Lucy Pollard-Gott's Blog, page 11
March 11, 2011
Looking for the Beast in "Beastly": A review of the film
The driving conflict in Beastly (2011, directed by Daniel Barnz) is set in high school, that daily battleground for adolescents where fragile identities form, clash, and remake themselves. The film retells the fairy-tale of 'Beauty and the Beast' as a story of teen rivalries, exclusions, and ultimately romance.
In many ways, it is a perfect choice. Appearance is all-important to teens, and the pain of being different doesn't need any explanation. So when arrogant class leader and likely prom king Kyle Kingson (or, the prince) is turned from handsome to "ugly" by a curse from an "ugly" girl he has callously tricked and humiliated, no teenager will be surprised that he skips school and hides out, while he figures things out. I put ugly in quotes, both times. The Beastly Kyle (Alex Pettyfer), who now calls himself Hunter, is transformed, but only arguably ugly: he seems to have a seriously punk look--bald with tattoo tracery over his face and scalp, scars, and some neat piercings, and spends much of the movie shirtless to show off his abs, which seem to be intact, ugliness curse notwithstanding. Likewise, Kendra, the girl who curses him, played with menacing aplomb by Mary-Kate Olsen, has a commanding presence as the witch, but it would be a stretch to call her ugly. Different is not the same as ugly, but in this teen universe, as perhaps in our own, these two blur.
Vanessa Hudgens is this film's Beauty, and her character, Lindy Taylor, manages to be both beautiful and different, the outsider, marginalized by her family's uncertain income and her father's involvement with illegal drugs. She has had a rough education for compassion, so her perspective on suffering prepares her to be the Beast's salvation. But first he has to convince her to come out of her room! She's been staying at his lavish New York apartment for protection, hiding out from someone threatening to take revenge on her father through her. (In this small detail, the film adaptation loses a wee bit of magic, because the fairy-tale Beauty goes to the Beast to save her father's life, not her own.)
The tale is well-known, and the film follows its outline with reasonable faithfulness. The "Beast" learns more about pleasing the tastes and interests of his Beauty, he learns to be less self-centered and more giving, and romance blossoms along with the roses he cultivates on the apartment's rooftop garden. With only a hint of any obstacle in their path, restoration follows swiftly upon romance.
Although the familiar shape of the fairy-tale ('La Belle et la B ête' by Madame le Prince de Beaumont, 1756) is clearly in evidence, the film seems to lack some of the substance that makes 'Beauty and the Beast' one of the most influential and widely dispersed tales, second only to 'Cinderella' for its numerous variations in many languages.
It belongs to a general class of folktales about animal grooms (and sometimes animal brides) whose fate depends on the actions and emotions aroused in a human partner. By discovering the truth behind appearances, the human character reaches maturity and grants the animal character a renewed chance at human life. Along the way, the opposites of beauty and ugliness, kindness and brutality, and humanity and bestiality are played off against each other in subtle ways to prepare for the final transformation. (The Fictonal 100, p. 190)
Beastly, the film, emphasizes the beauty-ugliness dimension, and to a lesser extent the kindness-cruelty dimension, to the virtual exclusion of the hallmark dimension of humanity vs. bestiality. When he is cursed, Kyle is obsessed with his ugliness, the loss of his radiant looks and the identity and power they gave him. He is "beastly" only in the sense of behaving badly--with thoughtless disregard for others' feelings or needs. Despite his adopted pseudonym of "Hunter," the animality of a Beast is essentially bypassed. This eliminates one of the fundamental internal conflicts for the Beast as well as a significant obstacle for Beauty to overcome and learn to accept.
'Beauty and the Beast' can be read for its social, psychological, and even political overtones, which critics such as Bruno Bettelheim and Maria Tatar have done with great insight. Yet the heart of the fairy tale seems to be one of the big questions of philosophy: What makes us human? How do we accept and come to terms with our animal nature, while still cultivating that which makes us transcend it? The Beast is transformed because as a man he was living at a level beneath full humanity. During the period of the curse, his form matches his bestial nature and he must work to regain his personhood. Beauty, the emblem of the fully human, willingly sacrifices her freedom to save her father. After she takes up residence in the Beast's castle, her compassion for him soon flows from the same fountain of human kindness and empathy, despite facing the evidence of his animality.
