Oedipus the King Read Free Page B

decisive fitting together is in fact a meeting on stage of two men. The Corinthian Messenger and the old Herdsman who long ago passed the baby Oedipus to him will join Oedipus'

     

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Corinthian life to his birth in Thebes as the son of Jocasta and Laius. Oedipus' determination has indeed meshed one clue he holds with another, and this coming together forces him to see that the incest and the killing he has committed are parts of a monstrous whole. On stage, Oedipus should make the terrible perfection of the knowledge the two men bring together physically lucid, by joining them not only by his will, but with his hands. The Corinthian should clasp the Herdsman, a reunion in friendship the Herdsman may sharply resist but which he cannot deny or evade. They are the flesh of the symbolon Oedipus knew from the start he must find, a symbol indeed whose destructive effect was beyond prediction or intuition.
The most mistaken of Oedipus' beliefs is that he lives in a world in which a good and able man may count on help and approval from responsible divinities. This belief too may be reinforced by stage action. What is most powerfully dramatic is the loss of this optimism. All through his long speech interdicting Laius' killer, Oedipus calls confidently on the gods to support his search and its righteousness:
I warn those who disobey me:
god make their fields harvest dust,
their women's bodies harvest death. (26971/32931)
Acting on this trust, Oedipus will make many reasonable inferencesfor instance, that because he knows his nature is not that of a father-killer or mother-marryer, Tiresias' accusations must be motivated by treason; or that because Polybos is dead, the oracle predicting he would kill his father must be wrong. The truth is so much less likely than what Oedipus assumes ought to be probable, he is led by his confidence into more and more mistaken deductions. These mistakes cannot be seen as failures of his intelligence. In each case he follows what we would call the laws of probability. He is the political ruler whose survival depends on making decisive use of what limited facts are in hand; his astuteness at cross-examination is evident in his questioning of Kreon, Jocasta, the Corinthian Messenger, and the old Herdsman. Even under stress and when angry, even when fully conscious of how brutally the daimon
    * has betrayed him, he manages to reason clearly.
A good instance of his ability to think swiftly and make imaginative leaps can be found late in the play in his response to the news that he is not Polybos' son, but a foundling recovered from a mountainside. After suffering the dreadful predictions of what he would do to his parents, Oedipus suddenly finds himself parentless. His quick mind instantly adopts a new parent Tyche , Luck.

     

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My seed may be base born,
but I will see at last what it is.
It may well be that my birth
humiliates her female pride.
But I, who have always known I am
the child of Luck, whose gifts are always good,
will never know disgrace.
Luck is my mother, my brothers are the months
who measured out the low times
in my life and the great ones.
It these are my true kinsmen,
how could I betray my nature
by giving up the great search
now that will find my birth? (107685/123649)
Euphoric as this is, it fits what Oedipus at this moment knows of his life. He knows he has been favored. He has survived dire oracles and self-exile from Corinth, he defeated the Sphinx and won Thebes. Now he learns he was saved from death on the very mountain that looms over Thebes. He finds himself without parents, he traces his origins back only to a babe on a mountainside. Luck herself, a vivid presence to a Greek of Sophocles' time, must be his true parent. And he is right, his life has issued from Luck, though the kind of mothering she has given him he does not yet see. Still, to make Tyche his parent is defensible. It fits what he knows. When the truth arrives, he speaks no more of