9 - Epic and the Subject Peoples of Empire

Summary

Among the tribe of balladeers and inditers of would-be heroic verse, for all their variety and mixed achievements, the alignment of epic and empire appears ultimately straightforward and bears out in broad terms the analysis of postcolonial critics like Patrick Brantlinger and Martin Green that ‘imperialist writing often translates experience into epic terms’ (see above, p. 130). Kipling's writing indicates a much more complex realisation of the heroic in relation to empire, and in some of his ballads at least it intimates that the heroic virtues are to be found on the other side of the frontier. This chapter enlarges upon this possibility; it is devoted to that entailment of the problematic of epic primitivism which suggests that it is the subject peoples of empire, rather than the imperialists themselves, whose experience and self-understanding is best understood in epic terms. In both poetry and prose, the nineteenth century saw a variety of attempts to write epics placed historically and geographically outside Britain and to represent those in conflict with imperial authority as peoples characterised by a heroic mentality. As a result, the ready alignment of epic and empire is reversed.

IRISH AND INDIAN EPIC REVIVED

Some of the paradoxes and complexities of the relationship of national poetic revivals and imperial history in the nineteenth century can be reckoned from the fact that two authors of such epics – Edwin Arnold and Samuel Ferguson – were both loyal servants of the empire and were indeed both knighted for their services to the British state.