[Nettime-bold] Wrote this baby before I ever heard of the Frankfurt School

[Nmherman@aol.com]

(Alex, please post this to Raw by way of a recantation of all of Genius 2000)


                                    Nickolas Herman
                                    Ancient Drama
                                    Prof. Pavlovskis-Petit
                                    December 10, 1993


        Oedipus and Hamlet:  Defining Language by Embodying 
        Its Antithesis in Two Heroes of Western Literature



    Like the eastern symbol of the yin-yang, language functions according to 
the principle of a dynamic inter-relation between similarity and difference, 
identity and distinctness.  In most, if not all, of the various structural 
relationships that constitute language and written or oral literatures this 
type of principle plays an essential part.  Examples would be the 
author/reader relationship, which depends on differentiated roles within a 
connected whole; the chorus/hero relationship, in which neither would make 
sense without the other; and the author/work relation, in which the author's 
creative message is expressed through how and why he shapes a form, not 
through an exact identification of the author with the form in a literal 
sense.   Moreover, language itself--the basic principle that lends words 
meaning--is the principle of contrast within a context, or sameness combined 
with difference.  This is why "hot" cannot be the opposite of "black," but 
only of "cold," and "wrinkled" cannot be the opposite of "circular," but only 
of "smooth."  Opposites, then, can only exist where there is a contextual 
identity.
    This principle becomes central in the formation of any literature or 
refined concepts in language.  In Western literature (which is not 
necessarily a tidily definable category, nor is it the precise opposite of 
Eastern literature) this principle of contrast--the generation of distinction 
through the means of similarity--can be traced as a recurrent influence on 
the patterns and trends that are often considered as this literature's 
characteristic elements.  There is a distinctive pattern in the use of 
contrast that pervades all levels of meaning in the Western tradition.  This 
is, briefly put, a tendency to pursue an understanding of language by 
creating a literature based on pictures of what language is not.  Because of 
an implicit dichotomy between "art" and "life" that characterizes the West 
from its earliest origins, the properties of language are explored through 
the creation of a literature that serves as language's opposite.  Language 
and literature are similar in that they are both verbal, but are invested 
with differences centered in the way they are created and their cultural 
functions.  Thus we can understand the language/literature relation as the 
most over-arching example of dynamic dialogue between similar yet different 
entities.  In trying to discover the attributes that distinguish Western 
literature from literature in the abstract, then, it is very useful to 
explore the specific ways in which literary art is portrayed as a similar yet 
opposite counterpart to non-artistic language.

    In the characters of Oedipus, as presented in Sophocles' Oedipus the King 
and Oedipus at Colonus, and Hamlet, from Shakespeare, we see two of the most 
enduring and influential examples of the Western conception of the hero.  
(Heroism in this sense should be interpreted as exclusive to tragedy, as 
neither Hamlet nor Oedipus are comic figures.  In this paper, except where 
otherwise noted, "heroism" will refer to the tragic protagonist, which is a 
literary construct which is in many, but not all, respects distinct from the 
comic hero.)  In exploring the similarities and differences between these two 
characters, and how they function in historical and aesthetic literary 
context, it is useful to examine the ways in which contrast is used in the 
delineation of their respective attributes.  
    The convention of heroism is one of the most ancient and widespread 
literary methods through which human experience is transformed into 
literature.  In a very literal sense, Hamlet and Oedipus both "become" 
literature.  This is of course in the obvious sense that they are central 
components of the plays in which they appear; it is also the case in how they 
function within the context of the plays themselves.  At Hamlet's death, he 
pleads with Horatio to 

    "Absent thee from felicity awhile,
    And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
    To tell my story..." (5.2.349-51).

