Medusa the Spaces of Postmodernity The favored imago of the artist in the nineteenth century was the flaneur. Ambling through the spaces of the "spectacular city which was open to a class and gender-specific gaze,"1 this voyeur and participant in public entertainments—bars, brothels, racetracks—had access to visual experiences and panoramas off-limits to an unchaper-oned, respectable woman. There could be no "flaneuse."2 Informal interior scenes of domestic life were of course not exclusively spaces for women artists; but codes of propriety organized the limits of most women artists' mobility within the spaces of modernity, both in daily life and in paint. To venture forth into a wider arena, Rosa Bonheur, for example, had to secure a permission de travestissement? To flatter— through the city, the picture plane, and art history—remains a necessity, even if the spaces of postmodernity may differ from those of modernity, even if revisionist art history, which takes social context and gender into account, is changing the discipline. In significant ways Ida Applebroog should be considered a true successor to Baudelaire's urban wanderer. And yet her work is often not referenced either to such a heritage or to the works of younger contemporaries who are credited with that heritage, such as David Salle, Eric Fischi, Robert Loneo. Indeed, her work is rarely discussed in relation to 68 WET av/ate of inhei development^ «sts she^as 8U 1 contrast Applebroog pencY^ v,atof °tbcr ht comPate *° m0tdantandha\\ucmatot7dmorrlf),s hough one ^ the ^ ^ o^esque fee*1 ^ from the H« Y ^ dommam m in the mid-** ......----------- — atutuues with \5C '""^ performance or feminist artists (particularly active in th ^ ties, when Applebroog lived in Southern California). Ytt^U faced humor of William Wegman's early videos finds a kind in the maddeningly understated punchlines of the small b *pirit nificantly titled "performances" —that Applebroog mailed ° '^'^ pecting correspondents in the seventies, and Eleanor Ami ' rate masquerades of feminine performative genius are offered* kind of stage in Applebroog's presentations of women. Instead, Applebroog's subject matter is generally described in d tail and her emotional message editorialized; the indecipherabili of a complete narrative is noted but poststructuralist analysis does^ ° follow, even though such discourse is the lingua franca of postmod ernist art writing. The central action in Ida Applebroog's recent paintings takes pi in a hostile, ruined, falsely or perilously idyllic outdoor space woman and child embrace in a pumpkin field in Tomorrowland (1986); a woman strapped into a strange pair of stiltlike shoes appears the apple orchard of Emetic Fields (1989). Yet to describe these spaces as primary in any thematic or dramatic sense would be misleading. Each painting is a large, complex orchestration of big and small canvases, architecturally disposed with a musical sense of counterpoint. In each work, human figures appear in a variety of scales: often a giant looms alongside the central scape occupied by a "life-size inhabitant, and narrow bands of single, enigmatic images that frame the larger canvases telegraph intimations of domesticity. In Maputo (1991), and other recent works, the installation space becomes a thrce^ dimensional pictorial field, in which paintings of varying size scale are freestanding, and the viewer becomes but another gu Applebroog's complex and ever expanding ground. ^ Formal decisions are not formulaic, despite these recurr ^ ^ elements. Small and large, interior and exterior, oppresse ace a in MEDUSA REDUX 69 ^ssor arc not disposed in the same configuration twice. In a discon certing manner, edges do not meet, walls show through segments narrative strips do not coincide with the larger canvases or images they abut. The peculiar flow of narratives through these different spaces and scales, and the locking and unlocking of time and space in these disjointed scripts and scapes, serve to disembody the very evident physicality of these architectural paint-things. In Applebroog's work, as in television, "the global village" tunes in to an unhierarchic toxic waste dump of places, images, and events. Earthquakes and ball games, assassinations, space walks, the "Love Canal" and The Love Boat, Donahue in a dress, the inside of a human ovary, senal murder, plastic surgery —you are there, you are they, they are here. Applebroog's basic compositional techniques for the dispositions of these spaces of postmodernity are related to the visual strategies of such artists as David Salle and Eric Fischl. However, for all their multiples canvases, images, and figures, Salle's and Fischl s works retain the conventional position of gazing into a chamber (whose occupant is most likely to be a woman). In Applebroog's work, on the other hand, the