Narrative Structure and Political Construction: The Epic at Work

The studies presented here¹ explore an aspect of the dynamism and efficacy of literature so masterfully illuminated by John Foley, especially in Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (1991). The construction of meaning through structure is at the very foundation of oral or "oral-derived" texts, which rely on the totality of tradition to create precise meaning. All the stories and narratives heard by listeners contribute to the creation of every character, every action, and every narrative motif.

My own analyses, along the same lines as Foley's, have led me to recognize that it is possible for real political thought to emerge in as well as by means of the narrative. I am interested in the construction of meaning through structure, not in literature in general, but within a given text. After a dozen or so years spent studying the genre of the epic, it seems to me that epics are precisely the texts in which literature can develop a profound, vital, and irreplaceable meaning not possible anywhere else: a real way of thinking, although without concepts.

Of course, in the first place, an epic presents itself as a narrative, or rather a series of narratives. These narratives are so compelling, and so familiar, that we remain fascinated by them and ready to believe with Hegel or Lukacs that they describe a harmonious and stable world. But if we place these texts very precisely in their original context we recognize that the world they describe is a world that is prey to crisis, disorder, and chaos; we may see then that the function of the epic is precisely to allow society as a whole to see, first dimly and then in more detail, a new political order. War is in fact used as a sort of metaphor for the intense political crisis in which Greece finds itself at the end of the Dark Ages and Japan finds itself at the beginning of feudalism. And so the epic will in effect discuss the epoch's disorder while seemingly "only" telling the stories of the warriors. It will make its public aware of a radically new political form that represents the real solution to the crisis facing them. If we focus our attention not on the psychology of the characters or the unfolding of the narrative surface but rather on the structural relationships among these characters as established by the various episodes, that is, if we read these war-stories as a structure, we discern political oppositions as the major stakes. The entire Iliad is primarily the staging of the confrontation of two possible forms of political power: on the one hand the autos (autocratic) government that Agamemnon seeks to impose by taking Achilles' captive, on the other hand a government in which the king is responsible before the people, and where his power is absolutely limited, a situation that the Greek world will effectively create with the city.

In other words, we have here an extremely effective way of thinking even though it is very different from the conceptual discourse to which we are accustomed. Through the narrative the epic builds a vision of the world, or, more exactly, it makes possible a comparison of the world visions that are available at that time, it plays out before the public the possible options by developing them in such a way as to allow the audience to judge them all. This is what I propose to call the "work of the epic." In the major texts I am studying, we can see the development of a radically new concept, never imagined by the listeners, of which the text is the "proof," whose validity it eventually shows, and which is what history will in fact retain: the city in the case of the Iliad, the vassalage pyramid in the Chanson de Roland, and the outline of what will later be codified as the Way of the Warriors in the Japanese Hôgen and Heiji monogatari.

To achieve this goal, the epic uses no other means than the narrative. Its essential tool is the parallel, the...