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Introduction
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Introduction

Huxley introduces his conversion (or, idle inversion) of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King by way of conversation with Mary Sarojini — granddaughter of Pala’s Dr. Robert MacPhail. The conversation follows,

“Oedipus?” Mary Sarojini repeated. “But that’s the name of a marionette show. I saw it last week, and they’re giving it again tonight. Would you like to see it? It’s nice.”
“Nice?” he repeated. “Nice? Even when the old lady turns out to be his mother and hangs herself? Even when Oedipus puts out his eyes?”
“But he doesn’t put out his eyes,” said Mary Sarojini.
“He does where I hail from.”
“Not here. He only says he’s going to put out his eyes, and she only tries to hang herself. They’re talked out of it.”
“Who by?”
“The boy and girl from Pala.”
“How do they get into the act?” Will asked.
“I don’t know. They’re just there. ’Oedipus in Pala’—that’s what the play is called. So why shouldn’t they be there?”
“And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?”
“Just in the nick of time. She’s slipped the rope round her neck and he’s got hold of two huge pins. But the boy and girl from Pala tell them not to be silly. After all, it was an accident. He didn’t know that the old man was his father. And anyhow the old man began it, hit him over the head, and that Oedipus lose his temper—and nobody had ever taught him to dance tho Rakshasi Hornpipe. And when they made him a king, he had to marry the old queen. She was really his mother; but neither of them knew it. And of course all they had to do when they did find out was just stop being married. That stuff about marrying his mother being the reason why everybody had to die of a virus—all that was just nonsense, just made up by a lot of poor stupid people who didn’t know any better.”
“Dr. Freud thought that all little boys really wanted to marry their mothers and kill their fathers. And the other way round for little girls—they want to marry their fathers.”
“Which fathers and mothers?” Mary Sarojini asked. “We have such a lot of them.”
“You mean, in your Mutual Adoption Club?”
“There’s twenty-two of them in our MAC.”
“Safety in numbers!”
“But of course poor old Oedipus never had an MAC. And besides they’d taught him all that horrible stuff about God getting furious with people every time they made a mistake.”
“They had pushed their way through the crowd and now found themselves at the entrance to a small roped-off enclosure, in which a hundred or more spectators had already taken their seats. At the further end of the enclosure the gaily painted proscenium of a puppet theatre glowed red and gold in the light of powerful floodlamps. Pulling out a handful of the small change with which Dr Robert had provided him, Will paid for two tickets. They entered and sat down on a bench.

This excerpt strips all sidelong conversation and unversed, unrelated commentary from the contents of this play. As the third-person spectators of this playful spectacle, Will Farnaby and Mary Sarojini, are interrupted prior to the play’s end, these contents end… abruptly.

Such is the dim glass the demons hold.

A gong sounded, the curtain of the little proscenium noiselessly rose and there, white pillars on a pea-green ground, was the façade of the royal palace of Thebes with a much-whiskered divinity sitting in a cloud above the pediment. A priest exactly like the god, except that he was somewhat smaller and less exuberantly draped, entered from the right, bowed to the audience, then turned towards the palace and shouted “Oedipus” in piping tones that seemed comically incongruous with his prophetic beard. To a flourish of trumpets the door swung open and, crowned and heroically buskined, the king appeared. The priest made obeisance, the royal puppet gave him leave to speak.

“Give ear to our afflictions,” the old man piped.

The king cocked his head and listened.

“I hear the groans of dying men,” he said. “I hear the shriek of widows, the sobbing of the motherless, the mutterings of prayer and supplication.”

“Supplication!” said the diety in the clouds. “That’s the spirit.” He patted himself on the chest.

“We repeat the appropriate litanies,” the old priest querulously piped, “we offer the most expensive sacrifices, we have the whole population living in chastity and flagellating itself every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. But the flood of death spreads ever more widely, rises higher and ever higher. So help us, King Oedipus, help us.”

“Only a god can help.”

“Hear, hear!” shouted the presiding deity.

“But by what means?”

“Only a god can say.”

“Correct,” said the god in his basso profondo, “absolutely correct.”

“Creon, my wife’s brother, has gone to consult the oracle. When he returns—as very soon he must—we shall know what heaven advises.”

“What heaven bloody well commands!” the basso profondo emended.

A phonograph started to play the Dead March in Saul.

From left to right a black-robed procession of mourners carrying sheeted biers passed slowly across the front of the stage. Puppet after puppet—and as soon as the group had disappeared on the right it would be brought in again from the left. The procession seemed endless, the corpses innumerable.

“Dead,” said Oedipus as he watched them pass. “And another dead. And yet another, another.”

“That’ll teach them!” the basso profondo broke in. “I’ll learn you to be a toad!”

Oedipus continued,

The soldier’s bier, the whore’s; the babe stone-cold
Pressed to the ache of unsucked breasts; the youth in horror
Turning away from the black swollen face
That from his moonlit pillow once looked up,
Eager for kisses. Dead, all dead,
Mourned by the soon to die and by the doomed
Borne with reluctant footing to the abhorred
Garden of cypresses where one huge pit
Yawns to receive them, stinking to the moon.

While he was speaking, two new puppets, a boy and a girl in the gayest of Palanese finery, entered from the right and, moving in the opposite direction to the black-robed mourners, took their stand arm in arm, downstage and a little left of centre.

“But we, meanwhile,” said the boy when Oedipus had finished,

Are bound for rosier gardens and the absurd
Apocalyptic rite that in the mind
Calls forth from the touched skin and melting flesh
The immanent Infinite.

“What about Me?” the basso profondo rumbled from the welkin. “You seem to forget that I’m Wholly Other.”

Endlessly the black procession to the cemetery still shuffled on. But now the Dead March was interrupted in mid-phrase. Music gave place to a single deep note—tuba and double bass—prolonged interminably. The boy in the foreground held up his hand.

“Listen! The drone, the everlasting burden.”

In unison with the unseen instruments the mourners began to chant. “Death, death, death, death . . .”

“But life knows more than one note,” said the boy.

“Life,” the girl chimed in, “can sing both high and low.”

“And your unceasing drone of death serves only to make a richer music.”

“A richer music,” the girl repeated.

And with that, tenor and treble, they started to vocalize a wandering arabesque of sound wreathed, as it were, about the long rigid shaft of the ground bass.

The drone and the singing diminished gradually into silence; the last of the mourners disappeared and the boy and girl in the foreground retired to a corner where they could go on with their kissing undisturbed.

There was another flourish of trumpets and, obese in a purple tunic, in came Creon, fresh from Delphi and primed with oracles. For the next few minutes the dialogue was all in Palanese, and Mary Sarojini had to act as interpreter.

“Oedipus asks him what God said; and the other one says that what God said was that it was all because of some man having killed the old king, the before Oedipus. Nobody had ever caught him, and the man was still living in Thebes, and this virus that was killing everybody had been sent by God—that’s what Creon says he was told—as a punishment. I don’t know why all these people who hadn’t done anything to anybody had to be punished; but that’s what he says God said. And the virus won’t stop till they catch the man that killed the old king and send him away from Thebes. And of course Oedipus says he’s going to do everything he can to find the man and get rid of him.”

From his downstage corner the boy began to declaim, this time in English.

God, most Himself when most sublimely vague,
Talks, when His talk is plain, the ungodliest bosh.
Repent, He roars, for Sin has caused the plague.
But we say ‘Dirt—so wash.’

While the audience was still laughing, another group of mourners emerged from the wings and slowly crossed the stage.

“Karuna,” said the girl in the foreground, “compassion. The suffering of the stupid is as real as any other suffering.”

Jocasta, Oedipus and Creon were sitting on the Palace steps, waiting, presumably for the arrival of Tiresias. Overhead, Basso Profondo was momentarily napping. A party of black-robed mourners was crossing the stage. Near the footlights the boy from Pala had begun to declaim in blank verse.

“Light and Compassion,” he was saying,

Light and Compassion—how unutterably
Simple our Substance! But the Simple waited,
Age after age, for intricacies sufficient
To know their One in multitude, their Everything
Here, now, their Fact in fiction; waited and still
Waits on the absurd, on incommensurables
Seamlessly interwoven—oestrin with
Charity, truth with kidney function, beauty
With chyle, bile, sperm, and God with dinner, God
With dinner’s absence or the sound of bells
Suddenly—one, two, three—in sleepless ears.

There was a ripple of plucked strings, then the long-drawn notes of a flute.

The girl puppet had moved to the centre of the stage and was singing.

Thought is the brain’s three milliards
Of cells from the inside out.
Billions of games of billiards
Marked up as Faith and Doubt.

My Faith, but their collisions;
My logic, their enzymes;
Their pink epinephrin, my visions;
Their white epinephrin, my crimes.

Since I am the felt arrangement
Of ten to the ninth times three,
Each atom in its estrangement
Must yet be prophetic of me.

Island

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Introduction

Contents