Oedipus the Hero

Posted on June 30, 2002 in Courage & Activism Myths & Mysticism

Oedipus the Hero

Many of us read Sophocles’s play Oedipus Rex back in high school or in our freshman year of college. Oedipus is depicted as the ultimate in arrogant politicians. He just won’t stop in his investigation to find the fellow who ruined Thebes for everyone. And in the end, he loses his job and his wife who also happens to be his mother. The lesson that we glean from that reading of Oedipus isn’t a good one. We call it “tragedy”. “See,” we say. “Don’t be concerned with the truth. Just persist in your happy illusion.”

To me, Oedipus is the bravest of the Thebans. Many politicians might not have pursued the truth in the first place. Others would have conducted proceedings in a secretive star chamber with a committee of select friends who could be counted on to keep things quiet. Still others would have suppressed the evidence and continued holding power. Oedipus does not hide from the truth nor allows the truth to hide from him or his people. He brings the bandy-legged, blind seer Terisius to his court and demands the identity of the monster who has brought ruin to the city. The scenes in court play out like a classic crime investigation with the Greek chorus sensing that things will not turn out well. Yet Oedipus pursues the truth and imposes the punishment — on himself.

Victor Hugo, I think, sensed Oedipus’s essential dignity and put something of him in Jean Valjean, the hero of Les Miserables. Valjean is, like Oedipus, a man of power, a leader who comes to the point where he must choose truth or a lie. There’s a man who they say is him, a crazy old hermit who the dutiful Inspector Javert has rooted out of the forest. Many convicts on the run would probably let the other fellow dangle. Valjean goes down to the court house and does what most guys would never dare to do: he reveals that he, the Mayor, is the escaped prisoner. I am Jean Valjean. The book proceeds from that revelation through a long flight from injustice during which Valjean saves an abused child and raises her as his own daughter. Not once does Hugo treat Valjean as the victim of his own doing. Valjean is not the tragedy. France bears the tragedy. And Oedipus’s tragedy belongs to Thebes, not to the king.

Compare Oedipus and Jean Valjean to recent actions of the Bush Administration. If George Bush were like Oedipus, would he forestall investigations into the 9-11 tragedy? Would he cover up Enron? I think Oedipus has been taught wrong to generations of children. The moral that gets transmitted is “don’t get caught at evil”. This fails to take into account that the evil Oedipus “committed” was inadvertent and unconscious. We should look not at Oedipus for the flawed personality, but at the gods who set him up and the people of Thebes who allowed him to die in shame. Oedipus is Jean Valjean in Thebes. Both men deserve our applause for holding themselves accountable to the same laws as every other man. The application of the laws are what we must question. Oedipus is a true hero, a proto-egalitarian, the kind of man we are supposed to have in the Oval Office at this moment. But we don’t.