traditional spaces of femininity—living room, bedroom, kitchen—become the viewfinder of a vast camera obscura. She is a global flaneuse whose paintings play host to an outer world, inhabited by men, women, children, and animals who spill into 'woman's world" at great speed and in tumultuous moral equivalence. It is the tumult of these spaces that animates the architectural elements of her paintings, transmuting archaic post-and-lintel construction into filmic space and montage. Yet Applebroog's call to the visual-narrative techniques of both old high art and recent low art builds on film's capacity to intercut unrelated images and actions. The narrow bands that horizontally or vertically frame most of the larger paintings have often been referred to as "predellalike," linking these works to medieval and early-Renaissance altarpieces. In these, the predellas were the narrative scenes painted on small panels, usually at the bottom or side of the central, larger image. While the main scenes might contain a static and symbolic portrayal of the principal iconography and be painted in a refined, "advanced," highly finished style, in the High Church Latin of visual language, the predellas were Painted in the vernacular. They often appear more "primitive, ^ as they ^11 a story in vivid movement and detail. But in Applebroog s work, 7° wet •d to simple repeating images tYat W . tI»tive is {tames from a silent movie vmYv ftw „ofi * ^e bleeds Ve , of a cWs Vme, an4 0{ 3>*.T-5*» ^S^^ Vtedeha ot ^ «riP* 15 ,me''^ant , old techmcpe and a vet, W, a rt Difference, such Bre h lan strategies of montage are particularly useful to an artist enga ed in cultural critique. Briefly stated, in order for art to get beyond or be hind conventions of representation, in order to expose the ideology these conventions serve, artworks should employ "dis-identificatory practices" that disrupt " 'the dance of ideology,' "4 and "distanciation" that would "liberate the viewer from the state of being captured by illusions of art which encourages passive identification with fictional worlds."5 This "critique of realism," as Pollock notes, depends on "the use of montage, disruption of narrative, refusal of identifications with heroes and heroines, the intermingling of modes from high and popular culture, the use of different registers such as the comic, tragic as well as a confection of songs, images, sounds, film and so forth. Complex seeing and complex multilayered texts [are] the project. Clearly Applebroog deploys these prescribed strategies as she aws from "high and popular culture" and combines "comic" and tffgMj registers: the presumed hero of her Tomorrowland has a P0*^ noble body but a clown face. A large bodybuilder, this time flexing her biceps in Applebroog's Rainbow Caverns, fa8^. sllS-posed with a small image of a girl, a single strand of spafc c pended between her fork and mouth, bonding a ^c^l0n^ tradition of heroic sculptural rendering to cartoonlike tig action. MEDUSA REDUX 71 "Dis-identificatory practices," of course, have constituted significant, even dominant strategies in the art of the past decade, particularly in works that offer important critiques of the position of women in representation. Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document (i976-go), in which every form of documentation except figural representation is used to expose the writing-out of the mother as the child enters into language, is a frequently cited example of the usefulness of these techniques to dismantle the repressive aspects of representation. But in the 1980s these strategies became standardized; image appropriation and juxtaposition are by now routine visual devices whose very ubiquity seems to have itself become a repressive discourse. At its best, appropriation can be construed as one more space of post-modernity, a fifth dimension of imagery and art-historical recycling, a flaneur's knowing stroll through an open library of representations whose reconfiguration will expose and critique ideology. Nevertheless, the actual practice of appropriation and juxtaposition can result in work that remains so close to its visual sources and the ideology they represent that it cannot be distinguished from them, or it can result in work that is simply mundane or flat-footed in its literal one-plus-one approach. If Applebroog shares certain references with her contemporaries— tv, pornography, pre- and post-1945 art—she distinguishes herself by her transformations of much of what she appropriates, and uses appropriation as a catalyst for her own meanings. Willem de Kooning's Woman I (1950-52), becomes an afterimage in Applebroog's Two Women III (1985), a blurred echo hovering over the shoulder of a fat, girdled woman screaming past de Kooning's vagina dentata, in counterpoint to a repeated predella image of male beauty queens whose rather foolish lumpiness suggests the Other's Other. Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children (1820-23) becomes, in Applebroog's Camp Compazine (1988), an elderly retiree eating a screaming homunculus during his afternoon snooze. From the high drama of mythology, evil is reinstated within the banality of daily life in a senior-citizen community. If one imagines a Mike Bidlo-esque use of the Goya image, would it have the disquieting effect of making you suspect that your grandfather in Miami might eat you up like bridge mix? As in the work of Leon Golub, the materiality of paint intensifies the disruptive potential of appropriation. Both engage us in an uneasy relationship with figures we might prefer not even to lool at. Painterly surfaces serve as a moral agent f. broog s palette-knifed, thick, but translUce °* attl Golub's painfully scraped surfaces. Both ' paint Golub's paintuny scraped surfaces. Both offer ' \\ as the body of Grunewalds Christ. And just . ^ Canv**s J**« . , ^ i l > . just as Wf> j , a?>w ''h tify with Golubs torturers —or their victims nt^an Hci with Applebroog's "heroes and heroines/"^* ls WJ" U)k\tn grotesque masks — or are they masks? Those °f hcr fij' ^ify even harder to identify with. Think of the nice ***** an armchair with a rifle across her lao in rv, C ^^otheri^1'V » i • • - " n chronic f-i n rlV lari figure s moral position is up for grabs-an inter V >n whose overall sense of moral outrage is una CreStin8 devlCe :Very 2fe/6*4»i«* (i989), a video by Applebroog anThe^- " ^ in both its content and its very title offers a rich crT ghter *H B broogs subversive practices. Its sound track pTml^T^^t Feldman gallery during Applebroog's 1989 New York etw' *°°»ld not a bad person, I'm not a bad person," one could he n; % angelic voice repeating now and then, from the black-cu^ ^ b°y's where the video was periodically screened, as one mov^df ^ ^ ing to painting, many of which featured children moving in a^^" centrality and in and out of moral high ground. The pink fac cT^ peeking out of an old man's brown coat in Idiopathic Center^m^ example, may retain a certain innocence relative to the other child ^ and adolescents depicted in the painting—some nearly vanishing be hind bars, others weeping—but this baby face is also the living heart of a man turned to stone, or it might be a boil, an eruption from the old man's earlier promise. This might even be Oedipus, but when he was an unknowing infant in the arms of a loving foster parent. In Lithium Square (1988) another sleeping baby, cradled in the lap of a figure whose identity and gender are hidden by a veil, becomes sinister: fat and stone colored, he emits smug indifference to the suffering of his guardian Pieta, who is as successfully erased from representation as the mother in Kelly's Post-Partum Document. In Crimson Gartens (1986) vignettes of children in scary masks and blindfolds confront a chorus line of women in a concentration camp. One ot te dren is a ringer: he or she also has a shaved head and clothes. Is this child a Holocaust victim, an adult woman1 ^ ^ by her bared skull, or a child's truly creepy Halloween J ^ Sluggo or little Elie Wiesel? Many of the children in fesSjuwtY pleased the ^ngun v hkt v.njiurAUVfi uuturr instruments \n tl uctic**0* »c«ujm"»v — m rwiwh it is said that "il Uut soutlrir pour beiie" A tx>v m 40 inw ťolUr *ínm UHMhilv. Ihts ttmgc trom ccfiív pwfiguted an Actual news story from 199) about a U trie girl jQb0m4 by a family rriend and chained by her neck in a Long Island Juxtgeo*1- The chUd was said to perfectly fit the victim profile for such -gfcpMKc crimes: prepubescent, abused, and adrift, with unknow-^rccmphcity> sJhe gravitated toward any phantasmic image of love Ai the end of Ašaáana*. the credits reveal that all of the script we have heard delivered in brief, intercut monologues by a cast of several men and women and one little boy are statements taken from testimonies ofJoBCjlk Mengeie's \ictims, Joel Steinbergs trial, and Freud's 1919 essay "A Child Is Being BeatenThe line spoken by the angelic child "I'm not a bad person,'* could well have been the self-pitying justification of Joel Steinberg, a child killer. The moral purity of the child speaker is damaged by this possible ventriloquism. All preconceptions and sentimentality we may attach to the idea of childhood are dissolved. On the other hand, by juxtaposing quotes from stories of actual physical abuse with erotic fantasies of abuse theorized by Freud, Applebroog and Beth B. effectively resist Freud's denial of the father's -nilt. Despite Applebroog's adherence to narrative techniques (story-board, figuration, captions;, Belladonna indicates her divergence from the traditional Oedipal narrative: something bad really has been done by the father. Like Laura