Edipo all'alba di Pasolini Cerica, Andrea
Lexis (Venezia, Online),
12/2022, Letnik:
40, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
Edipo all’alba is the first “Greek” tragedy by Pasolini: it was composed during the third year of his university education, but never made public until its posthumous collection in his complete works ...(most likely owing to the homoerotic content). Recent editions have proved to be damaging to the original because of several mistakes in copying and, as a result, to the precise comprehension of this composite play. On the basis of the last textual edition, just realised for the birth centenary, this paper tries to update the literature on Edipo all’alba shedding new light primarily on its ancient sources (Sophocles, Statius), which has been the least studied subject of the play.
In postwar Western culture, the myth of Antigone has been the subject of noted literary, literary-critical, dramatic, philosophical, and philological treatments, not least due to the strong influence ...of one of the key plays of the twentieth century, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. The rich discussion of the myth has often dealt with its most famous formulation, Sophocles’ Antigone, but has paid less attention to the broader ancient context; the epic sources (the Iliad, Odyssey, Thebaid, and Oedipodea); the other tragic versions (Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes and his lost Eleusinians; Euripides’s Suppliants, Phoenician Women, and Antigone, of which only a few short fragments have been preserved); and the responses of late antiquity. This paper analyses the basic features of this nearly thousand-year-long ancient tradition and shows how they connect in surprising ways – sometimes even more directly than Sophoclean tragedy does – with the main issues in some unique contemporary traditions of its reception (especially the Slovenian, Polish and Argentine ones): the question of burying the wartime (or postwar) dead and the ideal of reconciliation.
In the second half of the 1980s, Tine Hribar developed a distinctive interpretation of Sophocles’s Antigone, which he presented in 1991 in the monograph Tragična etika svetosti (The tragical ethics ...of sacredness). Here he developed an original concept of the sacred, on which he built an ethical system that has become – particularly through its determined defense of the so-called sanctity of the dead – a cornerstone of the Slovene reconciliation project. This paper deals with some of the fundamental problems that stem from Hribar’s enigmatic definition of the sacred as “the world itself in itself,” showing that, in the conclusions Hribar draws from that definition, the clear distinction between being and life is lost. The central aporia of the Tragična etika svetosti is also closely intertwined with other problematic dimensions of the work that are analysed in the paper: the unfounded appropriation of the ethical characteristics of traditions from which he distances himself in principle; the unreflecting distinction between being and action in relation to the sacred; and not least, the unexplained oscillation between vitalism and Antigone’s ideal of self sacrifice.
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