Framing Epic: The Night-Raid as Narrative Theory

Narrative theory developed in relation to the modern Western novel, although its insights have been productively applied to all sorts of objects.¹See Kent Puckett’s discussion of the relationship between the formal problems of narratology and narrative theory as a historically specific intellectual tradition, in the introduction to his Full reference in Zotero Library. This insight proposes a narratological account of Western epic on two levels: it seeks to understand this pre-modern genre from a narratological perspective, and it also reads epic as articulating its own discursive function in narrative terms. In other words, I suggest that epic is, itself, a kind of narrative theory. My discussion will focus on a particular epic trope, the night-raid episode, which serves as a locus for generic self-reflection along narratological lines. The night-raid is a mise en abyme, or a miniaturisation of the poem within which it stands. The success or failure of narrative closure in the night-raid, then, mirrors that of the poem as a whole, and, by extension, represents the poem’s capacity to enact political and ideological closure. Insofar as epic presents itself as a politically effective or ideologically charged type of narrative, the night-raid characterises, qualifies, or undermines that efficacy by interrogating its narrative basis. My account of how it does so will be based on my understanding of mise en abyme as organised around the reversibility of frame and content implicit in the phrase “framing narratives”. Just as the “narratives”, in this phrase, can be parsed as either the objects being framed or as the subjects doing the framing, an episode en abyme is framed by the work that contains it at the same time that it frames that work in miniature. The night-raid episodes in this paper both frame and are framed by the epics within which they stand, and they strategically capitalise on the dissonance between these two possible analyses of the relationship between poem and miniature in order to comment on their poems’ discursive projects.

The question of the frame is also a defining problem of epic writ large, which has always been theorised in terms of categorical purity and hybridisation. Accordingly, I will begin this paper’s reflection on narrative closure by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida for their discussions of generic closure; their central point of disagreement, I will argue, is nothing other than the relationship between narrative and genre. I will develop epic as a category that leverages mise en abyme to play its own narrativity against its generic identity—and in so doing, activates the full semantic range of the phrase “framing narratives”. I will then turn to an account of how the night-raid episodes of the two most influential classical epics, the Iliad and the Aeneid, construct and problematise the fantasy of closed discursive self-constitution at the heart of their genre. Finally, I will conclude with some comments on how this paper’s account of epic—as engaged not just in narrative but also in narratology—might allow us to read various early modern texts as reflecting, quite differently from one another, on the structural possibility and political stakes of their own narrative closure.

Epic and genre theory

Mikhail Bakhtin defines epic in terms of absolute ideological and historical closure: ‘the epic world is an utterly finished thing […] It is completed, conclusive and immutable, as a fact, an idea and a value’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Bakhtin is primarily interested in epic in counterpoint to the novel, which is ‘plasticity itself’ Full reference in Zotero Library and which he theorises as open in all the ways that epic is closed. The novel is ‘heteroglossic’ and incorporates a variety of mutually critiquing discourses indexed to heterogenous social positions,²On heteroglossia, see the essay “Discourse in the Novel,” and in particular the section titled “Modern Stylistics & the Novel” Full reference in Zotero Library. while epic, in contrast, crystallises ‘impersonal and sacrosanct tradition’ Full reference in Zotero Library and is authoritative without adopting the perspective of any particular position of social authority. The novel’s social openness is imbricated with its historical openness. The novel is of and about the present, and both represents and participates in ‘the incomplete process of a world-in-the-making’ Full reference in Zotero Library; the time of epic, on the other hand, is a fully perfective past ‘walled off absolutely from all subsequent times’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

This social and historical opposition also extends to the level of genre, where the very fact of generic indeterminacy or fluidity indicates the “novelisation” of the work in question which therefore cannot be an epic.³On ‘the novelization of literature’, see Full reference in Zotero Library. Bakhtin’s ‘no true Scotsman’ approach to genre keeps the epic corpus just as absolutely closed as the “epic past” itself, while the novelistic corpus is, conversely, characterised by the impossibility of identifying a ‘single definite, stable characteristic of the novel’ Full reference in Zotero Library to demarcate its bounds.

