In Our Time - The Epic

Episode Date: February 6, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the epic. In his essay 'Why the novel matters', DH Lawrence argued that the novel contained all aspects of life. Perhaps better placed to make that claim is the epic. From tackling questions of identity, history, warfare, mortality and the ways of the Gods to narrating tales of magic and supernatural creatures, it was the Greek and Roman poems of Homer and Virgil that underpinned and explained the position of men in the world. And it was these narratives of heroic actions and grand deeds that were to form a template from which many future epics would be constructed from Chaucer's Troilus and Cressayde to Milton’s Paradise Lost. But who are the heroes of these epics? To what extent was the classical epic a political project, a means of creating a founding myth for empire? How did the Renaissance revive the form and how successful were writers such as Milton in rendering the Christian story an epic? And what does the novel owe to the epic?With, John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University; Karen Edwards, Lecturer in English at Exeter University; Oliver Taplin, Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in his essay Why the Novel Matters, D.H. Lawrence argued that the novel contained all aspects of life. Perhaps even better place to make that claim is the epic,

from tackling questions of identity, history, warfare, mortality, and the ways of the gods, to narrating tales of magic and supernatural creatures, it was the Greek and Roman poems of Homer and Virgil that underpinned and explained the position of men in the world. And it was these narratives of heroic actions and grand deeds that were to form a template from which many future epics would be constructed, from Chaucer's Troilson Crescentor to Milton's Paradise Lost,

to Joyce's Ulysses, to John Ford's westerns. But who are the heroes of these epics? To what extent was the classical epic a political project a means of creating a founding myth for empire. How did the Renaissance revive the form and how successful were writers such as Milton in rendering the Christian story an epic? And what do novels and films today owe to the epic?

With me to discuss the epic of John Kerry, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, Karen Edwards, a lecture in English at Exeter University, and Oliver Taplin, Professor of Greek Literature at Oxford University. John Kerry, what exactly do we mean by the epic? Well, I think we use the term epic for the quite complicated fallout from three classical works,

the two Homer poems, and Virgil's Enid. And they have some things in common, and in some ways they're very different, it seems to me. What they have in common is that they're about battle or the surround of battle, and that it's not just battle, but that their scope is cosmic. supernatural gods and goddesses, not just a human battle, but something that relates to the cosmos.

Secondly, they're related in a style that is quite unlike what the culture speaks. It's a high style, an exalted, transcendent style. It's taken out of everyday life. Thirdly, they're about maleness, I think, and about male bonding. and indeed women are given a marginal or sometimes an oppositional role in them. So those are the things I think that they're having common and those features go down some of them into later epics.

In other ways they're quite different, I think, in that the Iliad is a battle epic. The Odyssey is an adventure story really, a very strange adventure story. I think the Odyssey is the original magic realist narrows. if magic realism comes from that, I think, with strange monsters and chantresses and so on, interfering with a human story, which is human,

in the end, very human, when Odysseus returns. And then the third of them, the Enid, is different, again, I think, in that it's more distinctly a national epic. In some ways a very dangerous thing, It pits your culture as supremely destined against other cultures that will be obliterated. The fact that the Iliad, the Odyssey and Enid are in verse, does that mean that epics have to, very simply, does that mean that epics have to be in verse to be epics? I think that that gradually changes.

That's to say my reading of how epic filters down through the ages would end up. in Joyce's Ulysses, and that's not in verse. It would go through Tolstoy's War and Peace, and that's not in verse. But I take it that the epic began in song, I suppose that's the theory, that it was something that was not written down. Primary epic was sung.

It was a social event of a particular kind. What evidence do you have for that, John? Well, I'm not a classicist, and I have only the evidence that classicists seemed a socialized. that that's how it was, but what the evidence, the linguistic evidence for those I don't know. We have a classical scholar, as it happens. To hand, on my right, Oliver Taplin.

What evidence is there for... John Kerry has said it was sung and said that he's not a classical scholar, so you are, was it? And if so, how do we know? Well, I suppose we know because these poems were created by poets who learnt how to be poets

by listening to other poets. Writing was only just coming into Greece at the time of Homer. In its very early days, about 700. When writing was extremely slow and extremely clumsy, and it wasn't until a couple hundred years later that people could write sufficiently quickly or read sufficiently quickly for literature to become a reading activity.

