OEDIPUS AND HAMLET

An Observation about Greek and Modern Tragic Heroes

WE ALL KNOW THE STORY OF OEDIPUS, son of Laius and Jocasta, king and queen of Thebes, at whose birth was prophesied that he would murder his father and marry his mother. And despite extreme measures taken by his parents to forestall such a prophesy, and then later by Oedipus himself as a grown man, this is exactly what happens, thus giving us one of the great tragedies of ancient Greek drama.

Oedipus’ reaction to the possibility that he murdered his own father is truly remarkable when seen from a modern perspective. What does Oedipus do when the truth begins to unfold?  He pursues it.  He calls in witnesses in order to pin the truth down.  And once the hard truth is known, Oedipus himself submits to the banishment that such a crime imposes for a punishment.  The objectivity which he exhibits through regarding the crime and his responsibility for it is all the more remarkable when seen in contrast to the complex mechanism, familiar to modern psychology, by which guilt is denied or minimized.  The modern tragic hero, to the contrary, has none of this objectivity towards his own guilt, and this because the way he is construed, the modern tragic hero is innocent of any crime.  The tragic form has undergone a transformation. The modern tragic hero has himself become the victim; the victim is now the murderer, who suffers misfortune not as a consequence of a defect and some resulting crime, but innocently. 

It is quite possible that a Greek looking ahead at modern literature would be unable to explain why we derive any pleasure from literature of this kind, from the sight of unexplainable suffering, which is what innocent suffering is. After all, a healthy man may derive pleasure from seeing the working out of justice, as in the case of Oedipus, but a healthy man does not take pleasure in the spectacle of afflicted innocence. Why then this literature, and where this pleasure?

That we have such a literature is explainable by the fact that for some reason we need this literature, that the very reasons why the Greek, who responds to the working out of justice in Oedipus, would be repelled by this literature explain why we are nurtured by it. This need may be identified as a need to deny guilt, antithesis to Oedipus’ need to get at the truth and determine guilt.  It follows then that the perfect hero for us would be one in whom no guilt is found, namely, an innocent man. And this innocent one must suffer because, as every conscience knows and demands, the crime must be expiated, but now not because he himself has committed the crime, has done evil and by this evil doing has called suffering down on his head, as a natural consequence, but rather as one who suffers an expiation of a crime he did not commit, but is rather the victim of.

The modern hero is a victim and we find this pleasurable because it serves the purpose of that mechanism by which the truth of our own crimes is avoided. The impulsiveness of the crime committed by Oedipus, its simplicity, has turned into the most complicated behavior by the time we reach Hamlet, for instance. Compare the mental gymnastics Hamlet puts himself through with the directness of Oedipus.  If the classical mind took delight in the logical unfolding of events in the Greek play, the modern mentality takes delight in Hamlet’s unending dialogue with himself by which he persuades himself, as us, that he doesn’t really want to do what he does in fact do, that, anyway, he is caught in a web of circumstances that force upon this tender conscience a most hateful course of action.  We take pleasure in this drama because Hamlet gets to kill his father--stepfather—without at the same time looking like a man who wants to kill his authority.  Rather he looks to us like a sincere, soul-searching young man of fine sensibility who has gotten entangled in a situation which makes any other course of action impossible.  And this is just what we want to believe about Hamlet, because we want to believe it about ourselves, that fundamentally we are good and innocent, that the evil we do we ourselves suffer, as its primary victim—the murderer has become the victim—incomprehensible to the ancient mind, perhaps, but standard fare for us in the Christian west.  And interestingly, enough, as a confirmation of this, it is very difficult for the modern reader looking back at the Greek play to see in the hero Oedipus anything but a perfect example of the innocent victim who suffers the outrageous whims of fate—and all this despite Oedipus; own persuasion as to the objectivity of his own guilt.

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For the modern writer who does not quite know what to do with the haunting Judeo-Christian overhang of guilt that still afflicts our consciences, the essential dramatic insight is that we are all victims.  Hear what the thoroughly modern author F. Scott Fitzgerald says about this in a letter to his daughter:  “The thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read—the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions those of defeat.”

                                                                                                         -Contributed