Nachtjager: Luftwaffe Night Fighter Units 1943-1945 by David Williams

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The psychoanalytically oriented critics, on the other hand, insist that Laius has always been lurking in the shadows, that the ancient story is the same one as the one they want to tell. In other words, they want us to believe that Laius never was a tragic hero. There is, in those accounts, no reflection on the specifically modern desire that drives their readings, including a very modern heteronormativity that, rather scandalously, far too often fails to distinguish between pedophilia, pederasty, and homosexuality.

This is the story that shapes all comparisons of Laius and Abraham, but it is not the story Aeschylus tells: Indeed I speak of the ancient transgression, now swift in its retribution. It remains even into the third generation, ever since Laius—in defiance of Apollo who, at his Pythian oracle at the earth’s center, said three times that the king would save his city if he died without offspring. Ever since he, overcome by the thoughtlessness of his longing, fathered his own death, the parricide Oedipus, who sowed his mother’s sacred field, where he was nurtured, and endured a bloody crop.

While Freud reads the oedipal plot as a child’s fantasy of patricide, we might be tempted to consider the plot of the subordinate son who displaces his desire in the interest of the patriarchal family as the Laiusian fantasy par excellence. Why else would you choose the six-year-old to embody the Oedipal force? Isn’t that the most reassuring rival a man could have? Unlike the infant, the young child is no longer allied with the mother’s body whose womb and breasts he had usurped (providing her, at least according to Freud himself, with a phallus he in some regards has stolen from the father), and unlike the young adult, he is socially and materially dependent, physically weak, and sexually insignificant.