This book edited by Anspach includes a new translation of Oedipus Tyrannus (O.T.) by Tyrrell (with facing Greek text) as well as fourteen excellent essays by various scholars, first published between 1929 and 2004: Anspach's ‘Introduction’ to R. Girard's Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire (2004) and a selection of the most relevant scholarship in the bibliography to his essay. R. Girard's interest in O.T. stems from his general theory of culture – a critical reply to the works of Freud that replaces ‘sexual desire’ by ‘mimetic desire’ as the primeval drive leading to human society.
Although the authors of the reprinted essays are well-renowned scholars in the fields of both classical and literary studies, the book's intended readers are more likely to be found among those interested in the latter than in the former. In view of this target audience, let me point out from the start the book's biggest problem. A quick look at the table of contents shows that Anspach's reading and presentation adheres to the so-called scapegoat theory. Anyone familiar with recent classical scholarship on O.T. knows that this reading is far from a consensus, but an uninformed reader would be easily misguided and likely to finish the book's preface believing that the scapegoat reading of O.T. is the state of the art. The title ‘The Oedipus Casebook’ fails to circumscribe the scope of the book, reproducing the hubristic attitude of presenting one possible (and rather outdated) reading as ‘the’ ultimate one. The book also has a methodological problem: lack of interaction with reception studies, not only in relation to the reception of Sophocles’ text, but also that of the reception of scholarship itself. The preface does not say a word about each essay's historical, institutional and/or intellectual context, nor does it situate clearly the book's position in a larger debate. Of course, every interpretation must fight its own corner, but it should at least acknowledge the fight, and Anspach does not really engage with the debate around the scapegoat reading of O.T., citing only one of its critics in an unemphatic note (p. 241 n. 34). Thus, the book neglects a significant part of most recent classical scholarship on Greek religion and Athenian tragedy.
Tyrrell's translation is very accurate, clear and fluid. In Part 1, ‘The Ritual Background’, W. Burkert's and J. Bremmer's chapters are still very important readings. Burkert's explanation of the etymology of τραγῳδία, as ‘the song (for the prize) of a goat’, instead of ‘the singing goat’, has certainly imposed itself; and Bremmer's description of scapegoat rituals conveniently considers the main ancient sources on the subject. But Burkert and Bremmer are conversing with nineteenth- or twentieth- (until the 1960/70s) century scholarship, often focused on universal theories proposing a unique key giving access to all human culture, and one of the greatest changes in the last 30 years of scholarship has been the abandonment of ‘big theories’ in favour of particular ‘thick descriptions’. As they insist on a ‘savage’ side of ancient Greek culture, both authors were still reacting to the image of an enlightened ancient Greece mystified as Western civilisation's cradle by nineteenth-century philhellenism, but only to replace one big theory with another, and without taking critical distance from this modern myth of Western culture. Both authors assume that, in ancient Greece, sacrificial killing was perceived as a violent act and attached a universal culpability to the act of killing in sacrificial rituals throughout human history. However, these assumptions, including K. Meuli's ‘comedy of innocence’, have been seriously challenged in studies of ancient Greek and Mediterranean ritual practices, for this model projects Christian representations of sacrifice on pagan contexts.
Regarding M. Delcourt's text, we face the same discomfort of reading an excerpt of an excellent 1944 book in the twenty-first century: her works belong to the ‘Myth and Ritual School’, presuming a univocal relation between the two; she criticises H. Usener's, J.G. Frazer's and G. Glotz's classifications of ancient Greek legends only to propose another arrangement of mythic ‘motives’, replacing the ordeal interpretation by the scapegoat one. Thus, ‘The Ritual Background’ does not give any glimpse on the presence of rituals within O.T.'s fictional world nor on the cultic dimensions of tragic choruses in ancient Athens – themes that have occupied a significant amount of classical scholarship in the past 30 years.
Nevertheless, this ‘Ritual Background’ fits very well the universalist approach presented in the next three chapters, opening Part 2, ‘King and Victim’. For Girard's writings on Oedipus participate in a project of formulating another ‘big theory’: a cycle of mimetic violent reciprocity is at the heart of all human culture, leading to moments of crisis whenever this contagious cycle goes out of control, promoting an abolishment of distinctions organising the community in question, and the scapegoat scheme is a universal solution to these crises, where one individual takes responsibility for everyone's guilt and is expelled from the community, which is then able to re-establish the lost social order. Anspach's chapter raises the question if Girard's ‘interpretation of Oedipus respects the specificity of the ancient Greek text’ (p. 222). However, his argument is far more concerned with Girard's universal theory than with the specificities of Sophocles’ text: he maintains that the text does not assure Oedipus as the killer and son of Laius; he questions the authority of the oracle and verisimilitude of the Theban plague; and he not only doubts that ‘enlightened Greeks’ of the audience would still give ‘credence to such archaic beliefs’, but also rules out the religious elements of the play because ‘culturally specific beliefs cannot account for behavior which is not culturally specific’ (p. 228). Thus, Anspach's arguments enter a vicious circle of applying a theory constructed upon the O.T. text on an analysis of this same text intended to validate this very theory: Oedipus must be innocent because scapegoats and sacrificial victims are supposed to be always playing Meuli's ‘comedy of innocence’. The next two chapters, Girard's and T. Eagleton's, follow up this universalistic perspective, often assuming an evolutionist tone: the former stating that ‘the process of finding a surrogate victim constitutes a major means, perhaps the sole means, by which men expel from their consciousness the truth about their violent nature’ (p. 261); and the latter extrapolating Burkert's suggestions about the sacrificial origins of ancient Greek tragedy defining it as ‘scapegoat song’.
