Re: OT: White Goddess

On Sun, 8 Apr 2001, 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. 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.
> Graves has taken a lot of flak because of the
> historical "inconsistencies", but the ideas do hold up
> in a mythical sense, regardless of the historical or
> logical inaccuracies that most of academia sees.
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.
<sigh>  As mythopoetic fact it reads much better.

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?  Or did Amaterasu undergo a sex-change while I wasn't looking?

> > OTOH maybe I've been a math major too long,
> > and the *poetry* of the work is quite beautiful and
> > fascinating.  But what passes for logic in the book
> > is just eluding me (especially the word-connections,
> > reconstructions, etc.).  Anyone? Anyone meep?
>
>     As someone who has studied Graves' works for a
> couple of years, I have to say that you shouldn't feel
> bad about it. Very few people "get" him, understand
> his ideas in the sense he intended them. You're in the
> majority.
It's at times like this that I regret that I haven't taken any literature
courses since coming to college after being scared off literature classes
by my high school.  (At one point I *liked* English...)

YHL

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