From Poetics of Relation: "*Hegel, in book 3 of his Aesthetics, shows how the founding works of communities appear spontaneously at the moment in which a still naive collective consciousness reassures itself about its own legitimacy, or, not to mince words: about its right to possess a land. In this sense Epic thought is close to that of Myth."
“During this period of invading nomads the passion for self-definition first appears in the guise of personal adventure. Along the route of their voyages conquerors established empires that collapsed at their death. Their capitals went where they went. “Rome is no longer in Rome, it is wherever I am.” The root is not important. Movement is. The idea of errantry, still inhibited in the face of this mad reality, this too-functional nomadism, whose ends it could not know, does not yet make an appearance. Center and periphery are equivalent. Conquerors are the moving, transient root of their people.
The West, therefore, is where this movement becomes fixed and nations declare themselves in preparation for their repercussions in the world. This fixing, this declaration, this expansion, all require that the idea of the root gradually take on the intolerant sense that Deleuze and Guattari, no doubt, meant to challenge. The reason for our return to this episode in Western history is that it spread throughout the world. The model came in handy. Most of the nations that gained freedom from colonization have tended to form around an idea of power—the totalitarian drive of a single, unique root—rather than around a fundamental relationship with the Other. Culture’s self-conception was dualistic, pitting citizen against barbarian. Nothing has ever more solidly opposed the thought of errantry than this period in human history when Western nations were established and then made their impact on the world.
At first this thought of errantry, bucking the current of nationalist expansion, was disguised “within” very personalized adventures just as the appearance of Western nations had been preceded by the ventures of empire builders. (…)”
General Character of Epic
Preliminary characteristics of an epic
“(a) (…) consists in extracting from the concrete world and its wealth of changing phenomena something which is necessary and self-grounded and expressing that independently, concentrated into epic phraseology. (…) The author is not yet expressing his own concrete self; on the contrary, he looks around and attaches to the object or place which he sees confronting him, and which is claiming his interest, a compressed explanation concerned with the kernel of the thing itself. (…) We find the next step taken when the duality of the externally real object and the inscription is expunged, i.e. when the poet expresses his idea of the object, without having the object present before his eyes. (...) which put together in a compressed form what is stronger than things we can see, more enduring and universal than the memorial of a specific deed, more lasting than votive offerings, temples, and pillars, – namely the duties of our human existence (…) The epic character in this mode of treatment consists in this, that maxims like these are not expressions of personal feeling or purely individual reflection, and neither is even the impression they make directed to our feelings with a view to touching us or promoting some interest of the heart, but instead they evoke an awareness that what is of intrinsic worth must be regarded as a human duty, as what is decent and honourable. (…) This is because in this totality the unity holding the parts together, and the real centre, is not provided by a purely lyrical mood or a dramatic action but by a specific and real sphere of life, the essential nature of which is to be brought home to our minds both in its general character and also in its particular trends, aspects, occurrences, duties, etc. Conformably with this whole stage of epic, which exhibits the permanent and the universal as such with the chiefly ethical aim of warning, teaching, and summoning to an inherently sterling moral life, productions of this kind acquire a didactic tone; (…) and, by allowing the descriptive element its necessary scope too, they prove completely that the whole of their doctrine and description is directly drawn from a reality that has been grasped in its substance and lived through.(…) ”
“(b) (…) Intensified by contemplating the greatness of this object and by struggling with its majesty, the soul’s enthusiasm begins to become lyrical at the same time; but the entire exposition of the truths entering the poet’s thinking has a purely matter-of-fact and therefore epic character. (…) the subject-matter is the coming-to-be of things, especially of nature, and the tumult and conflict of activities dominant in nature. Here the poetic imagination proceeds to present an occurrence more concretely and richly in the form of deeds and events, because it personifies more or less definitely the natural powers that work themselves out in different spheres and productions, and it clothes them symbolically with human events and actions. (…) The familiar example of such an epic way of putting things is the Theogony transmitted to us as by Hesiod. In this work, everything that happened takes the form of human events, and it remains all the less purely symbolic the more are the gods, with spiritual dominion as their vocation, free to take the shape of spiritual individuality which corresponds with their essential being, and for this reason they are justified in acting, and being portrayed, as human beings. (…) strictly human reality which must alone provide the truly concrete material for the sway of the divine powers.”
A proper epic
“(c) (…) while what is genuinely poetic is concrete spirit in an individual form; and ==the epic, having what is as its topic, acquires as its object the occurrence of an action which in the whole breadth of its circumstances and relations must gain access to our contemplation as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch. Consequently the content and form of epic proper is the entire world-outlook and objective manifestation of a national spirit presented in its self-objectifying shape as an actual event. This whole comprises both the religious consciousness, springing from all the depths of the human spirit, and also concrete existence political and domestic life right down to the details of external existence, human needs and means for their satisfaction; and epic animates this whole by developing it in close contact with individuals, because what is universal and substantive enters poetry only as the living presence of the spirit. (...) Further, such a total world, which nevertheless is concentrated into individual lives, must proceed tranquilly in the course of its realization, without hurrying on practically and dramatically towards some mark and the result of aiming at it, so that we can linger by what goes on, immerse ourselves in the individual pictures in the story and enjoy them in all their details. (...) the epic poem becomes rather diffuse and, owing to the relatively greater independence of its parts, is rather loosely connected together,== we still must not suppose that it may be composed bit by bit on and on, for on the contrary, like any other work of art, it must as poetry be finished off into an inherently organic whole; yet it moves forward in objective tranquillity so that we can take an interest in the detail itself and the pictures of living reality. (…) To this extent these memorials are nothing less than the proper foundations of a national consciousness (…) In epic proper the childlike consciousness of a people is expressed for the first time in poetic form. A genuine epic poem therefore falls into that middle period in which a people has awakened out of torpidity, and its spirit has been so far strengthened as to be able to produce its own world and feel itself at home in it, (…) (…) lyrically its dwelling on self and its preoccupation with the inner life of the individual; (…) But epic still demands that immediate unity of feeling with action, of inner aims logically pursued along with external accidents and events, a unity which in its original and undisrupted character occurs only in the earliest periods of poetry and a nation’s life. But we must not put the matter at all as if a people in its heroic age as such, the cradle of its epic, already had the skill to be able to describe itself poetically; for a nationality to be implicitly poetic in its actual life is one thing, but poetry as the imaginative consciousness of poetic material and as the artistic presentation of such a world is another thing altogether. The need to make play with ideas in such a presentation, i.e. the development of art, necessarily arises later than the life and the spirit which is naïvely at home in its immediate poetic existence. Homer and the poems bearing his name are centuries later than the Trojan war which counts as an actual fact just as much as Homer is for me an historical individual. (…) In spite of this separation in time, a close connection must nevertheless still be left between the poet and his material. The poet must still be wholly absorbed in these old circumstances, ways of looking at things, and faith, and all he needs to do is to bring a poetic consciousness and artistic portrayal to his subject which is in fact the real basis of his actual life. (…) If, then, the spirit of the artist is different from that through which the actual life and deeds of the nation described acquired their existence, then this produces a cleavage which at once confronts us as inappropriate and disturbing. For in that case we see on the one side scenes of a past world, and, on the other, forms, attitudes of mind, modes of reflection belonging to a different present. The result is that the forms of the earlier faith now become, in the midst of this further developed reflective mentality, a cold affair, a superstition, and an empty decoration provided by poetic machinery, and they wholly lack their original soul and proper life.”
