Oedipus and the Sphinx

The Threshold Myth from Sophocles through Freud to Cocteau

Almut-Barbara Renger, Duncan Alexander Smart, Rice David, John T. Hamilton, Duncan Alexander Smart, Rice David, John T. Hamilton

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226048116
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

When Oedipus met the Sphinx on the road to Thebes, he did more than answer a riddle—he spawned a myth that, told and retold, would become one of Western culture's central narratives about self-understanding. Identifying the story as a threshold myth—in which the hero crosses over into an unknown and dangerous realm where rules and limits are not known— Oedipus and the Sphinx  offers a fresh account of this mythic encounter and how it deals with the concepts of liminality and otherness.   Almut-Barbara Renger assesses the story's meanings and functions in classical antiquity—from its presence in ancient vase painting to its absence in Sophocles's tragedy—before arriving at two of its major reworkings in European modernity: the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and the poetics of Jean Cocteau. Through her readings, she highlights the ambiguous status of the Sphinx and reveals Oedipus himself to be a liminal creature, providing key insights into Sophocles's portrayal and establishing a theoretical framework that organizes evaluations of the myth's reception in the twentieth century. Revealing the narrative of Oedipus and the Sphinx to be the very paradigm of a key transition experienced by all of humankind, Renger situates myth between the competing claims of science and art in an engagement that has important implications for current debates in literary studies, psychoanalytic theory, cultural history, and aesthetics.

PART ONE

Oedipus before the Sphinx in Antiquity: On Sophocles

CHAPTER ONE

The Prince of Thebes and the Monster

The encounter between the Sphinx and Oedipus, son of King Laius and Queen Jocasta, is part of the so-called Theban Epic Cycle, which narrates the mythical history of the Boeotian city.¹ Among the texts once belonging to this group are the Thebaid, of which we have a few fragments, and the Oedipodea, lost but for a fragment with some later testimonies regarding its contents. Both epics encompassed numerous stories arrayed around the figure of Oedipus variously represented. However, the fragmentary nature of these texts leaves it impossible to say which episodes were specifically selected for narrative unfolding or epic amplification. Instead, we have been able to reconstruct only a bare listing of what stories were included, without any sense of broader narrative development. That is to say, we learn the “what” without learning the “how.” For example, we can safely assume that the Oedipodea contained, among other things, the episode of Oedipus’ act of solving the Sphinx’s riddle; but how precisely this story was shaped into an extended narrative is no longer extant.²

In addition to early references to the Oedipus myth in Hesiod’s Works and Days, the Iliad, and, above all, in the Nekyia episode of the Odyssey, the first longer reworkings of the story date from the fifth century BCE in Attic tragedy, which drew from the early epics. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides culled various stories from the old Theban narrative tradition and adapted them for the tragic stage in accordance with the current social and political affairs in Athens. In this way, Oedipus, who until that point had been understood as a ruler defending his polis against enemy forces—thus Oedipus appears in Homer and Hesiod³—became the tragic hero par excellence.⁴ Aeschylus composed a Theban tetralogy (467 BCE) that must have been of extraordinary power, since we know that it brought him victory in the agon. Of the four plays, only The Seven against Thebes has survived. Unfortunately, Laius, Oedipus, and the satyr-play Sphinx have been lost. The Oedipus dramatizations by Euripides and many others, including Achaeus, Philocles, and Xenocles, all written between the fifth and third centuries BCE,⁵ are likewise no longer extant. Sophocles, who drew from Aeschylus among others⁶ and is likely to have seen the tetralogy at around the age of thirty, has handed down to us, in addition to Oedipus the King, the tragedies Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus, which also address the tragic fate of Oedipus, his wife Jocasta, and their children, Antigone, Ismene, Eteocles, and Polynices.

