1—
Epic as Genre
Gregory Nagy
One of very few scholars who can speak authoritatively of both oral and written epic traditions, Gregory Nagy confronts the supposed divide between these traditions in this brief and suggestive exploration into the origins of the epic genre. In the spirit of his earlier work, such as The Best of the Achaeans, which demonstrated the impact of religious and political rituals on the Homeric poems, Nagy demonstrates that epos was even for the Greeks an elusive form whose generic expectations and demands changed considerably from archaic to classical Greece. In this rigorous philological reading of the term epos and its relationship to other terms such as muthos, Nagy cautions us to be sensitive to the varying cultural conditions that produce heroic poetry, arguing against a fixed definition of epic as such in order to encourage more flexible and inclusive models of genre.
In order to speak of epic as genre, we need a set of working definitions for three not two concepts: besides genre and epic, we need to define the concept of Homer as a prototypical exponent of epic as genre. This essay develops such a set, arguing that our received idea about epic results primarily from a narrow understanding of Homer as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the exclusion of other ancient Greek traditions, such as the so-called Epic Cycle. As we will see, it is Aristotle's Poetics that ultimately made this idea prevail, just as it is Aristotle who has been most influential in shaping the concept of genre in general. In his essay "Epic and Novel," Mikhail Bakhtin goes so far as to say: "Aristotle's Poetics, although occasionally so deeply embedded as to be almost invisible, remains the stable foundation for the theory of genres."[1]
A problem more fundamental than the definitions of genre and epic is the definition of poetry itself in social contexts where the technology of writing is involved in neither the composition nor the performance of any given poem or song. My invocation of the two factors of composition and performance implies a derivation of ancient Greek poetry from oral poetry, as defined through the comparative fieldwork criteria developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord.[2] From Lord's empirical study of living oral traditions, especially those of South Slavic heroic song, it becomes clear that composition and performance are aspects of the same process in oral poetry. In order to achieve a more accurate taxonomy of the earliest phases of the Greek song-making
tradition culminating in "Homer" and, ultimately, in our received notions of epic as genre, the two factors of composition and performance must be kept in mind. Only then may we arrive at a basis for considering the utility of a concept such as genre—and of a related concept, occasion.
In addressing these two factors of composition and performance, I propose to bring into play a crucial work that has taken them both into account, Richard P. Martin's The Language of Heroes (1989). Martin has pioneered an explicit connection between Lord's empirical observations about performance in living oral traditions and J. L. Austin's theories about the performative uses of language, as articulated in his book How to Do Things with Words (1962).
As Martin demonstrates, Austin's formulation of the performative, where you do something when you say something, meshes with Lord's formulation of performance as the key to bringing the words of a song to life. To use Austin's wording, song is a speech act, as Martin shows in detail with reference to Homeric poetry. Ironically, Austin himself resisted the idea that poetry could count as a speech act, and we can see clearly the reason for his reluctance: for Austin, poetry is a matter of writing, not speaking. For Austin, the dimension of oral tradition is utterly removed from his own conceptualization of poetry.
Martin's book demonstrates not only the self-definition of Homeric song as a speech act. It shows also that this medium is capable of demonstrating the function of song as "quoted" within its overall frame of song. That is to say, Homeric song dramatizes, as it were, the performative aspects of songs that it quotes. Ironically, the performative aspects of Homeric song itself are shaded over while the performative aspects of the songs contained by it are highlighted, including pronouncements of praise or blame, laments, proverbs, and so on. To put it another way, Homeric song specifies the occasion of songs that it represents, or even presents, while it leaves vague any potential occasion for its own performance.
I have used the word occasion here in referring to the contexts of speech acts "quoted" by Homeric song. In fact, I am ready to define occasion as the context of a speech act.[3] Further, I define genre as a set of rules that produce a speech act. In offering this definition of genre, I follow Tzvetan Todorov in chapter 2 of his Genres du discours; for him, genres are "principles of dynamic production" of discourse in society.[4]
Here I propose to build on this most useful formulation in three ways.
First, I hope to tighten up the notion of speech act, correlating it with the specific interweavings of myth and ritual in traditional societies and dissociating it from purely philosophical considerations that center on individual judgments concerning when a speech act is a speech act. For purposes of this presentation, a speech act is a speech act only when it fits the criteria of
the community in which it is being used. To determine the validity or invalidity of a speech act is to observe its dynamics within the community in question.