In the next four chapters, a methodological shift can be noticed. Neither J.-P. Vernant nor H.P. Foley equate Oedipus with a scapegoat: for them, he is ‘like a pharmakos’ (p. 289) or ‘as a scapegoat’ (in Foley's title), and here the comparatives make all the difference, since the pharmakos figure is recruited as a specific reality of ancient Athens, not as a universal truth of the human condition. Opening Part 3, ‘Oedipus on Trial’, M. Foucault's excerpt, focused on the validation of juridical truth by the enactment of avowal in the interrogations of the Messenger and the Shepherd, widens the scope to Western dramatic traditions, but does not go further, even if sometimes his analysis seems to project modern European judicial systems onto the ancient Athenian context.
W.C. Greene's article is the first of four chapters dealing with the mixing of singular and plural in the passages of O.T. referring to Laius’ murderer. Such an insistence is not meaningless: Anspach, R.M. Newton, K. Harshbarger and S. Goodhart take the ‘problem of numbers’ to argue that the play leaves room to doubt that Oedipus killed Laius and married his mother, a suggestion also present and well articulated in F. Ahl's proposition that the Corinthian is an opportunist character lying in the play. But Greene's analysis does not support this doubt: in response to a generation of critics who criticised Sophocles’ incongruences, he is interested in making sense of the change between numbers and associates it with Sophocles’ use of dramatic irony as a way to establish a dialogue with the audience, since the mixing of numbers is explicitly addressed by Oedipus in lines 842–5, and this is what prompts the summoning of the Shepherd, whose interrogation puts an end to the dramatic irony.
Much has been written in the last few decades about how Sophocles’ poetry raises expectations that are left unfulfilled and how in a theatre dramatising well-known traditional legends, both deviations from the tradition and irony are useful immersive dramatic resources to keep the audience's attention on the play. But, except perhaps Foucault's, all the chapters of Part 3 approach Sophocles’ text more as a literary piece (i.e. that was meant to be read) than as a script for a dramatic performance, sung and recited by masked actors in ancient Athens; or if the text is treated as dramatic, the acting tradition implicitly discussed is closer to Western nineteenth- and twentieth-century techniques (as the treatment of characters as real persons invested with a modern subjectivity shaped in a Stanislaviskian subtext shows). In a performative perspective, one can ask if the audience would pay attention to the fluctuation in number until it is actually mentioned by the characters. Moreover, Greene acknowledges that in ancient Greek, the plural is not limited to indicating quantity: especially in poetry, one finds examples of ‘emotional plural’, ‘plural of majesty’ and of an ‘allusive plural’, ‘in which an unnamed individual may be referred to’ (p. 369); and there is a more specific type of plural not mentioned by Greene that could clarify Sophocles’ play with numbers in O.T., a use also attested in Athenian courts: the ‘plural of reserve’ to refer to a criminal, especially a murderer; this could minimise the audience's focus on the mixing of numbers and also explain why, in lines 122–3, Creon's character specifies that bandits (in the plural) slew Laius ‘not with the strength of one but with a throng of hands’; under this light, Oedipus’ frequent use of the singular, against Creon's plural, could give support to Foley's proposition that the play contrasts two types of leadership, the reluctant leader showing caution in consistently using the plural, and Oedipus demonstrating his eagerness and lack of restraint in using the singular. As to the suggestions that the Corinthian is an opportunist liar and that Sophocles challenges the mythic tradition, one could argue that ancient Greek poetry, epic as well as tragic, often plays with its audience's expectations by making ‘fate’ and mythopoetic tradition coincide, but never going too far as to completely change the mythic past – the two endings of Philoctetes are an extreme example; and one could also argue that whenever characters lie in ancient Greek plays, the falsity of their sayings is never left entirely to the audience to guess.
Had the book made an allusion to its Girardian inspiration more explicitly in its title and included an essay situating its chapters, it would be an excellent volume about this undoubtedly important chapter in the O.T.'s reception. As it is, it should be read with some further guidance.
