Bulletin of Advanced English Studies – Vol. 3, No. 1 , 2019, pp. 44–59 e-ISSN 2617-6459, p-ISSN 2617-6440 Available online at http:// www.refaad.com https://doi.org/10.31559/baes2019.3.1.5 Ali Salem's The Comedy of Oedipus: You're the One Who Killed the Beast (1969) 1 : A Classical Tragedy Revisited Marwa Essam Eldin Fahmi Al-Kkhayat Associate Professor of Comparative Literature & Criticism, College of Foreign Languages & Translation, English Department, MISR University for Science & Technology, Giza, Egypt marwa.fahmy@must.edu.eg Abstract: The aim of the present study is to highlight the 'replay' of the master classic narrative: The Comedy of Oedipus: You're the One Who Killed the Beast 2 (1969) by Ali Salem. This 'appropriation' gives room for renegotiating fixed political authority of post-independence dictatorship. This juxtaposition, consequently, is an endeavor on the part of the artist who experiences 'internal colonialism'. It is the hypothesis that Ali Salem 'reworks' the classics within a post-independence context to invest it with more local flavor dissociating it from authority and authenticity. Thereby, Salem manipulates the trope of parody as a key site of resistance to imposed values and practices. In the appropriated play, the Egyptian playwright dramatizes the ascending of the Egyptian Oedipus to power portraying him as a god and as a despot as well. Thus, this present study analyzes the intertextual relations between the old play and the new version. The ultimate aim, besides the unlocking of the underlying message, is to shed light on the rationale behind such relations. In this sense, the current paper seeks to examine the semiotic clefs and sign-systems that unfold the underlying structure of The Comedy of Oedipus especially within the text-performance axis. Keywords: Classical Myths, Grotesque Comedy, Post-Independence Egyptian Drama, Intertextuality 1. Introduction: Scope and Rationale Sophocles's Oedipus Rex occupies a high position in the literary tradition inspiring many artists to 'rewrite' the play in order to investigate different viewpoints. Herein lies the significance of the intertextual complementary relationship between the original myth and its reworking. The Comedy of Oedipus has been hailed by many critics especially Ali Al-Rai who wrote the ''Introduction'' to the Arabic edition in which he states that Salem has been under the spell of the Brechtian theatre which is manifested in a new form in a Greek tragedy. ''Salem's intertextual enterprise'', as Al-Rai states clearly, ''is meant to demystify the concept of individual heroism which is no longer adequate in the second half of the twentieth century'' (Al-Rai, p. 7). Nihad Seleiha -in ''Manifold Oedipus''- presents a comprehensive survey of the early Egyptian plays which tackled Sophocles's Oedipus Rex after a long neglect of this myth for its ''taboo relationships'': "in 1949, Tawfiq El-hakim and Ali Bakatheer published their versions… in 1968 Fawzi Fahmi wrote The Return of the Absent… Ali Salem's hilarious political satire in the vernacular You Who Killed the Beast … All view the myth from a political perspective… waving aside the central conflict between Oedipus and the gods and the centering the plot on a power-struggle, riddled 1 The current paper is adapted from my PhD. Dissertation entitled, Post-Independence Drama from Utopia to Dystopia in Selected plays by Wole Soyinka and Modern Egyptian Dramatists, submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, 2010, supervised by Prof. Amal Aly Mazhar, Panel Committee: Prof. Nihad Seleiha and Associate Prof. Naglaa Al-Hadidy. 2 All the translations rendered in Salem's Oedipus come from Carlson's The Arab Oedipus: Four Plays (2005).