VII  Symbolic Language in Myth, Fairy Tale, Ritual and Novel（1）

神话、童话、仪式和小说中的象征语言（1）

The myth, like the dream, offers a story occurring in space and time, a story which expresses, in symbolic language, religious and philosophical ideas, experiences of the soul in which the real significance of the myth lies. If one fails to grasp the true meaning of the myth, one finds oneself confronted with this alternative: either the myth is a prescientific, naïve picture of the world and of history and at best a product of poetically beautiful imagination, or—and this is the attitude of the orthodox believer—the manifest story of the myth is true, and one must believe it as a correct report of events which actually happened in “reality.” While this alternative seemed inescapable in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries in Western culture, a new approach is taking place gradually. The emphasis is put on the religious and philosophical meaning of the myth, and the manifest story is viewed as the symbolic expression of this meaning. But even as far as the manifest story is concerned, one has learned to understand that it is not just the product of fantastic imagination of “primitive” peoples, but contains cherished memories of the past. (The historic truth of some has been established by many findings from excavations in recent decades.) Foremost among those who have paved the way for a new understanding of the myth are Johann Jakob Bachofen and Sigmund Freud. The former, with an unsurpassed penetration and brilliance, grasped the myth in its religious and psychological as well as its historical meaning. The latter helped the understanding of the myth by inaugurating an understanding of symbolic language on the basis of his interpretation of dreams. This was more of an indirect than a direct help to mythology, because Freud tended to see in the myth—as in the dream—only the expression of irrational antisocial impulses rather than the wisdom of past ages expressed in a specific language, that of symbols.

1.   The Oedipus Myth

俄狄浦斯神话

The Oedipus myth offers the outstanding illustration of Freud’s method of myth interpretation and at the same time an excellent opportunity for a different approach, one in which not sexual desires but one of the fundamental aspects of interpersonal relationships, the attitude toward authority, is held to be the central theme of the myth. It is at the same time an illustration of the distortions and changes that memories of older social forms and ideas undergo in the formation of the manifest text of the myth.

Freud writes:

            If the Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer no less powerfully than it moved the contemporary Greeks the only possible explanation is that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not depend upon the conflict between fate and human will, but upon the peculiar nature of the material by which this conflict is revealed. There must be a voice within us which is prepared to acknowledge the compelling power of fate in the Oedipus, while we are able to condemn the situations occurring in Die Ahnfrau or other tragedies of fate as arbitrary inventions. And there actually is a motive in the story of King Oedipus which explains the verdict of this inner voice. His fate moves us only because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before our birth the very curse which rested upon him. It may be that we are all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers; our dreams convince us that we are.

            King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or less than a wish-fulfillment—the fulfillment of the wish of our childhood. But we, more fortunate than he, in so far as we have not become psychoneurotics, have since our childhood succeeded in withdrawing our sexual impulses from our mothers, and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. We recoil from the person for whom this primitive wish of our childhood has been fulfilled with all the force of the repression which these wishes have undergone in our minds since childhood. As the poet brings the guilt of Oedipus to light by his investigation, he forces us to become aware of our own inner selves, in which the same impulses are still extant, even though they are suppressed. The antithesis with which the chorus departs:

“… Behold, this is Oedipus

Who unraveled the great riddle,

and was first in power,

Whose fortune all the townsmen

praised and envied;

See in what dread adversity he sank!”

            …this admonition touches us and our own pride, us who since the years of our childhood have grown so wise and so powerful in our own estimation. Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the desires that offend morality, the desires that nature has forced upon us and after their unveiling we may well prefer to avert our gaze from the scenes of our childhood.

The concept of the Oedipus complex, which Freud has so beautifully presented, became one of the cornerstones of his psychological system. He believed that this concept was the key to an understanding of history and of the evolution of religion and morality. His conviction was that this very complex constituted the fundamental mechanism in the development of the child, and he maintained that the Oedipus complex was the cause of psychopathological development and the “kernel of neurosis.”

Freud referred to the Oedipus myth in the version of Sophocles’s tragedy King Oedipus. This tragedy tells us that an oracle has told Laius, the King of Thebes, and his wife, Jocasta, that if they have a son this son will kill his father and marry his own mother. When a son, Oedipus, is born to them, Jocasta decides to escape the fate predicted by the oracle by killing the infant. She gives Oedipus to a shepherd, who is to abandon the child in the woods with his feet bound so that he will die. But the shepherd, taking pity on the child, gives the infant to a man in the service of the King of Corinth, who in turn brings him to his master. The king adopts the boy, and the young prince grows up in Corinth not knowing that he is not the true son of the King of Corinth. He is told by the oracle in Delphi that it is his fate to kill his father and to marry his mother. He decides to avoid this fate by never going back to his alleged parents. On his way back from Delphi he engages in a violent argument with an old man riding in a carriage, loses his temper, and slays the man and his servant without knowing that he has slain his father, the King of Thebes.

