Initially, class discussions about Oedipus Rex seemed out-there, too abstract, and irrelevant to real life. I love the world of ideas, but what good are ideas if they're not tied to action? What good is it to talk about the "nature of responsibility" when it really doesn't serve a purpose in real people's lives? Although these questions were going on in my head, I delighted in vexing myself (and classmates) with the spiraling story of Oedipus. The aberration of his unintentional actions didn't cease to awe me. I was so swept that I began asking my relatives, "If you were sleeping with your son/daughter, and you didn't know it, would you want to know?" My aunt raised her eyebrows in surprise. My dad squinted in confusion. I just smiled. Their reactions mirrored the complexity of Oedipus Rex, the tangling of morality and mental sanity/survival.
My dad told me a real life Oedipus story. To say I was taken aback is an understatement. It turns out that in one New York church my dad ministered, a 20-something-year-old man fell in love with a young-looking 40-something-year-old. He'd been adopted at birth and found a mate in this woman. However, as he learned more and more about her, he found out that she was his mom. The knowledge of it was too much (I'd imagine guilt, remorse, disgust, rage, confusion, to the point of his mind exploding, all lumped together), and he killed himself.
"A tragedy," I said to myself. I'd never had thought it could happen in real life. Suddenly, Oedipus Rex no longer floated out in the air like shiny philosophical tissue paper. It was now the newspaper, the tissue full of snot. What was I thinking? The parallels between literature and real life are endless. Finding them is the challenge. Literature, no matter how ancient, how distant, is born out of human beings. What are we all? Human beings. I hadn't seen it before - that dance between fate and free will happens every day, in the unlikeliest places.
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