Epic Literature

I’ve been back home for the past few weeks, and the majority of my time has been split between spending time with friends and family, and reading. Australia has certainly been quite different to life in college - it is noticeable much slower and not as ‘fast and furious’ as my life in America. I found that being with family was very comfortable and cozy, as if I were a kid again.

It is always hard to leave home, but I often think to ideas that I’ve come across while reading great literature:

“Now, whoever has courage and a strong and collected spirit in his breast, let him come forward, lace on the gloves and put up his hands.” Virgil, Aeneid V.363-364

I read a couple of books, starting with an old economics treatise that friends have recommended for years, then some Shakespearean tragedy (Hamlet and King Lear), before I dived deep into Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

I decided to pick up Moby Dick, largely because of one of my Classics professors, a great Bob Dylan fan, also an accomplished scholar in Greco-Roman literature, brought it up in a conversation during the semester. After being at school for a year, my favourite Harvard class so far was with him, reading Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin, largely because of how much the class focused on intertextuality, and how texts resonated with each other across thousands of years of literature. Indeed, having been influenced by a great ‘Dylanologist’ and seeing an early screening of ‘A Complete Unknown’ last year, I came across Bob Dylan’s 2016 lecture for his Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan spoke about three books which deeply inspired his excellent music Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Homer’s Odyssey - fascinating, given that Dylan never spoke about the meaning of his lyrics, perplexing fans for decades. And so, with some time back in Sydney, I started with the words ‘Call me Ishmael.’

But this wasn’t my first encounter with that great voyage. Around six years ago, I ‘read’ around a fifth of Moby Dick (100 out of 500 pages in my edition), but needless to say, Melville’s Shakespearean soliloquies, extensive allusion to the western canon, and frankly largely convoluted language ensured that I would practically retain none of the narrative. The worst part, we had barely even set sail from New Bedford yet. Poor 12 year-old me - how was I to understand Queequeg’s cannibalistic, pagan traditions? How was I to notice the subtle divine foreshadowing before we set out for the Great Whale?

When one mentions divine foreshadowing and prophecies, one necessarily tends to involve the idea of fate. TS Eliot argues in “What is a Classic?” that only in hindsight can we classify a work as a classic, and the work must originate from a 'mature civilisation, language, and literature.' Eliot also says that language must change before our next Milton or Shakespeare (that it's very hard to outdo what has already been done well), because the classic poet exhausts the language of his time.

When I first studied the Classics, I was never really all that conscious of the profound impact that the words on the page would have on the literature of western civilisation. Latin was a chore, a tenth of our classes in Year 7 and 8, where high school was a blur and class was by no means a student’s greatest priority. In hindsight, almost seven years later, I realise how lucky I was to have received a classical education from a public school, and to have been enticed into the subject by an excellent Latin teacher - then being provided the opportunity to continue studying the Classics in university.

I find that ‘epic’ literature tend to have many common themes - most notably, they serve to enshrine aspects of the human condition and preserve it for millennia to come. Somehow, we manage to read the words of Homer and Virgil all these thousands of years later, despite so many other works failing to be preserved or passed down through tradition. But how do humans pick and choose, through their figurative literature sieve?

Epic seems to always wrestle with the themes of fate, free will, the gods, the afterlife, the soul, metaphysical questions of where we come from, and supernatural events. Noticeably, all these ideas tend to transcend what we experience in the material world, and hence serve as a means for humans to ask higher, more existential questions about the direction of our lives. Epic also tends to capture human virtue - what it means to live a great, principled life. One can easily note the piety of Aeneas, the sins of Dante, the madness of Captain Ahab, the ambition of Macbeth, the anger of Achilles, the inaction of Edgar - the list goes on. We notice these virtues of humanity in ourselves, and the literature forces us to ask challenging questions about how we live. I think that’s what made me realise how powerful literature and storytelling is. From more than two thousand years ago, people have been impacted by these words, because they capture so many fundamental aspects of what it means to be human, inspiring us to consider how we would have acted in a character’s situation.

Almost like a mirror:

It is I. I hold
His sword to keep from falling, for the dust   
On the stuffed birds is breathless, for the bust   
Of young Augustus weighs on Vergil’s shelf:   
It scowls into my glasses at itself.

- Robert Lowell, ‘Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid’

Especially from the viewpoint of our post-modern world, there’s something so extraordinarily beautiful about how we can note how epic texts reference each others, despite being composed so many years apart. Homeric echoes of virtue and divine will of the 8th century BCE reflect in Virgil (1st century BCE), not least in scenes like the forging of Achilles’ and Aeneas’ shields by Hephaestus and Vulcan. Then you come across scenes in Dante’s Divine Comedy (14th century CE) which echoes so richly on Virgilian themes, perhaps even the first canto of the Comedy, with the she-wolf and the founding of the city of Rome. Then Shakespearean tragedy (17th century CE) reflecting Greek tragedy, and Moby Dick (19th century CE) with Ahab’s sojourn against the most grand, formidable creature of the sea. Hundreds, if not thousands of years apart, and I have plucked out only a few examples of some incredible intertextuality. Who am I to comment on such great texts? Many academics spend their lives studying even just sections of many of the authors I have noted, and I am but a mere observer. However, any reader can note how amazing it is that these stories serve to represent what being human in the author’s particular society involved, and thought-provoking how we notice common threads that have been questions asked by humanity for so many years.

I knew how Moby Dick would end. Ishmael hints to us at the very start of the novel that he was the only survivor of the Pequod, and throughout, there are endless omens, prophesies, and warning signs that doom will befall the crew. And yet, the climax of the battle between the Pequod and the great whale is only a couple of pages long, before so abruptly ending in Ishmael’s short soliloquy. The last scene is just him alone, floating on a coffin in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and that every member of the crew that we’ve got to know over the past however many hours of reading are dead. Ishmael is picked up by a forsaken ship earlier encountered, which asked for help in seeking the children of its captain (thought rejected by Ahab for chase of Moby Dick instead).

Ahab is a madman, chasing a creature of the abyss. Ishmael writes earlier about the calming qualities of the sea, and embarks on this three year whaling voyage with the crew. At first, Ahab seems like any old whaling captain, but as we read on, we notice insanity and total madness, obsession for this singular goal that an outsider would deem unimportant, and yet it is Ahab’s life mission (sound familiar, by the way?) We identify with the crew members - perhaps the pagan Queequeg, or the rational Starbuck, the cheery Stubb, or Pip, with his innocence and humanity. Moby-Dick is a story about fate, madness, journeying into the abyss, and man’s defiance of God, nature, and the cosmos.

Ahab, like Achilles, burns with rage, and it leads to his demise. Ahab is driven across the seas, like Odysseus, but by deadly obsession rather than nostos. Like Aeneas, he speaks to the dead, reckons with divine will through typhoons, and as is custom across Greco-Roman epic, receives many prophesies and omens of his fate. The Pequod is a doomed ship, its crew unaware they’ve signed on for a one-way passage into legend. Indeed, Canto 26 of Inferno, one of my favourites of Dante, notes Odysseus suffering in Hell for deceiving his crew, journeying beyond the straits of Gibraltar and the pillars of Hercules, trying to challenge divine will - not to mention in the Odyssey, his sacrifice of crew members to pass through Scylla and Charybdis. The novel is also undeniably Shakespearean, with soliloquies so powerful that they reminded me of Hamlet and his precarious situation, with an ending just totally gut-wrenching, reminding me of King Lear. Starbuck’s fate reminds me of that of Othello, just totally lost to fate, conscious that without confronting Ahab, his wife and children would now be without a father; and of course, the chapter called “The Musket”, where Starbuck contemplates killing Ahab - how it reminds me of Macbeth. I have not at all done justice to intertextuality, but these were certainly things that piqued my interest, worthy of note throughout my reading of Moby Dick.

I’m only 19, but I’m so very grateful I was able to encounter Greco-Roman epic early on, which casts such powerful shadows on more contemporary work like Moby Dick, Shakespearean tragedy, and TS Eliot’s poetry. Fascinatingly, these stories speak to each other across millennia, and I have been lucky enough to listen. They so powerfully and vividly encapsulate aspects of the human condition that I can’t help but think about some of the most profound questions of what it means to live well.

I know I will revisit these works again and again in my life. These words of these timeless stories don’t change, but I know that the inspiration and effect on my life will always be significant, yet changing.

The whale is the whale, and it will continue to swim, despite however many ships give chase.

…then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Yurui