Tuesday 19 May 2009

Greeks, Order & Oedipus

This is all a bit rough and ready, but anyway:

I'm afraid my knowledge of the Greeks and their literature is pitifully small but, and bravely ignoring the ramifications of this ignorants, it seems to me they, as in their leading intellectual lights, with the stress on intellect, were obsessed with enclosing life within cohesive, Euclidean, as it were, form; that the rationalising mind, which was coming to feel for such people to be human existence itself rather than an aspect of it, should be able to construct such a rational, spiritually legalistic form within which all the facts were contained and explained, and then with full ease and satisfaction of mind inhabit this perfect, seamless structure, and indeed bow down to it. Thus the Greeks' extreme disquiet over things like the Irrational Numbers of Pi and square root of 2, which thwarted such rational enclosures, instead leading back into the worlds of superstitious infinity the 'rationalists', then presumably as now, imagined they were moving away from.

And from there to the one Greek play somewhat within my own framework of knowledge, however hazy, Oedipus Rex, with its obsession with the transgression of the natural order, which in truth is the human conceived rational map that asserts itself to be the natural order. Oedipus' crimes are, within the moral framework of the time, not crimes at all if treated as naked existential acts. He kills rather than is killed, and marries a woman; it turning out these were unknown to him his father and mother. His 'innocent violations' are of a cold intellectually conceived machine, which is sent into disorder until avenged and repaired. In a way, if looked at as a purely intellectual edifice, an attempt at such a rational structure itself, the play I mean, it's more comedy than tragedy, with an unsolvable riddle being set whose desired end for the author and audience is the satisfaction of the moral and intellectual system which nothing should or must contradict, in which dramatic structure the great man of Oedipus finds himself simultaneously guiltless and overwhelmingly guilty. The rationalising mind tries frienzedly every imaginable avenue to see what is the solution, how is the cohesive rational legalistic structure of life, or imagined life, maintained. This is what is really at stake, and all that is produced to maintain the integrity of the edifice of truth, the structure of reality, is Oedipus senselessly stabs his own eyes out! What good could that do anyone?! Ah, order is restored. Now the machine of truth is free to start running smoothly again. The dangerous 'contradiction' has been absorbed within the system, as absorbed it must, for what kind of rational structure contains contradictions within itself?

No comments: