Truth is not smog from quick jet planes

[sovay]

I feel it is unfair of me to refer to Richard Brody only on occasions for disagreement, but then he does something like open his review of The Brutalist (2024) with the assertion that "the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn't know firsthand: it's, in effect, a fantasy about reality, an inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth," which is so much not the definition of an epic that it short-circuits me on the rest of the critique. It may be true that very few singers of tales nowadays are likely to have personal knowledge of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, but I wouldn't call the most important element of the epic that it didn't happen to the teller, since the same is true of most of human history, not to mention just about every narrative mode beyond the autobiographical, and the assertion that it is a supersizing of myth from reality strikes me as a reductively euhemeristic approach to take to material that has more to do with how a culture tells itself than the necessary veracity of the incidents through which it does the telling. Sure, four thousand years of Troy towns lay under Hisarlık, but if you are disappointed by the lack of a lapis-browed statue of Enkidu among the black-on-buff potsherds of Uruk XVIII, I don't know what to tell you any more than if you expect science fiction to print out the forecasts of the future rather than describe our hopes and anxieties for it. It's a cute sentence, it's nicely balanced, it reads well and it doesn't work even when applied strictly to films of ambitious scope rather than culture heroism. I will grant the notion of a received story, even if Brody makes it sound like the distance is the important thing rather than the tradition: Phoinix in Book IX of the Iliad, remembering the deed of long ago to tell it to those assembled, his near and dear. (μέμνημαι τόδε ἔργον ἐγὼ πάλαι οὔ τι νέον γε / ὡς ἦν· ἐν δʼ ὑμῖν ἐρέω πάντεσσι φίλοισι.) If he meant that the supercharged scale of the epic can be used to examine intimate human truths, it isn't what he said, but it is one of its functions. Fantasies about reality, though, are not epic by definition. Most of the time they are just called art. Or being human, story-making.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

Well, I have not your wealth of scholarship. Correct me freely. This:

more to do with how a culture tells itself

does most if not all of the work I could.

"the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn't know firsthand: it's, in effect, a fantasy about reality, an inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth

I suppose the pre-colonic sentence here could refer to the displacement of the epic into the distant, quasi-originary past, which -- is a feature, though not a definition.

(Say if Brody read the Wikipedia entry a couple of days before and didn't have time to refresh his memory before hitting send -- he might say a thing like that.)

I can't do much with "a fantasy about reality." What is that? That is all of fantasy and also all of reality.

As for the post-colonic "inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth," okay, sure, but so is, you know, myth. Again, the mere proximity of terms here makes me wonder if he's summoning up some vague reference to a thing I do find interesting, even unsettling, about epic, its overlap of history and what I would less like to call myth and more to name philosophy-through-symbolic-narrative, since my particular analytical tic is to apply what little I understand of Indigenous orature to anything that ever even appears to have wandered by the oral tradition some time or other to swipe the harvest of its garden.

But that literal-symbolic tango seems core to human self-telling too.

I grant you that "a big weird story that holds things together" lacks specificity.

As for the lapis statue, I don't even really want G., let alone E., to have been real. I want them to have been epic. I'm just hungry for material evidence of stories I can recognize myself in.

[sovay]

As for the lapis statue, I don't even really want G., let alone E., to have been real. I want them to have been epic.

I love this distinction and this wish.