Epic

Form, Content, and History

Frederick Turner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412849449
• eBook ISBN: 9781351296823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Epic does many things. Among others, it defines the nature of the human storyteller; recalls the creation of the world and of the human race; describes the paradoxical role of the hero as both the Everyman and the radical exception; and establishes the complex quest underlying all human action. Epic illustrates that these ingredients of epic storytelling are universal cultural elements, in existence across multiple remote geographical locations, historical eras, ethnic and linguistic groups, and levels of technological and economic development.

Frederick Turner argues that epic, despite being scoffed at and neglected for over sixty years, is the most fundamental and important of all literary forms and thereby deserves serious critical attention. It is the source and originof all other literature, the frame within which any story is possible. The mission of this book is to repair gaps in the literary understanding of epic studies—and offer permission to future epic writers and composers.

The cultural genres of Marvel Comics, gothic, anime, manga, multi-user dungeon gaming, and superhero movies reprise all the epic themes and motifs. Consider The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Lost, The Matrix, Superman, Harry Potter, and Narnia. Here can be found the epic beast-man, the miraculous birth of the hero, the creation myth, the founding of the city, the quest journey, the descent into the land of the dead, the monsters, and the trickster. This book will be of interest to all readers fascinated by folklore, oral tradition, religious studies, anthropology, mythology, and enthusiastic about literature in general.

1

The Epic Storyteller

I have chosen to group together various elements under the general topic of the epic storyteller: the self-referential prayer or invocation, the appeal to tradition, the use of frame tales, the mnemonic theme of the blind poet, and the plot device of the carrying of the tale itself to our ears. Because these elements are so closely bound up with each other both in the narrative logic of epic and in every example of the genre, I shall not attempt to separate them into subtopics, but deal with them together.

Almost every “Western” epic in the classical tradition begins with, and returns often to, a direct reference to the author, narrator, or singer of the tale. But this reference is highly complex in implication. Often it is in the form of a second-person prayer to or invocation of the muse. And the actual singing voice is insisted upon. “Sing in me, Muse,” says Homer; “Arms and the Man I sing,” says Virgil; “I sing of war, of holy war,” says Tasso; “Sing, heavenly muse,” says Milton. The author then, at the same time, asserts the fact that this is a story told by someone, and disclaims credit for it. (There are a few exceptions to the initial self-introduction—The Song of Roland refers only indirectly to the author at the beginning, in characterizing Charlemagne as “our” emperor, but “signs” the poem at the end with “Turoldus,” his name.)

The muse is a spirit of invention, of fiction, but she is also a god, and is authorized by God or at least the other gods to communicate truths to the poet. The story that the poet tells is also vouched for by tradition and ancient sources, and is acknowledged to be part of the accepted knowledge of the past—the Trojan War, the liberation of Jerusalem, the fight in Attila’s hall, the Fall of Man. But the “fourth wall” is decisively breached at the outset—the poet looks us in the eye, and his throat and tongue quiver with the live intention of a human presence. The whole poem, then, is already in quotes, so to speak.

Of course, as Thoreau reminds us at the beginning of Walden, every book is written in the first person, so it is more honest to admit that one is doing the crowing oneself than to pretend that one’s dunghill is Mount Sinai; but epic somehow manages both, by claiming something like a fit of possession. If I possess my words, they are mine, but if the god possesses me, maybe the words are free for anyone’s possession. The quotes in epic are double quotes—one set for the poet, one set for the muse. If quotes—“scare quotes”—tend to negate the veridical objectivity of what is quoted, double quotes would tend to negate the negation, and to give us something that is “not untrue.” And maybe the kind of truth that has gone through this double filter is deeper and more reliable than mere fact.

Many genres—textbooks, histories, manuals, treatises, etc.—do not have (or admit they have) such quote marks. Many others—lyric poetry, drama, the non-epic storyteller, etc.—have explicit single quotes. One of the distinguishing marks of epic—Western classical epic, at any rate—seems to be that it is in double quotes (at least). Many epics in this tradition are not content to merely open the poem with this disclaiming claim (or hugely assertive disclaimer). Homer gives us not one, but two, inspired blind court poets in The Odyssey (Phemios and Demodocus) as self-portraits and stand-ins to remind us of the quotes, and then throws in Odysseus himself, a consummate storyteller—and not always a truthful one—for good measure. He even advises us in the episode with Eumaios, the swineherd, how we should “read” such stories. He starts oddly to refer to Eumaios as “my” swineherd, thus identifying himself with Odysseus, who is Eumaios’s only master; and addresses him, as he is addressing us, in the second person. Then he tells the story of the forgotten cloak, which Eumaios, playing the part of the intelligent audience (ourselves), correctly interprets as a hint to give his guest (Odysseus/Homer) a cloak to keep out the night’s cold.

