The Si(eye)ght of Trauma: Oedipal Wounds, Tragic Visions, and Averted Gazes from the Time of Sophocles to the Twenty-First Century

In this article I set out to explore Sophocles’ classical tragedy Oedipus Rex and how this tragedy transposes the eye/I of vision from objective reality into an “inner” vision—or more metaphorically and topographically, the “mind’s eye”—and how this introjection, on a performative and aesthetic level, leads to trauma for both the actors and the audience. When Oedipus, for example, is affronted with the frightful “possibility” of seeing his parents in the afterlife, such ghostly (re)visitations, which objectively mark an unseen event, manifest themselves as an interior reality in the protagonist’s psyche, marking the traumatic or mimetic moment when meaning and representation break down along the axis of interpretation, and the traumatic gap or lacuna between signifier (word/gesture) and signified (message/meaning) widens. By drawing on the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s reformulation of Freud’s theories regarding the “enigmatic signifier,” which functions as untranslatable, hieroglyphic sign, and Cathy Caruth’s theories on trauma, together with Jean-Joseph Goux’s philosophic ideas on Greek tragic theatre), I would like to show how this gap between self and other, actor and audience—a gap that cannot be bridged—opens out a plenitude of interpretive possibilities for performance theory and theatre practice in general.

In order to do this, let us start with the gaze. The question of the gaze has occupied a central position in both Western literature and philosophy since ancient times.¹ There has been a repeated preoccupation with the interrelationships between vision, knowledge, and perception, a preoccupation that can be traced as far back as the fifth century AD in ancient Greek theatre. More recently various lines of inquiry regarding sight (or the site of theatre) have also tried to take account of the performative and traumatic ramifications of viewing particular events, both on stage and in real life, and how tragedy—imagined, actual or various—can lead to trauma via its localization in sight and perception. Paradoxically, however, the sight/site of a tragic event is not a necessary prerequisite for the acquisition of trauma, which may be triggered by an imagined event in the mind’s eye. In other words, trauma serves as an ambivalent marker on the cusp between perception and representation.

Yet the very notion of trauma itself (taken from the Greek and meaning “wound”) wavers between the intrapsychical and the social, the physiological and the psychical, “affect[ing] the whole organization.”² Thus while medicine has in the main recognized trauma as purely physical, Freud’s psychoanalytic framework brought psychical trauma onto the scene also, in the form of an “internal foreign body,” a shock to the system, which originates primarily from without and attacks—secondarily—from within. As he points out in Studies on Hysteria, the psychical trauma “acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must be continued to be regarded as an agent that is still at work.”³

There is then an internal-external bind or double logic here—what Laplanche terms “a kind of internal-external instance”—in which trauma curiously wavers between inner and outer worlds.⁴ Although an event may be external, the trauma (or rather the memory of the trauma) it produces in the subject is at once physical and—although belatedly—psychical. I would like to hold onto this idea of trauma as wavering between the internal and external, since it is precisely this wavering or oscillation of trauma that, in my view, lends the notion of vision in Oedipus Rex such an ambivalent status, making it appear at once psychical and social, virtual and real, a matter of both (traumatic) representation and perception at the same time. This may well be why Oedipus as character-cum-actor can neither be adequately represented nor perceived by the reader or audience.⁵ His (re)presentation necessarily precludes the audience’s perception of him. Jean-Pierre Vernant aptly points this out:

As soon as Oedipus has been “elucidated,” uncovered, presented as a spectacle of horror for...