A Close Reading of a Passage from Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Throne of Labdacus

 

From the shroud came

The gaze an infant bestows,

In untouchable, wavering, radiant waves;

Like a god’s gaze, found in solitude.

An infant maimed and left for dead. I stood

In the shrinking snows. I knew the oracle.

I knew what the god had said.

I covered my eyes with my hands.

But there are things we do

Not for the sake of the gods

But for other men. I lowered my hands again

And looked: an infant left for dead.

There was no arguing backward,

No looking ahead.

At the sight of the infant’s gaze

I was riveted, chosen, beguiled.

I knew what the oracle said,

And I rescued the child.

-Page 35 (italics are Schnackenberg’s)

The passage is written in the first-person, from the point of view of the shepherd who found Oedipus on the mountainside and decided to rescue and raise him instead of leaving him for dead. To a larger degree than most of the poem, it stands very well alone. The passage seems to have been deliberately made to stand starkly separate from the rest of the poem: it is in both a different point of view, and it is italicized. Those changes give me the sense that the shepherd is almost commenting on the rest of the poem. To put it another way, it seems like if the poem were a DVD movie of the Oedipus story, the passage I quoted would be the shepherd interjecting commentary in the DVD’s bonus features. The shepherd seems to be speaking more directly to the reader than the rest of the poem does. The use of past tense in the passage also gives the impression that it is the shepherd’s commentary on the rest of the poem.

The diction of the passage reminds me of some of the larger threads I noticed throughout the entire poem. There are six different instances in the passage of the notion of sight (lines 2, 4, 8, 12, 14, and 15). The use of sight is both reminiscent of Oedipus’ removal of his own eyes, as well as of the idea of "blind fate". We get the infant’s gaze, the god’s gaze, and the shepherd’s sight, but what I think is crucial is that the shepherd seems to make his decision while he has "covered [his] eyes with [his] hands". That is, the decision is made in blindness, and he just knows that it is the decision he must make, regardless of what he sees. Line 16 also seems to convey the inevitability of the shepherd’s decision: note that he says he was "chosen" instead of that he chose. Inevitability seems even further driven home by the fact that the shepherd obviously knew very well the consequences of his actions. He states that "I knew the oracle. / I knew what the god had said." It isn’t as if the shepherd was acting from the ignorance of not knowing the prophecy about Oedipus. He knew perfectly well what was going on, but he could not have taken any other action. A final, and somewhat detached, note on diction, is that I noticed that both of the instances where I was reminded in some way of divinity contained an emphasis: "god’s gaze" is obviously divine and alliterative, and I wonder if the alliteration of "shrinking snows" two lines below "god’s gaze" is meant to allude with extreme subtlety to snowy Mt. Olympus.

I think, though, that it is important to see that it isn’t as if the shepherd rescued the child reluctantly. While he does feel that choosing to save the infant was inevitable (recall again that he was "chosen"), I feel like it was more of an "inevitable choice", at least to the shepherd. In lines 9-11 the shepherd is clearly asserting that he has a reason for saving the infant. He says that "There are some things we do…for other men". His understanding of the moral gravity of his decision also seems to suggest he believed he had a choice in some sense of the word. "an infant left for dead" is mentioned twice (lines 5 and 12), which to me clearly conveys that his decision is, at least to him, morally relevant. His doing something for "other men" implies that the shepherd felt that he had a reason for committing that action which he committed. So it seems as if there is some sort of compatibilism going on. Either that or the shepherd’s feeling that he is saving the child for some reason other than the fact that it is inevitable is simply an illusion on his part.

For me, that dichotomy between the shepherd’s saving the infant for a reason other than he had to ("for other men") and his feeling it was inevitable ("chosen") form the core of what I derived from the passage, both in itself and in its role in the poem as a whole. The notion of having to make a choice is philosophically confusing, as choice seems to imply that it is not a necessary truth that that particular choice was chosen. Additionally, moral responsibility presupposes some form of free will, as it seems morally repugnant as well as irrational to hold someone blameworthy for an action that they had no choice in committing. As such, I cannot break the passage down into a one-size-fits-all "this is what Schnackenberg thinks about free will" sort of statement. Rather, I am simply left with a sense that the passage contributes to the overall attention to the notion of fate in the poem as a whole. Everything that happens in the poem, even the actions of the gods, are governed by fate, yet there is for me a palpable moral component that the passage reinforces, by presenting us with a shepherd that is analyzing in hindsight how he came to choose an action that was inevitable, as contradictory as that might seem.