Brian Aldiss unpicks the Jocasta complex

What if the gods of Greek myth had parallels with Freud’s notion of the unconscious? This is just one idea explored in Brian Aldiss’s sassy retelling of the stories of two prominent women of Thebes. In two novellas, Jocasta, Wife and Mother and Antigone, Aldiss puts both women and their emotional lives centre-stage, as they grapple with events familiar to us from mythology and the plays of Sophocles.

Jocasta in particular is presented to us as on the cusp of two worlds, embedded in a lusty and violent culture governed by animal instincts, yet deeply thoughtful and curious about her own feelings. Her bawdy grandmother Semele hobnobs with the spirit world, her son Polynices talks dirty with his sister Antigone as they frolic in the sea and her husband/son Oedipus crushes dissent, kills the Sphinx and generally digs himself into ever deeper holes. Yet, plagued by guilt, Jocasta begins to question the prevailing wisdom of her time — that we are merely playthings of the gods.