The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [377]
Obviously the Sphinx's question stands for something much deeper than just a childhood riddle. The real question she seems to be asking is `what is a man?, which Oedipus has answered in a way which clearly marks him out as quite exceptional. The fact that he has overcome the `dark feminine' in this spectacular fashion implies that, like Perseus in slaying Medusa, he has shown himself to be a true man. Indeed, having married Jocasta, widow of its former king, he goes on to rule over Thebes as the greatest king the city ever had. But then begins the more famous part of Oedipus's story, which shows that he has not really become a whole, fully self-aware man at all. Indeed he becomes defined precisely by how much about himself he does not know.
Oedipus the Tyrant
The opening of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannos introduces us to the familiar image of a kingdom which has fallen mortally sick. King Oedipus has brought his people fifteen years of peace and prosperity. But now a terrible curse has come upon `the City of Light'. Crops fail, animals die in the fields, pestilence rages. When the people plead with their king to help them, he promises he will do all in his power to get this shadow lifted. Indeed he has already sent Creon, brother of his wife Jocasta, to ask the Delphic oracle what he should do. Creon returns to report the oracle's pronouncement that the cause of the curse is the presence in Thebes of an `unclean thing, born and nursed on our soil and now polluting it. Fifteen years earlier, just before Oedipus arrived in the city, their previous king Laius, on a journey, had been murdered. Only if the murderer can be found and banished can the city be saved. Oedipus promises that all will be `brought into the light'. He will stop at nothing to track down whoever has been guilty of this unspeakable crime.
Then, at Oedipus's bidding, there arrives the wise old man Teiresias, who is blind. Having lost his outward eyes, he has gained that inward vision which can show him things hidden from normal sight. Three times Teiresias proclaims, to the king's mounting fury, that he, Oedipus, is the `accursed polluter of this land'; that the killer he is seeking is himself; `your enemy is yourself'. He ends by prophesying that Laius's killer will one day be driven blind out of the city, having been found to have killed his own father and married his mother. All this strikes Oedipus as no more than the ravings of a foolish old man and, having expressed contempt for Teiresias, he then explodes in fury at Creon, whom he accuses of having set up Teiresias to make these absurd charges as part of a plot to replace him on the throne. But when Jocasta tries to calm him down, we see Oedipus embarking on the three stages through which he pursues his determination to track down the truth of who is to blame for his city's mortal sickness.
First, Jocasta reassures him that he could not possibly have been responsible for her late husband's death, because another oracle had foretold that Laius would die at the hands of his own child. They had only had one child and, when it was three days old, it had been abandoned to die on a mountainside. Anyway, Laius had been killed by a whole gang of robbers, at a place where three roads meet. But this mention of `three roads' only provokes in Oedipus, for the first time, a terrible doubt. Fiercely he quizzes Jocasta for further details. The more he hears about where this happened and what Laius looked like, the more his fears multiply. Eventually he can hold back no longer. He pours out the story of his life: how, when a young man living in Corinth, he himself had been told by the oracle that he would one day kill his father Polybus and marry his