"Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn 126" by Rembrandt - The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
My novel, "The Dead Reckoner", discusses the myth of Oedipus directly and that of Samson a little more indirectly. Reggie expresses his frustration with the Freudian interpretation of the Oedipus myth, which is that everyone feels the need to harm the parent of the same sex and posses the parent of the opposite sex. Whether this psychological notion is true (and for the most part it has been abandoned by modern psychology) is not the issue. What frustrates Reggie is that the Oedipal Complex is not consistent with the story and obscures its deeper meaning.
Oedipus, and here I am referring primarily to Sophocles's version, was sent away by his parents because an oracle predicted that he would kill his father and marry his mother. He believed the couple that raised him were his biological parents. Then he set out on his own and, in the course of his travels, killed a man he did not know was his father and married a woman he did not know was his mother. He became king of his birth town, which later fell under a plague as a result of Oedipus’ actions. Upon realizing the truth, he had to sacrifice himself to save his city.
A variety of meanings have been attached to the story. I think the most important feature is that it is terrifying. Oedipus’s parents knew what would happen and tried to avoid it, but they couldn’t understand the complicated mechanisms that will lead him to fulfill. In mythological terms we could refer to this as fate, but in more modern terms there is an obvious connection to the question of free will. Even without adopting a philosophy of absolute determinism, we must admit that a great deal of our behaviors and those of others are driven by mechanisms that are beyond our control.
Another theme is that of exceptionalism affording us no protection. Oedipus is intelligent and strong. He solved the riddle of the sphinx, which no one else could solve. He became king of Thebes. And yet, he could not avoid tragedy. As Ecclesiastes says, the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous. We can only do ourselves a favor by not convincing ourselves that because we are exceptional we are pardoned from tragedy.
Then there is the issue of blindness, also related to the first two points. Oedipus, like all of us, is too close to his own life to understand the true nature of himself or his relationship to the people he loved. At first blush, one might say it is the cause of the above phenomena. That is, Oedipus may have solved the riddle of the sphinx, but he failed to see its relevance to his own life. Thus we could conclude that it is not that exceptionalism is no protection, it is that Oedipus was simply not exceptional enough. Would someone with better insight finally escape the grip of fate?
This is where the myth of Samson comes in. In this case I will not argue that my use of that myth has any relationship to a common interpretation of the same. The story of Samson is dominated by revenge. He marries a Philistine and at his wedding he tells a riddle the other Philistines cannot answer. They enlist his wife to get the answer and when she fails, they kill her and her father. Samson takes revenge and the cycle continues. Finally, Samson falls in love with Delilah and the Philistines pay her to find the secret of his strength. She cuts his hair and Samson is carted off to a temple, where he is blinded and in one last act of revenge pushes the temple pillars over and kills everyone.
What would it mean for Oedipus to have truly understood his position? It would have meant pulling back the veil which made the sphinx so mysterious and reducing it to a set of well understood formulas. Would that have helped him? What is the sphinx? It is one who tells riddles, like Samson. So we uncover the enigmatic sphinx and instead of discovering the austere heart of the universe, we find this vengeful beast man covered in blood. That is, truly understanding our natures is a matter of coming face to face with how we are still animals. “Know thyself” says the philosopher, but true self knowledge results not in inner peace and the enigmatic meaning of life, but in the yawning abyss of the billions of years of evolution, red in tooth and claw, which lead to our present situation. Sometimes, knowledge leads to despair. Thus we would rather pretend the sphinx is beautiful and dress it up with religious garlands than acknowledge it is just a projection of ourselves, which when dispelled forces us to admit how meaningless and insecure life is.
And yet, Samson is the animal that tells riddles. He shares in common with Oedipus the quality that he is, despite his brutality, quite clever. Humans are capable of transcending the programming of the blind watchmaker that created us. We can reflect on our natures. And sometimes, we can create our own meaning out of the chaos. This is not a matter of freedom, it is a spiritual necessity.
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