An epic view of the human? 1

Of all the literary genres, it is epic that is experienced by contemporary critics as most alien and obsolete. There is no doubting that the Homeric tradition of epic still exerts an extraordinary influence over the telling of stories, and even overspills literature to speak into art, culture, politics and war. The great Greek and Latin epics of the past are still read, but are arguably not emulated; or, at least, they are incorporated by way of ironic reference. There is, then, by no means a consensus as to whether epic has an ongoing relevance – which is not a question of whether the Iliad or the Aeneid cannot be read with any benefit today, but of whether the epic mode enables an author to say about the human condition that which needs to be said in our present time. Frederick Turner suggests:

Perhaps, in a skeptical and self-critical time, we are embarrassed by the emotions and partisanships aroused by the half-remembered nobility and grandeur of the old stories. We are so much more conscious, self-aware, and disillusioned than that now.[1]

That’s as may be. Though Turner is at pains to show that there are contemporary epics being written, including his own, he also has to concede that epic is not the preferred form of contemporary literary authors. 

As with each of the genres of literature, the definition of the genre is not simply a matter of ticking off a list of formal structures. There is with most theorists an agreement that different formal features arise because of different thematic concerns; and in turn, the preference for certain formal features generates a particular perspective on the world that then becomes characteristic of that genre. Thus, we may validly speak not only of an epic in formal terms but also of an ‘epic sensibility’.  

As we shall see, two of the best-known twentieth century theorists, György Lukács[2] and Mikhail Bakhtin[3], compare the epic with the novel (as opposed to say ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’). The Hungarian theorist Lukács published his The Theory of the Novel in book form in 1920 (English translation, 1963).[4] Ostensibly, it is a work about the development of the novel; however, it is subtitled A historico-philosopical essay of the forms of great epic literature. For Lukács, the novel is what the epic has become. The narrative that underpins the work is a description of how the great epic poems flourished under historical conditions that no long prevail. Lukács begins with an arresting description of the ‘happy ages’ – by which he means chiefly the era of Homer - in which

…there is not yet any interiority, for there is not yet any exterior, any ‘othernesss’ for the soul. The soul goes out to seek adventure, it lives through adventure, but it does not know the torment of seeking and the real danger of finding; such a soul never stakes itself; it does not yet know that it can lose itself, and it never thinks of having to look for itself. Such an age is the age of the epic.[5]

That is: the inner struggle which engenders the psychological inwardness of the novel – the struggle to overcome the self’s otherness to itself. The Greek epic is a world in which there is already an answer to the question ‘how can life become essential?’[6] The epic describes a ‘totality’, in which the world is almost oppressively coherent. Meaning oozes out of every passing event: every goose flying north for summer may turn out to be an omen of the future. It is (though Lukács doesn’t use this term) a theological vision of the universe in which destiny is perhaps impeded for a time but never ultimately diverted from its course. ‘For the epic, the world at any given moment is an ultimate principle.’[7] The epic poet did not have to struggle to explain transcendent realities, since the gods frequently walked on the ground.

For Lukács, the era of Greek civilization was echoed by the world of the Christian Middle Ages, in which once again the whole created order was thought to be suffused with transcendence and redolent with meaning. All human actions were enclosed with the divine providence. The Enlightenment has unraveled this enclosed and total system and introduced a radical open-endedness and uncertainty to the world, and separated out the transcendent from the immanent, as Kant did with his description of the noumenal and the phenomenal realms. The novel inserts itself in this moment of history as an attempt to give totality to a world in which totality is no longer obvious or directly revealed by a deity. Totality may indeed be discovered in the novel; but it is no longer something that is to be presumed upon. Lukács writes gnomically: ‘The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.’[8]

What of the human being? Lukács makes a number of comments about the contrast between the epic view of the human and the human being that emerges from the world of the novel. In the epic hero we do not encounter an individual meeting his destiny but an individual carrying the burden of the destiny of a community. There is not a personality as such. Interiority is simply not the interest of the epic, since the individual is not interesting in and of himself; what he does has import because he represents a people. Epic heroes are unlikely to be low-born for this reason, for they are connected by destiny to many others; as Lukács says, ‘the epic hero, as bearer of his destiny, is not lonely [in contrast to the hero of the novel], for this destiny connects him by indissoluble threads to the community whose fate is crystallised in his own.’[9]

The theo-anthropology of the epic is, as Lukács sees it, governed by the way in which the empirical world of space and time encloses human life with its order and beauty. Man knows his place in this cosmos under the government of the gods, a government which is constantly (though opaquely) being revealed to him. There are no Nietszchean übermensch here; even the rage of Achilles is not exercised in any defiance of the gods. Lukács writes:

Living empirical man is always the subject of the epic, but his creative, life-mastering arrogance is transformed in the great epics into humility, contemplation, speechless wonder at the luminous meaning which, so unexpectedly, so naturally had become visible to him, an ordinary human being in the midst of ordinary life.[10]

The appearance of the divine subdues the human. This gives the impression that Lukács views the epic as emerging from a kind of pre-fallen world in which, even though there is struggle and death, it is all at least a facet of the extraordinary design of Zeus. The epic has little to do with madness or crime: these are not explanations in the epic, since these are chiefly psychological categories in which the epic has so little actual belief.

Lukács limits his analysis of epic to the world of the Greeks, indeed to Homer, who alone he recognizes as a proper epic poet. He concedes a place to Dante, but only to the first two books of the Divine Comedy. This narrowness of this field seems to jar against his attempt to see the novel as the epic carried on under new conditions. The contrast between the novel and the epic in terms of interiority and the totality of life seems so crucial to him that it is difficult to imagine what the continuity between the two categories might be. Nevertheless, Lukács has recognized that a particular theo-anthropology is deeply embedded in the epic genre: it is a narration of the human experience according to a particular arrangement of time and space and those (the gods) who organize them.

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[1] Turner.

[2] Gyœrgy Lukács, The Theory of the Novel : A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans., Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971).

[3] M. M. Bakhtin, Michael Holquist, and Caryl Emerson, The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays, University of Texas Press Slavic Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

[4] In an later introduction to the work, Lukács speaks almost with embarrassment of his earlier writing. Nevertheless, political conditions in the Hungary of the 1960s were scarcely congenial to scholarly free speech.

[5] Lukács, p. 30.

[6] Ibid., p. 35.

[7] Ibid., p. 46.

[8] Ibid., p. 88.

[9] Lukács @ p. 67

[10] Lukács, p. 50.