Literature and the Gods

Literature and the Gods is an interesting and highly personal romp through modern European philosophy and literature. The stated aim is to discover how pagan deities reestablished themselves at the core of European literature after the Enlightenment. However, it ends with a surprising reinterpretation of divinity within literature that has more correspondence with Foucault than Homer.Calasso begins his argument by noting the diminishing role of the Divine Logos in European thought. The divine is not the highest reason embedded in nature but more akin to primordial chaos. It is man who creates the world out of this chaos; man who creates literature; and man who ultimately creates divinity.Literature is not a mirror reflecting reality: it is an allegory of itself, a self-referential, self-sustaining dialogue. Borrowing from ancient Vedic texts, Calasso sees all prose as poetry, all poetry as metered and all meter as ultimately divine. It is not that the gods inspire the poet. The poet by using meter creates the gods.If all this sounds somewhat difficult to understand...well it is. I’ve done my best to summarize it in a few sentences. If you feel like racing through modern Europe to reach a destination where it’s not clear whether the fog has lifted you should read Calasso. For those who like more logical, sequential thinking I would recommend sticking to the Anglo-American analytic tradition within philosophy.

All of Calasso's writings reveal deep insights from comprehensive readings of the classics.

I gifted away my paperback, so I "re-quiped" a Kindle edition this time. Some may have a problem with it if, for instance, you don't have a solid background in the classics and mythology, or if you don't like the way Italian writing has a kind of lyrical, rambling rhythm, but this is simply a great book. I absolutely love it and recommend it to everyone when conversation moves near this type of subject matter (synchronicity and so on). And just to belabor the point, I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" making it to television.

I decided to add a review because I was not only impressed with how erudite Calasso is, but I was also inspired by his rich approach to literature and the complex understanding he sheds on the wellspring of literature. After reading C. Collins review and the other two reviews, I realized no more needed to be said. I agreed with them all. Allow yourself the luxury of reading this challenging yet nourishing book.

I'm going to need to reread this book several times. Ridiculously deep and beautiful. And I will never read the literature the same way again. This book is amazing.

This relatively short book is actually 8 lectures Roberto Calasso delivered at Yale in 2000. I found Calasso's book The Marraige of Cadmus and Harmony to be exceptional. I found two others; The Ruin of Kasch and Ka to be more difficult. These lectures are not as accessible as The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony but neither are they as difficult as Ka, with it's convoluted explanations of Hinduism.Calasso sees the gods as the energy behind creative thought and thus only a few lucky individuals, with blank brains, are visited by the gods. The human mind is not strong enough to bear the full revelation, but we are able to briefly receive the images offered to us by the gods and struggle to give them shape.Calasso seems to think that contemporary thought has diminished the god's powers. Yet he knows they are still among us, and have even been joined by a vast herd of Eastern dieties, ready to invade the European mind.Calasso refutes Voltaire's assertion that the gods are only fables designed by the power hungry priestly class to control the masses. Calasso sees myths as archtypes, patterns, that reveal themselves to men rather than as imply stories invented by men. With sadness, he points out that for a period of 400 years they remained alive mainly in the paintings of Boticelli, Rembrandt, Poussin, and Tiepolo.The gods not only permeate the arts, Calasso points out that it is myth that holds a people together in community. This attests to myths enduring power over us as a society.As Nymphs, the gods survived in the visual arts and emerge in such modern masterpieces as Nabokov's Lolita.Calasso discussed Nietzsche's phenomenological concept that the sciences, and all forms of knowledge, are models of reality, are simulations. This is the the connection between art and science. They both are approximations of reality. Whereas science is forever in flux, being proven and disproven, but remaining useful; art has immediate impact.The image, the archtype, the vision must have form and this is the job of the artist. In poetry it is the meter. Calasso quotes Proust on the role of structure in giving body to the spirit of inspired thought. Calasso concludes with the concept that three actors are involved in the creative process, the hand that writes, the voice that speaks, the god who watches over and compels. This is related to the ego, the self,and the divine; all of which must mediate the creative process.Though he quotes Jung only once, I found many of these concepts to be present in the works of Jung, Joseph Campbell, and the essays of Iris Murdoch on the nature of the arts. Calasso challenges the reader's intellect, sometimes leaving us adrift due to his vast knowledge base, but always I found gems of unique insight and fresh interpretations of philosophy and literature.

I had high hopes for this book, judging from previous reviews, but was very disappointed. I have never come across a book that combined academic discourse with new age woo before, but I have now. I was hoping to find how the ancient gods have been re-imagined in European literature. What I got was an incoherent ramble concluding with an assertion that the Hindu gods are embodied in sentence construction, or something. All rather beyond me. Apparently this results in absolute literature, which seems to mean the books the author likes. Back to Baudrillard and Derrida, who are a tough read, but at least make sense, and Neil Gaiman, who knows how to use the gods in a novel.