Word: oedipus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although Crow offers no letup in the agony and gore, it should win Hughes a new and wider following. In it he parcels out human history and legend in a succession of charnel-house episodes. The Garden of Eden, Oedipus, St. George, all our prototypes of beauty, heroism and love, are reduced to so much pulsing, thrashing sinew, murderously intent on survival. A harsh and one-sided view, to be sure, yet difficult to deny. The headlines are on its side. Hughes is too cunning a craftsman to try to convey his vision in headlines or rant of any kind...
Such notions are the stuff that paradox is made of-true grist for the comic novelist. In MF, Burgess takes off from a Levi-Strauss contention that a universal connection exists between answering conundrums and committing incest. According to this view, it was not by chance that Oedipus' unwitting incest occurred after he solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Among the Algonquin and Iroquois tribes, there is a legend of brother-and-sister love in which riddles are posed by talking owls. In a 1967 essay, Burgess marvels at this transcultural yoking. In MF, the old Algonquin yarn...
Finally, his rage fastens on a myth, lately more in the public eye than most others since Oedipus-the myth of the vaginal orgasm. A complicated myth-Mailer admits to that right off-as difficult to prove as to explode, but one which is surely a match for all the writer's resources, imagination...
...Oedipus Rex, King of Thebes, died this week in his new home, Where's Poppa? Mr. Oedipus was 2,500 years old and had been ailing for almost a century. His troubles began on the couch. From Oedipus complex it was an easy plunge to Oedipus simple, bottoming out in pop-psych idiocy like Where's Poppa?, which offers the case of Gordon Hocheiser (George Segal) and his mama (Ruth Gordon...
Filming the dissecting of an orange is equal to dissecting an earthworm to look at the parts. Dancing the death of Jocasta is equal to reading Oedipus tell of his mother's death. Filming or dancing these experiences brings the ideas home to the doer: they mean something to him personally since he creates the order. Increment dance and film by one dimension until you reach a peak experience...