Thinking of those Branches Green
Which to express, he bends his gentle wit,
And thinking of those branches green to frame
A garland for her dainty forehead fit,
He plucked a bough; out of whose rift there came
Small drops of gory blood, that trickled down the same.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, modernized by me
Content warning: suicide, depression.
In the last post I noticed how scientific and historical
discoveries imply that there is always something we don’t know about the world;
I think beginning in media res is an
opportunity to think about how there is always something we don’t know about
ourselves
Epics are supposed to open in the middle of the story (in media res = in the middle of things)
and reveal the early parts with flashback. Paradise
Lost begins as Satan falls, and the angels describe the way in heaven and
the creation of the world to Adam; The
Faerie Queene begins as the Redcross Knight and Una are already on their
quest. However, in media res reminds
me of Judith Butler’s Giving an Account
of Oneself, in which she describes the ways in which we do not know
ourselves. One of these is that even in our own lives we start belatedly: the
situation into which we are born already exists and is part of a long history,
but also the moment when we start asking, “Who am I? How did I get to be this
person?,” happens well after that process has begun. Our own origins are
shrouded in forgetfulness, in the fact that we actually couldn’t form memories
when it happened, and (as Laplanche
would argue) we didn’t understand what was going on while those events shaped
us.* In a sense, every story begins in
media res because the character development begins well before the
narrative does. For instance, even Harry
Potter, which starts with Harry as a baby, leaves as backstory the terrible
event which shapes that baby’s life, signified by the lightning-bolt-shaped
scar on his forehead. However, I’m not quite sure how I would render this in a
narrative, especially since I just argued that literally every text begins in media res. Something to think about,
I guess, but a necessary theme would be that the conditions which gave rise to
the present action remain, in certain ways, mysterious.
I should point out, too, that Butler says these vexations
break our narrative. Digressions, as I discussed them, might represent a sort
of break in the narrative, but I know I’m still not sure what Butler means by
this—she doesn’t give many examples—and I’ll need to think more about that
problem, too.
On the topic of character and idea, let’s think about epithets. Most traditional epics have
epithets for its characters or concepts, referring to them by catchy poetic
names. In Homer, women are often “white-armed,” the sea is “wine-coloured” or
“wine-dark,” and Achilles is “lion-hearted” and “swift-footed.” Now, I have in
the back of my mind Leah Libresco’s discussion
of epithets, which warns against them as a possible limitation to personal
growth or new decisions, I want to set that aside for the moment. I think an
epithet might be useful to mark a distinction between social roles or
identities; in both postmodernism and empirical social psychology, people’s personalities/thought
and behaviour patterns change between contexts. This fact (and it is a fact) challenges certain naïve
conceptions of identity or authenticity which I think still need challenging in
some quarters. It isn’t a huge deal, but it is somewhat important to me and I
think epithets might be a way of signalling this but also exploring context collapse, in which social
contexts start to collide or overlap: what happens when an epithet is used in
front of the wrong people? (Today, social media—and Facebook in particular—is
where context collapse happens the most for most of us, but it has always
happened.) And it might be a way of thinking about the sorts of expectation which
get foisted on a person: what happens when a person outgrows their epithet or
feels it never applied in the first place, and they start to chafe under it?
And what if someone finds themselves with conflicting or competing epithets?
They might have a catalogue of epithets, and catalogues of objects are another epic
convention. (That was a segue, right?) Ovid spends stanzas listing the names of
Acteon’s dogs; Spenser spends them naming the kinds of trees in a forest. The
first thing that leaps to mind for me
is a library catalogue, and I would certainly be tempted to include a literal
library catalogue whatever the setting. However, this provides an opportunity
to think about something I like to think about: taxonomy. Specifically, the
difference between classification and categorization is one of the most
interesting things I’ve learned so far in library school. I could talk for a
while about it, but I won’t. However, there are two different kinds of
taxonomy: a classification is exclusive and
exhaustive, meaning that every object
under its purview must fit into a class and only one class, and it must do so
unambiguously; a categorization has fuzzier boundaries, in which an object
might not really fit anywhere or
might fit in two categories about equally well. These two facts have other
consequences—notably, in categorizations some objects might be more typical of
the category than others, which isn’t true of classifications; in
classifications, whatever is true of the class is always necessarily true of
all its members, which isn’t true of categorizations. Catalogues might be a way
of playing with this? Again, this might be a place to think about nominalism
and realism, and what abstract groupings even are in the first place. This is
pretty minor, though, both in terms of the epic itself and the things I’m
interested in, so I’ll move on.
Ekphrasis, a description of a piece of art, also depends a lot
on setting. I think this would be no problem for me: there are lots of artists
in my family and even if I know very little art theory I care a lot about it.
