Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Jennifer Porter, a 28-year-old elementary school dance teacher, introduced herself to the community nearly 18 months ago. Guided by her attorney, she read a prepared statement, apologizing for a hit-and-run accident in which two children were killed and two others were injured:
"I want to express my deepest sympathies to Lisa Wilkins, her family, friends and the whole community. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
"I wish there was more that I could say to ease her pain. I know there's nothing I can do to bring your two precious sons back, Bryant and Durontae. And I will continue to pray for the speedy recovery of your other two children," Aquina and LaJuan.
By coming forward, her attorney said, Porter was "doing the right thing."
Watching the news with keen interest was retired University of South Florida professor John Iorio. He taught nearly 30 years, part of the golden age of the school's Department of English in the 1960s and '70s. Now 80, the retired professor brings a different kaleidoscope to current events.
What was his take on the Porter case? Without missing a beat, he called it classic tragedy, in the mode of Oedipus Rex.
"To be tragic, in a Greek sense, you have to have a choice," Iorio said 18 months ago. "And you make the wrong choice. It's a flawed person caught in a bad situation. The protagonist realizes he's done something wrong and is willing to take the consequences. The attitude is, I'll take whatever fate has decreed."
Last month, Porter pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident. Her attorney, Barry Cohen, amplified for her in court:
"This is about acceptance of responsibility and respect for the mother of these children, the children that are alive, the children that are not alive."
Cohen said that Porter "taught her students when you make a mistake, you don't make excuses. You accept responsibility. This is the best example she can give them."
With the drama playing out as Iorio had cast it, a fresh conversation seemed in order. If the Porter case is Greek tragedy, are there implications for her court case?
Iorio agreed to discuss it. By morning, the professor had composed an outline for a lecture on Aristotelian tragedy. He answered his door in typical good cheer but said he had bad news.
"I'm afraid I can't really help you, because I really don't think this case is tragic. Really, according to the Greeks, it's pathetic.'
It would be unfair to Professor Iorio to go a single word further without first clarifying what he means. He uses "pathetic" not in common parlance.
""Pathos is the Greek word, which modern use has turned into "pathetic,' but that has taken on a connotation of being contemptuous. You can't use that word (about the Porter case). Maybe the Greeks would say it's soap opera, but that's too dismissive and light."
In the thesaurus under tragedy are "calamity," "catastrophe" and "stroke of ill or bad luck or fortune."
Under pathos are "pity," "sympathy," "fellow feeling."
"In Greek tragedy, you can't go down crying," Iorio says. "The audience should not cry but be elevated by the heroic attitude of the main character. You feel better about yourself and the human condition.
"Pathos would make you cry. It would enlist your sentiments. Pathos has those things as its end. They want you to feel emotions. The emotions rule. Tragedy doesn't think of those as its end. It's a big difference."
For those of us who find the tortured language of the classics incomprehensible, Professor Iorio tells Sophocles' Oedipus Rex like a made-for-TV movie.
He reminds that the actors barely acted; they held masks to their faces, stood mostly in place and called out their lines. A good actor was one who enunciated well.
The Oedipus mythology begins with the god Apollo, through an oracle, warning the King of Thebes that he and the queen were destined to have a child who would kill his father and marry his mother.
A son was born. To avoid the prophecy, the parents bound his feet and told a shepherd to leave him to die on a hilltop. Unable to go through with the order, the shepherd secretly gives the baby to be adopted in another kingdom. He is named Oedipus, Greek for "swollen foot."
Oedipus grows up and the oracle prophesies: You are destined to kill your father and marry your mother. Horrified, Oedipus leaves the couple he knows as his parents and sets out for another kingdom. Where three roads meet, Oedipus confronts and kills a man over who shall pass first. He doesn't know it, but he has killed the King of Thebes and fulfilled half the prophecy.
Outside Thebes is a Sphinx - a hybrid creature with the body of a lioness, the head of a woman and wings - who destroys all who cannot solve her riddle: "What animal is that which in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?"
None had solved it before Oedipus: "Man, who in childhood creeps on hands and knees, in manhood walks erect, and in old age with the aid of a staff."
The Sphinx is destroyed; the grateful people of Thebes make Oedipus king. He marries the widowed queen, whose husband was killed at the crossroads ... which means he has fulfilled the other half of the prophecy.
Plague comes to Thebes. The play begins with Oedipus promising the people he'll figure out who killed the king and brought the plague. I solved the riddle of the Sphinx, he says, I'll solve this.
(His tragic flaw: hubris, inordinate pride, he thinks he's smarter than everyone else. This flaw prompts him to do what at the time he thinks is right - solve the plague - but that ultimately will bring his downfall.)
Oedipus investigates. He interviews the shepherd who saved the bound newborn. Slowly, inexorably, Oedipus comes to see that the suspect he has been pursuing is . . . himself! He had killed his father and married his mother. No wonder there was plague.
Realizing the truth, Oedipus exits the stage and returns with blood dripping from the eyeholes of his mask. He has gouged out his eyes so that in Hades he will never have to look upon his parents in shame.
Chorus: O doer of dread deeds, how couldst thou mar Thy vision thus? What demon goaded thee?
Oedipus: Apollo, friend, Apollo, he it was that brought these ills to pass; but the right hand that dealt the blow was mine, none other . . .
Come hither, deign to touch an abject wretch; draw near and fear not; I myself must bear the load of guilt that none but I can share.
Says Iorio: "He didn't blame the gods or the fates at the end; he blamed himself. He said, "It was I,' and that's a real man."
Since Freud popularized the Oedipus complex, it's easy to forget that Oedipus Rex was a religious play. Greek tragedy, set against the moral order of the day, helped explain the relation of the human to the divine.
Today it's different, Iorio says, with no single moral order. This one's justice is another's injustice.
At first blush, the fates in the Porter case conspire like Greek fates. Prosecutors stipulate that Porter was barely speeding. Streetlights were out.
Wrong road, wrong time, could have happened to anyone.
Porter ultimately came forward. She pleaded guilty. She took what the fates dealt and accepted responsibility.
"You're not free, you are fated," Iorio says, "but you must take the punishment as if you are free. It was predicted, it was written, it was scripted by the fates, which gave (Oedipus) his character to carry it out.
"There's no free will here. Oedipus acts out the script. How can we blame him?"
Still, Oedipus takes responsibility.
"The gods would say that's the human condition. You must accept the responsibility as if you were free. The tragedy is that you must accept responsibility even though you are not responsible."
But Iorio distinguishes the Porter case from tragedy. Immediately after the crash - the moment she was confronted with what the fates dealt - the protagonist left.
"Leaving the scene. Now that's willful; she had a choice. She chose to run away. Rather than take responsibility like Oedipus did, she fled."
Porter hid her car. The next day she taught classes at her elementary school and at her dance studio. Her father wiped blood from the car, nobody from her family called police. She pleaded guilty, yes. Was it self-recognition? Or the best legal strategy?
"It's not ennobling in any way," Iorio says. "When you walk out of a Greek tragedy, you have participated in something that has purged you. Catharsis has taken place, and you feel better. This (the Porter case) is just sad. It's emotion-ridden. No, it's pathetic, that's what it is.
"It's pathos. Pathos makes us feel sympathy, horror. It appeals to our emotions. It can make us cry, it can make us feel sorry. On the other hand, it's very difficult to assess blame."
Jennifer Porter is scheduled to be sentenced in October.