You're doomed--may you never fathom who you are!

Oedipus Tyrannus, lines 1167-1173 (tr. Robert Fagles)

#this play isn't even really about the incest! it's about the nature of fate and the cost of truth!!#<- prev YEAH. and now im thinking about that one bit of uhhhhhh violence and the sacred#'If we eliminate the testimony brought against Oedipus in the second half of the tragedy then the conclusion of the myth#far from seeming a sudden lightning flash of the truth striking down the guilty party and illuminating all the mortal participants#seems nothing more than the camouflaged victory of one version of the story over the other#the polemical version over its rival—the community’s formal acceptance of Tiresias’s and Creon’s version of the story#thereafter held to be the true and universal version the verity behind the myth itself'#rip i realise i am a) pasting literally a paragraph in the tags and b) thinking abt jgy as oedipus instead#(he Did have a patricide moment though. like that is notably a thing that did also happen if under very different circumstances)#but mostly i am thinking about how the revelations of jgy's crimes are consistently Focalised Through Other Stuff#like are you seeing the actual thing or like. someone else talking about a letter written about someone else knowing about etc etc etc#and there is a limit to how much of that is just because the protagonist isn't able to see it Directly#but the result is like. im not going to paste another girard paragraph but there IS one about how all the accusations against oedipus Are#Just An Argument with tiresias (and creon?) and it's only the injection via prophecy etc of what an audience Knows is in the myth that#breaks the stalemate of This Is Just An Argument by Revealing the crimes the audience already knows were fated#i think the way the narrative (can it count as a narrative if it's a play) of oedipus rex relies on an audience knowing and trusting a myth#is v similar to how the narrative of mdzs/cql uses focalisation to allow The Victory Of One Version Of The Story Over The Other etc

@catilinas I am reading this tag analysis on the Oedipus post like 👀👀👀 and wANT TO HEAR MORE because

1.) The discrepancies between the version of events in CQL that we see unfold as viewers in real time and the version we get from NMJ during the Empathy sequence are a constant subject of rumination for me, and they're yet another example of seeing JGY through not one but two sets of filters, and NMJ's version of events is the last we see, and thus forms our lasting impression, but it's so far removed from the originals you don't even realize how much they've omitted unless you watch them back-to-back. Meanwhile, Tiresias's account is one of the first things we hear, but it colors everything that comes after it because We All Know The Story, the characters themselves fixate on it, and everything unfolds more or less in real time so we the viewers don't have time to forget anything and never got to see Oedipus or Jocasta or Laius outside of this moment.

2.) something something JGY claims that someone tried/ is trying to harm him every time he's confronted, and Oedipus accuses Creon of plotting to overthrow him

3.) what if "JGY lives" AU in the style of Oedipus at Colonus