thread: 2005-11-14 : Long and Short
On 2005-11-16, Neel wrote:
The two epics I know best are the Illiad and the Mahabharata. Like Chris says, the way they work is that they're made of LOTS of stories, with a vast cast of characters, and the art in them is that you use the stories in them to create parallels and echos that comment on each other and interrogate and question each others' themes. An epic, unlike a story, does not have a unitary theme, but each of the stories in it address the same set of questions, answering them in different ways.
If you take the Illiad, you can pull out a strand of it and tell a story about the humanization of Achilles, where his pride and conflict with Agammenon leads to the death of Patroclus, and his rage drives him to murder Hector and desecrate his corpse, and then his meeting with Priam leads him to realize that his love for Patroclus is not unique and that he has caused caused grief for other human beings. His repentance puts him in a state of grace, so that his death, ordained by Zeus, becomes a sacrifice which restores the moral balance of the world.
Or you can take out the thread of Hector. Now you've got a man who honors and respects the gods, loving to his wife and family, and courageous in battle—and none of it matters. The gods' trivial games lead to Paris and Helen eloping; his loyalty to his family means he cannot sacrifice Paris to the Achaens; and his courage in battle is delusional, for he does not strike the blow that fells Patroclus and yet he dies a dog's death against Achilles. This is a cosmically bleak vision of the world, arguing that the morality that we prize is nothing but an illusion.
But both of those stories—and the other stories you can draw out of the Illiad—are about the moral values of the Homeric Greeks. The analogy I think of is that if you think of a story as an argument, then you can think of the epic as a critical tradition.
