more Oedipa

[Robin Landseadel]

On May 4, 2009, at 1:24 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> Another connection to the Oedipus story is Oedipus's pursuit of the  
> killer of King Laius.  The pursuit of the real world implications of  
> the  murder in the Courier's tragedy may not point to Oedipa but it  
> does point to her identity as a patriot.
>     Below from Wikipedia
> Oedipus or Oedipais?
>
> It has been suggested by some that in the earliest Ur-myth of the  
> hero, he was called Oedipais: "child of the swollen sea."[22] He was  
> so named because of the method by which his birth parents tried to  
> abandon him -- by placing him in a chest and tossing it into the  
> ocean. The mythic topos of foresaking a child to the sea or a river  
> is well attested, found (e.g.) in the myths of Perseus, Telephus,  
> Dionysus, Moses, and Romulus and Remus.[23] Over the centuries,  
> however, Oedipais seems to have been corrupted into the familiar  
> Oedipus: "swollen foot."

My pursuit of the real world implications of the torture and execution  
of Dominico, in the Courier's Tagedy, about 1/3 into CoL49:

	The act itself closes with Domenico, to whom the naive Niccolo
	started it off by spilling his secret, trying to get in to see Duke
	Angelo and betray his dear friend. The Duke, of course, is in his
	apartment busy knocking off a piece, and the best Domenico
	can do is an administrative assistant who turns out to be the
	same Ercole who once saved the life of young Niccolo and
	aided his escape from Faggio. This he presently confesses to
	Domenico, though only after having enticed that informer into
	foolishly bending over and putting his head into a curious black
	box, on the pretext of showing him a pornographic diorama. A
	steel vise promptly clamps onto the faithless Domenico's head
	and the box muffles his cries for help. Ercole binds his hands
	and feet with scarlet silk cords, lets him know who it is he's run
	afoul of, reaches into the box with a pair of pincers, tears out
	Domenico's tongue, stabs him a couple times, pours into the
	box a beaker of aqua regia, enumerates a list of other goodies,
	including castration, that Domenico will undergo before he's
	allowed to die, all amid screams, tongueless attempts to pray,
	agonized struggles from the victim. With the tongue impaled on
	his rapier Ercole runs to a burning torch set in the wall, sets the
	tongue aflame and waving it around like a madman concludes
	the act by screaming,

	Thy pitiless unmanning is most meet,

	Thinks Ercole the zany Paraclete.

	Descended this malign, Unholy Ghost,

	Let us begin thy frightful Pentecost.


l. . . . ed me to the famous public torture and execution  of Giordano  
Bruno:

	. . .on February 16, 1600, the Roman Catholic Church executed
	Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher and scientist, for the crime
	of heresy. He was taken from his cell in the early hours of the
	morning to the Piazza dei Fiori in Rome and burnt alive at the
	stake. To the last, the Church authorities were fearful of the
	ideas of a man who was known throughout Europe as a bold
	and brilliant thinker. In a peculiar twist to the gruesome affair,
	the executioners were ordered to tie his tongue so that he
	would be unable to address those gathered.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/feb2000/brun-f16.shtml

Pynchon gets pretty graphic in his riffs on speech, invocation, the  
power of the word and the power of uttering a word.