In this way, Hamlet's life, though it ends in tragedy, becomes a story 
providing instruction and guidance to Denmark for the future.  In the same 
way, Hamlet becomes, as a literary hero, a source of instruction for those of 
us who read his story as Shakespeare (not Horatio) told it.
    Oedipus also becomes a living example for the people of Thebes.  The 
chorus says it will "lull myself to sleep with your name" (T:ll. 1222-23), 
and "There is much to ask and much to learn and much to see" (T:ll. 1304-5). 
Oedipus becomes, at the time of his death in Oedipus at Colonus, not a source 
of horror and ugliness to be expelled from the polis as a pollution, but a 
source of blessing which will insure that the city that takes him in will 
never be destroyed.  His crime while in its living form was dangerous and 
vile, but once having been transmuted into a legend, it becomes a healing and 
preservative force to the degree that his remains' worth to Creon warrants 
the insulting of a powerful monarch and the imminent risk of war.
    In the characters of Oedipus and Hamlet we see vivid and refined 
expressions of how the Western tradition uses a heroic paradigm to make 
literature out of human experience, or to put it another way, to shape human 
experience to fit the Western definition of literature.  There are numerous 
and complex parallels between the ways Hamlet and Oedipus are made to be 
heroes worthy of literary immortality.  In nearly every respect, the method 
of hero-making draws heavily on the manipulation of contrast, that is, the 
rendering of literary relationships between things which are simultaneously 
alike and different.  In a way that helps to some degree to understand the 
fundamental operative methods used in Western literature, it is possible to 
trace a pattern in the hero-making techniques that can be seen as a tendency 
to pursue a literary paradigm based on the long-term survival and 
canonization of highly stable literary works or plays.  In other words, the 
convention of heroism shapes Western literary forms or "plays," and is 
reciprocally defined as that which serves the purposes of the play form.  The 
creation of the hero in literature, then, is a focal procedure in which we 
can trace the most fundamental and essential originative patterns of the 
Western tradition, and observe the processes that have shaped the formal 
practices that predominate in that tradition.
    
    Hamlet and Oedipus are made into heroes through an uncannily similar 
process of characterization.  There is a virtual checklist of qualities that 
must be selected and heightened if an ordinary human's (as opposed to a 
god's) experience is to attain the stature of hero, and thus be worthy of 
being recorded as a spiritual or moral guide for subsequent generations.  
Perhaps even more than the similarities, the differences between Hamlet's and 
Oedipus' respective heroic identities reveal the building and evolutionary 
processes that make Western literature what it is.  (If we define literature 
and language, as this paper implicitly, if hypothetically, does, as the 
sustainment of contrast, it becomes extremely useful to describe literature 
itself, as well as literary tradition,  as a continuous process or set of 
processes rather than as a static object or set of objects.)  
    There is a striking pattern in the heroic attributes used to make 
literature out of Hamlet and Oedipus.  While there are certainly other motifs 
present, as well as exceptions to the basic pattern of character, it is 
nonetheless an important and recurrent aspect of the hero's persona that he 
embodies the breakdown or obstruction of communicative relationships.  The 
hero in Western literature, and in Oedipus and Hamlet in particular, exists 
in a state of profound disruption of the relationships of human life, 
including sexual, familial, political, religious, and what might be called 
"cognitive"--the consonance of perception with reality.  The hero's defining 
trait is isolation; he fights alone, besieged by enemies, uncertainty, 
ignorance, or a cruel fate, and has no recourse to the communal supports 
offered by human contact.  This isolation, or inability to relate 
effectively, is portrayed in many various ways corresponding to the central 
relations that make up human society.  Though each relationship is treated 
differently, all of the important ones (to which most people turn for 
assistance or assurance in times of crisis) must in some way fail the hero, 
and force him to rely only on his own resources.  To be heroic, Hamlet and 
Oedipus must reach the state of complete (if involuntary) individualism, and 
to that end relations between them and their communities must collapse on all 
levels.

