Blind Eyes and Open Ears (Oedipus Tyrannos, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our series on Oedipus Tyrannos, Emily Wilson highlights the delights and challenges of translating Greek tragedy into English, the play's long history of adaptation and live staging, and the ways in which Oedipus Tyrannos has continued to resonate with audiences over millennia.  What can the titular tyrant's ill-fated mistakes still teach us about the dangers of misinformation and unchecked power?
 
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies and Graduate Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Oedipus Tyrannos,  go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/OT. 

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Oedipus Tyrannos: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4MD6ds83udqlbI8jvbR8ic?si=ea7aa9974f2e4fb1.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/oedipustyrannos/part2/transcript.

Transcript

[Music]  

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present part two of our interview devoted to Oedipus Tyrannos by Sophocles, with its editor Emily Wilson. In part one we discussed who Sophocles was and the context in which he wrote the play, the challenges of translation, as well as some of the characters who populate the play. In this second episode, we ask Emily Wilson her favorite line, an Oedipus Tyrannos playlist, her hot take on the play, and much more. Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Among her many publications, she has translated Euripides, Homer, and Seneca, including three books available in Norton Library editions: Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Homer's “The Odyssey,” and, the topic of today's episode, Sophocles’ “Oedipus Tyrannos.” Emily Wilson, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast! 

[Emily:] Hi again! 

[Mark:] So, why don't we start with you telling us when you first encountered this work? 

[Emily:] I honestly don't— [Laughter] I've been wracking my brains to figure out! Um, I – I did, I first started learning Greek in high school, but I know that it wasn't one of the plays we read in Greek in high school. So I think it's possible that I first read it in Greek as an undergraduate at Oxford. Um, but I feel like I should have a, you know, origin story about it, but I don't have a good.  

[Mark:] That you fell in love with it at first sight. But that didn't happen? [laughter] 

[Emily:] I always love – no, it did happen! I mean, I always love Sophocles, no question. I always love Sophocles and I wanted to do as much tragedy as I possibly could at every stage of my academic career. I always loved it. 

[Mark:] And so when you began reading Sophocles, did you read him mostly in the original or did you read him in English? 

[Emily:] Mostly in Greek, yes. Yeah, because I – the British system is a weird system, and you specialize much too early, so I didn't really do much else except learn Greek. 

[Mark:] So you went right to the source. [Emily:] Yes. 

[Mark:] We mentioned in the first episode, you translated the Odyssey, you have a Norton Library edition of the Iliad coming out. When you were thinking of projects that you wanted to take on, and translations that you'd like to do, why did you land on Oedipus Tyrannos? 

[Emily:] I've always loved this play. I've loved Soph— tragedy in general is just such – it's weird to say “tragedy is so fun” but I do think it's really fun. Um. you get such an intense experience so fast with a tragedy. And I think, I think I mentioned last time I had done some translations of some Euripides, and so I thought it'd be a really fun challenge to try and think about how is, um, the dramatic verse texture of Sophocles different from that of Euripides, and how can I convey that in English? Um, I'd written about this play for my, in my first book,  and I've kind of been obsessed with it for many years. And I thought it would be exciting to see if I could put into English. 

[Mark:] For a non-specialist, if you say the title “Oedipus Tyrannos,” Oedipus has a lot of connotations that have nothing to do with the actual play. Is that a misreading of the play? Does Oedipus have an “Oedipus complex?” 

[Emily:] Well, Jocasta says in the play, “Many men have had sex with their mothers in dreams, and it's not a big deal.” So, is she talking about an Oedipus complex? I don't think she is. I think she's saying, um – so in ancient dream discourse, having sex with your mother is a very lucky dream, because it signifies a sort of return to… to something good. It signifies something about, um, being taken care of. Um, so I don't – I think the particular ways that Freud reads the myth are very distinct from how anyone who's actually reading the play would read it. For its analysis in “The Interpretation of Dreams,” it’s so much more about the myth – about the myth of desire, of a person who might actually, deliberately sleep with their mother, as opposed to the character of Oedipus in this play, who of course didn't deliberately pick Jocasta because she was his mother and didn't deliberately kill Laius because he was his father. 

[Mark:] But then wouldn't Freud also say there's no such thing as accidents? [Laughter] 

[Emily:] Of course, yes. 

[Mark:] Would the contemporary audience have considered killing your father and sleeping with your mother to be a trope? Something that they – that was in, sort of, dramatic discourse, or is this an original concept?  

