tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29676463.post9020798374469730259..comments2024-03-29T14:45:32.326+13:00Comments on The Imaginary Museum: Islomanes (2): Elizabeth Knox's 'Southland'Dr Jack Rosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29676463.post-21949070999439248932019-07-29T08:59:08.471+12:002019-07-29T08:59:08.471+12:00[I'm reposting your comment on this blog from ...[I'm reposting your comment on this blog from the 'Roland Huntford' page, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/10272507198753290435" rel="nofollow">Richard</a>, as it contains some interesting points that I think readers might like to see in context:]<br /><br />...Re Knox and your post on her, it looks interesting but I am a bit confused. I know of Knox and know she is held in pretty high esteem in certain circles, but I have to admit I myself kind of contradict my own 'universality' which I always urge is theoretical or is a potential, not me: and the me me is, in some ways, rather conservative. One small point though: Plato's 'Atlantis', in the Timaeus and Critias, is meant surely to be fictional: it is interesting but I think it fails to illustrate sufficiently what he has to say on writing vs. speech or has less to say in the stories (both those texts though have a strangeness and a beauty for a man who wrote the Republic, except for the beautiful Cave analogy etc. This comment is on the wrong post though so I will look again at the Knox post. But for me the problem is the weird. Dreams for me are almost always virtually nightmares or eerie and unpleasant (I know there are supposed to be ways to combat this). This steers me away from Knox for now but you certainly bring in some fascinating conjunctions! Who has read the plays of Yeats let alone his poems!? But your description of his play has caused me to want to read Yeat's plays, as I like reading plays! ([Previously] I had suspected they were probably not very good cf. his poetry).<br /><br />This is all a "drama of reading" and trying to understand. How to understand Yeats when he talks about 'the responsibility of the imagination'? He from a kind of 'supernatural' position, Sartre from Marxism: no one (Sartre's general thesis is) can be really subconscious is (more or less) his theme: we are all responsible as are all those in his 'No Exit' or Huis Clos (he affirms free will, although...)...but for me the effect is like 'The Third Policeman' by Flann O'Brien...an effect of terror and horror (for me, there is no escape in such: it's a nightmare, "help"! I cry!)! Eagleton in a book about 'Evil' uses that book as one example of the punishment of an evil act...If evil can be real (but there are (at least) 3 diff. kinds, Sartre's, Dante's and Yeat's ('The best lack all conviction / The worst are full of a passionate intensity' and things like '...the heart that's fed on fantasy's grown brutal from the fare'...and those things). These are works and words of imagination but, indeed, they have power....But eerie and frightening to think Yeats might have influenced the events of 1916. You go down some subtle twists and turns Jack!!<br /><br /><br />Dr Jack Rosshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01805945600952222957noreply@blogger.com