Oedipus the King (4 page)

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Lords of my country, this thought came to me: to visit the gods' shrines with a branch and incense in my hands. For Oedipus lets alarms of every kind inflame his mind . . . . Since he won't listen to me, Apolloyou are the nearest god I come praying for your good will . . . Cleanse us, cure our sickness.

As Jocasta speaks the words, ''the nearest god" (lit. simply "nearest"), the Messenger from Corinth should arrive, the timing, and the visual élan of his entry marking him as Apollo's answer to her prayer. News the Messenger brings will indeed cleanse Thebes and cure its sickness, but the cleansing will cause also Jocasta's death and Oedipus' self-blinding. The mocking cruelty of the daimon

* reverses all hopeful expectation, because the Messenger's 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

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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 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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