemporary. At the time of Devolution there was a sense that Scotland was emerging from domination by the English. Yet it was also the case that Scots played an important, even dominant role in the govemment of Great Britain, in industry, education, medicine, arts and sport. Great Britain represented a Union .between Scotland, England and Wales (which also won some measure of devolution at this time). Could Scots be British as well as Scots? What had been the role of Scots historically in the centuries between the Treaty of Union and the present day, centuries in which the British Empire had developed and then retreated from a position of commercial, military and politica! dominanee in several continentsof the world? How did the cultural politics of Scotland deal with this ambivalent status?
Certainly, the role of Scots in the growth of the British Empire had been extensive and the articulation of various aspects of Scottish identity in the 18th and 19th centuries had been closely interwoven with El mpire. The recent study by Tom Devine (Scotland's Empire 1600 -1815) examines the advantages in direct trade with the colonies that foliowed the Treaty of Union -'the tobacco trade transformed the social and cultural world of Glasgow .. . with capita! provided by British merchants, planters in Alnerica could purebase slaves and indentured Iabour' .9 Furthermore, the claim that Glasgow, unlike Bristol and Liverpool, played little part in the slavetrade has been refuted. Not only has the Scottish role in trafficking slaves from Africa to the Caribbean been underestimated but it has been shown that Scotland was heavily involved in the development of a colonial economy which 'could not have functioned without an entrenched and expanding system of slave Iabour' .10 Scottish regiments were (with Irish) at the military heart of British imperia! expansion in India and even before the expansion of Empire Scots were major bolders of East India Company stock. 11 Warren Hastings, Govemor-General of India 1774-1785, was known as Scotland's Benefactor, promoting Scots in the civil andcmilitary services and placing them at the centre of power. ·Later on, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the con tribution of Scots to the military extension of Empire and its policing and administration were also extensive. Yet this picture also has to be balanced by the position of poor Scots whose displacement and extensive enforced migration, including eviction of the Gaels or Gaelic speakers from their crofts and small landholdings during the Highland clearances, left them in a more oppressed position than even the indentured labourers who had preeerled them overseas. Devine argues that the new Scotland that emerged from the later 18th century was largely grounded in the imperia! project -'The Scots were not only full partners in this grand design but were at the very cutting edge of British global expansion' .12. Devine's other major recent study of Scotland, The Scottish Nation 1700 -2000, makes a corresponding point by showing how the Scottish sense of national identity was shaped by Empire.l3 Thus the differences and social conflicts in the Scottish imperia! experience became potential faultlines in the Scottish sense of identity. David Greig's adaptation of Oedipus explored the issues of politica! identity and the holding and transfer of power in a way which got to the heart of the ambivalence in the identity of Scots as both colonisers and colonised. His treatment drew on ways in which the psychological and politica! dimensions of incestuous relationships reflect a similar ambivalence and mirror the language of motherbood and sexual intercourse that has become a roetaphor for colonial relationships.l4. The production explored these issues through the coherence of its setting, design and language and through the ways in which it reworked Greek dramatic conventions.
It is frequently the case that in adaptations of Greek drama modern resonances are signalied to the audience by directoria! fiat -by choice of setting and design or by changes made to the acting script. Now, I do not at all subscribe to the view put forward by some classicists that such input is improper. Theatrical productions are artistic events in their own right and in any case the Greek plays were written in order to be performed not just to be analysed by philologists. However, I do share the view, put forward most recently by Rush Rehm in Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World, that it is in the ancient · play-text, its story, language and form, including its theatrical conven ti ons, that the energy for its adaptation to modern politica! and artistic concerns is to be found. Thus according to Rehm, 'Greek tragedy reminds us that humans live reallives (the only ones we have) and die real deaths (no matter how hard we try to deny it). Those hard truths provide the inspiration for tragic performance, and suggest simply and directly why this ancient form of theatre might be particularly timely now' .Is I therefore propose to examine Greig's Oedipus with reference to his treatment of the conventions of Greek tragedy as well as with reference to the set and design. The play was short, as Oedipus goes, with a running time of approxima------------381 tely one hourand twenty minutes. I shall frrst discuss the setting and then consider how this setting was integrated with the language and formal conventions of the play.
