Oedipus the King (7 page)

BOOK: Oedipus the King

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In the text, Oedipus' helplessness is remarked by the Servant who reports his blinding: ''He's so weak now, he needs to be helped" (1292/1482). If Oedipus emerges walking unaided, a chance to dramatize his physical dependency will be lost. When the Chorus first sees him, emerging from his palace doors weak and blind and bleeding, their words express a response that is not to his appearance only, but to the uncanny pollution he carries:


An eerie terror fills men's eyes at this pure and helpless anguish, . . . Name the god who leapt from beyond our knowledge to make your naked life his enemy . . . . I cannot look at you though I want so powerfully to speak with you, to learn from you, though your suffering grips my eyes so strong are the shivers of awe you send through me. (12971307/14871501)

The Chorus experiences here at first the expected shock and fear at the sight of a god-crushed man. But as always when the gods destroy a man, there is fascination, they are strongly drawn to know what Oedipus knows, their dread almost overcome. Their bodily motion should be the ebb and flood of their attraction.

What knowledge the Chorus craves from Oedipus, they do in fact hear. If we listen carefully to Oedipus' words (and to the Chorus') during the final part of the play, we will learn what beliefs and allegiances have survived. As he steps out into the sunlight, he dwells first on his trauma and frailty. He is wounded and disoriented; his world is blackness. Pain and abandonment fill his first speeches. Then he reacquires the human world still close by him as he hears the voice of the Chorus. Clarity and poise return as he tells the Chorus it was Apollo who destroyed his life, but that it was he and no one else who chose to strike out his own eyes. He discriminates precisely between what the gods have done to him and what he himself has done. Apollo may have predicted Oedipus' blindness through Tiresias, but unlike all his other evils, Oedipus' mind willed and his hand executed this evil. Although it was his choice, at that moment his choice was horribly limited. His thoughts are on the consequences of what has happened, for his city, his family, and himself. Not a vestige of his joy in being "the son of Luck" remains. He knows himself "the most ruined, most cursed, most god-hated man who ever lived" (134346/154647). "I have no god now," he says (1360/1562). What does he have left, we wonder. We have

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seen him abandon the assumption that divinity must be good to a good man.

What remains is the power of his family, of blood ties. His violating them has made their reality even more inescapable. The first reason he gives for blinding himself is the horror he has of seeing the eyes of his parents in Hades. The pain of watching his defiled children grow to maturity also cannot be endured. He has lost the right to see the sources of civic emotion in Thebes, her statues and towers. The gods who have forced Oedipus to commit such atrocities unaware have chosen their emotional terrain well. Oedipus cannot forgive himself what he has
done
, what his hands, his seed, his body, have done. There is no escape from the hold our father, our mother, our children, have upon us. The understanding of their power over us leads Oedipus to one of his finest and most painful imaginative leaps. He names the cause of the family itself, the sexual act of marriage, and declares it the source of humankind's devastation:


O marriages! You marriages! You made us, we sprang to life, then from the same seed you burst fathers, brothers, sons, kinsmen shedding kinsmen's blood, brides and mothers and wivesthe most loathsome atrocities that strike mankind. (14038/160914)

Where the bonds of love are most intense, there the danger is greatest. Oedipus knows he has released and survived more of this potential misery than any other man, but all humankind is potentially vulnerable. That love may cause such pain is the great resource of the god Apollo, who has defined the unique pain of Oedipus. The audience must see that Oedipus is the victim of his loyalties, which the god uses to force his responses and his choices; family love itself is what Oedipus' daimon

* has seized and ravaged.

The vulnerability of all human life to devastating reversal is especially concentrated within the family, where so much love and violence exist in the same relationships, and where forbidden erotic feeling may so easily shatter its sanctioned forms. The daimon can destroy us by loosening the fragile bonds that hold destructive forces in check, because we have no power whatever
not
to feel devastated by the damage to the bonds of love which our actions inflict.

Oedipus and Jocasta and the Chorus may alter their belief in oracles and gods moment by moment; they never alter their intense belief in the taboos and loyalties that derive from blood ties. The family is an ineradicable presence. With an energy equal to his unconscious violation of his family, Oedipus asserts its conscious

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force in his two long final speeches. He begs and demands Kreon to bury Jocasta with the respect due a kinswoman, demands exile and death for himself, to lift the pollution from the city, and he asks that exposure on Cithairon be the mode of his death, because that was what his parents had decreed for him, a decision whose rightness he now bitterly accepts. He foresees a barren and lonely future for his daughters, who will not marry because of the curse they carry. What he sees, he says directly to his young daughters, whom Kreon has brought to him. And Oedipus takes his daughters in his arms as he talks to them. We see the incest here in its bodily result; the father's arms are the brother's. Our attention is on what remains of this family, not on the gods. Oedipus has relinquished his authority to Kreon, repeatedly thanking him, praising him, begging him.

These are the two strongest emotional tableaux we take from the last moments: Oedipus' hugging his broken, defiled family; then Oedipus powerless, and being told he is powerless by Kreon.
⁵

Both images are fused as Kreon separates Ismene and Antigone from Oedipus' hands and orders the blind man no longer in power to go inside. Oedipus' love is as palpable to us by the end of the play as his wrath, his intelligence, his energy, his special relation with divinity, and his monumental ill-fatedness. It is a wonderful stroke that this side of his character is uppermost in our minds as we leave the theater. It reminds us of a truth that might be lost in the fury of the drama, that the intensity of his love for his family and his city underlies the intensity of his misery, and is as much its cause as the daimon

* itself.

I wish to thank Professor Thomas Gould of Yale for the wise comments and suggestions with which he greeted each successive draft

⁵Some scholars, Jebb and Knox among them, believe Kreon's ambiguous phrase, ''I never promise when I can't be sure," implies assent to Oedipus' demand for exile; and Oedipus does eventually achieve this wish in most versions of the myth. But Oedipus has asked for immediate exile and Kreon forces Oedipus at least temporarily inside the palace. Knox cites Kreon's problematical yielding as evidence of a larger pattern in which Oedipus, despite his blindness, weakness, and shattered confidence, manages to reassert his moral authority and dominate Kreon during the scene. I agree with Knox that Oedipus is a remarkable character in this final scene, but I do not believe this quality has to do with domination or power. Surely Kreon's words: