by May, Rollo
Thebes is suffering under another plague as the curtain rises on the actual drama. Word has been brought from the oracle that the plague will be lifted only when the murderer of the previous King Laius is discovered. Oedipus calls the old blind prophet, Tiresias, and thereupon proceeds a gripping and powerful unfolding step by step of Oedipus’ self-knowledge, an unfolding replete with rage at the truth and those who are its bearers, and all other aspects of our human struggle against recognition of our own reality. It is interesting that Freud, after watching the drama on the stage, cried out, “Ach, it is a psychoanalysis!”
Tiresias’ blindness symbolizes the fact that one can more insightfully grasp inner reality about human beings—gain insight—if one is not distracted by the impingement of external details.
Tiresias at first refuses to answer Oedipus’ questioning as to who is guilty with the words:
How terrible it is to know …
Where no good comes from knowing! Of these matters
I was full well aware, but let them slip….*
In response to Oedipus’ new demands and threats, he continues,
… Let me go home;
… So shalt thou bear thy load most easily.
…Ye
Are all unknowing; my say, in any sort,
I will not say, lest I display my sorrow.
The drama then unfolds as the progressive revelation of Oedipus to himself, the source from which the truth proceeds being not Oedipus himself but Tiresias. Thus Tiresias is the psychoanalyst The whole gamut of reactions like “resistance” and “projection” is exhibited by Oedipus as he fights the more violently against the truth the closer he gets to it. He accuses Tiresias of planning to betray the city; is this why he will not speak? The old seer replies,
I will not bring remorse upon myself
And upon you. Why do you search these matters?
Then in a burst of angry projection Oedipus accuses Tiresias of having killed Laius himself. And when the king is finally told the truth by the goaded prophet that he, Oedipus himself, is the murderer of his father, Oedipus turns upon Tiresias and his wife’s brother, Creon, with the charge that these words are part of their strategy to take over the state.
Jocasta, Oedipus’ wife, tries to persuade him not to place any weight on the seer’s accusation and bursts out in a very human tirade,
Listen and learn, nothing in human life
Turns on the soothsayer’s art.
Jocasta, the mother whom he has married, now herself becomes aware of the terrible knowledge that awaits Oedipus. She tries desperately to dissuade him:
... But why should men be fearful,
O’er whom Fortune is mistress, and foreknowledge
Of nothing sure? Best take life easily,
As a man may. For that maternal wedding,
Have no fear; for many men ere now
Have dreamed as much; but he who by such dreams
Sets nothing, has the easiest time of it.
When Oedipus still proclaims his resolve to face the truth, wherever it may lead, whatever it may be, she cries,
Don’t seek it! I am sick, and that’s enough.…
Wretch, what thou art O mightst thou never know!
Oedipus is not dissuaded but insists that he must know who he is and where he came from. He must know and accept his own reality, his own myth, and his fate.
I will not hearken—not to know the whole,
Break out what will, 1 shall not hesitate….
The old shepherd who rescued the infant Oedipus from death on the mountainside is finally brought, the one man who can provide the final link in the fateful story.
“O, I am in horror, now, to speak!” the shepherd cries. And Oedipus answers, “And I to hear. But I must hear—no less.”
When Oedipus does learn the final, tragic truth, that he has killed his father and married his mother, he pulls out his eyes, the organ of seeing. His punishment is first exile, imposed by himself but later, as in Oedipus in Colonus, the second drama, imposed by Creon and the state. The tragedy has now come full circle. He was originally exiled when he was a few days old on his father’s order, and now, an old man, he will be again in exile.
This exile is a fascinating symbolic act from our modern psychoanalytic viewpoint, for we have held in earlier chapters that the greatest threat and greatest cause of anxiety for an American near the end of the twentieth century is not castration but ostracism, the terrible fate of being exiled by one’s group. Many a contemporary man castrates himself or permits himself to be castrated because of fear of being exiled if he doesn’t. He renounces his power and conforms under the great threat and peril of ostracism.
RESPONSIBILITY NOT GUILT
We now turn to the drama which reveals the healing, integrative aspects of the Oedipus myth, namely Oedipus in Colonus. The old blind Oedipus is led by the hand of his daughter Ismene to Colonus, which is a grove of trees a few miles from Athens. There the old man pauses to contemplate his problems and to find some meaning in these horrible experiences he has endured.
There is very little “action” in this drama. It is almost entirely a man meditating on his tragic suffering and what he has learned from it. So far as I know, this drama is never mentioned in psychoanalytic literature in America, an amazing fact in itself. One reason for its neglect is that discussion of the integrative functions of myths in general tend to be omitted in psychoanalytic discussions. But, more specifically, a consequence of the literalistic interpretation of the myth as having to do with sex and killing the father requires that we stop when these are worked through, punishment meted out, and the situation accepted, as at the conclusion of Oedipus Rex.
