For Epic:
Space. Space and Time. Memory and Lament. The Commonality of Keening.
Bringing the dialects together, like tribes. Incorporation of the blown
apart words.
Against:
Conservatism of Response. Rote Learning. (for instance, those Akkadian
scribes, Ali). Stereotypicality. You Always Know What the Ending Will Be.
I don't blame Mark for his feeling, nor do I disagree with much of what he
says.
db
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 11:41 PM
Subject: The epic: pros and cons
> I promised myself after a week at the bottom of a canyon that I wouldn't
> enter into any really dumb topics, but those ae what we seem to be stuck
> with. So here goes:
>
> The Myth of the Hero's Journey, as transmitted by Wagner through Neitszche
> through Jung by way of Campbell (with a tip of the hat to Eliade--an
> unsavory lot for the most part) is a subset of the Rite du Passage and is
> universal. A paraphrase: your ignorance or mistakes or simple growth cause
> problems and you learn how to deal with them or die. Not in itself very
> interesting except to those (like the above-mentioned) who get off on the
> fact that We're All the Same (for Wagner the We was Germans) except for
> those pesky Jews. Novel or poem or epic aren't very interesting if the
> characters don't change. What's interesting, as in most human affairs, is
> the differences, the particularities, that no two stories of change are
> ever the same.
>
> So not a very good defining trait for a genre. It happens that the epic as
> understood in the West was conceived in the beginning as an origin myth
for
> the group that told it--the hellenes begat Hellas, and then hero was a
> forebearer or a member of the class of forebearers. Virgil was quite
> self-conscious about this--he was trying to borrow for Latin culture's
> inferiority complex the parenthood of Greece. In the 17th century Europe
> erupted with epics whose heroes had, like Aeneas, had escaped the flames
at
> Troy, all aimed at creating a myth that at once defined the inhabitants of
> a given country as a more coherent set than merely those who happened by
> accident to inhabited the domain of a particular ruling bureaucracy and in
> a few cases even spoke a common language. Somewhat like what's going on in
> the Balkans these days. Nationalist, or at least statist, propaganda, and
> exclusionary, or at least exceptionalist, to the point of racism. Wagner's
> adaptation of the Niebelungenleid is a later example, as is Omeros. The
> sense has been that the political unit has no legitimacy if it's not
united
> by a commonly accepted legend.
>
> What relevance does this sort of project have to the world as most of us
> know it? Why would any sane human being want to do this now? Isn't it
> rather like aspiring to write Ivanhoe?
>
> Mark
|