The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

tural anthropophagy of the West — just one
of the many brain-benders cheerfully strewn
throughout these two texts. Trinh also challenges
the reader to affirm while questioning,
to disregard realist aesthetics while acknowledging
their pervasiveness in Western
tradition, to claim difference while "unsettling
every definition of otherness arrived
at." The course of inquiry will inevitably
entail risk, a dissolution and rearrangement
of self, "intermittent blindness."
One of the most intriguing moments in
these texts occurs in the opening paragraphs
of "Bold Omissions and Minute
Depictions," in which Trinh allows her
poise to falter by sharing a moment of
"intermittent blindness." In conversation,
two Caribbean friends had scoffed at
Western academics' newly-fashionable preoccupation
with marginality, which happens
to be one of Trinh's main research
concerns: "What marginality? Marginal in
relation to whom? to where? to what?"
Trinh's elusive response — a meditation on
the nature of the Asian-American "hyphen"
together with the "formlessness in form" of
traditional Chinese painting— displaces
the original question with a creative nonanswer,
and leaves moot many of the issues
it raises.
Variance
Charlene Spretnak
Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of
Pre-Hellenic Myths. Beacon Press, n.p.
Paula Gunn Allen
The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in
American Indian Traditions. Beacon Press, n.p.
Walter L. Williams
The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in
American Indian Culture. Beacon Press, n.p.
Reviewed by Lynne Masland
All three books share in common the fact
that they are new editions of older works,
well known in their particular fields. Each
contains a new preface tracing recent developments
and clarifying earlier contexts. In
this sense, the prefaces have something of
the quality of a letter from an absent family
member which brings the reader up to
date, reflecting upon events and changes
since the last letter. Since each book treats
some aspect of gender and/or ethnic studies,
the new prefaces provide useful retrospective
on the development of these areas
in the last decade or so.
In the "Preface" to Lost Goddesses of Early
Greece, firstpublished in 1978 in the "first
wave of Goddess books," Charlene
Spretnak reviews the significance of the
Goddess spirituality movement during the
ensuing decade-and-a-half since her reconstruction
of the mythical stories of several
classical Goddesses: Gaia, Pandora,
Aphrodite, Hera, Athena, Demeter and so
forth. Spretnak introduces each myth with
a brief scholarly prologue tracing each
deity's characteristics, powers and history.
Reclaiming the goddesses from their late
classical, Homerian patriarchal roles, she
has carefully pieced together from fragments
of archeological evidence and scholarly
investigations by classicists and
mythologists the myths as they reflect an
earlier Great Goddess period in Greece
before waves of Ionian, Achaean and
Dorian invaders. The stories themselves are
re-told in a delicate, poetic style which
heightens the close relationship between
the goddess figures and the spirit of living
nature. She distinguishes between the pre-
Hellenic Goddess cultures, including
Minoan Crete, and later classical patriarchal
religions and social orders, noting that
a male supreme deity is "a relatively recent
invention." Zeus, she writes, first appeared
around 2500 BC and the Old Testament
patriarch, Abraham, around 1800 BC. Early
goddess statues date to circa 25,000 BC. She
also distinguishes between "patriarchal
archetypes," or archetypal figures as interpreted
from a patriarchal social perspective,