Thanks,
Nar
::the brooding bard blushes modestly::
I'm going to dip into Owen Barfield's
Poetic Diction (at least my memory of it) and apologize before hand if it seems highly esoteric, but it obtains to your comments, as well as those of SSM.
In
Poetic Diction, Barfield made the case that we as culture groups (and individuals) have ever increasing consciousness, (Barfield called it an evolution of consciousness) which is mainly caused by becoming aware of new distinctions. For example, neolithic cultures did not distinguish between "breath" and "spirit". For them, the wind was the spirits.
(As an aside, and related to this, I learned that the Celts considered the Alps to be the Great Divide between the land of the living and that of the dead, so when they invaded Rome and Greece in the 4th century BEC, they actually believed that they were boldly going where no living man had gone before, to borrow a rather apt phrase - which I'll come back to below.)
Somewhere along the line, I think it was the Greek philosophers, people started to think that "spirit" and "breath" were not the same thing; they came to think that those who believed that the wind or breath people breathed was spirit, were superstitious. So they had a change in consciousness brought about by a distinction.
Here's Barfield's main point as it obtains to fantasy and myth:
whereas something is gained by evolution of consciousness, something is also lost. What is gained, of course, is the new distinction. What is lost is harder to explain or describe, but it is a
wholeness, a completeness, that is in fact mythical. It is the attempt to regain the belief (secondary belief, I think he called it) that breath and spirit are indeed the same thing. I think archetypes have something to do with this, but exactly what I cannot say; perhaps they
are the wholeness?
Barfield went on to say that
poetry is usually an attempt to re-access the wholeness which has been lost through the evolution of consciousness.
Tolkien knew Barfield, and his
Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics and his
On Faerie Stories are partially indebted to Barfield's
Poetic Diction. If you ever have a chance to pick it up, do so. It was published in the second decade of the 20th century and was seminal and rovulutionary at that time. Heck, still is.
All that has to do with our discussion as follows:
Nar:
Quote:
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...details that destroy the wonder are the ones that arise from expanding the world around the protagonists according to general knowledge, rather than those that...grow and germinate—let a thousand flowers bloom—where the streams/ themes are flowing in and your archetypes welling up from that artesian spring deep below.
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This speaks to Barfield, except that instead of saying 'general knowledge' I would say something like 'modern distinctions'.
Silvershod Muse: Your point is well taken, however I would point out that Jules Verne wrote in the late 19th century, when naturalists and civil engineers and sociologists were 'cutting edge', just as these days books and movies about settling Mars, or asteroids being diverted from Earth, and so forth, are 'cutting edge' now. In other words,
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea has lost its wonder due to the passage of time. Asteroids being diverted (or not) from impact with Earth will lose their wonder, probably when we have developed the technology to divert them and doing so occurs routinely.
re Athens: Land owning men were the only citizens who could vote. This speaks to #1 the fact that agricultural technology was still the basis for society, and #2 good arable land was (and is) quite scarce in Greece; therefore to own it was a high status symbol. Trade at that time had yet to make headway as a viable and status-adhering occupation.