[Emily:] Well, it wasn't an original mythic concept, because we have allusions to Oedipus all the way, as far back as Homer. So the myth was much, much older than Sophocles. Um, the tropes of “do you have a Freudian complex?” Obviously, that's, that's kind of more of a stretch for the fifth century, right? I mean, the assumptions about psychology were very different in ancient times versus the assumptions that we have in the sort of post-20th century analysis of psychology. We have an idea of ourselves as deeply formed by sexual urges and deeply formed by early childhood experiences, and neither one of those things is exactly how ancient people thought about human urges and human development. 

[Mark:] Emily, what is your favorite line in the play? 

[Emily:] I'm not sure if this is my favorite, because I love a lot of the play, but I will read you just one line that has Oedipus’ name in it, which I think is a fun line that was impossible to translate because it puns on the name Oedipus. 

“ὁ μηδὲν εἰδὼς Οἰδίπους, ἔπαυσά νιν” (line 397). 

[Mark:] And what's the translation of that? 

[Emily:] “Then Know-Nothing Oedipus, I stopped her.” So, it's him boasting about the Sphinx, and he's punning on his name – he's “μηδὲν εἰδὼς Οἰδίπους,” and “Oedipus” is the “Know-Foot.” So, he's the, he's the “Not Know Foot Know-Foot.”  

[Mark:] So Oedipus is clever. 

[Emily:] He's clever! He's – he's “sophos” (σοφός), he's very smart, yes. Yeah, that kind of cleverness might not be enough, but yes, he's very clever. 

[Mark:] Not just clever in adventure, but also linguistically witty. 

[Emily:] Verbally witty, yes. 

[Mark:] And that's important to convey in the translation, obviously. 

[Emily:] Yes. [Mark:] Yeah. [Emily:] Yes.  

[Mark:] When you teach this book, and this may go back to what you were saying earlier about Freud, what techniques do you use? Do you have to sort of acknowledge the contemporary connotations of Oedipus? How do you present this to current readers? 

[Emily:] I think students tend to be very much interested in whether or not Oedipus is – whether or not this play is a tragedy of fate, and the roles of fate and the degree to which anyone, according to the ancient Greeks, can escape from what was fated. And so, I find that it – I spend a lot of class time sort of trying to disentangle what's the difference between the myth and the play as composed by Sophocles? To what degree is Sophocles interested in fate? I think, actually, fairly little. I think he's very interested in interpretation and relatively little interested in fate. And I think those – that question actually gets you to some interesting places about what exactly is going on in dramatic technique and how can we disentangle the dramatic arc from the premise of the play? 

[Mark:] You say interested in interpretation? [Emily:] Yes.  [Mark:] In what sense? 

[Emily:] He's interested in – in the sense that, um, he's interested in generating multiple different sets of words that have to be interpreted. Like, this person will kill, will— [Mark:] Ah. [Emily:] —but this is the oracle that came from Delphi through Creon. This is the oracle that Oedipus heard, this is what the drunk guy said at dinner one time about his father, this is the – these are the words that Jocasta had heard about her baby. These multiple different sets of words, each of which have to be interpreted, each of which are going to be misinterpreted in the course of this play. And then words layering on top of other words. How do all of those fit together? Is there any way to hear them all and see them all? There doesn't seem to be, unless you can live with the blind eyes and open ears of a prophet. 

[Mark:] Does this emphasis that Sophocles has – is that distinct from other tragedians of the era? 

[Emily:] I think his interest in, um, in the denseness of metaphor is, in a way, overlapping with what Aeschylus was already doing in the generation before, that he, Aeschylus, was already interested in the – you can see this in the Oresteia – in dense, riddling, metaphorical language which will only gradually get unfolded. But in the Oresteia, it gets unfolded and look! There is a political message at the end. And there is a message which all comes clear once you're in Athens and it's democracy and it's patriarchy and that's good. It's all fine. Whereas in Sophocles, there's an ambiguity that just always runs through it, and a double meaning or multiple meanings that always run through it. Even the fact that the end of the play goes on so long after the revelations. Oedipus remains on stage. Oedipus is the enigma now. How do we interpret him? Creon just wants to bundle him off and get rid of him as soon as possible, but he's still there. We still have to look at him even though he's not looking back at us. We have to interpret him, and what does it mean? 

[Mark:] Emily, we are trying to get our podcast to become more controversial, so— [laughter] —I believe you probably have a hot take about Oedipus Tyrannos. Am I right? 

