Gerald R. Lucas

Secondary epics are also called literary epics and were composed by sophisticated craftsmen in a deliberate imitation of the traditional form. Their efforts is attempt to use again in new circumstances what has already been a complete and satisfactory form of literature. The literary epics are composed more for readers in their structure and language. The concern is with the perfection of the word; sentences are carefully fashioned; words and phrases are more carefully chosen. There is less use of formulaic repetition. The heroic ideal: the hero is more concerned with national or universal duty than with personal happiness or self-fulfillment (e.g., Aeneas leaves Dido to continue his nation’s destiny). In a highly organized society, the unfettered individual has no place. The hero is inspired by service to his nation, world, or cosmos, not by individual prowess. Social ideal replaces personal identity. The hero becomes a symbol for the nation or world as a whole. The language suggests a written ceremony — a deliberate distancing from ordinary speech and proportioned to the grandeur and formality of the heroic subject matter and epic architecture. The “grand,” “ornate,” and “elevated” style. The epic’s movement is toward rebirth. Aeneas leaves old Troy to found new Troy (Rome). The secondary epic is a product of highly structured cultures and societies, like Rome. Examples: the Aeneid, Paradise Lost, and The Divine Comedy.

A mock epic, or mock heroic, poem imitates the elaborate form and ceremonious style of the epic genre, and applies it to a commonplace or trivial subject matter; the high brought low. In a masterpiece of this form, The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope views through grandiose epic perspective a quarrel between the beaux and belles of his day over the theft of Belinda’s curl. The story includes such elements of epic protocol as supernatural machinery, a voyage, a visit to the underworld, the arming of the hero, epic lists, and a heroically scaled battle between the sexes — although with hatpins, snuff, and abusive language for weapons. The term mock heroic is often applied to other dignified poetic forms which are purposefully mismatched to a lowly subject; for example, to Thomas Gray’s comic “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat.”

I’ve been thinking lately about being human. This is not necessarily a new thing for me, but, especially when I teach new media, I find myself drawn to what we humans do and what it is that defines us as human. I understand that “human” has both a physical and discursive reality; i.e., we have our physical relationship to our environments that we experience through our body and its senses, and an ever-changing and evolving conception of ourselves in relation to the universe. Call the first relationship that of science and the latter that of philosophy. I understand that this distinction is wrought with problems, but it’s the distinction itself that concerns the scientific myth that we humans seem to privilege: that of order.

Read more on Big Jelly.

These comments about Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” were forwarded to me from the Hemingway mailing list (Heming-L) by a friend. I thought, since my entry on this subject gets more attention than just about any other, I’d post them here. The email is signed only “Dan,” so if anyone knows the full name of the one who wrote these comments, please let me know.

Recently, I was re-reading “Indian Camp.” “First, tho[ugh], I had assembled some of the bits of dialogue from the members here about Uncle George and his possible parentage of the child in the story and listed the evidence:

1. Why be handing out the cigars if not the father?
2. Why does she bite George and not another of the men holding her?
3. Why does he react so sarcastically to Doc (the “great man” remark)?
4. Why does the story’s narrator, who knows more than any of the characters, only refer to the man in the top bunk as either “the husband” or “the Indian”?
5. Why does the husband kill himself?
6. Why does George stay following the birth?

Now some on this list have already rolled their bloodshot eyes and yelled, “Bloody hell, it’s just about a doctor performing a difficult operation.” Well, in profound respect, I think it is more than that, for if it were about an operation, then why do we not witness the operation?

I remembered someone else suggesting that a good way of approaching IOT is to ask students to prove all of the stereotypes of H–he glorifies war, etc. With this in mind, I set out to disprove George being the father.

