tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4096739.post7078124061023017770..comments2023-11-03T06:31:07.882-04:00Comments on Cahiers de Corey: The Truth and Life of MythAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06846875103765617419noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4096739.post-62490222335444092022010-04-30T09:44:23.096-04:002010-04-30T09:44:23.096-04:00If you go to this page at Chicago Review http://hu...If you go to this page at Chicago Review http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/index_53_2_3.shtml<br /><br />and scroll down just a bit to the PDF link where it says this: <br /><br />"The first installment of Kent Johnson's critical novella, Corroded by Symbolysme, an "anti-review" of Andrew Duncan's Savage Survivals. The new issue includes the second installment, on J.H. Prynne's To Pollen"<br /><br />you will find some anti-Prynne proposals by (funny they share the same name!) the Brit poet and critic Andrew Duncan on myth as "escape-vehicle."Kent Johnsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15233688630151467658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4096739.post-80745559653064147502010-04-29T21:59:59.687-04:002010-04-29T21:59:59.687-04:00Hey now. I like progressive rock. I once had all o...Hey now. I <i>like</i> progressive rock. I once had all of Jethro Tull's albums on vinyl, and the first rock show I ever went to was a Yes concert.<br /><br />Seriously, I appreciate Peter's speaking up for myth--but it seems too undialectical to just elevate that as somehow better or more authentic and truthful than logos. (Your mention of <i>aletheia</i> sets off my Heidegger alarm--a discourse I find seductive but can't fully trust.) The wonderful Hesiod lines that you quote here were, I thought, interpreted slightly differently in situ: not that mythos is truth and legein falsehood, but that there's no reliable way to tell the difference. Though I might allow this interpretation: that to translate the language of the muses into logos is to falsify their saying.<br /><br />Isn't that why Olson came up with the term muthologos--to try and create a mindset supple enough to work with both sides of the brain, or the culture? Of course Olson himself is hardly free of the trappings of the esoteric, and he could be a bully besides.<br /><br />Norman, of course you're right to mention Bloch, who I was unwittingly plagiarizing. It's utopia that for me articulates the structural principle of wishfulness that other thinkers go to religion for. A product, no doubt, of a relentlessly secular upbringing (tinged with Jewish skepticism and a superficial layer of Emerson-lite Unitarianism) combined with total immersion in the godless quasi-medieval universe that Tolkien conjured.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06846875103765617419noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4096739.post-81766383864692142782010-04-29T11:10:07.713-04:002010-04-29T11:10:07.713-04:00I'm flattered that Peter took my little remark...I'm flattered that Peter took my little remark and ran with it; he did it much more skillfully than I ever could. In a somewhat different register, Josh, I think you're right on when you write that you "would be willing to endorse the idea that myth, like memory and, most broadly, the imagination itself, can serve as a utopian reservoir." This resembles Ernst Bloch's notion of art's utopian surplus, a concept I worked with years ago in <i>The Utopian Moment</i> and to which I still subscribe. In a conversation with Michael Palmer at the symposium, I related the idea in turn with those of Agamben. So I think there are parallels between what some Marxists and some of the myth critics and anthropologists posit.Norman Finkelsteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03673105579717018812noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4096739.post-49353842498648839992010-04-29T10:10:50.178-04:002010-04-29T10:10:50.178-04:00Glad to have you at part of the Symposium, Josh. I...Glad to have you at part of the Symposium, Josh. I like Norman's formulation of myth as the remainder that survives the equations of capital. I want to elaborate on his point, because it implies a way to get beyond the fallacious binary that opposes myth to enlightenment - or Enlightenment, as you have it in your self-description.<br /><br />Myth's bad rap in the 70s and 80s might be blamed on a backlash against Jungian and Freudian conceptions of the self, or at least how poets in North America responded to a lot of bad, self-indulgent archetypal poetry (kind of the equivalent of b-tier progressive rock).