Legendary Past Research Articles

The Moon as the Patroness of Doubles and Magic. Miguel Ángel Asturias and His Guatemala Dream

The subject of this paper is the image of the Moon in the works of the Guatemalan indigenist writer Miguel Ángel Asturias. His artistic reality can undoubtedly be called magical. Nobel laureate, he let the voice and spirit of Guatemala into his works, revived the mythological and legendary past of his country. Here Maya myths, witchcraft and dreams are closely intertwined with reality. In Asturias’ Guatemala universe the Moon rules the over mythological space and time, carries the heroes into the world of dreams, rituals, magic and shapeshifting. The image of the Moon is the key to understanding Latin American literature, and within the artistic image of Latin American night helps a person to perceive himself and the true essence of being. The Moon is Asturias’ works possesses the property of mirror and dublicates reality, creates the doubles and is the one itself. In this paper we consider the influence of the moonlight on the landscape and the metamorphoses it initiates in the Asturias’s characters. The Moon becomes the conductor of the mystic gift to change the world by words in “Legend of the Singing Tablets”, helps the “Men of Maize” characters to unite with their naguals, reveals the image of love in the play “Kukulkan” and tunes the ritual time in all the works named.

«Сверхтекст» Е.И. Замятина о деве-воительнице. Статья первая

This article deals with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “hypertext” about the female warrior, i.e. with the totality of her manifestations in the works of the writer and the semantic continuum that they form. This type of character is defined as a heroine with outstanding physical abilities (such as strength, horse-riding and shooting skills, etc. – and also great beauty), a strong, proud personality, persistence, ability to fight back, determination to gain the upper hand, to win at all costs – especially in the game of power and armed conflict with the male character that is in love with the heroine and/or is loved by her. The author identifies Zamyatin’s works in which the woman warrior appears, analyzes the plot functions and the characteristic motif complex associated with this image. The author demonstrates that the female warrior represents a very frequent type of heroine in Zamyatin’s works: the image appears at the beginning of his career as a writer, in the short story “Kryazhi” (1915), and accompanies him until the end, manifesting itself in the screenplays written in the 1930s. The author reveals that a specific variant of the plot featuring the female warrior is implemented in Zamyatin’s works: the heroine is shown as equal in strength with the male character, and the test of power happens, in particular in the form of a literal duel. Whatever its outcome is and whoever wins, the storyline usually finishes with the death of one or both characters – either during the combat or as its remote consequence. While the type of the plot is usually the same, the female character itself shows a wide variety: there are Valkyrie-like heroines (Ildegonda in the play Atilla), polenitsas from Russian bylina songs (such as Nastasya Mikulishna in the screenplay “Dobrynya” or Marya in “Kryazhi”), Mongolian women warriors (Bortè, Ulek), and even contemporary heroines of this type (Zinaida in the screenplay “The God of Dance”). Usually such characters are attributed in Zamyatin to the legendary epic past or rooted in “folk archaics”; they belong to the rural world, to the Russian village. The constant topoi and the evolution of the female warrior in Zamyatin’s artistic works are revealed; in particular, such motifs as love–hate, test of strength (in the form of a duel or a competition), mutual intendedness of two “strong ones” and their tragic non-encounter are considered. The author notes that the supervalue of the female warriors in Zamyatin’s works is love, while for some other writers of the Silver Age, for instance, for Marina Tsvetaeva or Lyubov Stolitsa, such values were female agency, independence, control over one’s life, freedom, or even spiritual salvation. The play Atilla and its heroine Ildegonda are analyzed particular detail; the sources of this image are revealed.

The Blackness in The Bluest Eye

Novels, of any time, carry certain stories related to reality. The earlier forms of the Novel, Allegory and Romance, contained religious, philosophical facts. These literary genres took the shape of Novels, which continue to carry moral, philosophical and historical truths. George Meredith, a Victorian novelist, defined Novel as the ‘summary of actual life’. According to William Henry Hudson, an English writer, Novel is an effective medium of the portrayal of human thoughts and actions.
 The English word, Novel derived from the Italian term, Novelle, which means ‘a fresh story’. It was in 1350 that the Italian writer, Giovanny Boccassio, wrote his world famous collection of love stories in prose, named Decameron. Such stories in prose were called ‘novelle’ and a story in verse was known as ‘romance’. It meant a story of the legendary past. Malory’s Morte d’Arthur is an example. Some experts gave various definitions for a ‘Novel’. According to an American novelist, F. Marion Crawford, a Novel is a pocket theatre; a novel contained all accessories of a drama without requiring to be staged before an audience. George Meredith, an English novelist, called it a ‘summary of actual life’ including both ‘the within and the without’. According to W.H Hudson, Novel is an effective medium of the portrayal of human thought and action, ‘combining in itself the creations of poetry, the details of history and generalised experience of philosophy’.

THE KING WHO RISES AND REPENTS (TWO HYPOSTASES OF JAN III SOBIESKI IN THE REPORTS OF A RUSSIAN DIPLOMAT)

The Age of Louis XIV is characterized by the pomp and splendor of court ceremonial, which had the goal, among other things, to exalt the figure of the sovereign. But in different traditions, not everything was so clear. This paper examines two seemingly mutually exclusive characteristics of the king of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, Jan III Sobieski. In the Russian translation of records from the reports of the Moscow permanent embassy in Warsaw, the image of the monarch is combined with the exploits of the crusaders. The passage clarifies some aspects of the political propaganda of the epoch of Jan III, makes it possible to better imagine the folding of his image as a knight of the new crusades against the Muslim Turks. The reference to the crusaders also fills in some gaps in the awareness of some Russians-intellectuals, representatives of high society, about the history of the Crusader movement. Another case studied in the article is not the heroic side of the king, a penitent sinner who begs for forgiveness for a crime of the legendary past. Here a phrase is analyzed, which in the Russian translation of the novel by the popular Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski "Narrenturm" was rendered as "pal krestom na pol". This is not the first appearance of the expression in Russian - we notice something similar in the notes of the Russian resident in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The author of the article tries to reveal the "semantic levels" of an unusual phrase, to discover the relationship between the utterance and the cultural and political situation in Rzeczpospolita of the XVII century.

Voix et idéal : Jeanne d’Arc dans One of Ours de Willa Cather

As a form of homage to her cousin killed in action, Willa Cather wrote an ambiguous novel, in which the need to glorify WWI soldiers is mingled with a disenchanted depiction of the United States. At the end of the novel, the lofty ideals that permeated the American nation during the conflict do not seem to have put an end to the consumerism that was already rampant before the war. In her attempt to resuscitate an idealism that seemed to have deserted the modern world, Cather was accused of sentimentalism by the literati of the time as well as many critics of the following decades, despite the book’s considerable popular success. Some critics, however, later pointed out that the many ironies of the narrative should dissuade the reader from hastily equating the author’s perspective with that of Claude, the protagonist. By looking at the many echoes that Joan of Arc’s story finds in the novel, I shall argue that her story symbolizes both the ideal and its loss, the former now irrevocably confined to a legendary past. We shall see in particular how the voices that Claude encounters in Nebraska serve to designate France as a far-off land that could accommodate all of his ideals, and how the voices that he eventually hears in France actually belie his idealized vision.

The role of the past in late medieval hidalgo historical writing and memory

ABSTRACTThis essay is structured around two themes: the writing of history and memory. On the one hand, it analyses the use of the past in Lope García de Salazar's Libro de las buenas andanças e fortunas (1471–5). His approach to history is imbued with nostalgia for a legendary past, and more specifically for a political arrangement between the Lord of Biscay and the lesser nobility (hidalgos) which ensured respect for their privileges. This is set in contrast to a second group of material, legal documentation relating to the town of Escalante in Cantabria. Historically under seigniorial control, the inhabitants created a collective memory that framed a past prior to the fourteenth century which was free of lords and feudal obligations.

