Reading the Past Across Space and Time

Receptions and World Literature

Brenda Deen Schildgen,Ralph Hexter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781137558855
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Featuring leading scholars in their fields, this book examines receptions of ancient and early modern literary works from around the world (China, Japan, Ancient Maya, Ancient Mediterranean, Ancient India, Ancient Mesopotamia) that have circulated globally across time and space (from East to West, North to South, South to West). Beginning with the premise of an enduring and revered cultural past, the essays go on to show how the circulation of literature through translation and other forms of reception in fact long predates modern global society; the idea of national literary canons have existed just over a hundred years and emerged with the idea of national educational curricula. Highlighting the relationship of culture and politics in which canons are created, translated, promulgated, and preserved, this book argues that such nationally-defined curricula were challenged by critics and writers in the wake of the Second World War.

Part I
Epic Receptions

© The Author(s) 2016

Brenda Deen Schildgen and Ralph Hexter (eds.)Reading the Past Across Space and TimeGeocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies10.1057/978-1-137-55885-5_2

Begin Abstract

Epic Worlds

Ralph Hexter¹

(1)

Classics/Comparative Literature, UC Davis, Davis, CA, USA

“Receptions: Reading the Past Across Time and Space,” September 27–29, 2013, UC Davis, Davis CA; this paper, September 27. Thanks to Dr. Laura Pfuntner and Dr. Uwe Vagelpohl for their assistance, especially Dr. Pfuntner in turning the original talk into the current version. It has not been practical (nor did it seem necessary) to provide the same level of documentation throughout; I have tried to add footnotes on details less likely to be familiar to many readers. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

End Abstract

In her influential and inspiring volume, Wai Chee Dimock models thinking about literature—literary forms and literary linkages—across “deep time.” ¹ It is very much in that spirit that I meditate in this current essay on epic past, present, and future. In light of the 60,000-foot view I offer, we can dispense with a lengthy anatomy of the genre of “epic” or even a watertight definition of the term. By “epic” I simply mean works like the Iliad and Odyssey , the Aeneid , the Chanson de Roland and Nibelungenlied , the Mahabharata or Gilgamesh , the topic of Dimock’s chapter in this volume. To frame the questions I pose, I will err in the direction of inclusivity, and run roughshod over distinctions that have been made between “epic and romance” and “primary and secondary epic,” to name but two. And while I look back to the standard and traditional epics, epic in the sense I mean, it need not be restricted to verse, indeed, not even to sung or written texts. Other media are possible. Finally, in the spirit of this volume, I am eager to think about works from traditions far from Europe, even in cases where proper scholars of those traditions might well insist on calling the genre of such works by another name. In a global perspective, one would of course want to recur to all these elided distinctions as well as look back at what we’ve known as the rather standard “epic tradition” and that I’ve invoked in order to rethink the tradition itself from external perspectives. While the present essay cannot hope to achieve such an ambitious goal, I want to move toward such a project, since the last thing we want to do is leave the apparent “center” unquestioned in its seeming centrality.

Let me start with the older epics we know. Let me try to bring to mind the time of traditional telling and retelling of stories orally that predated the written texts of the Iliad and Odyssey , a pattern of tale-telling and oral transmission attested in many other cultures. Tales were no doubt told about this or that exploit, possibly about hunts for beasts now extinct ² and perhaps even of the battles between Homines sapientes and the last of the Neanderthals. Indeed, given some geneticists’ interpretation of the genomes of Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals, ³ who knows if there was not a Paris and Helen or Jason and Medea story from 50,000 years ago, albeit one with issue?

Lest the reader be alarmed, I will not attempt to reconstruct any such speculative tale. My point is that while we can guess that stories were told as soon as human linguistic capacity reached the threshold for story-telling, what was retold, and reshaped and refined over generations in the retelling, served not merely to record the past. In creating memory it gave it meaning to the retellers and their listeners. It was through the sum of memories that different peoples established the very meaning of the communities of which they were a part.

So far I have been galumphing about like a latter-day Herder or Wolf . ⁴ My purpose here is simply to set a beginning, a time when transmitted stories constituted the memory bank of a community and in turn gave it meaning as precisely that community and no other one.

Whatever the state of affairs when what we recognize as epic first arose, it is entirely proper for us to ask how epic has evolved, and how it has been received by later listeners, and at a certain point readers, in a multitude of very different settings. For the purpose of this survey I will highlight a few of those moments, as Greek epic was retold in the Roman world, as the Mediterranean met the Germanic, and the “old world” the so-called “new.” I will adduce in passing some examples of the ways practitioners of the tradition reshaped it to fit these novel situations, ways we might regard as relatively conservative but which also reveal productive tensions. In this slide-show of sorts, I will at least pose a question about what is happening in this tradition today, when travel, migration, and instant communication constitute the way of our world.

“Let us begin with Zeus, whom we men never leave unspoken”—so begins Aratus ’ Phaenomena . ⁵ And since the Zeus of epic is Homer , it is with Homer’s Iliad , or the Iliad ascribed to Homer, that we begin. The Iliad takes us, as it long ago took those who heard it in forms approximating the version we know as Homer’s, to the city of Troy, in what is now the northwest corner of Asian Turkey, or Asia Minor as it was once called. Greeks have been besieging the citadel now for nine years, all because the Trojan prince Paris, once a guest in Menelaus’ home, ran off with Menelaus’ wife Helen. But as this hosting itself suggests, this is not a struggle between nations that have no familiarity. Indeed, there are linkages of guest-friendship across the battle lines that have been drawn, and in some cases consanguinity. Perhaps the most famous example would be that of Glaucus and Diomedes, who are related through their grandfathers Bellerophon and Oeneus (Il. 6.119-236). Indeed, they are about to fight when, through a vaunt of Glaucus, Diomedes realizes they are related. Instead of fighting, they exchange arms (which has some humorous dimensions). Glaucus eventually dies at the hand of Ajax.

