Topic: self-knowledge and intuition as related to paying attention
Oedipus the King is not so much about the plot—a crazy one of killing your father and marrying your mother—as it is about more important questions. Oedipus is proud and hasty to anger. He’s opinionated and changeable. And he doesn’t know who he is.
That’s really the important thing: he doesn’t know himself. It seems that this is a story of mistaken identity. Oedipus tells the story of his childhood—after previous pages of arguing with Creon over who should be/is really king or in sections where he’s spooked by every shifting thought from out-of-town visitors. There’s the fighting between men over power. Then there’s the fighting within himself and that’s the really interesting part of Oedipus. Mid play he says,
“My father was Polybus, king of Corinth.
My mother, a Dorian, Merope. And I was held
the prince of the realm among the people there,
till something struck me out of nowhere,
something strange . . .worth remarking perhaps,
hardly worth the anxiety I gave it.” (852-857)
This important idea here in this passage is that Oedipus, at a banquet, is struck with an inner thought which he ignores, as he says, “ . . . something struck me out of nowhere,/something strange . . . worth remarking perhaps,/hardly worth the anxiety I gave it.” He unwillingness to pay attention to a sudden anxiety—a “something” that strikes from nowhere—is as serious a flaw in Oedipus as any he has. One rule of life is that what you pay attention to determines one’s direction. Oedipus is the poster child for naivete. He doesn’t pay attention to this fairly demanding thought within and this is both naïve and foolish on his part. He “doesn’t know” in the circumstances in which he finds himself in the play. This not knowing, because he isn’t paying attention, is a theme, or at least motif, in Oedipus. It marks him as a character without self-knowledge.
One way to look at this random thought is that Oedipus is merely an innocent bystander, a victim, if you will. Thinking of oneself as a victim is a common problem solving mechanism, and by common I mean to suggest not creative or really helpful. Problems are about just that—something needing to be solved not areas of life over which we have permission to wallow in self-pity.
We, the audience, know that Oedipus is heading for a BIG PROBLEM, so we give him a pass and let him march merrily along until the truth of his origin is disclosed. This unwillingness to closely examine his intuition, though, is a telling moment. Had he looked at that stirring within he (hypothetical, of course, but just looking at this practically) could have discovered the truth about himself and begun to figure out what to do that did not entail the self-destruction which followed later. By this time he has four children, all of whom are affected by his confusion.
There is such a thing as taking our intuitions very seriously because they often are ideas which, when acted upon, can protect us from our worst instincts and habits.
But Oedipus is led down the path towards disaster ever more swiftly because he chooses, in this moment, merely to note that he shouldn’t even be anxious about anything.
As a worrier who sometimes chooses to ignore the intuitions, I understand Oedipus’s reluctance to dig deeper into his anxiety but I can’t support him as a truly noble figure since he chooses not to pay attention. He needs to be, but is not, fully responsible for his thoughts and actions. Rather, he is in reactive mode and this wears thin quickly since he remains king. And we are kings and queens to our own selves—need to lead ourselves wisely in the noble manner of royalty. This is one reason we read Oedipus, to learn self-conduct and about humanity’s manner of solving difficult issues.
A king, a central character, even your writer here, needs to pay attention. Oedipus unwisely ignores what is happening within and says that this is “hardly worth the anxiety I gave it:” (857).
This is Oedipus’s problem—not that he killed his father. Ok. That’s a problem. But behind that problem is the fact that he’s symbolic of the unthinking but overreacting somebody-in-trouble. Oedipus the King is a great way to discover these lapses in judgment as a way to remind myself to take control and pay attention long before a crisis can develop.