[Emily:] Maybe I can say it's not his best work. 

[Mark:] Ah, interesting. Tell us why. 

[Emily:] Uh, I think the depiction of Deianeira in the Trachiniae is much more full than the depiction of Jocasta in the Oedipus. Um, I think the figure of Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus is in some ways more interesting than the figure of Oedipus in this play. 

[Mark:] How about linguistically, the way – just the poetry of how it's written – is this, indeed, his best, or do you also find, uh, strengths in other plays? 

[Emily:] I think we need to just reiterate that we have seven plays by Sophocles, which is a tiny miniscule percentage of the amount of output that Sophocles created in his lifetime. There's some wonderful passages and lines in this, and, in fact, I don't think this is – I'm not going to, not going to diss Oedipus! I think this is a wonderful play. I love it! [Laughter] Yeah, that was a hot take, as opposed to something I actually believe. Um, I mean, there were also very, very wonderful scenes, wonderful moments in all seven of the plays and also in the fragments we have – we have some fragments of Sophocles from plays that we don't have. Um, I'm not going to diss the Antigone, either, which is also a fantastic play.  

[Mark:] Well, I think, uh, a hot take could be your comments about Creon. Is Creon an underappreciated character? 

[Emily:] Creon is a fascinating character in this play, and I love the consistency of characterization of Creon in this play and also how different the characterization of Creon is in the, in the three Theban plays that Sophocles wrote that we still have: the Antigone and the Oedipus at Colonus. That he, in this play he's so much a family man and so clearly not wanting to air dirty laundry in public, um, but then he's forced to do it by the actions of his brother-in-law who doesn't seem to understand the norms of aristocratic life and Thebes. Um, and he's a sympathetic character in certain ways. I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with thinking, um, screaming out your business to the whole people of Thebes isn't necessarily the best way to deal with the political crisis. 

[Mark:] What is the history of performance of this play in terms of adaptations or repurposing? Is this a play that's frequently reimagined for the stage? 

[Emily:] It's very popular, yes. I mean, I think one thing just to remember about all of Greek tragedy is that there was a long period when, in the anglophone world and European worlds, it wasn't really, um, known, thought about, read, performed at all. Um, and so the works of Seneca were far more influential in early modern European and British contexts than anything in Greek tragedy. So, the Seneca version of Oedipus, which we haven't talked about at all, but it’s a fabulous play and really plays up the goriness in a wonderful way. I mean, it plays up that Oedipus isn't just stabbing himself – he's wishing he could sort of gouge out every element of his interior body. But it's gory in a, at a whole new level and rhetorical at a whole new level. So, the Seneca Oedipus was extremely popular and important. And then, you know, since the 18th century, this – the Sophoclean Oedipus – has become extremely important and has become important sort of within discourses about, um, Enlightenment and, of course, Oedipus as a figure of – is he a figure of enlightened man or not enlightened man? And the dialectic of enlightenment can't really be discussed without talking about Oedipus. Um, and then, of course, there have also been a whole series of modern stage adaptations. There was a, um, masked version – there've been several masked versions. Some of them sort of trying to play up the alienness of it, that we're not going to do an enlightened Oedipus, we're going to do a distant alien or bloody or weird Oedipus of different kinds. That there was a Ted Hughes Oedipus. Um, there have also been rewritings, adaptations of many different kinds. Um, I loved a recent novel that did a sort of trans Oedipus reimagined in a modern contemporary context. Um, there's also a wonderful play by Rita Dove called “The Darker Face of the Earth” that sets the story of Oedipus on a slave plantation, and the sort of ultimate horror isn't incest and parricide, the ultimate horror is slavery. And incest and parricide then sort of take this, um, they take on a different kind of context when you're aware of moral pollution as well as religious pollution. 

[Mark:] That's fascinating. Have you seen many of these adaptations or, uh, any performance of this in the original? 

[Emily:] I haven't seen it in the original, no! Um, at Cambridge University they do a Greek play every, um, regularly in Greek, and I don't know if they've done this within a time that I've been there. I certainly would have gone, if they had. [Laughter] But I would love to see it! I've seen, you know, clips of different productions on, you know, online and in DVD form, but I have not seen it in the original. I'd love to. 

[Mark:] You mentioned the orchestra and the role of dance in the, in the theater. What songs would you put on an Oedipus Tyrannos playlist? 