1. We have talked about this being an element of cultural appropriation. George takes over what should be some sort of ritualized greeting toward a man come to help the tribe. As other hints of cultural appropriation become evident–where they live, the loss of their ways of life, the inabilities of traditional ways to bring in this birth–this bit of tobacco sharing grows in significance, but alone does not prove anything other than appropriation.
2. Easy. He was close, holding her shoulder. Of course, there must have been someone on the other shoulder. Why did she not bite him?
3. It follows with his pretentious behavior (the inability or unwillingness to understand others–the tobacco sharing) that he would bristle at someone else grabbing the spotlight. To this extent, though? Maybe. However, if we read George’s remarks as sarcastic, can Doc’s following remarks also be sarcastic about how fathers are “the worst sufferers in these little AFFAIRS.” Of course not; Doc’s being quite plainly unaware of his brother’s snide remark.
4. Again, the narrator of a story is privy to information that any or all of the characters are not. “Only Doc calls the Indian in the upper bunk “the father.” “Maybe he does not know, or maybe, again, he is as sarcastic as his brother. “The narrator, possibly quite tellingly, calls the Indian either “the husband” or “the Indian.” “Someone else can disprove this tidbit.
5. He kills himself because he cannot stand his wife’s pain. Here is a man who lives in the woods, whose life is a physical battle (I’m assuming here, but nothing indicates otherwise) with the often painful powers of nature, whose survival in nature is a matter of determination, and he cannot take listening to someone elses pain. I don’t know. Maybe he recognizes how serious his position is, but it may be no more serious than his wife’s and she survives through the efforts of this white doctor. Maybe he is reacting in embarrassment to his own ineffectuality or to the elements of cultural appropriation that he is witnessing (even if he may not be able to articulate them as such) — he has failed in his position as the man by even being inside the room where his wife is giving birth, other men are assisting in what should traditionally be a woman’s place, the white man’s medicine has proven more powerful than his own. That could be. Like the tobacco, then, another element of appropriation.
6. Can’t say. Whiskey maybe, good fishing. H can’t think of a way to incorporate him in the leaving so he leaves George. In a story that is as tight as this one, where nothing is sloppy, I can’t figure the reason, Here, as with #4, someone else can disprove.

Sorry. After this, and I will admit I began with a bias, I still see George as the father. At the least, and I am willing to acknowledge that this may also be the most, H presents a story of cultural appropriation through the actions of George and Doc. If, however, we agree on this point, then how far is it of a stretch to consider George-as-father as the ultimate element of cultural appropriation, cultural destruction even.

At times knowledge brings merely an enlightened impotence or paralysis. One may know exactly what to do but lack the wherewithal to act. (Winner “Mythinformation” 594)

Janet H. Murray, in her work Hamlet on the Holodeck, discusses the future of narrative within digital environments, and she suggests the importance of “author” to narrative in particular and cyberspace in general:

We like to know that there is a ruling power in control of an imaginary universe, and it makes us uncomfortable if the author seems to abdicate that role. (Murray 275)

Granted, we don’t want that “author,” or controlling presence, in everything we do. One of the reasons the internet, and much built around the computer, is so appealing is the feeling of decenteredness: the idea that no one voice dominates where anyone can have a presence. Getting this voice is becoming increasingly easier as software becomes more powerful and less technical. The more voices being heard means the less that one dominates and controls the conversation, the flow of ideas, and the developing cyberworld.

However, this decenteredness also contributes to our anxieties. In not having a central authority to turn to for comfort and safety, the Internet can often leave us in a vertiginous state of flux: too many voices often leads to inaction. The “old” media (re)assures us by its authority: i.e., we know when a book is finished, how to watch a movie, and what to expect of a poem. Yet, these media — patterns, orders, conventions, structures — were the best at delivering the meaning and asking the questions when the are situated historically, but their usefulness is waning in the face of the digitality of new media. The authority of old forms is being questioned by the media of postmodernity: the computer.

However, as any critic of new media will tell you, the computer does not mean the instant death of the old ways. On the contrary, we remain nostalgic angels — to use a phrase from Johndan Johnson-Eilola — who long to fly toward a future of technological promise while our wings get caught in the cables of our past. We are not ready to give up our old media, nor should we be willing. However, as Murray points out in Hamlet on the Holodeck, we need to find a middle ground between the old authority and the new freedom (267).

I suggest that the same is true for education. I have doubts that our current educational system prepares our students to meet the challenges that new media presents in education. Instead of the “new order — an age of equality, justice, and emancipation” that the Internet promised for educators and students alike, Langdon Winner observes that these myths do not adequately account for the practical realities that any meaningful use of computers in education requires. Winner calls this faith in the utopian promise of computers “mythinformation: the almost religious conviction that a widespread adoption of computers and communications systems along with easy access to electronic information will automatically produce a better world for human living” (592).

Winner’s point is not lost on educators. With the proliferation of computers and networks increasingly replacing the analog tools of yesterday’s education — remember the chalkboard? the card catalog? — we have not changed our approach to education to accommodate these wonderful new tools. Now don’t get me wrong; I am no Luddite. I had a web site that contained rudimentary course information before many had even heard of the World Wide Web. I am an advocate of progress, but this progress must not only come in the form of new tools, but in how we work with and think about those tools.

