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Judgement and Atmosphere in Epic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Extract
These quotations exemplify a general consensus among critics that the narrative poet must not be seen in process of shaping our opinions for us. Most people would agree that moralising interruptions disrupt the reader's chain of thought and weaken his hold on the world which the narrator is creating. We want to see as little as possible of the author's thought-processes; he should follow Schiller's precept and remain as invisible behind his material as the Creator behind his Universe. When in The Eustace Diamonds Trollope begins a paragraph about Frank Greystock by saying ‘Within the figure and frame and clothes and cuticle, within the bones and flesh of many of us, there is but one person, — a man or woman, with a preponderance either of good or of evil. …’, the reader will, according to his nature, either grit his teeth and pursue the homily to its conclusion a page and a half later, or skip to the next point in the narrative. Most modern readers wish that Trollope would spare them. But in fact even Homer, ‘rapid and direct’ as he is, does sometimes pause for a word of moralising comment. Perhaps the most striking occasion is at Il. XXIII, 24, where Achilles has in mind the mutilation of Hector's body, and Homer describes such deeds as aeikea (‘unseemly’).
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- Copyright © Aureal Publications 1976
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