Rendered sequentially, Oedipus’ life story, in the form it had assumed in the fifth century BCE, proceeds in the following way:⁷ After receiving a prophecy from the Delphic oracle that a son would be born to him at whose hand he would perish, King Laius exposes his newborn, Oedipus. Found by shepherds, the boy is taken in and raised by King Polybus and Merope in Corinth. As he grows up and begins to have doubts about his parentage, he sets out for Delphi and there receives a message from the oracle that he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Believing his parents to be Polybus and Merope, he resolves never to return to Corinth, journeying instead into the unknown, so as to avoid this fate. Along the way there is a violent conflict at the junction of three roads in Phocis, where Oedipus kills Laius, who unbeknownst to him is his true father. Oedipus then appears before the Sphinx, who is bringing calamity and ruin upon Thebes. He overcomes her by solving her riddle and either kills her or causes her to kill herself.⁸ As a reward for this victory, Oedipus is promised sovereignty over Thebes and the hand of the widowed Queen Jocasta. He eventually realizes that she is his mother, but only after he has fathered four children with her and after a plague has come over the city. According to Apollo’s proclamation, the plague will recede only when Laius’ murderer is found and the crime is atoned. Through interrogating the blind seer Teiresias and learning new revelations from other sources, Oedipus at last discovers his true ancestry. Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus stabs out his eyes. He surrenders his sovereignty and leaves Thebes to begin a wanderer’s life as depicted in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. His rapturous death at Attic Colonus alone liberates him from his homelessness. From that point on, a cult is established to venerate Oedipus as a local hero.⁹

There exists no original wording of the enigma that the Sphinx is said to have learned as a song from the Muses (Soph. OT 36, 130, and 391; Eur. Phoen. 50, 808, and 1028). A fragment by Pindar is the first text that mentions the riddle (Pind. fr. 177d Maehler). In subsequent sources, it is ordinarily transmitted in prose, although one version in hexameter is extant as well. The most reliable reconstruction of the riddle is based on a compilation of relatively late antique texts in Greek. An English translation reads: “There is a creature on earth which has two and four feet, a voice, and three feet; of all the creatures that live on earth, in the air and in the sea, it alone can change its nature. But the strength of its limbs is at its lowest precisely when it supports itself on the greatest number of feet.”¹⁰ The hexametric version, which, according to a scholion on Euripides harks back to the tragedian Asclepius (Schol. Eur. Phoen. 50), could have involved a quotation from the Oedipodea or Aeschylus’ satyr-play Sphinx.¹¹ According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, the wording of the riddle was: “τί ἐστιν ὃ μίαν ἔχον φωνὴν τετράπουν καὶ δίπουν καὶ τρίπουν γίνεται;—“What is it that has a voice, and is four-, two-, and three-footed?” (Apollod. 3.5.8 [= 3.53]). The text goes on to give the solution: “Οἰδίπους δὲ ἀκούσας ἔλυσεν, εἰπὼν τὸ αἴνιγμα τὸ ὑπὸ τῆς Σφιγγὸς λεγόμενον ἄνθρωπον εἶναι· γίνεσθαι, γὰρ τετράπουν βρέφος ὄντα τοῖς τέτταρσιν ὀχούμενον κώλοις, τελειούμενον δὲ δίπουν, γηρῶντα δὲ τρίτην προσλαμβάνειν βάσιν τὸ βάκτρον—“Upon hearing this, Oedipus solved the riddle, indicating that the Sphinx intended ‘man’ [anthrōpos], who is born four-footed, crawling on all fours as an infant, but two-footed when grown up and then, with age, takes on a third foot in the form of a cane” (Apollod. 3.5.8 [= 3.54]).

“With intelligence, not taught by birds”

A central theme in Oedipus the King is the human capacity for insight. It is discernible by the fact that all the essential narrative turns are known in advance. Hence, the entire sequence of events plays out not as a series of actions, but in the form of questions and answers, exploration and discovery. Two storylines—the search for Laius’ murderer and the search for Oedipus’ own parentage—ultimately come together in Oedipus’ single, terrible recognition of his parricide and incest; and the protagonist’s slow process of feeling his way toward truth, disclosure, and self-induced blindness is thereby performed.¹² Everything to be considered here, including the Sphinx episode, is related to this central theme of the human capacity for insight.

