Re: OT: White Goddess

At 10:09 pm -0700 9/4/01, Aidan Grey wrote:
[snip]
>
>   Let me explain again that his works aren't valuable
>because of fact in the traditional sense of the word.
The 'traditional' sense, I guess, is "a deed, that which has been done"
(Latin: factum); this meaning is now somewhat archaic.

Or maybe by traditional you intend the current English meaning which my
dictionary defines as:
"truth; reality, or a real state of things, as distinuished from a mere
statement of belief"

But you seem to imply that "fact" can also have a 'non-traditional' sense.

>They are poetic and mythic. Yes, most of his
>linguistic connections have no bearing whatsoever on
>reality as we know it, but the connections he finds
>and the end results of his "fiction" do - they're
>valuable in the same sense that folk etymologies are.
I see - the same way as, e.g. the folk etymology of _outrage_ (<-- Old
French _outrage_/ _ultrage_ <-- late Latin *ultraticum) of _out_ + _rage_
has not only made the older pronunciation /'awtrIdz/ virtually obsolete but
has also influenced its meaning in contemporary English.

IMO while language can absorb a few folk etymologies like this, if this
pattern were repeated on a wide scale it would surely lead to a breakdown
in readily comprehensible communication - we would all become our own
Humpty Dumpties giving our own meanings to words according to the
connexions we make in our own 'analeptic selves'.

>They're not valid linguistic connections either, in
>any academic ( i.e. scholarly, factual, concrete)
>sense of the word, but they are valuable as poetic
>understandings of the world around us. Graves'
>brilliance is not in the details of his connections
>(details such as these are rarely important in myth),
>but in the connections themselves and the ideas they
>inform.
I'm afraid the linguistic connexions Graves gives remind me of those given
by a guy (whose name I forget, tho I'm sure some on this list will remind
me) who maintains a web-site whose sole purpose is to show  how all the
languages of mankind are ultimately descended from Basque.  To most of us
his connexions are "not valid linguistic connections either, in any
academic ( i.e. scholarly, factual, concrete) sense of the word", but the
guy certainly has a lively and vivid imagination and I am quite certain
that some people say of him: "[his] brilliance is not in the details of his
connections ..., but in the connections themselves and the ideas they
inform."

>   Raven didn't really get burned, Icarus didn't
>really wear wings fashioned from wax, Bre'r Rabbit
>didn't really get stuck in Tar Baby. These are
>fictions - myths.
Doh, and there I've been all these years a-thinking Brer Rabbit really did
get stuck in the Tar Baby!

[snip]

>      We know that the triple-goddess idea is
>NOT ancient, but the ideas that this concept envelops
>are valuable, and mythic. And the idea offers a new
>way to understand how the idea applies to life, how it
>informs life.
If you both know that the triple-goddess is a concept of the early 20th
century and also find the concept helpful in your understanding of life,
that's one thing; but Graves' book is most surely an attempt to show that
the concept is ancient.  He does this by culling a lot of unrelated facts,
half-truths and, as Yoon Ha Lee showed in regard to the Japanese myth,
distortions even of "mythic fact".

>> i.e. a mishmash of fact, fiction & imagination - not
>> what I understand by
>> either "fact" or "truth".
>
>   Think of truth and fact like circles and squares -
>a square is a circle, with sufficient numbers of sides
A square is not a circle; it has exactly four sides (all equal in length).
The ancients spent many a fruitless hour trying to construct squares and
circles of exactly the same area.  It can't be done - there's that pesky
'irrational number' called pi.

[snip]
>his works have played. It wouldn't get anywhere. There
>is a pattern to his thoughts - and they can only be
>understood by thinking of his works as a new
>mythology. Once you can do that, divorcing his words
>from anything you accept as true, there is an
>underlying "truth" expressed.
One could say precisely the same thing about Tolkien.  The difference is
that JRRT didn't write a book purporting to prove that his mythology was
ancient and citing 'facts' of history, language and the myths & legends of
different cultures as evidence.  JRRT presented his works as fiction.

[snip]
>
>  Let me say it one more time:  It is it's OWN MYTH,
>unrelated to any of those sources he used in
>fashioning it.
That, in my opinion, is patently untrue.  It may well be its own myth, just
as JRRT's Middle Earth is his own myth - but Graves DOES relate his myth to
the sources he uses.

