Brian S. HOOK Seneca's Oedipus and the Color of Ignorance

Criticisms of the rhetorical nature of Senecan drama are often directed at his dramatic characters, whose highly figured, artificial manner of speech interferes with our sense of them as intelligibly human. I suggest that there is a consistent, fictional intelligibility which is not dependent on psychological realism. The roots of that fiction are found in the rhetoric of the declamatory exercises. In Senecan drama, rhetoric does not obscure character, but creates it, and becomes it. There is nothing ''within which passeth show'. His personae are all presentation; their internal is external; they are their rhetoric.

Scholars who have traced influences of the controversiae and suasoriae in Senecan drama have focused primarily on the sententiae and the loci communes. I want to target the speaker's particular spin, which determined his impersonation. "Spin", in Latin, is color. In Senecan drama, where we have no knowledge of particular actors or reciters, color must be taken as the external correlative of what Seneca wants us to understand as "character". In other words, color replaces the mask as the indicator of character.

A comparison between Sophocles' Oedipus and Seneca's shows that these colores lie at the heart of Seneca's conceptualization and construction of dramatic character. In Senecan drama the color must be clear, since it indicates "internal" character. Whatever is internal must be made external, and must be made external by the speaker him or herself in a self-conscious way. In Sophocles, Oedipus' ignorance defines him and his actions and our interpretive and affective relation to him, since we do not share his ignorance. Oedipus' ignorance is essential to his tragedy. Seneca famously presents Oedipus quite differently, not as knowing fully, but as prescient, aware of something ominous, knowing that he is to blame without knowing why. Sophocles creates our awareness of Oedipus' ignorance by the irony of his first speech and Tiresias' prophetic fulminations; it is through these means that we know who Oedipus is. Seneca prefers to have Oedipus himself inform us of who he is, which requires some level of awareness. Complete ignorance is unavailable as a rhetorical color spoken in the first person. The colores are consciously used; they are self-presentations; and Seneca's need for self-conscious ignorance changes the nature of Oedipus' tragedy significantly.