‘‘Epic’’ - or any other literary genre - cannot be classified apart from the performers who transmit it. One can even argue, as Gregory Nagy does, that the invention of‘‘genre’’ as a system of categories in Greek literary history only occurs when the oral-traditional performances of the archaic period are reduced to writing, mostly during the fifth century BCE, and the originating events lost or forgotten. ‘‘Genre,’’ in this regard, is a tool for scholars and librarians. This is not to say that poets themselves never had an awareness of technical and thematic distinctions among, for example, verses to honor gods, tell of heroic deeds, mock social offenders, or accompany religious processions. But this was a matter of implicit poetics, both performers and audiences following what tradition suggested.
A review of contemporary verbal art in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Egypt will show that the fluidity of early Greek modes - and, as far as we can tell, that of Near Eastern ancient epic - is the norm in traditional societies. At the same time, we shall see:
That while something resembling ‘‘epic’’ can be distinguished from other forms, it is even more significant to see it in relation to its accompanying genres in performance; that the specifics of textual or performance style cannot be used to determine whether or not a performance is ‘‘epic’’;
That the epic ‘‘genre’’ has symbiotic ties with folktale, myth, and especially praise-poetry;
That, above all, epic stands out as the most pervasive, ‘‘unmarked’’ genre, in terms of when and where it can be performed, while at the same time it is the culturally most significant and ‘‘marked’’ form in terms of its ambitions and attitudes.
These observations, brief as they are, can help us to rethink the classical and western notion of ‘‘epic’’ while leading us to a deeper sense of the limits and possibilities of genre definitions.
Let us begin with the issue of boundaries. Daniel Biebuyck places the Mwindo narrative from the Congo within an array of other distinct verbal art forms practiced by the Nyanga people (Biebuyck and Mateene 1969). Significantly, the sequenced singing and recitation of long narratives ( karisi) incorporates these other genres of discourse: proverbs, riddles, and prayers in poetic form, eulogistic recitations, formulas used by diviners and medicine men, personal songs, animal tales, instructions and political advice, all find a place within Mwindo. Such generic inclusiveness is common throughout African epic narrative. A crucial further point can be adduced from the work of Dwight Reynolds on the Sirat Bani Hilal as performed in northern Egypt (1995). Reynolds points out that the urge to treat as the ‘‘epic’’ the pure story-line of one Bedouin tribe’s exploits must be resisted, if one is to appreciate the full impact of the performance. The Egyptian bard always dovetails his singing with two other equally important and formally different components, the praise of Mohammad (madih) and proverbial advice in lyric form (mawwal). More surprisingly, even when within the epic a character is about to speak, the same canonical sequence of genres occurs. In short, the ‘‘epic’’ must be taken as total social event including audience interaction, instrumental music, and these framing genres, not just the ‘‘text’’ we might want to cull from it.
We know that epic recitation was preceded by proems resembling the Homeric Hymns (see Thuc. 3.104). As mentioned above, Homeric and Hesiodic poems could be recited by the same rhapsodic performers. The Hesiodic corpus encompasses proverbial lore in diction and structures that have been compared to Greek lyric. In short, one can imagine an ancient Greek performer sequencing exactly the same functionally similar genres as the Egyptian bards: praise (humnoi), wisdom (gnomai), and ‘‘epic’’ (narrowly conceived). Furthemore, it can be argued that Greek epic not only can be framed by but itself consciously embeds such subgenres as praise and blame poetry, maxims, and lyric similes (see further section 4).
Such fluid genre boundaries relate to the wide range of‘‘epic’’ performance styles, both in the course of one composition and across regions. Mande hunters’ epics comprise three genres - narrative, song, and praise proverbs - and hence three performance styles. In Central African epic traditions it is common for the main reciter to be accompanied by backup singers performing melodic portions organic to the tale (often the character’s ‘‘speech’’ as song). The Nyanga bard dances and dramatically mimes parts of Mwindo, even taking on the hero’s role, while select respondents repeat his verses (compare the narrative and dance event described at Od. 8.255-369). In contrast to Central African multimedia productions, West African performances such as the widespread Sunjata epic often feature a solitary recitinggriot. (There are many local indigenous names for this role, which combines historian, praise-poet, herald, and arbitrator.) One such, the Maninka jeli, recites the epic at high speed, accompanying himself on a small four-string instrument.
Joyce Flueckiger’s research in northern and central India shows not only that ‘‘epic’’ can be done in widely different styles, but that even the same long, heroic narrative, like the Dhola-Maru tradition, sung in communities a few hundred miles apart, qualifies as ‘‘epic’’ in one but not the other (1999). Community self-identification, caste ambitions, and local religious cult all determine whether a people views the epic as its own defining narrative.
