Oedipus the King (2 page)

Authors: Sophocles,Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles

Tags: #Drama, #Ancient & Classical, #Literary Collections, #Poetry, #test

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reassure him he is their son. Still haunted by doubt, Oedipus travels to Delphi, where his question about his parentage is not answered by Apollo, who tells him instead that he is fated to murder his own father and to father children with his own mother. Afraid to return to Corinth and his parents, Oedipus decides to travel far away. On the road to Thebes he is attacked by a traveler whom he kills; when the other members of the party attack, he kills them all. On his arrival he finds Thebes being terrorized by the Sphinx, a monster with a lion's body, a bird's swings and the head of a woman, who kills all those who fail to solve her riddle. Oedipus solves her riddle, the Sphinx dies, and Oedipus is rewarded with both the Theban throne and marriage to the recently widowed Queen Jocasta, by whom in time he has four children. When the play opens, he has been living in prosperity for about fifteen years.

Knowing these few facts, the audience should be able to grasp the remarkable inner life of the play's dialogue, the famous web of double meanings that pervades it.

The play opens with an appeal by a delegation of Thebans who beg Oedipus to find a cure for the plague now killing his people and withering their crops and livestock. Oedipus promises to solve the mystery and end the plague. He begins a passionate inquest which reveals, when all the facts finally fit together, that it is Oedipus himself who has caused the plague. It is he who is polluting Thebes with his presence: a man who has killed his father and incestuously loved his mother. The plot that reveals his life's story moves through sudden twists and turns, elations and despairs, deductions both mistaken and correct, clashes of will and angry outbursts, toward understanding and eloquent grief. Since Aristotle, critics have praised its economy. Yet this tightest of dramatic plots requires that Apollo and the daimon

* invade Oedipus' life on stage just as they invaded it
before
he arrived in Thebes. The gods' cruelty is visible not only in the unspeakable actions Oedipus commits, but in the plot of the play itself, the diabolical
manner
by which the gods reveal to Oedipus what he has done. The daimon asserts itself by arbitrary interventions in stage action. One such is Jocasta's fatal mention of the crossroads where Laius was killed, which forces Oedipus to grasp that he might well be Laius' murderer. Another is the fact that the lone survivor of the attack on Laius (who would presumably know whether one man or many murdered his king) turns out, by what seems chance, to be the same herdsman who gave the baby Oedipus to the Corinthian shepherd. These daimonic coincidences give the action its fatedness, but also its surprise and speed. As Oedipus pursues the hunt for Laius' killers, he repeatedly alters

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its immediate objective as new information and circumstances influence him. Oedipus makes each alteration on rational grounds, but each twist is one more instance of the daimons

* continuous intervention.

For the audience to experience the play fully, it must see and feel the intervening presence of this divinity on stage; it must sense divinity coercing the events of the present as well as events long past. Staging should assist the text by concentrating attention on the difference between Oedipus' apparent ability to secure his well-being by acting wisely, and the truth, that his whole life has been and is being willed by powers he cannot see and does not suspect.

Many modern readers resist the conclusion that a great play could possess such a totally fated hero, one who seems a puppet at the mercy of gods. These readers believe they could not enjoy such a play because they hold that people are interesting only when doing and saying things for which they are morally responsible, and they assume that only by such acts is character revealed. But it does not follow that a person reveals character in action
only
when those acts are taken with full knowledge of their consequences. Oedipus' actions express his swift insight and ready sympathy, the impatience of his nature and the largeness of his mental grasp. To list only his most prominent decisions: he goes to Delphi to resolve his questioned paternity; he refuses to return to Corinth after hearing Apollo's terrifying predictions; he strikes back at a man who struck him; he risks his life to confront the Sphinx and attempt to solve her riddle; he assumes direction of Thebes when it is offered; he accepts marriage with the widowed queen of his predecessor; he sends Kreon to Delphi for advice when plague strikes; he accepts the necessity of pressing the search for Laius' killers, persisting although Tiresias, Jocasta, and the old Herdsman in turn urge him to quit; when all the truth is known, he puts out his eyes and demands exile. As the Servant who reports his blinding and Jocasta's suicide points out, these were actions taken knowing the consequences; all his previous ones were not. (The self-blinding is, however, also a fated action since Tiresias predicts it in his exit speech.) Yet all those earlier choices define Oedipus' character; he is no less interesting when we accept that all the actions he took, prior to bursting into his bed-chamber to find Jocasta dead, were equally fated.

In Sophocles' time, the belief was common that the fate of an individual was bound up with one's daimon*, a divinity who presided over the happiness or misery of that person's life. The Greek word for happiness,
eudaimonia
, preserves this belief, because it means ''well-daimoned" and suggests that a person so blessed is divinely and perhaps permanently protected. An individual may also be devastated by his daimon, as Oedipus is.

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Two images clarify the meaning that daimon

* possesses in the play: the image of a storm and the image of a leap at, or striking of, a person. Several times Oedipus is compared to a helmsman, facing troubles in a storm. A storm endangering a city is a familiar Greek image, but it is deepened by its relevance to Sophocles' grand design. Though it may be aimed by a divinity at a city or a person, a storm endangers all who are caught in it; it is usually general and widespread. Most important, it may be mastered by a skillful and courageous sailor. A storm is an image that suggests the power by which human resourcefulness and freedom of action may resist a threatening divinity or indifferent nature. Oedipus and all the characters except Tiresias believe his problems are like a storm that a gifted helmsman may survive. But the truth is contained in a different series of images, in which the daimon leaps, strikes, plunges directly at its picked target. Sophocles has used this image in a remarkably consistent way to suggest that the blow Oedipus struck at Laius, the sexual mounting of Jocasta by her son, and the plunging of the pins into Oedipus' eyes are all physical aspects of one single metaphysical action: the blow Oedipus says that Apollo ''struck" at him. Oedipus is not riding out a storm with the help of human intelligence; he is both the weapon and the target of a blow struck by the daimon. Another image of similar effect is that of the hunt. As the investigator of Laius' murder, Oedipus naturally thinks of himself as the hunter; as he uncovers his own potential guilt, the imagery of the hunt turns on him, and he becomes the one hunted.

The presence of the daimon, the unseen power that has shaped Oedipus' life, flickers continually in the echoes and double meanings that inhabit nearly everything the characters say. The audience feels the daimon when Oedipus tells his people that though each of them is sick, none is so sick as he is; or when Kreon says of Laius' disappearance:


He said when he left that his journey would take him into god's presence. But he never came home. (11415/13233) ³

The word translated as "into god's presence" is the noun
theoros,
which normally refers to someone who sees or takes part in a holy event or rite; here it has the likely intent in Kreon's mind of implying that Laius' destination was Delphi. But by not naming Delphi, Sophocles can use the word
theoros'
inclusiveness to suggest that god's presence may be manifest in an interview at Delphi or in an encounter at a fork where three roads meet.


³In citing lines from the play I have given first the line number of the Greek text and second the line as it is numbered in my translation.

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