Oedipus the King is a classic and outstanding ancient Greek tragedy, written by the playwright Sophocles, performed around 431 BC.
The script of "Oedipus King" begins at a time when Oedipus has become the new king of Thebes and Thebes is suffering disaster, and through Oedipus's search for the murderer of the former king of Thebes, Laios, constantly flashbacks show the story before the current timeline. This series of events is interspersed with thread after thread, culminating in a complete, tragic story of ancient Greece.
How did the original young wise man who solved the mystery of the Sphinx fall into the earth-shattering human scandal of "killing his father and marrying his mother" step by step, and finally blind his own eyes and become a blind and limp tramp bad old man? How did such a tragic, pitiful, and irresistible and painful fate have an aesthetic effect?
Today, Xiaobian is here for everyone to analyze and analyze.
Western aesthetic typology is the universe of substance and essence, which divides the entire Western world into two: the known world and the unknown world.
The nature of sadness as an aesthetic object is the product of the aesthetic relationship between man and reality to a certain extent.
The reason why "sadness" that is hostile to people and has a negative meaning can become an aesthetic object is based on two diametrically opposed but complementary conditions:
The first is universality, that is, tragedy always stems from our constantly moving forward life;
The second is the particularity, which is that tragedy cannot cause real harm to our lives.
This determines that the aesthetic theory of Western culture was originally beauty, and in the ancient Greek period, "beauty" was expressed as the two basic types of "tragedy and comedy".
The tragic art of ancient Greece, in its usual perception, in addition to its inherent glory and magnificence, is often rich in educational significance.
The originator of this understanding is Aristotle, who in Poetics makes a series of prescriptions rather than descriptions of "how tragedy should be created": for example, tragedy is a righteous person who falls from a good situation to a bad situation; for example, the protagonist of a tragedy must surpass ordinary people - which means that tragedy should not have a heroine, because "women are inferior to men" (this is self-defeating with the name of ancient Greek tragedy). For example, the function of tragedy is to arouse the "pity" and "fear" of the audience, so that their (audience)'s emotions are "purified".
Aristotle's comment to King Oedipus, the protagonist of our tragedy, is: "Although not particularly righteous or good, his misfortune was not caused by his own 'evil', but by some error." "
Some have interpreted it as a "mistake of reason." Aristotle's rhetoric perfectly incorporated The Oedipus king into the aesthetic framework of the aesthetics of tragedy.
The West often embodies the gods and destiny in terms of beauty, tragedy and sublimeness, as Chernyshevsky wrote in On the Sublime and The Funny:
"In the minds of the ancient Greeks, fate was that of a man who hated mankind, a very powerful and willful figure who liked to show his might, and often said to those whom he intended to kill in advance: 'I am ready to do this, but you will try to stop me.'" Fate does the same, it announces its decision in advance, proves to us that we are powerless to fight it, to avoid it, and at the same time to laugh at our weakness and clumsiness, to fight it as a vicious pleasure in a failed attempt. "
Yet Sophocles's view of destiny is intertwined with the praises of human genius.
The great human being is the creator and builder of all material and spiritual values that life has sent him. Sophocles's doubts about fate are a contradictory aesthetic idea that is vividly expressed in Oedipus The King, including the confusion of words, the circular paradox of the plot, and the struggles of the characters. Throughout, Sophocles never explicitly stated that Oedipus had committed the sin of the two-time curse of the oracle (although he tried to suggest it), and that the later Freud had written the "Oedipus complex" under the guise of his name only because of a consolation in the script that "many people have married his mother in their dreams."
But even if King Oedipus is no longer an innocent and poor good man, his body still strongly shows a strong vitality and spirit of resistance, even if the object of resistance is a seemingly illusory fate, he is still a protester who insists on his own opinion and eventually leads to destruction, and the process of struggle itself is very aesthetic.
Resistance, action, destruction are the most important elements of Western tragedy. Even if the object of their struggle is the gods and fate, even if the struggle is to hit the stone with a pebble and laugh at the wise men of the East, the attitude of the protesters towards the fate that has been written is positive enough to make people cry:
Between the egg and the solid wall, I will always be on the side of the egg.
Aristotle believed that "tragedy is the imitation of a complete and lengthy action." "
Tragedy must be "head, body, and tail", and the whole event "must be strictly organized, and once any part is moved or deleted, it will loosen and disconnect the whole", which coincides with our theory of "crested head, pig belly, and leopard tail" in our classical Chinese opera theory, and is also very close to our theory of "one person, one thing".
And "Oedipus King" condenses more than thirty years in just a few hours, and allows the narrow stage of the forecourt of the Thebes Palace to accommodate such a vast space, the whole play is compact and echoes from beginning to end, and its structure and content have a kind of exquisite blend, giving people a heartfelt sense of beauty.