In ‘La loi du genre’, Jacques Derrida takes up the challenge implicit in Bakhtin’s assertion that ‘[f]aced with the problem of the novel, genre theory must submit to a radical re-structuring’ Full reference in Zotero Library. He argues that all genres display the “openness” which Bakhtin makes synonymous with the novel—and that, accordingly, rather than having emerged in tandem with the novel’s sociolinguistic or historical openness, it is inherent in the very project of generic classification itself. Reasonably enough, the argument Derrida makes for this claim to generality is a very abstract one. When a text identifies itself as belonging to a category of writing, he claims, the textual gesture of self-identification with which it does so simultaneously constitutes and exceeds the bounds of that category: ‘la mention de genre ne fait pas simplement partie du corpus. Prenons l’exemple de la mention «roman» […] Cette mention n’est pas romanesque, elle ne fait pas, de part en part, partie du corpus qu’elle désigne. Elle ne lui est pas non plus simplement étrangère’ Full reference in Zotero Library.⁴‘Genre-designations cannot be simply part of the corpus. Let us take the designation “novel” as an example […] This designation is not novelistic; it does not, in whole or in part, take part in the corpus whose denomination it nonetheless imparts. Nor is it simply extraneous to the corpus’.No text can belong to a category without also, at least to some degree, failing to belong to it.

Although Derrida here formulates his loi du genre in terms of genre, and the genre of the novel in particular, most of his essay is dedicated to reading a text of Maurice Blanchot’s which he calls a récit. The ambiguity of this word, which can be translated into English as either “story” (a particular genre) or “narrative” (an abstract mode), becomes metonymic for Derrida’s refusal to privilege genre per se as a discursive category. His law of genre, or of the impossibility of categorical closure, applies equally to not just all literary categories (epic, novel) but to all categories of categories (genre, mode):

Je peux prendre chacun des mots de la série (genre, type, mode, forme) et décider qu’il vaudra pour tous les autres (tous les genres de genres, types, modes, formes; tous les types de types, genres, modes, formes […]) Le trait commun à ces classes de classes, c’est justement la récurrence identifiable d’un trait commun auquel on devrait reconnaître l’appartenance à la classe. Full reference in Zotero Library⁵‘I can take each word of the series (genre, type, mode, form) and decide that it will hold for all the others (all genres of genres, types, modes, forms; all types of types, genres, modes, forms […]). The trait common to these classes of classes is precisely the identifiable recurrence of a common trait by which one recognises, or should recognise, a membership in a class’.

Indeed, it is not that Derrida understands the “openness” which Bakhtin locates on the level of genre, in the contemporary “novelisation” of older fixed forms, as instead a property of narrative discourse—rather, he refuses to distinguish between those two levels of analysis at all. But Bakhtin is also attentive to the relationship between genre and narrative, which he distinguishes sharply. He ascribes to narrative per se the same fundamental openness that Derrida does. But, rather than concluding that epic must, too, be “open” by virtue of being a narrative genre, he insists on a categorical distinction between epic, as a hermetically closed generic frame, and the structurally open narrative it contains. The epic, he says, ‘is indifferent to formal beginnings and can remain incomplete (that is, where it concludes is almost arbitrary). The absolute past is closed and completed in the whole as well as in any of its parts’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Indeed, insofar as beginnings in medias res and authorial claims of unfinishedness are both tropes of the Western epic tradition, the conventions of that tradition anticipate this conceptual tension between formal closure on the level of genre and narrative openness on the level of plot.

Bakhtin understands epic as a formal frame whose narrative contents cannot affect its function as such, while for Derrida, epic narrative—like all narrative—stands within a generic frame which is simultaneously necessary and insufficient to identify it. But this deconstructive argument is explicitly premised on the idea that the “laws” of Blanchot’s récit are exemplary of all types of narrative. Derrida states, categorically, that the mark of generic or modal self-identification must necessarily itself exceed the genre or mode—but this is, to some extent, preconditioned on a modern understanding of narrative as mimetic. While it is true that the word “récit” is extraneous to the récit by definition, the same is not true, for instance, of the invocation of the muse, which is both a generic marker and a virtually obligatory element of epic textuality. At the same time, to read a text as a Bakhtinian epic—which is to say, as entirely determined by its generic self-presentation—involves a selective blindness to the contents of the narrative itself: the Aeneid presents itself to us as the glorious story of the founding of Rome, but the war in the second half of the poem is one of internecine violence and destruction. Should those “contents” not cause us to re-evaluate that “frame”?⁶Along similar lines, Bakhtin insists elsewhere that ‘parodied genres do not belong to the genres that they parody’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Epic mise en abyme deals with this very question.

Mise en abyme and the logic of the frame

The night-raid is a conventional epic trope which functions as a mise en abyme of the larger military conflict to which it contributes. As such, it complicates the narrative relationship of frame and content. On the one hand, the material en abyme is concretely framed by the work within which it is set; on the other, this “frame” is substantially larger and more complex than the self-representation it contains,⁷The Homeric night-raid, also called the doloneia, takes up one of the twenty-four books of the Iliad; Vergil’s imitation occupies roughly a third of one of the twelve books of the Aeneid.and it remains the interpretative centre of gravity as we read the smaller episode that evokes it. In other words, the material en abyme works to inform our reading of the main poem just as much as the main poem structures our approach to the material en abyme. These two perspectives on the relationship between miniature and large-scale models entail two different perspectives on the closure of the internal narrative frame that sets off the former from the latter.

If we give interpretative priority to the episode en abyme, that frame becomes nothing more than a depiction of the larger work’s gestures at closure, rather than performing closure in its own right. The farther we follow this logic of analogy, the more total the imbrication of inner and outer narrative becomes: anything inside the frame is, by definition, also outside the frame. The first night-raid in the Western tradition—the tenth book of the Iliad, also known as the doloneia—rewards this sort of reading. The top Achaean brass hold a council in the middle of the night and send Diomedes and Odysseus out to gather intelligence. They slaughter a number of Trojans before returning to their own camp safely before dawn.⁸One of the Trojan victims is a counter-spy named Dolon, who gives his name to the episode.These exploits are framed by the council that plans them,⁹This council meeting is, in turn, also framed by Agammemnon, Menelaus, and Nestor’s private discussions about how best to convoke the council, but this tertiary frame is not imitated in any of the post-Homeric versions of the episode of which I am aware.by the temporal bounds of the night, and by the literary bounds of book ten. The formal closure of the episode—which does not affect the plot going forward and is never explicitly referenced later—is so pronounced that readers of the poem have identified this book as a later interpolation by a different author.¹⁰On the history of this sort of reception, see Full reference in Zotero Library, specifically ‘Interpreting Iliad 10’. At the same time, recent critical work on the episode has shown that the book obliquely recapitulates the nine that precede it, as well as systematically anticipating the poem’s dénouement (see Full reference in Zotero Library on the former; Full reference in Zotero Library on the latter). In consequence, as Benjamin Sammons has argued, the framing of Diomedes and Odysseus’ actions internal to book ten also offers a framing of the Iliad as a whole. The lion’s share of book ten is devoted not to the military action itself but to the Atrides’ explicit rhetorical construction of military action as an opportunity for heroism; this, of course, suggests that the Iliad as a whole may be similarly framed and that its ideology of heroism may be similarly rhetorically constructed in ways that, by definition, it cannot itself make visible.¹¹Here I am working out the implications for the poem as a whole of Sammons’ argument in Full reference in Zotero Library, which is narrowly focussed on Agammemnon’s relationship with Menelaus .

This account of the doloneia as mise en abyme, which reads the larger structure through the smaller one, understands the two diegetic levels as offering different but harmonising perspectives on the same phenomenon. But they need not necessarily harmonise: we can, instead, read the smaller structure through the larger one, and approach mise en abyme as an interpolation whose implicit reframing of the poem is alien and untrustworthy. Taken in this light, the frame of the episode en abyme plays a crucial role in separating it from the (normative) major narrative it seeks to redefine or subvert: the internal frame effects real closure, rather than porously depicting the pretence of closure elsewhere.

This is precisely the dynamic Vergil mobilises in the night-raid of book nine of the Aeneid,¹²See Casali on the (now defunct) tradition of reading this episode as having originally been written as ‘a free-standing epyllion […] only subsequently inserted into the poem’ Full reference in Zotero Library.where the Trojan refugee-army, newly arrived in Italy and besieged by the locals in Aeneas’s absence, sends two footsoldiers to sneak out through the sleeping enemies under cover of night and send a message to Aeneas. Instead, the soldiers in question, Nisus and Euryalus, slaughter sleeping enemies and loot their corpses until they are caught, surrounded, and killed. In so doing—which is to say, in imitating Diomedes and Odysseus in Iliad X—they act epically, but according to a Homeric version of epic which is not that of the Aeneid as a whole Full reference in Zotero Library. Aeneas emblematises a new Roman mode of heroism, which defines itself in opposition to Greekness in several key ways: it valorises corporate military action over feats of individual valour, (re-)productive heterosexuality over homoerotic companionship, and traditional piety toward the gods over proto-atheistic Hellenistic philosophy.¹³On the opposition between Homeric individualism and Roman corporatism, see Full reference in Zotero Library on the erotic dimension of Nisus and Euryalus’s relationship, see Full reference in Zotero Library and on the theological aspect of the episode see Full reference in Zotero Library.Nisus and Euryalus behave “Greekly” along all of these axes: they speculate about the non-existence of the gods, their relationship is legibly homoerotic, and their choice to kill the besieging enemies themselves instead of summoning Aeneas is, precisely, a performance of individual heroic excellence at the expense of the collective military objective (see Full reference in Zotero Library on this as a structuring dynamic). But their failure to reach Aeneas is also a failure to join the main plot, and it is what produces the total narrative self-containment of the episode. This closure frames their Greek values and Homeric heroism not as tacitly contributing to the project of the Aeneid, but rather as a non-viable alternative to it which remains hermetically closed within its own narrative sphere.

Of course, mise en abyme can always be read either way. The tradition identifying book ten of the Iliad as a literal interpolation into the text stems, in part, from a sense of it as a suspiciously philohellenic episode in an otherwise remarkably even-handed poem.¹⁴Casali organises his reading of Aeneid IX around this tradition, which he discusses in Full reference in Zotero Library.In this view, the closure of the episode is so absolute that its contents can be critically excised from the text. Conversely, a more pessimistic reader of Vergil might take the Nisus and Euryalus episode as an analogic indictment of the way that the explicit Augustan militarism of the poem as a whole suffocates the individual, and drives the pointless slaughter of countless young boys like Euryalus.¹⁵This is the approach Casali takes, in line with the larger and mostly Anglo-American “pessimistic” school of Vergil criticism.Because it is always possible to read across the intradiegetic frame in either direction, the night-raid is not itself a vehicle for ideology (whether that of archaic heroism or of Roman militarism), but rather a depiction of the successful or unsuccessful deployment of a closed ideological system within and by narrative.

Conclusion: Narratological Epic

I have treated the night-raid as metonymic for epic writ large; in so doing, I follow both the analogic dimension of mise en abyme and Derrida’s insight that all categories participate equally in the problematics of categorisation. I would like to conclude by proposing that this account of classical epic may productively inform the study of its reception in early modernity. How does our understanding of Renaissance epic change if we consider epic not as a generic or ideological monolith, to be played off against other genres or conceptual modes (as Bakhtin does in ‘Epic and Novel’), but as itself about problems of closure—and as offering, in its tropes, a collection of narrative resources for interrogating those problems? Modern scholars of long early modern narrative poems have typically identified these problems as intergeneric ones produced by the hybridisation of classical epic and medieval romance;¹⁶Consider, for instance, Sergio Zatti’s aptly named Il Furioso fra epos e romanzo.my contention is that this problematic is actually (or additionally) intragenerically active in classical epic from the get-go.

In Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, for instance, the famous imitation of the doloneia in canto twelve brings the poem’s doomed attempt to police its own generic and religious purity to a breaking point;¹⁷On this aspect of the Liberata, see ‘Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme Liberata’ in Full reference in Zotero Library. along similar lines, Satan’s nocturnal excursion across chaos in book two of Milton’s Paradise Lost illustrates the restrictiveness of a sclerotic generic category that will ultimately open onto the modern world at the end of the poem.¹⁸See ‘Ulysses and the Devils: The Unity of Book Two of Paradise Lost’ in Full reference in Zotero Library.

These are the two most canonically epic Renaissance poems, but the approach I have outlined works equally well at the margins of that generic corpus. Texts that do not identify themselves as epic can still be read for how they use its generic machinery, such as the night-raid trope, to frame their own ideological and political investments in terms of narrative closure. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, for instance, has a night-raid episode that, like Vergil’s, allows the poem’s many “others” to exert agency when Angelica, the ultimate object of desire, becomes a desiring subject and elopes with the Sarrasin footsoldier Medoro.¹⁹For a thorough discussion of this dynamic and Angelica’s role in the plot of the Furioso, see the chapter on her in Full reference in Zotero Library.But the perfect containment of their relationship within this episode does not protect the poem’s dominant occidental ideology from the critique implicit in the non-western space of their relationship; it, rather, lays bare the extent to which that ideology depends on the presence of the other as such. In Rabelais’s Pantagruel, on the other hand, the production of a night-raid episode across chapters twenty-four to twenty-eight becomes a collaborative rhetorical game in which all the characters participate, which does not demystify but rather abolishes the power-relations that structure the other versions of the episode. Much like the Rabelaisian ideal of universal Christian brotherhood, the episode is completely “closed” in the sense that there is nowhere to go “outside” of its conceptual ambit—but there is room for everyone and everything within it.²⁰On Rabelais’s investment in the evangelical ideal of universal Christian brotherhood, and its fraught relationship with the national politics of Valois France, see the first three chapters of Full reference in Zotero Library.The night-raids of these two texts, and many others from early modernity, do not work to stake out generic identity or to activate any sort of “traditional” epic ideological position. Rather, they provide a syntax for these authors to develop new and modern accounts of closure, narrative, and political identity.