Word: oedipus
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Napoleon Wellington Oedipus Jocasta...
...dramatists plowing the Tennessee soil forget that Oedipus did not have a complex but a fate. Once analysis of motivation supplants action, the result is soporific drama, as exemplified this season by Anderson's I/ Never Sang for My Father and Chayefsky's The Latent Heterosexual. In contrast with the look-through transparency of these playwrights, Harold Pinter maintains a tantalizing and fascinating opacity in his characters. They are inexplicable and unpredictable as people in real life often...
Groucho as Oedipus. Roth sees Portnoy's life as "a masochistic extravaganza," and no one is more aware of this than Portnoy himself. In one of his many hysterical bursts of insight, he cries that he is "torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires." He views himself as the victim in a grim Jewish joke. "Doctor, Doctor," he pleads, "please. I can't live any more in a world given all its meaning and dimension by some vulgar nightclub clown. By some-some black humorist! Because that...
Portnoy wears his Oedipus complex as if it were a festering good-conduct medal that had been stapled to his sternum. But his is a tragedy in which Oedipus is played by Groucho Marx. Mother Portnoy is a vibrant orange-haired vision who has never given up trying to smother her son in the warm pudding of her ample bosom. She surpasses the grotesque stereotype simply because Roth plays her absolutely straight, making her totally and comically unconscious of the unconscious...
...difficult for two people to fix themselves at the same point on this scale of conversational levels. But there is another dimension to communication, where mutuality is almost impossible to achieve, he said. That is intimacy, an "ultimate intimacy not obtained by shared confessions of guilts, ambitions, Oedipus complexes, or secrets," but by a mental unification analogous to sexual intercourse, a joining of thought processes so total that the listener could just as easily be the speaker. In short, one gets inside the other's head...