Second, I would observe that the genre, the set of rules that generate a given speech act, can equate itself with the occasion, the context of this speech act. To this extent, the occasion is the genre.[5] For example, a song of lament can equate itself with the process of grieving for the dead. A case in point is the Homeric use of the words akhos and penthos, both meaning "grief," as programmatic indicators of ritual songs of lament.[6]
Finally, I would note that if the occasion is destabilized or even lost, the genre can compensate for it, even recreate it.[7]
In view of these criteria for defining the concept of genre, are we ready to say that epic is a genre? Or that Homeric song is epic? I would suggest that the answer is "Not yet." Granted, we may say that Homeric song dramatizes genres such as pronouncements of praise or blame, laments, proverbs, and so on, but we can recognize those genres only because their performative aspect is represented by Homeric song. By contrast, Homeric song does not directly refer to its own current performative aspect, and so we cannot easily recognize it as a genre in and of itself. Further, we are as yet far from being able to identify Homeric song as epic.
For Albert Lord, in fact, the term "epic" is far too vague to be useful in his description of Homeric song—making—or of its counterparts in the South Slavic traditions:
The word "epic," itself, indeed, has come in time to have many meanings. Epic sometimes is taken to mean simply a long poem in "high style." Yet a very great number of the poems which interest us in this book are comparatively short; length, in fact, is not a criterion of epic poetry. Other definitions of epic equate it with heroic poetry. Indeed the term "heroic poetry" is sometimes used (by Sir Cecil M. Bowra, for example) to avoid the very ambiguity in the word "epic" which troubles us. Yet purists might very well point out that many of the songs which we include in oral narrative poetry are romantic or historical and not heroic, no matter what definition of the hero one may choose. In oral narrative poetry, as a matter of fact, I wish to include all story poetry, the romantic or historical as well as the heroic; otherwise I would have to exclude a considerable body of medieval metrical narrative.[8]
Despite the imprecision of the term "epic," we may still say with confidence that there are many oral traditions strikingly comparable to what we find in the "epic" of Homer. There has been a wealth of comparative evidence about oral "epics" collected over recent years in Eastern Europe,[9] central Asia,[10] the Indian subcontinent,[11] Africa,[12] and so on.[13] In this context, I cannot stress enough the abiding importance of the comparative evidence provided by the South Slavic tradition of "epic": although it is different in many ways
from what we see in the Homeric poems, this tradition, as Martin argues, "still has a claim to being one of the best comparanda."[14]
But the point is, what leads us to persist in referring to the South Slavic tradition as "epic" is the influence of received notions about Homeric poetry. My further point is that the classical Greek idea of epic, as presupposed by these received notions, needs to be situated in its own historical context. Once we see it in that light, this idea of epic may continue to serve as a useful point of comparison, but it cannot any longer be imposed as some kind of universal standard.
Applying comparatively the classical Greek idea of epic, one Africanist has developed a working definition, based on his experience with living oral traditions of Africa and elsewhere:
An oral epic is fundamentally a tale about the fantastic deeds of a man or men endowed with something more than human might and operating in something larger than the normal human context and it is of significance in portraying some stage of the cultural or political development of a people. It is usually narrated or performed to the background of music by an unlettered singer working alone or with some assistance from a group of accompanists.[15]
Although there is no need to impose classicist models like the classical concept of epic on indigenous African oral poetic forms,[16] and although Lord himself, as we have seen, has explored the inherent difficulties of defining epic in terms of living oral traditions,[17] the fact remains that there are striking empirically observable analogies in a wide range of African oral poetic forms to what any classicist would indeed classify as epic.[18] As one Africanist puts it, "The burden of explanation therefore rests with those scholars who, for reasons best known to themselves, bandy about phrases like 'epic poetry in the normal sense of the word' and contend that on the whole the heroic narrative traditions in Africa yield little more than 'certain elements of epic.'"[19]
What is needed, then, is an understanding of epic that accommodates comparative perspectives:
What is epic according to one definition may be excluded according to another. And, most important, a general definition of a genre will often violate the internal definition of genres inside a given society. Ideally, if oral epic were to be directly comparable from one society to another, it would not be enough that the epic genres themselves were similar; their place in the general spectr [um] of literary forms of the society in question ought to be similar too.[20]
Further, it is not enough to say that "epic" may or may not exist as a genre in the oral traditions of a given society. For epic to be a "genre," it has to have a functional relationship of interdependence or complementarity with another "genre" or other "genres." The principle of complementarity is key to Laura Slatkin's formulation of genre in oral traditions:
Genres can be viewed, like other cultural institutions, as existing in a relationship of interdependence, in which they have complementary functions in conveying different aspects of a coherent ideology or system of beliefs about the world. The crucial point about these distinctions or differentiations is their complementarity: they exist within, and serve to complete, a conception about the way the world is ordered.[21]
