Method and Models

Mythology is the prototypical form of discourse from which popular genres developed and Oedipus is currently the most frequently cited exemplar of a specific myth influencing popular genres in literature and film. The structural relationships between the genres of gothic, detective, science, and tech-noir fiction, like those between myth and other narratives, can be shown by the identification and ordering of constituent units or elements in a manner that brings forward content that may not otherwise be apparent. Vladimir Propp (1928) addressed fairy tales and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958) revisited Oedipus in this manner. Similarly, Jack Burnham (1971) has shown how the structurally defined "myth" of the avant-garde in the visual arts involves the treatment of cultural elements, such as tube paints and spray guns, as "natural" elements and then "culturalizing" them by processing with choices and decisions about application and arrangement. The structuralist approach taken here demonstrates the association of primary fields of discourse – psychology, sociology, science, and aesthetics; with realms of experience – the symbolic, the real, the imaginary, and the simulacrum; and with specific genres and their constituent elements (Chart 1). Discourse, realms of experience, and genres are all somewhat artificially compartmentalized to facilitate the identification and understanding of their presence, relationships, and dynamics.

Any discourse may develop in any realm of experience, but specific areas of discourse take on conventionalized roles in relation to specific realms of experience, the constituent elements of popular genres, and individual popular genres. In other words, areas of discourse are articulated in the experiential realms and constituent elements of popular genres: characters; relationships between characters; the crime, mystery, or social issue at stake; its detection; and its resolution. This structural arrangement of areas of discourse, realms of experience, and constituent elements facilitates charting of the characteristics that historically distinguish individual genres and mark their cumulative development. It is demonstrated here in relation to the Oedipus myth and, more specifically, to exemplars of popular genres: Horace Walpole's gothic The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Tale (1764), Arthur Conan Doyle's detective fiction "The Speckled Band" (1892), Arthur C. Clarke's sciencefiction Against the Fall of Night (1948), and William Gibson's scifi-cyberpunk Neuromancer (1984).

Realms of experience and genre

Prometheus is undisputedly the Titan of technology and, by association, of tech-noir; but the Oedipus myth, not that of Prometheus, is the most commonly cited template for Western literature in general, and the inspiration for numerous structural and psychoanalytic analyses of narrative. The story of Oedipus, as compiled, summarized, and popularized by Robert Graves (1955) from sources including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, is as follows: Oedipus is abandoned as an infant by his mother Iocaste because of an oracular prediction about the future damage he will do and is thus raised by adoptive parents whom he later abandons because of a similar oracular prediction. His travels bring him to Thebes, a city tormented by the Sphinx sent by Hera as punishment to Laios, Oedipus's biological father, for abducting a boy. Not knowing him to be his father, Oedipus kills Laios in a fit of temper. He then answers the Sphinx's riddle and is rewarded for this accomplishment with the crown and the hand of his own mother, whom he also does not recognize, in marriage. Years later, when a plague blights the land, Oedipus seeks explanation in some human crime against the gods. He eventually identifies his own incest as this crime and blinds and banishes himself to wander as a beggar aided only by his devoted daughter Antigone. His sons (and brothers), Eteocles and Polyneices, war for his kingdom and Antigone has to see to it that the body of the defeated Polyneices is properly buried.

Otto Rank (1909), Lord Raglan (1936), and Lévi-Strauss (1963) all studied this myth and their research identified what they believed to be a list of the constituent elements for the hero, including, among others, a royal bloodline, unusual conception, attacks on his life in infancy or early childhood, foster parents, a successful battle in early adulthood with some enemy or beast, a royal marriage, a crown, and the eventual loss of favor, dethroning, and mysterious death. Lévi-Strauss carries the structuralist analysis further and identifies the myth's constituent elements as representing opposites that form patterns of mediation made more recognizable by their arrangement in four columns. He includes additional elements from the story of Cadmos, ancestor of Oedipus, and Cadmos's search for his sister Europa after she is abducted and raped by Zeus and mothers three children by him, including Minos. Cadmos follows the directions of the Delphic oracle, kills a serpent and sows its teeth, which sprout the "sown" men who immediately begin killing each other until only five remain. These five swear their allegiance to Cadmos and become his servants.

The first of Lévi-Strauss's four columns includes those elements showing various kinds of excess or the exaggeration of blood relations: Cadmos seeking his sister, Oedipus marrying his mother, and Antigone burying her brother. The second includes those indicating the devaluation or underrating of blood relations: the "sown" men kill each other, Oedipus kills his father, and Eteocles kills his brother. The third column shows the denial of the indigenous origins of humankind insofar as it involves monsters unwilling to allow humankind to be born or to take up residence in a particular location: Cadmos kills the serpent and Oedipus kills the Sphinx. The fourth column includes the names of the male characters and their meanings: the name of Laios's father, Labdacos, means lame; that of Laios means left-sided; and Oedipus means swollen foot. These names affirm the autochthonous origins of man by referring to what Lévi-Strauss claims is a universal characteristic of myth: the difficulties men have walking when they first emerge from the earth. Lévi-Strauss interprets the entire Oedipus myth as an attempt to resolve the conflict between the belief in autochthonous origins and the actuality of birth resulting from a union of man and woman, or, put another way, the myth is about how babies come to be and, more broadly, the question of how unity derives from individuals, diversity, and multiplicity. The first pair of columns identifies the extremes of relations between men and women and the second pair moves the dilemmas of this relationship to the mythic dimension of ultimate, rather than individual, origins.

The Oedipus myth also provided inspiration for Sigmund Freud's famous Oedipus complex, summarized in the cliché about little...