It is only logical that after reading Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex that we watch a video featuring Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs, right? Maybe not, but the connection should become clear after you watch the video.

Our (my) goal in this class is to help you understand the connections between fiction and reality—that the stories we tell must in some way mirror our lives in a way that is sometimes obvious, oftentimes obscure.

A student asked today why Oedipus is relevant today. This was a great question (and one you should always ask of all your classes). Here’s the response I gave:

Oedipus’ story is relevant because it is essential. That may seem like a circular definition, but by “essential” I mean “basic to the human condition.” I gave a few examples of non-essential literature, both graphic novels because I knew the student was familiar with them: Watchmen and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, both of which happen to be by Alan Moore. Watchmen is a brilliant revision of our view of superheroes; one that takes familiar characters (such as Batman) and subverts them (The Nite Owl) in a way that makes us see these characters in a different light. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen does something similar with characters from Victorian and Edwardian literature. The original superheroes and the characters from the late 19th century reflect earlier characters, and so on. Part of the fun of reading them is “getting” the references, and having one’s notions turned on their head. The other part of our interest in them is that they provide an interesting perspective on what it means to be human (in a skewed or magnified way, in the case of superheroes).

Oedipus, for modern readers, contains only the latter. Oedipus’ story is tragedy in it’s most pure form, and it is the simplicity of the story that speaks to all of us, that makes it essential.

In this video, Mike Rowe experiences what Aristotle called anagnorisis and peripeteia when castrating sheep. Oedipus is a pure example of a man whose view of his own life is turned upside down (peripeteia) by a single realization (anagnorisis).

Beyond the Freudian interpretations (every man is in a battle to overcome his father’s shadow, etc), Oedipus, with the simplicity of a fairy tale, clearly highlights an aspect of our own lives (hopefully not literally) directly, without muddying the vision by relying on previous works.

That’s why we read Oedipus.