Oedipus gives us a wonderful opportunity
to dip into our toolbox. Oedipus is incredibly rich and over years
has given scholars in many different fields a good opportunity to think with
the materials the Sophocles presents us. I'll just present a few ideas that just
scratching the surface of what can be learned from this incredibly rich story
that Sophocles passes down to us. First of fall, turning a functionalist
lens on what we're looking at. Remember, functionalist says that myths
are told in order to legitimize and authorize social norms in the culture that
is telling the myths to themselves. Now, in this there are multiple so, social
norms that are getting authorized and legitimized.
Number one, we, an obvious prohibition against incest is being shown to be the
right kind of thing to do. Where it's being exhibited to us, the
possibilities of awfulness that come from, committing of incest and the I,
prohibition against it is definitely here, underlined, authorized, and legitimized.
Then also another piece of this that's been coming out of my own presentation,
but I just wanted to label this as, specifically functionless kind of reading,
this is the importance of the role of Delphi in ancient Greek.
Society. We have a very strong message built into
this play that divine wisdom that comes from oracles should be heeded.
The traditional set of structures around the oracles, the temple sights, the people
that run the oracles. These people are being authorized by the
story. we're, we see in Oedipus's case, someone that, in the end turns against the
oracle, thumbs his nose at it and tries to talk about his own grandeur, as opposed to
the oracle being wrong. This is the wrong way to go.
I, I mentioned in one of the earlier lectures that.
The, the right thing to do if an oracle tells you some disturbing piece of
information is to go back to the oracle. You might say, I didn't like what you told
me, Or you might say to the oracle, well, so
what am I supposed to do since you've given me this awful kind of information.
But Oedipus takes it into his own hands to try to run away from the things that the
oracle has told him. And then as, as his story gets more and
more complex and he goes farther and farther away from the original message
that he get's from the oracle, he eventually turns against the oracle,
saying that, yes, for me to be okay, the oracle has to be wrong.
Well, that's strategically a blunder. You should never put yourself in a
position like that. Oedipus's play through a functionalist's
lens is authorizing this important social role of the oracle as a as a keeper and
protector of truths in a society. Looking through a Freudian lens, there's
obviously, we could talk for the rest of, the, the rest of our, time together, about
Freudian, possi-, possible Freudian readings, on the Oedipus story.
But yes, indeed, just to give a schematic outline of it, Freud would tell us, sure,
of course we're repulsed by Oedipus, but it's true that all of us are, in, in our,
in the end, repellent to ourselves because we have these, core, primal desires.
We live in ignorance of these primal desires.
So like Oedipus, we're in ignorance of our own crimes, since we're constantly, in our
case, we're constantly repressing them. We have conflicting feelings, at a, Freud
says, Freudian slip. Freud says we have conflicting feelings
about our parents. We have feelings that are maybe too
strong, they're upsetting to us and so we suppress them.
Freud will tell us yes, the Oedipus story grows out of precisely those strong
repressed emotions, of a, a sense of the, the son having competitiveness with
father, and a sense of intimacy with the mother.
These desires come out, we repress them, but they have to make their way out or
otherwise the steamkettle is in danger of blowing.
So we have things like can, Dreams, which consistantly do show things,
as people collect examples of dreams across, across societies. struggles with
fathers are common, intimacy with mothers, mothers are common in these kinds of
dreams. And Freud would say Oedipus grows out of a
primeval set of these dreams, and his myth is like the dream of an entire culture
trying to live out these allowing, a repressed desire to come out in a
displaced form onto a now Separate human being Oedipus on to whom we can kind of
drop all thse desires, let him express them for us. We live out those desires
through him and in the end find him repulsive, so we, shoe him and send him on
his way. From a structionalist reading we were
developing this when we looked at this question of autochthony.
In the story, remember, the, there were hints in Oedipus' tale of a connection
that he feels like he has with Cithaeron, back when he's trying to imagine what his
own complex lineage is. He goes from the question of lineage
directly to the question of the land where he's from and blends those two together.
He is expressing a very old and stubborn idea about where humans come from, in
Greek mythology. Very old and very stubborn.
The idea doesn't go away. The idea that human beings might just
sprout up from the Earth itself is something that shows up in ancient Greek
mythology. It is hard to eradicate because I think of
its appeal. Number one, it gets rid of the problem of
wanderingness, it shows that human beings do indeed belong to a certain kind of
birth, because that birth gives birth to them,
And it also allows, and the case of Oedipus makes this explicit for us, it
allows for a certain kind of escapism from the complexities that we have with
genealogical descent. To claim that a person is from a mother
and a father, and has a crazy uncle, and a strange cousin, and all of the
complexities that a family entails, is, can be burdensome, and the idea of
autochthony gives you not only this connectedness and rootedness to the land,
but also a chance to think of yourself as having a lineage that is displaced from
all the people and the family background that might be very complex and might get
very burdensome. So a structuralist might look at the
Oedipus story, And even though the whole story from
Cadmus on forward as a family that's oscillating between on the one hand,
embracing the idea of genetic lineage and background in their family.
And on the other hand, talking about autochthonous birth from the land itself.
And both of these I think you can find anchored in Oedipus's story.
Again, neither one of them is exactly resolved.
It's not as though the tension between these two ideas just kind of gets worked
out through the story. Instead you've got a, a human realization
that we come from other people, which make our lives complex,
And a human fantasy, which turns out to be very hard to eradicate, that claims that
we come from the land itself. These two things are in tension, and the
tension creates a kind of voltage and a structuralist would claim that the Oedipus
myth is a result of the tense voltage between these two poles that can't really
be reconciled but who's expression we find both side by side in Sophocles' very rich
tale of Oedipus.