I was thinking of gypsy tales, Eulenspiegel, Gilgamesh, folk tales...
(I'll pass over the "oral traditions are not literature" question,
which is very wobbly - there's lots to learn about story telling from
oral tales).
I'd say the primary shape of epic is circularity. And Sappho's "How
like a god he seems to me" is a narrative as much as Homer is.
I can't see that that the structural demands of story in prose and
poetry are very different. You have to tell a story in a way that
commands attention. I ended up thinking that was a primarily question
of rhythmic control, in the sense of large movements and at the level
of the sentence/line.
I've never got linearity as applied to story, unless it means one
thing after another moving forward in literal time, as Hal suggests;
in which case lyric is definitely linear too. Every story goes
backwards and forwards, because it reflects how memory works - I can't
think of a single epic poem without divagations and distortions of
imagined time - the lnvocation of the muses in the present that begins
the Iliad or the stories of the gods, the bizarre leaps back and forth
in Beowulf, Aeneas's visits to the dead, Milton's sudden moving
description of his blindness in Paradise Lost, etc etc.
xA
>
> "simplest kinds of story telling (oral tales, say) are often far too
> fragmentary" - depends, I suppose, what you're thinking of. Marko the
> Prince and other oral epics of Serbia - very straightforward and Homeric.
> Likewise Gilgamesh, probably based on oral tales. And then the crucial term
> is "based on." I was talking about literature, not oral traditions.
>
> Vergil: Augustus and Rome. Tasso: aristocratic Catholic Europe. Camoes:
> imperial Portugal and expansionist Europe. Milton: the radical Reformation.
> Nazim Hikmet: the international proletariat. Tribes.
>
> The inherent requirements of narrative poetry are very different from those
> of the novel. "[Moving] forward and backward in space and time in ways that
> are not straightforward at all" gets in the way. Linearity (I'll drop the
> quotes), coherence, relentless cumulative power, are needed. Their absence
> - a refusal to differentiate between narrative and lyric - makes Walcott's
> Omeros unreadable. Their presence makes Glyn Maxwell's Time's Fool
> lastingly enjoyable and useful, despite the relative triviality of its
> theme.
>
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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