    For both Hamlet and Oedipus, one of the most important relationships that 
is subject to this disruption is that of father to son.  It is no coincidence 
that this relation, perhaps the most profound and socially crucial in a 
male-centered society, forms the foundation of these characters' dilemmas.  
The murder of one's father compels both Hamlet and Oedipus to search out and 
destroy the perpetrator, in order to save the state or city from the 
corruption caused by uncleansed guilt.  Conversely, it is almost impossible 
to conceive of anyone being completely isolated if one's father is alive and 
one is on good terms with him.  For a hero to be placed in a crisis 
situation, the father relationship must be profoundly disrupted.
    It is clear how Oedipus has destroyed the socializing influence of a 
strong patrilineal bond--he has murdered Laius.  This fact of parricide makes 
Oedipus a pollution unfit to remain in civilized society; this fact is true 
despite the legalistic arguments of self-defense and unconsciousness that 
Oedipus raises in Colonus.  For the purposes of Tyrannos, the parricide must 
be expelled; the oracle leaves no question.  Thus Oedipus from the start has 
a crushing fate hanging over his head. 
    There are further elaborations on the theme of paternal ostracism, or the 
perversion and distortion of the paternal relationship.  Oedipus is not 
merely a parricide who intentionally killed his father to gain the throne.  
Rather, he acted out of ignorance.  Not only has he killed his father, but as 
far as his understanding goes, he has no father.   Tereisias taunts him, "Do 
you know who your parents are?" (T: l.415).  Oedipus would only be a coarse 
and distasteful brute if he had slaughtered his father out of greed, as if 
dispatching a sacrificial goat.  We are drawn in to his dilemma because of 
the far more psychologically complex reason for his parricide--oblivion to 
his own identity.  Not only does his unconsciousness make Oedipus 
sympathetic, it drives the plot of the play.  As we see the truth slowly dawn 
on him, we experience the satisfaction of seeing a great imbalance being 
corrected.  We sense the wringing irony in statements like "Helping the dead 
king I help myself" (T: l.141), and feel a keen desire to see the truth 
brought out.  That keen interest causes us to attend raptly to events, and 
not see them as distant or mechanical.  For reasons of plot and character, 
then, it is very useful for Oedipus to "have no father," so to speak, as this 
lack leaves a void which causes tremendous dramatic pressure and makes us 
urgently wish to see its resolution.  We feel the intense folly of Oedipus's 
statement "I account myself a child of Fortune, beneficent Fortune" (T: 
ll.1080-81), and its tragic resistance to compulsion.  Sophocles uses our 
instinct that no person can be fatherless to persuade us that no person can 
be free from "destiny."  Thus we see how the existential uncertainty 
requisite to the true hero, the true victim of fate, can be strongly 
reinforced by the removal of the paternal/filial consciousness, and the 
relationship it organizes.
    Hamlet's connection to his father, and all the exchanges and emotional 
engagement that make up that connection (especially in a hereditary 
monarchy), is also violently severed, and the revenge necessary to purge the 
stain of that violence makes up the primary action of the play.  Hamlet's 
story, the tale of his life, could hardly have been very interesting if 
Hamlet Sr. had lived, and Hamlet's life was spent carrying out the bland 
administrative duties that make up government, marrying Ophelia, and 
socializing and joking with Horatio, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Laertes.  
In order for a character to be heroic, his life must be different than our 
own, and different in a way that evokes awe, wonder, and fascination, not 
merely indifference.  The hero must be charismatic and larger than life.
    What makes Hamlet's life intense and tragic, riveting, is the fact that 
he must avenge his father's death, and what's more, avenge it upon his uncle, 
now king and married to Hamlet's mother.  Certainly here we have a "destiny" 
of heroic dimensions.  To fail in this vengeance would be so degrading that 
we feel an almost unbearable urge for Hamlet to act; it is this urge that 
makes his deliberations and setbacks so excruciating, and his surmounting 
them so aesthetically gratifying.  The ghost admonishes Hamlet, with a 
poignancy and tenderness that riles up our most fervent filial instincts, 

    "If thou didst ever thy dear father love--" 
    "O God!"  
    "Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder."  
    "Murder?"  
    "Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange,       
and unnatural" (1.5.24-30).

    The simple yet striking meter in this passage, moving in seemingly 
innocuous but ineluctable iambs and powerfully sounding the chord 
"Murder--Murder?--Murder," expresses remarkably the feeling of tenderness, 
loss, and passion that must have been wringing Hamlet Jr. at hearing this 
news.  The beauty and simplicity of true love and respect of a son for his 
lost father is shown here with subtlety and feeling, and is rent--emotionally 
and linguistically--by the word and the idea of death almost as by a dagger.  
Our feelings of filiality, inflamed in this way, do not make us jump up from 
reading to go play chess with our father in the next room; our emotion is for 
the abstract father, the archetypal father.  Our thirst for revenge, fired by 
a purity of father-love most of us probably never felt for our own fathers 
who are of course less than archetypes, impels us through the revenge with a 
furious intensity that is almost unequaled in literature.  Hamlet is for many 
writers (as well as myself) the great expression of the disinherited, the 
wronged son, and the anguish and longing for lost paternal nobility and 
power--the lost paradise we seek passionately (the Christian connotations 
included) through art.  There is no small meaning or power extracted by 
Shakespeare from the picture of a son broken off from his father.
    The paternal/filial instinct is expressed not only in the drive for 
revenge.  It is used also to explain Hamlet's single-minded intensity, "Thy 
commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain" 
(1.5.103-4).  (The literary implications of this line are immense, and make a 
powerful statement bringing together the strands of the metaphor of paternal 
obligation, the solitude and single-mindedness of the artist inherent in the 
heroic paradigm, and the literal equation of the mind with the written and 
finite work of literature.  A paper on heroism and literary purpose in the 
Western tradition could be written on this line alone.)  The spirit-deep 
revulsion verging on mania that Hamlet feels toward Claudius-- "I am too much 
in the sun" (1.2.67) (or son, implying the repugnance of having two 
fathers)--utilizes the father metaphor to express the corruption and 
spiritual obscenity that the false man, the usurper, is felt by the oppressed 
artistic individual and lover of truth and beauty to be.  In yet another 
layer, the reappearance of the ghost to Hamlet to "whet thy almost blunted 
purpose" (3.4.114-15) uses the energy and unique character of the feelings of 
obedience and lawfulness that traditionally accompany the father figure to 
symbolize the sense of duty and simultaneous denial of duty felt by the hero, 
especially the tragic one.  In showing the persistence of filial 
instincts--in a sense, the compulsion to be, like Oedipus, the son of the 
father--Shakespeare reinforces his particular presentation of the impulse for 
truth and justice as unignorable, fundamental, primal.  The bulk of the 
dramatic energy in Hamlet, then, is attained through the portrayal of the 
broken or dysfunctional father/son relation.
    
