Word: oedipus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...title story is linked to the original. Oedipus at Colonos, mostly through the image of an old. maimed man living in the care of his daughter. A disabling illness has put the father in a wheelchair-embittered, suspicious, and nursing a hatred for his schoolteacher wife, who contemptuously doles out his spending money. Daughter Antigone lives in a tight, self-woven net of deceit. She has retained the original name and relentless sense of justice of her counterpart in Sophocles' Antigone, but not her virtue, purity or innocence. She takes on a married man as a lover...
...repeats it as if she did not quite believe it. The fact is, no one is really convinced that the tormented figures of modern drama have the stature of tragic heroes. The measure of that disbelief is to imagine Jocasta asking an audience to pay attention to Oedipus, or Cordelia to Lear. Try not paying attention to them...
...Oedipus. What is the essence of tragedy? Steiner goes back to the two earliest moral visions of man's fate in Western civilization, the Judaic and the Hellenic. In the Judaic view, the universe is a parable of justice. Jehovah is wrathful and awesome, but ultimately fair. In the Greek view, "men's accounts with the gods do not balance." The world is riddled with "mysteries of injustice, disasters in excess of guilt." After his agonizing ordeal, Job "gets back double the number of she-asses; so he should, for God has enacted upon him a parable...
Cassandra's Scream. Amusingly caustic is Steiner's account of the literary bootleggers who pour new psychoanalytic wine in the old stolen bottles of the Greek myths. Gide, for instance, produced an Oedipus "who arrives at the extraordinary insight that his marriage to Jocasta was evil because it drew him back to his childhood and thus prevented the free development of his personality." White forgoing these lapses of taste, T. S. Eliot merely domesticates the Greek myths till they are as tame as Old Possum's pet cals...
...brisk, jet-borne academic types whisk in and out of Washington, the legendary absent-minded professor is an anachronism. But New York University Philosopher Sidney Hook still conforms to that older, homelier image; he has been known to enter the shower wearing pajamas, and he once absently rejected the Oedipus Complex as a tool of philosophy by exclaiming: "I learned that stuff at my mother's knee...