Oedipus Rex

The main difference between a tragedy and a comedy is whether or not the instigating errors have severe, permanent effects on the characters.

For instance, Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex as a tragedy, but if you remove the patricide, incest, and roll credits before the main character gouges out his own eyes, you've got the basis for a romantic comedy starring Steve Carell and Melissa McCarthy.

Which I would fucking love to see.

Even if they did include the...

So how is an epiphany actually different from a character simply learning something new? Let's break down the exact differences, because they're important.

When a character just learns a new fact they didn't know before, like in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, where Oedipus learns he's actually the killer he's been hunting down, Aristotle called that recognition.

That is very different from an epiphany.

In an epiphany, like in Joyce's famous story The Dead, the facts stay exactly the same.

First of all, the illusion of the actor.

We know that the actor on stage isn't really King Oedipus.

We know that he's just a man playing pretend.

However, we also lose a sense of tragedy if we don't suspend our disbelief a little bit.

So for the tragedy to have full effect, we, the audience, are tasked with simultaneously identifying with Oedipus while also realizing, in the back of our minds, that it's not really Oedipus there on stage.

You can see how a measure of distance is thus introduced.

If you were to completely identify with Oedipus, we couldn't handle it.

Second of all, the entire experience of the play as a whole delivers distance.

Bottom of the left-hand column, page 921.

In opposition to epistemic discourse, that is to say, the kind of discourse which has some principle or transcendental signified or blanket term as its basis, in other words, something which in a given moment makes it possible for all knowledge to flow from it.

In opposition to epistemic discourse, structural discourse Mythological discourse must itself be mythomorphic.

It must have the form of that of which it speaks.

Derrida then says this is what Levi-Strauss himself says in the following passage, taken from one of Levi-Strauss's most famous books.

If the mechanism here is simply having more information, how does it dictate entirely different outcomes in different genres? Let's look at how one mechanism creates two endings.

In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, the audience knows that the killer Oedipus is cursing is actually himself.

That knowledge leads us toward utter ruin.

Conversely, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the audience knowing Cesario is actually Viola in disguise just creates a fun confusion that we fully expect to be resolved.

but definitely underpowered when compared to Vision.

But what's interesting is why did they pick this name for her when they wrote her originally? Well, Jocasta, the other famous Jocasta, is based off of Sophocles' ancient Greek play, Oedipus Rex.

You may have heard of it from its Oedipal Complex, if you've ever heard of Sigmund Freud's ideas.

So in that myth slash play, Laeus is the king of Thebes, marries Jocasta, who's like some high up, you know, there in the city as well.

Her name will be looked at through a number of readings.

First, the Greek tragedy written by Sophocles, Oedipus Rex.

Second, Freud's Oedipal Complex.

Third, the change of her name from the masculine to the feminine.

And footnote, in reference to Sophocles' play, the other two plays of this trilogy, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, can serve a pretty interesting epilogue to the novel, which I may explore at the end of this series.

End footnote.

To begin, Oedipus Rex.

Oedipus was a child whose destiny was that where he would eventually kill his own father and marry his mother.

I don't mean poor readers.

So when I had, you know, history of the Roman world, or I had Greek mythology or introduction to Western humanities, and I would have a text, and I thought that they would like to read, I don't know, Sophocles' Oedipus or Euripides' Medea, in translation, of course, and they couldn't do it.

So I'd come to class, and there would be a third of the class couldn't do it.

They couldn't discuss.