Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex

Abstract

N HIS 1939 STUDY of ambiguity in Greek literature, W. B. Stanford notes that from the point of view of amphibology, Oedipus Rex occupies a special position as a model.1 No literary genre in antiquity, in fact, uses so abundantly as tragedy expressions of double meaning, and Oedipus Rex includes more than twice as many ambiguous forms as the other plays of Sophocles (fifty, according to the table that Hug drew up in 1872).2 The problem, however, is less one of a quantitative order than of nature and function. All the Greek tragedians had recourse to ambiguity as a means of expression and as a mode of thought. But double meaning assumes quite a different role according to its place in the economy of the play and the level of language where the tragic poets situate it. It can be a matter of ambiguity in vocabulary, corresponding to what Aristotle calls hom-5numia (lexical ambiguity); this type of ambiguity is made possible by the vacillations or contradictions of language.3 The playwright plays with them to translate his tragic vision of a world divided against itself, torn by contradictions. In the mouths of several characters, the same words take on different or opposed meanings, because their semantic value is not the same in the religious, legal, political, and common languages.4 Thus, for Antigone, nomos designates the opposite of what Creon himself, in the circumstances in which he is placed, also calls nomos.5 For the young girl the word means religious rule; for Creon, an edict promulgated by the head of the state. And indeed, the semantic field of nomos is sufficiently extended to cover, among others, both of these meanings.6 Ambiguity then translates the tension between certain values felt as irreconcilable in spite of their homonymy. The words exchanged in the theatrical space, instead of establishing communication and agreement between the characters, on the contrary underline the impermeability of minds, the freezing of character; they mark the barriers which separate the protagonists, and they trace the lines of