My boy Hyacinth and Textual Analysis

Lisa Schaffer-Doggett · 15 Mar 2003, 01:56 · from urth-v0303.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Lisa Schaffer-Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) My boy Hyacinth and Textual Analysis
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 17:56:25 -0800
Message-ID: <urth-v0303-3086 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0303/3086.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


On Friday, March 14, 2003, at 09:01 AM, James Wynn wrote:

>
> So, independently, I've rummaged around and followed several trails to=20
> the
> same place, all leading to Dionysus and Midas, with the same=20
> characters and
> critters popping up in the same roles. This is DEFINITELY thematic=20
> rather
> than textual analysis, but it is based on names, choices and clues=20
> provided
> by Wolfe. I'm not writing my own novel here.
>
> And while it's appealing to me to use Noah to connect Quetzalcoatl with
> Dionysus (through the Inhumi) I would never have considered it until I=20
> saw
> how closely Wolfe was following Graves' retelling of Midas. What are=20
> the
> odds, that it is all coincidental, really.
>
> As it is, I just can't see any point in waiting for Wolfe to break=20
> down and
> confess; I think the evidence is all there.
>

Don offers his opinionated opinion:

It is relatively easy to see Graves in Wolfe because of his relative=20
unorthodoxy regarding myths and their connections.  I'm not saying that=20
Wolfe is rewriting Graves, nor is he falling into allegory (it is=20
obvious that the needs of story are paramount to all other elements)=20
but the Sun books are steeped in Gravesian symbolism and it is a very=20
useful tool.


--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net