That damn family
by Seamus Sweeney
[ fiction - april 08 ]
That damn family. Always marrying their mother, attacking their city, killing their brother. Generally defying the legitimate authority. And not enough for them to destroy their own family, but to destroy mine too. Who did they think they were?
I, Creon, wander the lands. Outcast. Alone. Shamed among men. I am nothing. No one. I can hear snatches of conversation about me, as travellers go by on the road. "Most unhappy of men," they say. "He was the death of his wife, his son," they say.
Pity me, for it is all true. I killed my son, I killed my life. Of course, they killed themselves, my son and that bitch, but it is as if I had run Haemon through. Haemon, who I loved. And my Eurydice! I am Creon, but of course no one cares about me except as the uncle and brother-in-law of Oedipus, and the uncle and, well, grand-uncle of Antigone. You only care about me because of that marriage, and the hellish brood it spawned.
Or do you? Who knows? You seem ignorant of what I talk about, from your looks when I mention those names. No horror from you when I talk of Oedipus, or righteous indignation when you hear me say I was the one who did for Antigone. I have travelled far, far north, and while I recognise the words you spoke - or rather grunted - they sound harsh, ugly. And you speak each word rather slow, and your faces look baffled at my smooth rush of words. You do not look like people of the Attic shores.
Still, your bread and water (and you meat and wine, is that too much to hope for?) is as good as any palace of Thebes, especially to a man who has wandered the mountains and valleys, friendless, despised by all you meet. Drinking rainwater, eating grass and dead leaves. Call no man happy until he is dead, but call no man unhappy until he has fallen to the state of a non-man, a void walking on the face of the earth.
No, you musn't have heard of me. You have that mountain look about you, and yet you have not the suspicious looks of hill folk. Looking at your house, filthy and decrepit, your straggly kids and goats, your children, thin and with flies flying around, I wonder about you. Some youngest son, some weakling, some fool or incompetent, given the worst land and marrying the ugliest woman. You are too stupid to resent we when I speak the obvious truth. You were certainly not born for great things, great things like seeing your sister marry her son, and seeing the blood of your own son shooting out, his own blood pumping through the air onto my own face, after dashing his own sword into his neck. Or great things like seeing your wife dead, her corpse still warm, after hanging herself on a silken cord.
You look puzzled still, puzzled and a little horrified. Horror has fascination as its root. You are desperate to know more, I see, despite the anger you feel you should feel at me. More about Oedipus and Haemon and Antigone and Eurydice and Antigone and Oedipus and Jocasta and Laius and Oedipus and Jocasta and Antigone and Oedipus and Oedipus and Oedipus and Oedipus...
To hades with them! Anyway. I apologise. They have followed me here, its true. There are Furies, although they are not women. They are your own thoughts, your own self. I apologise too, for looking down on you. Simple! Untutored in the way of the world! What a glorious condition, how noble, how admirable. Looking at you, honest farmer, and your wife, beautiful in her own way, I envy you. Envy in the noblest, truest sense. I wish my life was like yours.
I want to propose something. I know people of your sort are hospitable naturally, it is the way of the mountain folk, even the most flinty-eyed of them, to give freely of their own to travellers. I have not slept in one place for two nights following for many a weary night. I would be glad of the rest. In return, I wish to tell you my story. You will speak of it, I know, the rest of your days, and you will remember on your death bed not your stupid, slow children, or the scrabble to make something out of your dry tract, but the days you hosted me.
Yes, the true history of Creon. King of Thebes. Uncle of Oedipus, also Brother-in-law of Oedipus. As I said. Uncle of Antigone, also Great-Uncle of Antigone. As I said. Father of Haemon, Husband of Eurydice. The man who cleaned up after the House of Laius. The man who went too far, I admit. The man who ruined his whole life.
Things are a little different from what they say. We all knew the truth about Oedipus, really. Why else do you think we all did our best to hide it from him? We even wheeled out that old buffoon Tireisias to come out with some mumbo-jumbo that sounded obscure enough to be mystical yet straightforward enough to put a man off delving into his roots. Amazingly, it didn't work. Tireisias came out with some pretty hard stuff. "This day will reveal bring your birth and your destruction" I thought of that one. Still Oedipus kept it up. Tiresias even told him the exact truth. "brother and father both to his children, son and husband both to his mother" Can you get any clearer than that? The old man had no imagination, once he'd used it up on pretending to be half-man, half-woman.
