Re: OT: White Goddess

At 7:40 am -0400 9/4/01, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
>
>Okay.  He writes with such conviction that I was beginning to wonder if I
>were just cluelessly missing the obvious connections that he was seeing.
Not at all - there are no obvious connexions to miss; and that you had
doubts about what Graves was saying - admittedly written with conviction -
is pretty good testimony IMO that you are not clueless.

><sigh>  As mythopoetic fact it reads much better.
I have to disagree about mythopoetic _fact_, since.......

>
>I think I choked badly at the point where he cites a Japanese myth about
>poetry involving the sun-*god* and moon-*goddess.*  I sat there thinking,
>Is this a version of Japanese myth that never makes it into the
>myth-books?
Yes - it is a product of Graves' "analeptic self".

>Or did Amaterasu undergo a sex-change while I wasn't looking?
Not at all - just Graves indulging in a bit of mythopoetic _fiction_. If
the myth don't fit your theory, so much the worse for the myth: the moon
must be emasculated & the sun have the severed organ grafted onto her.

But then Chapter 22, where the 'Japanese myth' is cited, is lamentably full
of errors like this as, alas, are all the other chapters.
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At 1:39 pm -0400 9/4/01, bjm10@CORNELL.EDU wrote:
>On Sun, 8 Apr 2001, Aidan Grey wrote:
>
>>    As dar as mathematical, philosophical, historical
>> truth, yes, there are big gaping holes. Graves
>> explains in the introduction that the work should be
>> taken as mythopoetic fact, that is, fact in the same
>
>It should not be taken as fact at all.
Amen.

>It should be taken as what it
>is--a para-novel.  If it is true to its internal vision, then it meets
>the necessary criteria.  Using the word "fact" implies consonance with
>external referents,
Quite so - and "The White Goddess" is demonstrably not consonant with
external referents.

[snip]
>
>> historical "inconsistencies", but the ideas do hold up
>> in a mythical sense, regardless of the historical or
>
>This is a dodge.  _White Goddess_ is a work in the genre of "mythological
>fiction",
Exactly!
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At 1:40 pm -0400 9/4/01, bjm10@CORNELL.EDU wrote:
>On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>
>> Graves should always be read as historical fiction. Suggestive
>> fiction, sometimes, but his are not scholarly works.
>
>The most fruitful way I've ever used Graves is to try to figure out how
>he invented his fictions from what he was likely to have encountered in
>the source material.
  :-)

>He's a fascinating relic--perhaps the last Victorian author.
IMO Graves owes more to early Romantics of the 18th century, than he does
to anything Victorian.

Ray.



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