[Emily:] Love this question! Yes! [Laughter] So, um, I was thinking about this and I thought the the obvious but wrong answer is the Tom Lehrer, um, comedy song it's “let me tell you a story about Oedipus Rex – he looooved his mother!” [Laughter] It's a repeated punchline about how funny it is that he was always having sex with his mother. But I don't think that's the song of Sophocles' play. I think that's a funny song about the myth. Um, the song about the – songs about the play, I think, should be songs that are darker, moodier, and about the process of discovery. So I was thinking, um, Ella Fitzgerald, what – “How Long Has This Been Going On?” might be a good song for the playlist. I mean, that sort of gradual discovery of something that's always been there all along. Or the Suzanne Vega “Night Vision” might also be on the playlist. Songs within that sort of register of, it's about blindness and it's about the gradual sense of “I'm realizing something which maybe I should have already known.” 

[Mark:] That's interesting, and that's consistent with what your introduction talks about about – this coming to knowledge, discovery, uh, with all of the – with all of the pain of that experience. How about “The End” by The Doors? 

[Emily:] Oh, good one! Yes, yes, that too! Yes, love it. Yes. 

[Mark:] That's not even a subtle allusion, right? That's – he's coming right out. 

[Emily:] Totally. He – he's doing it. 

[Mark:] Yeah. Emily, is there a portion of the play that you could read for us in the original Greek, just so we could come a little bit closer to it? 

[Emily:] So, we didn't talk about one of the the tricky translation things of “how do you deal with the, um, the words that are basically just screaming?” Which – of which there are many in – Attic tragedy has a lot of sort of conventionalized screams like “oi oi,” “ai ai,” “oi moi,” um, where we don't, we – In English, unfortunately, you know, we have “alas” which isn't really useful. Um, so I feel like I couldn't really use “alas.” But, um, this is Oedipus screaming and it starts with a couple of those words. 

“Αἰαῖ, αἰαῖ, δύστανος ἐγώ, ποῖ γᾶς φέρομαι τλάμων; πᾶ μοι φθογγὰ διαπωτᾶται φοράδην; ἰὼ δαῖμον, ἵν' ἐξήλου.”  (lines 1308-1311). — “Oh oh oh! I am undone! What land can I go to? The pity, the pain! Where are my words being carried? They fly all around – spirit, oh spirit, how far you have leapt!”  

[Mark:] That's great. Emily, in our first episode you talked about a moment in the play where there's this – a bit of critical controversy, interpretive ambiguity. And I wanted to point you to your notes on that, and maybe you can talk a little bit more about it. So, it's in page 40 – it's on page 41 of the text, but on the notes it's page 79. And you're talking about the phrase “arrogance fathers sovereignty.” And you talk in your notes a little bit about this, not confusion, but a little bit about this controversy. I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on it for us. 

[Emily:] This is the chorus generalizing about power. And so, I have, as a – I translated “arrogance fathers sovereignty” and it could, as I suggest in the notes, be, um – some versions of the original Greek text have it the other way around, that “sovereignty (or “tyrannia”) fathers hubris.” So, the word that we we get the English word “hubris” from, we present it as if this is a sort of quote from an ancient Greek word. And we sort of use the word “hubris” to mean, um, something like the tragic flaw that the tragic hero’s always supposed to have – his arrogance. In the Greek, that word “hubris” is also a legal term that suggests something like grievous bodily harm or violence against, um, against people. So there's a way that, um, this line seems to be speaking in some way or other about the relationship between political power and the overstepping of the marks that there should be about how a person treats another person. Um, so one of the big sort of dilemmas about this passage is the degree to which it's – Is it criticizing power in general? Is it criticizing one-man rule? Is it suggesting from an Athenian, democratic perspective we don't want to be living in a tyranny? We don't want to have just one guy be in charge of us? Maybe the lesson of this, this whole play is, “Don't have just one guy in charge because he's going to turn out to have some horrible skeletons in his closet! [Laughter] You want to get rid of him! So, you need to have many multiple guys in charge, so that even if half of them have, you know, have murdered their fathers— [Laughter] —there will be some left to carry on with the government.” 

