What is Oedipus' Tragic Flaw?
Another year of teaching Oedipus Rex. Each time enriches my understanding of Oedipus's tragic flaw.
The Fatal Flaw. Hamartia. "To miss the mark." The question is, in what sense do we take the term? To err is human, but there are many ways to err. Through ignorance, or malice, or hubris. In what sense, then, does Oedipus err?
Well there's certainly ignorance and malice. He unknowingly kills his father on the highway road. And there's hubris. He's defied the gods. He and Jocasta both boast in the play of having escaped Apollo's prophecy of parricide and incest.
And there's another sort of hubris, too. The misplaced confidence in his own skills, in thinking he can solve any riddle, even the riddle of his birth. Teiresias warns him against it (Jocasta too, once she realizes) but Oedipus doesn't take heed. Teiresias warns Oedipus, "that quality that makes you great will ruin you."
That "quality" he abuses is his ability to look into the heart of matters and decipher their mysteries. It's the human quality of attention and inquiry that makes us adaptable and successful. It's the quintessential quality of Mankind that sets us apart from other species. This is Oedipus's talent. With it he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, which is ultimately the riddle of Man itself. "What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?" A human being. (My students are always disappointed by the answer. They say it's not a very clever riddle.)
Oedipus's ability, his perceptiveness and ingenuity, brings him great fortune. But he accords it too much status. He comes to rely on it too much. He believes it will set him free, and instead it brings him to ruin.
It is "the very processes that make you intelligently adapted," John Vervaeke said in a recent podcast, that "make you perpetually prone to self-deception."
This is Oedipus's tragic flaw, as I see it this time around.
Borges knew this about this aspect of the play. In his poem "Oedipus and the Riddle" he writes
"We are Oedipus; in some eternal way We are the long and threefold beast as well — All that we will be, all that we have been. It would annihilate us all to see The huge shape of our being; mercifully God offers us issue and oblivion."