So it's a hearing activity, and poets learn how to tell long stories by listening to other poets and picking up the techniques and their audiences are educated in those techniques. So we're not into a reading culture, There's no way that these poems could have been created to be read. What are they saying? What's behind this, Oliver Taplin?

Are they saying this is the way men, we have to stick with the men for the moment, should live? This is an aristocratic society that I'm describing. These are our heroes. Are they affirming the great principles or the great objects they see of being alive and being a warrior and being a man at the time? Are they subverting it? What are they in that cruxies? Rather, Chris, I'm sorry about that.

What are they doing there? No, I mean, that is a very good question. And I think to some extent we inevitably read back into, if you like, it's political tendency, our own reading of what we've wanted to be. I mean, in a sense, there's a big divide between those who would say these poems telling the great stories of great humans of the past are bolstering aristocratic values.

They're saying, stick with the good old rulers, they're the people who look after you. Whereas one can put against that, you can say, well, actually the rulers in the poems are far from good role models. I mean, take Agamemnon. Spencer said, Agamemnon is the example of the good governor. But actually, Agamonon makes the most terrible hash of things. I mean, he's bad at Judge Murrell.

He alienates his best allies. And he ends up humiliatingly having to climb down. He actually doesn't say anything in the whole of the last third of the Iliad. The last thing he says, I'm very, very sorry. made a terrible mistake. So Odysseus, he's a sort of role model, but he's not a role model for an aristocratic ruler, is he? He goes to Troy with 12 ships full of men,

over a thousand men, doesn't manage to bring one single one of those men home. So as a role model for an aristocrat who should look after a society, he's a role model for all sorts of other things, but not that. So I would want to say that these poems are actually questioning power structures. I'm not saying this is exactly their primary purpose, but at the same time as telling stories of human depth, they question where power should lie,

what kind of bonds is it that holds humans together, what kind of thing makes society stable, under what circumstances is it all right to be angry, under what circumstances should you push revenge? Questions of this kind are implicit in what at the same time very human stories. 600 years after home, just to take a little step forward, Karen Edwards.

Virgil writes the Enid under the Emperor Augustus, partly to please and glorify, satisfy, celebrate the Emperor Augustus. To what extent was this, can you see this as a direct successor to the Iliad and the Odyssey? Yes, I wonder if one could even make an analogy. It is often said that we have Christ's teachings

existing by themselves, but that it was Paul who turned the teachings of Christ into Christianity. And sometimes I wonder if one could say that about Virgil, that it was actually Virgil's perception that there was something called Epic or that could be perceived as Epic that was there to be built on that actually created what we now call Epic.

Why, can you just explain to people who haven't got a grasp of it? Well, like myself, right? In what sense this was a political project? Why was it important for Augustus that this be done for him? Well, of course, he wanted to be praised as any autocrat might, and one wants to have one's deeds immortalized, and Virgil was recognized in his day as being an outstanding poet.

So that's understandable. Also, Augustus, as unconstitutional as he was, he saw himself and rightly as at least finally bringing an end to civil war to the famine that was also produced by civil war and various kinds of poverty depredations that Italy had been subjected to because of that. And I think that certainly Virgil was willing to admit that. He had grown up when Italy was really in terrible shape.

At the same time, because Augustus was so unconstitutional and had really ended Rome as a republic. That also had to be registered, the pain of loss. One could see in the Aeneid, in a way, Eneas is renouncing of Dido as emblematic of what has to be given up in order to achieve. Diodo is one of the few interesting women in these epics, isn't she? And Eneas does the dirty on her, really,

and the abandoned woman sacrifices herself on a pyre as he leaves. The absence of women in epics, is that something that, what we have to register it, but what do we make of it? I'm not sure I completely agree that, with John,

that Epic celebrates maleness. I think very often, John did say that women are oppositional, but I think what they also do is to point to the limitations of a male ethos. And I think it's, to me, it's not surprising

that I think typically the most, the favorite books of the and the Indian are those that involved Idaho. I would agree with Karen on that, that there is a, it's more complicated than that. I remember that the Iliad actually ends with the lamentings

of the three leading Trojan women for Hector. The poem actually ends with the woman's voice if you like. It's, while it is about the glory that can be won by war, it is also about the glory that can be won by human interactions like those between Hector and Andromarchy, like those between Prime and Achilles, like Penelope in the Odyssey.