Thus genre is not an absolute.[22] We may apply the classical Greek model of epic for comparative purposes only after we succeed in defining epic as a genre in relation to other genres within the historical context of classical and pre-classical Greece.[23]
The earliest available evidence is the usage that we find in Homeric song, where the word epos is regularly used as a complement to muthos: as Martin has argued, muthos is a marked way to designate speech, whereas epos is the unmarked way—at least with reference to an opposition with muthos.[24] Martin defines the terms "marked" and "unmarked" as follows: "The 'marked' member of a pair carries greater semantic weight, but can be used across a narrower range of situations, whereas the unmarked member—the more colorless member of the opposition—can be used to denote a broader range, even that range covered by the marked member: it is the more general term."[25] The Homeric sense of muthos, in Martin's working definition, is "a speech-act indicating authority, performed at length, usually in public, with a focus on full attention to every detail."[26] This is the word used by Homeric song in referring to genres that are dramatized within Homeric song, such as pronouncements of praise or blame, laments, proverbs, and so on.[27] To this extent, muthos is not just any speech act reported by song: it is also the speech act that is the song itself, the "epic" of Homer.[28] The Homeric counterpart epos, on the other hand, is "an utterance, ideally short, accompanying a physical act, and focusing on message, as perceived by the addressee, rather than on performance as enacted by the speaker."[29]
As the unmarked member of the opposition, epos or its plural epea can occur even in contexts where muthos would be appropriate.[30] On the other hand, "one can never simply substitute the semantically restricted term muthos-meaning authoritative speech-act, or 'performance'—for the ordinary term epos."[31]
Whereas epos can be found in place of muthos in Homeric diction, the reverse does not happen: "In Homer, a speech explicitly said to be an epos, and not also represented as epea (the plural), is never called a muthos." Further, "epea can co-occur to refer to a muthos, but muthoi in the plural is never correlated with the singular form epos, to describe a speech."[32]
Even if epos designates "ordinary" speech when early Greek epic refers to speech, we must keep in mind that the unmarked category of "ordinary" speech is a "default" category: "'Ordinary' is a variable concept, depending on whatever is being perceived as 'special' in a given comparison or set of
comparisons."[33] Further, "the perception of plain or everyday speech is a variable abstraction that depends on the concrete realization of whatever special speech . . . is set apart for a special context."[34] In the case at hand, if it were not for the opposition to unmarked epos by way of marked muthos, the word epos need not designate speech that is "ideally short," nor need it be perceived as merely "focusing on message."[35] Even an adjective added to the plural of unmarked epos can achieve a marked opposite of epos in Homeric diction: as Martin shows, epea pteroenta, "winged words" is a functional synonym of muthos in denoting certain kinds of marked speech.[36] If muthos can designate song as performed, then so too can epos, provided that muthos is not contrasted with it.
We may see in the Homeric term, epea pteroenta, "winged words," a poetic expression that recognizes the semantic potential of the word epos to designate, in its own right, song as performed. This potential gets activated as soon as epos gets detached from its complementarity with muthos. Such a detachment, I suggest, is made historically permanent by the eventual semantic destabilization of the word muthos. In post-Homeric contexts, as I have argued elsewhere, the words alethes, "true," and aletheia, "truth," evolve in explicit opposition to the word muthos in contexts where true speech is being contrasted with other forms of speech that are discredited, that cannot be trusted (e.g., Pindar Olympian 1.29-30).[37] As the word alethes, "true," or aletheia, "truth," becomes marked in opposition to muthos, which in turn becomes unmarked in the context of such opposition, the meaning of muthos becomes marginalized to mean something like "myth" in the popular sense of the word as it is used today in referring to the opposite of truth.[38]
The marginalization of muthos, resulting from its relatively later opposition to aelthes, "true," or aletheia, "truth," may be pertinent to the earlier opposition of marked muthos and unmarked epos.[39] We may allow for the possibility that the unmarked member of this earlier opposition had once been the marked member in still earlier sets of opposition.[40] The semantic markedness of epos reemerges in post-Homeric contexts: as Martin points out, this word begins to appear in the specialized sense of "poetic utterance" and even "dactylic hexameter verse."[41] In other words, the semantic specialization of epos in post-Homeric contexts suggests that it had once been a marked word in opposition to some other unmarked word for "speech," and that "it had served as an unmarked word in Homeric diction only within the framework of an opposition with muthos."[42] In our own contemporary usage of the English words epic and myth, we see indirect reflexes of the later semantic specialization of epos, and of the later semantic specialization of muthos. As parallels to English epic and myth, we may look back and compare Aristotle's use of epe (the Attic form of epea ) in the sense of epic and of muthos in the sense of myth as "plot."[43]
Mention of Aristotle brings us full-circle, finally, to his own concept of
"epic," which he regularly designates as epe. Near the beginning of the Poetics (1447a14-15), he says: "The making of epe[epopoiia] and the making [poiesis] of tragedy, also comedy, and the making [-poietike] of dithyrambs, and the [making] of reed songs and lyre songs-all these are in point of fact forms of mimesis, by and large".
