Oedipus for the Rest of Us

Though I have done a lot of reading in my life, there are gaps to be sure. My recent introduction to Lionel Trilling led me to an anthology that he assembled called The Experience of Literature in which he wrote short essays about a number of the works in the book. It’s fascinating to get his perspective on these canonical works of literature and feels somewhat like a college seminar with Trilling as the professor. The book begins with a section on drama, and starts off with the Robert Fitzgerald translation of the Greek play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, something I hadn’t read since college. But in reading with a new eye, and keeping in mind Trilling’s moral stance on literature, this new way of thinking about it gave me a real sense of purpose in reading it. Trilling calls the plot “the most ingenious and the most terrible that has ever been conceived.” But it’s the way in which the plot unfolds that accounts for this. He also calls it a detective story, and in that regard Oedipus thundering about to disclose the murderer of the previous king, Laïos (Laius), is harrowing as his investigation brings him closer and closer to the fact that he himself is the murderer and that this criminal act, in Trilling’s words, “is immeasurably worse than at first it had seemed.”

Next he goes on to talk about the controversy over whether or not to call the play a tragedy, and the argument that by doing so removes the element of free will from the character and thereby diminishes the story. For me, however, that debate seems to be Sophocles’ purpose. In his essay on education, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education,” English professor Mark Edmundson quotes Walter Jackson Bate who said on the same subject, “we need not be the passive victims of what we deterministically call ‘circumstances’ (social, cultural, or reductively psychological-personal), but that by linking ourselves through what Keats calls an ‘immortal free-masonry’ with the great we can become freer--freer to be ourselves, to be what we most want and value.” Therefore it is not the circumstances of our lives, fate if you will, but how we govern ourselves in the face of them that really determine the outcome of ours lives. Given this, what we should take from Sophocles’ play is that Oedipus’s primary flaw, “his choleric pride, amounting to arrogance that prevents him from heeding any word of caution when he is pursuing his search for the killer of Laïos,” according to Trilling, is really responsible for his tragic downfall. Trilling dismisses this idea, however, saying that Oedipus’s pride is simply the catalyst and that fate had already laid the explosives that his arrogance touched off.

For Trilling, the ignorance about Oedipus’s true lineage is what causes the tragic revelation and therefore by the time the play begins the die has already been cast. Sophocles then is making the form of the play fit with its function as a tragedy. The audience, along with Oedipus, can do nothing to change the outcome. The only other option is for Oedipus to live in ignorance the rest of his life, but that is utterly inconsistent with his powerful character. I hesitate to call him fearless because it is his fear that drives him from Corinth to Thebes. And this is really what supports the free-will analysis, for had he faced his fear in Corinth and stayed, Oedipus would have avoided all of what transpired. In either reading, however, Sophocles’ plot remains at the center of what makes the play great. This same idea, that frisson of knowledge that the audience shares but the character does not possess, is reminiscent of Somerset Maugham’s retelling of the short tale “Appointment at Samarra,” which Trilling abbreviates but is given here in full.

                    Years ago in Bagdad, a merchant sent his servant to buy supplies. The servant returned, shaking
          and out of breath. The merchant asked, “What’s wrong?”
                    “Master, I was in the market and I was jostled by a woman in the crowd. When she turned around,
          it was Death who had bumped me. She looked me in the eye and made a threatening gesture.” The
          servant begged, “Master, lend me your horse and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I’ll
          go to Samarra and there Death won’t find me.”
                    The Master concurred and the servant rode away in a cloud of dust. Later that day, the Master
          went to the market and encountered Death. “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant
          when you saw him this morning?”
                    Death spoke, “It wasn’t a threatening gesture but a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him
          in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

The ultimate irony of a man fleeing his fate and running into the arms of it as a result is splendid. Trilling attempts to distinguish between the two characters, however, saying that the servant who is a mere pawn of fate is far different from the nobility of Oedipus who turns the merely ironic into tragedy. But I would argue somewhat with the idea of Oedipus being all that noble.

