Travessias (Sep 2019)
Crossroads and gears: Oedipus’s destiny in The infernal machine, by Jean Cocteau
Abstract
In the play The infernal machine, by Jean Cocteau, a retelling of the Oedipus myth, we can see the occurrence of symbolic crossroads, here understood as places in which destinies converge and could be altered. But,in the divine machine of annihilation built by the gods, humans are nothing but gears and can not do anything to modify what was already previously determined for their existence. The purpose of this article is to analyze how Oedipus’s destiny is consolidated in three symbolic crossroads, so the methods employed by the gods to accomplish the tragedy are exposed. Our sources consist of authors such as Aristotle (1966), Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant (2017), Gerd Borheim (1992), Gilbert Durand (1995; 2002), Mircea Eliade (2002), Albin Lesky (1971) and Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (2005).