In the historical context of classical Athenian traditions, it seems preferable to specify that these genres are a matter of performance traditions, not so much oral traditions in a looser sense of the term "oral." In Athens, during a period starting roughly from the middle of the sixth century and running through the fourth, tragedy and comedy can be viewed as two complementary genres evolving side by side and becoming mutually assimilated as performance media within the framework of a major Athenian state festival, the City Dionysia. In the same historical context, we can see taking shape an analogous complementarity between tragedy and epic, evolving side by side and becoming mutually assimilated as performance media within the two complementary frameworks of the City Dionysia and the Panathenaia respectively, subsumed under the larger framework of the overall cycle of Athenian state festivals.[44]
Applying Aristotle's point of view, we may justifiably describe the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey as the genre of epic—but only in the historical context of Athens during the period just noted, starting roughly from the middle of the sixth century and running through the fourth. In a separate work, I have argued extensively that this particular phase in the evolution of Homeric song making represents but one of at least five distinct periods, "Five Ages of Homer."[45] During this particular phase, the equivalent of "period 3" within an evolutionary scheme of five periods, the very idea of "Homer" as author became restricted to the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the exclusion of a vast reservoir of additional or alternative material known as the Epic Cycle.[46] For Aristotle, the "authors" of the Epic Cycle are clearly distinct from the Homer of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Poetics 1459b1-7). As we read the words of the fourth-century Athenian statesman Lycurgus (Against Leocrates 102) declaring that only the epe —which we may now confidently translate "epic"—of Homer could be performed at the Feast of the Panathenaia in Athens, we can be sure of what he means: for Lycurgus, only the Iliad and the Odyssey can be considered true epic.[47]
In sum, we may expect the criteria for determining the status of epic as genre to vary from culture to culture, even from period to period within a culture. When Bakhtin speaks of "epic" in his essay "Epic and Novel," he obviously has in mind the taxonomy of Aristotle. And yet, as valid as Aristotle's criteria may be from a classical and postclassical Greek point of view, they cannot be universalized or absolutized.
Even in the ancient Greek epics that we have, the Iliad and the Odyssey, we may detect patterns of complementarity that point to the need for genre distinctions that require subdivisions of Aristotle's notion of "epic." I would go so far as to say that Bakhtin's hermeneutic model of "epic," if we follow through on his criteria for distinguishing it from "novel," fit the Iliad only, to the exclusion of the Odyssey, which actually seems more appropriate to Bakhtin's hermeneutic model of "novel," not "epic."
If we take a broader view of ancient Greek civilization, there are still further possible criteria to consider. For example, in light of typological evidence for oral "epics" transmitted by women in various cultures,[48] we may see in song 44 of Sappho, "The Wedding of Hektor and Andromache," the traces of earlier Greek "epic" traditions that could cross back and forth between female and male performative conventions.[49]
In this connection, I invoke a distinction made by Joyce Flueckiger and Laurie Sears in their general formulation of epic: "Epic narratives exist both as oral and as performance traditions."[50] In terms of these shorthand designations "oral traditions" and "performance traditions," we may in effect distinguish between "a general knowledge of the 'whole story' (as summary) that many in the folklore community would be able to relate and the epic as it is performed in a marked, artistic enactment of that oral tradition."[51] That is to say, there is a gap between the notional totality of epic as oral tradition and the practical limitations of epic in actual performance:
Thus, although scholars have spent considerable energy recording epic stories "from beginning to end," counting the number of hours and pages required to do so, this is not how the epic is received by indigenous audiences. Further, certain episodes of the epic are performed more frequently than others; and there may be episodes that exist only in the oral tradition and not in performance at all.[52]
This insight may prove to be a key to understanding the inclusiveness of "epic" as a form, or even as a genre: if indeed epic can be realized informally as well as formally, it becomes the ideal multiform, accommodating a variety of forms. I draw attention to the inclusiveness, the notional wholeness, of Homeric poetry. Here is a genre that becomes a container, as it were, of a vast variety of other genres, realized in varying forms of performance and in varying degrees of formality in performance. Here is a repertoire shared
by men and women, replete with stories suitable for a broad spectrum of different performances, ranging from the songs of Sappho to the declamations of rhapsodes who claim, at the very start of their performances, to be Homer himself.[53] Here, finally, is a medium of discourse that sees itself as all-embracing of the society identified by it and identifying with it.
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