Mulvey, who, in her essay "The Oedipus n: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx," questions what "has been stematically ignored in both classical tragedy and later tradition,"7 Applebroog explores the obvious mystery, namely, why were Oedipus and his family cursed? Mulvey reveals the prehistory of the myth: the rape, by Oedipus s father, Laius, of his host's young son, Chrysippos. According to this pre-history of the myth, Laius's aggressive and violent homosexual act is the latent cause of the curse and of Oedipus's later suffering. Chrysippos's experience with Lams can act as a displacement on to another young boy from a prim . c .u , ~lar,rm«- the reoression of this asp anxiety m son-to-iather relations, 1 t „ known that Freud i g the period of m in ■ • A child speaks the word* of a child sies of child abuse recorded by Freud: these Applebroog s rebellion against the repressive Oedipal narrative that dominates Western prctation. This reading of Belladonna is our understanding of the child-eating old man m stone Snuggli-carrier of Idiopathic Center, and the of Marginalia. Disidentificatory practice and refuncrinning if mm^ac m±i„ at its greatest play in Applebroog s depiction of women, bsk project any kind of narcissism onto her figures. "11» ode is ironically apt because there are no traditionally, ovexuV faoHritt women in her work, whereas within dominant represeaaocn, oii and ugly women are conventionally relegated to the margin of *ot turally overdetermined scopophilia."9 They housework through a doorway in the background of a {Mnong faf Vermeer, or attending the beautiful young ladv in too man? partings of nudes to be specific. As such they are as the rhr on Ac pewa fruit of a vanitas, allegorical emblems for the ine\itabilir?otaec*«i death embedded in Woman by patriarchy. When the agea«»il ugly do appear as central subjects, it is in genre painting, t **** class citizen within art history. By placing ugly and plain 0» ^ fand men and children), with whom no one wishes to iocntil\> center of her project, Applebroog in effect genetieailT yvj^a painting, in a sense "elevates" it to the level of history paintwr painting exists in a continuum with such large-sctfc ing as Gericault's The Raft of the "Medusa" ^1818-19), Dc^^\&i of Sardanapalus (1827), and Courbet's The Artist's St*d» (* W -ontcmporary media culture trivializes history, so Applebroog brings S trivial details of a collapsing order to the scale and tragic dimension of* history painting. But if the "Grand Tradition" of painting is understood as fundamentally masculinist," then Applebroog s place within it is an anomaly and represents a hostile takeover. Perhaps part of what makes this possible is the fact that the artist herself is beyond the "age" of representation. As Kelly notes, "Being a woman is but a brief moment in ones lifer12 In dominant representation, a female human is only a woman between menses and menopause, and thus only woman's youth is pictured. When the woman artist has aged out of the picture, she can return to alter it without compunction. It is significant in this regard that the mainstream avant-garde continues to focus on representations of youth by young women artists, if anything privileging a regression to "teenage girl art" in terms of its sources, content, and style. Works by Karen Kilimnik, Pam Buder, Elizabeth payton, and Jenny Watson fall into this category. Belladonna also allows us to travel through ideas about female representation toward the possibility of a repositioned gaze. At a time when writing about femininity is focused on a specular economy in which woman is an object of vision, in which male subjectivity depends on Woman's disappearance into representation, Belladonna is a significant title on another level. Belladonna (also known as deadly nightshade), a poisonous hallucinogen found in certain plants, induces widely dilated pupils and can cause psychosis in greater dosages. It was used by women in the nineteenth century to make their eyes appear fashionably large and limpid. Applebroog uses belladonna, the poisonous prison of female beauty, to dilate her pupils and sharpen her vision of patriarchy, transforming Woman from a site of representation and a sight into a seer. It is said that children and animals have often become the victims of belladonna, accidentally poisoned by eating its fruit.13 Patriarchy aptly is the worm in the apples that have fallen off a tree at the center of Emetic Fields: a woman walks on stilts to avoid touching these tainted fruit, while on the tree, apples are inhabited by images of elderly men, blindfolded men, and a guy with "Mother" embroidered on the back of his jacket. This Eve bows her head—or is it that she's watching her step? :>plebroog's belladonnas are "Medusa and the Sphinx," who, "like the other ancient monsters, have survived i in someone elses story, not their own."'