Dante is even more present in his epic, and he is being scolded again and again: first by Virgil and then by Beatrice, for his human moral blunderings and misapprehensions of what he sees. The double quotes now become an amazing guarantee of the truth—or at least the allegorical truth—of what he tells us. We can trust the scientist who tells us that his experiment failed. The author surrenders his own trustworthiness to the truths about which he has been mistaken.

Milton, too, does not settle for one initial invocation and confession. He returns in Book III to give his passionate plea for light in his blindness (thus identifying himself, in this amazing hall of mirrors, with Homer himself and again deflecting any merely autobiographical interpretation). More subtly he insists all along that we must read him with suspicion, for after all he is seeing Paradise with fallen “eyes,” prone to make fallen that which is not yet so—and even shows us Eden first through the eyes of Satan, the only fallen being there present.

Eschenbach begins his epic of Parzifal with an elaborate argument justifying his own strange crabbed metaphorical style. Here the self-mockery wins us to him and makes us the more ready to take in the beautiful details, the mystery of Trevrizent’s initial but necessary lie to Parzifal about the guardians of the Grail being lost angels, the ugliness of the wise guide Sigune, and the odd encounter with the fisherman on the second approach to Munsalvaesch.

Wordsworth outdoes all in the tradition by making the invocation/confession into the whole poem. As the poem depicts the accumulating self-consciousness of the poet, each time there is a new viewpoint, a new insight, a new frame-tale emerges. The poet sees the poem with fresh eyes as “I” the subject turns to “me” the object, and the poem itself is taking so much time to compose that a large part of the poet’s increasingly reflexive identity is being forged by the poem itself. Here there is a multiple ventriloquism—the older poet throwing his voice into the mature poet, the mature poet into the youthful poet, the youth into the child. And yet it is the child’s voice that is animating all those voices:

Six changeful years have vanished since I first

poured out (saluted by that quickening breeze

which met me issuing from the City’s walls)

a glad preamble to this Verse: I sang

aloud, with fervour irresistible

of short-lived transport, like a torrent bursting

from a black thunder-cloud, down Scafell’s side

to rush and disappear.

(VII.1–8)

So one could argue that in addition to the epic being the story of a people and of the universe, it is also a gigantic form of lyric; but in response to the likes of Bakhtin, the epic is far more “dialogical” than any novel, since its Gödelian questioning of its own premises leaves its story utterly free for anyone’s possession. Epic is always already post-modern in this sense, but it has not had to concede any of its veridical power in the process. Its truths stand for themselves.

But is this characteristic, of the constitutive self-reference (and its humbling by the possessing muse) borne out in epics from other times and parts of the world? The answer is that if anything, the first person (and its negation by the claim of ventriloquism) is even more pronounced outside the “West,” the double quotes more multiplied. The Popol Vuh is insistent:

This is the beginning of the Ancient Word, here in this place called

Quiché. Here we shall inscribe, we shall implant the Ancient Word,

the potential and source for everything done in the citadel of

Quiché, in the nation of Quiché people.

And here we shall take up the demonstration, revelation, and

account of how things were put in shadow and brought to light . . .

The poet is saying what he is going to say. Tedlock’s translation is evidently laboring to convey the simultaneity of the acts of naming, of demonstration, of revealing, of picture-drawing, of planting (as corn), and of creation itself. These first self-referential and self-validating words are echoed throughout the story itself. The point is that if such words as these were never uttered, coherent and probative language itself could not exist, for it would have no axioms for itself to be based upon. And if the whole course of creation be taken (as for instance some contemporary quantum cosmologists suggest) as the emergence of coherent naming systems that are able to observe what was previously only potential into actual being, then this account is not just descriptive but prescriptive. What is being emphasized—even more clearly than in the book of Genesis, which St. John’s glosses as “In the beginning was the Word”—is that the very words that the Popol Vuh storyteller uses at this moment performatively and retroactively create the world. Like the pronouncement of the rules for a new game, like the words “I do” in the marriage ritual, like the signing of a bill into law, and like the words of a Catholic priest consecrating the host, the epic storyteller’s speech act makes a new reality come into being.

