I had fun in Berkeley. I liked some of the cast, disliked others, felt indifferent to the rest, the way it usually goes. We were busy first with rehearsals and then with the performances themselves, and I didn’t have time to get lonely. Every week, though, I’d call Jessie or she’d call me and we’d exchange news.
Finally we settled into a routine and I had time to catch my breath. The man playing Iago told me about an audition in San Francisco, a company that was going to do Sophocles’ Oedipus. “Almost no money, of course,” he said. “But all the prestige you can eat. It’ll look good on your rйsumй.”
I called, got an appointment for an audition. Iago loaned me his Berkeley university library card, and I took the BART train over to campus to study up on my Sophocles.
All the way there I could hear Jessie, as clearly as if she were sitting next to me. “Why are you doing this? What possible good can it do you? This isn’t going to lead to anything, you know that.”
In my mind I told her, firmly, to shut up.
I was a bit overawed by the graduate library stacks at Berkeley: I’d never seen anything quite like them. There’s no space between the bookshelves–they sit on tracks and have to be cranked apart by hand. It’s the only way they can keep their huge amount of books in one space.
I found the Oedipus trilogy fairly easily. While I was in the Greek drama section I decided to look around, see if there were any books that might help with an interpretation of the play. I took down a few that looked interesting, then reached for the crank.
I stopped. There was a book on the shelf called Fortune and Misfortune, grimy with dust. I don’t know why it caught my attention–it looked as if no one had opened it for years, maybe decades. I pulled it down and read at random.
“And he who reads the following words will be plagued by ill fortune for all his life,” it said.
This is my story, as I said, but now I’m going to talk about you. Are you comfortable? Probably you are, sitting and reading in your living room, leaning back in your recliner, a pleasant record in the CD player, iced tea or coffee or beer or wine beside you. Or maybe you’re sitting in your family van, waiting to pick up your child from school or ballet practice or the orthodontist. The sun is shining, birds are singing.
One of the books I picked up in the library was Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle says that when we watch a tragedy we feel pity and terror as the protagonist falls, and that when the play is over we feel cleansed, pure, a catharsis.
But what about the guy on stage? What about Oedipus, standing there with the gore running down his cheeks after he’s plunged Jocasta’s brooches into his eyes? Aristotle goes home, whistling, feeling better, feeling glad the tragedy happened to some other poor schmuck, but how does Oedipus feel?
What if the shepherd bringing the final message hadn’t said, Oedipus, the reason all the crops are failing and everything is going to shit is because you killed your father and married your mother, you poor fool? What if instead he had looked out into the audience, pointed to, say, Aristotle, and said, “You–you’re the reason we’re in such a mess. You don’t know it, but you’ve killed your father and married your mother, and now we’re all doomed.” Would Aristotle have gone home whistling then?
I don’t think so. We feel better when we watch someone else suffer. But Oedipus, if there really was an Oedipus, and I think there must have been, he doesn’t feel better at all.
The first thing that happened was that I didn’t get the part of the Messenger in Oedipus. Well, I thought, I don’t get most of the roles I audition for–you could hardly call this ill fortune.
The second thing was far worse. My mother called the hotel I was staying at and told me that my father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He’d had stomach aches and nausea for months, but by the time he’d finally gone to the doctor it was too late. They gave him a day or two at the most. I took the next flight out.