A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  The Iliad and Odyssey remain the most readable (and filmable) of stories. But at their centre, these epic narratives look at how ancient Greece – what we like to call the cradle of modern democracy, our world – came into being. Epics are the offspring of ‘noble and puissant [powerful] nations’, as the poet John Milton called them. (Milton is the author of what many see as the last great epic in British Literature, Paradise Lost, composed in the mid-seventeenth century when Britain itself was becoming ‘puissant’ – a world power. See Chapter 10.)

  Could Luxembourg, or the Principality of Monaco, however gifted its authors, host an epic? Could the multinational European Union have one? Such states can create literature, great literature, even. But they cannot create epic literature. When the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow asked his insulting question, ‘Where is the Zulu Tolstoy, where is the Papuan Proust?’ he was, essentially, making the point that only great civilisations have great literature. And only the greatest of those great nations possess epics. Great world power is at their centre.

  The following is a list of some of the world's most famous epics, and the great nations or empires from which they sprang.

  Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia)

  Odyssey (ancient Greece)

  Mahābhārata (India)

  Aeneid (ancient Rome)

  Beowulf (England)

  La Chanson de Roland (France)

  El Cantar de Mio Cid (Spain)

  Nibelungenlied (Germany)

  La Divina Commedia (Italy)

  Os Lusíadas (Portugal)

  Saul Bellow's own nation, the USA, is missing from the list. Should it be included? No nation has been more powerful. But historically speaking, the United States is a young country – juvenile in comparison with Greece, or Britain (which once owned a considerable part of it). Its frontier struggles, as modern American civilisation spread westward, can be seen as having inspired some versions of epic, in the form of the films of D.W. Griffith (Birth of a Nation, 1915) and westerns (John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are undeniably ‘heroic’ cowboys). Some have argued that Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick (1851), which recounts Captain Ahab's doomed quest for the (mythic?) white whale, is not merely ‘the Great American Novel’ but ‘the American Epic’. In modern polls George Lucas's Star Wars film series is often voted the great modern epic. But what we see here is less actual epics than the aching sense that the USA may have come too late on the world-scene ever to have one. A real one, that is. It still tries.

  Traditionally, literary epic has four elements: it is long, heroic, nationalistic and – in its purest literary form – poetic. Panegyrics (extended hymns of praise) and lament (songs of sadness) are main ingredients. The first half of Beowulf is an extended celebration of the youthful hero's prowess in defeating Grendel and his mother. The second half laments Beowulf's death, in old age, having incurred fatal wounds in defeating the dragon that terrorises his kingdom. He has secured his country's future with his life. The death of the hero is, very often, a climax moment in epic narratives.

  Typically, we may say, epic is set in a great age that has passed, at which later ages look back nostalgically, with the sad sense that epic greatness – heroism and honour – is a thing of the past, but that without it, we would not be where we are. It's the kind of complex feeling literature often elicits.

  The great epics are still highly enjoyable to read, although most of us will be obliged to read them at one remove, in translation. In many ways, epics are literary dinosaurs. They once dominated, by virtue of sheer size, but now they belong in the museum of literature. We can still admire them, as we admire the other mighty works of our national ancestors, but, sadly, we seem no longer able to make them.

  CHAPTER 4

  Being Human

  TRAGEDY

  Tragedy, in its full literary form, represents a new highpoint (some would argue the highest ever reached) in the long evolution of literature: the imposition of ‘form’ on the raw materials of myth, legend and epic. Why do we still read and watch drama that was written 2,000 years ago, in a language few of us understand, for a society which might as well be on another planet for all the resemblance it has to ours? The answer is simple: tragedy has never been done better than when Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and other ancient Greek dramatists did it.

  What, though, do the terms ‘tragedy’ and ‘tragic’ actually mean? A jumbo-jet falls out of the sky. It happens rarely but, alas, it happens. Hundreds of passengers are killed in the event, which makes headlines in national newspapers. The New York Times has on its front page ‘Tragic accident: 385 dead’. The New York Daily News has the more sensational ‘Horror at 39,000 feet: Hundreds slain!’ Neither headline would strike readers of either paper as unusual.

  But, ask yourself, is a horrible event the same thing as a tragic event? This question was given exquisitely precise treatment in a play written some two-and-a-half millennia ago. The play was composed by Sophocles, who was writing for an Athenian audience. It would have been performed in the open air, in daylight, in an amphitheatre – a solid-stone ‘theatre in the round’ with raked seating – by actors wearing masks (called ‘personae’) and elevated footwear (called ‘buskins’). The persona may have acted as a megaphone, and the buskins made the actors visible even to those in the very back seats. (The acoustics of the theatres where they performed were better than you will find on Broadway or in London's West End. If you go to the best-preserved of the ancient theatres, at Epidaurus, a guide will sit you in the farthest row of stone seats, go to the centre of the acting area, and strike a match. You can easily hear it.)

  Sophocles' masterpiece, Oedipus Rex (‘Oedipus the King’), recounts the following story, based on an ancient Greek myth. Things that happened in the past are now ‘coming to a head’. It is foretold by a priestess at Delphi – famous for her power of foreseeing what is to come, but equally famous for the enigmatic nature of her prophesies – that a son, born to the king and queen of Thebes, Laius and Jocasta, will kill his father and marry his mother. The infant is destined to be a monster. Thebes will be better off without him – even though he is the couple's only child and his death will pose tricky problems as to who will be the next king. Baby Oedipus is put out on a mountainside to perish. But the baby does not die. He is rescued by a shepherd and, by a series of accidents, his true birth wholly unknown, he is eventually adopted by another king and queen, in Corinth. The gods seem to be taking an interest in him.

  Grown to adulthood, Oedipus himself consults the oracle because he is worried that people are saying he is not his father's son. The oracle warns him that he is doomed to kill his father and to incestuously marry his mother. Assuming that the oracle is referring to his adoptive parents, Oedipus flees from Corinth and heads for Thebes. At a crossroads, he meets a chariot coming the other way. The charioteer pushes him off the road. Oedipus hits out at him, and in turn the other driver strikes Oedipus hard on the head. A furious fight ensues, and an enraged Oedipus kills the other man, not knowing that he is his father, Laius. It's road rage, a heat-of-the-moment deed.

  Oedipus continues his journey to Thebes, unaware of what lies in wait for him. First is the Sphinx, a monster that lives on a mountain and is terrorising the city. The Sphinx poses a riddle to every traveller to Thebes. If they cannot answer correctly, they die. The riddle is: ‘What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?’ Oedipus answers correctly, the first person ever to do so: it is ‘man’. The baby crawls on all fours. The adult walks on two legs. The old man walks with a stick. The Sphinx kills itself. A grateful Thebes elects Oedipus their king. Once crowned, Oedipus consolidates his hold on the throne by marrying the mysteriously widowed Queen Jocasta. They are unaware, both of them, what has happened to Laius and the awful thing they are doing.

  Oedipus proves to be a good king, a good husband, and a good father to the children he and Jocasta have. But, years later, a terrible and mysterious plague afflicts Thebes. Thousands di
e. Crops fail. Women cannot bear children. This is the point at which Sophocles' play begins. There is, clearly, another curse on the city. Why? A blind soothsayer, Tiresias, reveals the awful truth. The gods are punishing the city for Oedipus's crimes of patricide (killing his father) and incest (marrying his mother). The horrible details are finally disclosed. Jocasta hangs herself. Oedipus blinds himself with his wife's brooch-pins. He lives what remains of his life as a beggar, the lowest of the low in Thebes, attended in his wretchedness by his faithful daughter, Antigone.

  To return to the question with which we started, what makes Oedipus Rex tragic, as opposed to merely horrible? Why is the death and suffering of all those unidentified Thebans not more tragic than the story of a single man who survives, albeit disabled and broken in spirit?

  These questions were addressed by one of the greatest of literary critics, Aristotle, another ancient Greek. His study of tragedy – specifically Oedipus Rex – is called the Poetics. The title does not mean that Aristotle is exclusively concerned with poetry (although Oedipus Rex and many of its translations are written in verse) but with what one could call the mechanics of literature: how it works. Aristotle sets out to answer that question, using Oedipus Rex as one of his main examples.

  Aristotle begins with an illuminating paradox. Imagine, for example, the following. You meet a friend who is just coming out of a theatre showing Shakespeare's King Lear (a play strongly resembling Oedipus Rex). ‘Did you enjoy it?’ you ask. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I've never enjoyed a play so much in my whole life.’ ‘You cold-hearted thing!’ you retort. ‘You enjoy the spectacle of one old man being tormented to death by his devilish daughters, another old man being blinded on stage. You tell me you enjoyed that? Perhaps you should go to a bullfight next time.’

  It's nonsense, of course. Aristotle makes the point that it is not what is depicted in tragedy (the story) which affects us, and gives us aesthetic pleasure, but how it is depicted (the plot). What we enjoy (and it's quite correct to use the word) in King Lear is not the cruelty, but the art, the ‘representation’ (Aristotle calls it ‘imitation’, mimesis).

  Aristotle helps us understand what it is that makes a play like Oedipus Rex work as tragedy. Take that word ‘accident’. In tragedy, we are led to understand as the play progresses, there are no accidents. It is all foretold – which is why oracles and soothsayers are so central to the action. Everything fits and falls into place. We may not see that at the time, but we will later. As Aristotle puts it, when we see a tragedy acted the events should strike us as ‘necessary and probable’ as they unfold. What happens in tragedy must happen. But actually seeing what lies behind the unfolding of the predestined course of events is, typically, too much for flesh and blood to bear. When Oedipus sees how things have worked out, because, he now understands, they had to work out that way, he fulfils another of the soothsayer's claims – that he is (metaphorically) blind – by literally blinding himself. Humankind cannot bear too much reality.

  With Aristotle's assistance we can take apart Sophocles' perfectly constructed tragedy, as a mechanic might dismantle an automobile engine. Tragedy, he decrees, must address itself to personal histories of noble men, who actually existed. Royalty is an ideal subject (there was, in earlier times, actually a king called Oedipus). The idea of a slave or a woman being a tragic hero is, Aristotle says, absurd. The tragic play, Aristotle insists, must concentrate our attention on ‘process’ – there must be no distractions. Any violence must take place off-stage and, ideally, the tragedy must – as in Oedipus Rex – narrate the final phase of the tragic process. Tragedy is concerned with what in chess is called the ‘endgame’: consequences.

  The modern French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910–87), discussing his adaptation of another of Sophocles' plays (about Oedipus's daughter, Antigone), described the tragic plot as a ‘machine’, all the component parts working with each other to produce the final effect, like the ‘movement’ of a Swiss watch. What gets the machinery moving? Aristotle says that there must be a trigger and the tragic hero must pull it. He calls that trigger hamartia which is usually translated, awkwardly, as ‘an error in judgement’. Oedipus triggers the tragedy that will ultimately destroy him by losing his temper and killing that infuriating stranger at the crossroads. He is hot-headed (so is Laius, his father – it runs in the family). That is his hamartia, or error in judgement, which starts the machine, just as a key starts the engine in a car – a car that drives off and has a fatal crash. It is terrifying because we all are guilty of such errors in our everyday lives.

  Aristotle is particularly shrewd on how the audience collaborates, if the play is working as it should, in the full experience of tragic performance. He notes how emotionally powerful tragedy can be – pregnant women have been known to give premature birth, he says, while watching tragedy, so overwhelming was the tragic effect. The specific emotions that tragedy brings about, he says, are ‘pity and fear’. Pity, that is, for the tragic hero's suffering, and fear because, if it happens to the tragic hero, it can happen to anyone – even us.

  The most controversial of Aristotle's arguments is his theory of catharsis. This word is untranslatable (we usually use Aristotle's own term) and it is best understood as a ‘tempering of the emotions’. Let's go back to our audience leaving the theatre after watching a tragedy like King Lear or Oedipus Rex, performed well. The mood will be sober, reflective – people will be in a sense exhausted by what they have seen on stage. But also strangely elevated, as if they had gone through something like a religious experience.

  We don't have to take everything Aristotle says as critical gospel – let's say he gives us a toolkit. But why does Oedipus Rex still work for us, separated as we are by all those centuries? We don't, for example, agree for a minute with Aristotle's social views on slaves and women, or his political views that only kings, queens and the nobility matter in the history of nations.

  There are two plausible answers. One is that the play is so wonderfully well constructed. It is a thing of aesthetic beauty – like the Parthenon, or the Taj Mahal or a Da Vinci painting. Secondly, although the store of human knowledge has expanded hugely, life and the human condition are still very mysterious to the thinking person. Tragedy confronts that mystery, examines the big questions: What is life all about? What makes us human? In its aims, tragedy is the most ambitious of literary genres. Aristotle has no doubt that it is, as he tells us, the ‘noblest’.

  CHAPTER 5

  English Tales

  CHAUCER

  English literature – as we know it – starts with Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), 700 years ago. But I'll rephrase that sentence. Not ‘English literature’ but ‘literature in English’ starts with Chaucer. It was a long time before England had a language that unified the speech and writing practice of the whole population – and Chaucer marks the point where we can see it happening, around the fourteenth century.

  Compare the two following quotations. They are the opening lines of two great poems written, in what we now think of as England, at almost exactly the same time, toward the end of the fourteenth century:

  Forþi an aunter in erde I attle to schawe,

  Þat a selly in siɜt summe men hit holden …

  When that Aprilis, with his showers swoot,

  The drought of March hath pierced to the root …

  The first quotation is by someone known only as the ‘Gawain Poet’, and is the opening of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a semimythic tale set in the reign of King Arthur (discussed in Chapter 2). The second is by Chaucer and is the opening couplet of The Canterbury Tales.

  Most readers – unfamiliar with Anglo-Saxon poetic diction, its two-stress rhythms, half-lines and vocabulary sometimes as alien as Klingon – will make heavy weather of the Gawain example. Only a few of the words hint that it is a kind of English. The second extract (with the information that ‘swoot’ means ‘sweet’) is, for the modern reader, broadly understandable – as is the whole poem, its rhymes a
nd rhythms. With a few words translated for us, most of us can handle the poem in the various early forms in which it was transcribed. And it's more enjoyable in the original. It speaks to us, as we say.

  Fine poem though Gawain is, its retention of the language and style of Old English stands at a literary dead end. Those people to whom it once spoke are long gone. There was no future for writing like that – beautiful as the poem is to those today who trouble to learn the dialect in which it is written. Chaucer's ‘new’ English is at the threshold of centuries of great literature to come. He was hailed as ‘Dan’ Chaucer by his follower, the great Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser – ‘Dan’ is short for Dominus, ‘Master’. The leader of the pack. Chaucer was, Spenser said, ‘the source of English undefiled’. He gave our literature its language. And he himself was the first to do great things with it, opening the way for others to do great things.

  It is significant that we know who Chaucer actually was and can see him, as we read, in our mind's eye. Literature, after him, has ‘authors’. We do not know who composed Beowulf. It was probably the work of many anonymous hands and minds. Nor do we know who the ‘Gawain Poet’ was. It could have been more than one person. Who knows?

  Much had changed in the regional kingdoms and fiefdoms (estates controlled by lords) of Britain during the half-century that separates Beowulf from The Canterbury Tales. It wasn't just ‘English’ that had happened, but ‘England’ itself. The British Isles were conquered by William, Duke of Normandy, in 1066. ‘The Conqueror’, as he is called, brought with him the apparatus of what we recognise as the modern state. The Normans continued the unification of the land they had invaded, installing an official language, a system of common law, coinage, a class system, Parliament, London as the capital city, and other institutions, many of which have come down to us today. Chaucer was this new England's pioneer author, and his English was the London dialect. One can still hear the old rhythms and vocabularies of Anglo-Saxon literature, even in his verse, but it is subterranean, like a drumbeat reaching us from vibrations in the ground.