Cultural Criticism: Will we win the war? How can we rid the city of the plague? Should I invade my enemy's territory? Any list of questions to be posed to an oracle today would also have to include the all-important one: Will I be happy? The abiding human impulse to look for certainty, to seek meaningful patterns, to dispel fears of helplessness and chaos is the subject of this playfully perceptive book by the literary scholar, Michael Wood, writes Helen Meany.
Our desire for answers hasn't altered over the centuries, he suggests, although the authorities we invest with oracular power have, and currently include economists, doctors and astrologists.
Although he has done his research and presents a vivid picture of the oracular culture of the Greco-Roman world, of sibyls, pythias and priests, the book is not so much a history of oracles as a commentary on their significance. What fascinates him are the narrative possibilities offered by the ambiguity of the oracles' responses. The process of teasing out these narratives forges the connection between oracles and literary criticism, between public and private hermeneutic acts. As a critic Wood is concerned with questions of interpretation - and not only because a god might speak in riddles. When Socrates was given a clear answer by the Delphic Oracle to the question of whether anyone was wiser than him, he still questioned what the response meant. Interpretation, for Woods, is our prerogative and, perhaps, the extent of our freedom of choice - whatever we might believe about the possibility of God or gods.
The question of belief is skated over early on. "Confident doubt is always a little short-sighted and liable to collapse into negative dogma," he writes. "All things are full of gods . . . even if they are only figurative."
The gods and their oracles allow for the richness of metaphorical truth - and metaphors and signs are Wood's raw materials. Later he returns to the subject, posing a series of questions which suggest that he is alive to the possibility that the gods might be more than metaphors. Like the recent work of Roberto Calasso, Marina Warner and James Wood, his explorations create a space for the interplay between literature, philosophy, psychology and religion.
Paradoxical connotations of both infallibility and ambiguity have been associated with oracles from their earliest appearance in historical accounts. Both senses are still inscribed in dictionary definitions of the word "oracle", though, as Wood remarks, "you can't blame a dictionary for what people think". People who consulted oracles sought precisely this combination of authority and obscurity, simultaneously desiring and resisting knowledge.
The Greeks had a term for the notorious double-speech of oracles, "amphibology", but even on the rare occasions when an oracle spoke without equivocation, the auditor might still choose not to understand.
Commenting on the Oedipus myth and Oedipus's incomprehension of the awful truth uttered by the Delphic Oracle, he writes: "Obscurity becomes a name for a clarity you can't bear."
Versions and variants of the Oedipus myth are central here: Wood ranges lightly from Sophocles to Freud, from Stravinsky's opera-oratorio, Oedipus Rex, to Pasolini's film version, examining the sense of inevitability imposed by narrative form. We may ask whether Oedipus could have avoided the fate predicted by the oracle - that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Could he have chosen not to act, or avoided that fateful encounter with his father on the road? But "in the belated time of narrative" the answer has already been chosen; the story is always over. The crossroads on the road to Delphi is "an intersection of contingency and necessity - the site of the irrevocable deed that wasn't irrevocable until it occurred". This may appear to be labouring the obvious but there is a rich seam here, suggestive of the temporal aspects of literary form and, even, of definitions of the self.
As in his essays and his critical studies of Nabokov and Stendhal, Wood specialises in acute observations that are couched as witty asides or throwaway remarks. This "ironic lightness of being" is deceptive: when he gets his teeth into a text, his readings are brilliantly illuminating. In his commentaries here on Hopkins's poem, 'Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves', on Wittgenstein's discussion of certainty and on Kafka's secular oracle, the reader can be grateful that he has done the thinking for us; all we have to do is enjoy the results.
Less convincing are the associations made between the contemporary "oracles" - economists, medical experts and astrologists - and the institutional oracles of the ancient world. At this point things turn a bit sketchy and anecdotal: there is a distinct sense of someone running out of steam as Wood's restless gaze takes in Nostradamus, The Matrix and global terrorism.
Deciding not to consider the oracular role of psychoanalysis, he writes: "Psychoanalysis, when it is working well, creates something like the 'inward oracle' Milton's Christ announced, the one in the heart rather than the one representing external authority." We could translate this as: "I don't have time to go into all that right now." But then, as Wood modestly concedes, understanding oracles "may be much harder than we thought".
Helen Meany is a freelance journalist and editor
The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles. By Michael Wood, Chatto & Windus, 271pp. £17.99