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All that sentence requires to become consonant with the current orthodoxies of Sophoclean criticism is the insertion of a few negatives:3 when Oliver Taplin ends his own discussion of the end of the Oedipus Tyrannus with the declaration that Sophocles, far from taking us through a clear, easily defined and complete emotional cycle, rather 'uses his theatre to stop us from finding a way out of his tragedy,4, the différance of meaning in his last words is seen as increasing, rather than diminishing, our respect for the play. |
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This sort of critical 'opening', however motivated and I have quoted the last page of a piece by Taplin rather than of, say, Simon Goldhill's Language, Sexuality, Narrative: the Oresteia to make the point that we are not talking only of deconstruction represents one pole of modern classical criticism, as of criticism in general. The other pole is of course historicism, old and new, with its stress on the closure of meaning by the realities of power: and the two form a pretty opposition onto which many other oppositions can be projected5 and which can itself be deconstructed. In this piece I want in one sense to write within the 'opening' tradition: I want to set some ancient endings against the theories of irony developed by the German Romantic critics in order to 'spoil' any sense of cool classical perfection, to show again that the images of classical closure held by people in other disciplines can be made to look misleadingly simple. But irony has also become central to postmodern attempts to cope with the abandonment of 'foundationalism'. I want to suggest that these attempts may help to alleviate some of the resistance to theory in a classical community which has similarly to face the loss of its foundations. Many classical scholars are attached to a rhetoric of presence because they feel that without it their activity has no point. If we are not trying to discover what Vergil meant or why the Peloponnesian War broke out: if we are only telling stories about the past: why bother? I cannot of course claim that there is nothing to fear, but I believe that one can be brought to feel that things are not quite as bad as they seem. |
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I would to heaven that I were so much Clay
As I am blood bone marrow, passion feeling
Because at least the past were past away
And for the future (but I write this reeling
Having got drunk exceedingly to day
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling) |
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3 See especially Roberts (1988). |
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4 Taplin (1983) 174. |
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5 Cf. Fowler (1991) 335. |
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