Tiresias
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In Greek mythology, Tiresias (also transliterated as Teiresias) was a blind prophet famous for being transformed into a woman for seven years. Mythology claims that he was the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo and that he participated in fully seven generations at Thebes. T. S. Eliot used Tiresias as the primary speaker in his modernist poem, "The Waste Land". The French composer Francis Poulenc wrote an opera called The Breasts of Tiresias based on Guillaume Apollinaire's surrealist text.
In post-classical literature
The figure of Tiresias has been much-invoked by fiction writers and poets. Since Tiresias is both the greatest seer of the Classical mythos, a figure cursed by the gods, and both man and woman, he has been very useful to authors. At the climax of Lucian's Necyomantia, Tiresias in Hades is asked "what is the best way of life?" and his disconcertingly modern response, couched in high-flown diction is "the life of the ordinary guy: forget philosophers and their metaphysics. This advice is pragmatic and moderate and represents the moral message of the short story.
In The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto XX), Dante sees Tiresias in the fourth pit of the eighth circle of Hell (the circle is for perpetrators of fraud and the fourth pit being the location for soothsayers or diviners.) He was condemned to walk for eternity with his head twisted toward his back; while in life he strove to look forward to the future, in Hell he must only look backward. Tiresias' daughter Manto is also assigned her punishment here.
More recently, "Tiresias" was the title of a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
T. S. Eliot used Tiresias as the primary speaker in his landmark modernist poem, "The Waste Land".
The French composer Francis Poulenc also wrote an opera called Les Mamelles de Tirésias ("The Breasts of Tiresias") based on Guillaume Apollinaire's surrealist text.
Frank Herbert also uses the mythic characteristics of Tiresias in his second Dune novel, Dune Messiah, where the protagonist Paul Atreides loses his sight but has prophetic powers to counter this stemming from insights into both the male and female part of the psyche.
Amy Seham, drama professor at Gustavus Adolphus College, wrote a musical entitled "Tiresias" in 1999, with music by Chanda Walker and Kira Theimer.
Tiresias as a motif of doubleness (male/female) also occurs in the writing of Rohinton Mistry. There it serves as a comparison to the protagonist of the short story "Lend me your Light", who is torn between his childhood home in Bombay and his new existence in Toronto: "I, Tiresias,/ Blind and throbbing between two lives..." (Tales from Firozsha Baag: 180).
In Lawrence Durrell's novel, Balthazar, the second part of his Alexandria Quartet, various of the novel's characters are seen as having moments of prophetic sight, namely Melissa, Scobie and Balthazar. Scobie also cross-dresses, thus implying the androgyny of Tiresias. The novel also features the sing-along rhyme:
- Old Tiresias
- No-one half so breezy as,
- Half so free and easy as
- Old Tiresias
Tiresias also shows up in Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (novel). Cal, the protagonist, references and compares himself to the seer, and even played him in a production of Antigone.
Haruki Murakami's novel, Kafka on the Shore, has a character called Oshima, who is an androgynous seer, like Tiresias.
Carol Ann Duffy wrote a poem entitled 'from Mrs Tiresias' in her collection The World's Wife.
Genesis's song "The Cinema Show" (from the 1973 album Selling England by the Pound) is based on an excerpt of T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land", and as such, mentions the character of Tiresias.
During the opening scenes of O Brother Where Art Thou, a clear derivative of Odyssey, Tiresias is introduced as an old black man on a railroad handcar.