While the emphasis in most analyses tends to be on the character of Oedipus, what struck me the most was the reaction of his uncle, Kreon (Creon), to Oedipus’s taunts in the middle of the play. Certain that the blind seer Tieresias (Tiresias) --whom Kreon sent to Oedipus--is acting on Kreon’s behalf when he accuses him of the murder of the previous king, Laïos, he threatens to have Kreon killed. The typical response that we would expect is indeed Kreon’s first reaction. “I am told that heavy accusations have been brought against me by King Oedipus. I am not the kind of man to bear this tamely.” But Kreon is a noble man and believes that if he is indeed guilty of a crime that he will gladly face his punishment. “If in these present difficulties he holds me accountable for any harm to him through anything I have said or done--why, then, I do not value life in this dishonor.” Upon hearing the charges, however, he knows them to be false, and yet he can barely get in a word because of Oedipus’s anger. “Do you think I do not know that you plotted to kill me, plotted to steal my throne? Tell me, in God’s name: am I a coward, a fool, that you should dream you could accomplish this?” After ranting along these lines for a while, Kreon is finally able to speak. “Now listen to me. You have talked; let me talk, too. You can not judge unless you know the facts.” But Oedipus is not interested in facts, and his righteous indignation overpowers all of his senses.

What’s remarkable is that Kreon doesn’t react with anger, but instead tries to reason with the King and when he gets his chance he makes a good case for himself. Knowing full well he is innocent of the charges, he offers his life to Oedipus. “If I am found guilty of treason with Teiresias, then sentence me to death. You have my word it is a sentence I should cast my vote for--but not without evidence!” Even the chorus chimes in at the end of the argument. To Oedipus they say, “A friend so sworn should not be baited so, in blind malice, and without final proof.” Oedipus then tells the gathering why his argument has been so heated. If Tieresias is not lying, it means he did kill the king. “You are aware, I hope, that what you say means death for me, or exile at the least.” Then Oedipus lets Kreon go, but curses him all the same. Kreon has the last word on the matter, and it’s a good one. “Ugly in yielding, as you were ugly in rage! Natures like yours chiefly torment themselves.” The resolution demonstrates once again Kreon’s nobility. At the end of the play, after Oedipus knows he is the murderer, and Kreon is brought before him as the new king of Thebes, he says, “Alas, how can I speak to him? What right have I to beg his courtesy whom I have deeply wronged?” And, in keeping with his nobility, Kreon answers, “I have not come to mock you, Oedipus, or to reproach you either.”

What we have here is an example of the kind of morality that Lionel Trilling believed was possible to learn through the act of reading literature. And though he primarily dealt with the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his precept can certainly apply to all eras, including the Greek. “For our time the most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred years. It was never, either aesthetically or morally, a perfect form and its faults and failures can quickly be enumerated. But its greatness and its practical usefulness lay in its unremitting work of involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to put his own motives under examination.” In this context it’s easy to see that Kreon’s behavior is a model for us all. Trilling, however, continues to focus his interpretation on Oedipus, stating that it is actually his very inability to escape his destiny that earns him nobility as well. “Oedipus, who is unable to save himself by intelligence and right intention and who is subject to an order of things which does not proceed by human rules and is not susceptible to human understanding, is enhanced in stature by his doom.” It is this idea that Trilling’s teacher, John Erskine, mentions in passing as the only real virtue in accepting one’s circumstances: “If you want to get out of prison, what you need is the key to the lock. If you cannot get that, have courage and steadfastness.”

On both instances, then, Oedipus’s “courage and steadfastness” in the face of the horrible crimes that he unwittingly committed, or the nobility of Kreon’s refusal to engage Oedipus emotionally when the argument was clearly one that demanded intellect, we are presented with moral examples in literature that we can use to measure ourselves by and put our “own motives under examination.” When looked at in this way it should be obvious that the great works of the past still have much to teach us in the present and that the human experience, though altered radically in its outward guise throughout history, is still very much the same as it always has been. It’s a completely new way of looking at literature for me, and one that I’m eager to continue, a master class taught by a master of literary analysis, the great Lionel Trilling.