HEROIC FICTION, COMBAT SCENES, AND THE SCHOLARLY RECONSTRUCTION OF ARCHAIC GREEK WARFARE

Abstract Combat scenes depicted on vases are a critical source for the reconstruction of Greek warfare in the archaic period. They are the subject of a lively debate over their accuracy and reliability as historical sources, and the degree to which they represent historical ways of fighting among archaic Greeks has been questioned. A particularly common argument used to question, or even in some cases, to reject some scenes as potential sources is to identify them as depicting ‘archaizing’ and/or ‘heroizing’ topics, that is, images drawn from a legendary past or from the myths. This scepticism has often been based on the identification of a few elements in the pictures which have traditionally been regarded as belonging to myth or to a period prior to the introduction of the phalanx. It is shown here that an examination of both these specific elements and the larger combat scenes in the light of new theories about the phalanx and the hoplite in the archaic period offer fresh grounds for analysis.

The Intel trinity: how Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove built the world's most important company

Based on unprecedented access to the corporation's archives, The Intel Trinity is the first full history of Intel Corporation-the essential company of the digital age- told through the lives of the three important figures in the company's history: Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove. Often hailed the most important company in the world, Intel remains, more than four decades after its inception, a defining company of the global digital economy. The legendary inventors of the microprocessor-the single important product in the modern world-Intel today builds the tiny engines that power almost every intelligent electronic device on the planet. But the true story of Intel is the human story of the trio of geniuses behind it. Michael S. Malone reveals how each brought different things to Intel, and at different times. Noyce, the respected high tech figure of his generation, brought credibility (and money) to the company's founding; Moore made Intel the world's technological leader; and Grove, has relentlessly driven the company to ever-higher levels of success and competitiveness. Without any one of these figures, Intel would never have achieved its historic success; with them, Intel made possible the personal computer, Internet, telecommunications, and the personal electronics revolutions. The Intel Trinity is not just the story of Intel's legendary past; it also offers an analysis of the formidable challenges that lie ahead as the company struggles to maintain its dominance, its culture, and its legacy. With eight pages of black-and-white photos.

Community Diversity and Unity in Witihama, Adonara

For fourteen months in 2000-2001, I conducted a research in the District of Witihama, eastern Adonara. Witihama is a religiously mixed community, made up of Muslims and Catholics. However, both groups also practice blood sacrifice and carry out ceremonies required by adat. Muslims and Catholics are closely related by ties of marriage and descent. In the recent historical past, as well as in the ancient legendary past, the community has a remembered history of bloody warfare and murder, not linked to questions of modern religious allegiances, which provide incentives to take precautions to maintain community harmony and peace. Mindful of sectarian conflict elsewhere in Indonesia, Catholics and Muslims maintain close ties of cooperation and solidarity. On holidays like Christmas, Easter and Idul Fitri, for example, they hold community meetings to express mutual friendship. Members of the District have suffered from conflict elsewhere in Indonesia, for example during the fighting between Suku Batak and the 'Flores people' in 1999 in Batam, in the Moluccas and in the violence inDili, East Timor. Refugees from these other conflicts came and went while I was there. There have been attempts at sectarian provocation in Witihama by people from elsewhere in the past, leading to their expulsion. There was an unexplained incident in which a hand grenade exploded in Witihama killing one child and injuring two others, causing considerable consternation within the community. Rumors of plans to bomb the Catholic Church were taken seriously. Efforts to place East Timorese refugees in the Kabupaten of Flores Timur were strongly resisted on grounds of safety and local peace. Finally the national move toward regional autonomy led to Witihama becoming a separate Kecamatan and resulted in moves to turn Flores and Lembata into a separate Province.

Keragaman dan Persatuan Masyarakat di Witihama, Adonara

For fourteen months in 2000-2001, I conducted a research in the District of Witihama, eastern Adonara. Witihama is a religiously mixed community, made up of Muslims and Catholics. However, both groups also practice blood sacrifice and carry out ceremonies required by adat. Muslims and Catholics are closely related by ties of marriage and descent. In the recent historical past, as well as in the ancient legendary past, the community has a remembered history of bloody warfare and murder, not linked to questions of modern religious allegiances, which provide incentives to take precautions to maintain community harmony and peace. Mindful of sectarian conflict elsewhere in Indonesia, Catholics and Muslims maintain close ties of cooperation and solidarity. On holidays like Christmas, Easter and Idul Fitri, for example, they hold community meetings to express mutual friendship. Members of the District have suffered from conflict elsewhere in Indonesia, for example during the fighting between Suku Batak and the 'Flores people' in 1999 in Batam, in the Moluccas and in the violence inDili, East Timor. Refugees from these other conflicts came and went while I was there. There have been attempts at sectarian provocation in Witihama by people from elsewhere in the past, leading to their expulsion. There was an unexplained incident in which a hand grenade exploded in Witihama killing one child and injuring two others, causing considerable consternation within the community. Rumors of plans to bomb the Catholic Church were taken seriously. Efforts to place East Timorese refugees in the Kabupaten of Flores Timur were strongly resisted on grounds of safety and local peace. Finally the national move toward regional autonomy led to Witihama becoming a separate Kecamatan and resulted in moves to turn Flores and Lembata into a separate Province.

