Epic to Novel
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EPIC TO NOVEL THOMAS E. MARESCA Epic to Novel OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright® 1974 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America Portions of the chapter entitled "Dryden11 appeared in the summer 1974 issue ofELH under the title "The Context of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel." Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Mare sea, Thomas E Epic to Novel Bibliography: p. 1. English fiction — Early modern, 1500-1700 — History and criticism. 2. Epic poetry. English — History and criticism. I. Title. PR769.M3 823\03 74-19109 ISBN 0-8142-0216-0 ISBN 0-8142-0289-6 Original hard-cover edition 3 March 1975 Paperback reprint issued May 1977 FOR DIANE CONTENT S Preface ix Dryden 3 Pope 79 Swift 135 Fielding 181 List of Texts Cited 235 Index 237 PREFACE This book attempts to trace the process by which the novel replaced the epic as the major literary form in English. It explores the hows and whys of this process by an analysis of the subject matter of epic rather than its form or manner; that is, it attempts to find out what post-classical readers understood when they read epic by examination of major commentaries on Virgil's Aeneid from the early Middle Ages through the Renaissance. After that it proceeds to the same goal by close reading of major English literary works that bear a parodic relation to epic. I understand the epic tradition this book talks about as a heterogeneous body of materials growing from a single root, always changing and transforming them selves, but changing in ways and directions indicated by their earliest shaping. What I think I am describing is an organic growth toward the novel, observing its own inner laws and rhythms; it is as if the genre of epic possessed a kind of autonomy that pushed its practitioners into channels and branches already potential within it. Innovations within the epic tradition seem almost always the product of internal realignments or mutation, almost never the result of grafting. In working method and critical position, I have chosen to follow Aristotle's example rather than his conclusions; I try to proceed from the critical description of a single text outward to more general conclusions, gathering evidence as I go. Generally speaking, the book is cumulative. Rather than overburden it at the outset with theory, I have left many things to be clarified and elaborated throughout. I hope that by its conclusion all of my sweeping assertions and cryptic phrases will have been supported and explained. Similarly, in the arrangement of chapters Preface x I have occasionally disregarded chronology for the exposition of a clear logical development. Terminology I found a maddening problem, not yet resolved to my own satisfaction. In some cases, I invented or purloined useful words; in others, old and somewhat weak-hammed warhorses were trotted out for another go-round. This is particularly true of "form and content" — a distinction I find more and more artificial, but which seems rhetorically necessary to the clarity of my arguments. Beyond all this, this study because of its scope produces a great deal of fallout: it has something to say about the Medieval distinction between the allegory of the poets and the allegory of the theologians, about the meaning of ut pictura poesis, about poetic imagery and the seventeenth-century revival of atomic theory, about the meaning of narrative or plot in novels. I would call it an idiosyncratic book; others may think it merely cranky. Certainly I do not claim to be right in my conclusions in the sense of being exclusively right. What this book adds up to in my mind is one satisfactory mode of dealing with all of the factors I have examined. That there are other modes of so doing I have no doubt, but this one pleases me: it answers for me the basic questions of how and why the novel supplanted the epic, and it explains their essential relation — and those are the questions that pushed me to undertake this study in the first place. I am grateful to many institutions and individuals for support and encouragement: to Ohio State University for a quarter of assigned research duty; to the Humanities Center of Johns Hopkins University for the fellowship that enabled me to do the basic research for this book; to the State University of New York Research Foundation for two Summer Grants-in-Aid that allowed me to write it; to two (to me unknown) readers for Ohio State University Press, for numerous pertinent and helpful suggestions; to good friends, whose names would read like a litany of my colleagues at Stony Brook, for advice and occasional consent; and to the late Earl Wasserman, for help and for friendship over many years. My greatest debt I acknowledge in the dedication. oryden N ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL , Dryden created the last traditional verse epic of any merit written in the English language. By the strictest canons of neoclassical criticism, it must be con sidered an epic poem — or, making allowance for its brevity, an epyllion. Dryden labels it Absalom and Achitophel: A Poem in the same succint fashion in which Milton called his work Paradise Lost; A Poem in Twelve Books. Indeed, Dryden's poem much more closely approximates contemporary notions of epic than does Milton's. It is tightly organized around a single great end, presented under the guise of historical truth; Le Bossu's definition of epic fits it exactly: The Epopea is a Discourse invented by Art, to form the Manners by such Instructions as are disguis'd under the Allegories of some one important Action, which is related in Verse, after a probable, diverting, and surprising Manner.1 Generic definitions of this sort have no intrinsic importance; their value lies rather in what the properly identified particular example can tell us about the development of the form, and Dryden's poem, both in its excellences and in its limitations, provides a great deal of information about the crisis of epic poetry at this time. Paradise Lost had already contained the germ of serious mock epic (as opposed to epic burlesque) in the parodic relation in which Satan stands to God: in particular, his fraudulent self-examinations and false or mistaken recognitions of his ''mission" offer the base on which Dryden builds the shaky edifice of Epic to Novel Absalom's self-created mission, to establish the "dominion of grace" that grotesquely and profoundly parodies David's merciful rule. From this to the full-blown inversions of Pope's Dunciad is a short step ideologically but a great one literarily and culturally. Before we get there, we will have to examine in some detail exactly what Dryden accomplishes in Absalom and Achitophel. With very few exceptions, Absalom and Achitophel maintains a narrative integrity that few political allegories ever reach; its fable (in our terms, its vehicle) achieves a kind of autonomy that renders it complete and satisfying in itself and perfectly transparent as a vehicle for other things. These very qualities hide the real achievement of the fable of Absalom and Achitophel by cloaking it with an inevitability that it by no means possesses. We are sufficiently aware of the frequency with which seventeenth-century political writers compared Charles to David to accept without demur the appropriateness of the biblical tale to the English situation. If we remember piously that Dryden has really re versed the roles of the biblical Absalom and Achitophel, the fact does little to alter our acceptance of Dryden's fable as donnee rather than aperqu, semi-fact rather than full-fiction. Yet the imaginative reordering of history, both Jewish and English, constitutes the excellence of Dryden's poem, and the "fabulous" (in the root sense) nature of Dryden's narrative makes it so inevitable a vehicle of his meaning. In general terms, the most significant change Dryden has made in the biblical narrative lies in his radical transformation of its temporal and conceptual contexts, both of which he wrenches into a rich ambiguity. To clarify this, we shall have to examine the much-worked-over opening lines of the poem: In pious times, e'r Priest-craft did begin, Before Polygamy was made a sin; When man, on many, multiply'd his kind, E'r one to one was, cursedly, confind: Dryden When Nature prompted, and no law deny'd Promiscuous use of Concubine and Bride; Then, Israel's Monarch, after Heaven's own heart, His vigorous warmth did, variously, impart To Wives and Slaves: And, wide as his Command, Scatter'd his Maker's Image through the Land. (1-10) Let us put aside at the outset the idea that this passage serves only as a witty justification for, or palliation of, Charles's promiscuity; that is certainly true, but I doubt that Dryden needed ten lines for only that. The passage establishes an explicit temporal and conceptual context for the whole poem, a context that the remainder of the poem will treat with the same irony and ambiguity that Dryden provides for the biblical narrative on which the poem as a whole is based. "Pious times, e'r Priest-craft did begin" were technically the patriarchal period before the establishing of the Levitical priesthood, the period between God's covenant with Ab raham and the more explicitly codified covenant established with the people of Israel through Moses.2 Obviously, chronological difficulties present themselves from the beginning: the biblical David did not live in those pious times, and Dryden's "Before Polygamy was made a sin" ignores the pointed injunction of Deuteronomy 17:17 that kings should not multiply horses, wives, or concubines.