Friday, February 11, 2011

Crafting a National Epic


America has no national epic. Nor mythology. Nor even a novel of particular distinction (hence the reason every author can aspire to write the Great American Novel). J. R. R. Tolkien was concerned that Britain had a similar lack of national mythology, so to rectify the problem he created Middle Earth, cobbling together pieces of Anglo-Saxon mythology, adding bits of English history and dashes from Roman, Celtic and other mythologies, and then giving the whole thing the original touch of a single author. If one were to undertake such a project for the United States, where would you begin?

In a previous thought experiment, involving the boys of St. Boniface College, I asked if America has a canon. The result included Homer, the Bible, and the works of Shakespeare, among other things. But none of those were written by Americans, you might say. Right you are. The curious thing about the United States is that it is overwhelmingly a nation of immigrants. So we should expect that our deep cultural roots run beyond our own shores. Indeed, even the Roman epic, the Aeneid, locates Roman origins in the Greek world, though it also draws upon elements of more local Italic history. It seems to me an American epic should draw on our indigenous pre-Columbian history, the history of the colonies and United States themselves, and the literary heritage of our primary parent cultures in Europe.

In addition to the works named above, where might an author of a great American mythological epic look? Virgil looked to Homer, so why don't we take a look at some other national epics? I turned to the Wikipedia page on the matter.

First there are the ancient roots: Homer, Virgil and Scripture. All these are fairly well known to most educated folks.

But then I started looked at more modern works. The great works of England are not so obscure: Beowulf, the Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost and Shakespeare. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) is not nearly so widespread, though known to students of early English history.

But the national epics (or contenders for that title) of the other British nations are lesser-known. For Scotland, John Barbour's The Brus - about Robert the Bruce and Scotland's fight for independence throughout the Middle Ages - and James Macpherson's Ossian cycle - a retelling/translation of Scottish mythology (pictured above left) - are the leading contenders. I'd never heard of either, but both look like fun (at least if I can get through the old Scottish of The Brus). Ireland's Táin Bó Cúailnge - the story of an ancient raid to steal a magic bull (pictured below right) - I have never read, but I remember shelving it at the city library; does that count? Of course some would argue that James Joyce' stream-of-consciousness Ulysses is the real national epic of Ireland these days. The mythical Mabinogion of Wales I am familiar with, but only because of some poking into Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles.

And what of the Germans, that largest ancestral group in America. I started to read the Nibelungenlied - the story of the hero Siegfried, his murder and subsequent avenging by his wife - one break, but did not finish. I have never picked up Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, nor am I sure I want to; Romantic though I be, I'm not sure I want to read about the the sturm und drang of an angst-ridden young man.

Or what of the Norse, the bold folk who were the first Europeans to come to the New World? I think I own a copy of the Eddas somewhere, but I have never read it.

I was as lost among the various works that have tried to be or have been held up as some sort of American national work: Joel Barlow's Columbiad? Never heard of it. It doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page! Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass? It may be a collection of poems, but could make great source material for an epic writer. Alas, I confess I've never read it. Several works I read in part or whole in high school: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I enjoyed; To Kill a Mockingbird was all right (though hardly epic, but perhaps I need to read it again) and I hated The Grapes of Wrath. I never made it through Moby-Dick (a second attempt may be in order) and I have never even picked up The Great Gatsby or Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha. But at least we've all heard of these.

So what does all this mean? Let me suggest several possibilities:
  1. The epic, or at least the national epic, is dead. If people cared more we would have at least heard of these. In fact, if people cared, we'd already have one, right? But although England has several great contenders for the title, I think Tolkien was right that none of them quite synthesized England and its habits in the way that the Aeneid did for Rome. Work remained to be done, as evidenced by the run-away success of Middle Earth.
  2. I have a lot of reading to do when I retire. Some day if I find myself independently wealthy and feeling inspired, perhaps I'll start writing that American epic. In fact, I might start sooner.
  3. Perhaps we all have a lot of reading to do. This may have been an imperfect catalog of our roots as Americans, but was something of the sort. If we are so cut off from our own heritage we are culturally adrift, a dangerous thing.

9 comments:

Margaret E. Perry said...

Is America really old enough--that is, does it have a culture of its own that has endured for a long enough time to have a national epic? Even if the genre is dead, I don't think its possible in our young culture. After all, Virgil wrote both on the shoulder of another great epic, and at the height of Roman culture, many hundred years after it had been established.

Stephen said...

I think I have to agree with Margaret: I'm not sure America's ready yet to have an epic.

As for German literature, I think the Nibelungenlied is kind of like Beowulf in that it was lost and then rediscovered in the second half of the 1700s. There was no unbroken continuity with the past, but the rediscovery came just as European nations were rediscovering their medieval pasts and also looking for national epics. Of course, nationalism took on a much more widespread Romantic, medieval color in Germany than it did in England, so the Nibelungenlied became more widely accepted in 19th-century Germany as a national epic than Beowulf did in England.