Les armes d’Achille : prolongement de la mémoire héroïque ?

Achilles’s weapons : a prolongation of the memory of the hero ? Achilles’ fame, archetypal hero of the Greek mythology, is closely linked to its fabulous weapons. Don of the gods, they are the keystone of the heroic identity value for the members of the Greek and Roman elite. The written sources and the figurative directory which put forward these fabulous objects, convey the transmission of the memory of a legendary past on which the Greek and Roman societies lean. The two figurative episodes of the legend which represent weapons on the paintings of Pompeii’s houses are Thetis in forges of Hephaestus and the Discovery to Scyros. This article insists on the reception and symbolism of the Achilles’s weapons, then on the role of the symbolism of the shield in the universe of Roman creation of the first century A. D.

J.R.R. Tolkien and Jordanes. Some resemblances in spiritual outlook

An analysis of three instances of the influence exerted by Jordanes on J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium: (a) the notion that cultural and political decay may be caused by being exiled from a formerly paradisiacal situation; (b) the notion that winning a war against Evil may become an unwanted cause of cultural devolution; (c) the construction of a pseudo-history by establishing genetic and cultural links with a mythical, highly evolved people from the legendary past.

Legends of the Fall: on rereading Companions of the Day and Night

In recent years the “spatial turn” with its revaluation of relationships between space and time has had repercussions in many disciplines, and offers a fruitful approach to Wilson Harris’s fiction. How space can be experienced to give access to the legendary and historical past is a major concern in his novel Companions of the Day and Night (1975). This essay combines a spatial approach with an investigation of the novel’s intertextual relations with Blake’s Gnostic and alchemical work “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, C.G. Jung’s proposal of a “new conceptual language” in his essay on synchronicity, and the legend behind the name of the Kaieteur Falls in Guyana. How Harris disturbs and subverts our processes of reading to allow the mythic, personal and political to be unveiled in outer and inner landscapes by the imag(in)ary is a revelation of the revolutionary and prophetic qualities of his art.

The Secondariness of Virgilian Epic and Its Unprecedented Originality

Virgil’s epic obsessively laments its inferiority with respect to its Homeric model, and yet the creation of reflexive, self-lacerating interiority is itself a radical new departure. It turns into an original invention of prophetic revelation through reflection on history projected as a future destiny to be embraced and realized on the strength of an inner conviction and conversion issuing in self-sacrificial action. Obliterated as a man by his mission, Aeneas is no Odysseus, but the emptying of all meaning from his present existence opens a register of historical meaning generated by the interacting absences of past and future. History is thereby made into typology, yet its very hollowness as a supposedly triumphal procession exposes a deeper dimension of committed realization of visionary truth. Prophecy emerges not as magical forecasting of the future but as impassioned interpretation of the shape of events as a whole anticipated through enactment of history’s imagined goals.

Some Implications of Literacy in Uganda

During the last fifty years, several debates have waxed and waned regarding the implications of literacy for African history. Among social scientists in general and social anthropologists in particular, Jack Goody and Ian Watt's survey of “The Consequences of Literacy” (1963) for hitherto preliterate or partially literate and now modernizing societies, drew attention to one suggested transformation: “The importance of writing lies in its creating a new medium of communication. (…) Its essential service is to objectify speech, to provide language with a material correlative, a set of visible signs. In this material form speech can be transmitted over space and preserved over time; what people say and think can be rescued from the transitoriness of oral communication.” The consequences, in Goody and Watt's view, were immensely important: “In oral societies the cultural tradition is transmitted almost entirely by face-to-face communication; and changes in its content are accompanied by the homeostatic process of forgetting or transforming those parts of the tradition that cease to be either necessary or relevant. Literate societies, on the other hand, cannot discard, absorb or transmute the past in the same way. Instead, their members are faced with permanently recorded versions of the past and its beliefs; and because the past is thus set apart from the present, historical enquiry becomes possible. This in turn encourages scepticism; and scepticism, not only about the legendary past, but about received ideas about the universe as a whole.”

