Artists are directly responsible for fashioning their own tropes through the processes of extension, elaboration, composition and/or questioning. They must wrestle with their precursors, who inspired them to be creators in the first place, to do this. Such dialectical struggle, called an 'agon,' is more than simply oedipal. The African spirit Eshu, the trickster patron saint of crossroads, and Jacob, who struggled with God in the Bible, make better metaphoric models than Oedipus.