As for what could be called the modern German epic, it's certainly not Werther; as influential as it was, an epistolary novel centered on one man's emotional suffering simply can't be an epic. My vote would be for Faust, which is what they seemed to think in Germany in the 19th century. Nietzsche made fun of it, saying that it was a just a story about a man seducing and abandoning a girl, but Faust certainly has the grand scale that an epic requires. That scale, though, is more cosmic, really, than national, so it still might not be an epic in the way the Aeneid is.

Aaron Linderman said...

Maggie, you might be right about America's youth, though three things give me pause.

(1) Virgil stood on the shoulders of Homer (just as Roman culture generally borrowed heavily from the Greeks); America stands on a whole pack of shoulders. This is why Russell Kirk could write for hundreds of pages about The Roots of the American Order, spanning dozens of centuries. Does the fact that America has such a long history of Western Civilization to draw upon mean that she needs less history of her own? Perhaps.

(2) The pace of history is arguably picking up. Technology changes faster than ever, and with it our lives. Ships were around for centuries before Columbus sailed to America, and even then it was centuries more before the common man would think about an oceanic voyage. But in a few short years after the invention of the airplane, we have commercial aviation that spans the globe, and is fairly inexpensive. Likewise, political regimes last for far less time than they once did. Egypt, Assyria and Persia lasted for centuries. The Roman Empire lasted 400 years (from Caesar to the sack of the City; 2,100 if you want to go from the founding of the City to the fall of Constantinople). Britain's empire (the so-called "second empire", the Pax Britannica) lasted only a century. I'm not entirely sure what this quickening of history means, but one consequence may be that we have to rethink "old". Perhaps national culture will never run as deep as it once did because nations will not last as long.

(3) It strikes me that America has a kind of historical story which might form the outline of an epic: the story of freedom. It has all the makings of a great epic. Britain, (relative) beacon of liberty in her day begins oppressing the colonies, which rise up and - through valiant struggle - assert their freedom. But there's a kind of Faustian pact: they do so at the price of ignoring slavery. For a time they think they can skip out on their deal with the devil, but they can't. The new nation is torn asunder by civil war. In the end, slavery is stamped out and the union saved. You can end the story there, or carry it forward to the Civil Rights Movement and America's engagement with the world (mostly for good, sometimes ill, almost always in the name of freedom) during the 20th century. The themes are of sufficiently epic proportions: freedom, justice, tragic flaws, fratricide. In the right hands, I could see these themes worked into an American epic.

Steve, by mentioning the German interest in medievalism, you raise an interesting question: what form would an American epic take? Where would Americans expect their national story to come from? It says a great deal about 18th and 19th century Germans that they looked to the medieval era. Where would Americans look? What would they expect a national epic to feel like? I submit three possibilities. (Today's a very trinitarian day, isn't it?)

(1) Something colonial. Americans have a sense that we came from the east coast, from colonies where people wore white wigs. It would be fitting if a national epic took place in such a setting. It need not be strictly historical; Lloyd Alexander's Westmark is set in a fictional 18th century country which feels not unlike colonial America in many ways.

(2) Something Western. I buy F. J. Turner's frontier thesis. The frontier was where America was forged, and it remains the archetypal place where the hard-working individualist can get ahead.

(3) Something sci-fi. Americans assume that technology is part and parcel of their lives. To what extent this is a recent phenomenon I'm not sure (though Santa Susanna, the American church in Rome, was the first in the city to have electric lighting). I could see a futuristic story being a good vehicle for communicating American-ness.

Stephen said...

Aaron, your three possible settings for an American are all plausible, but I don't know about a futuristic setting, simply because I'm not sure you can set an epic in the future. If any nation could set its epic in the future, it would be the US, but it just seems wrong to set an epic in the future. (I'll have to think more about exactly why.)

As for your storyline (the first #3), that sounds way too Whiggish. Freedom is not the goal of history; it's what allows us to act in history. A compelling and truly American epic could be made out of that material, but the history of America as the "story of freedom" would be mere ideology.

Finally (at least for now), to go back to the original post, I too am not sure what to make of the fact that I (and probably a fair number of other people) am hardly acquainted with American literature. Maybe it just means that American literature is no good? Of course, it could also very easily mean that I am simply uneducated.

Aaron Linderman said...

Steve, I'm not sure (a) that American history as the "story of freedom" needs to be ideology, nor (b) that ideology cannot be translated into a national epic.

I'm not suggesting here a crude Whig interpretation of history. Whether we are freer now and whether that freedom was inevitable or not, I leave to others. What I am suggesting is that Americans have long though about their nation and their history in terms of freedom. Maybe the rhetoric conforms to the reality and maybe it doesn't, but that's definitely a major rhetorical theme for America. An epic about the story of freedom could interrogate, even subvert, the Whig interpretation, while still being about the unfolding of freedom in America.

