Duplicity. “When Oedipus speaks he sometimes says something other than or even the opposite of what he thinks he is saying.” Yet “the ambiguity of what he says does not reflect a duplicity in his character, which is perfectly consistent, but, more profoundly, the duality of his being. He is double. He is himself a riddle whose meaning he can only guess when he discovers himself to be in every respect the opposite of what he was and appeared to be.”
Reversal. One after another several people try to deter him. In vain. “He goes all the way. And at the end of the road that he, despite and against everyone, has followed, he finds that even while it was from start to finish he who pulled the strings, it is he who from start to finished has been duped.”
Yet “at the very moment when Oedipus recognizes his own responsibility in forging his misfortunes with his own hands, he accuses the gods of having prepared and done it all.” An unfair claim, as we shall see. But it is true that “the gods [who] know and speak the truth make it manifest by formulating it in words that appear to men to be saying something quite different.”
Thus “two different types of discourse, a human and a divine one are interwoven and come into conflict. At the beginning they are quite different and separate from each other; by the end of the drama, when all is revealed, the human discourse is stood on its head and transformed into its own opposite. The two types of discourse become as one and the riddle is solved. Seated on the stepped slopes of the theatre, the spectators occupy a privileged position that enables them, like the gods, to hear and understand the two opposed types of discourse at the same time, following the conflict between them right through from start to finish.”
Vernant and Vidal-Naquet provide us here with an important clue to understand Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. Perhaps no other Greek tragedy has pushed the logics of inversion (what Aristotles calls περιπέτεια, peripeteia, literally “turn,” “shift”) as far as Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex has. Dionysian reversal – as Dionysos, to whom all Ancient-Greek tragedies were dedicated (celebrated, as they were, during his annual Athenian festival, the Dionysa), is the god that questions, and subverts, the world’s limits.
A number of additional proofs are likewise eloquent in this sense: Oedipus, who, like any son, one would expect to care for his parents, ends up killing his father and sleeping with his mother. While he is welcomed into Corinth as a child of Fortune, he finishes his days accursed. Despite having gone to the sanctuary of Apollo to gain knowledge, he later only manages to achieve ignorance. In Thebes we know that he is responsible for a plague that devastates his subjects, whom he is unable to protect as a king should. Once a king, he nonetheless finishes his days as a beggar. Lastly, Oedipus’s pulling his eyes out at the end of the play must not only be viewed as a self-inflicted punishment, but must be connected, once again, to the inverted relation between knowledge and ignorance that pervades this particular tragedy, for if in Ancient Greece vision and knowledge are – as we have elsewhere seen – inherently connected, blindness symbolises its opposite.
How and why do we want to know, that is to say, how do we approach knowledge? Plus what good is to know if you do not manage to know when you need to? Lastly, can knowledge be or become a two-edged thing? Above anything else perhaps, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex formulates and explores these questions. And it does so in a most upsetting manner.
A sort of philosophical inversion seems to be at play in it, as well. Tiresias the diviner affirms laconically: “What is not known is not” (rather than “does not exist,” as there’s no verb “to exist” in Greek) – “What is known, is”. We are tempted to take this as pun on Parmenides’s equation being = thinking (= knowing), in the sense that what is not known may not be (“is not”), but it may have (real) effects on our lives, whereas once it is known, it can be eventually useless…
In any event, an existentialist interpretation of the play would be erroneous and misguiding. Pasolini sees it very well when he has the Pythia (the priestess of Apollo at Delphi who delivers the oracle to Oedipus) say: “You will kill your father and marry your mother. It is your fate” (our emphasis); but then in Thebes the Sphinx confronts Oedipus and tells him: “The darkness you want to throw me back into is inside you” (our emphasis).
In fact Oedipus, after receiving the oracle from the lips of the Pythia, could have avoided killing men older than him; likewise, he could have avoided sleeping with women older than him. But he did not. Acting out of fear Oedipus tries to escape his fate instead of reflecting on the oracle’s words, on what they may imply and what they may not. Given that things are always fragile, fear that they may go amiss is necessary, as otherwise one forgets to care for them; but an excess of fear makes one incapable of caring for anything, as well: blinded by fear, one tries in vain to elude what, acting in such way, one contributes to precipitate. In short, acting out of fear always proves fatal.
Even more so in a situation in which everything is the opposite of what it seems. Hence the confrontation with the pseudos, that is to say, with the “dissembling,” which, in Ancient Greece, was the opposite of truth understood as aletheia or “disclosure”. Put differently: if truth brings things into the light (truth as “norm” and “rectitude” is a later Roman invention), pseudos names instead the deceiving appearance, that endangers the clearing in which the truth consists. If in general, then, the Ancient Greeks loved enigmas, Sophocles offers us an impressive one here: one full of dissembling appearances, as for Oedipus everything proves to be the opposite of what he thinks it is.
It is therefore safe to deduce that Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is not a play on how one is doomed by fate. The Greeks were not interested in providential- or counter-providential logics, which are later Christian themes – as also sin, condemnation, fatality, etc. Attic tragedy aimed, first and foremost, at educating; and Oedipus Rex is no exception to this.
What must we know? How and why do we want to know? What good is to know if we do not get to know when we need to? How can we know ourselves? Can knowledge be somehow marked by duplicity? This is what Sophocles asks us to think and to reflect on. As Heidegger says, “we measure the nobility of any word,” and of any literary work, we may add, “in terms of what remains to be said in it”; that is to say, in terms of what it may still give us to think.
Further reading: Jean-Pierre Vernant & Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece.
Close-up of the Pythia delivering Apollo’s oracle to Oedipusin Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967)