Epic language is one of simile and analogy rather than concept and abstract measure. A distance is gauged not in metres but is, for example, “as far as a man’s strong shout can carry”. The world is knit together by likeness (the celebrated “epic simile”) rather than by a ghostly plane of substitutable units. After all, no one has “seen” a metre nor held a kilogram. We touch or see things, objects, and colours.
“Joy.. warm as the joy that children feel/ When they see their father’s life dawn again./ One who’s lain on a sickbed racked with torment./ Wasting away,/ Wasting away, slowly, under some angry power’s onslaught.”
Joy, or whatever emotion, is always embodied, implicated in some object, wedded to some event or person. It is not yet some abstract emotion which can fill out any random thing indiscriminately. It never migrates into some purely conceptual realm, a pure dictionary-like definition.
What the epic simile seems to do is endlessly enlarge (and postpone) the ‘definition’ of some word, by opening a sudden window onto some other example. And it is as if the ‘definition’ of the word is nothing but the constellation of these concrete ‘examples’. What is presupposed here is a world of correspondences, whereby one experience receives light and definition from another analogous one.
In this respect, the world of Homer seems to me utterly unPlatonic - if in Plato there is first of all a realm of disembodied concepts, which then descend to and reside within this lower world, availing themselves of a transitory material envelope.
Moreover, in the Homeric there exists an acute and graphic sense of how things work, are put together, come apart. Things are known, or reveal themselves, though and in their use. It is “A world where everything is living” (George Steiner), a world corresponding and attuned to a different human sensorium - things address not only our sense of sight; touch and smell are equally, simultaneously present. There is no specifically 'psychological' lexicon. “Burn this into your brain” (Iliad) is not just ‘memorize’ – it addresses the sensory experience of registering something, it also ‘metaphorizes’ the physical world in order to talk about (what we would now call) the ‘mental’, as though what takes place (tangibly) in the world is the image and yardstick of mental events. The latter do not require their own autonomous language, the language of ‘psychology’ and of action are not, as in our world, dissimilar and differently structured. Perhaps ‘mind’ is, indeed, more ‘transparent’, since implicitly it is intelligible through the optic of action/ being-in-the-world.
It was of course Hegel and his heirs who thought of ‘the epic’, ‘the novel' etc not simply as literary genres intelligible within the “laws” and biases of literary development, but as embodiments of Worlds, as presupposing certain historical shifts which can then, as it were, be read off from them in reverse:
Our present-day machinery and factories, together with the products they turn out and in general our means of satisfying our external needs would in this respect […] be out of tune with the background of life which the original epic requires[1]
Vital in this regard, in Hegel and later in the criticism of people like Lukacs, was the historical truth disclosed in the novel, and the distinction between the novel as a genre and earlier forms such as the epic and the traditional story.
Jameson on Benjamin and Sartre:
The two forms [the tale and the novel] are opposed not only in their social origins (the tale springing from collective life, the novel from middle-class solitude) and in their raw materials (the tale using what everyone can recognise as common experience, the novel that which is uncommon and highly individualistic), but also and primarily in their relationship to death and to eternity.
And on Lukacs:
In the artworks of a preindustrialised, agricultural or tribal society, the artist’s raw material is on a human scale, it has an immediate meaning, requiring no preliminary explanation or justification on the part of the writer. The story needs no background in time because the culture knows no history: each generation repeats the same experiences […..] the works of art characteristic of such societies may be called concrete in that their elements are all meaningful from the outset. [..]
The village, the city-state, is a whole world in itself
[1] Cited in Jameson, Marxism and Form, p. 166.
Anyway, thinking about 'nostalgia' for the Epic world as a motif in Modern thought, eg Heidegger. Will try to post something on what I mean by this if I have time.