Reflections on the Oedipus Myth
Author(s): THOMAS PAVEL
Source: Yale French Studies, No. 123, Rethinking Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) (2013), pp. 118-
128
Published by: Yale University Press
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THOMAS PAVEL
Reflections on the Oedipus Myth*
An early study of Claude Lévi-Strauss by Edmund Leach compares
his work with the achievements of two influential social anthropolo
gists in the English speaking world, Sir James Frazer and Bronislaw
Malinowski.1 Frazer examined myths and rituals from every culture
and historical period to learn how the human psyche works, while
Malinowski concentrated on a single community in Melanesia, fo
cusing on the way it functioned as a social system. Leach argues that
Lévi-Strauss is closer to Frazer's tradition, if not to his style, insofar
as the French anthropologist takes as his object the operation of the
human mind rather than social organization. But whereas Frazer's
analyses highlight rituals and mythical meanings that are accessible
to collective consciousness, Lévi-Strauss is interested in the way ab
stract, impersonal semantic structures operate independently of their
ostensible aspects.2
Thus, in his influential article "The Structural Study of Myth,"
published in 1955, Lévi-Strauss contends that the Oedipus myth—
considered in all its versions, including the one sketched out much
later by Sigmund Freud—always relies on two semantic oppositions:
1 ) the overratingof blood relations versus the underrating of blood
relations; and 2) the assertion of the autochthonous origin of man
kind versus its denial.3, Oedipus's killing of his father exemplifies
the underrating of blood relations, while his marriage to Jocasta il
lustrates the overrating of such relations. The killing of the Sphinx,
*1 am particularly grateful to Robert Doran, the editor of this issue, for his gener
ous guidance and advice.
1. Edmund Leach, Lévi-Strauss (London: Fontana/Collins, 1970), 7.
2. Ibid., 51.
3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and
Brooke Grundfest Shoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 215.
YFS 123, Rethinking Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), ed. Doran, © 2013 by Yale
University.
118
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THOMAS PAVEL 119
a chtonian monster, denies that mankind is born from Earth, while
Oedipus's name, which means "lame foot," signifies the difficulty
of standing upright, therefore asserting that man is born from Earth.
An even more abstract, quasi-algebraic formula is supposed to under
lie the structure of all myths in all cultures.4 The algebraic specula
tions notwithstanding, the four elements of the semantic oppositions
found by Lévi-Strauss are grounded in human experience and human
attempts to interpret it. Although Lévi-Strauss presents them as ele
ments that shape human understanding, they are in fact, like any
interpretive notion, the result of human understanding. Lévi-Strauss
himself seems to be to some extent aware of this aspect. He never
explains how the pair of oppositions translates into the actual myth
of Oedipus, but neither does he claim that his reading of this myth
is definitive. On the contrary, he is fully aware that his interpreta
tion might not be "acceptable to the specialist."5 He wants only to
illustrate a specific technique of myth analysis that detects abstract,
general semantic elements, even though the use of this technique "is
probably not legitimate in this particular instance."6 And he com
pares his demonstration with the actions of a "street peddler, whose
aim is not to achieve a concrete result, but to explain, as succinctly
as possible, the functioning of a mechanical toy which he is trying to
sell to the onlookers."7
Lévi-Strauss'shonesty is admirable. The two semantic opposi
tions that, in his view, form the core of the Oedipus story are to be
understood as mere examples of a kind of myth-analysis that delib
erately goes beyond easily reached comprehensibility, rather than as
an accurate interpretation of this particular myth. The kind of analy
sis he wants to promote is based on tentative assumptions that fall
within the province of early French structuralism, in particular on
the convictions that "myth belongs to the same category as language,
being, as a matter of fact, only part of it,"8 and that natural languages
4. Lévi-Strauss was persuaded that the validity of this abstract structure would
easily be proven if only French anthropologists had enough space for "vertical boards
about six feet long and four and a half feet high, where cards can be pigeon-holed and
moved at will. [. . .] Furthermore [he adds], as soon as the frame of reference becomes
multidimensional [.. .] the board system has to be replaced by perforated cards, which
in turn require IBM equipment" (ibid., 229).