This is shown dramatically in Jean Cocteau's masterpiece of filmmaking, La Belle et la Bête (1946), starring Josette Day as a luminous Beauty and Jean Marais as the most poignantly convincing of Beasts. In one visually stunning scene, Beauty accidentally observes the Beast in the midst of a meal, devouring the prey he has caught. Becoming aware of her, he himself feels caught, and is overcome with shame, symbolized by the smoke rising from his bloodied paws. No other image could so completely capture his dilemma. She is shocked at first, but understands that this is what animals must do.
When the Beast allows Beauty to return to her sick father (in Beastly, Hunter must face a similar decision that tests his ability to be unselfish), he is on the road to recovering his humanity, but he is only released from the curse by grace, the freely given love of Beauty who returns to him. (Perhaps we are all made human by such grace!) Beauty is also transformed by this act, integrating her humanity with her physical nature, thereby enabling the true marriage with her prince--body and soul.
To the extent that the film Beastly bypasses the dilemma of our simultaneous human and animal nature, it misses an opportunity. Even Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast (1991) embraced the animal transformation of the Beast. I have not read Alex Finn's 2007 novel Beastly, the basis for the film adaptation, but what little I have read about it suggests that her teen Beast may have been hairier! I would be interested to have someone who has read the novel weigh in on its treatment of the human-animal theme.
February 26, 2011
"Phantom Heart" and "Maat" by Annie Q Syed: Two Stories with a Deep Connection
A few nights ago I read Phantom Heart and Maat, two stories from the luminous writings of Annie Q Syed. They are both part of her short-story series Tuesday's Torrent, and I happened to read these two together. At the time, they seemed very different kinds of stories--which they are. "Maat" springs from the rich, fertile soil of Egyptian myth and psychological archetype, with many possible nuances of symbolism and meaning. It tells the story of a 12-year-old girl, named Thais, who dreams about a tree and a woman named Maat. Her recurring dreams set in motion a longing to understand this powerful intimation of the great lineage of mothers. Hovering just beyond view in the lives of the girl, her mother, and the Bedouin prophetess she meets is the Egyptian Goddess Maat, or Ma'at, who was said to participate in the weighing of souls after death. By contrast, "Phantom Heart" feels like a very "modern" story, a medical case-study almost, from the annals of neuropsychology (its manifestations are described very well). A man begins to think that his wife, Petka, is not his wife, that she has been replaced by an impostor. His daughter, Litiya, must try to make sense of his father's delusional dissociation and her mother's pain. Even with this clinical impetus, rather than the mythic underpinnings brought to the foreground in "Maat," "Phantom Heart" likewise feels full of nuance and possibilities of meaning just out of view.
The next morning, it became very clear to me that these stories, rather disparate in content and tone, are actually deeply united by the heart as the seat of memory. For Litiya's father, in "Phantom Heart," his disorder of the memory is also a disorder of the heart--it "weighs less" without access to the true memory of his wife united to his experience of her now. He is suffering from a phantom heart. Yet, remarkably, this missing part of his heart is still beating in his dreams. That revelation took my breath away, as it did for Litiya in the story. I am still working out all the implications for Petka's identity, and her faith in her husband's love, however fragmented in memory. Even the boats that set the scene for the story suggest an Egyptian connection to me. In this life, Litiya's father takes two boats out, but refuses to take with him the wife he no longer recognizes. Yet reading the story gives me the strong presentiment that their boats will cross together again in the afterlife. If I were going to map out the underlying connection with words and arrows, then I shouldn't be surprised that these two stories seem to inform each other--at least for me. The connections might go something like this:(Phantom Heart) neuropsychologypsychologydreams-psychesoulpsychearchetype and mythdreamsprophecy (Maat)I was so excited by these connections, I wanted to learn more about Maat, so I pulled out the volume in the University of Chicago's Mythologies series on Greek and Eyptian Mythologies . I found two very relevant articles by Philippe Derchaine, professor at the University of Cologne: "Egyptian Anthropology" (trans. by David White) and "Egyptian Rituals" (trans. by Gerald Honigsblum). What I got from these articles was how closely Maat is linked with memory, as the seat or sustainer of memory, and with creative imagination.