If content or consistent style fail to demarcate contemporary ‘‘epic,’’ neither do the Eurocentric contrasts with ‘‘folktale’’ or ‘‘myth.’’ For example, the mvet narrations of the Fang (southern Cameroon, Gabon) recount episodic struggles between two clans, a mortal and immortal. There is no central protagonist; magical elements abound, along with romance or folktale motifs. Yet the night-long narrations function like other Central African epics to address the society’s abiding concerns. Their human quest stories are simply a strand in a much larger tapestry of cosmic issues: how plants, animals, and social hierarchies came to be. In Greek, we might at first perceive fewer cosmic issues in the martial or adventure epics. But the Hesiodic corpus, especially the Catalogue of Women, is clearly related to local concerns, rites and tales; the Theogony embodies an entire cosmology. The investigations of Georges Dumezil have been especially useful in illustrating how ‘‘epic’’ in Greece, and even more so in the related languages of Iceland, Ireland, India and Rome, is often a matter of cosmic myths, historicized and secularized (1968,1971,1973).
Myth and folktale might be considered the deeper roots of epic, yet they can just as easily be synchronic and interactive with epic. It is perhaps best to think of them along a spectrum, with audience interest the determining factor in how unspecified, as to time and place, a story can be, and what belief it engenders. A different dynamic exists between epic and praise poetry. As described by Africanists, praise-poetry is an allusive, highly compressed, and non-narrative evocation of the genealogies and successes of chieftains. Marked by often obscure, riddling names, brief references to events, and a repetitive, incantatory style, this genre is more widespread than epic, especially in southern and eastern Africa. Instead of a range on a spectrum, the praise-poem is a telescope: what is compressed in a style that imitates the instantaneous exultation of a client before his patron, in epic is expanded to fill out chronology, cause, and characterization. While praise (often in second-person address) is more direct and more lucrative, epic (usually third-person) is more lucid. The dynamic interaction of praise and epic should make us think of such poetic forms as ancient Greek epinikia and enkomia, as preserved mainly in the work of Pindar (ca. 518-438 bce), often noted for the same features - allusive, elliptical, gnomic, and narrative only in a kernel form. Medieval Irish bardic verse and prose sagas exhibit a similar kernel-and-expansion relationship. Whether or not we construct a diachronic development from praise poetry to epic, the synchronic reality of their interdependence must be kept in mind,
In brief, contemporary ‘‘epic’’ stands in at least three typological relationships to other types of verbal art. It can (1) incorporate smaller forms (proverbs, songs, etc.). It can (2) embody an entire deep form, providing epic skin for the bones of myth or folktale concerns; and it can (3) expand a socially functional kernel form, praise-poetry. Furthermore, all three relations can occur simultaneously, as in Sunjata. The many versions available (1) feature songs of griots and wise sayings; (2) embody a folktale type of the boy’s success story, about a marginalized mother-son dyad and its rise to power; and (3) contain frequent formulaic praises of the hero as founder of the kingdom of Mali (and of his griot as ancestor of modern singers). Perhaps, indeed, we should define epic as that form that consistently represents all three of the above relations.
The expansiveness of epic as ‘‘super-genre’’ brings us, finally, to observe a matching pervasiveness on the level of performance. From the accounts of numerous ethnographers, it is clear that ‘‘epic’’ events are unconfined in contrast to most other stylized verbal art, and not pinned to authorized occasions, rituals, or audiences, such as initiatory groups. Epic can be sung in almost every setting, by professionals or amateurs. Just as epic as actual performance functions as a soundstage, an environment for setting off ah sorts of smaller genres, so epic as possible peformance is equivalent to the cultural environment itself, ready to be instantiated and evoked at any moment. As dozens of field studies show, the total ‘‘epic’’ is in fact never performed unless elicited by an outsider, such as the folklorist. Yet even when it is brought forth, as usually, in shorter episodic form, the performance depends on an audience and performer’s unspoken awareness of the totality of a story and its conceivable permutations. In potential size, epic is hugely ambitious, undertaking to articulate the most essential aspects of a culture, from its origin stories to its ideals of social behavior, social structure, relationship to the natural world and to the supernatural. The scope of epic is matched by its attitude: as Aristotle noted, it dwells on the serious. (Even its meter, says Aristotle, is ‘‘most stately and weightiest’’: stasimOtaton kai onkOdestaton, Poetics 1459b34-5.) Epic, the ultimate metonymic art form from the perspective of its pars pro toto performance, is on the level of ideology a metonymy for culture itself.
World History
