Reading Oedipus feels like standing on granite outcroppings on the Maine coast looking seawards. The rock is among the oldest on the planet and the Atlantic was formed about 150 million years old. Birds, sun, clouds, sky, rock, ocean. Oedipus feels as fundamental in its portrayal of human beings – universal in our capacity for blindness, essential and primordial in the rawness of its emotional power.
In this time, Kings, nobility, aristocracy, oracles and gods all were both distant from ordinary life and because of the tiny nature of the Greek city states, intimately connected to it. Thebes is a polity where the former King Laius knew a herdsman by name. It is a State where everyone might know each other, and therefore every matter of the State is personal.
King Laius has been murdered at a crossroads. His killer remains unpunished. The populace believes that the plague in Thebes is a result of King Laius’ unavenged murder. Virtue and evil are entwined with the capricious Gods as supremely powerful physical and metaphysical forces. Injustice is the pollution that causes the plague. Laius’ killer must be found and punished. In this way the plague may end.
However, the Gods will reward you and the Gods will ruin you. Both are true. But how is one to know what the Gods desire? In what direction should one walk? What choices should one make? It is a world where men continually fail to please the Gods. and one’s options are to endure or rebel.
King Oedipus, who followed Laius, and is married to Jocasta, Laius’ widow, promises to “avenge this country and God together” by finding Laius’ killer. He “will follow every clue.”
Jocasta warns him not to pursue the truth as do a herdsman and Tiresias. But in Thebes the truth may be as apt to destroy you as set you free. Tiresias, the seer, understands the terrible power of truth: “How terrible it is to know where no good comes of knowing.”
Yet Oedipus must know. His integrity is at stake. A King has been killed, the former husband of his wife. A good King and a good man should pursue the mystery, pursue the killer: “Now my curse on the murderer. Whoever he is, a long man unknown in his crime or one among many, let that man drag out his life in agony, step by painful step.”
But here truth destroys illusions, the illusions that alone might keep a person, a family, a polity together. Pause for one moment and think about how absolute truth can destroy love, political movements, friendships.
In Oedipus secrets are not necessarily corrosive but affirming in the sense that they preserve the stability of a family and a polity. But secrets also linger, always present for those who know them, possibilities for unexpected disaster that depend upon the silence of fallible human beings.
Oedipus discovers that he is the murderer of his father, the husband to his mother, the father to brothers and sisters. He is a regicide, a parricide, a perpetrator of incest and the King. His sins, even though unwilled and unchosen are a storm Thebes cannot endure. The King is the source of stability. When that stability has been shredded by all those sins in the body and person of the King himself, then he must be punished.
King Oedipus blinds himself, and his wife and mother, Jocasta, hangs herself. He cannot even die for death would bring him face to face with his father and “poor mother.”
Oedipus was threatened with death at a crossroads by a man he did not know. He had to fight or be killed. A trap began the chain of events that resulted in catastrophe. Thebes is a world of traps where men and women must enter each day praying that one of the arrogant Gods will take pity on them and preserve them.
At the end of Oedipus, one questions one’s own faith in free will. What nets entangle us and impede our actions – genetics, class, wealth or poverty, bigotry and race and religion, the country where a person is born, its politics, a state of war, drought, heat, flood, storms, chance — a wrong turn, a decision to stop for a coffee, a momentary shock of glare while driving ….