Another aspect of personality is the heart, which men as well as gods possess. According to the stela of Shabaka, which preserves a curious cosmogony, the heart is the seat of creative power--the imagination, in a sense--which becomes reality throught the mediation of language, as language transforms thought into word and thus into action. But the heart also functions as memory and in this way serves to characterize the person even in the hereafter, where hearts are weighed against Ma'at, the notion of social and cosmic order in which an equilibrium must be maintained. The heart thus occupies a central place in the conception of the judgment of the dead ... But the heart does not play the role of conscience in this confrontations, as has sometimes been said, but simply plays the role of a witness, which assures us that its function was indeed that of being the seat of memory. (Philippe Derchain, "Egyptian Anthropology," p. 221)
Not only in the judgment of the dead, but in this life, the offering of Ma'at was an essential part of Egyptian ritual and a duty of the king in his partnership to sustain the Gods, as they sustained Creation.
The culmination of the ritual was logically the offering of the symbol of Ma'at, the guarantor of both cosmic and social order in her capacity as guiding force of the universe. The ritual was usually performed deep inside the shrine as the final act of the celebrant in his progress toward the meeting with the god.... For if Ma'at were abstractly guaranteed by the gods whom she nourished, it was necessary for men, led by their king, to act daily in accordance with this order, each one himself and according to his rank, so that the gods could draw from this well-ordered reality the energy needed to sustain the process of creation. (Philippe Derchain, "Egyptian Rituals," p. 231)
On p. 232 of this article there is an illustration of the offering of Ma'at on a relief from the temple of King Sethi I at Abydos. Photos of this tomb by Robert J Rothenflug show this detail very well
Derchain remarks in a footnote that "there are numerous examples of the offering of Ma'at since the New Empire" (p. 234). Here is another example: The photo below by Su Bayfield shows the king offering Ma'at and two vases to Osiris in a double scene at the Tomb of Seti II.
To me all of this information about the meaning and associations of Maat is very suggestive for dreams, identity, and the story of a life. As with all of Annie Syed's stories (all the ones I've read so far!), there is so much there, so much that could be developed even further. Yet they do stand alone as short, energetic frissons to shake up the mind, emotions, and senses out of their usual ruts. I love that about them. Webster's defines frisson as a shudder that is disquieting but thrilling. Yes, indeed.
I am still meditating on one crucial aspect of "Maat"--the connection to trees. Like many people, I have long felt a deep connection to trees, a friendship even. I was fascinated, therefore, to find that the friendship of young girls with trees figures in several important variants I had encountered in my research on the story of Cinderella. In "The Cat Cinderella" by Giambattista Basile (Il Pentamerone, 1634-36), the unscrupulous heroine, named Zezolla, kills her stepmother in order to install her seemingly friendly governess as her father's new wife. The woman double-crosses Zezolla, however, and sends her to work in the kitchen in typical Cinderella fashion. Zezolla enlists help from a wish-fulfilling fairy housed in a date tree. In the Brothers' Grimm's "Aschenputtel" (1812, the much-abused Ash-girl, like Zezolla, found consolation from nature: She planted a hazel tree, watered it with her tears, and then caught a gold and silver dress thrown down by a white bird perched on one of its branches. She snuck off to the king's festival and lost a shoe there. In each case, the tree stands in as a substitute for the girl's natural mother or benevolent mother-figure. One other mother figure I'll mention comes from "Yeh-Hsien," the founding Ur-story of the Cinderella character from 9th-century China. Yeh-hsien (or Sheh Hsien) was a chief's daughter, but she suffered under an evil stepmother who made her wear rags and do heavy housework. Worst of all, she killed the girl's beloved pet fish, but Yeh-hsien buried the bones and learned that she could wish upon them. She obtained gold dresses from the bones' magic, enabling her to attend a festival, where she lost one shoe. (The fact that tiny feet were prized in ancient China has continued to reverberate in the Cinderella tale ever since.) Both the trees and the buried bones are creative maternal symbols--bestowing gifts for the daughter and helping her realize her dreams. The deep roots of these stories also make me shudder: with the love of mothers and daughters, their connection in spirit beyond death, and the ways that help seems to arise