5. Ibid., 213.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 210.
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120 Yale French Studies
can be exhaustively described as systems of oppositions. The pres
ent discussion will not focus on these assumptions, which I have ex
amined elsewhere.9 Instead, I will look at the Oedipus myth and its
versions,10 to show that the semantic oppositions mentioned above,
while grasping something interesting and important about this myth,
need to be supplemented, as Lévi-Strauss himself appears to intimate,
with a richer, more diversified interpretation. Therefore, at every step
in my analysis of Lévi-Strauss's structuralist interpretation, I will
supplement Lévi-Strauss's abstract notions with readings that high
light intuitively accessible aspects of this myth. It will become clear
that Lévi-Strauss's abstract approach, far from contradicting a more
intuitive way of looking at this myth, is ultimately based on rather
common insights about human experience.11
Among the two oppositions, the one that contrasts the assertion of
the autochthonous origin of mankind with its denial is, when under
stood literally, less noticeable than the debate about blood relations,
but, as we shall see, it nevertheless plays a role as a deeper, more
general reflection on the mission human beings fulfill in the world.
Lévi-Strauss argues that in myths about humans born from the Earth,
they walk clumsily when they emerge from the depths, a clumsiness
to which Oedipus's name is presumed to allude. Lévi-Strauss's Native
American examples, drawn from Pueblo and Kwakiutl mythology,
are convincing; it is nevertheless difficult to forget that the slow—
very slow—learning of how to walk is a feature of actual human be
ings, the only mammals that require a year's growth before standing
9. See Thomas Pavel, The Spell of Language: Post-Structuralism and Speculation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
10. Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources,
vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 488-502.
11. At about the same time, Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (The Hague:
Mouton, 1957) proposed a set of mathematical models that underlie linguistic perfor
mance: a finite-state, an immediate constituent, and a transformational model. These
models are truly abstract in the sense that they are first constructed mathematically
and only then checked against the actual sentences of natural languages. Chomsky's
project is perhaps best understood with reference to the cybernetic dream of solving
the mind-body problem. See Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On
the Origins of Cognitive Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000; re
issued in 2009 on MIT Press [Cambridge, MA] as On the Origins of Cognitive Science:
The Mechanization of the Mind), which offers an incisive history and critique of this
dream.
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THOMAS PAVEL 121
upright, in contrast to four-legged mammals, which can walk almost
immediately after birth.
To be sure, stories about humans born directly from the Earth are
present in Greek mythology, for instance in the tale of Deucalion and
Pyrrha, the only survivors of the deluge unleashed by Zeus to punish
Lycaon's sacrifice of his own son. Deucalion and his wife, who is now
too old to have children, are instructed by an oracle to repopulate
the earth by throwing the bones of their mother over their shoulders.
Realizing that their mother is Gaïa, the Earth itself, they pick up and
throw rocks which, when these touch the ground, become human
beings. But in the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha the issue is not that
of creating mankind from the Earth, but rather of restoring it after
the Father of the gods has virtually exterminated it as a punishment
for an outrageous crime. Moreover, in this story the humans born
from Earth's bones do not totter, stagger, or walk clumsily. Neither
do the armed warriors who, in Cadmos's myth, menacingly rise from
a dragon's tooth planted in the Earth by Oedipus's valiant ancestor.
Thus, in the mythical imagination, being born from the Earth does
not necessarily involve walking clumsily.
Oedipus's name alludes to a swollen foot because his parents,
wanting to get rid of the infant to avoid the prophecy that warned
them against having children, had instructed a shepherd to leave the
child exposed in the Kithairon mountains with his ankles pierced by
an iron pin. Later in the story, the Sphinx's riddle makes a clear refer
ence to this possibility: a creature that in the morning goes on four
legs (and later, at noon, on two and finally, in the evening, on three)
can well use the four of them to crawl away. As for limping, Asklepia
des's version of the riddle specifies that "when it [this creature] goes
supported on three . . . feet, then the speed of his limbs is weakest."12
Weak legs in this case are, quite plausibly, a sign of age, not of chto
nian birth.