Education, like all other ways of using computers, is in an incunabular state. That is, we have yet to develop conventions for the use of computers. We think they are neat. Administrators love to see them in our classrooms, students busily typing away, smiling as they fill their minds with the wonders of the Information Superhighway. Yet, as we all are by now well aware, just having the tools does not mean we have the desire or the knowledge to use them effectively. A two-year-old with a pen and paper can successfully scribble, but she needs guidance in order to begin to use those tools meaningfully.

Like all other colleges out there, our library system has adopted a series of online catalogs. The dead and long-since-buried card catalog has been replaced by those beige boxes that have improved our ability to do research tenfold. Yet, almost every time I go to use our library’s electronic resources, I need a refresher course. Progress comes at such a rapid pace that even someone as computer-savvy as I often feel overwhelmed — if only momentarily — when going to look up current articles in the MLA database. Did I say the “MLA database”? Forget about that: there are now databases that link to full-text articles so I don’t even have to get up to read the latest scholarly research on Beowulf or James Joyce. And with projects like the Perseus Digital Library, Project Gutenberg, the Voice of the Shuttle, the American Humanities Index, and Project Muse, I may never have to pick up another paper journal for the rest of my academic career. With all of this information available, surely students are at more of an advantage today than ever before.

Why, then, do my students’ blogs and wiki assignments all cite random and tenuous sites, usually because they felt lucky Googling, rather than taking advantage of the resources available through their campus library? Part of this has to do with getting paid. Many of these databases are expensive, and are therefore protected — or hid — behind barriers so only registered users have access. This makes it difficult for students to even get to these databases, much less use them. One cannot find an entry from the MLA database from Google. This pay-per-use system is indicative of the current trend to protect intellectual property rights, like the DMCA; this system is part of the reason that research is still relegated to those who have access under the aegis of institutionally deep pockets. It seems that information is still a closely guarded, exclusive club in most cases.

While the lawyers and copyright holders hammer out these issues, we are still stuck with the problem of computers in education. The way I see it: we want students to take advantage of these new tools toward an efficacious education, yet still allow them the freedom to acquire their own knowledge. It seems increasingly clear to me that our current educational system teaches students that knowledge is something that is passively absorbed by listening to a lecture, and maybe writing down a point or two — that education can be accomplished through a minimum of web browsing, cutting and pasting, and maybe regurgitating what Nelson calls the “official angle” about the subject on the exam (308). As Nelson points out, education is as much about indoctrination as it is about knowledge. That is, their ability to do what they are supposed to is perhaps more important than the subject at hand. This practice, Nelson opines, destroys a student’s motivation by making him “orient himself to the current topic” only by understanding the “official angle” (308). Nelson suggests that the human mind is born free, but education imprisons and destroys “intelligence, curiosity, enthusiasm, and intellectual initiative and self-confidence” (309). The implication here is that if students are given access to the resources they require and the proper encouragement, they will be able to learn on their own.

Nelson’s argument is, in itself, utopian and radical. Yet, that does not mean he doesn’t make sense. Like Murray, he seems to suggest that students need the appropriate mixture of directed guidance or motivation — that “authority” — and the freedom to explore knowledge for any angle that interests them: a “golden mean,” if you will. I have noticed that the most effective way of approaching this is through encouraged research and response; the former using the collaborative environment of the wiki, the latter the individual expression of the blog. A commitment to giving just enough guidance — like how to use the wiki and blog; how to use the college databases; how to cite research; selecting primary texts — to allow students to have the ability to pursue any aspect they want about Homer might be a strong approach to teaching literature successfully online.

Indeed, how can I make an online literature experience successful for students that have had all of the autonomy and agency trained out of them by their educational history? How do I help students embrace the power of the technology and at the same time helping them get over their anxieties about it: enough to cure their inaction, but not enough to stifle their own desire to learn? How do I avoid having to answer the same question several times a semester: “How do I post to the blog again, Dr. Lucas?” Are these things related? I think so.

More on this to follow.

For in my heart and soul I know this well:
the day will come when sacred Troy must die, [. . .]
That is nothing, nothing beside your agony
when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears,
wrenching away your day of light and freedom!
–Hector to Andromache, the Iliad, VI.396-97, 405-07

Book VI of Homer’s Iliad shows the contention in the heart of Hector, Ilium’s champion, but also a husband and new father: he is torn between his responsibilities as a hero to his people and as a the head of the household. Like so many soldiers going off to battle today, Hector is a new father who must risk his life to maintain his people’s way of life. Hector knows that Troy is doomed, but he must do his duty as champion and prince, even though it means the enslavement of his wife and child. In Hector’s plight, we see what is perhaps the utmost position of humanity in war: to lose does not mean just the death of the hero, but his death precipitates the death of the society that he protects.