Oedipus looked just like Laius. The very same. Except twenty years younger. Poor Laius! It must have been like being killed by a double of yourself. That cleft chin, those olive-coloured eyes, that stupid cast of the face that fools called self-assurance. The same height even, the same squat build. I can imagine Oedipus - never the calmest chap, so just like Laius in yet another way - going into one of his blind rages at whatever utterly harmless thing Laius' bodyguards did.
What was Jocasta thinking? She didn't know, I'm pretty sure. Blinded by love, by gratitude. Besides, don't women always fall for the same type? It must have seemed quite nice to get a younger, fitter version of Laius... yet I must stop this dreadful train of thought, must stop thinking about that vile, polluted marriage bed. In some perverse way Oedipus in honoured, as that dreadful farce at Colonus showed, yet I am reviled.
People feel a fascination for Oedipus, after all. Maybe his perversion is more common that we think. Or maybe it is a desire common to us all, and Oedipus is a man they are secretly admire. Whatever. When I tell them in a farm who I am, even when they don't believe me - and they never believe me - they always ask about Oedipus. Oedipus and nothing else. Only the educated ones, or rather the ones who make a great show about education - the likes of you - care about Antigone.
Which, to be honest, is the story I care about most myself, considering my family all died because of that shrill little harpy.
But the story of Oedipus has sex, however perverse and bizarre, while the story of Antigone is about corpses, and the brave Antigone defying the law and the awful Creon. It raises all sorts of issues about authority and who is to rule, and the will of the gods, and all that sort of thing. Oedipus - all murder and sex. We all know what the people really want.
Anyway, back to Oedipus and Laius. Son and Father. Murderer and murderee. Oedipus didn't know, in fairness to him. But we did. We knew. How could we have let it go? He'd conquered the Sphinx (not that that happened the way they say either) and was, as an administrator, quite good. A wise, judicious leader. Everything a city could long for.
What amazes me is how transformed he was by discovering that he was his mother's son and his mother's lover, his children's father and his children's brother. Most men would be humbled by this, to put it very mildly. And by gouging out his eyes, it seemed that Oedipus did too.
But the streak of awful sanctimoniousness that infects that family - and which Oedipus had been, aside from a few sharp words when finding out his fate, been very good at suppressing - came to the fore. The silly, shrill Antigone had it in spades, of course. But I don't blame her for what happened. I did it all myself.
By the time of that business in Colonus, Oedipus was in full pity-me mode. Killing his father and sleeping with his mother - anyone else would have killed themselves, but Oedipus took out his eyes. Always with an eye - if you excuse me - always with an eye for appearances. No, they couldn't be bothered with running a city anymore. Couldn't be bothered with the courts, with laws - aside from divine laws, of course, or rather whatever Oedipus and Antigone wanted to do, and to hell with everyone else. Not a concern of them, of course. Leave that sort of thing to Creon. The man who cleans up after the house of Laius. And for my pains? You have, no doubt, heard the well known story.
They say that it was destined by the gods. Don't believe it. Oedipus, wandering around Greece, could easily have not come across Laius in his caravan. And if I had only reined in my own madness, Antigone would be my irritating daughter-in-law, irritating us all in Thebes with her histrionics. But I didn't.
And I am as much a descendant of the gods as they were. Ares and Aphrodite were my great-grandparents too, you know. The god of wine is my cousin - well, not quite cousin, but his children would be my second cousins. Does he have any? Who knows? They never call to me, do they? Abandoned by the gods as I am, due to my horrible crimes. And all that.
Not all of them were that bad, really. I liked Ismene. And Etoceles, now that was a loss. Polyneices? A nasty little runt. An unpleasant thug a Even if he hadn't taken arms against his own city he would have deserved to lie there unburied. Lie there, for the crows and for the dogs. I think I hate him most, looking back. Oh, Oedipus and Antigone, always shouting and standing on their dignity and all that, all very annoying. But they were great. Their greatness wasn't entirely illusory. Polyneices? He deserved what he got.
Yet it's hard to talk about Polyneices much. He was a colourless type, really. The other two - well, say what you want about them, and the gods know I can say plenty - they did impress themselves on your memory. They had something beyond the usual human qualities. You would not forget them.
But I go ahead of my story. And I am weary, so weary. Let me sleep tonight, and tomorrow night, over your evening fire, I will tell you the first part of my tale. The awful tale of Oedipus, King of Thebes, his mother's lover, his father's killer.
LET US BEGIN!
