The Severance of Vison - On Oedipos Rex
This is the second of a series of entries on Sophocles' Oedipos Rex. For the first entry, click here. Numbers in parenthesis represent line numbers. The translation used is by David Grene, from the University of Chicago's "Complete Greek Tragedies" series, 2nd edition, published 1991.

Oedipos is surrounded by people who are reluctant to know or to share the truth. Tiresias:

... Let me go home.
It will be easier for both of us
to bear our several destinies to the end
if you will follow my advice. (319-322)

Or the herdsman, when a messenger begins to reveal the daisy chain of hands that the infant Oedipos passed through on his way from Queen Jocasta to King Polybus:

Death take you! Won't you hold your tongue? (1146)

Or Jocasta herself, when she begins to surmise her relationship with her beloved husband:

God keep you from the knowledge of who you are! (1068)

Oedipos' grim determination to discover his identity, when that appears to hold the secret of his country's troubled fortunes, is evident by contrast. To Tiresias:

For God's sake if you know of anything,
do not turn from us; all of us kneel to you,
all of us here, your suppliants. (326-328)

To Jocasta:

I will not be persuaded to let be
the chance of finding out the whole thing clearly. (1065-66)

To the Chorus:

... Such is my breeding,
and I shall never prove so false to it,
as not to find the secret of my birth. (1084-1086)

In another exchange with the herdsman:

I [am on the brink] of frightful hearing. But I must hear. (1169-1170)

This unflinching desire to know is part and parcel with Oedipos' heroic character, and singles him out from others. It is what has made him king, and the method by which he brought prosperity to Thebes, because it was in solving riddles, in learning what no one else could discover, that Oedipos saved the city from the Sphinx.

But the situation lies differently this time. Solving this riddle will drive him to despair and drive him out of the city as the most piteous of men. It will drive him into a complete solitude. The city was held together on the basis of a tangle of secrets and ignorance. It must eject the bearer of its bad tidings to move on.

Once everything has been fully illuminated, Oedipos seeks darkness. He wants to be blind, not only in this life, but in the next:

I do not know with what eyes I could look
upon my father when I die and go
under the earth, nor yet my wretched mother --
those two to whom I have done things deserving
worse punishment than hanging. (1372-1375)

Thebes fully concurs with him, and keeps up the refrain of the desire not to know what's painful:

Unhappy in your mind and your misfortune,
would I had never known you! (1347-1348)

Because of his insatiable desire to know, Oedipos found out things hidden in darkness. Having faced darkness, Oedipos must face the world with darkened visage, irrevocably cut off from an intolerable world that no longer tolerates him.

Yet even in shunning the world that he once inspected so relentlessly, Oedipos heroically stays among the living. While Jocasta killed herself over the revelation, Oedipos lives on:

Approach and deign to touch me
for all my wretchedness, and do not fear.
No man but I can bear my evil doom. (1413-14155)

Even while cutting himself off from the city, he seeks to reconnect with it, this time on a different footing. He gets his wish. At the closing scene, Creon guides the helpless Oedipos out of the city. Even heroes need a hand.

Universal Man - On Oedipos Rex

This is the first of a series of entries on Sophocles' Oedipos Rex. More will follow. Numbers in parenthesis represent line numbers. The translation used is by David Grene, from the University of Chicago's "Complete Greek Tragedies" series, 2nd edition, published 1991.

At the beginning of Oedipos Rex, Oedipos is almost literally the life of the city of Thebes. He found Thebes in deeply distressed and preoccupied by the Sphinx, and, through solving the riddle, delivered them into prosperity and peace. The citizens recognize him as :

the first of men
in all the chances of this life, and when
we mortals have to do with more than man. (32-35)

So when the city comes under an even greater distress, they naturally look to him:

Once you have brought us luck with happy omen;
be no less now in fortune.(52-53)

They look to Oedipos because he represents their hopes and dreams, the fulfillment of their ideals, the best representative of their virtues and values. They vest themselves in him, utterly and completely.

Oedipos reciprocates. He accepts the life of the people, accepts responsibility as their protector, and sees their suffering as his own:

... My spirit groans
for city and myself and you at once. (63-64)

And again:

The grief I bear, I bear it more for these
than for my own heart. (93-94)

Both Thebes and Oedipos are operating on assumptions about how a king will solve the problem. He will consult with experts, find the bad guy, and get rid of him. It therefore comes as a great surprise when Tiresias announces to Oedipos that "you are the land's pollution" (353). Yet, when considered more deeply, there is a deep congruity to this revelation. Oedipos is the life of the city. He is not merely himself. His destiny is deeply and intimately intertwined with the destiny of Thebes. It is therefore clear that he must be the source of all of Thebes's fortunes, good and evil. It is a package deal.

Like Oedipos himself, Thebes was as blind to their king's vices as they were fixated on his virtues. Thebes suffers a great shock when they begin to see their king as vulnerable and defenseless:

Now when we look to him we are all afraid;
he's pilot of our ship and he's frightened. (923-924)

Once the shocking revelation has come, Oedipos the King must divorce himself from his people. His private life, his "old pain" (1033), the secrets of his personal destiny, have brought universal distress against the people he sought to serve. Now the only service he can perform for them, the only way that he can fulfill his role as king, is to enter into a private and secluded life. He must leave.

Oedipos, in his shame, desires this outcome just as strongly as the city does. Indeed, his violence against himself, his self-blinding, encapsulates the desire to be removed from contact with others, because he sees his presence as toxic to others:

To this guilt I bore witness against myself -
with what eyes shall I look upon my people? (1384-1385)

The situation is so piteous that the blindness and exile of a far-seeing hero are the only relief in sight.

But what about us? Is it Thebes alone that colludes with the hero, that must suffer his secret curses as it enjoys the radiance of his outer grandeur? No. All of us, as witnesses to the tragedy, drink from the cup of his fate. He leaves the stage because we can not bear to see him any more. What part of our hearts does he take with him?

Married to Endurance - On Ethan Frome

Ethan is brilliant, psychologically mature, receptive to beauty, heroic in form. His cultural resources are spare, but his vision is wide enough to let him know that he belongs elsewhere. His habitual silence indicates the abyss between the grandness of his conceptions and the limitations of his language. Even if he had language for his thoughts, the ears about him in Starkfield would not receive what he had to say.

His namesake, an ancestor, was married to a woman named Endurance, and died at Starkfield. This will be his fate, too, and he is welded to it all the more strongly after his attempt to escape fails. Endurance is the only virtue left in Starkfield. Every other virtue requires the hospitality of nature and culture to survive. Endurance thrives in us only when every other hospitable element is turned against us. Ethan's graces is the more admirable for the meanness around him, and his refinement more evident in the face of his own ignorance.

The landscape of the harsh New England climate is Ethan's only simpatico. His reflections on it are his only solace.

In view of the foregoing, we can see that Wharton is isolating and distilling the human spirit by showing what of it can survive the harshest conditions. This is what distinguishes it from her society novels in which her aim is to watch the decadence of the human spirit when every material comfort is at its beck and call. Language has never been so spare, so brilliant, or so utterly chilling. Like Ethan, it takes its cue perfectly from the cold geists of New England.