On Oedipa, Oedipus, the tower was everywhere and a family in decline

[alice wellintown]

‘tis better to be lord of men than of WASTE: since neither
walled town nor ship is anything, if it is void and no men
dwell with thee therein.”  Priest of Zeus to Oedipus

> Re: The tower as in 'the tower is everywhere"....well, I had no memory of how pervasive that was as a metaphor in Oedipus....from the beginning, as in Hamlet, The Wasteland, the tower metaphor describes the land with a sick 'king'---who doesn't know he is sick. Late in the play: the chorus: "like our saving tower---soared above the rotting shambles here."

Who is the sick or fisher king in Hamlet? Although Hamlet has all 7
elements of the revenge tragedy it is not a revenge tragedy.  The Play
is the thing. Not revenge. The play begins with the tower and the
first player to speak does not say his own lines but those of another
player. That other player should ask who goes there but the man at the
bottom of the tower says this. The world is not only sick or rotten to
the heart or core, it is turned over in its grave.Hamlet, young
Hamlet, whose "flaw" or rather harematia is often said to be inaction,
asserts himself when he jumps into Ophilia's grave. Once in the grave
with the rival for his lover's corpse, her brother, incest being only
the most obvious gothic pathology of a rotten kingdom, Hamlet says he
is the Dane or King. The tower is now in the womb/tomb. Love and Death
in the American novel is easily traced thru Hamlet to Oedipus and you
don't need a Freudian to make these connections. Of course, it was
Melville who beat Pynchon to all this in Moby-Dick. Pynchon, for
whatever reason, decided to focus on the detectives and spies and rats
and priests in Shakespeare and Greek drama---seems Tom can't help but
read with political lenses on, kinda like how the theatre of the
absurd looked at the school chums Hamlet murdered with his pen,
re-drafting the letter, re-writing the plot.