Word: cadmus
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...Fool? Good man? Yorkin and Lear soon learned what it might have felt like to be Cadmus, the legendary Greek who sowed dragon's teeth only to see them spring up from the ground as armed men fighting each other. From the dragon's teeth of Archie's vocabulary, the producers reaped a crop of ethnic spokesmen, psychologists and sociologists, all armed with studies and surveys and battling each other over whether "Family" had lampooned bigotry or glorified it. The debate seemed rather top-heavy for such light humor, but that was precisely the issue: whether "Family...
Roberto Calasso’s first work translated into English, the brilliant Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, saw him marking out his territory as somewhere between the literary anthropology of Robert Graves’ classic The White Goddess and the mythology-blender of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Calasso of Literature and the Gods is a little closer to Goddess than Hero, as he attempts to trace through all of Western literature, from Homer to Nabokov, a phenomenon that he defines called “absolute literature.” Absolute literature is literature...
What Calasso did with Greek mythology in Cadmus and Harmony was a bit like what Blake did with the Bible in his poetry: breaking the old myths apart, reinterpreting them, and finding explanations for all the contradictions and holes in the different versions of the myths. While it is a great read that draws its power from a very genuine sense of awe and wonder, I don’t think anyone would mistake it for an accurate version of Greek mythology. It’s more like Calasso’s personal poetic riff on symbols established by Greek...
...matter and then you can go. So, as for Literature and the Gods, smile when you pass it on a bookshelf, but don’t buy it. If it’s awe and wonder you’re looking for, check out The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, where Calasso comes by it honestly. If it’s coherent literary theory you’re looking for, bleached of interest, I hereby give you permission to sneak into any one of the English courses on campus, free of charge...
DIED. PAUL CADMUS, 94, controversial artist known for his satirical, near-illustrational style; in Weston, Conn. He gained fame in 1934 when Navy officials yanked his painting The Fleet's In from a show because it depicted sailors with a gay man and prostitutes...