7 - Epic and the Imperial Theme

Summary

EMPIRE AND ATAVISM

‘Uneven development’: the term works especially well in relation to the remarkable juxtapositions and conflicts of the late nineteenth-century world, when the sophisticated products of advanced capitalist society were brought into contact, in myriad ways, with traditional societies at widely differing stages of development. But it might be used also to describe the cultural landscape within those advanced capitalist societies themselves: a diverse repertoire of genres, each of them bearing within themselves implications or ideological connotations drawn from socially diverse histories. Epic and novel in competition: but also, across a range of different media, new technologies of production and reproduction in conflict and collaboration with ancient forms. The late nineteenth century had its own word for the pleasure people might take in those traditional forms, such as epic, which appeared to speak to the older, less advanced, or barbaric propensities in human nature: atavism. This chapter seeks to describe how a theory of atavism linked epic and its cousin ballad to the history of the empire at the end of the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

I introduce this topic by way of Joseph Conrad's Victory, completed just before the outbreak of the First World War. Conrad speaks, in his ‘Note to the First Edition’, of ‘that pagan residuum of awe and wonder which still lurks at the bottom of our old humanity’; and Heyst, meditating on his unusual energy in the course of the narrative, reflects that ‘“There must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all.”’