“All Comes Clear at Last,” but “the Readiness is All”

“All Comes Clear at Last,” but “the Readiness is All”* Thomas B. Stroup When all comes clear at last, Oedipus rushes off-stage and tears out his eyes. Finally he sees. He sees himself, and the sight is too horrifying to be endured. His identity is no longer to be mistaken. This is the point of discovery, the time of recognition and reversal. Oedipus can now say Ecce homo; I am he. And he has come to this recognition, this full realization, ironically by the relentless exercise ofhis own powers of reason—and the pur­ suit of virtue. No god reveals Oedipus to himself; no intuition or rousing motions dispose him to his deeds. It was apparently rea­ sonable and altogether virtuous, if not wise, for the clever prince to use his wits to evade the oracle by leaving Corinth, to rid Thebes of the Sphinx, and then proudly to track down the pol­ luter with determined initiative and enterprise and logic. He him­ self sent to know of the oracle the source of the suffering in Thebes; the oracle laid no obligations upon him, nor did it give him the answer direct. He took upon himself the tasks; the gods did not set them upon him, nor did they help him out of them— not in Oedipus Rex. He was too humanly wise, that is, too fool­ ish, to disregard their prophecy in the first place; and they knew he would not heed them. Foreknowledge, not predestination, is operative here. If Oedipus had, in the first place, stayed in Corinth and properly regarded the oracle by not regarding it by any overt action, he would have proved the prophecy false and saved his eyes. The essential irony is that his belief is expressed in an act of unbelief, * This paper was read at the Symposium given in honor of Professor Fielding Rus­ sell upon the occasion of his retirement at Georgia Southern College, 17 May 1975; it will also appear in a festschrift edition, The Humanist in His World: Essays in Honor of Fielding Dillard Russell, edited by Barbara W. Bitter and Frederick K. Sanders, which will be published by the Attic Press of Greenwood, S. C. later this spring. 61 62 Comparative Drama a lack of trust, of faith in an act that denies faith. He chose not to accept the apparentwill of the gods as given in the words from Delphi. Had he done so, his own will had then prevailed—and the true desire of the gods as well! For the true will of the gods was assuredly that men achieve a measure of peace and happi­ ness. Now that someone had pried too deeply into their secrets, had by his free and inordinately inquisitive mind asked what would happen in the future, that which was in the original scheme of things had been changed. A new future is now deter­ mined because the gods well know the characterof their creature, whowouldbe as gods themselves knowing the future. Soit is that Oedipus, he of all people, so justly proud of his intellectual pow­ ers, made the simple but fatal mistake of assuming to know his own identity, of assuming that he was the son of the king of Corinth. (“It is a wise man who knows his own father,” we are told.) Acting upon this assumed knowledge, in his mental blind­ ness he actually thwarts the original will of the gods by trying to escape the Delphic prophecy—the apparent will, or what he assumes is their true will. Oedipus suffers, then, not merely from the attempt, but from the accomplishment. And his unwitting tri­ umph, doubly ironic, breaks him. Had he surrendered himself to the apparent, he had made the true and original will of the gods, the original scheme of things, prevail. But no inner guide, no spiritual promptings, no rousing motions, no fightings within his heart come to teach him of the divinity that shapes his end and save Oedipusfrom the burden it is to be a man—only a man. All has come too clear. The light of ultimate truth is blinding. Not so with Hamlet. Spiritual illumination or intuitive promptings do...