— And you, my friend, how did you get along?
— When Creon took over the rule of Thebes I sank back into thankful obscurity and retired to keep company at last with the birds. It was a bird, if you like, who told me the end of the story.
— Tell me, please.
— Do you really want to know?
— You know, I feel now it is all I want to know.
— It might go against your grain, Dr Freud.
— Almost everything I have learned has gone against my grain, my friend.
— His end was marvellous. Now there’s the thing you didn’t grasp.
— Where are you off to? Don’t go!
— I’m trying to find the corner of your room, Doctor.
— Why?
— Take me to a corner and I’ll show you. Are we there?
— We’re facing the French windows where you enter.
— And the corner?
— It’s here to our right. The other corner is all bookshelves.
— Very well, describe it to me, please.
— The corner of my room?
— How many lines meet there?
— How many lines? Three.
— Good. Now describe the directions.
— Two meet at right angles on the horizontal plane and the third makes a right-angled vertical.
— Exactly so.
— Well?
— Well what?
— Aren’t you going to explain?
— I would have thought it obvious. It was the third road, the vertical. He took it at last.
— Where to?
— Ah, that’s not for me to say. We call it the gods; you may, if you like, Dr Freud, call it “reality”. The sanction of the gods, the sanction of reality – what’s in a name? In any case, it’s what you come up against when cornered, and that is when you may begin to know what you are made of and who, really, you are.
— You don’t make sense.
— Is that what you are after still, Doctor? I thought we’d said goodbye to sense. It doesn’t make “sense” that in spite of all he had done, killed his father and three innocents besides, married his mother and fathered four children out of that sacrilegious union, the gods should take Oedipus finally for their own. They clamoured for him. He became holy.
— What is the root of “holy”? Stop a minute. Here, we’ll look it up in the dictionary. Why are you laughing?
— You amuse me, Doctor! Go ahead. Consult your oracle, while I tell you how it was with mine.
When Oedipus was very old, and more rancorous than ever, he arrived one day, in the company of his stalwart daughter Antigone, at Colonus, a deme of Athens, and sat down to rest his worn-out bones. And out of the blue his smooth-talking brother-in-law Creon turned up, declaring that Thebes was in trouble again and that the oracle, in its impossible wisdom, had now pronounced that without Oedipus’s dead body the city would be doomed.
— A bit of a nerve, wasn’t it?
— More of Apollo’s dark humour. Another reversal to keep the wretched Thebans dancing. But the cantankerous old king wouldn’t budge. He refused point blank to go back. By this time he wanted to be shot of the place which had given him nothing but grief.
— I don’t blame him.
— Nor did the immortals, it seems. Creon made an error. He tried to have the blind old cripple taken back by main force. What he didn’t bargain for was that those lame feet had taken their limping, stinking, railing, louse-ridden, taboo-breaking owner to the threshold of a most sacred grove. It was here, at this very place, where Oedipus’s knowing feet had landed him at last, that Orestes had been arraigned for matricide and Apollo had argued, fervently, that the slayer be pardoned for his crime. It was the judgement of Athena that finally set Orestes free and transformed the terrible Furies, who had pursued the mother murderer across the face of the earth, into the Kindly Ones.
— My Athena?
— Your own divinity, Dr Freud.
— If I believed in her she might be!
— I thought you claimed she helped to protect you from the Nazis?
— Ah, I’ve found “holy”.
— And what does your oracle tell you?
— “Holy”, Old English, “holi”, “hali”; Anglo Saxon, “halig”: hale, health, well, whole, akin to Old High German “heilac”, Danish “hellig”, Icelandic, “heilagr”; cf. Halibut, Hallow, Hollyhock. I like “halibut”!
— So, your oracle has provided your answer, Doctor: Oedipus became, if it suits you better, whole.
— He resolved his Oedipus complex?
— Dr Freud!
— My little joke.
— He re-solved the sphinx’s riddle, more like. Refusing to be confounded, he found instead for himself what it can mean to be a man. And the ways of being a man, as you and I can vouch for, Dr Freud, may be wayward and shocking. It was not for nothing it took him three attempts. The first time he answered with pure theory, the next he had to play out the drama, but in the end…
— Tell me the end, Tiresias. You know, I believe I’ve had a fear of endings.
— I know.
— But Oedipus didn’t?
