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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Introduction to The Sore-Footed Man [and] The Temptations of Oedipus

Introduction to The Sore-Footed Man [and] The Temptations of Oedipus

As a writer of verse with a mind to be a playwright, I think I brought with me to the theatre a subconscious certainty that the Greek myths and legends are never out-of-date since they form that mythical stratum in the mind of modern people which enables them from time to time to make a pattern out of the chaos of their experience. In some cases I have given the Greek archetype a total skin of modern realism (I did this respectively with Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and Euripides’ The Bacchantes); but in the two plays contained in this book I kept the Greek setting as well as the Greek legendary structure. None of this would have been possible without the help and friendship of Mr Patric page 168 Carey of the Globe Theatre in Dunedin, a producer with a free and fertile spirit, who first, by the force of his example, enabled me to see what a play was – a metaphoric structure in which the multiple statements of the characters corresponded to the accumulated images of a poem – and then by his superb productions enabled me to learn from one play the direction which another play might take.

The problem of adapting the Greek chorus to the modern stage has been almost without exception the Achilles’ heel of playwrights who have tried to make over Greek material for modern use. I take it that the choruses of Aeschylus or Sophocles had a hymnal significance which they cannot have in 1970 since we no longer adhere consciously to the ancient nature religions. Falling in alternation from the lips of young women with a modicum of ballet training, Greek choruses transliterated into English come down with a thud heavy enough to knock a hole in the floor of any stage. It seemed to me best to cut the knot by making all choruses conversational. This mode of dealing with the problem is particularly evident in The Sore-Footed Man, where the sailors provide a ribald and semi-comic chorus to balance the more decorous exchanges of the main characters.

Two French playwrights provided me with a springboard in dealing with the Greek material – Girandoux in Tiger at the Gates and Sartre in The Flies. I am not even the ghost of a Greek scholar – and thank God for it, since otherwise I might have been caught in the barren trap of trying to translate from my Greek models to win the approval of select college audiences. But a half-memory of the gloss and panache of good English versions taken from the French helped to give me courage in forging out my own stage language – a prose rhetoric with some precision and some use of poetic images. It seems to me a pity that modern stage language has tended to become thin and bureaucratic in tone. I see no reason why we should not introduce a strongly metaphoric prose into the theatre since all stage language is constructed for an aesthetic purpose.

The situation of the main character in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, cogitating in solitude on his island, mirrored so exactly the predicament of the modern intellectual. But Sophocles’ Philoctetes was an inveterate wailer and groaner; it would not do to keep him like that; and the Homeric code of military honour can mean little to modern audiences accustomed, at least by way of the mass media, to the regular functioning of impersonal army machines and genocidal massacres in the swamps of Asia.

Odysseus became in a sense the main character in my own play, since he alone has the power to liberate Philoctetes from his intellectual roundabout. He does it, inevitably by stratagem. I trust I have not made him a neo-Fascist. The character of Odysseus had in fact haunted me for many years, from the time I began to realise that neither conventional ethics nor the theology of Aquinas were much use in determining what choices a man should make who page 169 wishes to win a war, or court a woman, or even free himself from the chains of family conditioning. I suspect that The Sore-Footed Man is mainly written around the enigma of human freedom. Philoctetes in my play is essentially a ‘beat’ type (as Norman Mailer expresses the distinction in his remarkable essay, The White Negro) where a universe of ideas rotates around his own navel, whereas Odysseus derives his sanction from the unknown fertilising power of action itself. In a poem once, I had let the Sirens propose to Odysseus the tragic nature of such a course in life:

. . . Ithaca is your remorse,
The home each sailor loves and runs away from,
And when you come there you will die of boredom.

How then shall your heart that like the sea
Becomes omnivorous, a sepulchre of storms,
Love concord and an old man’s idleness?
You, who even in Hades would walk with a heavier
Tread from the wisdom of stratagem, the power
Learnt by looking at your life’s plague pit with
An unflinching eye. (version of an extract from ‘The Sirens’, CP 132)

It was a barman who told me that ‘omnivorous’ was the right word; before then, ‘carnivorous’ had been my choice, and the barman, thank God, lacked in education.

Philoctetes needed a wife. I gave him one. The delicate semi-charade of her dialogue both with Philoctetes and with Odysseus may need the skill of an experienced actress. Neoptolemus is a necessary fence post.

Much of what I say about the language and situations of The Sore-Footed Man might also apply to The Temptations of Oedipus. Whether or not Freud was in the right of it, the Oedipus Tragedy is fundamental to all men, since we marry our mother when we descend into the grave. In The Temptations of Oedipus, however, the scales of ‘beat’ and ‘hip’ are somewhat reversed. It is Oedipus the yogi who wins by losing to Theseus the Commissar. The Temptations of Oedipus is probably the most developed play I have written. I doubt if it requires elucidation except to say that Ismene is the daughter who understands best the situation of her father. She is, I think, the heroine of many modern novels of female emancipation. Though the external crisis of the play occurs when the child is sacrificed, the interior crux lies, I suspect, somewhere in the conversation between Oedipus and Polynices, who prefers the freedom to wear his warrior’s mask and die, to the alternate freedom of being a man without a fixed dramatic role. Without the dramatic role, life tends to be experienced as chaos. The unveiling of this chaos is perhaps the theme of all my plays. The Furies, who most nearly represent it in its present page 170 and most aboriginal form, may, according to the producer’s wish, be absent from the stage or present as a strict and all-but-silent chorus.

1970 (614)