Re: Racial Attitudes in James Branch Cabell
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 20 July, 2023 02:26PM
Yes, yes. That's my impression too -- from admittedly little reading.
The figures of mythology, the creatures of folklore -- portraying them in silly situations as an exhibition of one's cleverness; that's not what they are for. If we deflate them, make them mere figures of fun, then what do we have left to evoke the awe-full, the mysterious, the eerie? Poetry is greatly impaired. (By "poetry" I don't mean only that which is written as verse, though I mean that too, but also even the visual arts, and music.)
It's true that there is, occasionally, humor even in mythology as well as in folktale. There's the Greek myth in which Hephaestus makes a net to catch his wife, Aphrodite, when she's betraying him with Ares. There's the Norse myth in which Thor is bested in combat with a scrawny old mag (who turns out to be Time itself, or the Earth). But I think these stories are not "sophomoric," as, say, it seems to me it is if someone writes a story in which the Dwarfs form a miners' union and go on strike, or a vampire goes to the blood bank to make a withdrawal, etc.
More than 50 years ago now, I suppose, I read some of those Harold Shea stories by de Camp and Pratt, and later I figured I was probably a bad reader of those works -- because I wasn't interested in reading them in the spirit they were intended, as farces or whatever; I read them for such glimpses as I could get of mythology and adventure, etc.