Re: Frankenstein

D wrote:

<snip>

I enjoyed Frankenstein. Great book!

Karen Karbiener's notes in the Barnes & Noble Classics edition:

    <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35247.Frankenstein>

are loaded with literal pattern recognition. For instance, a hint of the
theme of incest between creator and creation manifests itself as the
daemon promises to join Victor on his wedding night.
    Mary Shelley wrote the book on incest calling it _Mathilde_. Her
father successfully suppressed _Mathilde_, both during his life, and
from the grave, until 1959.

    Author's Introduction [to Frankenstein by Mary Shelley]

    ... "We will each write a ghost story," said Lord Byron,
    and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us.
    The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he
    printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more
    apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of
    brilliant imagery and in the music of the most melodious
    verse that adorns our language than to invent the machinery
    of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his
    early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a
    skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a
    key-hole - what to see I forget: something very shocking and
    wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse
    condition than the renowned Tom of Coventryd, he did not
    know what to do with her and was obliged to dispatch her to
    the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was
    fitted. ...



    End Note [by Karen Karbiener]

    Poor Polidori: John William Polidori (1795-1821) claimed
    that he had begun a novel entitled Emestus Berchtold; or,
    The Modem Oedipus (completed 1819) at the same time
    Frankenstein was planned. Polidori also developed the
    fragment of Byron’s abandoned ghost story and published
    it as The Vampyre in 1819.

With incest and Oedipus pretext out of the way, we can now embark to the
recently departed, doctor of script, Robert Towne's magnum opus:
_Chinatown_.
    The trajectory from Polidori to more modern interpretations of
_Oedipus Rex_ leads to a psychological focus, particularly through the
lens of Freud. One of my ambitions is to acquire the 1975 issue of
_Film Quarterly_ where Wayne D. McGinnis compared Chinatown to Oedipus
Rex by Sophocles.

This thread from last year attempts to sort out the existential hot mess
of mod _Oedipus Rex_:

On Tuesday, August 1, 2023 Don wrote:

Robert Carnegie wrote:

Don wrote:

>
First, a review of previously posted postulates. The Oedipus complex
manifested within Perry Rhodan's son, Thomas Cardif is a straight
forward "I want to kill my father" impulse.
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
At Thora's funeral a foreshadow hints at Cardif's intentions to fully
indulge his Oedipus complex (whose usage in this context is shown below)
and kill his father. Thus the tragedy begins and metastasizes.
>
Freud was absolutely obsessed with changes that take place in
our minds as we move from childhood to adulthood. When we are
children, Freud suggests, we are fiercely devoted to our mothers,
because they nurture and protect us. Anything or anyone who gets
in the way of this devotional love becomes, in our irrational
baby minds, a threat that should be eliminated-even if that
>
What I've just described is a version of Freud's famous Oedipus
complex, in which a male child, echoing the actions of the tragic
Greek king Oedipus, wants to kill his father and marry his mother.
>
<https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-uncanny>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
Next comes Priestley's thoughts on /Oedipus Rex/.
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PR's Thomas Cardif affair was treated as an /Oedipus Rex/ adaptation by
me in Lynn's recent review of 67 "Interlude on Siliko 5." And it turns
out Priestley mentions /Oedipus Rex/ in _Man and Time_. And, his words
work better than mine did:
>
But the reason for writing plays in this form has nothing to do
with the Time element. It is because their action works like a
coiled spring, producing an effect both of increasing tension
and dramatic inevitability. In plays of this kind (of which
perhaps the supreme example is the /Oedipus Rex/ of Sophocles)
we are made to feel that the characters are helpless victims of
fate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
Now for something new - a person posits how the movie _Chinatown_
contains complex components comparable to /Oedipus Rex/.
>
Analysis and interpretation
>
A modern Oedipus Rex
>
In a 1975 issue of Film Quarterly, Wayne D. McGinnis compared
Chinatown to Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. He suggested that a
"wasteland motif predominates in both works", in which a
character (Noah Cross in Chinatown and Oedipus in Oedipus Rex)
uses "a plague on a city" to get into public power and then
harbor corruption. McGinnis wrote that both works allude to
"a sterility of moral values in its own era": of Athens in
"a time of intellectual upheaval [...] after the heroic battle
of Marathon" in Oedipus Rex and of America in the Watergate
era in Chinatown. He also argued that in the film, director
Roman Polanski splits Sophocles' Oedipus into two morally
polar figures, with the film's protagonist Detective Jake
Gittes paralleling the "good" Oedipus: the one uncovering the
source of corruption. McGinnis asserted that after "confronting
the web of evil perpetrated by Cross [...] Gittes is the Oedipus
whose success, to the use the words of Cleanth Brooks and
Robert B. Heilman, 'has tended to blind [him] to possibilities
which pure reason fails to see'". McGinnis concluded that
"There is finally pity for the doomed, ignorant Gittes, just
as there is pity for the blind Oedipus in Sophocles", however,
"Gittes' real sight, like Oedipus, comes too late".
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)>
>

I see a difference between Freud's idea that sons
(is it just sons?) love their mother and resent their
father, and the supposed actual history of Oedipus,
whose actual father orders the kid taken away
to be abandoned to die, since he, Oedipus, is destined
to kill his father and marry his own mother (what?!)
A twist is that Oedipus instead is adopted, doesn't
know that - the adoptive parents deny it - and does
know about the destiny, so to try to protect his
not-real parents in Corinth, he heads for Thebes -
and runs into his actual father (a road rage incident)
and then his mother, and destiny takes its course.
One reading of this is that when the gods hate you
with or without good reason, this is very bad.
>
As far as Oedipus knew for most of his life,
he loved his father. Who was not the man, Laius,
who arranged his murder as a baby, and then drove
a cart over him in an argument at a road junction.
Laius seems to be not much of a loss, even excluding
a rewrite where he raped a male student which
apparently makes everything else fair punishment,
of Laius. But Oedipus didn't consciously resent Laius.
Perhaps he did unconsciously recognise and resent him?
>
Anyway, which way is it with Thomas Cardif?
He knows that Perry Rhodan is his father, and he
is against Rhodan? That's more like Mordred -
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur%27s_family>
Although Mordred's parents may be siblings -
that wasn't in the story originally, someone "sexed it up".
And then Mordred gets a prophecy and Arthur supposedly
tries to kill any child born around the given time.
You know, like Voldemort did.

>
My original post inadvertently intermingles ideas.
>
An Oedipus complex is a psychoanalytical term. It involves a child's
hostility towards the parent of the the same sex - a son who wants to
kill his father.
My first snippet shown above pertains to psychoanalysis practice.
Thomas Cardiff suffers from an Oedipus complex and wants to kill his
father Perry Rhodan.
Mordred also suffers from an Oedipus complex. Ergo, Mordred wants to
kill his father too, King Arthur.
>
OTOH, /Oedipus Rex/ denotes the Athenian tragedy by Sophocles. The
second and third snippets appearing above apply to /Oedipus Rex/.
Danke,

In the Sopocles play, Oedipus has no desire to kill his father; in fact he's
fleeing the area where he thinks his bio parents live to avoid that fate, when
he *does* kill Laius (who he does not know is his father) in the first
recorded incident of road rage.

Nor does he know that Jocasta is his mother when he marries her, as a
prize for getting rid of the Sphinx.

Oedipus doesn't have any of the motivations described in Freud's 'Oedipus
Complex'.

Danke,

--
Don.......My cat's  )\._.,--....,'``.     https://crcomp.net/reviews.php
telltale tall tail /,   _.. \   _\  (`._ ,.    Walk humbly with thy God.
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'    Make 1984 fiction again.