The second great theorist of the 20th century who focused on the Oedipus myth was Levi-Strauss, the father of structuralism. He reads the myth in all its versions, not just in Sophocles’ telling of it, as mediating between two conflicting accounts of human origin, what’s called autoxony and sexual reproduction. Now, autoxony is a word that simply means springing from the earth. Auto means self.
Kthon, C-H-T-H-O-N, means earth, so autoxene means coming from the earth itself. And this is a theory of human origin that has left its traces in several Greek myths, usually in myths of particular cities. The Athenians, for instance, claimed that they themselves were autoxenous. Other peoples may have been created in one way or another, but the Athenians claimed that they themselves sprang from the earth of Athens.
Levi-Strauss thinks that the Oedipus myth encodes or represents a conflict between the theory of autochthony and the observed reality of sexual reproduction. In his reading of the myth, the riddle of the Sphinx and Oedipus’ uncertainty about his parentage both concern the essential nature of being human. Where do human beings come from and what kind of creatures are they?
The riddle of the Sphinx, which Sophocles does not tell us, according to other authors, was just this. The Sphinx asked everyone she encountered, what kind of animal walks on four feet at morning, two feet at noon, and three feet at evening? And Oedipus was the only one who was able to recognize that the answer was man or a human being who crawled as a baby, walks erect as an adult, and leans on a cane in old age.
So the Sphinx’s riddle has to do with what sort of a creature is a human being and also lays emphasis on feet. And Levi-Strauss thought that the emphasis laid on lameness in Oedipus’s family. His grandfather Labdicus has a name that means lame one. Oedipus’s name means swollen foot, and refers to a detail of his myth that before he was exposed his father Laius pierced the baby’s ankles in order to lame him. Levi-Strauss sees this stress on lameness as a reference to autoxiny because in stories of autoxinous origins very frequently humans who are born from the earth are lame or at least have some sort of oddity about their lower limbs, the last bit of them to emerge from the earth. Now, there’s no doubt that the detail of the piercing of baby Oedipus’ ankles is an odd detail in the story as it’s come down to us. It makes no logical sense. The infant is exposed as an infant. He can’t even crawl yet. What’s the point of laming him?
And Levi-Strauss says that the point is simply that the myth requires this element of lameness in Oedipus as in other members of his family. So, according to Levi-Strauss, the myth, which is about the origins of Oedipus, mediates. Remember, structuralism sees myth as mediating between oppositions. The Oedipus myth mediates between the theory of autochthonous human creation and the observed reality of sexual reproduction, represented in Oedipus’ story, obviously, by his union with his mother, Jocasta. Now, I think it’s fair to say that very few classicists have been fully persuaded by Levi-Strauss’ reading of the myth.
Other scholars connect the Oedipus story with initiation rites, since very frequently in initiation rites for young males, there’s at least some sort of symbolic killing of or setting aside of the father. But as I mentioned when we were talking about the possibility that the Theseus myth reflects initiation rites, the main problem for this interpretation is that we simply have no evidence of ancient Greek initiation rites, so we just don’t know, if the myth reflects those or not. Now, among literary critics and classicists, the most common reading of Sophocles’ play, if not of the underlying myth itself, has been to see it as exploring and representing the conflict between fate and free will. This is a pretty obvious element in most modern readers’ view of the play as Sophocles presents it.
The actions taken by Laius, Jocasta and Oedipus himself all lead inexorably to the inexorable working out of fate. It is precisely because Laius and Jocasta choose to expose their infant son that he can grow up ignorant of who he is and therefore kill Laius and marry Jocasta without knowing what he’s doing. If they had brought him up themselves, he would have known who they were.
and therefore it’s the very fact that they try to avoid their fate that enables their fate to be worked out similarly with Oedipus if when the Oracle of Delphi told him you will marry your father you will marry your mother and kill your father if he had returned straight home to Corinth to his adoptive parents he would have been safe it’s precisely because he tries to avoid his fate that he walks right into it. And so many modern readers see the play as looking at the conflict between the fact that these characters are fated to commit the deeds that they commit and yet it is their freely chosen actions, the actions that they choose to do through their own free will, that leads them directly into that fate.
However, one objection that’s often made to this interpretation is that it’s basically an anachronistic reading. We moderns, people in modern American and modern Western culture, tend to see this conflict between fate and free will very clearly delineated in this play. But that may be an effect of the Christian tradition in which free will is stressed as being so crucially important to human spiritual development.
Ancient Greek authors do not ever seem to have pointed to the Oedipus play as particularly involved with fate and free will. And in fact, it’s noteworthy that classical Greek doesn’t even have a term for free will. This doesn’t seem to have been a conflict that they were particularly interested in talking about. It’s glaringly obvious to us and I’ve spent many class hours having students talk about and work out and hash over how can free will exist if actions are fated to happen and yet we see in the myth that these fated actions are played out through free will choices, but this topic which we find endlessly fascinating really does not seem to have engaged the ancient readers of this myth or viewers of this play to the same extent.
Another way to interpret the Oedipus play and one that I find very fruitful and very useful is to see Oedipus as the paradigm of a rationalist intellectual, someone who seeks to establish truth not through consulting the gods or through religious ceremonies and rituals, but through the questing of his own intellect, through the intelligence and rational use of his own mind. Again, if we take this reading, we have to beware of anachronistic assumptions. Many modern readers who do see the play in this way, who see Oedipus as the paradigm of a rationalist intellectual trying to figure things out through his own intelligence,
Many modern critics who take that view tend also to see it as an unambiguously good thing, to assume that Oedipus is thus some kind of proto-humanist hero who uses intellect, reason, and logic to get away from superstition and irrationality. But in the context of 5th century Athens, in the context of the society for whom this play was written and the society to which its author Sophocles belonged, most people would probably have seen such an intellectual independence as a negative thing, not as a positive thing. In fact, Sophocles here is drawing on or I think making reference to one of the great intellectual movements and one of the great philosophical controversies of his own day. He is casting Oedipus as a Sophist and looking at the philosophical movement that we call Sophism through his exploration of the Oedipus myth.
Now, the sophists were a group of itinerant teachers. They were centered in Athens, though most of them were not native-born Athenians. And they taught a great many things, but one of their most important areas of teaching was in the field of rhetoric and argumentation. And one of the reasons the sophists were so controversial in 5th century Athens was that they taught young men to argue both sides of a subject equally fluently. They taught what we would recognize as techniques of debate. To us, this seems utterly uncontroversial. We teach debaters in high school to argue both sides of a topic equally fluently and probably like our debate team teachers, the sophists meant this as a way of honing their pupils’ intellects, training them in constructing logical arguments, training them in seeing what evidence will and will not support. But in 5th century Athens, when this was done for the first time, it was seen as a very unnerving and a very dangerous thing.