paul volsik
My analysis of the epic will begin with what may seem a distant issue, but
is,I would (with others) argue, an origin: MacPherson’s founding pseudo-epic
Ossian—a text which served to help define the epic, in the Celtic world, in
nationalist terms. The essay will then attempt to show how, despite the double,
articulated critique of this link both by poets who experienced a war (the First World
War) the brutality of which flew in the face of the sentiments and sentimentalities
generated by the nationalist reading of the epic and by modernism’s radical attack
on the aesthetic that incarnated them (notably the dream of a unifying founding
‘national’ narrative), the model was to survive to haunt the troubles in Northern
Ireland. The final, and major, part of this analysis will show how poets sympathetic
to a nationalist community involved in armed conflict could find themselves
negotiating (ambiguously) with certain of thetopoithat structured this particular
construction of the epic and the aesthetic priorities that were seen as consubstantial
with them, while other poets, not always, but often, and not by chance, of Protestant
origin, would in some sense be forced to confront more directly the darker sides
of this construct and turn away from it in a gesture of refusal, one of whose
manifestations would be horror of the dark, apparently endless, violence that it can
incarnate.
Constructing and Deconstructing
the Nationalist Epic and the Epic
Character of Nationalism
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••At the very outset of the Romantic revolution, in a period when the question of
nation was becoming central in poetry, the pseudo-epicOssian(1762–3), which
rewrote the Irish Fenian stories, fired the imagination of the whole of Europe.
Thus Johann Gottfried Herder in his ‘Correspondence onOssianand the Songs
of Ancient Peoples’ (1773) introduces the song of this ‘barbarous’ people as ‘the
gnomic song of the nation’,^1 a song that is indissoluble from the war he sees at the
heart of the original epic text. Herder hears alliterative Germanic verse forms and
the distich line as the incarnation of the ‘marching-order of the warrior-band’, a call
to arms, and the echo of shields clashing. The nation, manliness, a certain violence
of language, and warfare are being inextricably mixed. This reading is theorized by
Hegel in hisAesthetics, which indissolubly links epic and nation, and nation and
warfare. All those aspects of the epic that do not fit this reading (humour or the
grotesque, for example) are cast into shadow.
(^1) Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Correspondence onOssianand the Songs of Ancient Peoples’, in David
Simpson (ed.),The Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from
Lessing to Hegel(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 71.