— Oh he did. It was rather that he took no account of the fear. He did the things we are all of us able to do – or fear to do, or if we do we deny it – did them and owned up to them and lived to tell the tale.
— Or have you tell it!
— Or you, Dr Freud. But you, who have travelled so far with death at your side, and have charted, better than any, the perpetual temptation of our own quiescence, have missed something vital. Oedipus renounced the wish to die, even knowing at last who he was and what he had done.
— But who was he, finally?
— Who are any of us, “finally” Dr Freud? As the riddle suggested, he was both many and one.
— Of course we are all a crowd.
— Or a play. For you see, he played many contrary parts in his eventful life. For look, having escaped death himself, he lived to play the murderer; cast out from his homeland, he returned to become its ruler; taken from his mother’s breast, he came back to lie on it.
Yet, in his passionate pursuit of the truth, he robbed himself, some would say ruinously, of that return to the welcome, and now welcoming, breast and honoured place of high standing. He sentenced himself to be cast out again, a wanderer on the face of the earth, feeling his way by means of the very instrument which had brought him to this pass.
But this is the wonder: this worst of men lived to become the best. That unwillingness to yield, which took his father’s life and overcame his mother’s, saw Oedipus to a hero’s end.
— To tolerate life is the hardest of all its duties. So he didn’t die?
which took his father’s life and overcame his mother’s, saw Oedipus to a hero’s end.
— To tolerate life is the hardest of all its duties. So he didn’t die?
— This is what I heard: Creon was thwarted in his crude attempt at body snatching. The King of Athens, hearing of the famed pollutant’s presence in his land, placed Oedipus under his protection. The younger daughter, Ismene, hurried from Thebes to see her father again and a touching reunion took place. His daughters were filled with anguish when Oedipus told them that he had at last earned the right to leave them. They clung to their father, their faces wet and their garments drenched with tears, till a great voice cried out, so that the hair of all who heard it stood on end: Oedipus, why are you delaying? You keep us waiting too long. Then, on the steps which lead down to the grove where no living soul may tread and even the birds are silent…
— …You said a bird told you?
— Silence is not always absence, Dr Freud, as you will appreciate. One bird alone inhabited the sacred resting place of the Kindly Ones, for by day it keeps silent.
Oedipus turned back twice on the bronze steps, kissing his dear girls again and again. It is said that as he turned again the King of Athens escorted him down to the edge of the
holy ground. And there Oedipus threw away his stick and walked on into the grove, unaided and alone. All I can report is what the nightingale sang to me: Oedipus, who survived death to murder one of his would-be murderers, and fathered four children with the other, walked at last, at the immortals’ behest, into the deathless light.
— Where he could see?
— Who knows, my friend? I’ve yet to see for myself.
19
20 Maresfield Gardens, 21 September 1939
— Anna?
— No, it’s me, Doctor.
— My old friend?
— In every sense.
— You’re back?
— I am back. Turned up again like a bad penny!
— I should say you were worth your weight in gold.
— You would find I do not weigh much. A feather wouldn’t balance me.
— Nor me, the way I feel.
— How do you feel?
— Light.
— As opposed to dark?
— As thistledown. Schur has given me morphine. I asked for it.
— I know.
— I chose to end it. Here. In my own study. Looking out at the garden. The last patient on my own couch.
— I know.
— Patient means sufferer – well, of course you know that too! So here we are again, you and I. The promised end. You don’t think…?
— No, Dr Freud. You too have earned the right to go.
— At least I saw the almond flower. A flock of long-tailed tits landed on it one afternoon not long after I saw you last. Their breast plumage is like the tree’s bloom, the palest pink. Pretty birds. I looked them up in my British birds guide. It reminded me of your finches with the scarlet heads from the god’s blood. I thought you might reappear.
— I’m here now, Doctor.
— There was something I wanted to ask you.
— By all means.
— No, I forget. I wish you could see the Michaelmas daisies. The tall mauve-coloured flowers. One of your goldfinches was feeding on them the other day. When I was a boy and couldn’t sleep my mother used to tell me a tale about the Mauve Fairy. The fairy of oblivion. I used to tell it to Heinz…I looked up hollyhock. It comes from the Middle East. It might have grown in Delphi. Its other name is althaea. Doesn’t that mean truth?
— No, Doctor. That’s aletheia. An unforgetting. Remember?
— Unverborgenheit.