Perhaps it is too much to say that nations have a national ideology, but I would at least say they have an ethos. Brits are committed to the monarchy, even if they think it silly or antiquated. The French are secularists. Modern Japanese are committed pacifists (or something darn near it). Europeans at large believe in social welfare in a way that is foreign, even to the American left. Are these examples of a national ideology? Call it what you will, there's something to it. In the case of America, a nation united not by blood or common ethnicity but by affirmation of a set of political principles, this seems all the more true. So I would expect something of the sort to show up in an American epic.

Theophilus said...

First of all this is a very interesting post. Thanks for writing it.

I think there are a few reasons why America doesn't have a national epic and why it doesn't necessarily need one. Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn are two of these candidates. Moby Dick is an epic, but it is far too pessimistic and rejects traditionally American values. Not to mention it is still very much a European-style book (what's more I just don't think it is that good). Huckleberry Finn is definitely an American book but I do not think it even comes close to capturing what America is, and it is certainly not epic. Some, who see race relations as the defining aspect of our country might argue that it does, but to me race is only one part (though indeed a large part) of the American experience.

So I don't think we have a national epic in any sense. I think this is partly due to the history of our nation. The role of national epics has been to establish some sort of founding myth or at least to state the values of a particular people (some epics do not do the former but all do the latter); for modern countries like ours, born in an age not shrouded in mist, we can turn to history books instead of poetry.

Since we know our own history it makes it hard to redefine ourselves in a fictional work; it also makes it unnecessary since most Americans who know their American history already draw a great deal of inspiration from the past. Especially in periods such as the founding and the Civil War. Our great leaders and our legal documents embody American values.

Not only that, I also think it would be impossible to write an epic in our time because an epic presupposes shared values, a national ethos, like Aaron was hinting at earlier. Our sense of national unity and culture has much declined. There are a great many people who reject the idea of America and what's more reject the idea of national identity and prefer cosmopolitanism. Since World War II we have been very leary of anything smacking of nationalism. Perhaps this is a reason why, to my knowledge, no epics have been attempted since WWII. (The last one I can think of is Joyce's Ulysses).

Another reason we may not have an epic is because Americans are typically more casual than Europeans and epic is the most formal type of literature there is. That may be another reason why there is not only no national epic, but hardly any attempts at making one.

Stephen said...

Aaron,

You're probably right that an American epic would have to confront the issue/rhetoric of freedom. And I'm sure you wouldn't want a crude Whig interpretation of history.

But, even if ideology can be translated into an epic, it wouldn't be an interesting epic. The Aeneid, for instance, has its moments where it approaches a state ideology, especially:

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.


(Bk. VI, l. 851-853)

But Virgil was certainly not an ideologue, and he introduced enough ambiguity into the poem to make it reflect the real Roman people, such as the death of Turnus: Aeneas was certainly conquering the proud, but was he really "sparing the conquered"?

Stephen said...

Theophilus,

You raise many good points, especially about our lack of a real national identity. But, what I would ask is this: Is it possible for a country to construct its identity such as America has done purely on the basis of "freedom" (however we understand that nebulous term)? National identity, it seems to me, has to come primarily from a shared vision of the good beyond freedom, simply living together for a long time, and from a great deal of historical accident.

Theophilus said...

Stephen,

That is the problem isn't it. The very ideology of liberalism (that is, the classical liberalism which our country was founded on) makes the shared moral vision almost impossible; after all, the end of liberalism is to be free to do as you please and is not at all concerned with things such as national unity and loyalty to common values. To insist that our country be united in any way (language, allegiance, etc) seems to a considerable segment of our populations to be obtuse. If we oppose the doctrine of multi-culturalism we are bigots; if we wish all Americans to speak english, we are xenophobes; if we wish each child to pledge allegiance to the flag we are intolerant, etc, etc.

But the thing is, the human tendency to form a culture and an ethos is so strong that even under liberalism we have found a common culture and a common myth: the myth of freedom. The idea of freedom is the one thing that all Americans hold dear and we have organized all our political structures and have interpreted all of our history to serve the end of freedom. So contrary to what I said above, there is one thing (at least) that is insisted upon from an American: to believe in freedom. So, ironically we have formed a common culture and a myth and a national unity that surrounds an idea that seems to be contrary to the very idea of common culture, and to a unified national identity, and that is liberalism.

There are many other examples of common cultural knowledge and myth, but these are usually more local, and since America is such a huge country, it is no wonder that they occur. So there is a different epoch in the West, in New England, and in Paul Bunyan's woods in Minnesota, where I live.

Perhaps I am not being clear, but I hope you understand what I am trying to say.