when it looks impossible. As mother goddess, Maat is rooted in these things, as she embodies order and guards Truth through memory. As Annie Syed says so beautifully in her story, "Maat was a direct descendant of those who drank the sap of the most ancient tree." Thais's beautiful (but disturbing to her) dream of a tree and a woman named Maat seems to spring from the same source as these fairytale and mythic elements, but blended into a new whole. Thais has many mother figures around her: her mother who is present, the mother who wisely waits; the Bedouin woman who sees the future; and Maat, the mother who comes in her dreams, rooted in the wholeness of a Tree. This is echoed in the words of the Bedouin seer to Thais, to sustain her for the time of mourning ahead: "All those who carry any part of the Truth are mothers. You will find your mother again, even if she doesn't look like how you remember her now." Yet, Thais wasn't ready for this and had to "spend years forgetting only to later search to remember." Maat would be her guardian during all that time, holding her memories, keeping her heart whole for her, even when it felt like a phantom of itself. Similarly, in "Phantom Heart," there is the hope that Litiya's father, who cannot recognize his wife and connect her to his memories, will find his wife again in the future, and find himself restored. As seer of the future, the Bedouin woman is also Maat. Derchaine discusses how Maat is related to a God, Sia, knowledge: her knowledge of Truth relates both memory of the past to creative imagination, reaching toward the future:
If we now attempt to find a connection between these two functions of the heart--creative imagination and memory--I believe it will suffice to recall that the heart is the seat of the god Sia, whose name simply means "knowledge." Knowledge of the past is obviously "memory," while the creative imagination is necessarily related to the future. ("Egyptian Anthropology," p. 221, with a footnote crediting G. Wirz's thesis for his discussion of the function of memory)
The story of Thais's dream in "Maat" seems to me to resemble a true account of a flash of mystical experience, the kind that sets one on a path of searching and remembering for the duration of one's life. Linda Johnson describes her own experience along these lines in her books on yoga and meditation, and says her whole life has been an attempt to understand, if possible to reproduce and sustain, that unexpected appearance of the Divine in her life. Sometimes dreams, or prophetic dreams, are the portal--to insight, to memory, to creativity. Both of these stories I have discussed, perhaps with some speculative license, ring with authenticity and show how determinedly such a dream wants to be understood and mined for usable meaning. It begs to transform the dreamer.
References
Annie Q Syed, "Phantom Heart" (Tuesday's Torrent, No. 1 in the series Da Vinci's Dreams), Feb. 22, 2011. http://annieqsyed.com/2011/02/phantom-heart/
Annie Q Syed, "Maat" (Tuesday's Torrent No. 12), Sept. 21, 2010. http://annieqsyed.com/2010/09/maat/
Philippe Derchain, "Egyptian Anthropology" (trans. by David White), pp. 219-224, in Yves Bonnefoy, Ed., Greek and Egyptian Mythologies , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Philippe Derchain, "Egyptian Rituals" (trans. by Gerald Honigsblum), pp. 230-235, in Yves Bonnefoy, Ed., Greek and Egyptian Mythologies , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
For Cinderella, see my chapter in The Fictional 100 and:
Alan Dundes (Ed.), Cinderella: A Folklore Casebook (New York: Garland, 1982).
Neil Philip, The Cinderella Story (London: Penguin, 1989). [Includes a version of "Yeh-Hsien," trans. by Arthur Waley]
February 22, 2011
I Won't Forget "Alice" on Oscar Night
About a year ago, Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" premiered, in all its glorious, grey-washed, yet intense color and with the trappings of 3d, vines, tendrils, Jabberwocky, and all. I wanted to see it on opening day (not an effort I usually make). My husband was working, so I went out to our local multiplex in early afternoon, put on my big plastic glasses, and settled in for the experience. Despite a fairly full theater, having no particular companion concentrated my full attention on the screen. Soon, just like Alice running after the White Rabbit, I was running after Alice and tumbling through the hole, down the hollow tree into Wonderland. Tim Burton's Wonderland.
by Lucy Pollard-Gott (March 5, 2010)
Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland looks and feels like a Tim Burton movie, not a pastel-hued, scene-by-scene rendering of Lewis Carroll's immortal Alice books. But in the end, that is the strength of this bold, visually stunning film. Carroll's mythmaking and, more importantly, his characters prove they are vibrantly alive by how well they survive and thrive in such transformation.