The general position which the poet has to take up in the case of epic proper
”(…) However much the epic must be of a factual kind, i.e. the objective presentation of a self-grounded world, made real in virtue of its own necessity, a world to which the poet’s own way of looking at things is akin and with which he can identify himself, still the work of art that portrays such a world is and remains the free production of an individual. (…) In the Iliad, for example, we see now Calchas, now Nestor interpreting the events, and yet these are explanations which the poet provides. Indeed even what passes within the minds of the heroes he interprets objectively as an intervention of the gods as when Athene appears to the wrathful Achilles, trying to bring him to his senses. This is the poet’s invention, but because the epic presents not the poet’s own inner world but the objective events, the subjective side of the production must be put into the background precisely as the poet completely immerses himself in the world which he unfolds before our eyes. This is why the great epic style consists in the work’s seeming to be its own minstrel and appearing independently without having any author to conduct it or be at its head. (…) Although an epic does express the affairs of an entire nation, it is only individuals who can write poetry, a nation collectively cannot. The spirit of an age or a nation is indeed the underlying efficient cause, but the effect, an actual work of art, is only produced when this cause is concentrated into the individual genius of a single poet; he then brings to our minds and particularizes this universal spirit, and all that it contains, as his own vision and his own work. (…) But many pieces composed on and on in the same tone do not make up that unitary work which can be the product only of a single mind. This is a point of importance in connection with the Homeric poems and the Nibelungenlied, because we cannot prove the authorship of the latter with any historical certainty, while, in regard to the Iliad and the Odyssey we all know that some have advanced the opinion that Homer, supposedly the single author of both, never existed and single pieces were produced by single hands and then assembled together to form these two great works. The fundamental question in relation to this contention is whether each of these poems forms an organic epic whole, or, according to widespread opinion today, has no necessary beginning or end and therefore could have been prolonged indefinitely. (…) What they reveal is solely the thing itself, the people’s objective way of looking at things.”
Particular Characteristics of Epic Proper
”(…) the traits which seem to me to be the chief characteristics naturally belonging to epic. These can be grouped together under the following heads:
(a) First, the question arises about what character the general world-situation must have if it is to provide a ground on which an epic event can be adequately portrayed.
(b) Secondly, we have to examine the quality of this individual event and consider of what sort it is.
(c) Thirdly, we must cast a glance at the form in which these two sides are intertwined and moulded into the unity of a work of art.”
(a) The General World-Situation of Epic “We saw right at the beginning that what is accomplished in the genuinely epical event is not a single casual deed, and that consequently it is not a purely accidental happening which is related, but an action ramified into the whole of its age and national circumstances so that it can be brought before us only within an outspread world and demands the portrayal of this world in its entirety. (…) ==The state of human life most suitable as the background of an epic is that in which it exists for individuals already as a present reality hut which remains most closely connected with them by the tie of a common primitive life.== For if the heroes who are placed at the head of affairs have first to found an entire social order, (…) on their subjective character and cannot appear as an objective reality. (…) The relations of ethical life, the bond of the family, as well as the bond of the people – as an entire nation – in war and peace must all have been discovered, framed, and developed; (…) the sole origin and support of these relations in an epic world must clearly be a sense of justice and equity, together with custom and the general mind and character, so that no intellectualism in the form of a prosaic reality can stand and be consolidated against the heart, individual attitudes of mind, and passion. (…) The relations of an objective ethical order must indeed have already been willed and developing, but they can acquire their existence only in and through the actions and character of individuals, and not yet otherwise in a universally valid and independently justified form. Thus in epic we find an underlying community of objective life and action, but nevertheless a freedom in this action and life which appear to proceed entirely from the subjective will of individuals.”
…
“In addition to the cited epics with a classical education as their basis, we may add the Lusiads of Camoens. With this work, wholly national in its contents because it sings the bold sea-voyages of the Portuguese, we have already left what is properly medieval, and it takes us over into interests proclaiming a new era. Here, however, despite the fire of patriotism, the liveliness of the descriptions drawn for the most part from the poet’s own vision and experience of life, and the epically rounded unity-of the whole, we cannot but feel the cleavage between the national subject-matter and the artistic formation derived partly from antiquity and partly from the Italians, and this destroys the impression of the primitive originality of epic.”