The Postcolonial Epic

From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh

Sneharika Roy

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351201575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book demonstrates the epic genre's enduring relevance to the Global South. It identifies a contemporary avatar of classical epic, the 'postcolonial epic', ushered in by Herman Melville's Moby Dick, a foundational text of North America, and exemplified by Derek Walcott's Caribbean masterpiece Omeros and Amitav Ghosh's South Asian saga, the Ibis trilogy.

The work focuses on the epic genre's rich potential to articulate postimperial concerns with nation and migration across the Global North/South divide. It foregrounds postcolonial developments in the genre including a shift from politics to political economy, subaltern reconfigurations of capitalist and imperial temporalities, and the poststructuralist preoccupation with language and representation. In addition to bringing to light hitherto unexamined North/South affiliations between Melville, Walcott and Ghosh, the book proposes a fresh approach to epic through the comparative concept of 'political epic', where an avowed national politics promoting a culture's 'pure' origins coexists uneasily with a disavowed poetics of intertextual borrowing from 'other' cultures.

An important intervention in literary studies, this volume will interest scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, especially South Asian and Caribbean literature, Global South studies, transnational studies and cultural studies.

1
Rallying the tropes

The language of violence and the violence of language

From the Iliad on, the disjunction between the represented action of characters in epic (in war, in love, and in moral struggle) and the figurative claims made about that action by the poet becomes a defining feature of epic poetry.

– Susanne Wofford, The Choice of Achilles

Epic similes and other forms of elaborate figuration are a strikingly consistent stylistic feature of epic poetry across literary cultures of the Global North and South. Critics have tended to focus on the aesthetic significance of the genre’s stylistic devices. James Whaler (1931: 1035−37), for example, identifies the following functions of epic similes: they explain, emotionalise, ennoble or anticipate the action, or provide relief from it. In his notes on the translation of the first volume of Valmiki’s Ramayana, Robert P. Goldman (1990: 100) underscores a similar purpose of epic similes that divert the reader’s attention from the story to the objects of comparison. Imagery, particularly metaphor, is also ‘a salient literary poetic feature’ of African heroic poetry (briefly evoked by Walcott in Omeros through the bardic figure of the griot), including the epic traditions of the Tanzanian Bahaya people, the southern African Basotho tribes and the West African Mande groups (Mulokozi 2002: 193, see also n1). However, recent criticism has foregrounded the ideological power of epic language. Far from being exquisite but superfluous ornaments, the figurative devices of epic are seen as instruments of the aestheticisation of violence that reflect the author’s stated and unstated ideological concerns. Poetic choices in classical epic, as Susanne Wofford (1992) has persuasively argued, are thus profoundly political. Yet, the use of language to depict violence also entails a certain violence done to language in both political and postcolonial epic, making epic tropes a valuable site to investigate the tensions and contradictions embedded in the political projects of both forms. While political epic seeks to naturalise and legitimise the violence of war even as it downplays the linguistic violence necessary for such ideological justifications, postcolonial epic shifts our attention from physical violence to a double-edged rhetorical violence that serves to both elevate its subaltern characters to the proportions of epic and expose the fault lines of the postcolonial project of nationalist identity-construction.

A pertinent example of the aestheticisation and legitimisation of military violence appears in Book Two of the Iliad. When Agamemnon must motivate his troops, battle-worn after nine years, and persuade them that war is more thrilling ‘than sailing hollow ships to their dear native land’ (1991: 2.537−38), the narrator must lead a parallel verbal assault. Six successive epic similes (2.539−64) fan out to figuratively amplify the rising swell of enthusiasm among the soldiers’ ranks. The shining armour of the soldiers is compared to a blazing forest fire; their debouching on the plain to the migration of birds, to leaves and to flies around milk pails; the noise of their horses’ hooves to thunder; and the leadership of their officers to that of herdsmen guiding their flock. As the soldiers amass ‘tribe on tribe’ on the Scamander plain like the waves of ‘winging birds’ landing together on tidal flats, the action is gilded with a certain epic splendour:

Armies gathering now

as the huge flocks on flocks of winging birds, geese or cranes

or swans with their long lancing necks—circling Asian marshes

round the Cayster outflow, wheeling in all directions,

glorying in their wings—keep on landing, advancing,

wave on shrieking wave and the tidal flats resound.

So tribe on tribe, pouring out of the ships and shelters,

marched across the Scamander plain.

(2.544−50)

Even if Homer’s poetic representation does not express the kind of teleological temporality and imperial ideology that would appear in Virgilian epic, it lays the groundwork for the depiction of violence in Western political epic. Homeric epic tropes have become a definitive convention of Western epic poetry: the similes of bees, flowers and leaves in the citation above have been reincorporated by Virgil, Dante, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Luís de Camões and John Milton in their respective national epics. Homer’s comparison between a falling hero and a poppy in the Iliad (e.g., Gorgythion’s death, 8.349−53) is reworked by Virgil to describe Euryalus’s death in the Aeneid (2010: 9.497−502), by Ariosto to depict Dardinello’s defeat in Orlando Furioso ([1532] 1975: 18.153.1–8), by Camões to evoke Inês de Castro’s dying moments in the Lusíads ([1572] 2008: 3.134.1−8) and by Tasso to portray the fall of Lesbin, Solyman’s page, in the Liberation of Jerusalem ([1581] 2009: 9.85.6−86.8). Homer’s celebrated Iliadic simile comparing men to leaves (6.171−75) reappears in Virgil’s description of the dead souls in the underworld (6.352−55), in Tasso’s depiction of Latinus’s death at the hands of Solyman (9.39.1−8) and in Milton’s evocation of Satan’s host in Paradise Lost ([1667] 2005: 1.301−4). Epic tropes thus illustrate the paradox of political epic that lays claim to a mythic past of originary purity, uncontaminated by foreign influences, even as its enunciation is enacted through hybrid intertextuality. Travelling epic tropes derived from multiple cultural texts are enlisted to serve a politics of a rooted, monocultural collective identity.

Similar intricate figuration characterises Valmiki’s Ramayana (2009: 18.6), evidenced by the description of Ram’s monkey-warriors being ‘like great black clouds, dark as collyrium’. When they are struck down, ‘they resembled mountains falling as their summits were shattered by thunderbolts’ (57.71). Valmiki’s use of monsoon imagery with elephants in rut, rain-clouds and storms would migrate across later Sanskrit texts to become a stock device of the courtly kavya tradition (Lienhard 1984: 23; Peterson 2003: 101−4). As Sheldon Pollock (2006: 14) argues, Sanskrit kavya’s efficacity in articulating ‘a form of political consciousness and culture’ facilitated its spectacular migration across the Indian subcontinent and beyond, as far as Vietnam and Java in the transregional space of the ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’. Even in the medieval period, ‘when, with new forms of vernacular literary culture everywhere making their appearance’, the ‘Sanskrit literary culture […] reign[ed] supreme’ (Pollock 2006: 95). Firmly associated with political authority, its migrating kavya conventions would promote the imperial aspirations of regional empires.

Classical analogies across epic literatures serve to legitimise political power through the cultural authority of their intertexts, but they can also have subversive undertones. Agamemnon’s need to convince his troops to fight already attests to the tension in epic between the pacifist stance of returning home (nostos) and the martial ideal of glory (kleos). This ambivalence is also present in Valmiki’s Ramayana. In an extremely atypical passage in the sixth Book of War, the author ironically counterpoints the pastoral bliss of a river with fish and swans against a muddy, weed- and vulture-infested river bank. In a complex system of parallel figurations, the battleground is initially compared to a river and ‘its great trees’, but the pastoral moves inexorably towards a paroxysm of the grotesque and the morbid:

Indeed, the battleground resembled a river. Masses of slain heroes formed its banks, and shattered weapons, its great trees. Torrents of blood made up its broad waters, and the ocean to which it flowed was Yama. Livers and spleens made up its deep mud, scattered entrails its waterweeds. Severed heads and trunks made up its fish, pieces of limbs, its grass. It was crowded with vultures in place of flocks of ham˙sas, and it was swarming with adjutant storks instead of sa¯rasa cranes. It was covered with fat in place of foam, and the cries of the wounded took the place of its gurgling. Truly, it resembled a river at the end of the rains, swarming with ham˙sas and sa¯rasa cranes.

(2009: 46.25−8)

Valmiki’s use of irony and repulsive imagery can be seen as a powerful castigation of war, even if his final flourish of figuration (which returns to the positively connoted swans and cranes, rather than vultures and storks) reinforces an aestheticised vision of violence. This celebration of violence is the stylistic norm of the work.

Susanne Wofford opens a productive avenue to investigate such figurations of violence in The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (1992). While traditional criticism of classical literature focuses on the aesthetic harmony underlying the apparent contrast between figure and action, Wofford sees such dissonances as symptomatic of the epic’s deep-seated ideological contradictions. She posits that it is the disjunction and contradiction between figure and action that represent a ‘defining feature in epic poetry’ (1992: 7). In order to ‘guarantee their cultural authority and power’, epic poems not only ‘accommodate and allegorise the specific ideological requirements of their societies, but make that accommodation visible’ in ‘the moment of separation’ between action and figure that enacts ‘a series of displacements of their own poetic claims’ (3, 2). To illustrate, Wofford cites the example of the epic simile of the falling poppy flower used to evoke the death of Gorgythion, a son of Priam. By creating analogies between the hero’s irreversible death and the repeating natural cycle of seasons, this simile glosses over the finality of the hero’s death and legitimises it as heroism. Such figurations suggest that, like the trees and flowers which will bloom again in spring, the hero will live on in song (a symbolic mitigation of his death only appreciated by the readers, not the hero). Thus, natural imagery, she explains, serves to disguise the human cost of epic ambition by transforming the linear temporality of mortal existence into the iterative temporality of the seasons. Often, nature imagery also involves references to the world of everyday work (shepherding, carpentry, fishing etc.) serving as a reminder of the civilisational ideals for which the Homeric heroes are fighting. The disjunction between linear action and the iterative figure is thus changed into deeper continuity or likeness, suggesting that there is a profound harmony between the natural and human worlds. As Wofford puts it,

Taken together, the figures in the story suggest that heroic action gains its significance through a connection to the larger civilisation and its ongoing life, a connection defined as political and moral, and shaped by ideological imperatives. These figures represent the peaceful world left behind – the alternative Achilles does not choose. They claim, in an attempt to join two alternatives that the poem has put asunder, a continuity and moral correspondence between heroic and nonheroic life.

(5)

It is this disjunction between the figure, suggesting continuity, and the act of dying, linked to the absolute disruption of the life cycle, that Wofford sees as characterising epic poetry. The fact that epic violence constantly requires an accompanying figurative justification betrays an awareness that heroic action is not inherently justifiable and in itself does not contain the meaning attributed to it externally by tropes. The yoking together of martial action and natural imagery stages a confrontation between two choices, war and peace, one which Achilles will resolve in his unequivocal decision to live a short, glorious life rather than a long, anonymous and peaceful one. For Wofford, Achilles’s decision dramatises the epic’s generic vocation of immortalising the hero’s deeds and death in battle. His choice is thus paradigmatic of epic style: it is the choice the epic poet himself must make.

Wofford’s argument draws from contemporary Marxist theory, specifically Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology and Fredric Jameson’s attention to the resolution of ideological contradictions in texts. She connects the ‘stress in Althusserian Marxism on the unacknowledged structuring of one’s world’ through ideology to the Jamesonian emphasis on ‘the unacknowledged structuring of a poem’. Extending their ideas, she argues that the ‘political unconscious’ of epic poetry works to suppress its contradictions (the human cost of a war it must glorify) through an imaginary resolution (the hero’s immortality through song). Its figurative economy thus ‘conceals assumptions, represses or submerges the costs of the claimed resolutions and thereby makes their solutions seem natural’ (19). The disjunctions are latent – it is for readers like Wofford to bring their ideological contradictions to the surface. However, her focus on disjunction is extremely fruitful in an area she leaves unexplored – postcolonial epic tropes. In this chapter, I apply Wofford’s analysis of classical tropes to postcolonial texts. In contrast to the ‘unacknowledged’, concealed contradictions of classical epic, the tensions and potential malfunctioning of the figurative machinery in Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy are manifestly advertised by the authors, both as political and aesthetic statements. While political epic seeks to veil and naturalise the deep-seated disjunctions between action and figure, postcolonial epic self-consciously aggravates and problematises them by subjecting the epic language of violence to varying degrees of linguistic violence. If implicit disjunction is the ‘defining feature’ of political epic, explicit disjunction, then, is the salient trait of postcolonial epic.

Felled trees and fallen heroes

Ever since Aristotle, Western rhetoric has been marked by a power struggle between simile and metaphor, largely to the benefit of the latter. While both rely on the interplay of like and unlike, the comparison made by the simile is explicitly assumed in connectors including ‘like’, ‘even so’ or ‘as’ – and not suppressed, as is the case of implicit comparisons or metaphors. Metaphors are therefore considered more sophisticated and intellectually demanding (Wheelwright 1959: 103). Jakobson and Hale (1956: 76–82) implicitly rearticulates the Aristotelian privileging of metaphor by linking metonymy to prose and realism (based on the referent) and metaphor to poetry and romanticism (more attentive to the sign). However, the Russian linguist also implies that similes are more difficult to analyse than metaphors. The simile performs a double duty of comparison and contiguity: while exhibiting the property of similarity associated with metaphor, it also operates on the metonymic principle of horizontal contiguity and the syntagmatic arrangement of successive items. In the context of epic, each epic simile is both a comparison and a self-contained part of the whole, a miniature world within the simile-studded constellation that is the epic poem. By ostensibly inviting readers to look for resemblances, the epic simile ultimately asks readers to reassemble the parts and reassess their views of the whole, thereby partaking of both the metaphoric and metonymic functions. It is against this backcloth of specific epic similes and broader ‘wholes’ of political agendas that I will analyse the use of vegetal imagery, a stock epic comparison, by Melville, Walcott and Ghosh. Tree imagery not only serves to foreground their aesthetic and ethical positions, but can also help identify the primary epic model for each author. For Melville, it is the Miltonic tradition of the ironic simile that is ideally suited to his ambivalent exploration of questions of subjugation and supremacy in the polemical period preceding the Civil War. For Walcott, it is Virgil’s poetics of metaphoric fusion and metamorphosis that allows him to reject the binarisms of both colonialist and nationalist discourses in favour of a deliberately unsettling stance of historical revisionism and moral relativism. For Ghosh, it is Rabindranath Tagore’s synthesis of classical Indian aesthetics and European Romanticism that allows for the articulation of Indian experiences of colonial realities within an indigenous philosophical tradition that questions the nature of reality itself. All three authors create highly unstable, heterotopic figurative economies whose seamed disjunctions are profoundly at odds with the seamless conjunctions to which classical epic aspires. These intertextual ties between classical and postcolonial poetics merit detailed analysis in a comparative framework.

Melville is drawn to the epic simile because it guides readers towards a metonymic conception of his epic where intertextual references serve as parts to be constantly reassembled in our understanding of the whole. When Melville compares Ahab to a tall tree, he is imitating Homer’s systematic comparisons in the Iliad between falling trees and dying heroes including Simoisius (compared to a poplar, 4.553−64), Imbrius (compared to an ash, 13.212−16), Asius (compared to an oak and poplar, 13.452−58), Hector (compared to an oak, 14.489−96), Sarpedon (compared to an oak and poplar, 16.570−74), and Euphorbus (compared to an olive tree, 17.59−68).¹ Though Melville uses this classic epic simile of conjunction, he selects its most disruptive and violent form: the tree struck down by lightning (as compared to trees reintegrated back into the living world through their wood used for chariots or ships, as is the case for the similes used for Simoisius, Asius and Sarpedon). Ahab’s body-length scar running from h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: from classical to postcolonial epic
• 1 Rallying the tropes: the language of violence and the violence of language
• 2 ‘History in the future tense’: genealogy as prophecy
• 3 ‘The artifice of eternity’: ekphrasis as ‘an-other’ epic
• 4 Conclusion: resistant nostalgia
• Bibliography
• Index