If it were a contemporary setting, I could use photography, about which I do
know a few things. If not, I’m sure I could still manage. Architecture might be
an interesting way in, too. I could also include a Borgesian technique, where
characters describe and discuss non-existent novels (or poems or legends or
whatnot). There are a lot of directions I could take this: the way in which art
allows us to see through another person’s eyes or ears, however briefly, or appears to let us do this but probably
doesn’t do it as well as we think; the
reasons people create art, and how those reasons shape the art; art as a
metaphor for all human society and the nature of creation, the
order-giving artist working with chaos-tending matter. Take your pick.
Two of the weird features that I’ve saved for the end do fit
well together for me, even if they wouldn’t for everyone; I refer to the talking trees and the snake-ladies. Epics conventionally
included trees which spoke, often because they were people transformed into
trees; they also included half-women half-snake beings, usually with the human
woman part above the waist and the serpentine part below the waist. The trees
might often be warnings; the snake-ladies (drakaina
in Greek) were often minor villains, especially boundary guardians. This would
be a place to indulge in my environmentalism and general love for plants and
animals, but I also see in these figures a combination of the human world and the
natural world. Much as the centaurs of Greek mythology were a mix of
civilization and barbarity, as are humans, these figures might show how the
human and the natural worlds aren’t so separable after all; humans are animals,
as the snake-lady might suggest; the natural world isn’t so inert and
unthinking as we make it out to be, as the talking trees suggest. But there’s a
hazard to humanizing the natural world too much: I wouldn’t want to undercut
how radically Other it is. Perhaps, then, it might be fair to have trees which ought to talk but don’t (the
sky does not speak), and a drakaina that appears human at first but turns
out to be entirely otherwise. It might be difficult to address these in a
realistic setting, but Wade Davis did it (probably unintentionally) in One River, so it can be done. A woman
with a snake, for instance, or a snake tattoo, might stand in for one idea;
trees that ought to tell us things—in the sense of scientific evidence, or in
the sense of clues in a mystery—might do for the other.
Another note on the trees: in Dante’s Inferno, these trees appear in the Wood of Self-Murderers. Everyone
who commits suicide either becomes a tree or is entombed in one; these trees
are then plagued by harpies. I have strong feelings about suicide: it is a
tragedy when anyone does kill themselves, but at the same time we must be cautious
to avoid making people with suicidal thoughts feel worse because they have them.
Condemning suicide could make people who have suicide feel worse; therefore we
might have to avoid condemning it. (I have no evidence of this, but I am
sufficiently convinced that I’m concerned about this.) So talking about suicide
is a tricky thing to do. I’m not sure I’m up to the task, but this issue with
trees might be a way in: perhaps, in fantasy setting, some people have turned
themselves into trees in order to avoid dealing with the world or themselves,
and this is why it is conspicuous that the trees do not talk.
I saved the discussion of the protagonist’s aristocracy for last. In Greek, Roman, and to
some extent early modern epics, the protagonist must be an aristocrat or royal.
The justification is usually the same that Aristotle gave for making tragic
heroes aristocratic: when an aristocrat falls, the society falls with him, but
when a peasant falls, the society does not notice. In order for the epic to depict
an event of any importance, aristocrats must be part of that event. But I think
this is pretty clearly a rationalization of the true reason they wrote about
aristocrats: the culture in which these epics appeared cared about aristocrats
and no one else. So if we transplant the epic into another cultural milieu and
ask, “Who is equivalent to the aristocracy here?,” there are two aspects to
that question: 1) who do we think actually make a difference in this society?
and 2) whom do we care about at the expense of others deserving our
attention? For Tolkien, the answer was
“the common man,” and specifically a hybrid of the middle class men and the working
class men who both fought next to him in the trenches of WWI, and so his heroes
were male hobbits. Not female
hobbits, of course. Male ones.
This is therefore an embarrassing question. For me, the
answer is probably “intelligent people,” or maybe “educated people with
intellectual empathy.” I admit that this is a problem, or could be one if I
wasn’t careful and specific; I’d write about it, but Scott
Alexander has just done it better than I ever would. So, in a bad way, intelligence would be my
aristocracy: I am simply more interested in people who I feel can keep up with me (or who I have trouble keeping up with) than people who can't. I don’t think intelligent people are of more moral
worth, but I do pay more attention to them. This is a fault I'm trying to overcome. And, in a neutral way, intelligence would be my aristocracy: intelligent
people probably are the ones who will change the world for the better,
in the broad sense of creating the ideas which allow all of us to improve the
world. They are the ones with whom we rise—or fall. So, if my goal was just to create an epic depicting my ideas, good and
bad, intelligence would be my aristocracy; if my goal was to challenge my own
ideas, I would have to think about what a less-intelligent protagonist could do
in my epic.
That’s all of the conventions I plan on discussing for the
time being. In the next post I’ll talk about what’s missing, and how this might
fit together.
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