Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Oedipus Tyrannus 145
dialectical loosening is so great, that a touch of surpassing cheerfulness
is thereby communicated to the entire play, which everywhere
blunts the edge of the horrible presuppositions of the procedure. In
the “Oedipus at Colonus” we find the same cheerfulness, elevated,
however, to an infinite transfiguration: in contrast to the aged king,
subjected to an excess of misery, and exposed solely as a sufferer to all
that befalls him, we have here a supermundane cheerfulness, which
descends from a divine sphere and intimates to us that in his purely
passive attitude the hero attains his highest activity, the influence of
which extends far beyond his life, while his earlier conscious musing
and striving led him only to passivity. Thus, then, the legal knot of the
fable of Oedipus, which to mortal eyes appears indissolubly entangled,
is slowly unravelled—and the profoundest human joy comes
upon us in the presence of this divine counterpart of dialectics. If
this explanation does justice to the poet, it may still be asked whether
the substance of the myth is thereby exhausted; and here it turns
out that the entire conception of the poet is nothing but the lightpicture
which healing nature holds up to us after a glance into the
abyss. Oedipus, the murderer of his father, the husband of his mother,
Oedipus, the interpreter of the riddle of the Sphinx! What does the
mysterious triad of these deeds of destiny tell us? There is a primitive
popular belief, especially in Persia, that a wise Magian can be born
only of incest: which we have forthwith to interpret to ourselves with
reference to the riddle-solving and mother-marrying Oedipus, to the
effect that when the boundary of the present and future, the rigid
law of individuation and, in general, the intrinsic spell of nature, are
broken by prophetic and magical powers, an extraordinary counternaturalness—as,
in this case, incest—must have preceded as a cause;
for how else could one force nature to surrender her secrets but by
victoriously opposing her, i.e., by means of the Unnatural? It is this
intuition which I see imprinted in the awful triad of the destiny
of Oedipus: the very man who solves the riddle of nature—that
double-constituted Sphinx—must also, as the murderer of his
father and husband of his mother, break the holiest laws of nature.
Indeed, it seems as if the myth sought to whisper into our ears that
wisdom, especially Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural abomination,
and that whoever, through his knowledge, plunges nature into an
abyss of annihilation, must also experience the dissolution of nature