In a more playful but equally profound way, the Mahabharata opens with an explicit act of self-reference and self-validation. But like everything else in the Mahabharata, this act is multiplied, mirrored, and elaborated into a delightful and bewildering game, so that the poem itself is enclosed by multiple frame tales, multiple quote marks. Vyasa the poet has dictated his poem to the god Ganesha, who adds an account of his own origins, as a sort of password key to the written text. This text has been taught by Vyasa to his disciple Vaisampayana, who recites it to three hearers—the king Janamejana, grandson of the poem’s hero Arjuna, to Sauti, and to Vyasa himself. Sauti later recites the poem (with its verifying provenance) to Saunaka, from whom, presumably, we readers get it in turn. Is Vyasa, who is alive at the time this “final” version is performed, responsible for the transmission of the frame tales and implied certification, as well as the main tale? We are reminded of the way classic Chinese scroll paintings are certified by the chops of successive emperors, which also certify the previous chops. We might also recall the old joke:

One dark and stormy night, three men sat round a fire. And one said to another: ‘Jake, tell us a tale.’ And this is the tale he told:

“‘One dark and stormy night, three men sat round a fire. And one said to another: “Jake . . . ”’

More confusing still, one of the first events to be recounted, after the creation of the universe, is the miraculous birth of Vyasa himself; and Vyasa is to play an important part in the action of the main story of the Pandavas, a participant-observer. (The tricks of postmodern fiction are not new.) In mathematical terms, Vyasa as poet is the set of all the sets in the poem; but he is also one of the sets. Is he a member of the set of all sets that are members of themselves, or the set of all sets that are not members of themselves? Can he contain himself in the poem, who contains the poem that contains him? If he is an inventor of fictions, can he be one of the fictions? This Cretan has truly lied himself into existence as lying Cretan, retroactively turning the lie into the truth. We trust him because he is there before us, lying to us. The world, after all, itself lies to us, and therefore, qua veil of maya or illusion, it exists. Nonexistence could not lie; the veil of illusion is a real veil of illusion, and Vyasa claims no more for it than that. “The poet,” says Philip Sidney, “nothing lieth, for he nothing affirmeth.”

This is Russell’s paradox—the village barber shaves everyone in the village who does not shave himself: who shaves the barber? Analysis of this paradox led in the history of mathematical logic to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which states that because such statements as “This statement is unprovable” are legitimate, unprovable, and true, there must be truths that preexist proof.¹ Only if some axioms are simply assumed on faith—or performatively enacted by speech act—can one reason (mathematically or logically) at all. To even state Gödel’s paradox in words requires, if one unpacks the adjective “this,” an infinite set of nested quote marks: “this statement: ‘This statement: “This statement: ‘This statement . . . is unprovable’ is unprovable” is unprovable’ is unprovable.” Perhaps the supreme unforgettable oddity of all basic creation myths is a signal that we are not to take them as reasoning within a preexisting set of grammatical, lexical, and logical rules, but a specification of the rules themselves. “This piece looks like a horse and moves one square orthogonally and one diagonally, and can jump other pieces” is not a good move in Chess.

Though the Mahabharata resembles many other epics in its framing devices, it adapts this general device to its specific cultural practice—as indeed the others do too. The Vedic disciplines of meditation require a similar dizzying hall of mirrors, in that the process of cleansing one’s mind of distraction itself provokes distractions that must in turn be cleansed, so that the illusion of the self as a fixed thing dissolves in the activity itself to lay bare the inner soul or Atman as a dynamic of subject–object rather than as an object viewable by a subject. One discipline, recommended in the Upanishads, is the repetition of a mantra. The periodicity of that repetition is the same as the periodicity of the eye’s response to an ambiguous gestalt image like the faces–vase illusion, the rabbit–gull illusion, or the Necker cube. Every three seconds or so—the length of the chant line—the visual system finds itself unable to maintain one interpretation of the illusion, and must switch to the other. The concentric squares, circles, and other geometrical figures that enclose the inner space of the mandala serve a similar psychological purpose: the figure–ground or frame– reality distinction is disrupted, leading to a state of chairos where the subject–object duality disappears.

By the same basic logic as the Gödel theorem the Mahabharata is claiming to be a set of unprovable but true axioms upon which a world can be created or, in mythological terms, churned out of the original sea of milk by the play of dialectical opposites. And the storytelling situation itself is a sort of proof or demonstration of the originary validity of the speech act that performs the poem, with its interpretive and epistemological universe, into being.

In the Heike, the self-referential framing is much more muted (as befits Japanese minimalist aesthetics) than is the case with the Mahabharata ’s postmodern pyrotechnics. The storyteller is modest and self-effacing, but he is no less definitely there, even when he comments, in some scene of agonizing pathos, that one can scarcely imagine, nor can words express, the suffering of the victim. His most frequent means of meta-commentary is his characteristic device of drawing a parallel between an incident in the struggle and an ancient classical story from China, both pointing a moral and dignifying the heroic stature of the story. Roman writers—Virgil and Plutarch of cour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• In Memoriam
• Introduction
• 1. The Epic Storyteller
• 2. The Creation Myth
• 3. The Hero
• 4. The Quest
• 5. Kinship Troubles
• 6. Natural Man and the Fall
• 7. The Descent into the Underworld
• 8. The Founding of the City
• 9. The History of the People
• 10. Setting an Example
• 11. A New Medium of Communication
• 12. Conclusion: Epic Form and Epic Content
• A Bibliography of Epic Texts
• General Bibliography
• Index