    Another basic human relation whose breakdown is a central element of the 
Western heroic tradition is that between mother and son, and its 
psychological mirror or mature manifestation, the relation between husband 
and wife.  (The child's primary relation with females is to his mother, the 
adult's is to his wife, and secondarily to his daughters.  I am discussing 
the mother-wife-daughter relationships as contextually bound because of their 
strong interconnections.  Since most tragic heroes are male, their spousal 
relationships are to women, and in heroic literature women are thus most 
meaningful as wives, mothers, or daughters.  The ramifications that arise 
regarding heroic literature in terms of the portrayal of women are hugely 
complex, and cannot be meaningfully treated in a paper of this scope and 
emphasis.  Suffice it to say that the perceptions of women in a society 
having a heroism-based literature are very likely to be in many ways 
unworkable and inaccurate.   The nature of my approach makes it necessary to 
emphasize the role of portrayals of broken male-female relations in the 
definition of the hero, and this definition's influence on Western literary 
forms.  The impact of such portrayals on the social definition of women is 
strongly connected and definitely worth inquiry, but far beyond the capacity 
of a short paper emphasizing formal literary patterns.)  The paternal bond, 
one could argue, is the psycho-social focus for instincts like justice, 
order, and stability, while the maternal is the focus for instincts of 
reproduction and sexual love.  To disfigure the father/son relation then 
creates a feeling that honor and law have been corrupted; to disjoint or 
pervert the mother/son relation creates a similar feeling of corruption of 
reproductive and sexual propriety.  Both Oedipus and Hamlet experience major 
revulsion and disturbance toward their mothers.   This disequilibrium 
contributes to the overall tragic qualities of both of their situations in 
two major ways:  by inflicting on them a personal, painful feeling of 
corruption and decay, and by divesting them of the communication and mutual 
support of wife and mother relations.
    Oedipus's relationship with his mother is probably the worst aspect of 
his suffering.  Although the murder of Laius is what the god considers 
pollution, the incest that Oedipus commits is (at least to the modern 
audience) the more personally distasteful.  Certainly, there is nothing 
particularly sexual about killing one's father; Freud has construed such an 
act as sexual (this theory is in itself debatable) but even he did so by 
equating hostility toward one's father with sexual desire for one's mother.  
Whether or not the two "Oedipal" impulses are perfectly equivalent, it is 
certain that by including maternal incest in Oedipus's fate, Sophocles 
introduced a piercing sting of sexual agony.  It is incest and the children 
of incest that are called "the foulest deeds that can be in this world of 
ours" (T: ll.1406-7).  It is no coincidence that the discovery that he killed 
Laius comes to Oedipus first; the crushing blow that prompts Jocasta's 
suicide is not the prospect of Oedipus's banishment as a murderer, but the 
knowledge that her relation with him was incestuous.  Similarly, the chief 
agony for Oedipus is the incest.  He bears up strongly, declaring himself "a 
child of Fortune" (T: ll.1080-81) despite knowing he killed Laius; but on 
finding out that Jocasta is his mother, he rushes to kill her, finds her 
dead, and blinds himself.  We see in this involvement of the sexual aspects 
of psychological torment, achieved (despite Freud) through showing an 
unnatural mother/wife combination, a further example of a disrupted personal 
relation being used to characterize the hero.  That Oedipus's misery would 
have been nearly as total had he only been a parricide is highly doubtful; 
this quite possibly reflects the way in which the remaining healthy 
relationships tend to compensate for those that fail, and why Oedipus's 
incest was crucial in making his downfall utter and his story truly tragic.  
His banishment from Thebes (for Laius's murder) is aggravated into an 
unmitigated psycho-sexual aberrancy, and his outcast status insured.  
    Though mother/wife incest is the chief female relationship that 
degenerates for Oedipus, others are worth noting briefly.  His daughters, 
whose successful marriage would, on a very important instinctive level, 
moderate his ostracism and temper our sense of his tragedy, share the 
devastation of his fate.  They are "men, not women, in bearing troubles with 
me" (C: l.1562); Creon hints at Antigone's risk of being raped while 
attending Oedipus through foreign parts, which highlights her miserable 
condition; both daughters are "doomed to waste away in barrenness unmarried" 
(C: l.1502), a misery that we empathize with and thus find Oedipus's fate all 
the more cruel for its extension to his children.  Oedipus's suffering is 
enhanced by showing how it disrupts the normal relations between father and 
daughter, how future hopes and the social benefits of family will be inverted 
into barrenness, poverty, and vulnerability.  The comfort that daughters both 
offer and receive can be seen as communication, and is often couched in terms 
of seeing, hearing, and touching.  All communication with his daughters is 
poisoned by the fact of their corrupt origins; to see them and even to love 
them is only an added reminder of his transgression that intensifies his 
desolation.  
    For the case of marital communication as a source of relief from pain, it 
is denied Oedipus--though he foolishly thinks he possesses it when he says to 
Jocasta "whom should I confide in rather than you" (T: ll.772-73)--and rather 
serves as an additional blow from fate.  As she leaves the stage to commit 
suicide, she laments "O Oedipus, unhappy Oedipus!  That is all I can call 
you, and the last thing I shall ever call you" (T: ll.1071-73).  By 
destroying the basis of mother/son as well as husband/wife relations, 
Sophocles removes yet another possible source of relief from his hero, making 
him all the more tragic, and his story all the more distant from the accounts 
of average people's daily life.
    Hamlet's feelings toward the female are similarly those of revulsion and 
alienation.  He denounces Gertrude for being weak in the defense of Hamlet 
Sr.'s honor, classically declaiming "Frailty, thy name is woman!" (1.2.146).  
She has, in Hamlet's eyes, abandoned his father; his relationship to her 
ceases to be that of son to mother, and she becomes a necessary object of his 
cleansing mission, not an ally in that mission.  In "honeying and making love 
over the nasty sty" (3.4.95-96), she becomes an integral part of Denmark's 
rot, and thus a further source of pain and responsibility to Hamlet.  "He 
must speak daggers to her, but use none" (3.2.395), the implication being 
that he can no longer treat her as a healthy and supportive fellow human, but 
must instead act as a scourge toward her as he does toward Claudius.  There 
is an implied impulse to simply kill her, but Hamlet's heroism lies in 
purging evil, not degenerating to its methods or motivations.
    Hamlet is similarly bereft of any comfort from Ophelia.  He utterly 
derides her intellect and speech, saying (as of all women) "You jig, you 
amble, and you lisp, you nickname God's creature's, and make your wantonness 
your ignorance" (3.1.146-48).  Clearly he sees no comfort from her as a 
confidant or comrade in his dilemma; if I had been him and really loved and 
been able to relate to Ophelia, I would have gushed my heart out to her over 
a picnic lunch.  Of course that wouldn't have helped the avenging of my 
father any; that's the point.  For the hero, relationships with women don't 
help any.  In his disgust over what he sees as the frivolity, shallowness, 
and corruptibility of women, and their utter irrelevance to his heroic 
struggle, he bluntly says, to Ophelia and all women, "Get thee to a nunn'ry" 
(3.1.122).  And although Ophelia offers no aid in his jeopardy, she is far 
from insignificant--her death, and the loss of the life Hamlet had hoped to 
lead with her are bitter punishments and profound statements about the 
harshness and coldness life inflicts on any human of feeling.  Shakespeare's 
message, as his drama, is expert; yet there is no denying that by choosing 
the heroic mode he sacrificed the ability to show human beings successfully 
and fulfillingly relating.

