Jocasta: Wife and Mother

The old man gave her a piercing look. She seemed to hear him say, ‘No one will come. Presumably if we are, as I suppose, in a separate probability sphere, then we are entirely alone, encased, as it were, in our own private abstract universe. If you stepped through that door you might well encounter – nothingness … We are at once here and not here, like a cat sealed in a box. But you need not be frightened. It might indeed be fruitful for you to regard our conversation as a monologue within yourself.’

A monologue? She could not understand the implications of that suggestion.

‘You don’t frighten me,’ she said, pressing a finger to her lower lip to stop it trembling. ‘What do you want, anyway?’

The elder explained that he had no wants, at least as far as this present probability sphere was concerned.

‘Could you stop saying “probability sphere”? It makes my tummy rumble.’

Ignoring this remark, the elder said that their meeting was of academic interest only. Indeed, he went on to say, in a half-humorous manner, it might well substantiate a claim made by his son that he was non compos mentis …

Jocasta, he claimed, was not a real person, but rather a character in a play he had written. To believe one had substance was subjectively almost the same as actually having substance. She lived a brief life on stage, but was otherwise a fiction.

‘What you are saying is meaningless to me.’

‘Nevertheless, I think you understand what it means to live a lie. Living a fiction is much the same.’

This statement, he said, was not at all insulting, for fiction represented another kind of life, a rich imaginative metaphorical life in which mankind itself invented the circumstances; it was therefore an improvement on real life, where people had to endure or do battle with the circumstances in which they found themselves. He said, in his casual rather grumbling way, that she must labour under no illusion about her unimportance in the plot.

‘What plot? What plot are you talking about?’ she enquired angrily. ‘Who are you anyway?’

The elder scrutinised her with his sharp blue eyes before replying with some formality. ‘I am called Sophocles of Athens. I am – or I was – or I shall be – famous. I enjoy the privilege of being the author of a drama in which you are for the most part contained. I must tell you – without, I hope, undue immodesty – that my play has met with considerable success. So much so that it is still performed somewhere or other, in countries of which I have never heard, over two thousand years after my demise.’

‘You’re dead, are you?’ she said, with contempt. ‘That explains a lot. I am talking to a ghost and therefore am plainly having a hallucination. A fit of some kind.’

‘Ah, a monologue?’

‘You’re not like Aristarchus. Aristarchus was alive. He was real. This – this apparition, on the other hand, is all my strange old grandmother’s doing. She was born in another age. She must have conjured you up.’

But in her mind, she asked herself, forlornly, Is this my life? Am I living? I’m talking with the dead: then I must also be dead … So is death any worse than the terrors life inflicts? Neither death nor life makes much sense, when you look into the matter. Both are equally illogical. Is this not something of which that venerable Aristarchus told me – that my path through life might already be written? Was that what he said? I can’t think. I am about to be sick. This old man is not here. I am not here … Semele – she is a witch.

‘I suppose Semele’s in your play too?’

He answered with quiet dignity that Semele’s name did not feature in his play. He thanked her, adding that his play was not about the Bronze Age.

‘What age? What is this drama of yours about, then? Is Antigone in it? The Sphinx? What about Oedipus? Is he in it?’

‘Oh, he’s in it all right. In fact, the name of my play is Oedipus Rex, more properly Oedipus Tyrannus. It’s a tragedy. Its theme is that of predestination. No matter how humans struggle, it is destiny which shapes our endings.’

‘Oh, so it’s useless to struggle? We might as well be vegetables – onions, for instance. What a silly idea!’

‘It is also our destiny to struggle. Onions do not struggle. It is for that reason I would not consider writing a play with a tomato, however purple, however rich, as central character. My play, Oedipus Tyrannus, makes it all clear. Perhaps you would care to read it?’ He proffered the scroll he was carrying.

She backed away from it. How can I read about myself? I must be demented to believe I am having this conversation …

‘I don’t want to read your play. Why is it called Oedipus Rex? Between these four walls, Jocasta Regina would have been a better title, wouldn’t it?’ She giggled at the nonsense she was prepared to talk, speaking to an empty room, still standing, if rocking slightly, and plainly out of her mind.

Sophocles told Jocasta, with a note of apology in his voice, that she had only a small role in his play. ‘In fact, I am prepared to admit that in your case the characterisation is rather scanty. Poor, to be frank. But a fuller characterisation would have revealed a rather weak hinge in the carefully constructed plot.’

The literary criticism confused her; she was unused to such discourse. She asked Sophocles what he meant by a weak hinge.

By way of answer, Sophocles offered her the instance of a play in which two people were marrying. He posited that they were brother and sister and, for purposes of the plot, had been apart for some years, so that it was legitimate to suppose they might not recognise each other when they met again; hence the close relationship between them remained concealed. The he involved marries the she, his sister, in all innocence, unaware that he is committing the forbidden sin of incest …

The blue eyes contemplated Jocasta narrowly as he posed the rhetorical question with which, he said, he was confronted at this stage. Was the playwright to characterise the sister as similarly innocent? But that was to make too much of coincidence, bordering almost on farce. (In other words, he said, observing Jocasta’s confusion, if the double-coincidence arrangement was revealed, the audience might laugh. Laughter was fatal to a tragedy.)

The playwright was therefore left with two alternatives. He could characterise the woman as a wanton, who secretly recognised her lover as her brother—

‘Stop it! I know nothing about writing plays. I don’t want to listen!’ Jocasta heard her own voice shrill in the confined space.

Sophocles continued, unperturbed by the outburst. He regarded this alternative as the more interesting of the two. However, the play was to be centrally about the male, not the female. Therefore, he would adopt the second alternative, which was to give the female in the case as small a role in the plot as possible – even if she provided the hinge of it.

Her cheeks were flaming. She hid her face in her hands, to babble that she had no interest in this hypothetical play. Finally, controlling herself, she asked, ‘What is this plot you keep talking about? Is someone plotting against me?’

Sophocles went into a long explanation of the way in which a dramatist worked. In his play it was the circumstances which were against the characters. ‘Circumstance makes character,’ he said. That was his idea of drama: men caught in the net of destiny … His genius in dramatising this idea was to have the central character’s fate revealed step by step, until he was brought low. Sophocles cackled to recall how low …

The judgement, he said, was not always to the just. However noble the characters, circumstances conspired to bring them down. For instance, he had written another play in which Jocasta’s daughter, Antigone, had a good meaty role, fighting stubborn circumstance. Her brother Polynices—