Sophocles’ decision to steer attention to Oedipus’ discovery of the truth—a discovery that the hero makes only through persistent, independent searching—is a reflection of the Athenian spirit of the time. In the fifth century BCE, the city-state of Athens emerged in the midst of an exceedingly active intellectual life that was coursing through the Greek-speaking realm. Sophocles was every bit as aware of its advantages as he was of its disadvantages and dangers—dangers that could reach into the abyss of human existence. As a native Athenian and great lover of his city (he bore the surname Philathenaios), Sophocles was fully integrated into the life of his time. He considered the city-state to be his task, to be fulfilled as a good citizen by taking on political as well as military offices. As Joachim Latacz expresses it, Sophocles wrote not as an entertainer but rather as “a deliberator, an advisor,” as one who admonishes.¹³

We must endeavor to understand Oedipus the King against this background. The play appeared in 430, at the height of the Greek enlightenment movement promulgated by Sophism and its governing motto “knowledge is power” (as Francis Bacon would later formulate it). At this time, a general “euphoria of understanding” predominated, which posited, as Protagoras proclaimed, that man is “the measure of all things.” Sophocles—himself a man of intelligence who, as an expression of his commitment to Athenian democracy, contributed intellectually, artistically, and politically to the social and intellectual progress of the city-state—assumed a critical position toward this worldview, insofar as he regarded it to be one-sided. For him, unyieldingly one-sided attitudes toward life were fundamentally disharmonic, and he saw in them the gravest danger of hubris.

Already in the prologue to Oedipus the King, set before the royal palace, we see clearly that the hero in his sovereign position is exposed to this danger to an especially high degree. Here, a priest who leads an emergency Theban delegation portrays for Oedipus the great need that has come upon the city as a result of the plague and beseeches him, “the first among men” (ἀνδρῶν δὲ πρῶτον, 33), for help, he who has already saved the city once before by freeing it from Sphinx’s terror.¹⁴ Oedipus appears in this scene as one endowed with thoroughly superior ability and understanding. He demonstrates that he comprehends the correct use of sense and understanding and—as Arbogast Schmitt has pointed out—that he already knows everything the priest is saying even before hearing it.¹⁵ The opening scene’s reference to Oedipus’ great rescue mission as well as his intellectual prowess, which has already proven to be so beneficial to the polis, are alluded to and taken up implicitly and explicitly throughout the rest of the play, for example by the Theban seer Teiresias (OT 440) and by the choir of Theban elders who praise their king as having passed the Sphinx’s test “cleverly” (σοφός) as a “friend of the city” (ἡδύπολις, 504–511). Here, it quickly becomes clear that Oedipus has benefited from the deed for which he became famous and from the intelligence that he applied to it. When Creon, Jocasta’s brother and Oedipus’ confidante, reports Apollo’s pronouncement that a plague has come over the city because Laius’ murderer has not been punished and the crime has not been expiated, Oedipus declares that he will “reveal” (φαίνειν) what is hidden; that is, he will bring light into the darkness of things, clear up the issue, illuminate (φανῶ) it, as he did once before by solving the Sphinx’s riddle. Thus, without any hesitation, he sets himself upon this “enlightening” endeavor (OT 132).

This attitude—his belief in his ability to dispel the darkness of ignorance and his quick decision to act in the interest of the polis—characterizes Oedipus as a typical Athenian of the fifth century BCE, as he has been frequently depicted by modern commentators, for example, by Bernard Knox, Egon Flaig, and Hellmut Flashar. As such, he is not, therefore, unequivocally reprehensible.¹⁶ More problematic in the Sophoclean sense are the imbalance, disharmony, and one-sidedness apparent in Oedipus’ thought and action: the hero sees his intelligence too one-sidedly as a panacea that is insuperable. He overlooks the limitations of human ability through exce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One. Oedipus before the Sphinx in Antiquity: On Sophocles
• Part Two. Oedipus before the Sphinx in Modernity: On Freud and Cocteau
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index