A Little History of Literature (4 page)

Let's return to
Beowulf
, and its opening lines; first in the original Old English, then in modern English translation:

Although the poem is in ‘Old English’, and circulated in England for centuries, it is set in ‘Daneland’, which is another way of saying ‘a land far, far away’. But what is clear is that this great poem starts by metaphorically raising a national flag: the flag of the Spear-Dane kingdom. In the poem, Beowulf, a princely-hero from ‘Geatland’ (now Sweden), comes to save an embryonic civilisation from being destroyed by the Grendels. Had he not succeeded – by quite extraordinary, self-sacrificing heroism – the modern world of the Anglo-Saxons and all the other European nations would never have existed. They would have been killed at birth by horrible ancient monsters. Civilisation, the epic tells us, had to fight to the death to come into being.

A further important point needs to be added here. Literary epics – those, that is, which are still read centuries (millennia, in some cases) after they were composed – chronicle the birth not of ‘any’ nation, but of nations that will one day grow to be great empires, swallowing up lesser nations. In their later maturity empires cherish ‘their’ epics as witness to that greatness. Epics certify it. Linguists love the following conundrum: ‘
Question
: What's the difference between a dialect and a language?
Answer
: A language is a dialect with an army behind it.’ What, then, is the difference between a long poem about a primitive people's early struggles and an epic? An epic is a long poem with a great nation behind it – or, more precisely, in front of it.

Consider the most famous of all: the epics originating in what we now know as Greece, Homer's
Iliad
and
Odyssey
. We know nothing about Homer's life, and never will. Legend has it he was blind. Some have suggested he was a woman. But since ancient times his name has been attached to these greatest of poems. What are they about? In the
Iliad
, a beautiful Greek woman, Helen, becomes the lover of a handsome young foreign prince, Paris. Their love is complicated by the inconvenient fact that she is married. The two of them elope to his homeland, Troy (located where Turkey is now). It's a romance, you say – a love story. But viewed objectively, it is about the clash of two emergent city states: Greece (as it will become) and Troy; two maritime trading nations in a world not big enough for the both
of them. In the Trojan War, one nation must burn. It will be the ‘topless towers of Ilium’ (as the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe put it): Troy goes up in flames so that Greece can rise to greatness from its ashes. Had it been the other way around, world history would have been very different. We would have had no Greek tragedy; some would say, no democracy (a Greek word) either. Our whole ‘philosophy of life’ would have been different.

Homer's sequel to the
Iliad
, the
Odyssey
, is more mythic than the preceding epic story. As we saw in Chapter 2, over ten eventful years the Greek hero Odysseus returns from the Trojan War to his minor kingdom, Ithaca. On his journey, after escaping from the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, he and his crew are stranded on an island where the beautiful sorceress Circe tries to cast spells over them, and are threatened by the sea-monsters Scylla and Charybdis. Finally Odysseus contrives to make it back to Ithaca and save his own marriage to the ever-faithful Penelope. Stability (after much slaughter) is restored. Civilisation can grow. Empires can rise. That is a dominant theme of Homer's two epics.

The
Iliad
and
Odyssey
remain the most readable (and filmable) of stories. But at their centre, these epic narratives look at how ancient Greece – what we like to call the cradle of modern democracy, our world – came into being. Epics are the offspring of ‘noble and puissant [powerful] nations’, as the poet John Milton called them. (Milton is the author of what many see as the last great epic in British Literature,
Paradise Lost
, composed in the mid-seventeenth century when Britain itself was becoming ‘puissant’ – a world power. See Chapter 10.)

Could Luxembourg, or the Principality of Monaco, however gifted its authors, host an epic? Could the multinational European Union have one? Such states can create literature, great literature, even. But they cannot create epic literature. When the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow asked his insulting question, ‘Where is the Zulu Tolstoy, where is the Papuan Proust?’ he was, essentially, making the point that only great civilisations have great literature. And only the greatest of those great nations possess epics. Great world power is at their centre.

The following is a list of some of the world's most famous epics, and the great nations or empires from which they sprang.

Saul Bellow's own nation, the USA, is missing from the list. Should it be included? No nation has been more powerful. But historically speaking, the United States is a young country – juvenile in comparison with Greece, or Britain (which once owned a considerable part of it). Its frontier struggles, as modern American civilisation spread westward, can be seen as having inspired some versions of epic, in the form of the films of D.W. Griffith (
Birth of a Nation
, 1915) and westerns (John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are undeniably ‘heroic’ cowboys). Some have argued that Herman Melville's novel
Moby-Dick
(1851), which recounts Captain Ahab's doomed quest for the (mythic?) white whale, is not merely ‘the Great American Novel’ but ‘the American Epic’. In modern polls George Lucas's
Star Wars
film series is often voted the great modern epic. But what we see here is less actual epics than the aching sense that the USA may have come too late on the world-scene ever to have one. A real one, that is. It still tries.

Traditionally, literary epic has four elements: it is long, heroic, nationalistic and – in its purest literary form – poetic. Panegyrics (extended hymns of praise) and lament (songs of sadness) are main ingredients. The first half of
Beowulf
is an extended celebration of the youthful hero's prowess in defeating Grendel and his mother. The second half laments Beowulf's death, in old age, having
incurred fatal wounds in defeating the dragon that terrorises his kingdom. He has secured his country's future with his life. The death of the hero is, very often, a climax moment in epic narratives.

