for whom a great haven
the same both as father and son
how, O how, have the furrows ploughed
by your father endured to bear you, poor wretch,
and hold their peace so long?
Perhaps the most famous of the Greek tragedies--held up as perfect by Aristotle and even inspiring a Freudian theory--King Oedipus
is curious for centering around a devastating ironic twist in its plot,
when just about everyone knows about the twist beforehand. This bug is
likely a feature. As it's impossible to consider the play without
discussing the twist, I'll spoil it for any poor soul now by saying that
Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother...without his knowing.
The play is about his learning of that horrific fact, and how he
responds to it.
It's worth mentioning
the backstory. Ancient Thebes is attacked by a powerful sphinx, who will
only leave if someone answers its riddle. The King, Laius, leaves
during this period and is killed on the road by a man heading to Thebes,
named Oedipus, who didn't know this was the king of the place he's
heading to. When Oedipus arrives in the city he solves the Sphinx's
riddle and the people make him king as reward; he also marries the queen
Jocasta. Some time later a plague falls upon the city--here the play
starts--and Apollo's oracle says this is punishment for never bringing
Laius' killer to justice. Oedipus vows to do so, and as the story
unfolds Oedipus learns that not only is he the killer, but he is also in
fact Laius' son--exiled from Thebes as a babe because of a prophecy
wherein Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother--all of which
he has accomplished against his will and knowledge. The play ends with
Jocasta killing herself, and Oedipus gouging out his own eyes and
banishing himself from Thebes.
Because everyone knows the twist
before seeing the play, I don't know how to describe the effect,
mirroring the protagonist, of learning about this cruel irony for the
first time. I can only offer analogues with modern movie twists. Instead
the delight--or catharsis, as Aristotle would have it--is witnessing
the characters experience the horrific revelation of truth: a succession
of dawning comprehensions that build and erupt into self-mutilation and
suicide. This is internal action at its best. Nothing is ever
physically done to the characters. It is simply their impending
awareness that threatens, scares, and finally smashes their sanity to
splinters. You pity these people. Even Oedipus' heated murder of Laius
(and, don't forget, his entourage) withstanding, one feels his fate was
undeserved. I especially feel for Jocasta. But King Oedipus
never quite reaches the levels of mean-spiritedness that would turn off
the reader. The dramatic (albeit cruel) irony and symbolism of this
family's self-destruction allows the audience to profit from the
suffering, and so justifies the whole thing.
It
may seem strange--or to be honest I should say 'ironic' again--that in a
play explicitly about the devastation of knowledge, the protective veil
of ignorance, and the mockery of the "liberating" power of truth, that
we should ask "Was Oedipus better off before?" Fiat justitia ruat caelum
is easy to proclaim when our heads are not the ones being bombarded.
There's also the question of "which truth?" Our protagonist saw through
the sphinx's riddle, looked over his people as king, and even watched
his life fall apart with each new revelation. He heeded Apollo's oracles
and cast light on the murder of Laius. To what extent is his
blindness--driving him to gouge out his own eyes in protest over their
uselessness--morally culpable? Should Oedipus have admitted his guilt
for killing Laius before accepting kingship, possibly avoiding his
incestual marriage? How can that be possible if he was fated into his
position? It's telling that even the blind seer Tiresias felt honesty
should be avoided here, and the audience is left unsure about their own
commitment to truth, and what it might entail.
This unease is
less morally or intellectually interesting than its emotional effect,
which goes back to Aristotle's commentary. I was surprised to find upon
re-watching the play how much of a Columbo-esque crime drama it is. I
tried looking for plot holes and felt satisfaction, along with anguish,
at each new piece of the puzzle. I relished, in stark relief to
Aeschylus, Oedipus' severe interrogation of characters and the painful
ricochets of insight. (The dots connecting in Oedipus' mind were almost
palpable.) I'll even admit moments of "no, don't, stop!" flashed through
my brain. Though I think King Oedipus is over-rated (Antigone
is probably Sophocles' masterpiece), I do admire the mixture of
opposites I felt while watching: the desire to see the play continue
just as I want it to stop, pitying Oedipus' pain while taking perverse
joy from it's delectable irony, and seeing a virtue (knowledge) be more
cruel than it's mirroring vice (ignorance). The play's legacy is the
skill with which Sophocles has the audience seep into Oedipus, to the
point where we are both paradoxically blind and enlightened by story's end.
This internalized tension, both reflective and reassuring, is what makes
art great. (Not to mention the convenience of experiencing these
emotions without the need to gouge out our eyes. That, at the very
least, deserves for Sophocles our thanks.)