But viewing the myth as the presentation of the human struggle, the truth about oneself, we must indeed go on, as Sophocles does, to see how a person comes to terms with the meaning of these acts which Oedipus has committed. This subsequent drama is Oedipus’ stage of reconciliation with himself and his fellow men in the persons of Theseus and the Athenians, and it is a reconciliation with the ultimate meaning in his life. “For the gods who threw you down sustain you now,” as his daughter Ismene phrases it.
Since it was written by Sophocles when he was an old man of eighty-nine, this drama can be supposed to contain the wisdom of his old age as well.
The first theme we find in Oedipus’ meditation at Colonus is guilt—the difficult problem of the relation of ethical responsibility to self-consciousness. Is a man guilty if the act was unpremeditated, done unknowingly? In the course of his probing old Oedipus comes to terms with this; the answer is responsibility but not guilt.
Creon has come from Thebes, having heard the prophecy that the city which has Oedipus’ body will always have peace, to persuade old Oedipus to return. But the old man defends himself indignantly against the brash accusations of guilt with which Creon attacks him:
If then I came into the world—as I did come—
In wretchedness, and met my father in a fight,
And knocked him down, not knowing that I killed him
Nor whom I killed—again, how could you find
Guilt in that unmeditated act? …
As for my mother—damn you, you have no shame,
Though you are her own brother—
...........................................
But neither of us knew the truth; and she
Bore my children also—…
While I would not have married her willingly
Nor willingly would I ever speak of it.*
Again, about his father he cries out that he has
A just extenuation. This:
I did not know him; and he wished to murder me.
Before the law—before God—I am innocent!
It is clear that Oedipus accepts and bears his responsibility. But he insists that the delicate and subtle interplay of conscious and unconscious factors (as we could call them) makes any legalistic or pharisaic imputation of guilt inaccurate and wrong.
It is a truism since Freud that the problem of guilt is not within the act but within the heart, as indeed Jesus said four centuries after Sophocles wrote this drama. The drama holds that the sins of meanness, avarice, and irreverence of Creon and Polynices are “no less grave than those sins of passion for which Oedipus was punished, that in condemning them to the merciless justice soon to descend, Oedipus acts thoroughly in accord with a moral order which his own experience has enabled him to understand,”†
In angry, vehement words, Oedipus refuses the tricky proposal of Creon, the present dictator of Thebes, who tries to get the exiled king to return by capturing Antigone as a hostage. Fortunately Theseus, ruler of Athens, comes out in time to send his troops to overtake Creon and bring Antigone back again to the grove at Colonus.
The myth does point toward a conclusion emphasized by modern existential psychotherapists, that because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an acceptance of the universal human situation. We then recognize the participation of every one of us in man’s inhumanity to man. The words to Oedipus from the hero, King Theseus, who exhibits no inner conflict at all, are therefore poignant and eternally important:
… for I
Too was an exile.…
I know I am only a man; 1 have no more
To hope for in the end than you have.
Another theme in this integrative drama is the power of Oedipus to impart grace—now that he has suffered through his terrible experiences and come to terms with them. As he himself says to the Athenians who have come out to see him and his daughter in the grove at Colonus:
For I come here as one endowed with grace,
By those who are over Nature; and I bring
Advantage to this race….
Theseus accepts this: “Your presence, as you say, is a great blessing.” This capacity to impart grace is connected with the maturity and other emotional and spiritual qualities which result from the courageous confronting of his Oedipus’ experiences. He cries,
One soul, I think, can often make atonement
For many others, if it be devoted….
But there is also a clear symbolic element to make the point of his grace unmistakable: the oracle has revealed that his body after death will ensure victory to the land and the ruler which possesses him. The mere presence of his body is enough.*
The last emphasis in the outworking of this myth is love. At the end of the drama old Oedipus takes his daughters with him back to a great rock to die. A messenger, who then came back to the group to report the marvelous manner of Oedipus’ death, states that his last words to his daughters were:
… And yet one word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.
Oedipus does not at all mean love as the absence of aggression or the strong affects of anger. Old Oedipus will love only those he chooses to love. His son, who has betrayed him, asks for mercy and states, “Compassion limits even the power of God,” but Oedipus will have none of it. The love, rather, he bears his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, and the love they have shown him during his exiled, blind wanderings is the kind of love he chooses to bless.
His sharp and violent temper, present at the crossroads where he killed his father years ago and exhibited in his sharp thrusts with Tiresias in Oedipus Rex, is still much in evidence in this last drama, unsubdued by suffering or maturity. The fact that Sophocles does not see fit to remove or even soften Oedipus’ aggression and anger—the fact, that is, that the “aggression” and the “angry affects” are not the “flaws” he has old Oedipus get over—all this illustrates our thesis that the aggression involved in killing his father is not the central issue of these myths. Oedipus’ maturity is not a renouncing of passion to come to terms with society, not a learning to live “in accord with the reality requirements of civilization.” It is Oedipus’ reconciliation with himself, with the special people he loves, and with the transcendent meaning of his life.
