Part 1 - Three Ways of Representing Action on Stage
One of the characteristic features of classical Greek drama is that violence is usually not presented on stage, but occurs off-stage and is reported by messengers after the fact. Sophocles follows this convention in Oedipus Rex: Jocasta's suicide and Oedipus' self-blinding occur off-stage, and are reported by a messenger in all their gruesome detail.
In addition to the off-stage violence that occurs during the performance, there is another type of off-stage action that is very important to Oedipus Rex: the "mythological" content of the play. This includes the major events of Oedipus' life that would have been familiar to an ancient Greek audience and are known to many people today: Oedipus is the man who killed his father and married his mother. He is also the man who solved Sphinx's riddle and saved Thebes. This mythological content is sufficiently violent or explicit that it would have been difficult or distasteful (according to the conventions of the time) to show on the stage. In a certain sense, we can read Oedipus Rex as a response to the problem of making it possible to bring the myth of Oedipus on a stage, without showing the fated events themselves. That is to say, the offstage events in Oedipus Rex are more than just the characters' backstory: they are the "unrepresentable" of the theater being represented onstage through their aftermath and discovery.
It is useful to keep in mind that action is represented on three different levels in Oedipus Rex:
Actions that happen directly on stage. E.g. Oedipus promises to save Thebes and launches the inquiry; Tiresias tells Oedipus he is the murderer of Laius; Oedipus confides in Jocasta; Oedipus discovers his past crimes, as do the city of Thebes and possibly Jocasta (dependent on our interpretation of how much she knows and when); Oedipus laments his fate and says farewell to his daughters; etc.
Actions recounted on stage, which happen during the span of the drama. E.g. Oedipus blinds himself; Jocasta commits suicide
Actions recounted on stage, which happen before the beginning of the drama. E.g. All of the oracular pronouncements concerning Oedipus' fate and that of his parents; Oedipus' is exposed on Cithaeron, and is saved by a shepherd; Oedipus grows up in Corinth, and then exiles himself; Oedipus kills Laius; Oedipus solves the Sphinx's riddle; Oedipus becomes king of Thebes and marries Jocasta, they have two daughters and two sons; etc.
Part 2 - The Representation and Recognition of the Off-Stage, On Stage
A more contemporary analogy for the convention of "hiding the violence" in classical Greek theater is the way that horror films, especially films from before the era of special effects, hide a horrific monster or horrific events rather than showing them. This often heightens the atmosphere of terror, rather than taking away from it: we see how frightening or horrible something is through its effects and the reactions it provokes. We could say that the actors act as a medium and as an amplifier of fear or horror: through the contagion of empathetic identification, we as viewers are drawn into the atmosphere of horror.
The entirety of Oedipus Rex is about a similar dynamic: the slow revealing of off-stage action through its discovery by characters on-stage. The brutal irony that makes it a tragedy and not a horror drama, though, is that the audience already knows the story of Oedipus before it is retold through the drama. Oedipus' words and actions on stage (at least until his ultimate discovery of his crimes) are therefore not in tune with what the audience is feeling, but actively push against their own responses. The same goes for many of the other characters, including the Corinthian Shepherd. This dissonance is only resolved late in the play, when the past has finally unspooled itself in the present, and Oedipus calls himself the most cursed of men. The moment of recognition - the one that sets off Oedipus's vertiginous fall from the highest kingship into the basest criminality - is a moment of emotional whiplash for both the audience and for Oedipus the character; it is the reversal or peripeteia that according to Aristotle is characteristic of tragedy.
Some questions I've been mulling over in connection with all this:
How does Oedipus' presence on stage change when his knowledge finally comes to match that of the audience (i.e., when his past is fully uncovered)? Does his recognition of his crimes make the audience "recognize" themselves in him in a new way?
What about Jocasta? Based on her lines, it is impossible for us to know whether she knows Oedipus is her son before the Corinthian Shepherd tells all. How does our interpretation of how much she knows affect how much the audience will identify with her pain?
Why does Tiresias provoke laughter in us rather than fear?
How does the Chorus's representation of the "ID" of characters through movement fit into this framework?
What kind of paradigm (in terms of transmitting, processing, and mediating emotions of fear and pity) does the Priest of Zeus's "preaching" about the seed of men signal?
-Ella