The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [382]
`This is the end of all that was I, and the end of your long task of caring for me. I know how hard it was. Yet it was made lighter by one word: love. I loved you as no one else has ever done.'
As a terrifying voice sounds from heaven, calling out `Oedipus, Oedipus, it is time', he asks Theseus to protect the girls, before asking his daughters to leave, so he can be left alone with Theseus. Then, in a way which cannot be described but which leaves Theseus looking stunned, Oedipus passes from mortal sight:
`Maybe a guiding spirit from the gods took him, or the earth's foundations gently opened and received him with no pain. Certain it is that he was taken without a pang, without grief or agony: a passing more wonderful than that of any other man.'
So, on this sublime note of reconciliation, ends the story of the once-tragic hero Oedipus; leaving his daughters to grieve but to be assured by Theseus that their father is now received by the gods and at peace. `This is the end of tears' says the Chorus, `no more lament. Through all the years, immutable stands this event.'
This remarkable episode may remind us how rare it is for the hero of any story to be shown dying peacefully in old age. There are other instances, such as the passing of the great hero King Arthur which in some ways is not unlike that of Oedipus, and to this we shall return. But what makes the death of Oedipus so particularly remarkable is that it should come at the end of the life of someone who has also been the hero of one of the world's greatest tragedies. The natural ending of Tragedy is that its central figure has become so blinded by egotism, so split off from the Self, that he or she must come to a violent death, because this is the only way in which the wider state of wholeness can be restored. We have seen Oedipus at the time in his life where he was blinded by hubris in this way, and certainly this led to catastrophic consequences. But in the final scenes of that tragedy Oedipus himself did not come to a violent end. What happened was that his ego was crushed and his inward eyes were opened, in very much the way we expect to find in a story shaped by the plot of Rebirth.
This is precisely what we see having taken place by the time of Oedipus at Colon us, so that the sight of the deposed king wandering the earth with his daughter becomes, like Lear and Cordelia, an image of the Wise Old Man and the Anima. Certainly by the end of the story the physically frail Oedipus is, like Lear, recovering his old kingly authority, but in a wholly new, spiritual way. We are left in no doubt from the supernatural accompaniments to his death that he is fulfilling some extraordinary higher destiny. And when he is at last `taken by the gods, in a way so miraculous it cannot even be described, this provides one of the most indelible images in literature of a man finally finding his inmost identity as he merges into and becomes one with the universe.
What we also see in Oedipus at Colonus, in a way which contrasts it completely with Oedipus Tyrannos, is the central opposition throughout the play between the `dark masculine' and the `light feminine'. In the earlier play the `light feminine' value had been conspicuous by its almost complete absence. No one through most of that story had represented love and selfless feeling. No one sees whole until it is too late. Even the increasingly apprehensive Jocasta is presented only really in terms of her own self-interest, wrapped up with the self-interest of her husband. But in the later play, the whole of the action centres round this dramatic contrast. The `dark masculine' world of the ego is represented by Creon and Polynices, obsessively caught up in the ruthless power struggle raging over who should control Thebes. The `light feminine' is represented by Antigone and Ismene, acting like twin anima-figures to give such powerful emphasis to the feminine through the play. And in between them stands Oedipus, now totally aligned with the `light feminine, and supported by