At this point I should specify an important difference between Lévi
Strauss's approach and the one proposed here. For the French anthro
pologist, the story told by a myth only seems to be a linear succession
of actions and events linked to each other by intentions, causality,
chance, or fate. Going beyond this temporal unfolding or succession,
12. Gantz, Early Greek Myth, 496.
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122 Yale French Studies
the anthropologist establishes a bi-dimensional chart of events and
actions, classified according to their semantic similarity, e.g.:
Column I Column II Column III Column IV
Cadmos kills
the dragon
Oedipus kills
his father
Oedipus kills
the Sphinx
=
Oedipus
swollen foot
Oedipus mar
ries his
mother
Eteocles kills
his brother
Polyneces
Antigone
buries her
brother
Polyneces
The chart'scolumns illustrate the main oppositions: I—overrating
of blood relations,- II—underrating of the same; III—denial of Earth
origin; IV—assertion of it. Although they have a definite semantic
content, the above columns operate not unlike grammatical catego
ries that designate the syntactic functions fulfilled by words in a sen
tence. Consider the two sentences "The cat jumps on the couch" and
"John takes the cat on his lap." By analyzing them one can go beyond
the concrete meaning of the words and find the following abstract
sequences:
Column I Column II Column IE Column IV
Subject Verb Direct Object Indirect Object/
Prepositional phrase
The cat jumps on the couch
John takes the cat on his lap
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THOMAS PAVEL 123
But, obviously, the speakers who utter these sentences in conformity
with the rules of English grammar do not mean to say: "Subject +
Verb + Direct Object + Indirect Object." They use the grammar
and the vocabulary to speak about the cat, about its jumping on the
couch, about John, and about him taking the cat on his lap. Similarly,
the story of Oedipus might well involve the semantic oppositions il
lustrated by the Lévi-Strauss's columns; but what the story tells us
is that Oedipus did this and that, for this or that reason, in such and
such a context, and that what he did and what happened to him give
rise to a variety of possible meanings.
The same is true about the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha. Its reso
lution does involve the birth of a multitude of human beings from the
Earth, but the entire story tells us much more. It affirms the divine
origin of human beings and emphasizes the unity of humankind and
its dependency on the rule of the gods. Zeus governs the world and
requires worship and obedience. By punishing the whole human race
for Lycaon's sacrifice of his son, Zeus makes it clear that the worship
he requires from all humans should never infringe upon the natural
duties of parents to their children. Human sacrifice, in particular the
sacrifice children, is prohibited. The biblical story of Abra
of one's
ham and Isaac has similar implications: Yahweh, who requires Abra
ham's absolute devotion, asks him to sacrifice his son Isaac. In the
end, however, he prevents this cruel deed, and in the place of Isaac,
Abraham sacrifices a ram. In the Bible, this moment is understood as
a manifestation of divine generosity: Yahweh graciously renounces
something he himself had earlier asked for. In the Greek myth, hu
man sacrifice, seen from the beginning as a transgression, is punished
very severely once it takes place, intimating that Lycaon should have
known how scandalous it was to offer his son to Zeus, who had never
asked for such a sacrifice. As for the deluge and quasi-extermination
of the entire human race as punishment for its corruption, something
similar occurs in the biblical narrative as well, where the flood is
meant as a response, as in the Greek myth, to the moral decay of hu
mans. In both cases, a single couple is saved, perhaps as a reminder
that humans (and in the Bible, animals too) are born from the sexual
union of their parents. Mother Earth's presence in the story of Deuca
lion and Pyrrha invites its audience to realize, in addition, that hu
mans are not simply and only born of their parents, but are equally
indebted to the gods and to nature. Humans should therefore be grate
ful—in a wise way—to all those who made their existence possible.
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124 Yale French Studies
Taken as stories, myths do not merely convey abstract semantic op
positions, but narrate concrete actions and their consequences, imag
ine origins and describe ways of the world, often in order to shed light
on prevailing religious and moral obligations.
In the case of the Oedipus myth, one of the most stable elements
in its ancient versions is the child's being cast off by his royal parents
and adopted by another royal couple. The human ability to decipher
blood is indeed part of the topic here, for, in a species in
relations
which infants are for a long time defenseless, being unable to walk,
talk, and remember what happens to them, it is as easy to get rid
of one's newborn children as it is difficult for them later to figure
out who their true parents are. Similar separations between infants
and their parents can be found in many traditions—in the biblical
story of Moses, for instance, whose mother sends him afloat on the
Nile in a tiny basket soon to be picked up by Pharaoh's daughter. In
one of the versions of the Oedipus story, Laius's son is also placed
in a chest that floats on a river until it is found by king Polybos of
Corinth. Later, in ancient Greek romances and their Renaissance and
early modern imitations, the main character often does not know his/
her true origin until late in the story: thus, Chariclea in Heliodorus's
Ethiopian Story believes that she is the daughter of the Greek mer
chant Charicleus, while in reality her mother, the Queen of Ethiopia,
noticing that the newborn girl's skin was white (as a result of the
Queen's looking at a portrait of Andromeda at the very moment of
conception), has given her daughter up for adoption in order to avoid
the accusation of adultery. Such stories emphasize the difference be
tween the biological parents and the adoptive ones, between birth
and education, or, in Lévi-Strauss's terms, between nature and cul
ture. Humankind, they remind us, is the only species that weaves a
cultural curtain able to cover and hide natural blood links. All these
stories concern
ignorance of blood relations. But while Moses and
Chariclea, once they discover their true origin—Hebrew for Moses,
royal Ethiopian for Chariclea—happily merge into their newfound
real family, in Oedipus'sstory ignorance is fatal. Rather than merely
opposing the overrating and the underrating of blood relations, the
Oedipus myth reflects on the difficulty of gauging them correctly and
on the high price one must pay for a mistaken assessment. The epis
temic element is crucial, for in none of the myth's ancient versions
does Oedipus know who his real father is. Incidentally, when Freud
speculated that small boys feel close to their mothers and are jealous
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THOMAS PAVEL 125
of their fathers, his use of the Oedipus myth (recast as the Oedipus
complex) is not entirely suitable. Supposing that such attachments
and jealousies do occur in small children, they can be said to develop
in situations in which the boy in question knows that this woman
and this man are his parents. In Oedipus's case, however, the tragedy
takes places precisely because its hero is unaware of the blood links
binding him to Laius and Jocasta.
