Word: legendes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although Crow offers no letup in the agony and gore, it should win Hughes a new and wider following. In it he parcels out human history and legend in a succession of charnel-house episodes. The Garden of Eden, Oedipus, St. George, all our prototypes of beauty, heroism and love, are reduced to so much pulsing, thrashing sinew, murderously intent on survival. A harsh and one-sided view, to be sure, yet difficult to deny. The headlines are on its side. Hughes is too cunning a craftsman to try to convey his vision in headlines or rant of any kind...
...harpies of legend, having once gripped an artist, are slow to let go. One of their regular victims has been Paul Gauguin. The image of the painter has been yanked, tugged, tortured and distorted by a succession of novels and films starting with Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence...
Moon provided a legend of the theatrical kind that Gauguin himself invited. Here was an archetypal rebel against bourgeois civilization, who quit a prosperous job on the Paris Stock Exchange to find his true artistic self in Tahiti among brown innocents, baptized anew in coconut milk and liberated from his own and Europe's stale past by primitive ritual...
...language, understood nothing of their rituals and social structures, never ate yams or fish when he could afford tinned asparagus and claret, and was prone to copy his scenes of native life from tourist photographs purchased in the grubby colonial port of Papeete. The most advertised side of the legend is also false. Gauguin's art was neither freed nor even significantly changed by the South Seas. When he left France in 1891, he was no Sunday painter but a mature artist with a circle of admirers that included Van Gogh, Maurice Denis and the Symbolist poets. Tahiti served...
...from a Levi-Strauss contention that a universal connection exists between answering conundrums and committing incest. According to this view, it was not by chance that Oedipus' unwitting incest occurred after he solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Among the Algonquin and Iroquois tribes, there is a legend of brother-and-sister love in which riddles are posed by talking owls. In a 1967 essay, Burgess marvels at this transcultural yoking. In MF, the old Algonquin yarn is the mother of one of his richest comic inventions...