Response to Christian Thorne’s “The Grassy-Green Sea”
Kendrick, Christopher
Early Modern Culture, No. 5 (2006)
Abstract
That Christian Thorne’s argument is not so easy to summarize certainly doesn’t owe to lack of clarity, whether at the level of general or particular arguments, but rather to how much argument is packed into its 40-some pages. Talk about your range and sweep! But follows an attempt, which is bound to miss several things. Thorne’s main claim is that the epic genre (presumably the study or updated practice thereof) might be of service in the ongoing attempt to narrate a contemporary social reality characterized by increasing complexity and globality. The tradition of epic could prove of such service, could rather significantly supplement or replace the novelistic tradition, which one naturally associates with the enterprise of realistic representation, because where novelistic narrative typically focuses on the private lives of a set of characters in a given national context, epic narrative has been political-military in its focus and imperial in scope. More than this: on inspection, older or “pre-modern” epics turn out, not just to be about finished empires, but to narrate a transition, largely negotiated but still under way, from a romance world-order, mythic and mythicizing, of dispersed pre-agrarian peoples, to the properly epic order of rational empire. So even the older, or what Thorne calls the Mediterranean, epic form offers narrative paradigms that ought to be adaptable, or at least suggestive, to the task of representing the ongoing encounter between “developed” and “underdeveloped” sites, the more integral and dynamic kind of imperialism, putatively referred to by the term “globalization”. But then it happens that there is a modern tradition, that of Atlantic epic, a part of whose distinctive mission is to do to the Mediterranean epic, and its relatively static and settled world of tributary empire, what that had done to the order of mythic dispersal. The two Atlantic poems discussed, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Joel Barlowe’s Columbiad, are centrally concerned to represent and evaluate, Barlowe in boosterish tones and Milton with prophetic resignation, the move from a tributary to a less settled, more dynamic — or in a word, capitalist — imperialism.
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