<br /><br />But the negative associations with myth in the Western imagination stretch well back before Plato disparaged mythical thinking in his dialogues. As Bruce Lincoln demonstrates in his book <i>Theorizing Myth</i>, the Hesiodic formula about the muses contains a vital clue to how myth was initially imagined. That formula, which I quoted in the conversation with Mackey and Donahue, runs: "We know how to recount many falsehoods like real things, and / We know how to proclaim truths when we wish." (Theogony, 27-8; Lincoln's translation.) The verb for "recount" here is "legein," a form of the Greek "logos." Put crudely, then, the muses are saying, "When we want to speak falsehoods, we use logos." The verb for "proclaim" is "gerusasthai," but, as Lincoln points out, a great many manuscripts of Hesiod's poem replace the verb with "mythesasthei," which means "to speak, to tell." Again, put crudely, the muses are saying, "When we want to tell the truth, we use mythos."<br /><br />Mythic speech is associated early on with alethea - truth. Deceptive speech is associated early on with logos. Over the course of several centuries, these associations would be inverted. And that inversion survives into the present: ask most people what a myth is, they say, "It's a lie." Much less commonly - depending on level of education - they say, "It's Greek and Roman stories." And among specialized scholars and critics, it can be associated with archetypal stories (in the Jungian sense) or as an ideological discourse (this is how Lincoln tends to read it), for instance.<br /><br />When you refer to Duncan putting the mystification into mysticism, I see you channeling a version of this first understanding of myth; namely, that it represents a lie, or an untruth. That you feel this way, I suspect, has as much to do with received knowledge (especially coming from Olson's famous down-dressing in "Against a Wisdom as Such": even if you haven't read it, that essay has shaped the way Duncan's work is received, especially the image of him as the poet of the "Ecole des Sages ou Mages") as it does with your sense impressions with the work. (Which I can tell from this piece are nuanced and thoughtful.)<br /><br />To my mind, Duncan's work exhibits the most complex understanding of myth of any 20th-century American poet. By way of his oft-quoted formulation, "Myth is the story told of what cannot be told," he places myth in a zone of thought that Lévi-Strauss identified as belonging to the so-called "Savage Mind." As a result of the Platonic prejudice against mythos and the Western privileging of logos, we've operated with the assumption that myth is either primitive religion or primitive science. Enlightenment more intensively discourages us from regarding myth as anything but a warm up to real thought. That Lévi-Strauss didn't demolish that prejudice is a sign of its durability in our imaginations. <br /><br />But, like Norman suggests, we're built for mythos - it will survive long after other things collapse. Logos is the interloper. Or, in Duncan's Gnostic cosmogony: it's the Demiurge.<br /><br />Word verification: somnion! I like it.Peter O'Learyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13623296704563726700noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4096739.post-92193721445748507822010-04-28T15:35:02.956-04:002010-04-28T15:35:02.956-04:00"myth is just as often what escapes from the ..."myth is just as often what escapes from the trammels of capitalism and commodification"<br /><br />That's a little too fast for me, Norman. But I would be willing to endorse the idea that myth, like memory and, most broadly, the imagination itself, can serve as a utopian reservoir: a knowledge that things could be otherwise than they are. But the content and history of a given myth would matter enormously in this case. <br /><br />I suppose the pastoral/idyllic mode that has so long fascinated me would be an example of the kind of myth you speak of. And yet what interests me most about pastoral in its modernist and postmodernist incarnations is when it demonstrates self-consciousness regarding its own mythic status--when the fantasy is made palpable <i>as</i> fantasy, or is in someway critiqued or undermined. And yet the truth-content of pastoral as the beyond of capitalist modernity remains.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06846875103765617419noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4096739.post-42178688618632869062010-04-28T12:50:50.049-04:002010-04-28T12:50:50.049-04:00The genre of the blog comment prevents me from off...The genre of the blog comment prevents me from offering the full response your post deserves, but as a poet and critic who is very much an initiate in Duncan's hermetic brotherhood, I think you pose your reservations quite fairly. And as someone who also has written from a Marxist perspective, I still sometimes share your suspicions. So try this speculation: myth is just as often what <i>escapes</i> from the trammels of capitalism and commodification. This is an idea that Silliman & Co. would never entertain. What do you say?Norman Finkelsteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03673105579717018812noreply@blogger.com