ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history of the relationship between Oedipus myth and literature, which is probably unique. The characters of the Oedipus story either become simple walk-on parts, as in the work of Corneille, Voltaire, Cocteau and perhaps even Seneca, or Oedipus ceases, as Hegel says, to be a sculpture and becomes a character. What people can glimpse in all this is the difficulty of writers in distinguishing themselves from Sophocles or, to put it another way, the difficulty of writing about Oedipus without repeating Sophocles. Through psychoanalysis, Oedipus has become a useful and common reference point for the most diverse thinking. Indeed, it would seem that the quality of Sophocle's tragedy weighed too heavily for anyone to free themselves from it sufficiently to be innovative. Thus they has Hegel, Holderlin, Nietzsche, all three of whom use Sophocle's work to define tragedy and whose thinking can be said to start from literature to return to it in the end.