His wanderings lead him to Thebes. There the Sphinx is devouring the young men and women of the city, and she will cease doing so only if someone will find the right answer to a riddle she asks. The riddle is this: “What is it which first goes on four, then on two, and eventually on three?” The city of Thebes has promised that anyone who can solve the riddle and thus free the city from the Sphinx will be made king and will be given the king’s widow for a wife. Oedipus undertakes the venture. He finds the answer to the riddle—which is man, who as a child walks on all four, as an adult on two, and in his old age on three (with a cane). The Sphinx throws herself into the ocean, the city is saved from calamity, and Oedipus becomes king and marries Jocasta, his mother.

After Oedipus has reigned happily for some time, the city is ravaged by a plague which kills many of its citizens. The seer, Theiresias, reveals that the plague is the punishment for the twofold crime which Oedipus has committed, patricide and incest. Oedipus, after having tried desperately not to see this truth, blinds himself when he is compelled to see it, and Jocasta commits suicide. The tragedy ends at the point where Oedipus has suffered punishment for a crime which he committed unknowingly and in spite of his conscious effort to avoid committing it.

Was Freud justified in concluding that this myth confirms his view that unconscious incestuous drives and the resulting hate against the father-rival are to be found in any male child? Indeed, it does seem as if the myth confirmed Freud’s theory that the Oedipus complex justifiably bears its name.

If we examine the myth more closely, however, questions arise which cast some doubts on the correctness of this view. The most pertinent question is this: If Freud’s interpretation is right, we should expect the myth to tell us that Oedipus met Jocasta without knowing that she was his mother, fell in love with her, and then killed his father, again unknowingly. But there is no indication whatsoever in the myth that Oedipus is attracted by or falls in love with Jocasta. The only reason we are given for Oedipus’s marriage to Jocasta is that she, as it were, goes with the throne. Should we believe that a myth, the central theme of which constitutes an incestuous relationship between mother and son, would entirely omit the element of attraction between the two? This question is all the more weighty in view of the fact that, in the older versions of the oracle, the prediction of the marriage to the mother is mentioned only once in the version by Nikolaus of Damascus, which according to Carl Robert goes back to a relatively new source.

Furthermore, Oedipus is described as the courageous and wise hero who becomes the benefactor of Thebes. How can we understand that the same Oedipus is described as having committed the crime most horrible in the eyes of his contemporaries? This question has sometimes been answered by pointing to the fact that the very essence of the Greek concept of tragedy is that the powerful and strong are suddenly struck by disaster. Whether such an answer is sufficient or whether another view can give us a more satisfactory answer remains to be seen.

The foregoing questions arise from a consideration of King Oedipus. If we examine only this tragedy, without taking into account the two other parts of the trilogy, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, no definite answer can be given. But we are at least in a position to formulate a hypothesis, namely, that the myth can be understood as a symbol not of the incestuous love between mother and son but of the rebellion of the son against the authority of the father in the patriarchal family; that the marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta is only a secondary element, only one of the symbols of the victory of the son, who takes his father’s place and with it all his privileges.

The validity of this hypothesis can be tested by examining the whole Oedipus myth, particularly in the form presented by Sophocles in the two other parts of his trilogy, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone.

In Oedipus at Colonus we find Oedipus near Athens at the grove of the Eumenides shortly before he dies. After having blinded himself, Oedipus had remained in Thebes, which was ruled by Creon, his uncle, who after some time exiled him. Oedipus’s two daughters, Antigone and Ismene, accompanied him into exile; but his two sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, refused to help their blind father. After his departure, the two brothers strove for possession of the throne. Eteocles won; but Polyneices, refusing to yield, sought to conquer the city with outside help and to wrest the power from his brother. In Oedipus at Colonus we see him approach his father, begging his forgiveness and asking his assistance. But Oedipus is relentless in his hate against his sons. In spite of the passionate pleading of Polyneices, supported by Antigone’s plea, he refuses forgiveness. His last words to his son are:

            And thou—begone, abhorred of me, and unfathered!—begone, thou vilest of the vile, and with thee take these my curses which I call down on thee—never to vanquish the land of thy race, no, nor ever return to hill-girt Argos, but by a kindred hand to die, and slay him by whom thou hast been driven out. Such is my prayer; and I call the paternal darkness of dread Tartarus to take thee unto another home,—I call the spirits of this place,—I call the Destroying God, who hath set that dreadful hatred in you twain. Go, with these words in thine ears—go, and publish it to the Cadmeans all, yea, and to thine own staunch allies, that Oedipus hath divided such honors to his sons.