Sometimes ideas come to me in the form of wordplays, slips of the tongue, puns. A couple of days, somehow, when one of my profs mentioned that something was "edible," I imagined that he'd said that it was Oedipal... And thus, the current pun.
[Another example, one which I may have posted previously, was this stupid (and as it turns out, totally unoriginal) pun: "Eros by any other name" (actually sounds like the way someone with a heavy Filipino accent would say the true line...).]
Anyway, the trick about these things is to make it meaningful, and not just some gimmick... So I've been kind of beating my head about it. And then, in a way, it occurred to me. I recall something I'd written for a Religion class, something about how Oedipus (whom I have always held a certain sympathy for [perhaps sympathy is too light a word]) united the community of Thebes by being the "double-crosser." Let me see if I can find the passage... Okay, found it... It's long, bear with me:
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The notion of the fold is interesting. A fold creates an inside and an outside that communicates through the homogeneous fabric. However, it would be untrue to view the fold of the word as being an attempt by it to cut itself off completely from that original fabric. It is true that the word is involved, as we have said, in the act of cutting, in "meaning." However, that cutting is never complete; in fact, it would be quite true to say that the word does not mean to make a complete cut. The word needs the homogeneous fabric that it abjects and folds.
The need of the structure for its own want or absence is aptly expressed in the enigmatic story that de Certeau recounts, that of the "Idiot Woman." That woman, de Certeau notes, is the absence about which the community of nuns is formed. "Already when questioned about the 'lack' around which the representation of the convent was organized, they used the significant formulation: 'We have an idiot within.' This could also mean: it is our innermost secret, a madness within ourselves." (Michel de Certeau, "The Mystic Fable: Volume One, the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, pg. 37)
Related to this story is that other one, so central to psychoanalytic theory: Oedipus Rex. He is the Pharmakos, the poison-cure and the scapegoat. He is the outside (as exile) that becomes an inside (as king), who through his own desire to know, becomes outside once again. He is the one that crosses the threshold of the fold of Thebes twice. Through this double-crossing, Thebes is purified. Why?
Oedipus is that in-between man who takes upon himself the sins that each and every member of the fold feels. He himself seems pure and innocent as milk (or at least, he "means" well); yet, in the stomach of that tempted community, he becomes the milk that is used to induce a vomiting of poisonous temptation. "The mainspring of the tragedy lies in that ambiguity; prohibition and ideal are joined in a single character in order to signify that the speaking being has no space of his own but stands on a fragile threshold as if stranded on account of an impossible demarcation." (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p. 84-85) Oedipus, the transparent man who crosses the borders of Thebes (and hence, crosses every member of Thebes), becomes the opacity that binds the community together in its fear of him. He becomes the externalized object of fear that allows everyone else to pretend that what he is is not within themselves as well.
A final interesting story from a questionable source (a horror movie, Howling VI) must be told in this context. A nun once went mad in that fold of the sheep, the Church. This nun would walk about, mumbling the ominous phrase, "We are all in fear, we are all in fear," with a look of utter terror upon her face. After she died, an investigative reporter on vacation became interested in her story, and tried to find out why she had gone mad. One night, she read the transcript of the phrase over and over again. By a slip of the tongue, she discovered what the nun had been trying to say all along: "Werewolf in here." In that instant, the reporter realized that every single member of that community was a werewolf...
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Okay, not entirely an Oedible Complex; in fact, that's the crux. Oedipus cannot be digested and absorbed; he might be palatable going down, but "inside", by what he is, he "upsets" our stomach, and forces himself up and out again...
Anyways, just random thoughts.
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