reading from the margins Niran Abbas editor

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 13:09, Terrance wrote:
> 
> 
> Malignd wrote:
> > 
> > <<Madeline Ostrander -- Influence and incest:
> > relations between The crying of lot 49 and The great
> > Gatsby >>
> > 
> > It's about time someone looked into this.
> 
> I think Tanner looks into the relationship between Gatsby and Lot 49,
> the Pyncher and Fitz and the like, but not incest. others have looked
> into the relationship of TGG and VL. 

There is ALWAYS incest.

All happy families are alike.



 
> Incest? Why incest? 
> 
> Oedipus and Oedipa and  ... Gatsby? 
> 
> Sophocles implies that incest and exile, too much unity and
>   too much diversity, are not opposites but are, literally,
>   two sides of the same coin. He also suggests, what the
>   audience believed, that incest and parricide are acts that
>   obliterate the distinction between man and beast, inside and
>   outside, the wild and civilization. What Oedipus lacks (and
>   Thebes as well) is some middle term, an Aristotelian Polis
>   that mediates between our divinity and animality, making us
>   whole in a community constituted by diversity.” 287
>   So says,  J. Peter Euben in  The Road Home: Pynchon’s The
>   Crying of Lot 49, the concluding chapter of his The Tragedy
>   of Political Theory. [1990]