* j« ril>r % scient child, and the ancient monster. A bald^ ^^/thT'*n her portrait in an evening gown and an arm cast ^ nearby, eats a watermelon in AW Fields (1987). , ^ (W men to stone, to that which is not action, that ^ W*'* »ur tation, to art. Pygmalion's transformations are a^ ^ * X^r^ a crime. Applebroog's figures, significantly, are ohtT^ stone color. Applebroog becomes both Medusa and p »n z her belladonna-widened gaze that turns action into re :r * The monstrous aspect of these major figures in Ap leb^^' recalls the theory of female creativity proposed by Sandra M^*0^ and Susan Gubar in their 1979 Madwoman in the AtticAb xo " Gilbert and Gubar argue, have internalized patriarchy's myth * the destructive, monstrous nature of female creativity and power * are fearful about using a language that incorporates these defanu^ images. This double anxiety erupts in their art through monstrous, mad, violent alter egos; Rochester's mad wife in the attic of Thorn-field in Jane Eyre is the eponymous example. The conflict implicit in the negotiation of these monstrous alter egos is manifest in works by a range of women artists. Diane Arbus's photographs, while they often show a voyeuristic identification with their "freaky" subjects, also suggest a tacit acceptance of mainstream categorizations of what constitutes normalcy and monstrosity. Cindy Sherman's baroque self-representation as a dead pig is another example of this pattern, as are her male and female figures from art history endowed with a fairy-tale profusion of false noses and disfiguring moles. Applcbroog like Sherman, moves away from a limited, binarist acceptance monster/woman artist identification by placing monstrousne* many heads. c Finally, if these paintings use Mutative uvhmquc.j ^ altarpieces, one may wonder to whom these PafTU u ' [_ ^ dedicated. Certainly not to female figures w to patriarchal religion (the Yin ary)- 1 hex 11' inc Arcs, N"< , translucent traveled on. z _=er. ic-'-ni ndb the key doonx, bat Doom. They Deflect tfac vision of Galatea, perhaps, bat _tu liti Iji ill ii nf flfiiy 5hrllrj^f "omniu i ' in nf riwiiln In Emttic Fields Queen Elizabeth, like all die large-scale figures in Applebroog's paintings, is painted with a gebom brown or gray matter, oil point mended with gd ai At rimes it looks like gleaming dodge. No wonder ť such a still upper lip. Visceral, gleaming paint is a to Applebroog's apparent exclusion from the canon- i the current feminist avant-garde as is her creation—rather rh presentation—of female representation, for paint is not the sp choice for postmodern women artists. Applebroog s trast in ň tenaiity of paint to convey a political message, to effect a fe intervention, brings her up against the profound distrust of I tion and narrative arrived at through the manipulation of slithe tied matter on a ground, a distrust held by a school of cr in another context I have dubbed "aesthetic terrorism."17 Mod and postmodermsm have added one last element to the atavistic association of woman /blood/guts /mud/slime/putrefaction/ death—that element is paint, a viscous flowing matter capable of d W E T curbing multiformity.18 The "distanciation" most ^ bv this school of criticism is that from the body paint is particularly grounded in the body. The L~ AW she exhibited in New York in 1987 was painted in^L** *°r0L of bodily fluids and excretions: blood red, shit broJT *M **tuT "ties fefc In her 1989 New York exhibition, Nostrums, all th psychiatric care or physical/psychosomatic management" I broog s color range expanded to include sappy pi^ '*nd APplc! peach, colors meant to subdue crazy people, which in this1*1^ ^ at least temporarily, the viewers. case mea^ Applebroog's use of paint is at once spartan and bar committal and passionate. In one sense her applicationtf**' n0n" instrumental: nothing is ever more than it needs to be. The U sections are quite flat, minimal in color and surface. The used functionally, applied as necessary to cover a particular^* * create a form (note how the palette knife fashions an orange-cW^ figure in Lithium Square, for example, or how the transparency 0f th gel medium conveniently renders the black nylons in Elixir Tabernack [1989]). There are no special effects here, but there is effective authority, indeed old-fashioned mastery: the old man eating a child is sculpturally rendered as the Belvedere Torso that inspired Michel-ngelo, but constructed with economy rather than showy virtuosity. Applebroog's gift to painters and to other viewers is precisely in what she achieves beyond the merely instrumental: "unnecessary" moments >f visual pleasure within grim pictures. As an example, Camp Compazine is a condemnatory expose of America—with its slumbering child-eater to one side, somber businessmen on