They win their glory too. Karen Ed, what you want to come in here? Well, I was, again, just to insist that Epic does indeed complicate. It's one of the things that distinguishes Epic from adventure story. But also, in terms of the question of maleness, it also depends on which Epic you're talking about. It seems to me that Epic also tends to shatter the mold each time an Epic is, is created, then it has to re-examine everything. And it seems to me that one of the crucial things that is re-examined

is this, is maleness, is a relationship between men and women. Certainly, I would say in Paradise Lost, one could make an argument that the only whole entire human being in the poem is a combination of Adam and Eve. I was going to sort of pause, I'm trying to make a sally towards Beowulf and Northern Epic, but I think if we go straight to Paradise, Lost and Milton.

Just to give it a bit more time, because it's rummaging around very nicely, and I don't want to rush through Bear Wolf. We can come back to Bear Wolf another day. Well, you said it's very interesting. Adam and Eve is a combination in Paradise Lost. Yes, that together they have all the qualities that a human being needs to be happy, to be fulfilled.

I think that's right. Well, I do think that's right. I think that Eve's contribution is crucial, particularly after the fall. It's really Eve, who thinks that they should go and beg forgiveness from God. Adam says it's no good. When she first suggests that, it says, no good, no good. But she insists and they do that, and that is the right thing to do. So she has a kind of wisdom which shows itself in adversity that Adam hasn't got.

Just to go back two steps, though, John Kerry. In what way was Paradise Lost? Can you describe Paradise Lost as an epic, which will put it in the same brackets, as it were, as Homer and Virgil? Paralyce loss is an anti-epic. We talking about a Christian... Paradise loss is an anti-epic.

Merrin says, oh no, so I'll register me. I'll say why I think it is, and then can contradict me. But it seems to me that Milton thought epic, because that was nonsense. It's like going to watch football matches on Saturday, all this boy's stuff, you know, nonsense. He says that he's not going to write about it. that. He said he is not sedulous by nature to indict wars hitherto the only argument heroic

deem. He's going to write about battle. He's going to write about the really important question which is what's wrong with human beings. It's the question that Freud asks and answers by reference to psyche. It's the question that Marx asks and answers by reference to the economic system. Milton answers it by reference to their relation to God. They're disobedient and they trust passion and not reason. It's quite a good point. Reason is what we need in crises when we're faced with wars, not passion. And it seems to me that that is completely different from the ancient epic. Of course he's saturated in the ancient epic.

Of course he's been brought up on it. Of course he loves it. Worships. Virgil and the home, of course he does, and can never really cut himself off from it. So it seems to be one of the failures of Paradise Lost is that how, you say, how does it actually overcome evil with a chariot?

The son of God rides over the fallen angels, throws them out of heaven with chariot of the deity. Well, that is an ancient epic solution, but it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be there. And in order to correct himself, he wrote another epic. Paradise regained.

No one has a chariot there. Christ is completely passive, doesn't lift a finger. He just wins by argument. I think I have quite a different reading of Paradise Lost. I would say that, first of all, I think Milton doesn't so much reject ancient epic as say that it is useful as a sort of model, but a model that needs to be surpassed.

And it seems to me that Milton, actually says the true epic action occurs in the human mind. It's where we make decisions, where we make decisions and how we make them. That's the crucial action. So that I don't think that Milton is saying there's what is wrong with human beings. I think he's saying there's a great deal right with human beings. And even the fall, I think in Paradise Lost, is not presented as an unmitigated disaster. First of all, Milton's Christianity wouldn't have allowed his God to make such a mistake.

but it seems to me that once Adam and Eve have fallen, then the question of making decisions, they still have to decide how to act, how to behave, in a more shadowed world so that it's more difficult. One could say they become even more heroic after the fall because knowing how to know, knowing what to do, becomes so much more difficult. Oliver Tuplin, do you think that Milton did succeed in Christianising the epic?

Yes, I mean that's, and I think it is, epic, and I just wanted to take up John Kerry on that. It seems to me that his attitude is to make a model, a really rather an exaggerated model of epic, and then say, epic is actually what I don't like. So if I like something, if I like a long narrative poem with a lot of speeches in it, then I'm not going to call it epic. I suspect that people, when they first heard the Odyssey,

said, this isn't epic. This isn't about boys' games. This isn't about battle. The Odyssey, after all, doesn't fit your... caricature of epic. When Milton rejects Marshall Epic, I think he's rejecting more Tasso and the Italian epics than he is Homer or Virgil. Virgil said, and Augustus said, Latin is new. This is a new language. We are a new culture. We're not Greeks, and we've got to try and set up our own thing to rival the great Homer at the beginning. Because part of Epic is slightly missed out is it helps to define a nation as well. It's a defining motion.