In Freud's use of the myth, the emphasis falls on the attraction
the little boy is assumed to feel for his mother, presumably repli
cating Oedipus's marriage with Jocasta. But in the ancient versions
of the myth, the marriage of the young hero to a woman who later
turns out to be his own mother does not always take place. The mur
der of Laius, in contrast, is always present. Moreover, in at least one
version, Oedipus, still without knowing what he is doing, kills both
his father and his mother. Even when his father is the only victim,
the murder is surrounded by a complex of circumstances that do not
involve Oedipus's awareness and even less his guilt. Laius has long
before been warned by oracles that he must refrain from having chil
dren if he wants to avoid either his own death or the destruction of
his city, Thebes. The reason for this interdiction varies. Some ver
sions refer to an earlier serious transgression that has upset Apollo.
In other versions, Laius is portrayed as a lustful, bisexual man who in
his youth abducted and raped Chrysippos, the son of Pelops, thus of
fending Hera, the goddess of marriage. In some cases, the oracle who
informs Laius that his child will kill him specifies that this is Zeus's
answer to the prayers of angry Pelops (but in other versions Pelops
accepts the relationship between Laius and Chrysippos). Moreover,
Laius is unable to respect the interdiction of having children. Never
presented as a model of self-mastery, Laius, in at least one version of
the myth, forgets the oracle in a fit of lust and drunkenness. Finally,
he attempts to cheat fate and the gods by getting rid the infant. In An
cient Greece, infant exposure did not qualify as murder, since most
often the abandoned child was left not far from the parents' house
where he could be rescued by others. But by ordering the child to be
exposed on the top of a mountain with his ankles pierced, Laius does
not merely abandon an undesirable progeny; he wants to make sure
that the infant, left in the wilderness and unable to crawl, will die.
The myth's various versions thus portray Laius as someone who
deserves his fate. Seen in this light, Oedipus is the instrument used
by fate and the gods against his father. By punishing Laius and his
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126 Yale French Studies
family in a horrible way, fate and the gods highlight rather than ques
tion the importance of blood links. These links get polluted and bro
ken because the retribution for Laius's transgressions, in particular
for his turning a deaf ear to the oracle's warning, is designed to target
and destroy the most basic, vital ties between humans. Those who
fail to respect the gods' rules (a situation that was, in fact, rather dif
ficult to avoid in a world in which the gods' requirements so often
contradict each other) pay a high price. And precisely because of the
very tightness and significance of family relations, fate and the gods
punish transgression by striking indiscriminately at the whole family
rather than at one single individual.
Equally important is Oedipus's belonging to Thebes as a city—
a law-governed union of related families. Just as Oedipus, an aban
doned infant, cannot remember his genuine family, no reliable clue
will later tell him in which country he was really born. Adopted and
raised by the king of Corinth, he has no reason to believe that he is
a Theban. When he leaves Corinth and arrives in Thebes—in some
versions because he learns that he is destined to murder his father
and, wanting to avoid this fate, runs away from the king of Corinth,
in other versions because Thebes had offered a reward to the person
who defeated the Sphinx—Oedipus and the Thebans are persuaded
that he is a stranger. This stranger magnificently saves the city, is
adopted by it, and is invited to marry the Theban queen. Considered
a foreigner, Oedipus is revered as the savior of the city, the husband
of its queen, and its wise king. Ignorance about one's actual place
among one's fellow human beings is again a trap set by fate and the
gods. For, when it turns out that this foreigner is, in fact, a native,
his parricide and incest will weigh heavily on his and his city's con
science. If only he were truly a foreigner! If only he had known he
was a Theban! The myth, particularly in the form Sophocles gave to
it in his Oedipus Rex, intimates that the glory is that of the stranger
and the shame that of the native. To run away from one's country is a
blessing, as Oedipus, having left Corinth, learns after his victory over
the Sphinx. To be rooted is a tragedy, as the revelation of his Theban
origin teaches him. In conformity with this view, in Sophocles's trag
edy Oedipus's remains are said to be buried in Colonus, far from the
city of his birth (an episode not found in other versions of the myth).
