"Morality" in *GR*

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>

> "The sun comes up in the east."
> Deconstruct this.

Yessir,
no deconstruction needed to tell that this is a 19th-century literary lie,
or better, just a silly metaphor reminding us that we're mortal, thus have
to be thankful for every sunrise we may encounter - astronomically the sun
doesn't come up at all. The earth turns around the sun etc blah blah. I
would say that the writer has a remarkable grasp for the obvious.
If you want to understand it metaphorically I see a tendency towards
naturalism, romanticism and orientalism.
Your request reminds me personally very much on the post of S~Z from the
22.05.00 (GRGR Campout).
But this is of course an example of the "solar hypothesis" John Barth talks
about in *Mystery and Tragedy* (The Friday Book, p. 41-54, esp. 45-46).
"To explain a symbol--cultural, literary, whatever--you look for its
referent; but you don't explain a myth these days at all, (...) What you do
is look for correspondences, merely, between it and other things, and
correspondences may be manifold, coexistent, and equally "legitimate,"
though of unequal interest and heuristic value. (...) Obviously the westward
movement of the hero, his contest with the forces of darkness, and his
descent into and resurrection from subterranean realms, as well as the
generally cyclic path of his biography, correspond(s) (...) to the daily
apparent motion of the sun (...) this correspondence lead some
nineteenth-century investigators to maintain that the myths were fanciful
primitive accounts of such natural phenomena. (...) and nowadays (...) we're
more inclined to go at it the other way around, regarding the daily motion
of the sun (...) as metaphors  for the myth instead of vice versa. (...) The
myth and the natural facts are surely analogous (isomorphic is the
fashionable term) and throw reciprocal metaphorical light on each other; no
need to see one as symbol and the other as referent."

The sentence calls up immediately its counter-sentence: The sun declines in
the west.
Questions anyone?

Otto