Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues

by Lowell Edmunds and Professor Lowell Edmunds

Book Overview

The power of the Oedipus legend is apparent not only in its interpretations but even more so in its variations. As Edmunds writes, Translations, adaptations, and performances still come forth in a never-ending stream. Again and again, playwrights have tried their hand at new shapings of the Sophoclean Oedipuses and often a country's Oedipus forms a whole chapter in the history of its literature. Drawing on more than seventy works that dispersed...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 142143718X
• ISBN13: 9781421437187
• Release Date: February 2020
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A Dream of Blood Lust

"Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and its Later Analogues" by Professor Lowell Edmunds is scholarly, erudite, and extensively researched. It starts with ancient literary sources of the Oedipus tale. There is no mention of "Oedipus and Akhnaton" by Immanuel Velikovsky. It is followed by the texts of the endless analogues from Medieval and Modern Europe, Slavic, the Near East, Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. Let's not overlook that Oedipus by Sophocles or Oedipus by Seneca are both analogues. The core of the legend is of parricide and incest. The book tries to show why Oedipus the drama is so compelling. The author gives his interpretations of the interpretations from Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Propp, and Levi-Strauss as to the origin and nature of the legend. Freud's interpretation is psychoanalytic. Propp's is historical. Levi-Strauss is structural. Freud stands on the shoulders of Darwin, Robertson Smith and James Frazier with his formulation. The motif of parricide and incest is the latent content, the genotypic core for Freud. The drama is the phenotypic manifest content, the symbolic representation of the "eternal recurrence" of what pre-humans had to go through to rise above their natural animal nature to become humans. Oedipus is a re-enactment of what actually occurred thru evolutionary time. The struggle these pre-humans had to endure to become humans. This "memory trace," this Lamarckian scar on our psyche to kill our father and to commit incest with our mother is still with us now embedded within the unconscious but is always ready to rear its ugly head. Individual childhood development repeats these pre-historical stages. The eventual restraint of the two deeds and the self-awareness that comes with it leads to the development of the human conscience. In psychoanalysis, the goal of a mature character configuration is the control of the "Oedipus Complex." Haeckel's "Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny," is pure Freud. Other specialists except for most psychoanalysts regard Freud's interpretation reductionistic, naive, and ridiculous. Propp's interpretation is similar to Freud's without the unconscious. Propp's view is that the story of Oedipus is a vestige of our incipient origins in pre-history when we were struggling to become a "post-hunting, herding society." Where we had to learn to inhibit our murderous desire to kill our father and wish to possess our mother. The dawn of humans when we had one foot in our animal nature and one foot in the new era of human cooperation. Oedipus is a condensed version like a dream of that history of our species where we had to slowly learn to control our instincts. One of the ideas of "structuralism" is that a myth is a mirror image of the laws that govern how the mind works. It makes no use at all of the content of the myth. For example, the "structural" interrelationships within the Oedipus Myth between the idea of precocity, and the emphasis of kinship somehow reveals the