A Scholar's Lament

[rymenhild]

Lately I've been doing some research on Robert Graves's beautiful, bizarre, deeply influential monstrosity of attempted anthropological research, The White Goddess. It's quite frustrating, because all the criticism I've found so far fits into three categories:

1. Scholarship that proclaims The White Goddess to be utter trash, bearing no resemblance to actual religious beliefs and practices of early medieval Britain.

2. Scholarship that examines The White Goddess as it relates to Graves's warped personal life.

3. "Scholarship" that assumes The White Goddess is a factual and important account of the true, formerly-neglected Triple Goddess of the Celts.

I'm looking for, and have not found, work that treats The White Goddess as a fascinating literary invention in its own right, and examines it for its content and, perhaps, its influence on other authors.

Usually, when I find a large hole in current scholarship, it excites me. There's clearly a great deal of research left to be done here, and I can do it. The problem is that I have very different plans for my dissertation. Will not become obsessed with Robert Graves. Will not become obsessed with Robert Graves.

Comments

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

*you are getting sleepy*

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

*very sleepy*

[prosewitch.livejournal.com]

By all means, get obsessed! It's fun, and leads to much reading and writing and ranting to innocent civilians... and did I mention fun? ;)

(I get to revise my 510B paper this weekend, wheee!)

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

But I have other things to be obsessed about first.... *hides*

[concordantnexus.livejournal.com]

why not do your dissertation first and dangle Robert Graves research (if you publish a book on the matter, I *will* buy it) behind it as a carrot to encourage yourself to finish the dissertation? ;)

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Ah, but can I wait that many years? The dissertation isn't started yet!

[agonistes]

*dangles copy of The White Goddess*

...you know you want to...

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

...I know I do. I was reading it for purposes of tDiR fanfic in the first place, and I hadn't any idea how much White Goddess Susan Cooper had simply picked up and dropped into tDiR. Maybe no one's studied TWG's influence on literature yet because most of the literature it's influenced is modern fantasy and Real Scholars Don't Work With Modern Fantasy. Feh. (That's a rant. I would gladly work with modern fantasy.)

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I haven't had a chance to reply to your comment on my journal because there's so much to say, but this relates to The Book of Three. You can't talk about Alexander's inspiration for Prydain without referencing The White Goddess.

Maybe I'll do that work of scholarship on Graves some day. At least, insofar as it relates to children's literature...

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

At present count, there are about twenty-five major works of scholarship to be done on Graves. Feel free to do that one. Please.

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

Eep! I'm so sad that you all have to do homework, and you can't devote yourselves to writing books about The White Goddess and Lloyd Alexander and what Robert Graves accidentally did when he wrote The White Goddess.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

Context for the uninitiated?

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Hmm, how do I explain this in one short comment?

The following explanation is deeply oversimplified:

Once there was an anthropological theory that claimed that all folktales, legends, incomprehensible fragmented poems, et cetera, exist in their current, deeply frustrating forms in order to hide certain religious mysteries that could not be expressed clearly for fear of revealing those mysteries to the general public.

Robert Graves espoused this theory. The White Goddess is, among other things, Graves's attempt to translate a large number of very difficult medieval poems into a single statement about the nature of the universe. This single statement could roughly be summarized, "All of the arts exist as worship of the beautiful, cruel, all-encompassing mother-lover-crone-goddess who is muse of everyone and everything."

In trying to prove this statement, Graves resorts to all sorts of numerology, rune shuffling, riddling, and otherwise deeply dubious textual play. His opus has no footnotes and no bibliography. One really can't use his conclusions to prove any kind of real scholarly point, although I have the suspicion that some of his contentions have snuck, unproven, into the basic framework of literature studies.

What fascinates me, though, about Graves and The White Goddess, is that by opening himself to unscholarly methods of approach to his material, Graves does something very interesting and un-anthropological. Instead of finding a true history of the early Middle Ages in Britain, Graves ends up inventing a fabulous and exciting narrative himself. He creates the mythology which underpins modern Wicca. He assembles a collection of stories that later serves as the nucleus for Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising books and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books, among other masterpieces of modern fantasy. Graves's work deserves to be pooh-poohed as anthropology -- and hailed as literature. The pooh-poohing has happened, but the hailing has not. Actually, let me qualify that. Perhaps it may be more accurate to say that lay readers have hailed The White Goddess as narrative and taken it as fact, while scholarly readers have scoffed at the book for its facts and barely examined its narrative qualities.

Does that answer the question?

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

There does seem to be a trend about you being interested in people who invent mythic history. You may not be able to avoid it... :)

Mostly explained, except -- if I wrote incomprehensible fragmented poems, would that mean I knew something I didn't?

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

This comment is slightly more than a year late. But yes, according to Robert Graves, if you wrote incomprehensible fragmented poems that you yourself did not understand, the Goddess would be speaking Truth through you, so you would know something you didn't.

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I agree with fleurdelis28. This sounds like a work of scholarship that could be related to your thoughts on Geoffrey of Monmouth...

[the-paper-nun.livejournal.com]

I personally feel graves' work has not been around long enough to be recognized at literature by any of the people who like going around discovering people's fake history as literature.. Herodotus gets lots of attention, but that's because he's really OLD.. Graves' work is going to take another few hundred years before it really molders its way into the literary world