The Sphinx of ancient mythology was a fearful monster who waylaid passers-by and ripped them apart if they couldn’t solve the riddle it put to them. It was a good deal more alarming than the docile statue that squats beside the Pyramids today, which is about as terrifying as Peppa Pig. The riddle in question was: What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon and three feet in the evening?
Only King Oedipus, masterful and quick-witted as always, was able to come up with the answer: humanity. Infants crawl, adults walk upright and the elderly lean on a stick. Devastated by this response, the Sphinx hurled itself off a cliff to its death. If it was among other things a symbol of a savage Nature, then Man had got the better of it. Civilisation had triumphed over barbarism.
As with most victories, however, this one came at a price. For Oedipus outwits the Sphinx only at the cost of admitting that humanity is a monster too. Monsters for the ancient world were hybrid creatures, made up of the scraps and leavings of other animals. The Sphinx has a female head and breasts, a lion’s body and a bird’s wings.
But the answer to its (or her) riddle reveals that humanity is equally mongrelised and diverse, composed of different phases and never quite at one with itself. Incongruous things are pitched together, just as they are in the riddle of Oedipus’s incestuous career. In a regrettable series of oversights, he has killed his father and married his own mother. Or as the satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer puts it, ‘He loved his mother like no other, his daughter was his sister and his son was his brother.’
Incest is monstrous because it involves mixing together things that should stay apart. So Oedipus, conqueror of monsters, stands exposed as a monster himself. And in Sophocles’ drama Oedipus at Colonus, he will come to acknowledge this traumatic truth. Blind, cast out and dispossessed, the headstrong ruler who dominated Nature now recognises the frailty of his own flesh, which is itself part of Nature. Like Shakespeare’s Lear, another self-exiled king, he is forced to confront the fact that civilisation is rooted in the material world, that the high has its foundation in the low, and that something will come only of nothing. To adapt the words of the Internationale, you can’t be all unless you recognise that you are naught.
Monsters in the pre-modern world were homeless creatures as well. They lurked in the margins of political society, cursed and polluted. The fact that the Sphinx is a woman is highly relevant to this fact. Yet they could also be a potent power for transformation. The word ‘sacred’ in Latin means both cursed and blessed. If only you can acknowledge the monster as part of your own flesh, gaze at the Medusa’s head without being turned to stone, you have a chance of redemption.
As Shakespeare’s Prospero says of the monstrous Caliban in The Tempest: ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.’ It is at this point that tragedy turns into comedy. Or, to put it in a more modern idiom, that the dispossessed come to power.