Transformed indeed. Alice (played by winsome and willowy Mia Wasikowska) has grown up to age 20, but is still dreamy and imaginative, still questioning. After she no longer has the protection of her understanding father, recently deceased, she is nearly pushed into a stifling aristocratic marriage that seems designed to quash her mind and her freedom. When she spies the white, waist-coated Rabbit, she flees in pursuit of him rather than accept such a proposal. Next to that, a frightening fall through an almost endless rabbit hole seems like a welcome relief. As objects and images whiz past her, and she tumbles past them, her descent can't help but evoke Dorothy Gale's equally frightening ascent, when caught up by the Kansas cyclone. There is even a flying bed, reminding us of Alice's recurrent thought that, surely, this must all be a dream.
Alice lands in the faithfully rendered locked room, and by means of just the right key and drink ("Drink me") and cake ("Eat me"), she emerges--for the first time, she thinks--into Wonderland. This much we expect. Yet this world is not the Wonderland of our childhood memories, and it's certainly no smiling Oz, albeit a bit more colorful than anything we've seen so far in the film. We don't usually think of Wonderland as a twilight world, even when it is threatened by such creatures as the Jabberwocky or the frumious Bandersnatch. But Burton's misty and mysterious art direction bathes Alice in moonlight and shadow, and blond as she is, she still projects a liminal beauty between light and dark.
Alice has forgotten, or repressed, her childhood adventures beyond the looking glass, and so she must figure out where she is and even who she is, as she meets one creature after another who takes her measure and finds her wanting in comparison to the old (that is, younger) Alice they remember. Can she really be the one whose return they have been anticipating? As in most adaptations, Carroll's creatures from several books (Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and even a little Hunting of the Snark thrown in) all meet in a conflated jumble to populate the movie Wonderland. After all, who would wish to wait for a sequel to see Tweedledum and Tweedledee?
But as soon as Alice follows the Cheshire Cat, languidly voiced by Stephen Fry, and is reunited with the Mad Hatter (a resplendently batty Johnny Depp), he will lead her to the site of an old attack by the Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter) who snatched the crown from her more pacific sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway). Burton's ruined Wonderland is beautiful in its devastation, a type of landscape he does so well (as in The Corpse Bride or even The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, also starring Depp). The Hatter tells Alice that the White Queen needs her to remember who she is and champion the realm, defeating the Red Queen's Jabberwocky with the Vorpal sword (because of Carroll, a standard issue weapon familiar to many role-play gamers). The moments deep in the burned forest when Depp recites snatches of the "Jabberwocky" poem lift the scene to a higher dimension, 3D or not.
Stayne, the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover), ambushes the Hatter, Alice, and their creature friends but captures only the Hatter. Alice is still unsure about herself, and definitely not sure that she wants anything to do with the dread Jabberwocky, but she knows one thing for certain--she wants to go and rescue Johnny Depp!
How she chooses to deal with the quest laid upon her will determine the quality of the adulthood she has earned. Even with an older Alice, the film retains a certain playfulness, though a little grisly at times; be sure to look for poignant moments that flash back to the child Alice. This film may not satisfy purists, but it is purely magical.
Alice ranks 25th on The Fictional 100 by Lucy Pollard-Gott.
January 27, 2011
Oedipus the King: The Riddle of Himself
As part of the Ancient Greek Classics Tour, I offer my reading of Oedipus the King, also known by the Latin title Oedipus Rex, the greatest drama that has come down to us from Sophocles (c. 496-406 B.C.). I thank Rebecca Reid for organizing this tour for the The Classics Circuit and I recommend that you check out the many interesting stops on the tour, highlighting the Ancient Greek epics, tragedies, comedies, and histories.
Oedipus ranks 6th on The Fictional 100, and the following chapter is excerpted from my book. If you would like to learn more about other Ancient Greek characters, their continuing influence, and where they rank on the list, please visit the Fictional 100 website.
6 Oedipus
With such clues I could not fail to bring my birth to light.1
Oedipus is the most striking and memorable character dramatized by the ancient Greek tragedians. This is saying a lot, because there is so much competition: Medea [26], Electra [27], Agamemnon [43], Antigone [68], to name a few. The power of Oedipus lies in the depth of his own horror at his situation, combined with its apparent inevitability.