— Unconcealedness, then, if you prefer. The word doesn’t matter.
— I remember what it was I wanted to ask. The question Oedipus came to put to the Pythia. What was it? No one ever lets on.
— Ah, you are sharp, Doctor. He asked: How should I know who my parents are? And so…
— He was answered after all?
You know I’ve missed you. I’ll tell you, it was Lün who made the final decision. She wouldn’t come near me. When a dog imposes its veto you are no longer fit for any company.
— You are fit for mine.
— Who are you? Really.
— I am Tiresias.
— Not a figment of my imagination?
— The two are not incompatible. As you yourself might have said, my dear Dr Freud, there is no such thing as a “figure of speech”. Are you more real than Oedipus? Or Apollo? Or the oracle? Is a dream real?
— A dream is an unconscious reality. A reflection…
— …A reflection of a reflection of a reflection. Where does reality start? And end?
— As to that, I confess I am in the dark. It is dark, suddenly. I don’t seem to see where I am. Take my hand, please.
— I have it already.
— Where are you leading me?
— Don’t be afraid.
— I am not afraid.
20
Golders Green Cemetery, 26 September 1939
“He is being buried today in the atmosphere he would have wished, one of stark truth and realism; in sheer simplicity, without a note of pomp or ceremony…”
* * *
— We seem to have been walking for ages. Where are we?
— A place I have always in my mind when I think of the story you and I have told, my dear Doctor. Our story.
— If you say so.
— A point where a road parts and one arm strikes northwest in a steep defile towards Delphi while the other skirts the foot of Parnassus and winds eastward towards the fertile plains. A place of divergence or convergence.
— Depending on your point of view?
— Depending on your point of view.
— Is it Daulis we are going to?
— It has been in my mind to stand on the bridge and show you the swallows’ flight.
— I should like to see the swallows. And the pigs? The white pigs.
— If you wish.
— Might there be an almond tree flowering?
— Perhaps.
— And after that, Tiresias?
— After that we shall see, my old friend.
He died, as willed, in a foreign land,
his eternal resting place in quiet shade,
his passing not unmourned.
Antigone, “Oedipus at Colonus”
Author’s note
My re-reading of Freud has been greatly illuminated by the new Penguin Classic editions, edited by Adam Phillips, which made the task a joy and not a duty. My thanks to Penguin for permission to quote the extract from Interpreting Dreams, where Freud first formulates his idea of the Oedipus complex.
Where names in the Oedipus story are likely to be already known to readers, I have used the more familiar spellings: Delphi, Oedipus, Jocasta, Creon, Tiresias, rather than the more accurate but potentially alienating Delphoi, Oidipous, Iokaste, Kreon, Teiresias. However, where a name is likely to be less widely known I have favoured the transliteration of the Greek, thus, Phokis, Laios, Athena, Dionysos, daimon and so on. This deliberate inconsistency may annoy purists but my excuse is that this retelling is intentionally anachronistic and my aim has been to assist rather than perplex the reader.
I have taken the essence of the myth from the Loeb bilingual editions, past and present, of Sophocles’ dramas, though I have also drawn occasionally on other, more fragmentary, sources.
The words spoken at Freud’s funeral in Chapter 20 came from the oration by his colleague and biographer, Ernest Jones. Petrie Harbouri helped me with the translation of the lines from Oedipus at Colonus with which the book concludes.
Robert Lister generously furnished me with maps and archeological accounts of Ancient Phokis which gave me a good idea of where the original place “where three roads meet” might be found.
Where Three Roads Meet
Salley Vickers has worked as a teacher of
literature and a psychoanalyst. She is the author
of the bestselling Miss Garnet’s Angel, Mr
Golightly’s Holiday, Instances of the Number 3 and
The Other Side of You. She now writes full-time.
‘There is something rare and special about
Vickers as a novelist. She manages to touch
something buried deep in all of us.’ Independent
Also by Salley Vickers
Miss Garnet’s Angel (2000)
Instances of the Number 3 (2001)
Mr Golightly’s Holiday (2003)
The Other Side of You (2006)
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in Australia in 2007 by The Text Publishing Company
This digital edition first published in 2009 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Salley Vickers, 2007
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Map of Ancient Phokis and Boeotia by Tony Fankhauser
Plan of the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi by Bill Wood
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A c
atalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 652 8
www.meetatthegate.com
Where Three Roads Meet Page 10