Listening in Sophocles: The Sounds of Empathic Dialogue

Abstract:This article explores how listening sounds in Sophoclean tragedy. Engaging with insights from the work of psychotherapists and philosophers of sound and voice, I offer an understanding of listening as an active form of vocalization—a manifestation of empathy. By focusing on metric structures and other poetic effects making up the vocal soundscape of Sophocles, I explore how such listening is sonically performed between characters as they engage in sung dialogue, and how such dialogues may offer a possibility of healing during or after extreme suffering. Musical passages in particular bring together the protagonist and the chorus, a collective body of listener-witnesses, in moments of great distress and heightened emotionality. Three sung dialogues are examined in detail: one from Oedipus Tyrannus and two from Oedipus at Colonus. The exchange between the chorus and Oedipus the King immediately following his act of self-blinding already suggests the possibility of mitigating and making sense of suffering through empathic resonance. The first dialogue at Colonus exemplifies the chorus's refusal to empathically listen to Oedipus, an interaction that magnifies his traumatic experience; the second demonstrates the subsequent development of choral listening and the radical therapeutic potential of a reciprocally empathic vocal exchange.