Yes. I mean, I think the Ineer became very important for it. a Roman national identity. It's a very new culture. It arrived very fast. Suddenly took up over the whole of the Mediterranean and eventually got to the point where it said if we're going to be a real culture, we've got to have something of our own to be Homer,

to be arrival to Homer. In the vernacular in English, Milton's not the first attempt to have something to rival Homer and Virgil. But one of the things that Paradise Lost is doing is saying, let us in English and let us in Christian terms have our own great narrative poem

with its speeches, with its similis, which is something I'd quite like to get to because I think they're somehow characteristic of epic as well. Yeah. Well, if I had to take a character from Paradise Lost who I thought of as an epic character, I would take Satan. Satan, it seems to me, is the epic hero.

You know, courage never to submit or yield. That's an epic attitude, isn't it? What Milton says he is going to praise is the greater fortitude of patience and heroic martyrdom unsung before, he said, unsung by any one Ariosto Virgil Homer. It's not just talking about Italian epic. He's going to do a new thing. It's a Christian epic.

And I think that Satan is by far the greatest character in the poem. He's the only human character in the poem, totally human character, an amazing character because he sees through himself. The beginning of book four, when he's on Nifatis top, and sees the beauty of the universe, he looks into himself and he sees it's completely his fault. God is quite blameless. Nevertheless, he will fight God.

Vengeance is what he wants. If it's love that God has, then love be cursed, because all it does is bring Satan's pain, wonderfully believable psychological character, with real adulthood, which God in the poem never has. I mean, Karen says that the poem is not, simple and that's absolutely true and I entirely agree that part

of Milton wants it to be an epic in the old form and does admire the old kind of epic but another part of Milton is pitted against that and I think Milton is a highly complex poet and that's why it's a great poem you can't eventually say who is who is it hero Christ is the hero

Satan's the hero Adam and Eve together are the hero of God is the hero doesn't work it's not a simple poem Does all this come from a deep contradiction between the classical pagan and the Christian. It comes from that contradiction, I think, yes, which is basic, and I think Milton would see as quite unbridgeable. I think it also comes from a deep contradiction within Milton.

That is to say, Milton is a Republican, of course, and yet he has to write a poem which has a supreme ruler who is unquestionable at its head, God, absolute ruler. everything he does is by definition right. That's very difficult. It's very difficult for Milton who has spent his life, the later part of his life, before writing the poem, defending the execution of Charles I.

And so what he does, it seems to me, is to his psyche splits, and part of him goes into Satan, the character who rebels against this supreme rule, part of him goes into hymning, the goodness and glory of God, who is at the head of the poem. I think it is a very divided work. I'm a bit stuck here, tell you the truth. We could go on to try to move on to Wordsworth

and interiorising the epic in the prelude, but then we wouldn't get very far with near the modern time, Joyce's Ulysses and then maybe Omeros de Orcott and maybe touching on the Western. So shall we just go straight to there? Savantes announces that an epic novel Tom Jones is an epic, but we've got Ulysses. Couldn't be a, couldn't be plainer in the face, could it?

There's Joyce sitting down and saying, I'm doing the epic, it's in a day, it's in Dublin, it's about as far as anybody is, an ordinary man, and here we go. Well, it's an anti-epic, I mean, just as Fielding says that it's the comic epic in prose, if you don't like epic, if you're going to insist that Homer is terribly grandiose, which is something that I really would want to question. That if you're going to insist that Homer is grandiose, then the Ulysses is anti-Homeric, obviously. It's a Jewish advertising agent with an unfaithful Penelope.

