The Tragedy of Modern Rootlessness
Last year, I taught “Oedipus Rex” to a group of 20-year-old sophomores at a tiny Christian college in Florida. After a few moments in class, I noticed that the story had not moved them the way (I thought) a tragedy was supposed to. It seemed to have filled them with neither pity nor fear, but only empty indifference. I wanted to yell: “He married his mother! He killed his father! He can’t even look at himself!”
But then we reflected on Tiresias’s warning to Oedipus: “I tell you, no man that walks upon the earth / Shall be rooted out more horribly than you.”[1] I realized that Oedipus’s nightmare was not unlike my students’ everyday reality.
Oedipus killed his father. My students hardly knew theirs. Oedipus was exiled. My students felt no love of homeland. Oedipus was denied by the gods. Few of my students belonged to a religious tradition or congregation. Oedipus was horribly uprooted, but my students never had any roots.
By the end of our discussions, however, the tragedy had moved them—and in a way I had not expected. As we contemplated Oedipus’s fall from family, country, and the gods, they spoke of their pain in the absence of these communities. With a tragic vision, they began to see order through disorder, friendship through loneliness, roots through gaping holes. Oedipus’s sorrow revealed their great potential for joy; his nightmare awakened their dreams. They were rootless but did not need to remain that way.
If we recover tragic stories, we might just find our roots, and with our roots, true piety. As the elders of Thebes sing, “Though fools will honor impious men, / In their cities no tragic poet sings.”[2]
[1] Sophocles, “Oedipus Rex,” I.I.213-214.
[2] Sophocles, “Oedipus Rex,” IIII.II.32-33.
