Belatedness: A Theory of the Epic

Introduction—belatedness

The theory of the epic, following Georg Lukács, comes too late. For Lukács the age of the epic explicitly has no seeking, no philosophy, no questions (only answers), and therefore no theory, not even its own. Thus, the theory of the epic begins when the age of epic has ended—only when epic is a thing of the past does one begin to ask what it was, what questions it may have answered, what meaning it has. The novel, on the other hand, is inseparable from its theorization—and, I want to add, from the theorization of the epic. The theory of the epic and the theory of the novel are coeval and co-extensive. Akin to Peter Szondi’s analysis of Schiller, in which the naïve is the sentimental (i.e., the naïve only comes into being as naïve alongside sentimentality, as an expression of the latter),¹ Lukács outlines how the theory of the novel produces the epic as part of its self-understanding. The epic, therefore, is less a strictly historical category than an epistemological one; or rather, it is a historical concept to the degree it serves an epistemological function in the self-understanding of modernity and its most prominent literary form, the novel.

If the theory of the epic is necessarily belated, a perhaps too simplistic question is: Why does the theory of the novel even need a theory of the epic? What does the theory of the novel gain by simultaneously theorizing the epic, a therorization that first invents epic, at least to the extent that modern, novel consciousness can understand and use it? Lukács is emphatic: we “invent a relationship between the Greeks’ forms and our age of the world.”² Greek epic and all it entails is so removed and so foreign to the modern age (i.e., at least since Don Quixote) as to not even be an object of nostalgia or sentimentality. Homer, the sole representative of the genre, represents all that is unapproachable [das Unnahbare] and unreachable [das Unerreichbare] in the epic—a world that found answers before questions had ever been posed (22/30). Therefore, Lukács’ notion of the epic is simply ‘other’—epic is all that the modern age and the modern subject are not. In its fullness, its being replete with meaning, its rounded totality, and its lack of a gap between essence (meaningfulness) and life (the events and raw materials of daily existence),³ the epic determines the lack around which the modern, fragmented subject defines itself. Therefore, its radical otherness is essential to the theory of the novel. There is no theory of the novel without a theory of the epic.

One could argue for a dual presentation of theories of epic and novel that emphasizes the historical nature of genre distinctions, in which epic precedes the novel and is then replaced by it. This would be the case in Germany’s first great theory of the novel, Blanckenburg’s Versuch über den Roman (1774).⁴ And, in Lukács’s own schema, only in epic narration, including both epic and the novel, does one genre historically supersede the other: comedy, tragedy, and lyric poetry march on to this day. Therefore, from the perspective of a historical interpretation of genre-poetics, the theory of the novel needs the theory of the epic, because it is necessary for understanding the novel’s status and relevance in the history of genres.

While this emphasis on historical poetics is certainly relevant for Lukács, it doesn’t capture the urgency of his theory of the novel—an urgency that is paradoxically defined by the epic as deferred, delayed. Only because it is belated, part and parcel of the theory of the novel, does the theory of the epic assume its formative force, quasi ‘after the fact’ (though right on time) and only as an ‘afterlife’ (which, however, is inseparable from the question of life, as we will see). This strange temporality and delayed significance is where Rainer Nägele’s delineation of...