Typically, we may say, epic is set in a great age that has passed, at which later ages look back nostalgically, with the sad sense that epic greatness – heroism and honour – is a thing of the past, but that without it, we would not be where we are. It's the kind of complex feeling literature often elicits.

The great epics are still highly enjoyable to read, although most of us will be obliged to read them at one remove, in translation. In many ways, epics are literary dinosaurs. They once dominated, by virtue of sheer size, but now they belong in the museum of literature. We can still admire them, as we admire the other mighty works of our national ancestors, but, sadly, we seem no longer able to make them.

CHAPTER
4

Being Human

T
RAGEDY

Tragedy, in its full literary form, represents a new highpoint (some would argue the highest ever reached) in the long evolution of literature: the imposition of ‘form’ on the raw materials of myth, legend and epic. Why do we still read and watch drama that was written 2,000 years ago, in a language few of us understand, for a society which might as well be on another planet for all the resemblance it has to ours? The answer is simple: tragedy has never been done better than when Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and other ancient Greek dramatists did it.

What, though, do the terms ‘tragedy’ and ‘tragic’ actually mean? A jumbo-jet falls out of the sky. It happens rarely but, alas, it happens. Hundreds of passengers are killed in the event, which makes headlines in national newspapers. The
New York Times
has on its front page ‘Tragic accident: 385 dead’. The
New York Daily News
has the more sensational ‘Horror at 39,000 feet: Hundreds slain!’ Neither headline would strike readers of either paper as unusual.

But, ask yourself, is a
horrible
event the same thing as a
tragic
event? This question was given exquisitely precise treatment in a
play written some two-and-a-half millennia ago. The play was composed by Sophocles, who was writing for an Athenian audience. It would have been performed in the open air, in daylight, in an amphitheatre – a solid-stone ‘theatre in the round’ with raked seating – by actors wearing masks (called ‘personae’) and elevated footwear (called ‘buskins’). The persona may have acted as a megaphone, and the buskins made the actors visible even to those in the very back seats. (The acoustics of the theatres where they performed were better than you will find on Broadway or in London's West End. If you go to the best-preserved of the ancient theatres, at Epidaurus, a guide will sit you in the farthest row of stone seats, go to the centre of the acting area, and strike a match. You can easily hear it.)

Sophocles' masterpiece,
Oedipus Rex
(‘Oedipus the King’), recounts the following story, based on an ancient Greek myth. Things that happened in the past are now ‘coming to a head’. It is foretold by a priestess at Delphi – famous for her power of foreseeing what is to come, but equally famous for the enigmatic nature of her prophesies – that a son, born to the king and queen of Thebes, Laius and Jocasta, will kill his father and marry his mother. The infant is destined to be a monster. Thebes will be better off without him – even though he is the couple's only child and his death will pose tricky problems as to who will be the next king. Baby Oedipus is put out on a mountainside to perish. But the baby does not die. He is rescued by a shepherd and, by a series of accidents, his true birth wholly unknown, he is eventually adopted by another king and queen, in Corinth. The gods seem to be taking an interest in him.

Grown to adulthood, Oedipus himself consults the oracle because he is worried that people are saying he is not his father's son. The oracle warns him that he is doomed to kill his father and to incestuously marry his mother. Assuming that the oracle is referring to his adoptive parents, Oedipus flees from Corinth and heads for Thebes. At a crossroads, he meets a chariot coming the other way. The charioteer pushes him off the road. Oedipus hits out at him, and in turn the other driver strikes Oedipus hard on the head. A furious fight ensues, and an enraged Oedipus kills the
other man, not knowing that he is his father, Laius. It's road rage, a heat-of-the-moment deed.

Oedipus continues his journey to Thebes, unaware of what lies in wait for him. First is the Sphinx, a monster that lives on a mountain and is terrorising the city. The Sphinx poses a riddle to every traveller to Thebes. If they cannot answer correctly, they die. The riddle is: ‘What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?’ Oedipus answers correctly, the first person ever to do so: it is ‘man’. The baby crawls on all fours. The adult walks on two legs. The old man walks with a stick. The Sphinx kills itself. A grateful Thebes elects Oedipus their king. Once crowned, Oedipus consolidates his hold on the throne by marrying the mysteriously widowed Queen Jocasta. They are unaware, both of them, what has happened to Laius and the awful thing they are doing.

Oedipus proves to be a good king, a good husband, and a good father to the children he and Jocasta have. But, years later, a terrible and mysterious plague afflicts Thebes. Thousands die. Crops fail. Women cannot bear children. This is the point at which Sophocles' play begins. There is, clearly, another curse on the city. Why? A blind soothsayer, Tiresias, reveals the awful truth. The gods are punishing the city for Oedipus's crimes of patricide (killing his father) and incest (marrying his mother). The horrible details are finally disclosed. Jocasta hangs herself. Oedipus blinds himself with his wife's brooch-pins. He lives what remains of his life as a beggar, the lowest of the low in Thebes, attended in his wretchedness by his faithful daughter, Antigone.