From: "Alice Turner" <al@interport.net>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v021.n005
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 08:45:48 


>
>From: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney@crossover.com>


>At 07:46 PM 10/29/98 -0500, alga quoted Julian Jaynes:
>>"The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do.
they
>>have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no
>>introspections."
>
>By complete coincidence, I just happened to be reading part of _The Iliad_
>only a couple of weeks back--I'd never read it before; quite
>interesting--and I can say that this is, as a categorical statement, false.
>The death of Hector provides a clear example of introspection: (From Samuel
>Butler's translation, Book XXII)


[snip]

Oh, I agree, and could easily find other examples, even from Gilgamesh. (Why
are you reading Butler, btw, did you download it? There are some splendid
more modern translations. Did you know that Butler, and Graves after him,
was convinced that The Odyssey was written by a woman?)  But there is a
certain very general argument that could be sustained or at least argued
over in the Jaynes premise. I'll say again that I believe that Wolfe is at
his best when dealing with rather flat "archaic" figures, that in my own
opinion he is less successful at the nuanced 3-dimensional "modern" figure.

-alga


*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/