Oedipus

Oedipus has an elevated way of speaking that emphasizes his nobility, but ultimately can do nothing to avoid his terrible destiny. His language doesn’t empower him in his arguments early on with Teiresias and Kreon. When he argues with Teiresias, he is immediately at a disadvantage, due to his lack of knowledge regarding his identity. With Kreon, his lack of evidence and hot anger in the face of Kreon’s cool logic causes his argument to pale in comparison. So the language available to Oedipus neither limits nor empowers him. However, a lack of communication throughout the entire play contributes to the circumstances that allow him to fulfill the prophecy. Had the servant sent to abandon Oedipus revealed the truth about Oedipus’s birth to the messenger who gave him to his adopted parents, then the messenger might have eventually shared this information with Oedipus. If the oracle had been a little more forthcoming and/or answered Oedipus’s initial question he might not have left Corinth. Nevertheless, Oedipus was fated, and would probably have fulfilled the prophecy anyway.

Since the school year has begun, it seems as though I've been struggling with writing and discussing my thoughts. Words seem to get stuck at the tip of my tongue and are not quite capable of expressing everything that I really mean. It’s certainly not uncommon, but very frustrating. Sometimes, there simply aren’t words to express what I mean. Unfortunately there are few other methods of communication, other than language. There’s charades I suppose, but that’s even more limited than language. Pictures can sometimes imply meanings that words cannot, but it’s not particularly practical to communicate with pictures. So people are left to use language, despite its occasional inadequacy. Communication is necessary, though, of course. Many times it’s even empowering. Over the summer I helped my mildly autistic brother in sessions with a speech therapist so that he can learn to speak more clearly. It frustrated him when people couldn’t understand what he was saying because he couldn’t enunciate clearly. Because of the lessons, he’s been having more conversations and seems more confident. So, language can be both empowering and limiting and it’s this duality that I’ve decided to examine.

Over the summer, I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I found Oscar’s grandfather’s life to be a clear example of the duality of language. Oscar’s grandfather had stopped speaking. His only way of communication was through writing and gestures. Because he often ran out of pages in his journal, he had to use the limited number of phrases he’d already written to best state his meaning. He gives an example, of having to use, “the regular please” as an answer for how he’s feeling. In that way language was limiting him. To him, not speaking is almost a way of not living. He states later in the book, “it’s a shame we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I would have spent one with her. I would have stayed in the apartment with her…said ‘I want two rolls,’ sang, ‘Start spreading the news,’ laughed, ‘Ha ha ha!’ ”(Foer 133). He doesn’t enjoy the life he leads, but he chooses not to, if he had a second life he would choose to actually live by communicating. In that way, language empowers life, makes ‘living’ possible.

This idea reminded me of a theme of several articles we read last year. They focused on modern loss of communication. That, since it is so easy now to send message, the messages we send mean very little. People say things through writing that they wouldn't say out loud or to someone’s face. In a way this empowers the message sender, to say hurtful things with little if any repercussions. At the same time it limits other messages, since tone and emotions cannot be expressed through a text. This ability to spread messages also empowers the message sender by allowing many people to read his message. For example, if he were a blogger, he could gain many followers through the internet. At the same time though, this ease creates more messages (or blogs, or internet articles) than anyone could actually read, and it gets lost in the masses of available information. This doesn't limit the words’ impact but it can limit those that are impacted.