The story of Oedipus, as part of the cycle of myths concerning the kings of Thebes, was well-known to Homer, who mentioned it briefly in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Later, composing tragic plays about Oedipus was apparently a very common thing in ancient Greece, because at least twelve such plays by dramatists other than Sophocles are believed to have been lost.2 Among these are an Oedipus by Aeschylus (for which the sequel, Seven Against Thebes survives) and one by Euripides. But Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus managed to survive. Perhaps because of their near perfection, people made more copies of them, and these came to supersede all other versions of the story. In fact, when Aristotle wrote his theory of tragedy in the Poetics, he singled out Oedipus the King as the epitome of the form, and his theory shaped the way tragedies were written and analyzed for the next two thousand years.3
But at its debut performance in 427 B.C. (the date is somewhat uncertain), Oedipus the King won only second prize! It lost to a play by Aeschylus's nephew, Philocles, who is barely remembered now.4 It soon became clear, however, that Sophocles' play was remarkable not only for the shocking story it tells, but for the way in which Oedipus demands that all secrets be revealed. His gradual discovery of his unwitting crimes requires the intricate plotting that Aristotle admired so much.
When the play begins, Oedipus is already king of Thebes, a position he attained by virtue of solving the famous riddle of the Sphinx: What creature walks on four legs, two legs, and three legs? Man—because he crawls on all fours as a baby, stands erect on two as a vigorous young man, and then must lean for support on a stick, his third leg, as an old man. For this feat of freeing Thebes from the Sphinx's power, Oedipus won its throne and its newly widowed queen, Jocasta. But now a plague ravages the city and an oracle proclaims that the only remedy is to banish the murderer of the previous king, Laius. Oedipus does not know who this could be, and in his relentless pursuit of the answer he destroys himself. His tragedy is that by seeking the truth, he will uncover his own guilt. His situation brims with paradox and irony, trapping him in his own riddle. As French anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernant put it, "lucid and blind, innocent yet guilty, the decipherer of enigmas is for himself an enigma he cannot decipher."5
Because Oedipus has remained so much a part of our culture, modern readers, as much as their ancient Greek counterparts, know what is coming. Oedipus learns that he unwittingly murdered his father, Laius, and married his own mother, Jocasta, also having four children with her, a horrifying mixing of the generations in which he is both father and half brother to his children. (From an anthropological viewpoint, this need to avoid confusion in kinship structure is the primary barrier to incest, since social order rests on maintaining orderly succession between generations).6
No matter that both Laius and Oedipus, at different times, had tried to escape their fate, which had been predicted by earlier oracles. When Laius heard the prophecy that his son would kill him, he pierced and bound his newborn son's feet (oedipus means "swollen foot") and left the baby to die of exposure on the Cithaeron hill. But a herdsman rescued him, and gave him to the King of Corinth, Polybus, to be raised. Oedipus likewise had heard from an oracle that he would murder his father and so left Corinth, only to encounter his real father, Laius, on a crossroads, have an altercation with him, and kill him. He proceeded into Thebes, answered the Sphinx, and, completely "blind" to his true position, married his mother. When the truth came out, two hideous consequences followed: Jocasta hanged herself, and Oedipus literally blinded himself, feeling utterly guilty for what he had not been able to see and utterly repelled at seeing any longer what the world had to offer. He left the city to wander as an outcast, finding refuge in Theseus' Colonus only as an embittered old man.
He is sometimes charged with pride, what the Greeks called hubris, an overconfidence that he could outwit Fate and thereby escape it. This seems unfair to him, however, because he merely did the best he could to avoid doing evil, and when confronted with the truth he punished himself mercilessly. His bitterness at the end reflects his frustration: His sincere efforts to avoid outraging the laws of the gods and society only made it more inevitable that he would transgress them.