The costume and setting suggested the India of the British Raj. The same basic set was used as for the other plays in the sequence. There was a mid-blue backcloth which the lighting design tinged with pink at the lower level. Incorporated with this was a plain entrance which had the appearance of an upright stele. For Oedipus, a dead tree was added towards the rear of the acting space. In the centre was a ritual circle used for taking auspices and, at the end, for enacting the verbal image of ashes with glowing embers and smoke. The driedup tree signalied aridity and drought as a man erawied in search of the last dregs of water in the dried-up river in a silent and stunning opening sequence to the play.
Costume also explored class gradations in the Indian setting. Oedipus and Creon wore white high buttoned coats and trousers. Tiresias was dressed like an Indian holy man, the Chorus as simple people (rather than the Elders of Sophocles' play). The Indian context and associated religious ritual distaueed the struggle for politica! change from the modern time and place of the performance yet there was contemporary impact in the theme of transfer of power and the exposure of corruption and the causes of disease. The combination of costume and set design suggested that the sun was setting over a colonised city -an ironie allusion, perhaps, to the British Empire over which, it used to be said, the sun never set. The language and acting styles ensured that there was never a simplistic or closed definition of who or where was colonised. Both usurper and liberator spoke English with Scots' accents and i di om and the identification of Creon and Oedipus with the roles of usurper and liberator fluctuated throughout the play. The setting and focus reminded anyone who was tempted to forget that Scots, too, were leaders in the expansion and organisation of the British Empire and the play resisted equation with the notion that post-devolution Scotland was simply emerging from colonial rule. Yet both colonial histories, of the Raj, of devolution, were there, in the context of the associated crises of identity.
The tone and focus of the play was set by Greig's adaptation of the Greek theatre conventions, especially Chorus, Agon (including the stichomythia of the sharp exchanges) and Messenger speech. The Sophoclean prologue was replaced by the immediate intervention of the Chorus. As they sat under a dead tree one man among them erawied towards the palace. The Chorus (of seven, both genders, dressed in white, barefoot) asked god to give them the power to see such pain and yet feel no pity, a feeling fatal to humans: He wants water. There's none. Re's licking at the dust... He' s sniffing at the ground, he thinks he can smell a river ... A cruel river trick that: to leave its smell bebind ... Give him a kick. See if he moves (When the man slumps) I think we should say a prayer ... We beg you god. Kill the pity in us. Make us like you. Give us the power of your bate. The power of god to see pain and feel nothing. Hear our prayer. Plunge our hearts into divine frre. Cauterize our souls against this fatal human feeling -pity. Re's dead now.I6 This Chorus introduces the twin themes of drought and the ironies of pity that permeate the play, combining the effect of the priest and the parodos in Sophocles but also communicating an intensified communal desperation. The cause of their despair is not immediately explained, in contrast to the very specific and conallusions in Liz Lochhead's version of the parodos in Thebans, 2002, whtch refers to the outbreak of foot and mouth disease that devastated British in 2001 to the SARS virus that was at the time causing panic in western Citles.l 7 In Gretg's play the stress on drought and the absence of the Ionged-for river resonates with images of water in post-colonial critica! discourse example, Ngugi wa Thiong' o has written in his hook Decolonisation of Mmd of the way in which rivers can becomes bridges rather than barriersls. The riverin setting is dried up, a souree only of thirst and plague and a symbol of suffenng rather than communication. Later in the play, the Chorus, in its role both people and commentator, also elaborates on the language assoctated With the plague that is ravaging Thebes: This plague's tearing out the heart of everything. It's cut open scars And picked at scabs. Leave it alone.19 Greig alludes to the scars that have become images of the wounds of in the writing of post-colonial writers such as Derek Walcott. I think of Philoctetes' scar in Omeros, caused not by a snake-bite as in Homer but by a rusty anchor left bebind by an imperial navy. In Walcott's work more generally, and in Seamus Heaney's version of Philoctetes, A Cure at Troy (1990), the scars of colonial histories are seen as wounds of affliction and oppression which may be reopened by poetry but which nevertheless have then to be allowed to heal if new futures are to be created. zo Finally, the closing Chorus looks at what Oedipus stood for and tely destroyed him. These are the material achievements and effects of tmpenalism, many associated with Scots: Look at him. This is Oedipus. Dam builder. Road maker. Visionary. He has been consumed by the frre of his own life ... Look at him closely. What do you see. Nothing beyond. Only Ashes. And the memory of the fire.2 1 Greig also exploited the Greek convention of the agon, the verbal contest between two leading characters. It is through the agon that Sophocles presents the successive ebaHenges to Oedipus' assumed identity as _rul er and protector of the people. In Greig's play the exchanges wtth Ttrestas follow the Sophoclean pattem quite closely. Greig uses the with to th: dual aspects of the struggle for power inherent m the between Oedtpus status as a supposed bringer of better times and Creon s mhentance as a memher of a family of kings. The sub-text is that ironically these aspects are Creon could have brought better times by avoiding mistreatment and explmtatt?n of the people (shown in his contemptuous dismissalof t?e of life and their environment, an analogy perhaps with the Scottish clan chtefs destruction of the traditional way of life of their people and their own consequent absorption into the ruling class of Great Britain after the Union) while Oedipus, ostensibly the reforming outsider, is actually the legitimate of power who becomes the destructive insider. In the contest between Oedtpus and Creon, the ambivalence of identity of power-holderand complicit ruling .class, of coloniser and colonised is given a coruscating focus.
The Greek convention of the Messenger Speech uses focalised narrative and refinements of diegetic space to enable the audience to imagine off stage action and to explore its own perspectives as well as those of the stage characters. Sophocles refines this by using the apparent messengers, the herrlsman and the driver, to interact with Oedipus' growing self-awareness. Greig's version takes this further. The driver weaves into the action the Pity motif set out in the opening Chorus with his ironie My pity saved him Nursed him And brought him through time To a cross roads near where three rivers meet . 22 The meeting of three rivers is substituted for Sophocles' motif of the three roads. The servant's account of Joeasta's suïcide-by drowning in the brown-red water, not by hanging as in Sophocles -followed by Oedipus' self-blinding, unites the motifs of water, aridity and blood in Oedipus' history. Finally, Oedipus in a post-Freudian rhesis reflects on pity and 'The facts of my life' Inside my skin is all the agony the world can make I hold it in me My skin protects you. Outside my skin the world is good. 23 Thus the production resisted crude or reductionist contemporary allusion while retaining contemporary impact. Graham McLaren, the director, wrote: 'With this project I wanted to create lasting work that would impact on Scottish culture. I wanted to commission writers that could truly articulate the principal elements of the myths and so create plays that would transform great and ancient classica! works into pieces that would speak not only directly to a Scottish audience but also of universa! modern experience24'.
In addressing the ambivalent identity of Scots as both colonisers and colonised, Greig's version of Oedipus also addressed modern experience -and vice versa. The process of decolonisation of the mind persists long after the end of Empire. In his adaptation of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, David Greig created 385 a metaphorical territory on which the concealed past of Scottish colonial experiences could be explored and the basis of community memories questioned. T. Devine, Scotland 's Empire 1600-1815, London, 2003, p 73. Devine, op.cit., p 74. Devine, op.cit., chapter 11. Devine, op.cit., p 360. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700-2000, London, 1999 See, for example, Seamus Heaney's poem 'Act of Union' in, North, London, 1975, pp 43-4. The title of the poem puns on the incorporation of the North of Ireland within the United Kingdom after the rest of Ireland had gained independence. In the poem Heaney uses the act of impregnation as a roetaphor for the repeated recolonisation of a 'half-independent' Ireland:

NOTES
And I am still imperially Male, leaving you with the pain The rending process in the colony . . . No treaty I forsee will salve completely your tracked And stretch marked body, the big pain That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again. ' for death is everywhere death blights our crops they blacken in our fields death bas ravaged our herds and flocks the buming pyres of their biebbed and blistered remains send up a pall that chokes us our babies abort themselves unbom we elders anaesthetise ourselves with alchohol we young folk pervertour lives with poisons ... new diseases daily invent themselves the spares of mutating pestilence in each polluted gasp of air we breathe.