Pablo Massa comments:

>Oh, I just can't believe what I read!.  Then, Achilles, son of Pelleus,
>was a psycho killer; Oedipus, a guy who could't resolve his oedipus
>complex; Dante, a catholic terrorist; Henry V, a fascist; Don Giovanni, a
>guy who became a freak rapist because the society didn't let him to assume
>his homosexuality; Dr. Jekyll, a schyzophrenic; Dracula, a symbol of
>plusvalia; and Moby Dick, a memeber of an endangered species.  Nice
>isn't?.To judge any artistic ot intellectual expression from the past
>through concepts from our time only is called "anachronism", which is not
>only a fail of judgement, but a lack of taste and culture.  What do we do
>about it?: if every idiot around believes himself in the right to cut off
>from art any expression that he finds offensive (just as Fetis did when he
>"corrected" some "wrong" harmonic passages of Beethoven), the result will
>be no art at all.

Let me try this again.  I think it is true beyond a hemidemisemiquaver of
a doubt that the vast majority of Western Literature before the late 20th
century held the following propositions to be true:

1)      The white race is the superior race.
2)      Men should be above women in the social hierarchy.

When this fact was discovered, what in the USA we call the "culture wars"
began.  One side wanted to eliminate most of Western literature from our
reading, thus allowing for more effective mind control; the other wanted to
deny or ignore the failings of Western literature completely, thus allowing
for more effective maintenance of established power structures.  To some
extent these two positions still dominate, and neither is acceptable.
Fortunately, we've been in this conflict long enough that more reasoned
positions are starting to emerge, and will hopefully prevail.

I have to confront these matters on a daily basis, because I teach
literature for a living, and most of the literature I teach is pre-1900
Western literature.  I teach that literature because I love it, despite
the fact that much of it is based on principles that I do not hold
myself (monarchy, to pick only one).  I recognize its many aesthetic and
philosophical virtues; I also recognize its many failings.  When I teach
Shakespeare, I make sure my students understand the plays in the context of
the ideas of their time.  We study them not only as works of art, but also
as documents representative of the culture of Elizabethan and Jacobean
England.  This means we explore the cultural premises on which they are
based--which does not mean we accept those premises as our own.  Nor do
we reject a play because its premises are not ours.  We understand it as
representative of its time, appreciate the many wonderful things it has to
offer, and note where it diverges from beliefs that we have come to accept.
I want very much to save all those many centuries of Western culture, but
we cannot save them by denying their failings.  And if we cannot use late
20th century terms like "sexism" and "racism" to talk about 17th century
art, then for us it is no longer art, but artifact.  Older Western
literature should be an important part of our current aesthetic, political,
and philosophical dialogues; as such, it must be amenable both to the
vocabulary of its time and the vocabulary of ours.

Peter Goldstein