@kennethamy,
kennethamy;142856 wrote:Only that this is exceedingly speculative (psychoanalysis from a distance of many centuries). It does not seem to me to be something anyone should pronounce on with much (or any) confidence.
Well, yes, I question psychoanalysis regardless of distance. The author is dead and I speak as a reader but the reader, if he dares say anything at all, cannot help but speculate as to the author's motives. Perhaps it is best to not speak ill, or for that matter good, of the dead. If we speak at all about these fables we must reconstruct the fables and also their authors (with some bracketing) in our own time and in our own terms as if they were written today. Why would the story of Lilith be told if it were told today? It is this question that I was actually proposing an answer to. As for the long dead inventors of the Lilith story I can speak with even less certainty but what does the story mean to us today and what sort of reader would consider it to hold some kernel of truth? These readers who take the story to hold some kernel of truth: they are the authors I really speak of for to repeat in that voice, the voice that claims the text has authority, is also to be an author and thus to die (so to speak) so that one may be read. I was responding to hypothetical living modern authors restating the story of the real ancient and dead authors.
Towards a bridge, perhaps a corpus callosum: I find this sort of analysis of a fable terribly interesting; perhaps to the same degree as you find the analyzing a particular linguistic anomalie interesting. And after I write, I can only look back on the words of my now dead hand with living eyes and wonder what I meant though in this case I have infinitely more knowledge than I have of those ancient authors of the fable of Lilith.