Beowulf <i>and Lejre</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Beowulf and Lejre Jennifer Neville Beowulf and Lejre. By John D. Niles, with contributions by Tom Christensen and Marijane Osborn, foreword by John Hines, and afterword by Tom Shippey. Edited by John D. Niles and Marijane Osborn. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 323. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007. Pp. xiv + 495; 48 illustrations. $89. This is a strange book. It contains a bewildering range of materials—from archaeological reports to critical essays to medieval texts (with translations) to geographical descriptions to accounts of museums and modern reenactment—so the first challenge in reading it lies in determining what the book is about. In some ways there is a simple answer to this question: it is simply a collection of everything that we can currently know about a place called Lejre. As the place itself is of so much interest, there may be little need to rationalize the making of such a collection. Yet the title of the book reveals that some need was felt to rationalize the production of such a lavishly illustrated and lengthy book, and the rationale behind bringing the fraught history of Lejre to the attention of the English-speaking world (as opposed to the Danish-speaking world, which has had the benefit of some of the included publications before) is the argument that Lejre is the real, [End Page 117] historical site of Heorot, the hall attacked by the monster Grendel in the Old English poem, Beowulf. This is not a new argument, as the essays by Niles and Osborn reveal. Many scholars from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Thorkelin, Grundtvig, Chambers, Clark Hall, and Klaeber, among other illustrious names) "have been willing, if pressed, to locate Heorot at Lejre even if with caution" (p. 290). Lately, however, this apparent consensus has not often been acknowledged. Since Tolkien in 1936 famously transformed Beowulf from a source of historical facts to a literary artefact, there has been much less interest in the poem's connections to sixth-century Denmark and much more in its connections to eighth-, ninth, tenth-, and eleventh-century England. Parts I and II of this book provide a corrective for that lack of interest and supply as much evidence for a physical reality behind the poem as modern archaeology can provide: plans of two great halls and their surrounding buildings and monuments, remains of weapons, jewelry, and other artefacts, and descriptions and photos of the surrounding landscape. The technical detail in the six separate contributions (most of which have been published previously) may prove a challenge for literary scholars, but there is no question that the information here is exciting and suggestive for the world of the poem. Much of this evidence is new, based on excavations that concluded in 2005, and thus it is worth considering the old theory again in the light of new information. For the benefit of those who had not previously considered the bases on which the old theory rested, Part IV of the book contains texts and translations of the texts that mention Lejre and the adventures of the Skjöldung kings that correspond with characters in the Old English poem. These include: Thietmar of Merseburg's Chronicon, Grottasöngr, The Lejre Chronicle, Sven Aggesen's A Short History of the Kings of Denmark, Skjölfunga saga (in Arngrímur Jónsson's Latin paraphrase), Saxo Grammaticus' History of the Danes, Snorri Sturluson's Ynglinga saga and "Hrolf Kraki and Vögg," and The Saga of Hrolf Kraki. The essays by Marijane Osborn and John D. Niles in Part III not only discuss these texts and their possible connections with Beowulf but also trace the history of previous scholarly (and less scholarly) examinations of them. Although the writers in this book are careful to acknowledge the absence of direct proof that Lejre is the site of Heorot, the amount of material amassed here seems in itself to form part of the argument for the connection. The problem with accepting an argument based on mass, of course, is that new accounts of the legendary past draw upon old accounts of the legendary past, and, once the idea of Lejre...