[Mark:] And in the phrase “arrogance fathers sovereignty,” as you point out, when we first meet Oedipus he is taking on, wouldn't you say, a paternal role over the— 

[Emily:] Very explicitly! Yes, very explicitly he presents himself as the father of his people. So there's a sort of question about “what does it mean to be a father?” Oedipus presents himself as this metaphorical father, but it's obviously a problematic kind of fatherhood if you're not actually the literal sower of the people of Thebes. The people of Thebes are also supposed to have been sown by dragon teeth, and they have this sort of problematic heritage as well as problematically incestuous history. And then at the end of the play, Oedipus is again a problematic father who wants to embrace his children. But how can he? Because they're also his sisters and that's… kind of creepy! [Laughter] So fatherhood in general sort of runs through all these lines where you would think – and this is part of what I was saying about the denseness of metaphor in Sophocles and how important that is – that father, it's important that it's not just power gives way or pride gives way to, or leads on to, it's specifically “fathers” or “begets” or “sows.” That imagery of being a father is there, even in the most abstract lines of the play. 

[Mark:] Emily, two other things from your notes that I'm wondering if you could expand on a little bit. One is your description of the plague, which we see right when the play begins. What do – what do we as contemporary readers need to know about the plague historically, but also dramatically in the play? 

[Emily:] I mean, part of this depends on when we think the play was performed, right? I mean, I think it – that that question might be answered a bit differently if we think this play is being performed right after a huge outbreak of plague in Athens versus if it's – there's been less of a huge outbreak of plague recently in Athens. Um, but the the horror of plague as a real life thing that the people in the audience might be experiencing is definitely something – we need to be taking that seriously and be aware that this is not… We as contemporary readers may have read about the plague of Athens in Thucydides, and there's a very vivid description of the plague of Athens in Thucydides which, in some ways, parallels the description in verse at the start of this play. Some of the details about even the animals dying in the fields, the completely widespread nature of the of the plague, and the ways that it destroys the bonds between people as well as bodies, that it's not just destructive of the physical elements of human life but also cultural, social, political elements of human life. I think we need to be aware of that and see how how dangerous plague is. 

[Mark:] I couldn't help thinking about it in our contemporary context, about the, uh, emotional, psychological, and physical repercussions. And I wonder – and seems like that would have been consistent at the time, too. 

[Emily:] Right. We didn't talk about that in terms of, you know, my translation of the play. But obviously I was affected by the pandemic as much as anyone and affected by that whole question of “In the wake of a pandemic or in the wake of plague, what kinds of political responses could be adequate?” Is Oedipus doing – you know, and also is it a problem if you're always thinking “There's a pandemic – we need a single, male ruler to be our savior. Whether it's, you know, the people of New York are going to put too much faith in Andrew Cuomo, or it's going to be some other— [Laughter] —sort of contemporary relevance to all of that, yes. 

[Mark:] The last question I was going to ask you about your notes, we've talked about it a little bit in the first episode. I'm interested in your thoughts about the Sphinx. Um, that would have been eminently well known at the time. Could you tell us about the Sphinx's role, both in the play and in in that culture? 

[Emily:] Yeah. So, sphinxes are a very, very ancient part of, um, Mediterranean culture. And, as you and everybody presumably knows, they are Egyptian before they're Greek. Um, there were depictions of – huge depictions of sphinxes in Egypt, sphinxes in Egyptian art. Um, the Greek iconography for sphinxes tends to be a little bit different. Um, they're sort of more petite than they are in, um, Egyptian art. But, um, there was – it's one of many, many sort of hybrid monsters, usually coded as female, usually coded as at least partly divine, that occur in, um, Greek and neighboring ancient mythologies, ancient, um, sort of systems of imaginative thought. Within the play, the Sphinx is, as I think I already said in the previous one, the riddle of the Sphinx is never spelled out. And I think that really matters for what Sophocles is doing, that he's working by allusion to these texts which have to be interpreted. And you may not ever get the sort of “Here's the final version of this text.” We don't ever – we never get the final version of what is the riddle of the Sphinx. And presumably there were several possible versions, um, swirling around. One of the things that's fascinating, also, is that in this play, this very unusual use of the word “poet,” “aoidos” (ἀοιδός), um, for this female Sphinx. So she's a – she's in a way presented as analogous to Homer or to Sophocles himself. She's the composer of the words that everyone else has to interpret. And if not, they're going to, you know, they're going to [??] it. 

[Mark:] Excellent. So, Emily, what is the contemporary relevance that you are presenting in your introduction and with this edition? 

