The Heroic Temper (Sather Classical Lectures) - Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy

Bernard M. Knox

University of California Press

1983

224 páginas

7h 28m

ISBN-13: 9780520049574

The first two chapters of this book isolate and describe the literary phenomenon of the Sophoclean tragic hero. In all but one of the extant Sophoclean dramas, a heroic figure who is compounded of the same literary elements faced a situation which is essentially the same. The demonstration of this recurrent pattern is made not through character-analysis, but through a close examination of the language employed by both the hero and those with whom he contends. The two chapters attempt to present what might, with a slight exaggeration, be called the "formula" of Sophoclean tragedy.

A great artist may repeat a structural pattern but he never really repeats himself. In the remaining four chapters, a close analysis of three plays, the Antigone, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus, emphasizes the individuality and variety of the living figures Sophocles created on the same basic armature.

This approach to Sophoclean drama is (as in the author's previous work on the subject) both historical and critical; the universal and therefore contemporary appeal of the plays is to be found not by slighting or dismissing their historical context, but by an attempt to understand it all in its complexity. "The play needs to be seen as what it was, to be understood as what it is."

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Até que ponto o caráter é o destino?

In a Sophoclean drama we are never conscious, as we always are with Aeschylus, of the complex nature of the hero's action, its place in the sequence of events over generations past and future, its relation to the divine plan of which the sequence is the result. The Sophoclean hero acts in a terrifying vacuum, a present which has no future to comfort and no past do guide, an isolation in time and space which imposes on the hero the full responsibility for his own action and its consequences. It is precisely this fact which makes possible the greatness of the Sophoclean heroes: the source of their action is theirs alone. Sophoclean presents us for the first time with what we recognize as a tragic hero: one who, unsupported by the gods and in face of human opposition, makes a decision which springs from the deepest layer of his individual nature, his physis, and then blindly, ferociously, heroically maintains that decision even to the point of self-destruction.