Nausicaa: Gerty and Isolde

People who have studied Ulysses and The Waste Land are familiar with what Eliot called “The Mythical Method”. Guided by Eliot’s review of Ulysses, they understand it as a way to replace the narrative structure of a text. In other words, myth takes charge of granting coherence and structure to the otherwise disconnected images and episodes. However, I think the use of myth both in Ulysses and The Waste Land is not aimed to give structure to the text, but rather to charge it with meaning. In fact, paraphrasing Ezra Pound it would be more accurate to speak about mythopoeia, but I will not go into that… I just want to show how these parallels work.

Tristan & Isolde of Gottfried von Strassburg

I love sad and dark stories where you can actually see good and evil engaged in battle… I don’t really know why, but ‘beautiful’ stories usually do not catch my attention. The same runs true for films, “Dancer in the Dark” would be a good example -though I still think that Von Trier is totally nuts-. But from time to time it’s very healthy to leave the Brodies, Sutpens, Stavrogins and the like and take a deep breath of pure clean air. So to forget the aftertaste of Miss Brodie I spent some days with the Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg.