intended mission is to bring good newsthat Oedipus' father Polybos has died and that the people choose Oedipus to succeed him. Hearing the news of the man he believes is his father, Oedipus euphorically concludes, not only that the oracle predicting he would kill his father has been discredited, but all oracles have been shown worthless. The tenor of the scene should be one of such elation in Oedipus and the Chorus that it overwhelms Jocasta's nearly inarticulate misery as she runs into the palace to hang herself. It is in this excess, the surge of hope almost beyond reason, that the daimon makes itself felt. The daimonic essence is to mislead, to withhold meaning, to obstruct human knowledge until the damage is final. The counterpoint between Oedipus' fresh hope and Jocasta's agony will show the two faces of the daimon.
The Corinthian Messenger himself is an embodiment at the level of human character and motivation of the double meaning present in so much of this play's dialogue. He intends to convey one thinggood newsbut cannot prevent himself from conveying something far different and far worse. He displays the helplessness of the human will in his small crucial way as much as Oedipus does in the largest of all ways.
The Messenger's inability to know what will be made of his news is analogous to the characters' limited understanding of many of the words they speak during the first half of the play. The characters know only a part of what their own words mean; they are oblivious to the situations and events which give those words the daimonic meaning they possess for us. Even those most potent words of all, the oracles from Apollo, literally true as they prove to be, are fulfilled by events and twists about which these oracles themselves
page_9
Page 9
are silent. Because the daimon
* infests and controls so much of the characters' speech, speech itself becomes an instrument for humbling humankind; it is the daimonic intersection of god and humanity. Because human speech is so susceptible to fatal meanings its speakers cannot comprehend, speech asserts divinity's power and our subjection. Waiting Kreon's return from Delphi with impatience, Oedipus thinks ahead to how he will respond to the oracle:
But when he comes, I'd be the criminal
not to do all the god shows me to do. (7677/8990)
It is, on the contrary, by doing what the god asks, finding the killer of Laius, that Oedipus will become the criminal ( kakos ). Later he says, regretting the necessity that kept him from returning to his Corinthian parents:
Ever since, I have been luckyyet,
what happiness to see
our parents with our own eyes! (99899/115355)
To see his parents will prove so much the reverse of happiness that he must end sight itself.
Sometimes Sophocles will use a word that hints at how a scene might be staged. Early in the play Oedipus ponders the immense difficulties he faces if he is to track down Laius' murderer:
Unless I can mesh some clue I hold
with something known of the killer,
I will be tracking him alone, on a cold trail. (22021/26971)
The word translated as ''clue" is symbolon , and as Oedipus uses it here, it refers to a specific device the Greeks used to confirm kinship or the authenticity of a written message. A symbolon was the broken half of some larger whole, typically a potsherd that would exactly match the edge of the half held by a friend, relative, or ally. A symbolon was sometimes used to identify a lost parent or child. A baby abandoned by its parents might have a symbolon tied around its neck so that, should the baby survive, it could be identified when the parents' half matched the child's half of the potsherd. By simply using the word symbolon Sophocles invokes the context of a child finding his lost parents.
Oedipus hopes to find that he holds something that will mesh with some jagged edge pertaining to the killer; otherwise, he says, he will fail. As the action unfolds Oedipus will fit many clues together, but the final and
The Corinthian Messenger himself is an embodiment at the level of human character and motivation of the double meaning present in so much of this play's dialogue. He intends to convey one thinggood newsbut cannot prevent himself from conveying something far different and far worse. He displays the helplessness of the human will in his small crucial way as much as Oedipus does in the largest of all ways.
The Messenger's inability to know what will be made of his news is analogous to the characters' limited understanding of many of the words they speak during the first half of the play. The characters know only a part of what their own words mean; they are oblivious to the situations and events which give those words the daimonic meaning they possess for us. Even those most potent words of all, the oracles from Apollo, literally true as they prove to be, are fulfilled by events and twists about which these oracles themselves
page_9
Page 9
are silent. Because the daimon
* infests and controls so much of the characters' speech, speech itself becomes an instrument for humbling humankind; it is the daimonic intersection of god and humanity. Because human speech is so susceptible to fatal meanings its speakers cannot comprehend, speech asserts divinity's power and our subjection. Waiting Kreon's return from Delphi with impatience, Oedipus thinks ahead to how he will respond to the oracle:
But when he comes, I'd be the criminal
not to do all the god shows me to do. (7677/8990)
It is, on the contrary, by doing what the god asks, finding the killer of Laius, that Oedipus will become the criminal ( kakos ). Later he says, regretting the necessity that kept him from returning to his Corinthian parents:
Ever since, I have been luckyyet,
what happiness to see
our parents with our own eyes! (99899/115355)
To see his parents will prove so much the reverse of happiness that he must end sight itself.
Sometimes Sophocles will use a word that hints at how a scene might be staged. Early in the play Oedipus ponders the immense difficulties he faces if he is to track down Laius' murderer:
Unless I can mesh some clue I hold
with something known of the killer,
I will be tracking him alone, on a cold trail. (22021/26971)
The word translated as ''clue" is symbolon , and as Oedipus uses it here, it refers to a specific device the Greeks used to confirm kinship or the authenticity of a written message. A symbolon was the broken half of some larger whole, typically a potsherd that would exactly match the edge of the half held by a friend, relative, or ally. A symbolon was sometimes used to identify a lost parent or child. A baby abandoned by its parents might have a symbolon tied around its neck so that, should the baby survive, it could be identified when the parents' half matched the child's half of the potsherd. By simply using the word symbolon Sophocles invokes the context of a child finding his lost parents.
Oedipus hopes to find that he holds something that will mesh with some jagged edge pertaining to the killer; otherwise, he says, he will fail. As the action unfolds Oedipus will fit many clues together, but the final and
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