    Though it is beyond the capacity of a short paper to cover all the 
relationships whose disruption or deformity are used to create heroism, even 
in these two plays alone, they can nonetheless be briefly listed.  
Relationships, based on communication, are all shown in their broken or 
insufficient form in the following situations:  That between the hero and the 
polis; the hero and his kinsmen or allies (Creon and Theseus; Rosencrantz, 
Guildenstern, Laertes, and Horatio); between human speech and human 
knowledge, sight and comprehension; between humanity and the divine, such as 
oracles and prophecies, or ghosts; and even between the author and the 
reader, who, in the heroic paradigm and its attendant canonical approach to 
literary authority, are implicitly placed on vastly disparate planes of 
prerogative and knowledge.  In almost no work in the heroic tradition, be it 
Beowulf, the Iliad, or The Old Man and the Sea, will one find any of these 
relationships functioning smoothly and effectively.  Their breakdown and the 
ensuing heroic action are the bedrock of the Western tradition; and although 
communication and relationship are almost always affirmed as ideals through 
the hero's death, (as we see in the way Oedipus's body blesses Athens, 
causing Oedipus to claim that "Only in this people...have I found...no 
hypocrisy" (C: ll.1291-93), and the chorus of Athenian elders to say "All of 
these matters have found their consummation" (T: ll.2021-22)) living and 
functioning communication and relationships are never a part of the hero's 
life.

    Now that we have seen some of the ways that relationships are disrupted 
in the heroic genre, certain questions arise as to whether such disruption is 
necessary, and if so, what are the limitations on the literature for which 
the portrayal of disabled communication is the foundation.
    The purpose of heroic individualism is to establish the sufficiency of 
one person's story--a story with fixed characters--to describe and illuminate 
the human experience.  If Hamlet's dilemma were resolved through some human 
relationship, then it would follow that we should pay attention to that 
relationship, not to Hamlet's heroism in making do without it.  If fixed and 
canonical artifacts, rather than general and non-mimetic discussions of 
language relationships, are to constitute a literary culture, then the 
limitations of fixed works must be de-emphasized.  This is done by 
inordinately stressing the individualistic experience of language, or how 
language works for people who are, at least temporarily, out of relationships.
    The paradox is that language itself is a relationship, so that if 
relation breaks down, then so must language.  Creating the heroic, 
communicatively isolated individual, then, means creating a work in which 
language is confuted, disrupted, disabled--in a very real sense, does not 
exist as a functioning reality.  These works usually end with the removal or 
expiation of the obstacle to communication, and present a statement about 
communication as a human ideal, but rarely with the resumption of 
communication itself.  (In the cases of both Hamlet and Oedipus, the 
protagonists die or are banished at the end of the plays; they do not go on 
to live lives rich in functional social communication.)  Heroic literature 
(and to the degree that it is based on a heroic pattern, Western literature) 
thus explores the relationships that constitute language by creating pictures 
of those relations when malfunctioning or non-existent.
    This brings up serious questions as to the ability of heroic literature 
to fulfill the potential language possesses to improve and facilitate human 
communication and well-being.  At some point, the heroic mode, with its 
tremendous emphasis on the individual as the defining participant in 
literature, begins to undermine our ability to grasp the fundamental nature 
of language and its basis in relationship or mutuality.  Perhaps in its 
beginnings, when literature had less of a grip on the human intellect and a 
less established cultural status, it was less of an imbalance to make the 
individual's role in language preeminent.  Now, however, with the strong 
influence literature has on how we conceptualize language, the heroic 
paradigm (and the literary canon from which it is inextricable) has 
diminished society's ability to recognize, absorb, and master the 
co-operative elements of communication.  
    While heroism made us conscious of the relationships that make us human, 
it belongs to a very different (and yet unformulated) literature to provide 
us with the particular, utilitarian skills to sustain and nurture those 
relationships and not merely bemoan and heroically endure their decay.  
Heroism showed us the ideal; we must now invent other literatures to shape 
and forge the reality.  Accordingly, heroic literature ought to be 
re-assessed as a means or phase in the ultimate maturity of human 
communication, and not as an end in itself.  The heroes will be forgotten 
once they have truly triumphed.




Notes:
"T" before the line number indicates Oedipus Tyrannos, "C" indicates Oedipus 
at Colonus.  Both are from the University of Chicago translations of David 
Grene.  Quotations from Hamlet are taken from the Scott-Foresman edition by 
David Bevington.


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