Finally, the messenger comes back and reports, describing Oedipus’ miraculous death and burial,
But some attendant from the train of Heaven
Came for him; or else the underworld
Opened in love the unlit door of earth.
For he was taken without lamentation,
Illness or suffering; indeed his end
Was wonderful if mortal’s ever was.
This touching and beautiful death of a great character is magnificent as Sophocles presents it dramatically. As Oedipus Rex is the myth of the “unconscious,” the struggle to confront the reality of the dark, destructive forces in man, Oedipus in Colonus is the myth of consciousness, the aspect of the myth which is concerned with the search for meaning and reconciliation. Both together comprise the myth of human beings confronting their own reality.
THE HEALING POWER OF MYTH
From our concern with these dramas of Oedipus, we can see the healing power of myths. First, the myth brings into awareness the repressed, unconscious, archaic urges, longings, dreads, and other psychic content. This is the regressive function of myths. But also, the myth reveals new goals, new ethical insights and possibilities. Myths are a breaking through of greater meaning which was not present before. The myth in this respect is the way of working out the problem on a higher level of integration. This is the progressive function of myths. The tendency has been almost universal in classical psychoanalysis to reduce the latter to the former, and to treat myths as regressive phenomena, which are then “projected” into ethical and other forms of meaning in the outside world. The upshot of this is that the integrative side of myths is lost. This is shown in the great emphasis on Oedipus Tyrannus in psychoanalytic circles while Oedipus in Colonus is forgotten.
But myths are means of discovery. They are a progressive revealing of structure in our relation to nature and to our own existence. Myths are educative—“e-ducatio.” By drawing out inner reality they enable the person to experience greater reality in the outside world.
We now emphasize the side that is generally overlooked, that these myths discover for us a new reality as well. They are roads to universals beyond one’s concrete experience. It is only on the basis of such a faith that the individual can genuinely accept and overcome earlier infantile deprivations without continuing to harbor resentment all through one’s life. In this sense myth helps us accept our past, and we then find it opens before us our future.
There are infinite subtleties in this “casting out of remorse.” Every individual, certainly every patient, needs to make the journey in his and her own unique way. An accompanying process all along the way will be the transforming of one’s neurotic guilt into normal, existential guilt. And both forms of anxiety can be used constructively as a broadening of consciousness and sensitivity. This journey is made through understanding and confronting myths which have not only an archaic, regressive side but an integrative, normative, and progressive aspect as well.
PART II
MYTHS IN AMERICA
SIX
The Great Myth of the New Land
The discovery of America galvanized and inebriated the Western world. It did more than anything else—even Copernicus and Galileo—to overturn the world view of the Middle Ages. It revolutionized the thought of Western man. He was now convinced that human society was getting off to an entirely new start
Thomas Merton
WE FIRST ARE SURPRISED to note the curious phenomenon that myths precede discovery. Medieval Europe did not “want” a new world in the centuries before Columbus set forth in his three tiny ships in 1492. The Vikings under Leif Ericson had come to America in the eleventh century, and the Irish had made several trips to North America before them. But these discoveries were largely ignored. Medieval people were concerned with their own inner world and with heaven, the world above, not a new world like their present one. It took an inner change in Europe before the people could let
themselves see and experience a new world. A new mythic world had first to be born; it was then time to discover a new outer world as well. We note that people’s myth is decisive, rather than bare historical fact, in what they let themselves see and not see. It is not by its history that the mythology of a nation is determined, but, conversely, its history is determined by its mythology.* This reminds one of Virgil’s saying, “We make our destiny by our choice of the gods.”
To be able to discover and populate the New World required the Renaissance, with its great surge of humanistic change in Europe. The new burst of love for nature which is shown in Italian art, for example, supplanted the stiff mosaics of the Middle Ages. There was a new confidence in human possibilities, a new sense of adventure, a challenge on all sides to push beyond previous boundaries of geography and science. These new myths set the stage for Columbus to make his voyage. As is often the case, myth leads to fact rather than the reverse. The myth leads people to give their attention to one possibility rather than another, and hence to change the direction of their intentions and their dreams. Columbus proposed his expedition at the right time—the Kairos †—when people were ready to accept the discovery of the new world.
In people’s minds this discovery of America was due to God’s favor. It was part of His plan for a fresh beginning for mankind, in an age when almost everything was starting anew. The New World myth did not ignore older myths. The myths which filled the minds and souls of the people on the Mayflower were myths of Paradise, the Garden of Eden, the Golden Age. The people transformed these ancient myths into what was to become the great myth of America.** Since myths are beyond time, they could all be formed into one glorious narrative. Stephen Vincent Benet wrote in 1943, in “Western Star,” that the myth was filled: