A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  Here's an elegant little mind game, set up by the critic Frank Kermode, which demonstrates the point I'm making about being ‘wired’ to think mythically. If you put a wristwatch to your ear, you will hear tick-TOCK, tick-TOCK, tick-TOCK. ‘Tock’ will be stressed more than ‘tick’. Our minds, receiving the signal from our ear, ‘shape’ the tick-tick into tick-TOCK – into, that is, a tiny beginning and a tiny ending. That, essentially, is what myth does. It creates a pattern where none existed, because finding a pattern helps us make sense of things. (It also helps us to remember them.) And what is most interesting in that little ‘tick-TOCK’ example is that no one teaches you to hear that narrative shape. It's natural to do so.

  One way, then, of thinking about myth is that it makes sense out of the senselessness in which, as human beings, we all find ourselves. Why are we here, and what are we here ‘for’? Typically, myth supplies an explanation through stories (the backbone of literature) and symbols (the essence of poetry). Let's try a mind game. Suppose you are one of the first people to try growing crops on the land, 10,000 years ago. You know there are periods when nothing grows. Nature dies. Then, after some time, the earth comes back to life. Why? What explanation can you come up with? There is no scientist around to explain it. But you have, somehow, to ‘make sense’ of it.

  Seasonal rhythm is vital to agricultural communities – ‘a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted’, as the Bible puts it. Any farmer who doesn't know those ‘times’ will starve. The mysterious cycle of the earth's annual death and rebirth inspires ‘fertility myths’. These myths are often dramatised in terms of kings or rulers who die only to be resurrected. It creates a reassuring sense that although things change, in a larger way they stay the same.

  One of the oldest (and most beautiful) poems in English literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, opens, vividly, at the Christmas festivities in the court of King Arthur. It is the deadest time of year. A stranger, who is decked out in green from head to toe, bursts in on horseback. He imposes certain trials on those present, and gives them to understand that bad things will happen if the right things are not done. He is a version of the Green Man, the pagan god of vegetation: himself holding a holly bough, he represents the green shoots which (God willing) will sprout in spring. If, that is, mankind is watchful.

  Let's explore that tiny beginning and ending of the tick-TOCK pattern, this time in a more literary example: the familiar and much-told myth of Hercules. Early versions of the story are found on decorated Greek vases, from around the sixth century BC. A recent version can be found in the Iron Man films. The legendary strong man of myth meets a giant, Antaeus, stronger than even he is, with whom he is obliged to fight. Hercules throws the giant to the ground. But every time Antaeus makes contact with the earth, he becomes stronger. Hercules finally wins by grabbing his opponent in a bear-hug and lifting him in the air. Uprooted, Antaeus withers and dies.

  What is significant is that the story moves from beginning to end very satisfactorily (as do all the ‘labours’ of Hercules). It has a plot: there is an opening situation (the hero, Hercules, meets a giant, Antaeus), a complication (Hercules fights Antaeus, and is losing), and a resolution (Hercules realises how to beat his opponent, and wins). The fight in which the hero has to outsmart his much stronger opponent, as Hercules outsmarts Antaeus, will be familiar to every lover of James Bond films. The myth, like every Bond film, has a ‘happy ending’. In simple and complicated ways, we find that kind of ‘plotting’ everywhere in narrative literature.

  There is another element to myth. Myth always contains a truth, which we understand before we can clearly see it or explain it. To help prove that point, let's look at the oldest – and many would say the noblest – work of literature that we have, the poems known as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Tradition has it that they were created by an ancient Greek author, known only as ‘Homer’, probably around 3,000 years ago.

  The poems are about a long war between two great powers, Greece (as it would become) and Troy. There was such a war – archaeology has established it. But creating the work when he did, Homer was never too far away from the bare-bones ‘myth’. The hero of the poems, Odysseus (also known by his later Latin name, Ulysses), has many adventures on his way back from the war (a journey that takes him ten years). In one of them he and his shipmates are captured and imprisoned in a cave by a one-eyed giant called Polyphemus. This monster's single eye is in the middle of his forehead. When he feels hungry, he eats one of the captives in his cave – usually for breakfast. Odysseus, the most cunning of heroes, gets Polyphemus drunk and stabs him in his eye, blinding him, so that he and his crew can escape.

  What ‘truth’ can we see buried in this myth? It lies in that single eye. You have probably had the experience of arguing with someone who can't or won't see ‘both sides of the question’ – someone who just holds to one viewpoint. It's hopeless. You'll never change their mind. All you can do is find some way of escaping – and preferably in a less violent way than Homer's hero.

  You may be thinking that this all sounds rather primitive (‘the thought of savages’, as some belittle it). But myth always contains within it that grain of truth which is as relevant for us now as it was for the time when it was written. And mythic thought lives on, thrives even, long after you might think modern society and science had left its explanations hopelessly behind. It is, if you look carefully, woven into the fabric of contemporary literature, even if the eye does not immediately see it.

  Here is one, fairly recent, example of the ways in which myth is woven into our culture. In the period between James Cameron's Oscar-winning film Titanic, in 1997, and the centenary anniversary of the great liner's launch, on 12 April 2012, there was huge fascination with everything about the wreck in Britain and the USA. This fascination seemed, on the face of it, a little odd. Some 1,500 people had died when the ship went down. It was a horrible event. But the death toll pales in comparison with the millions of deaths and casualties caused by the First World War just a few years later. Why had people never forgotten the shipwreck? The answer may well be in the name of the vessel: Titanic.

  In ancient myth, the Titans were a tribe of giant gods. Their parents were the earth and sky and they were the first race on earth to have human form. After a long time enjoying their status as the most powerful species on earth, the Titans found themselves locked in a ten-year war with a new race of gods who had reached an even higher stage of evolution than they had. Although the Titans were giants possessed of gigantic strength, that was pretty well all they had: brute force. This new race, the Olympians, had much more: intelligence, beauty and skill. They were, essentially, more like humans (like us, we might think) than forces of nature.

  Despite their massive strength, the Titans, as the myth goes, went under. Their defeat is the subject of one of the greatest narrative poems in the English language, John Keats's Hyperion, which he wrote around 1818. In the poem, the Titan Oceanus contemplates his conquering successor, Neptune, who has replaced him as God of the Sea, and realises that:

  'tis the eternal law

  That first in beauty should be first in might

  For the un-beautiful Titans, their day is over. But, Oceanus prophesies:

  Yea, by that law, another race may drive

  Our conquerors to mourn as we do now.

  The White Star Line vessel that went to the bottom of the ocean in April 1912 was named the Titanic – accompanied by the ritual bottle of champagne cracked across its bow, itself a mythic act called ‘libation’ – because it was one of the largest, fastest, most powerful vessels ever destined to cross the Atlantic. It was thought to be unsinkable. But those who named it must have felt a certain uneasiness. Was it not tempting fate to name a ship Titanic, recalling what had happened to the Titans?

  One reason we are so fascinated by the disaster is because we suspect, irrationally, that the sinking of the Titanic contains a message for us. (Millions of dollars have been spent
exploring the vessel underwater and there has always been interest in ‘raising’ it.) The event is telling us something, warning us about something that we really should try to understand. Do not be overconfident, seems to be the message within what has become a myth for our age. The Greeks have given us a name for that overconfidence: hubris. It's echoed in the phrase ‘Pride comes before a fall’, and is a common theme throughout literature.

  The courts of inquiry, after the Titanic disaster, laid the blame, rationally enough, on lax regulation, inadequate iceberg monitoring, poor construction, and criminally insufficient lifeboat space. All this was true. But in his famous poem, ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”)’, Thomas Hardy, one of our greatest but most pessimistic writers (whose poetry we look at in detail in Chapter 24), saw deeper, more cosmic, mythic forces at work. (The ‘creature’ in his lines is the ship.)

  Well: while was fashioning

  This creature of cleaving wing,

  The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

  Prepared a sinister mate

  For her – so gaily great –

  A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

  The Admiralty came up with one verdict, based on nautical science. The poet came up with another verdict, based on a mythic understanding of the world. In the next chapter, let's consider how myth – the bedrock of literature – evolves into epic.

  CHAPTER 3

  Writing for Nations

  EPIC

  The word ‘epic’ is used widely but very loosely nowadays. In the newspaper I've just put down, for example, I find a soccer match (one of the very few, alas, in which an English team has won a major sporting title) described as an ‘epic struggle’. But in terms of literature, ‘epic’ has, when properly applied, an anything but loose meaning. It describes a very select, very ancient, set of texts that carry values which are ‘heroic’ in tone (‘heroic’ being another word we tend to use too loosely). They show mankind, we may say, at its most manly. (The gender bias in that remark is, unfortunately, appropriate: an ‘epic heroine’ is almost always a contradiction in terms.)

  When we think seriously about epics we encounter an intriguing question. If this is such great literature, why don't we write it any more? Why have we not done so (successfully, at least) for many centuries now? The word is still with us; the literature, for some reason, isn't.

  The most venerable epic that has survived through the ages is Gilgamesh, whose origins can be traced back to 2000 BC. The narrative originated in what is now called Iraq (then called Mesopotamia), the cradle of Western civilisation. This ‘fertile crescent’ was also where wheat was first cultivated, enabling mankind's great move from hunter-gatherer to an agricultural way of life. This, in turn, made cities possible – made us possible, we may say.

  Like some other epics, the surviving text of Gilgamesh is incomplete, dependent as it is on clay tablets not all of which have endured the passage of thousands of years. The hero is first encountered as the King of Uruk. He is part-god, part-man, and has built, to glorify himself, a magnificent city over which he tyrannises brutally. He is a bad, despotic ruler. The gods, to mend his ways, create a ‘wild man’, Enkidu, as strong as Gilgamesh but nobler in character. The two wrestle, and Gilgamesh wins. They then become comrades and embark on a series of quests, adventures and ordeals together.

  The gods, always unpredictable, infect Enkidu with a fatal illness. Gilgamesh is distraught at the death of his dearest friend. Now fearing death he travels the world to discover the secret of immortality. A divinity who can grant him his desire sets him a test: if he wants to live for eternity he can, surely, stay awake for a week. Gilgamesh tries, but fails, accepts the fact that he is mortal, and returns to Uruk a better and wiser ruler. And, in course of time, he will die.

  The themes of this very old story – the building of civilisation by heroism and the domestication of the savage legacy in our human nature – is common to all literary works that merit the title ‘epic’.

  Historically, epic evolves out of myth. One can usually see the joins between the two narrative forms quite clearly. In the great British epic, Beowulf, for example, the hero – a ‘modern’ (eighth-century modern, that is) warrior – is shown slaying ‘monsters’: Grendel and his mother, who live deep in a dark pool and emerge at night to slay any human they find. Beowulf himself is later slain by a dragon. Dragons are mythic, as are monsters like the Grendels. Warriors, like Beowulf and his comrades, are historical. Their armour and weaponry can be found, exactly as the epic poem describes them, in the ship-burials in which heroes and kings like Beowulf were sent to their final rest. The most famous of such ship-burials, the one excavated at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, is on display in the British Museum. You won't find dragon bones buried with the swords, helmets, chain-mail and shields.

  British literature is founded on this 3,182-line Anglo-Saxon poem. It was probably composed in the eighth century, drawing on old fables that went even further back into the mists of time. It was brought to England in some earlier form by invading Europeans, then it was recited orally for centuries, with countless variations, before being transcribed by an unknown monk (who made some tactful Christian insertions) in the tenth century. Monasteries were institutions that archived the nation's earliest writings and nurtured learning and literacy. Beowulf, as the text has come down to us, stands at a junction point between pagan and Christian, between savagery and civilisation, between oral and written literature. It's hard work to read but important to know what it means, historically.

  Epics in their earliest oral form typically happen at just such transitional moments in history. That is to say when ‘society’, as people know it, is taking its first ‘modern’ shape – becoming, recognisably, the world in which they now live. Epics celebrate, in heroic narrative, certain fundamental ideals. And, more specifically, they mark the ‘birth of nations’.

  Let's return to Beowulf, and its opening lines; first in the original Old English, then in modern English translation:

  Hwæt. We Gardena in gear-dagum,

  þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

  hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

  Lo! we have learned of the glory of the kings

  who ruled the Spear-Danes in the olden time, how

  those princes wrought mighty deeds.

  Although the poem is in ‘Old English’, and circulated in England for centuries, it is set in ‘Daneland’, which is another way of saying ‘a land far, far away’. But what is clear is that this great poem starts by metaphorically raising a national flag: the flag of the Spear-Dane kingdom. In the poem, Beowulf, a princely-hero from ‘Geatland’ (now Sweden), comes to save an embryonic civilisation from being destroyed by the Grendels. Had he not succeeded – by quite extraordinary, self-sacrificing heroism – the modern world of the Anglo-Saxons and all the other European nations would never have existed. They would have been killed at birth by horrible ancient monsters. Civilisation, the epic tells us, had to fight to the death to come into being.

  A further important point needs to be added here. Literary epics – those, that is, which are still read centuries (millennia, in some cases) after they were composed – chronicle the birth not of ‘any’ nation, but of nations that will one day grow to be great empires, swallowing up lesser nations. In their later maturity empires cherish ‘their’ epics as witness to that greatness. Epics certify it. Linguists love the following conundrum: ‘Question: What's the difference between a dialect and a language? Answer: A language is a dialect with an army behind it.’ What, then, is the difference between a long poem about a primitive people's early struggles and an epic? An epic is a long poem with a great nation behind it – or, more precisely, in front of it.

  Consider the most famous of all: the epics originating in what we now know as Greece, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. We know nothing about Homer's life, and never will. Legend has it he was blind. Some have suggested he was a woman. But since
ancient times his name has been attached to these greatest of poems. What are they about? In the Iliad, a beautiful Greek woman, Helen, becomes the lover of a handsome young foreign prince, Paris. Their love is complicated by the inconvenient fact that she is married. The two of them elope to his homeland, Troy (located where Turkey is now). It's a romance, you say – a love story. But viewed objectively, it is about the clash of two emergent city states: Greece (as it will become) and Troy; two maritime trading nations in a world not big enough for the both of them. In the Trojan War, one nation must burn. It will be the ‘topless towers of Ilium’ (as the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe put it): Troy goes up in flames so that Greece can rise to greatness from its ashes. Had it been the other way around, world history would have been very different. We would have had no Greek tragedy; some would say, no democracy (a Greek word) either. Our whole ‘philosophy of life’ would have been different.

  Homer's sequel to the Iliad, the Odyssey, is more mythic than the preceding epic story. As we saw in Chapter 2, over ten eventful years the Greek hero Odysseus returns from the Trojan War to his minor kingdom, Ithaca. On his journey, after escaping from the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, he and his crew are stranded on an island where the beautiful sorceress Circe tries to cast spells over them, and are threatened by the sea-monsters Scylla and Charybdis. Finally Odysseus contrives to make it back to Ithaca and save his own marriage to the ever-faithful Penelope. Stability (after much slaughter) is restored. Civilisation can grow. Empires can rise. That is a dominant theme of Homer's two epics.