The Greek fighting force is itself composed—as we know from the famous catalogue of book 2—of contingents from many different places, from settlements on the Greek mainland as well as islands. Crete, Rhodes, and Ithaca are but three of the more well-known of these islands. Achilles’ troops, the Myrmidons, are regarded as somewhat stranger, but all are Danaans. Aiding the Trojans are troops from all over Asia Minor, from Lydia, Pelasgians from Larissa, Thracians, Paphlagonians, the Halizones “from Alybe far away,” Mysians, Phrygians “from Askania far away,” and Karians (as listed in 2.819-end). There’s also “the proud Hippomolgoi, drinkers of milk,” and the Abioi, “most righteous of all men” (perhaps Scythians?) at the beginning of Book 13. Whatever difference in tongues we might posit must have existed in a reality that would correspond to such a story is not significant in the Iliad .

There are peoples even more far-flung, and of course there are Penthesilea and her fellow Amazons, but one does not really leave the pale until we hear of the Ethiopians, referenced in both the Iliad and the Odyssey . Zeus himself tarries 12 days among them, these blessed “most distant of men” (eskhatoi andrôn), in the first book of the Iliad, and in the Odyssey reference is made to Poseidon’s attendance at one of their feasts. They are, tellingly, hosts of Olympians and other gods (e.g., Iris [Iliad]) rather than companions of mere mortals, and their placement at the ends of the earth makes them boundary figures in more than one sense. At the risk of citing an over-used phrase, one might say that they fall into the category of the “good to think with.”

The Ethiopians were not at the muster at Troy, with—as appears now and again, though with a regularity that we must count it as a trope in itself—a singular exception. In this case, it is Memnon. Memnon was known as the “king of the Ethiopians” and his liminality is marked already by his semi-divine parentage: he is the son of Eos, the dawn, and Tithonos. His uncle was Priam, so of course he came to Troy’s defense. He was slain by none other than Achilles himself. He shared another distinction with Achilles: his armor also was made by the god Hephaistos.

Not all of this is in Homer , of course, and I have crossed a line into another epic , now lost: the Aithiopis sometimes ascribed to Arktinos of Miletus and dated to the seventh, possibly the eighth century BCE. The Aithiopis belonged to the so-called epic “cycle,” of which the two epics we call Homeric are the only fully preserved examples. The Aithiopis was post-Homeric in more than one sense; in terms of the sequence of the “story,” it took up where the Iliad ended, and covered incredibly important “territory,” narratively speaking: from the arrival of the Amazons and their subsequent routing, then the arrival of Memnon and Achilles’ victory over him, to the death of Achilles himself and the argument between Ajax and Odysseus over the slain hero’s armor. How much further it went, we cannot for certain say, nor can one say whether the appearance of both the Amazons and Memnon marks an interest in exotica characteristic of a new stage of the Greek’s sense of placement in the world that we will see more of in Herodotus . For we must remember that the “ex” in both “exotic” and “exoteric” refers to the “outside.”

Before visual maps, the naming of peoples and their distribution in catalogues and through epithets was the only way to suggest to audiences what existed, and especially who resided, beyond their own territories. While the Iliad brings peoples to the citadel of Troy, the Odyssey , as one of the poems about the Greeks’ home-comings (nostoi), runs a different course, tracking the travels of Odysseus back to Ithaca. If the first narrative of travel, that of Odysseus’ son Telemakhos, sticks to familiar Greek territory—Telemakhos leaves Ithaca to visit Sparta, where he is hosted by Menelaus reunited with Helen—Odysseus, once he has passed by Thrace, enters topography that would be exceptionally hard to map. Where does Kalypso live, where Circe? Where do the Lotos Eaters have their home, where Polyphemus and the other Kyklopes? (Hard to map, but as easy to describe in Homeric Greek as Ithaca itself.) All of these figure in Odysseus’ own narration to the Phaeacians. Indeed, where is Phaeacia to be sited? All these places, even more, all these peoples, seem to inhabit a moral geography more than a literally Mediterranean one. As such, these various peoples, whether imaginary or not, define what it is to be Greek, and, ultimately, what it is to be Odysseus, by virtue of being something else, just as Penelope appears prominently as in a negative—in other words, she is not-Helen and not-Klytaemnestra—before we actually spend a great deal of time with her, narratively speaking, in the second half of the Odyssey. It seems worth noting that in that same portion of the poem, Odysseus tells other stories, each a subtle variant on the other and each crafted carefully to meet his needs in different situations. In each of them, he feigns to be a traveler from a very real place, Crete. He is, in other words, presenting a sort of not-Odysseus, although not quite in the same way. (Homer has Odysseus trade on an old calumny among the Greeks, namely, that all Cretans are liars. He is of course lying, for he is not Cretan; the more Cretan he.)

One could quite easily include in this unfolding sequence the Argonautica of the third-century poet Apollonius Rhodius . A highly wrought account of Jason ’s trip with his Argonauts to Colchis, on the distant eastern littoral of the Black Sea, to recover the “golden fleece,” the Argonautica offers depictions of many lands and many peoples exotic to the Greeks. It is on this trip that he meets the beautiful sorceress Medea , who commits heinous crimes to assist Jason in his theft and then flees with him. Even though the theft is represented as the recovery of lost Greek goods, Apollonius’...