In a brief but sharp review of Graves' The Greek Myths,… [H. J. Rose complains] that Graves includes "sentimentalities of his own devising, legitimate enough in a work of the imagination, but quite out of place in a handbook of mythology, where a story should be told as the authorities tell it, or epitomized from their account." (p. 145)
The predicament can be summarized simply: the contemporary mythographer inherits a formidable equipment of technology and scholarship, and can no more ignore it than he can ignore the modern prose in which he expresses himself and which is no less a fruit of the same soil. To treat myth, in this light, as object for study is to provide a useful service of one sort, but it robs the story of its affective and noumenous dimension without which it does not remain mythic. On the other hand, to treat it without the context of historical analysis is to run the risk of divorcing the story from the lived and incarnate actuality which engendered it. The problem of reconciling these contraries is formidable, and although the theorists have made presentations of great sophistication, the proponents of ritualism, of euhemerism, and of psychology have found reconciliation extremely difficult. The analytic mind, its force bound by its own strength, simply finds in mythology the infuriating paradox (and rebuke) of a whole meaning which existed prior to the divisions of speech by which the very sophistication of analysis is achieved. In such a predicament, claims Graves, the artistic imagination is singularly powerful, and by its means we can focus afresh on the old stories to experience them new and whole—as poetry undivided, not as prose analysed into sober familiarities. Consequently, though he will adapt the modern skills and sciences, Graves does not aim to reproduce their results: to criticize him for not doing so is to fall into a trap, as he scornfully expects we will.
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