Unless, Oliver, unless you said, as I would say, if Epic is trying to capture the controlling force of a culture, perhaps Joyce is saying the controlling force of our culture is that there is no controlling force. Therefore, material has to be organized in a completely different way. I keep coming back to my sense that the epic has to, it shatters molds

every time it's created. There is so much at stake. I would go along with you. I think we're two against one on this, actually. Yes, I think we are. And for anti-epic, I would almost say, anti-epic, you need to look to something like Ovid, to metamorphosis, to anything that is

constantly changing its shape. That seems to me the anti-epic impulse. Yeah, so Newlysses has a complex structure, which in a very rough way follows the structure of the Odyssey. But Joyce is very much not laying it on a template of Homer. No, just as

Derek Walcott keeps on insisting that his onus is not laid on a template of Homer, and people on Derek Walcott's behalf say, this isn't epic. And to call it epic is to assimilate it to battle, to assimilate it to white, European, male

dominated, etc. But if we see Epic as this kind of family resemblance, collection of works that break the mould in order to face the contemporary. I mean, I like what I've been hearing from opposite. Opposite is current. People can't see this programme. Then it seems to me that James Joyce and Omaros

in their different ways, even Philip Pullman perhaps, I could bring in as a remaking of Milton, but a remaking of Milton for the concerns of the children and adults. Milton is his first epigraph, isn't it? Yes, yeah, the titles are taken from it. Milton and there's the war in heaven and so on that is Miltonic. Well, there are two things, I think, that's pick up there. I mean, one is that what Ulysses seems to me to be about is the movement of a mind.

I mean, actually, it's an attempt to be realistic. And I think the words with James George's relationship is very, very close. I agree, yeah. Absolutely so. The only difference being that Wordsworth makes his education and growth, into a narrative, a recognizable narrative. As Karen says, that isn't there in Ulysses. We no longer believe that we can really

narrative eyes our lives. They're much more fragmentary and piecemeal than that. And so what you have is the so-called stream of consciousness technique enjoys just the movement of the human mind. So breaking the mold, well, if breaking the mold is what makes Epic, it does that. However, I would have thought there was one crucial difference between Ulysses and Epic. Well, when Oliver was talking earlier, he said that the epic audience was educated in those techniques of the singer.

But the epic audience being educated in those techniques, by that he didn't mean he was an exclusive audience. I take it. He meant it was the people, everyone. They listen to the singer. They just recognized the techniques. They didn't realize they were educated and they weren't. They couldn't read.

This is very different. And Ulysses is completely different. Unity's is an elitist work of high culture And that, I mean, you can't, unless you cut the audience out of consideration altogether, you can't call it an epic, it seems to me. Epic is not written in that way. Where do you go from here, you two? Karen.

Well, I would disagree that Ulysses is elitist. I mean, it seems to me that it is saying that the hero, the heroic, is the everyday person. And also when you think about the way Ulysses ends with Molly Bloom's wonderful soliloquy, it seems to me it also is doing something about, it's definitely undermining any notion that the epic has to do with maleness. Oh, of course, but I'm saying it's written for an elite. I mean, of course, it's saying we're in favor of the common man, except the common man can't read it.

I mean, that's the paradox at the heart of Ulysses. Just as a very brief postscript, do you think that the Western, which seems to follow the obvious rules, the obvious of the the Iliad the Odyssey, the films, the Western, the John Ford Western, is, they can be called epics, the man riding in,

martial, changing society, standing for society, defining society, that sort of thing. Can you include that in the word epic? There's something of that, though. The epic film, again, I suppose, is capacious, been defined as the simplest kind of movie to make badly. But 2001

a Space Odyssey, or there's a Troy in the making even at the moment oh brother where art thou at the very beginning they quote the Odyssey and then the Coen brothers say of course we haven't read the Odyssey

it's actually what Derek Walcott says it's all based on Homer and then in the course of the poem he says I haven't read Homer so it's this ambivalent attitude to tradition coming through again is the Western and epic

well yes and no I mean Karen you're no I think it isn't I think it's a good, Westerns are good adventurous stories, but it seems to me their take on reality is too narrow. They're concerned with too small a representation of the world as we know it. And it seems to me it's more that possibly Western is more related to pastoral,

not epic. It seems to me it's that it's narrow. I think it's an epic and I think that computer games are also epic. I think that's where it's gone. It's gone into popular literature because, of course, since words with high literature has had no time for it. Well, I think it's a question of when will you three meet again. We've been all this work to prepare for this programme. I've only used the butter sort of it.

There's two more programmes to come on the epic. Next week we'll be talking about chance and necessity in evolution. Meanwhile, thank you very much to Karen Edwards, John Kerry and Oliver Taplin, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio 4.