After the Greeks, the Oedipus story continued as a strong current in Europe in plays by the Romans Seneca and Julius Caesar (Caesar's is lost), the Frenchmen Corneille and Voltaire, the Englishman Dryden, and the Austrian Hugo von Hofmannsthal, to name a few.7 Above all, Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was responsible for a revolutionary interpretation of Oedipus at the turn of the twentieth century. He understood it not as a tale of the outlandish fate of one unfortunate man, but as a parable of the psyche of every man:
If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified.…It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. . . . Here is one [Oedipus] in whom these primaeval wishes of our childhood have been fulfilled, and we shrink back from him with the whole force of repression by which those wishes have since been held down within us.…Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these wishes.8
This first published statement of the Oedipus complex appeared in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, where he also cited, as evidence, Jocasta's assertion that men dreaming of sleeping with their mothers is commonplace.9
As a cornerstone of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex is the form in which the myth of Oedipus now affects us most in modern culture. Jean Cocteau's Oedipus in The Infernal Machine (1936) reflects Freud as much as Sophocles. Furthermore, no modern production of Hamlet has been the same since Freud applied his Oedipal analysis to it (see Hamlet [1]). We have become used to skepticism about whether the Oedipus story is a genuine reflection of our own subconscious wishes, but, of course, that is just what Freud would expect.
The predictability of our reaction to the Oedipal situation makes it potent material not only for high drama, but for the lighter touch of pop culture as well. In an interview with Larry King, actor Michael J. Fox was asked to account for the tremendous popularity of his 1985 movie Back to the Future. He cited as one crucial factor the story's resonance with the Oedipus myth. The film's time-traveling teen hero, Marty McFly, finds himself transported back to 1955 and brought face to face with his own amorous teenage mother. He must divert her attentions away from himself and toward the young man who will become his father. The paradoxes of time-travel physics provide the weird workings of Fate, and McFly must work hard to avert an Oedipal disaster that would obliterate his own future.10
Oedipus has come down to modern times with little loss in the force of his personality. His violation of the incest taboo makes him a focal point for the experience of our deepest fears and, if Freud was correct, our most secret desires. Watching Oedipus on stage or reading his drama may allay our fears for a while—we believe we have escaped a fate like his—but again and again, an attraction deeper than we suspect pulls us back to him.
Notes
1. Sophocles, "Oedipus the King," trans. David Grene, in Greek Tragedies, vol. 1, eds. D. Grene and R. Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), lines 1058–59.
2. Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 108–9.
3. Ibid., p. 195.
4. Ibid., p. 114.
5. Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Oedipus," in Greek and Egyptian Mythologies, ed. Yves Bonnefoy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 199.
6. Ibid., pp. 199–200.
7. Kaufmann, p. 109; Lowell Edmunds, Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
8. Sigmund Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 4, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), pp. 262–63.
9. "Before this, in dreams too, as well as oracles, many a man has lain with his own mother." Sophocles, " Oedipus the King," lines 981–82.
10. For further discussion of Back to the Future and time-travel paradoxes, see J. Richard Gott, Time Travel in Einstein's Universe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), pp. 11–13.
Excerpted from The Fictional 100: Ranking the Most Influential Characters in World Literature and Legend by Lucy Pollard-Gott, chapter 6.
Copyright © 2009 Lucy Pollard-Gott, PhD. All rights reserved.
Also today:
Rebecca Reads writes about Poetics by Aristotle
Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog writes about The Odyssey by Homer
January 12, 2011
Some of my best friends are fictional ...
In the year since The Fictional 100 was published, I have had the pleasure of chronicling the busy lives of these 100 fictional persons, drawn from world literature and legend, who seem to be making news wherever I turn. As I went to press, Sherlock Holmes appeared in a new movie, enlisting the talents of Robert Downey, Jr., Jude Law, and Guy Ritchie to dramatize his further adventures and boxing prowess in a steampunk universe. In March 2010, Alice went back to Wonderland and tried on all different sizes of clothes, before putting on armor, defeating the Jabberwocky, and breaking the heart of the Mad Hatter. In January 2010, Holden Caulfield mourned the death of his creator, J. D. Salinger. A year later, Mark Twain may well be whirring in his grave as a controversial new edition of his greatest book changed the controversial speech his Huckleberry Finn had always uttered (though experience taught Huck to think about things differently). You don't have to be "real" to make news, as my Google Alerts told me every day, filling my Inbox with the latest performances of Hamlet (the play) or Hamlet (the opera) by Ambroise Thomas, the latest reworking of Superman's formative years, the latest Sherlock Holmes graphic novel, video game, or app, the latest variation on a character's fictional possibilities.
