Fate, Family, and Oedipus Rex: Crash Course Literature 202 - YouTube (2)

can't help himself. He wants to know the whole story. For me, at least, that's what's admirable

about him, and also what's pitiable.

The play asks whether knowing is a good thing. I mean, Tiresias says: "Alas, how terrible

is wisdom when it brings no profit to the man that's wise." And Oedipus, at least, personally,

probably would have been happier living in ignorance, although, then, the plague would

have continued to devastate Thebes.

So I think the play ultimately suggests that even though ignorance can be bliss, Oedipus'

search for truth is right and just and brave and uncompromising, and that's what makes

him great. It's also what ruins his life, as the critic E.R. Dodds says, "What causes

his ruin is his strength and courage, his loyalty to Thebes and his loyalty to the truth."

And so, finally, thankfully, I do find myself disagreeing with Aristotle, because I don't

think that Oedipus was a great man ruined by a great error. I think the story is more

complicated than that. So, could Oedipus ever really have escaped his fate? Probably not.

I mean, there are occasional examples in Greek myth of gods softening of fate or finding a loophole, but those are rare.

So when you read Oedipus, you realize there are actually two stories: one is about what's

already happened, and one is about what's happening now. It's the second one that interests

Sophocles, like, killing the father and marrying the mother -- that stuff happens in the past,

offstage. Sophocles concentrates on the choices that Oedipus freely makes to find the source

of the plague, even when it means implicating himself to gouge out his eyes so that he won't

have to look at his parents in the underworld.

So Oedipus can't escape his fate, but he does have a measure of free will, he does make

some choices. What's interesting to Sophocles isn't so much the fulfillment of the prophecy

as HOW it is fulfilled, and how that affects the present.

As the critic A.W. Gomme put it, "The gods know what the final score of the football

game will be, but we still have to play it." Ultimately, the victory, Gomme says, "will

depend on the skill, the determination, the fitness of the players, and a little on luck."

Instead of using the play to stage some sort of fate versus free will debate, Sophocles

is interested in asking questions of both fate AND free will. I mean, when we see Oedipus,

we should ask ourselves, "How much control do we have over our lives? How much do we

owe to genetics, to privilege, to upbringing, to accident, to the choices that we do or

don't make?" And those are relevant questions today.

Now, of course, not everyone thought that was the most interesting part of the play.

Like, Sigmund Freud decided that the reason the play was so successful is because everyone

suffers from a so-called "Oedipus Complex." Freud described this in the Interpretation

of Dreams as "the fate to direct our first sexual impulse and our first hatred and our

first murderous thought against our father." But, for the record, Oedipus does not have

an Oedipus Complex. His tragedy is about a man who deliberately tries to avoid killing

his father and impregnating his mother, not about a man who secretly wants to.

But ultimately, what makes Oedipus such a great play is that it stands up to many readings,

and can inform our lives in many ways. I mean, is he a great man? Does he make a great mistake?

Does he suffer his fate because of personal flaws or because of the nature of the universe?

Those are big, interesting questions, and it's nice to know that people have been asking

them for millennia. Thanks for watching, I'll see you next week.

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