Read the rest at HumX.

A basic tension between head and heart was characteristic of our naturalistic novelists. Their intellectual commitment to scientific determinism and its attendant implications regarding humanity’s place in nature is to be seen in the forms of their works — in explicit and implicit commentary, in character conception, in the use of background, in the dynamics of interaction between character and environment (the conduct of action), and in motif, image, and symbol. Their attempt to render the new deterministic vision in the novel form constitutes what we may call their “positive naturalism.” Inevitably, such an effort issues in what has been called “negative naturalism,” an attack on false values based on non-scientific assumptions. This effect, however, is not simply a quiet or implied corollary of their positive naturalism. Indeed, in many cases the novelists seem at least as interested in toppling the intellectual idols of their fathers as they are in embodying their own bleak new knowledge.

The main objects of their iconoclasm are rational humanism, Christianity, romanticism, the “genteel tradition” (ideality, sentimentalism, respectability, gentility, etc.), the assurances of the editorial pages and the pulpit, and the various components of the American dream. Sometimes the work of denial is conducted sadly, sometimes dispassionately, sometimes with an épater le bourgeois avidity, and sometimes with trenchant irony. But even as they discredit “outmoded” formulas for viewing life in humanly meaningful terms, it is clear that they have not purged their own hearts of that need. In spite of their determinism, as Malcolm Cowley has put it, “The sense of moral fitness is strong in them; they believe in their hearts that nature should be kind, that virtue should be rewarded on earth, that men should control their own destinies.” Both within the forms of their novels and in their effects, the reader discovers a residual humanistic and teleological sensibility at work.

“The Dynamo and the Virgin” — The sublimation of the sexual energy in the form of the Virgin was the power of spirituality in the Middle Ages. This has been superseded with the invention of the Dynamo which Adams sees as representing an amoral force with no laws of cause and effect; a fragmented multiverse with no spirituality. This force has become an end in itself — a potentially destructive force that could easily overwhelm its creators.

The projection of romantic ideals into a naturalistic, indifferent universe is destructive. There is no morality or beauty in this universe ruled, as Henry Adams sees it, by the chaotic, destructive power of the Dynamo, rather than the loving power of the Virgin.

The desire for nature to be benevolent and kind, rewarding the righteous, freedom of choice, and the power to control our own destiny, is still alive, and part of naturalism. The various authors acknowledge the fact of an amoral, indifferent universe, yet lament that it must be so. This view is sometimes represented a the contention between head and heart. The head realizes that the universe is monistic, i.e. of one substance, the physical precluding the spiritual as delusional; the heart pines that it should not be so. If the balance fails and leans toward the desires of the heart then man projects upon the universe what he needs out of it, e.g. anthropomorphic qualities, the control by an almighty God, who is perhaps, like the Deists believed, removed from influence and entreaty, or teleology.

Yet Darwin destroyed any Deist arguments of design with benevolence. He looked for, and discovered, the mechanism of evolution. Struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest, was the only law of the universe; this is the amoral law of variation.

Comtis, in his law of the three stages of human thought, traces the development of the human mind:

1. theological — divine causes for everything, this thought is fictitious and deceiving
2. metaphysical — controlling essences within nature rather than divine entities, i.e. de-anthropomorphized
3. positivistic — science would study events and determine why because of milieu.

All move through these phases with sociology being the last. Eventually, through these laws, including Darwinism, a perfection will be reached where only the strongest and most perfect will comprise humanity.

Spencer, similar to Comtis, attributed the development of everything by the universe’s force moving perpetually and persistently through everything. These forces will both culminate in the winnowing out of the weaker, lesser beings in a society. This idea led to Social Darwinism.

Yet, there is a link with the past — always. Humans are the sum of their animal pasts. The primal, animalistic instinct is still lurking within ready to be unleashed with any chance change of circumstances, or milieu. Anyone, at any time, can atavistically relapse into her/his constituent bestial elements.

There is a chance for escape in the reader. The authors of these naturalistic works are depending upon the readers understanding and action to change the circumstances presented by them in their novels. We, the readers, have a weighty responsibility in seeing that there are no more Maggies, Trinas, or McTeagues. Like the scientist, the naturalistic novelist points out the natural laws underlying events so that we will be able to understand them and eventually control them, to some extent, and improve our lives.