[Emily:] I mean, I guess I partly think that it doesn't have to be just sort of tied to a single year a single moment, because I do think that the resonance of what this play – what does it mean to read this play two years ago in the way – in the height of the pandemic was probably different from what it's going to be five years from now. And I really hope that this translation is still being read five years from now. But, you know, who knows what plague we’ll be going through by then— [Laughter] —and who knows what political crises we’ll be going through by then. Because, presumably, there'll be more of both coming up. Um, I mean, I think sort of it – one can sort of speak about broad brush resonances as opposed to “here's the specific this day, this date” kinds of things, which I also think is part – is more of what Sophocles was doing, too. That he was interested in sort of broad brush, provocative resonance, but not necessarily “here's a specific one-for-one correspondence between Oedipus and any one political leader.” People have tried to say, “Oedipus must be Pericles! Oedipus must be this specific ancient Athenian!” and I don't think that necessarily flies. I think maybe he's a little bit like an Athenian in his arrogance and his cleverness, but, you know, there are other people who are arrogant and clever who are not Athenians, too. And we could probably think of some nowadays. I mean, to me one of the really striking things that I think – when I first started reading and studying this play, I wasn't nearly as conscious of as I am when I go back to it now – is just how preoccupied with insiderness and outsiderness it is. How in – How much it's so much about sort of policing the boundaries of a community and defining who is an insider, who is an outsider, how do you earn a status as part of a community? And Oedipus’ sort of pride in having earned his way into becoming an insider but thinking he's done it by cleverness, not by birth, and then also policing the boundaries of “whoever's killed Laius must be completely outside our part, our half.” But then also within the, within the insiders in Thebes, he doesn't want to listen to them. He doesn't want to listen to Tiresias and Creon, who are different kinds of insiders. So I think the resonance is in terms of whatever's going on in our era of partisanship, our era of globalization means a lot more movement of peoples between different communities, and yet also different kinds of policing of boundaries between different communities – different sort of questions about what does it mean to have knowledge or understanding, and how can you – and how painful can that be? Do you have to have knowledge of yourself before you can know anything else, and, again, what does it mean to know yourself? I don't think that's a sort of fully answerable question but this play lays out a way of struggling with it. And I also think that, maybe I should just say also, that one thing I want this translation to do is just make people understand how fun and exciting this play is. How quick it is. But I just did a staged reading of it with some high schoolers, and they really had a great time. And especially they had a great time with the stichomythia, the passages where it's one line, one line, one line, one line. Like, the TalkBack element of it is really fun to do out loud and fun for people of, you know, pretty much any age, any background. 

[Mark:] One of the themes that you elaborate on in your introduction is the danger of the quest for knowledge. I wonder if, 2023, there's any kind of, uh, resonance to what Oedipus finds out when he is looking for the truth. 

[Emily:] Yeah, I think there’s a lot of resonance. I mean, I think there's resonance, I mean, on some level, with the sort of question about whether doing your own research rather than learning from others is one of the tropes of our culture, right? People who don't want to ask the professionals for, um, for something that they might have spent their careers learning about, but instead you do your research through Google or on telegram or on some other alternative to the mainstream news. So I think one can read the play as Oedipus is sort of so insistent on doing his own research that it makes him, for the first half of the play, completely unable to listen to the information that he's hearing. I mean, I think that trope in that, in the speech I just read, of that it's about his ears as well as his eyes, it's to do with this inability to trust professional knowers or to trust people who might, um, be seen as having their own agenda. Um, so he can't trust Creon because he has this whole paranoia about what anyone else might think, how other people are going to be taking his power from him. And he can only find out things for himself. Um, and then I think there are different kinds of resonances about, you know, is knowledge always inherently dangerous? Um, what if you can't put it in any kind of context? What – How do you deal with knowledge? And also the fact that there were so many – even beyond the quest for knowledge – there are so many objectively scary things that all of us are so scared to contemplate, right? I mean, the fact that there's a climate crisis and there may not be humanity on planet Earth in 100 years or 50 years. I mean, those kinds of things are hard to find out about and hard for us to contemplate. 

[Mark:] Yeah, to say nothing of personal history and family, you know, travails. 

[Emily:] Yes, exactly. And even just sort of who were our grandparents— [Mark:] Exactly.  

[Emily:] —and were your grandparents, or your great great great grandparents enslavers? And what kinds of horrors are in your family closet or in mine? 

[Mark:] Emily Wilson, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast. 

[Emily:] Thank you so much! 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Oedipus Tyrannos, edited by Emily Wilson, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description of this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

[Music]