Human beings, Sophocles seems to say, cannot and should not always
be bound to the place of their birth.
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THOMAS PAVEL 127
As much as these qualities raise Oedipus above mere mortals,
the power of his mind—in Sophocles's version—and his personal
strength and courage—in those versions of the myth in which, absent
the riddle, Oedipus fights and kills the monster—do not suffice to
keep him in this exalted position. His mind as well as his courage
may well outshine everyone else's, but he is present in this world
only because he was born into a family and in a city and, as such, he
willy-nilly carries along the guilt, the debts, the mistakes, and the
crimes of his kin. In Sophocles's version, in particular, Oedipus's in
telligence and rectitude, so obvious when he acts without knowing
his origin, are set in contrast to his being crushed by fate when he dis
covers it. The question "How to define an individual human being?"
has two, tragically different answers: on the one hand, humans are
what their gifts and actions make them,- but, on the other, humans
are a product of their origin. In most versions of the myth, but espe
cially in Sophocles's version, the tension between these two answers
is left unresolved. Among many other things, the Oedipus myth also
speaks about the heartrending conflict between what it means to be a
praiseworthy human being and what it means to be deeply-rooted in
one's original family and city. In a vivid, non-abstract way, the issue
of humankind's autochthonous
origin is thus present in this myth.
I wonder what Simone Weil, who has so aptly defended the need for
roots, would have thought about this last point.13
This myth, finally, raises a fundamental question concerning hu
man involvement in action. Is the person who performs a deed fully
responsible for it? In all versions, Oedipus, fated to murder his father,
performs this act in ignorance of the full reality of what he is doing.
He is thus both the main agent, because Laius dies at his hands, and
a mere instrument of fate, because he unwittingly fulfills the oracle's
prediction. Human beings, the myth seems to say, are not fully in
charge of their acts, not only because destiny governs their lives, but
also because their grasp of the world in which they live is partial, in
adequate, and deceptive. And yet their deeds are unmistakably theirs.
To emphasize this point, Sophocles included in his tragedy two ele
ments that were not always present in the other versions of the myth:
Oedipus's marrying Jocasta and their having children together. The
13. See Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1952].
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128 Yale French Studies
incestuous consequences of Oedipus's lack of knowledge are vividly
presented on stage. The story of Oedipus asks whether human beings
are the true source of their deeds or—to use a contemporary philoso
pher's terms—a mere complement that these deeds require in order
to be achieved.14
These considerations have taken us far beyond Lévi-Strauss's sim
ple and elegant view of the Oedipus myth. To defend his structural
approach, one might argue that it deliberately bypasses details and
nuances to seek what this myth means in the last analysis. I suspect,
however, that here looms what could be called "the final analysis fal
lacy." In the final analysis, human beings are sets of atoms, but each
field of, for instance, medical research operates at the more complex
levels of molecular biology and organ physiology. In the last analysis,
a novel is a set of sentences, but to confine literary study to this level
is to miss the plot, the characters, the staging, the underlying ide
als, the message, the period, the expectations of the readers, and the
talent of the author. Far from being required to perform a last analy
sis, disciplines—be they exact sciences or cultural disciplines—are
expected to find and target the appropriate level of analysis at which
their work becomes relevant. I therefore doubt that in the study of
myth and, more generally, of cultural phenomena there is such a
thing as the "last analysis." Those who seek to achieve it by devising,
as Lévi-Strauss intended to do, a general semantic framework, may
end up discovering an illuminating set of notions. Since such notions
are ultimately based on human experience, myth and literary analysis
can considerably benefit from them. Lévi-Strauss's own study of the
legend of Asdiwal is a splendid model of structural analysis precisely
because the author sees and makes visible a content that is present
in the story.15 This kind of analysis, however, is not the last word on
myth and literature: other insights capturing widely shared human
interests remain possible, welcome, and even necessary.
14. Vincent Descombes's Le complément de sujet (Paris: Gallimard, 2004) ana
lyzes the human agent as a complement of the verb designating the action. Other
complements may indicate the target, the place, the time, and the cause of the ac
tion. While traditional analyses privilege the subject of the action, Descombes makes
the interesting point that the subject, that is, the agent, is simply one among several
complements that surround the verb.
15. Lévi-Strauss, Le geste d'Asdiwal (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1958), trans
lated as "The Story of Asdiwal," in Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 2. (Basic
Books, New York, NY, 1976): 146-94.
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