(Im)Mobilization and hegemony: ‘hill tribe’ subjects and the ‘Thai’ state

In the mountains of northern Thailand the constraints and restrictions placed upon ‘hill tribe’ people and their bodies are often counter-posed to a legendary past where people could move freely across borders, where refuge in the mountains represented freedom from oppressive state powers, and where highlanders could come down from the mountains and integrate. This paper explores how highland subjects have been transformed as the emergence of the Thai state has imposed concrete and regulated boundaries demarcating Thailand, and a Thai people. Building on historical narratives in which the freedoms of the past are counterpoised with the closely governed present, I present a more complex and contradictory picture of the national subjects in Thailand. I discuss the citizenship movement, in which activists have been fighting for citizenship status for highlanders through a strategy that seeks a place for highland people within hegemonic discourses of the nation-state and belonging. The citizenship movement establishes a new ‘Thai hill tribe’ subject position, formed in opposition to its constitutive outside—the ‘non-Thai hill tribe’. And as highlanders find new ways to fit with the hegemony of the nation-state, both more fixed and more mobile subject positions open up as Thai-ness and its ‘others’ are redefined.

Introduction

Introduction Ifhuman beings were not divided into two biological sexes there would probably be no need for literature. And ifliterature could truly say what the relations between the sexes are, we would doubtless not need much of it then either. —BarbaraJohnson Towards the conclusion of Malory's Morte d'Arthur, after Lancelot and Guinevere have been captured together in the queen's chamber, after Lancelot has killed the king's nephew, Aggravane, his great nephews Florens and Lovell, and thirteen other knights in order to make his escape, after the queen, sentenced to death, is rescued by Lancelot, who this time murders Sir Belyas Ie Orgulus, Sir Segwardes, Sir Gryfflet, Sir Braundyles, Sir Agglovale, Sir Tor, Sir Gauter, Sir Gyllymer, Sir Raynold, Sir Damas, Sir Priamus, Sir Kay Ie Straunge, Sir Dryaunt, Sir Lambegus, Sir Hermynde, Sir Pertolyp, Sir Perymones, and, most important, the king's nephews Gareth and Gaheris, Arthur laments: . . . wyte you well, my harte was never so hevy as hit ys now. And much more I am soryar for my good knyghtes losse than for the losse ofmy fayre quene; for quenys I might have inow, but such a felyship ofgood knyghtes shall never be togydirs in no company. And now I dare say . . . there was never Crysten kynge that ever hylde such a felyshyp togydyrs. And alas, that ever sir Launcelot and I shulde be at debate. (Malory, III, 1183-84) This lament has been a source of consternation for critics who, having idealized Arthur much the wayTennyson did, are at a loss to explain the ease with which the king dismisses the queen and the difficulty he has blaming Lancelot for the carnage that has taken place. It strikes us that the concerns voiced by the critics mask what truly disturbs them about Arthur's statement. In Arthur's lament we catch a glimpse of a sexual economy in which the bodies ofqueens and knights are seen as goods which maybevalued, compared, and exchanged. Furthermore, the hypermasculine world oftheArthurian court operates within a sexual economy of homosocial desire which attributes far greater value to relationships between men than it does even to the marriage ofthe king and queen. This sexual economy—the term we will use to designate the imbrication ofwealth, power, patriarchy, exchange, sexuality, and history ARTHURIAN* 8.2 (1998) ARTHURIANA in any social formation (Clark 71)—has been in place from the beginning of the Morte d'Arthur, silently negotiating Arthur's ascent to power. It is understood both by the subjects of Malory's narrative and by Malory's fifteenth-century audience, even ifit cannot be openly discussed. When it is, as it is in this passage, theeffect is jarring. Modern critics ofArthurian romance have not, until quite recently, vigorously pursued these intersections between sexuality and economy, apparently unwilling to give up their nostalgia for an idealized, hypermasculine—and heterosexual—society ofthe Round Table.1 It is, however, these intersections, the ways in which social constructions of gender are imbricated in the economic production and reproduction of culture that bring together the five essays in this special issue on 'Symbolic and Sexual Economies in Arthurian Romance.' These essays explore the sexual economies ofFrench and English aristocratic culture between the twelfth and fifteenth century, the culture that monopolized thewealth and patronage that enabled the production and dissemination ofthe Arthurian histories produced by Geoffrey ofMonmouth, Wace, and Lagamon and the romances produced by poets from Chrétien de Troyes to Thomas Malory. These histories and romances both reflected and refracted the cultural anxieties of this class—its nostalgia for a legendary past that never existed and its desire to maintain political and economic hegemony through fictions of aristocratic value and unbroken patrilineage—that were increasingly threatened by the Church and by the emergence ofa wealthy mercantile class. At the center of any sexual economy (as Gayle Rubin argues in her now classic essay, 'TheTraffic in Women') is sexual difference, which both produces and is produced by the sexual economy. Indeed, we use term 'sexual economy' to describe what Rubin calls 'the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products ofhuman activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied...

