Old wine in new skins

Canongate has commissioned various distinguished authors to retell the myths, and whether by choice or bad luck, Salley Vickers got landed with Oedipus. The problem with this story is that the details are so horribly memorable and its poet so good that there is nothing really to add. The Greek tragedians could play fast and loose with the myths and adapt even major details to suit their purposes, but when a story has become so enshrined, we are left with little to do but admire and analyse it. This is what Vickers has done: Tiresias goes to see Freud and tells him the tale. She has plundered the Greek play freely and, in terms of plot, furnished us only with an elongated version of Sophocles, adding a little about Tiresias’ childhood for good measure. The interest lies in the analytical bent. Her contribution is to tell us that ‘it was her [Jocasta’s] deepest never-to-be-spoken desire …to recover to her womb her precious first-born son’, and similar observations. Here lies the second problem: we all know the kind of things Freud would say, and so his take on the story is necessarily somewhat predictable.

The difficulty is that this cannot be a plot-driven tale, or rather, only at second hand; there is no climactic explanation for Tiresias’ visit to Sigmund Freud; they just could have had an interesting conversation if they’d met. But it isn’t interesting. Each character is lightly sketched and we are not really encouraged to care much about the seer or the neurologist; there is scope for amusement in the chasm between their explanations of various phenomena, but not much. Salley Vickers is asking us to become engrossed by a lengthened version of a story we already know, and it’s not easy.