Re: OT: White Goddess

At 7:51 pm -0700 8/4/01, Aidan Grey wrote:
>--- Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> wrote:
>> I'm reading Robert Graves' _The White Goddess_ right
>> now and I have to ask, before I go crazy, as far as
>> historical/anthropological/linguistic "fact" is he
>on
>> crack, or am I a dull uneducated unpoetic soul
>>(always possible :-p), or are there big gaping holes
>> of logic?
>
>   As dar as mathematical, philosophical, historical
>truth, yes, there are big gaping holes.
True - but the big gaping holes I noticed first when I read the White
Goddess the first time some 40 years ago (I still have a copy of the book)
were linguistic.  Alas, practically all his linguistic 'evidence' is pretty
worthless; and when I started looking at the other stuff - mathematical,
philosophical, historical - I did indeed find the similar gaping holes.

>Graves
>explains in the introduction that the work should be
>taken as mythopoetic fact, that is, fact in the same
>way that myths, legends, poetry, or art are truth.
i.e. a mishmash of fact, fiction & imagination - not what I understand by
either "fact" or "truth".

>Graves has taken a lot of flak because of the
>historical "inconsistencies", but the ideas do hold up
>in a mythical sense,
Oh yes?  Many do not subscribe to that thesis, either.  I was brought up on
the classics and have a fair knowledge of the mythologies of Greece and
Rome, at least - and I haven't noticed many of Graves' idiosyncratic ideas
actually holding up.  Yes, I do have both volumes of his "The Greek Myths"
with all his 'explanatory' notes; while I commend his relation of the myths
- his English style is good and he his sources are comprehensive and fully
acknowledged - I cannot do the same for his explanations which owe far more
to a vivid imagination (or "analeptic thought" as Graves calls it).

>regardless of the historical or
>logical inaccuracies that most of academia sees.
Alas, one doesn't have to be in academia to notice some of the more glaring
inconsistencies and, indeed, downright errors.

As Lars Henrik Mathiesen, so rightly IMHO, wrote:
.....
>Graves should always be read as historical fiction. Suggestive
>fiction, sometimes, but his are not scholarly works.
Amen.

Ray.




=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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