If you want to read Greek mythology, read Calasso

Among the constellations of Western works derived from Greek mythology, The Feast with the Gods – The Secrets and Lies of the Ancient Greek Gods by the famous Italian publisher Roberto Carrasso (1941-2021) is the most profound and special. The German Schwab's "Greek Myths and Legends" is a collation and retelling of Greek myths for the public, and the Frenchman Jean-Pierre-Vernan's "Greek Mythology: The Universe, Gods and Man" provides young readers with a "light" interpretation of mythology and historiography, while the ideal readers set by Carasso are more general-literate. Just as his compatriot and friend, the great writer Calvino's The Invisible City, is not just fiction, the Russian poet Brodsky's travel prose in exile in Europe is by no means just an aesthetic description of landscapes, and the British historian Simon Shama's Landscapes and Memories is not a general history of art in the ordinary sense, in modern times, these scholarly writers and writer-type scholars have constantly broken the shackles of academics and invariably created a subtle narrative that uses natural imagery to organize the intellectual and social history of mankind. Relying on primordial concepts such as earth, fire, water, and wind to grasp the deep structure of the object of interpretation, the worldview is presented in a relief text of the story and the in-depth interpretation of the text, thus realizing one of the tenets of poststructuralism - the text is the world.

This is the case with Carasso's Greek mythology: its blending power of academic and mythological texts, narrative and interpretation, poetry and logic, not only stimulates a strong passion for interpretation in literature, anthropology, history, art, textual sociology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics, but also prompts experts in these disciplines and theories to be as careful as possible to avoid the habit of disciplinary discourse damaging the ideological spirituality of the work.

Of all these encyclopedic humanistic writers, Carrasso remains unique: his retelling of myths and textual perusals are not the stardust aphorisms of French thinkers like Bashira and Baudrillard, nor the models of games such as tarot cards that Calvino used to plot his texts, or the Gothic lair that Benjamin carved out in the Hegelian dialectic architecture. His rhetorical style is much like that of Elias Canetti, an English-Jew (one of the most thoughtful writers of the 20th century), and Carrasso's "Athena is the only one who is born not to grasp something, but to discard something", and this kind of dynamic writing is also Carnetti's skill. They all have the insight into the transformative function of myth or fable, the ability to generalize, and the powerful metaphorical ability, which enables them to defy the trappings of all disciplinary discourse systems, and directly pick up the significance of a mythological character and a mythological archetype to the entire history of discourse from the action, so that the narrative is always poetic, concise, profound, precise and interesting. The anthropological ambition of myth in Feast with God, which I have only seen in Canetti's indefinable Masses and Power (1960), is a vivid account of human groups by a writer who lived through the brutal Second World War with the eyes of an anthropologist, not the words. The juxtaposition of these two anti-academic works is an interesting anecdote of the European mythology and its modern consequences in the second half of the 20th century. But Canetti's narrative ends with an archetypal categorization of the masses, which is very different from Caraso.

What is the structure of "A Feast with God"? If you understand this passage quoted by the editor of the Chinese translation of Kyushu Publishing House on the back cover, you can understand the narrative of the book, and at the same time grasp its core idea:

"The mythical gesture is like a wave, which takes shape when it breaks, just as the dice we roll form a number. But as the waves retreat, unconquered complexities swell in the onslaught, and it is in this chaos and disorder that the next myth begins to take shape. Therefore, myths do not allow for the existence of systems. In fact, when it first took shape, the system itself was nothing more than a flick of a god's cloak, a tiny gift from Apollo. ”

In fact, this narrative suggests to readers around the world how to view Greek mythology and in what sense to expect its reverberations to continue in today's world.

As the dreamlike origin of the self-narration and self-representation of European civilization, the castration of Greek mythology has always gone hand in hand with creation. From the tragedy of Sophocles to the war blockbusters of the Hollywood film industry, we will see all sorts of pre-made versions of Greek mythology, luxuriously textured and crisp, in which vague and fragmented characters and stories are either stripped out or thrown into a basket of ideas such as "simplicity, chaos, collective creation, and word of mouth." In short, we do understand the richness of Greek gods and their many versions, but we know little about the way, meaning, and function in which they emerge throughout history.

In this regard, Carasso's work has a deafening effect: it tells us that in order to understand the id, ego and superego of European civilization, it is not only not enough to summarize the motifs of Greek mythology, to popularize the gods and events, and to examine their relationship with real history and literary descendants, but in fact has already turned myth into an objectified object, as criticized by the customary "male gaze". What does myth really mean to us, how is it generated in observation, and how is it continuously watched and shaped in generation? In the final analysis, we need to be clear about the premise that myth never ends, and there is no real beginning.

Yes, myths have no beginning, as the clock does not tick and answer at the same time. Calasso's retelling begins not with the beginning of heaven and earth and the creation of children by fathers, but with the robbery of the young girl Europa by Zeus, which naturally emphasizes the historical metaphor of the origins of Europe - but the real mystery lies in the following sentence: "What did all this come about?"

This is the narrative ruse that Calasso placed in his Trojan Horse: to subordinate diachronic to synchronicity. He traces the antecedents in each of the key episodes, and this retrospective creates a myriad of whirlpools that restore Greek mythology from a single finished product to the dynamic form in which it was being weaved, disseminated, and interpreted, and then to the many branches of Homer's epic poems and to the archetypes of all medieval and Renaissance stories. Like the fisherman in The Peach Blossom Spring, like Deleuze's Thousand Plateaus, it is more multidimensional than multi-dimensional, forming undulating lines, fractures, folds and coatings that are constantly self-revising, while at the same time its structure remains clear: this structure is very much in line with the Greeks' own style: as one of the three major sources of logic in the world, the Greeks' writing style is from left to right, and then from right to left, in a linear cycle.

In short, this is a book that will remind you of many books, the oldest modern interpretation of the European dream, a wonderful story, and a treasure trove of scholars. As Brodsky said, it's the kind of book you only come across once or twice in your life. Although this book has a threshold for the general public, it should be the first choice for the general public to read Greek mythology, because the best reading habit is never to read an easy-to-understand primer in a certain field (which means that easy is always easy, difficult is always difficult), but to pick the pearl of the pyramid in your hands first. So, if you want to read Greek mythology, read Calasso, because mythology is beautiful and deep, and we actually live in it.