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.
9 Praesentia
On my first visit to Los Angeles I surprised my hosts — and myself — by asking to be taken down to the sea. I found that, more even than wanting to visit the streets down which Philip Marlowe had walked, or any of the city's great museums, which my hosts were anxious to show me, I wanted to dip my hand in the Pacific. We drove out of town and along the coast in the direction of the Getty Museum. They stopped the car and I got out and went across the dirty beach and bent down where the waves lapped the shore.
The water was warmer than it ever is in the Channel, though perhaps a little colder than it is in the Mediterranean. It tasted, of course, as I found when I put my hand up to my mouth, of salt. I dabbed my forehead and cheeks, took one last look and trudged back to the waiting car.
Why this need to touch? Why had I not been content simply to see the Pacific? (Why indeed should I have wanted even to see it, since I knew very well what it must look like, no different from any other stretch of sea at the edge of a big city?)
I don't know. I only know that, having got to Los Angeles, I had to do more than merely visit the city, more than merely see the ocean. Dipping my hand in it confirmed in some way that I had been there. Less permanent than a photo (for how long does a sensation last?), the act of dipping my hand in the Pacific nevertheless did what no photo could ever do. It confirmed that I had indeed been there, been there ‘in person’. Within a very short while, of course, I could recall nothing of that moment, only my sense of myself hurrying across the sand and the feeling of disappointment that the water did not seem in any sense distinctive.