In his Foreward to "The White Goddess", Graves explicitly expresses his
thanks to various people, in his own words, "have supplied me with
source-material for this book."  A litle further on he says: "Yet since the
first edition appeared in 1946, no expert in ancient Irish or Welsh has
offered me the least help in refining my argument, or pointed out any of
the errors which are bound to have crept into the text, or even
acknowledged my letters."

These seem strange statements if, in fact, "The White Goddess" is its own
myth and is not related to the sources used in fashioning that myth.  It
can only mean, as I see it, that Graves was deluded in thinking these
sources important at all.

[snip]
>
>> 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.
>
>   In a strict sense, or even the sense of
>scholarly/academic I explained above, absolutely. I
>agree. But as a work of religious inspiration (like
>the Bible or the Quran or the Upanishads or the Avesta
>or the Sutras or...
....yes, let's add the Book of Mormon, Science & Health with Key to the
Scriptures, the Tripitaka, the Tao Te Ching.  This could fuel a real
flame-war (but not on this list, I hope).

Personally, I fail to see how, e.g. the Bible, which is _not_ one book, but
a whole collection of books of quite different genres written over several
hundreds of years in three different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic & Greek)
with what most (except Fundamentalists) will readily admit are many
internal inconsistencies is comparable to the single work of one 20th
author who claimed to be writing "a historical grammar of the language of
poetic myth."

You yourself said that the triple-goddess is a 20th century concept.  But
in the introduction to "The White Goddess", Graves states: "My thesis is
that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and
Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious
ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from
the Old Stone Age, and this remains the language of true poetry - 'true' in
the nostalgic modern sense of 'the unimprovable original, not a synthetic
substitute'."

It seems to me that Graves is (a) not purporting to write a work of
religious inspiration, and (b) that he is claiming to write a historical
(i.e. factual) grammar of a poetic tradition dating back as early as the
Old Stone Age of northern Europe and the Mediterranean.

), it _IS_ scholarly.
>   Of course, being pagan certainly helps in
>understanding it.
I don't see the relevance.  One may as well claim that being a Roman
Catholic helps in understanding Tolkien.

Indeed, some would claim that being a Christian, e.g. blinds one to the
'deficiencies' of The Bible, that being a Mormon makes one blind to the
'errors' in the Book of Mormon, that being a Muslim renders one blind to
the 'inconsistencies' of the Quran, etc, etc, etc.

I merely state this as a fact that some people hold such views.  I don't
think it appropriate on this list to start a thread about whether such
views are rightly held or not.

>
>  Aidan, defending a work that gets a lot of flak for
>being misunderstood (and even Graves' misunderstood
>it, I think).
Ah - so even Graves himself misunderstood what he was doing!!  That opens
up a whole can of worms.

I guess you mean he didn't realize that "The White Goddess" was/is a 'work
of religious inspiration', i.e. that he was writing under religious
inspiration and proclaiming the 'truth' of a myth despite the short-comings
of his own fallible sources; that, in fact, Graves was seriously mistaken
when he wrote in Chapter 27 (the 1960 Postscript):
"I am no mystic: I avoid participation in witchcraft, spiritualism, yoga,
fortune-telling, automatic writing, and the like.  I live a simple, normal,
rustic life with my family and a wide circle of sane and intelligent
friends.  I belong to no religious cult, no secret society, no
philosophical sect; nor do I trust my historical intuition any further than
it can be factually checked."

Actually, of course, I think he was lamentably at fault as regards the
rigor of his factually checking; but I think also that he clearly did not
regard "The White Goddess" as a work of religious inspiration.  On the
latter I agree with him.

Herein lies our difference: you regard the work as one of religious
inspiration; I do not.

As Mark Line was fond of saying: our ontologies are different.

But, finally, I would just like to add that not the least of my gripes
about Graves' book is that it deliberately perpetuates and emphasizes the
division between the 'scientific' and 'artistic' view of the world which
has, ut opinor, bedevilled western thought for far too long.  Such a
dichotomy is, ut modice opinor, unhelpful and, indeed, false.

Ray,
Bachelor of Arts, Master of Letters, Master of Science.





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