As the editors make clear in their introduction, the contributors to this volume have been asked to examine only those tragedies connected to the house of Laius or the house of Atreus. Given that this subset of extant Greek drama furnished Freud with the ‘Oedipus complex’ and the ‘Electra complex’, it is unsurprising that many of the contributions draw on the tools and writings of psychoanalytic theory. The book is pleasingly cross-disciplinary, with contributions from experts in continental philosophy, French literature and English Studies as well as several Classicists who have a long-standing reputation for combining psychoanalytical, feminist and Marxist approaches with robust and original scholarship on Greek epic and tragedy.
The express aim of the volume is to examine the links between the representation of sexual difference and the workings of political structures in Greek tragedy. Leading off from the work of J.-P. Vernant, the editors think that Greek tragedy serves as a ‘potent site for the exploration of anxieties associated with the relation between the body politic and its embodied, especially sexed, subjects’ (p. 1). They subscribe to the view (familiar from the work of Zeitlin, Mendelsohn and others) that sexual difference is integral to tragedy's status as a reflection of a moment of ideological crisis and transformation in Athenian society. The quality and usefulness of the individual essays amply justify the volume's existence. I am less sure that they constitute a unified and coherent project.
P. Burian's opening synkrisis between Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes and Euripides' Phoenician Women shows us that Greek tragedy is far from static in its instantation of what Vernant called ‘the tragic moment’. In Aeschylus' play it is strongly suggested that the destruction of the royal house assures the survival of the polis. The tragedy demonstrates that the fate of the dynastic family and the fate of Thebes are dangerously intertwined. But Euripides' version is constructed in such a way as to separate the fate of the Labdacid genos from that of the city. It is Menoiceus' self-sacrifice which saves the city rather than Polyneices and Eteocles' mutual destruction. Antigone's rejection of marriage in order to lead Oedipus into the wilderness underscores the opposition between her genos and the polis. For Burian, Euripides' stress on the brothers' factional philotimia is an expression of the state of political culture in Athens around 409 b.c.e. By contrast, the Aeschylean version reflects tension between the old aristocratic order and the new Cleisthenic dispensation. Thus Eteocles is both doomed dynast and saviour and leader of his polis. This is a characteristically careful and fruitful synthesis of dramaturgical and historicist analysis: a world away, then, from the simplistic Hegelian readings of Antigone which the next chapter attacks. While it is always good to be reminded of Greek tragedy's aesthetic autonomy, I struggled to identify what enhanced understanding of the play emerged from C. Sheperdson's polemic.
M. Buchan's fresh and intelligent chapter, ‘The Laius Complex’, focusses on a well-known problem in the Oedipus Tyrannus. The account of Laius' death which makes Oedipus realise that he might be the old king's murderer contradicts an earlier report from a slave who insisted that he saw many robbers at the crossroads. In contrast to Ahl's famous conclusion that Oedipus did not actually do it, Buchan concedes that Oedipus is Laius' physical killer. But the play's references to multiple murderers at the crossroads reflect the latent desires and guilt of the king's slave, Jocasta, Laius himself and perhaps even the entire Theban community. Inter alia, Buchan points out that in saving the infant Oedipus, the slave must in a sense be desirous of his master's death. Little wonder, then, that he flees both the violence at the crossroads and the city now under Oedipus' control: he is one of several agents in the drama who share some responsibility for the events that unfold. Where Buchan ranges wide, D. Schur zooms in on one line, namely Jocasta's words of reassurance to Oedipus after they have been brought news of Polybus' death: καὶ μὴν μέγας γ᾽ ὀϕθαλμὸς οἱ πατρὸς τάϕοι (OT 987: ‘and yet the burial rites of your father are a great eye’). Where most translators and critics are happy to render ophthalmos as ‘sign’ or ‘comforting light’, Schur argues that it must retain some of its literal meaning (‘eye’) and is an example of ‘uncanny language’ as discussed by Freud. Jocasta uses a phrase which is unwittingly prophetic and yet also consonant with the play's imagery.
We then move back to Antigone and two essays which very directly address the stated aims of the volume. V. Wohl shows how the play's legal aporia reflects its staging of irresolvable sexual difference and its adumbrations of incest. The essay is original and illuminating, not least in its closing suggestion that tragedy in a sense ‘enacts’ justice and the promise of democracy through its deferral of resolution, its guarantee that wisdom (euboulia) will always come too late and through a double-edged logic in which the possibility of sexual justice for women is both revealed and yet closed off. E.P. Miller engages Hegel's readings of Antigone and the Eumenides (and Irigaray's and Derrida's readings of Hegel). Both tragedies represent a concept of ‘natural law’ as emerging from the opposition between divine and human law. But that opposition can only be defined and thereby transcended through its mapping onto the opposition between male and female.
Several important studies of Greek tragedy owe a debt to J. Kristeva's distinctive definition of ‘intertextuality’. But Z. shows us that the Oresteia's incorporation and transformation of the Erinyes is also illustrative of Kristeva's argument that democratic states' constructions and accommodations of threatening strangers ‘without’ the state are always a reflection (and repression) of the fact that citizens are psychically ‘strangers to themselves’. P.-A. Brault continues the theme of the feminine and foreign ‘other’ in Aeschylus. Her close reading of Cassandra stresses the connection between her alterity and tragedy's function in foregrounding the dynamic relationship between revelation and denial in their psychic and political dimensions.
The next two chapters deal with Electra. McC. offers a persuasive mapping of the thwarted political impulses and potential exhibited by Sophocles' Electra. Her passionate speech and mourning in the absence of male kin modulate into the fantasy of her adopting the role of assassin. But Orestes' return heralds the transformation of her anger (orgê) into a pleasure (hedonê) which is then repressed. She is ultimately contained and silenced by Orestes' actions. McC. draws on E. O'Neill's claim that Electra ‘peters out into undramatic married banality’ but suggests that ‘the whole world around her follows suit’ (p. 235). In a typically astute piece, K. Ormand shows how Euripides' version ‘becomes, in part, a meditation on what it means to exile a woman, a person who even when occupying the seat of “citizen” has none of the participatory rights of citizen men’, and he shows how its typically tragic presentation of archaic and contemporary language and concepts to do with social status and citizenship ‘intensify Electra's isolation from family, community and city’ (p. 250). The first and only time Euripides' Electra addresses Argos as a polis (as opposed to an astu) and her fellow-women as politides (as opposed to astai) is also the moment when she must leave them all behind as an exile. For Ormand, this is a Euripidean comment on the structure of women's citizenship in Athens and an expression of women's ambivalent relation to the polis.
The volume closes with M. Griffith's excellent chapter ‘Orestes and the In-laws’. It offers a departure from a recent emphasis on Euripides' Orestes as an intensely self-conscious, baroque and darkly ironic work which resonates with the political situation of Athens in 409. For Griffith, the key to the play is its ‘nexus of marriages and in-law relationships that is (re) affirmed in Apollo's dispensation’ at the end of the tragedy (p. 303). He convincingly shows that the play's difference from Aeschylus' Oresteia lies in the uncomfortable degree to which it highlights the human costs of dynastic power politics and the decisive role of divine patronage, intermarriage and family interests (rather than law or democracy) in achieving its dubious resolution.