The New Simonides and Homer's Hemitheoi

The New Simonides and Homer's Hemitheoi Jenny Strauss Clay The proem to Simonides' recently discovered "Battle of Plataea" is addressed to the hero Achilles.1 How long it was and whether it dealt with the hero's birth and other exploits remains unclear. Fr. 10 surely deals with Achilles, but its precise contents are obscure. The beginning lines of the far more extensive fr. 11 apparently describe the hero's death in an epic simile adapted from Homer.2 The damaged lines that follow (9–14) provide a brief summary of the end of the Trojan war, the destruction of Troy, and the return of the Greeks: 3 Before breaking off, Simonides credits Homer with the heroes' renown: [End Page 243] At first glance, the claims on Homer's behalf seem exaggerated. As Aloni notes, the incidents alluded to—the death of Achilles, the fall and sack of Troy, and the returns of the heroes—are actually not recounted in Homer.4 Yet there is no reason to think that Simonides ascribed an Iliou Persis to Homer. To be sure, by exaggerating Homer's accomplishment, Simonides can rhetorically magnify his own. As Homer granted immortal fame to the heroes, so too will Simonides to the Plataean heroes he celebrates. Lloyd-Jones has observed that the diction of these lines is peculiarly evocative of the epic, both in the choice of , a Homeric hapax, which occurs when Helen tells Hector that Zeus set an evil destiny upon herself and Paris, to make them for men to come (Il. 6.357– 58), as well as the epithet , which in four out of its five occurrences is used by Thetis of her son.5 For Simonides, not just Achilles but the whole race of the heroes is . As he says in his Threnoi (523 PMG): In addition to the many verbal echoes of Homer that have already been observed by others, fr. 11 as a whole contains another, I believe more precise, allusion. The two passages are linked not only by the similarity of their contents, but also by the term , a hapax in Homer and surprisingly rare elsewhere. Hesiod uses it almost as the terminus technicus to refer to his fourth race, the race of heroes who fought at Thebes and at Troy: (Works and Days 159–60).6 Similarly, the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women closely links the suitors of Helen and the Trojan War with Zeus' plan to destroy the (fr. 204.100 Merkelbach-West).7 In Alcaeus 42.13 Voigt, Achilles is called one of the hemitheoi, as is [End Page 244] one of Alcman's Hippocoontids in the Louvre Partheneion (3.7 Calame). Callinus' praise of the brave warrior implies that, if he survives, he will be (1.19 W); he becomes the equal of those legendary heroes of the past. Whenever the term is used in these passages, it suggests a retrospective vision, looking back at the legendary past from the vantage of the present. But the comprehensive vision of the Trojan War with which Simonides brings his proem to a close most closely resembles Homer's similarly synoptic view at the beginning of the twelfth book of the Iliad. In Iliad 12, Homer momentarily pulls back from the immediate action on the battle field to distance himself from the heroes who fought before Troy. From that unique vantage, those who participated in the Trojan war belong to an earlier generation and to a different world, the . As he begins his narrative of the assault on the Achaean wall, Homer looks forward to a future time when it will have disappeared (12.10–16): At that point the gods in concert will destroy the wall, (12.23). In characterizing Homer's accomplishment as making a name among men to come for the , Simonides likewise distances himself from the heroes of Troy and, above all, Achilles. In the next line, the poet will salute Achilles and take his leave of the hero, before turning to the task at hand. In echoing the Homeric passage and in using the expression , Simonides both links himself with, and dissociates himself from, Homer and his subject matter. Troy and the race of...

Pynchon's World and its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland

(1990). Pynchon's World and its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 32, Vineland, pp. 107-125.