| This study has a threefold aim: to reveal the semiotic system through which embedded myth works in fiction and the mechanics of reader response to it; to test these observations on narratives using the Oedipus myth; and to examine the reasons for the hold this myth has on the twentieth-century imagination.; Myth is narrative which demands interpretation and thus owns a hermeneutic tradition while inviting further interpretation. In fiction, myth acts like a language, offering to transmit its pre-existing explanations or to accommodate a new meaning. This situation compares to the communication triangle, with the author as encoder, the reader as decoder, and the parts of a myth--its mythemes--as the signs.; The language theory of myth is verified on narratives using the Oedipus myth. These Oedipal works divide into three genres: detective fiction, science fiction, and psychological fiction, each stressing different mythemes. The first group--which includes Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers, Butor's Passing Time, and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49--uses the Oedipal mythemes of the investigation and the self-incrimination to establish their anti-detective nature.; Beginning with Wells in The Time Machine, science fiction writers employing the Oedipus myth have concentrated upon the Sphinx mytheme. Following Wells's precedent, sf authors such as Dick and Zelazny in Deus Irae and Farmer in Venus on the Half-Shell and "Riders of the Purple Wage" use this mytheme ironically, to depict a non-heroic future.; Freud supplied the pattern for writers employing Oedipus in psychological fiction before 1945, but Lacan can be seen as providing the Oedipal paradigm for authors using the myth since then. O'Connor's Wise Blood, Moravia's The Lie, Frisch's Homo Faber, and Spencer's Asylum center upon the progress of a protagonist from ignorance to insight, the movement Lacan stresses in interpreting Oedipus.; The appeal of the Oedipus myth for modern authors lies in its treatment of knowledge. In using Oedipus, writers infer that his primary discovery is that humans cannot know absolutely. This inference parallels the theories of scientists such as Heisenberg and Kuhn and of mathematicians such as Godel who find probability and unsolvability at the end of the scientific quest. |