the other, and born-again Christians on top - a country and a painting overrun by turkeys whose feathers are built up in waxy, bas-relief slabs of paint. And yet the transition from translucent red to translucent pink in the empty ce: in : a 1 iti I * mter effects a fluid, almost gentle passage from dark to darker pa ^ 1 color, tone, and subject. Such incidences of visual pleasure^ aintings time to be read over a long period. The layering ^ ^ ^ nd of paintings within paintings, moves the viewer t roug^ ^ manner more akin to film than many artworks that tar . ^ ^ iy and self-consciously remind us that they have app' P tax and formal elements of cinematic language. .1 to describe in a M I I M I S A R I'. I) II x 79 Ida Applebroog, Marginalia (baby), 1991, detail from Marginalia #2, oil on canvas, 38 x 34 x 3 ins. (Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York) planatory sentence. Of the painting Chronic Hollow, is it sufficient to say it is a painting of a girl in a dog mask? A girl interrupting a purple landscape with a bench and people tumbling? And what of the pre-della scenes? But as we stand in front of it, a complex interplay of a thinly applied, pale pinkish brown (dare we call it puce?), slabs of gray gel, nervously applied white, and a "natural" canvas color make up the central scene in which the dog-masked "heroine" interrupts the flow of figures tumbling through a space of uncertain scale. The tumblers' mobile white-brush-marked outlines strike a delicate balance between virtuosity and functionality, replicating and augmenting their movements through the canvas segments, causing them to move past our gaze like a film run sprocket hole by sprocket hole. At the top of the painting, the starker contrasts of dark crimson, blood red, and white, thinly layered, construct a montage of Applebroogs gun-toting grandma in an armchair, a couple supporting a woman °se head has vaporized into a delicate white haze. 8o wl!í Perhar Applebroog's infusion of trust in paint] ,lttrmly displayed in Marginalia (baby) (i0QI^g gtUery: In vulnerability and that ofpaint^ ^ °« the fl(^°St *10. K amazement that she is "the first painter :fS^^m, in recent - ™ e*. plunge deep into the taboo-ridden areas of the psyche''"VT^ to -from within painting? ™ thereby disregarding Applebroog's 0 * (.onfributions to the renewal of painting as a locus of\ C°nsidtr-course. Applebroog's formal influence on Williams should^T* ^ although Williams remains, perhaps deliberately, mucri mo/ live m her pictorial means. Williams and other artists who rom abjeel may unfortunately be popular because female victimization** graphically expressed through references to pornography, is mak' ^ ented, although it may express some women's personal experiences Applcbroog understands the deeper meaning of the 1970s' feminist motto, "The personal is the political": the goal was to release indi vidua! women from the bondage of isolation, from self-destructive delusions of unique abnormality, to provide a sense of commonality to illuminate the existence of a determinative patriarchal system of difference, and to focus anger away from the self toward the culture in order to achieve voice and agency. Applebroog's work has the scope to encompass personal suffering, identification with many sufferings, including those of monkeys and men, and the levels of ambiguity between victim and victimizes She has, and offers to the viewer, both no emotional distance and totally ironic authorial distance. She may have infiltrated the "Grand Tradition" of nineteenth-century painting, literally deconstructing its surface, but her work offers a reconfiguration as broad, ambitious, and inclusive as any nineteenth-century narrative oeuvre. Applebroog's functional, emotionally expressive, and fearless use of paint to reposition ancient female "monsters" at the center of political narrative suggests another space of postmodernity, beyond what is becoming the limited, hackneyed space of poststructutalist theory. It is a space in which narrative has power, but it is a narrative of difference, a different narrative than that of the death of painting or of the ideological prison of late-capitalist commodity culture. The difficulty in properly contextualizing Applebroog may be her persistent slippage between theoretical positions *A aeocx tt visuai strategies: she uu* Brcchtian practice t. ern femvu* writer,, but .he doe, ^ ^ for by p,^^ ^ popular narrative trchn.au«, but her JT^ °" ^ Wr stones. Twentieth-century viewer, ^/rc^T d°not^« f*nfl_ eJ* Oedipal narrative as it is traditionally exp^"!to resists these readings, refocuses the "destr^^'J* ^^broog wonder convention*! readings can onlyoo^* ^ No nonal reaction and political commonpL^W*^ ^ <* «"o-rative of the Sphinx or The Raft7^M^ . 001 "cognize the son's shark. 7 * * *«*«*• as paontedbyW^