by Feed your head with a play by Pamela Olson

Created on: August 26, 2008

Wishing Only To Be Blind Again.

Where each uncovering of layers of meaning to the truth led inevitably to tragedy.

According to Aristotle, tragedy requires, among other things, a character that many once admired greatly, but who always possessed a secret, resulting in his hamartia, which is the fall of a once noble man caused by some excess or mistake in his behavior. Hamartia is related to hubris and it inevitably leads to deadly errors in judgment. That character inexorably falls from happiness into misery as their peripatetic situation progresses due to his hubris, which totally blinds him in his relentless pursuit of another's destruction. The total effect of the unfolding of the real truth invokes dismay and horror because in the end comes his anagnorisis: the recognition or uncovering of his tragic error. When at last he sees the truth, and too late for he had achieved his desired destruction, he wishes then only to be blind again.

The theme in Antigone is clear for the right of the individual to reject society's infringement on her freedom to perform a personal obligation. Antigone says to Ismene about Creon's edict forbidding her, "It is not for him to keep me from my own.." This theme brings up the issue of whether Antigone's will is based on rational thought or instinct, a debate whose contributors include Goethe. Creon advocates obedience to man-made laws while Antigone stresses the higher laws of duty to the gods and one's family. Teiresias, the blind prophet, enters to warns Creon that the gods side with Antigone, as will always happen in whatever modern version may be happening. The appropriately blind prophet's warning is because there is the belief that there are laws higher than those of state. Antigone does state her belief that state law is not absolute, and that it can be broken in civil disobedience in extreme cases. Her case is her desire is to maintain honor in her family.

Does human compassion then prevail over the horror of what one has done when the full tragedy is finally revealed? Does the once noble man accept the truth as finally revealed and now cling to his more humble bargain with fate? In the more profound form of tragedy, that character finally recognizes and accepts the ultimately flaw in himself, and also finally recognizes the truth about the one he had previously mistaken in identity, that he had relentlessly sought to destroy or had finally destroyed. What is there now to help him right such previous fatal mistakes?

Oedipus

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