paper prompts (voluntary)!

* "the detective story [deals with] a hidden guilt that threatens to destroy the self-contained community, or, more contemporaneously, the social fabric of a city  . . . "  Leslie Fiedler

*Levi-Strauss asserts that myths of the Oedipal type always assimilate discovery of incest to the solution of a living puzzle personified by the hero--in his words "The audacious union of masked words or of consanquines unknown to themselves engenders decay and fermentation, the unchaining of natural forces--one thinks of the Theban plague-- . . ."

*It is a common observation--and like so many other commonplaces, an important one--that our system of thought, perception, and logic depends on our insistence that the world can be perceived in terms of categories which include some elements and exclude others.  The starkest and most fundamental kind of category is that which designates a paired opposite:  ie, "p" and "not-p."  They are interdependently defined:  "The category 'p' includes all that which is not not-p, and vice versa."

Part of the persistent horror of Oedipus's fate is that in his case, "p" and "not-p" have collapsed (and so therefore have most other important distinctions in Thebes--the place is a mess):  The King is the Regicide; The Son is the Father; the Mother, the Wife; the Criminal is the Detective/Judge/Executioner;  the Daughter, the Sister; etc.  Implicit here as well is the horrific threat behind the prohibition of such transgression:  if you violate these taboos, all distinction, which is to say, all culture and civilization (that which, we say, separates us from the animals) will precariously tumble into chaos.