In this paper, I will focus not on the horror of incest, but more precisely on the horror of the myth of the myth of incest and its mythic truth – I will concentrate on the myth of the Oedipus Complex. I will begin by explaining how the myth of the Oedipus Complex, or the myth of the myth of patricide and incest, is distinct from the myth of Oedipus the King, particularly because the two each have their own particular nuances. While both deal with repression, the latter speaks of actions carried out, then repressed, and the consequences which ensue, while the former centers on desire and the necessity for repression of that desire. The mechanism of repression of desire is precisely how the “the law of the mythical figures” works for the myth of the Oedipus Complex, as it “depends on the impossibility of fulfilling their statutes. If they are fulfilled, then the myths are finished” (Horkheimer, and Adorno 47).
In every myth, “each mythical figure is compelled to do the same thing over and over again. Each of them is constituted by repetition: its failure would mean their end” (45). Here too, both the myth of Oedipus the King and the myth of the Oedipus Complex are tied together by repression. Within the myth of Oedipus the King, Oedipus’ repression of the oracle’s prophecies doom him to the end of his reign as king, and eventually to the destruction of his lineage, as “following the deaths of Oedipus and his two sons there is no male descendant to carry on the Labdacid line” (Vernant 101). In contrast, within the myth of the Oedipus Complex, we become the mythical figures, and our compulsion is the repression of murderous and incestuous desire. Our failure to repress is our potential end. “The suppression of instinct which … separates [us] from beasts was the introverted form of the repression existing in the hopelessly closed cycle of nature” (Horkheimer, and Adorno 55).
The Oedipus Complex becomes a myth by the nature of its definition – its origin is nowhere (though Freud was the first to articulate it, he was not the author per se). Furthermore, the myth of the Oedipus Complex is regenerative, self-perpetuating, and intergenerational. It extends its legacy by sealing strands of family history and marking them with its bequests, albeit inherently tragic ones. This seal links generations together as if they were a chain, connecting, recapitulating. For if the Complex could stand alone (and it cannot, nor will it ever,) two generations are contained within – there is the slain father and the guilty son. But before the father was slain, wasn’t he too once the guilty son? And it is this question precisely that allows for the continuity of the Oedipus Complex.
One way in which the myth of Oedipus the King and the myth of the Oedipus Complex become entwined was articulated by Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams:
“[Oedipus] is one in whom these primaeval wishes of our childhood have been fulfilled, and we shrink back from him with the whole force of the repression by which those wishes have since that time been held down within us. While the poet, as he unravels the past, brings to light the guilt of Oedipus, he is at the same time compelling us to recognize our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found” (Freud 296).
Freud claims that through reading the poet’s telling of the myth we come face to face with the “primaeval wishes of our childhood” (ibid). However, the horror of the Oedipus Complex is not necessarily dependent on the unraveling of the past by the poet as Teiresias the prophet did for Oedipus. The psychoanalyst can perform this task as well, and it was Freud, the first psychoanalyst that assumed Teiresias’ daunting task and in doing so entered into a different cycle of Oedipality.
Throughout his controversial work, Freud exposes to us our unconscious like the blind but all-seeing Tiresius. For the prophecy is merely Oedipus’ unconscious being communicated through a mediator – someone or something, whether it be prophet, oracle, or psychoanalyst – which puts our conscious in touch with our stormy unconscious, puts us in touch with the dangerous divine, which we misguidedly and hubristically believe can be denied. “The oracle [or the unconscious] is always enigmatic but never lies. It does not deceive man but allows him the opportunity to err” (Vernant 105). “[Oedipus] strikes as a warning at ourselves and our pride” (Freud 296). And Oedipus’ “destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us … Our dreams convince us that this is so” (ibid).
If this is the case, then how does Freud – more precisely, the mythic Freud, where Freud’s body of work becomes the body of the man, with his self and being as an eerily uncanny effigy – become the doomed king, the dead father, Laius? He does so by assuming Tiresius’ role, and then Freud, the father of psychoanalysis (the messenger of the unconscious) transforms himself into the fated father of Oedipus, King Laius. He embodies Laius and eagerly assumes this role, and as a result we must destroy him (his work) when he becomes a double for our father and draws out the monster within ourselves not only by reminding us of the horror of incest, but more so by vividly and dangerously reminding us of the incestuous and murderous wishes that we all attempt (but fail) to contain and repress. For the things he tells us about our own animal-like, beast-like selves are so shameful, violent, disturbing, and disgusting, that his death (as in the form of discounting and the rejection of his work as dated, fantastical, farfetched, and over sexualized) becomes the only plausible solution.
The once obscured horror becomes clear, and the prophecy changes us, for once we were “with darkness on [our] eyes, that now have such straight vision” (Sophocles 28). It is at this point when we are presented with a choice, and if we choose to deny the prophecy then the messenger, Freud, must suffer. Thus we metaphorically destroy his work (his self, his effigy) through denial. For through some act of sympathetic magic we believe that destroying the messenger destroys the undeniable message. But alas, the incombustible cannot catch flames. It is only later that we realize what we have done – we have killed our doomed father, we fulfill the irrefutable prophecy by imitating Oedipus, and it is out of this unavoidable shame and guilt that we resurrect him (his work, his effigy) in hopes of forgiveness and deliverance.
At this point, the inherent degree of truth of the Oedipus Complex becomes irrelevant due to two entwined reasons. First, the complex articulates itself by speaking through not only Freud but through Freudian discourse as well, and it is articulated to us like a dooming curse. It is not a curse because it dooms us to committing patricide and incest, it is a curse because it gives credence to the darkness of our dreams and illuminates their nature: “Before this, in dreams too, as well as oracles, many a man has lain with his own mother. But he to whom such things are nothing bears his life most easily” (Sophocles 52). This curse punctures the wall that attempts to restrain the unconscious and allows dark matter to flow freely. Both for us and for Oedipus in the myth of Oedipus the King, “the horrors which [are committed] are the curse which has fallen on them. Mythical inevitability is defined by the equivalence between the curse, the abominable act which expiates it, and the guilt arising from that act, which reproduces the curse” (Horkheimer, and Adorno 46). In both myths, the guilt works to reproduce the curse. In the case of Oedipus, by dooming his family – most poignantly, his most loyal daughter Antigone – and in the case of the myth of the Complex, the guilt that reproduces the curse if not toiled through, reproduces the curse of repression and leads to the outpouring of an unconscious that cannot be reigned in. Second, after the initial horror of the complex, the curse, fear lingers, resonates, and stays. The grain of truth (no matter how small or big) keeps it steady and in place. In this way, the Oedipal curse gathers its power and strength as “mythical fate” reassumes its long ago abandoned relationship “with the spoken word,” where “the word was thought to have direct power over the thing, expression merged with intention” (47). This is made possible because within the realm of the unconscious, metaphor is the language that is understood literally. If murderous and incestuous desire were once metaphors for something else, this something else no longer remains, not even in trace. For the unconscious, “thought and reality [are] synonymous” (54). “Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been forced upon us by Nature, and after their revelation we may all of us well seek to close our eyes” (Freud 296-7).
Sources
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York, NY: Avon Books, 1998. 294-298. Print.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002. 35-62. Print.
Sophocles. Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, & Antigone. Trans. David Grene. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Print.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Trans. Janet Lloyd. 1st ed. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1988. 85-111. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment