A Review of the Framework of Epic Theory 180

If the narrative epic is a kind of genre which is just as prevalent in the “old” media of oral poetry or literature as it is in “new” media, then the formal criteria for identifying and evaluating epics must be the same regardless of the medium in which any epic tale is told. In the first chapter, I extrapolated from various epic theories a fourfold framework for organizing these criteria which seemed to fit traditional epics. This framework consisted of the analytical differentiation of the epos, the mythos, the ethos, and the cosmos, and it is the relationship of the work in question to each of these “tiers” that determined the extent to which that work was epic.

First, to be considered an epic in the specific sense argued for here, a narrative work must be an epos, an exemplary instance of storytelling. It fulfils certain formal, qualitative criteria, namely that it is highly complex and cohesive relative to comparable works in the same medium; it is regarded as “high quality.” These formal criteria are specific to the affordances of the work’s particular medium and production context. For example,

The Wire is held up as an exemplary television series because it outclasses its peers in the

very qualities considered particular to episodic television drama: ensemble acting, complex story arcs, and a certain kind of social realism. The Dark Knight trilogy, on the other hand, is considered a qualitative success in the related, but distinct, medium of the feature film; acting and writing must of course be fine here too, but there is an added expectation of spectacle, stunt work and special effects, and the pushing of technological boundaries which is neither as necessary nor as practical for the televisual epos.

Meanwhile, for a video game like The Legend of Zelda to be an epos in its medium, the excellence of the gameplay mechanics and the breadth of the explorable world become more important than achieving the depth of characterization one would expect in drama, although what elements of character and story there are in the adventure game must still be done well.

But the formal and textual properties of an epos are not the only set of factors that determine whether a narrative work is considered an epic. It must also incorporate and subsume, or otherwise allude to, as much previous narrative material as possible, which I have called the epic’s mythos. The relationship of an epos to its mythos is primarily

paratextual: in other words, one of the criteria for defining an epic is its relationship with narratives that have preceded it (and also those that follow). These narratives are often historical, but not necessarily so; the important thing here is textual history, not history as such. This solves the problem of categorizing epics that are not based on historical

events; in any case, the criterion of historicity has always been problematic due to many epics’ description of legendary or mythic events and personalities. Thus The Wire has a rich mythos not because it is explicitly based on real events, but because of the great variety of source material, which includes true-crime books, previous television series, and so on. The Dark Knight trilogy has little to do with “real” history, but draws upon and synthesises an enormous body of previous comics, television shows, and films, each with a complex textual history of their own. The Legend of Zelda, whose narrative has no direct connection to history at all, nevertheless counts among its influences a unique blend of Japanese and American archetypes and cultural flotsam, and bootstraps its own fictional world by adding to each successive sequel the narratives of previous games. Furthermore, the creation of each of these epics influences any works that follow; they necessarily occupy positions on, and by their circulation alter, what Bourdieu called the field of cultural production (53–55), and the extent to which this occurs also determines the extent of a work’s “epicness.” The more definitive a particular narrative work is – i.e., the more it becomes perceived as the dominant version of the particular story it tries to tell, and the more its successors must deal with that perception – the greater its success as an epic. The Wire thereby becomes the defining epic of Baltimore. And while the Dark

Knight trilogy does not mean the end of Batman films, any more than Ocarina of Time

was the last Zelda game, the fact that their successors must contend with the artistic and technical achievements of those works is a testament to their success.

Next, the epic must embody a certain ethos, which I have defined as the range of possible representations within the epic’s culture (or sub-culture). The ethos is necessarily larger than the mythos of the epic, because the ethos contains within itself all the previous representations of the entire mythos, as well as any symbolic material that is consistent with the mythos but has yet to occur in a particular narrative. If we are to accept the Althusserian definition of ideology as the imaginary relationship we have to the real conditions of existence (Althusser 109), then the ethos, as an intermediate level which is

greater than any particular work or set of works, and yet less than the totality which those works aspire to represent, is the level at which ideology operates. The ethos of the Zelda games consists of, for example, an ahistorical medievalism and a less-stereotypically- male style of gameplay; but immanent within these possibilities (and occluded by them) are, respectively, the highly technological, capital-intensive production of modern video games, and the sometimes-sexist depiction of Zelda herself, who is almost never the protagonist in the games named after her. Likewise, The Wire has within its ethos various media stereotypes of police and criminals – recall the allusions to Shaft or Scarface – and even as these are explicitly rejected, they are at least possible; within the The Wire’s logic of realism they must be rejected precisely because they are possible. This too is the result of a certain ideological stance. The positioning of the “realist” Batman of the Dark

Knight trilogy does similar work, just as the conscious suppression of parts of the

established Batman mythos, such as the queer or camp elements, does this ideological work in a negative sense. The ethos is also an important analytical category because it allows us to account for the inclusion of narrative material that is “original,” that is, not taken from the already-existing mythos. Even though Bruce Wayne’s fear of bats, which leads indirectly to his parents’ murder in Batman Begins, does not appear in any of the numerous retellings of Batman’s origins in the comics, it is consistent with the ethos of the Dark Knight trilogy precisely because it is the sort of detail that would not be out of place in a Batman comic.

Finally, we can relate the epic to the social totality within which it is created and circulated, a totality which I have called the epic’s cosmos. Indeed, one of the

fundamental traits of the narrative epic is that it purports to represent this totality; the degree to which any particular epos is felt to be successful at this, and the greater the totality, the more “epic” the work is. Thus we can have the epic of an entire civilization (as the epics of antiquity were often thought to be), or we can have epics that function as the representational apex of a subset of a particular society – that is, a subculture. All three of the main cases of this study operate in this latter mode, that of a more narrow slice of society: The Wire as an epic of Baltimore, the Dark Knight trilogy as an epic of superhero mythology, Ocarina of Time as an epic of adventure gaming. The question of how universal the old epics in fact ever were is beyond the scope of this project; but even

making the doubtful assumption that the audiences of Gilgamesh or the Iliad were completely homogenous and accepting of one, and only one, epic, it does not follow that postmodern epics, with a more fragmentary or spatially diffuse audience, have any less relevance to their communities or are any less “popular.” Identifying the profusion of epics in recent decades is less an attempt to rehabilitate popular narratives as epics than it is a recognition of the fact that there are simply orders of magnitude more people

producing and consuming narratives of all sorts than have ever done so before.