“L’énigme du Sphinx. Le début du Roman de Thèbes ou le lecteur médiéval du signe antique”

Abstract

The analysis of the story of Oedipus, which comes as an introduction to the medieval rewriting of Stace’s Thebaïde, demonstrates that the characters are not subjected to the blind Fate of the Ancients. They are faced with various signs —material or verbal ones— which they fail to interpret or do not even see. Indeed, their emotions, consisting mostly in concupiscence on Jocasta’s part and irascibility on Oedipus’s, check their rational faculty. The issue of free will is thus raised in Christian terms: as events seem to follow one another in accordance with an apparently implacable determinism and as the future of the characters is predicted to them, their free will, put into play by the presence of signs they come across on their various ways, enables them to construct their destinies. The structure of the beginning of the Roman thus reveals that, for medieval rewritings of classical stories, everyone’s role in History is closely related to their decoding of signs, a thorough analysis of which would throw light on the medieval grammatical theories the author favored.