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Oedipus and the Sphinx by Gustave Moreau. Creepy, no?

Speaking of myths, I like the way Sigmund Freud summarizes the story of Oedipus in Interpreting Dreams. This extract from the Penguin Classic edition appears in the prologue to Salley Vickers’ novel, Where The Three Roads Meet.

Oedipus, the son of Laius, King of Thebes, and Jocasta, is exposed as an infant because an oracle had informed the father that his as yet unborn son would be his murderer. He is rescued and grows up as the son of a king at a foreign court until, unsure of his origins, he consults the oracle himself and is advised to avoid going home since he is destined to become the murderer of his father and husband to his mother. On the way from what he thinks of as home, he encounters King Laius and kills him in a fight that erupts swiftly. He then approaches Thebes, where he solves the riddle posed by the Sphinx barring the way; the grateful Thebans express their thanks by making him king and giving him Jocasta’s hand in marriage. He rules for many years in peace and honour and, together with the woman he does not know to be his mother, has two sons and two daughters—until a plague breaks out, occasioning a fresh consultation of the oracle, this time by the Thebans…

The plot of the play consists quite simply of the gradually intensifying and elaborately delayed exposure (not unlike the task of psychoanalysis) of the fact that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius as well as the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta. Shattered by his unwittingly performed atrocity, Oedipus blinds himself and abandons his homeland. The words of the oracle are fulfilled…

My introduction to Oedipus and the Greek myths was via Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. There was a dusty paperback in my cousins’ house, where my parents had parked me in the hope that I would learn to play with other children. That didn’t work, but it got me interested in the classics. If they’d known what I was reading they probably would’ve freaked out—big ick factor—and had me exorcised again. In my defense I could’ve pointed out that part in the Bible where Lot’s daughters decide that in the absence of potential mates their father would have to do.

In Pasolini’s film adaptation, Oedipus is a young man in fascist Italy.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex

Woody Allen’s spoof Oedipus Wrecks in the New York Stories trilogy is the story of a guy whose mother vanishes onstage during a magic act and reappears in the sky to embarrass him.

Oedipus Wrecks