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“What creature,” the Sphinx asks the homeless, wandering Oedipus before the action of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex begins, “goes on four feet in the morning, on two at noonday, on three in the evening?” With his answer—“Man”—Oedipus does what no one else in his world could, solve this riddle of the gods, thus becoming symbolic of all us mortals, whose intelligence seemingly has no bounds. He symbolizes a particular way the world appears to us—a “mortal form.” Oedipus reinforces this idea, this form, within our consciousness; however, this initial sense of comfort is but an illusion. As the tragedy enfolds, Oedipus’s fate gradually tears us away from our attachment to this idea around which we’ve formed ourselves. I love how Oedipus first attaches us to the mortal form of “humanity as the riddle-solver,” but then he shatters that form, and leaves us dangling above a precipice of meaninglessness.

Fate. In a rehab visit for a friend’s crack cocaine addiction, the therapist mentioned his wiring, the long history of addicts, my friend the first to seek help. Why him? Was that too wired in the genes? The oracle would tell him that he too would be doomed—that his fate contained this inevitability. In Homer’s Iliad, Fate isn’t one of the gods, but rules both Olympus and earth, a force not even Zeus can change without throwing the world into chaos. Where, in such a world, do we find ourselves?

After reading, for the first time, Oedipus Rex and Homer’s Iliad, I picked up Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex and am partway through it. “I try to go back in time,” Cal says, “to a time before genetics, before everyone was in the habit of saying about everything, ‘It’s in the genes.’ A time before our present freedom and so much freer!” (37). She thinks of her grandmother Desdemona, who “didn’t envision her insides as a vast computer code, all 1s and 0s, an infinity of sequences, any one of which might contain a bug.” This memory takes place in the shadow of Mount Olympus, a clear sign that the external gods have moved inside, still controlling us, connected to our genes, in that same relationship Zeus and the gang shared with Fate and the mortals under them.

Two riddles Oedipus gets. As a direct result of his great intellect, Oedipus rises in the world. “Yea,” the Chorus says, “for this cause [of killing the Sphinx] hast been named our king” (43). The homeless foreigner finds a home in Thebes, a home he arrived at because his intellect—his answer to the riddle—resulted in the gods’ blight being lifted. And it was intellect that brought Oedipus to Thebes, a rational plan to defeat the oracle that told him he would kill his father and commit incest with his mother. We sense something great in him. Oedipus can outwit the gods! No mystery is safe from such a mind. Thus, armed with his intellect, Oedipus faces another riddle as the play opens. To solve this riddle of who killed the previous king, Oedipus tells his people he will search for the killer of their king “as if he was his own father” and “will follow out every clue” to find the murderer (10).

And the answer to both riddles. Himself. It is he who will walk on four feet, then two, then three—and he who killed the king, his father. It is himself he finds—and not the self he had envisioned beforehand. My friend in rehab, facing the truth of what he’s become, hearing from the therapist his fated genetic wiring, beholds himself, perhaps also for the first time. Hector and Achilles—aware of the prophesized doom for themselves and their world—discover their selves in the choice each one makes. Still though, I cannot grasp why some choose to fight and others to yield?

The characters in my story, subjected to the fate I’ve preconceived for them, begin with their soon-to-be-thwarted desires, confront the world hostile to it in a series of actions, struggle toward the conflict’s resolution. No way out for them. And yet…

The story turns unexpectedly. A husband, discovering his wife eating bugs, runs out to the pet store for some crickets. He was supposed to scream at her, drive her from the house. What’s he doing?

Every sentence, every action requires a choice to be made. I’d like to think that I, as author make such a choice. But maybe I’m like Oedipus, blind to the truth. Maybe the characters themselves have a greater say in the matter than I’d like to think. Fate becomes the way the gods and the world controls us, filing the world with restrictions and boundaries, our selves with the histories of our family lines. I yearn for such control in my fiction and yet the characters resist. They make a choice against my own wishes. A complex relationship, for in reacting to the control I would exert are they not in some way still being formed by the controlling (and touch typing) hands of Fate. They resist; I follow their new path; discover another Fate or pull them unknowingly toward the original one. One must accept uncertainty, I guess, in the world. What Oedipus could not. What scientists cannot grasp. One never knows. One can only act and hope for the best. A strange way to live, yes?

Perhaps the metaphor for our existence can be found in such a relationship, between authors and their characters. As much as we’d like to control them, they surprise us, the way I imagine Oedipus’s blinding of himself surprised the gods, perhaps made Fate blink, and in that blink, Oedipus escaped something, created a new Fate. Our prophesized future inheres within Fate—genetics, our childhoods, the world into which we were born and its inherent restrictions. When one decides to take on Fate, I imagine the insanity that might develop. I shall now throw this pen across the room? Wait. Perhaps I am fated to throw it. So I won’t. But wait. Maybe that was— And so on.

In that unexpected action, the struggle against what I would make my story become, my characters discover themselves. I imagine my friend does the same, struggling to break free of the fated trap. I’m learning to follow my characters along their unexpected journeys. Perhaps that’s where the story was fated to go along.

The inspirational song of the day:

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