On the Origins of Stories (Part One) (2024)

Hi everyone!

This week, I’m looking at genre: what it is, why it matters, what it can teach us — and why the idea that it can do those things doesn’t really matter all that much in the end.

Let’s jump right in.

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Form Makes Content

At Columbia University, all incoming undergraduates have to complete what’s called the Core Curriculum. It’s a series of semester- or yearlong classes that ground students in the foundational works of western culture.

Over time, each class has developed its own nickname. “Music-Hum[anities]” and “Art-Hum” are semester long courses on, well, the history of western music and art. “CC,” short for Contemporary Civilization, is a yearlong course that reads foundational philosophical texts. There’s also Frontiers of Science (science history), a foreign language and writing class requirement, and a couple of other add-ons over the years.

For two years as a doctoral candidate, I taught “Lit-Hum,” or “Literature-Humanities,” the yearlong course on the history of western literature.

At first, the syllabus’s reach from Homer to Virginia Woolf seems almost laughable.

In 2012-13, when I taught this course, the autumn reading list was:

• Homer, Illiad (epic poetry)

• Homer, Odyssey (ditto)

• Hesiod, some poems (lyric poetry)

• Sappho, some poems (ditto)

• Aeschylus, Oresteia (drama — tragedy)

• Aristophanes, Lysistrata (drama — comedy)

• Sophocles, Oedipus the King (drama — tragedy)

• Euripedes, Medea (drama — tragedy)

• Gilgamesh (epic poetry)

• Herodotus, excerpts from The Histories (historical narrative)

• Thucydides, excerpts from The Peleponnesian War (political history, including plague story)

• The Bible (poetry, prophecy, history, myth, etc.:

  • The Books of Genesis and Job

  • The Gospels of Luke and John

And that’s it. The WHOLE autumn semester, and you’ve barely crossed the line from BCE (Before the Common Era, formerly Before Christ) to CE.

The spring semester, in contrast, flew through the post-Christ age like a honey badger out for blood:

• Virgil, Aeneid (epic poem)

• Ovid, selections from Metamorphosis (narrative poem)

• Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (autobiography)

• Dante, the Inferno from The Divine Comedy (epic poem)

• Boccaccio, selections from The Decameron (prose epic/plague stories)

• Montaigne, selections from Essais (essay)

• Shakespeare, Hamlet (drama — tragedy)

• Cervantes, excerpts from Don Quixote (novel)

• Goethe, Faust, Part One (epic poem)

• Austen, Pride and Prejudice (novel)

• Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (novel)

• Woolf, To the Lighthouse (novel)

From the 1st century BCE to the early 20th century. More recently the Core has updated the reading list to be more than just white men, including more works of Middle Eastern literature, more women, and writers of color. Overall, I consider this a good development.

Still, Lit-Hum remains a deep immersion into THE CANON, the word used to describe the list of works western culture — a culture shaped and chosen by white men — has deemed of the highest quality and greatest importance.

Essentially, Lit-Hum is a study of the history of genre. “Genre,” Britannica says, is “a category of literature or art.” I just call it “form.”

Musical genres, for instance, include pop, rock, classical, jazz, ska, trap, rap. Visual art genres can be as broad as “painting” or “sculpture” or as specific as Pop Art or pointillism.

There’s a lot of room for variety and mixing and matching. You can have classical jazz, pop R&B, a Pop Art sculpture, or an impressionist collage.

In western literature, you’re usually dealing with three basic kinds of writing, which I’ve loosely defined here:

• poetry, the form that prioritizes rhythm (metrical structure) and sound.

• drama, the form that is first and foremost meant to be performed and watched, not read.

• prose, the form designed most to be read, which does not prioritize metrical structure.

Within those kinds, you get genres.

Genres like:

• epic poetry (Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton)

• Aristotelian tragedy (drama that adheres to the main tenets that Aristotle used to define the genre of tragedy in his Poetics, which he himself created by looking at what he considered the best tragedy ever, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King)

• the epistolary novel (novels which are essentially letters between characters shared back and forth — the primary example of this is Samuel Richardson’s 18th-century works, Pamela and Clarissa)

• the realist novel (as it sounds, an attempt to capture the reality of everyday life — examples include George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Tolstoy’s War and Peace)

• the magical realist novel (a 20th-century movement usually associated with Latin America that fuses fantastical ideas, like people who live for hundreds of years, into realism — the most famous example is Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude)

  See Also

  Eden - Crazy In Love Video"terms and conditions hotel eden edelweiss" - Song SearchI Just Wasn`t Made For These Times by Jakob Dylan & Neil YoungHymn as Literature - Christian Classics Ethereal Library

And only when I started teaching Lit-Hum as the history of western literary genres, did I understand why it had such a lopsided historical timeline. Because to understand the literature of now, you have to understand how it’s responding to what came before.

Over time, each genre has developed a set of conventions, or qualities, that crop up over and over.

A Case Study in Epic Invocation

Homer (ca. 700s BCE)

Here’s just one example: the convention of the invocation, or appeal to a deity or deities for assistance, in epic poetry.

Homer’s epic starts with an invocation to the gods to help him tell this great tale, one that started out as one of many co-existing oral works that was eventually written down sometime in the 8th century BCE.

Set during a four-day period in the final year of the decade-long Trojan War, it tells the story of the repercussions when a demigod fighting for the Greeks (against the Trojans) named Achilles gets really angry and takes it out on everyone. Here are the first lines:

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus [aka Achilles]

and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians [Greeks],

hurled in their multitude to the house of Hades1 strong souls

of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting

of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished

since that time when first there stood in division of conflict

Atreus’ son the lord of men2 and brilliant Achilleus. (1.1-7)

Gorgeous writing. Achilles (or, in the more faithful transcription of the Greek, Achilleus) is fighting on the side of the Greeks. Yet, because of his anger, thousands of them become no more than carrion for dogs and birds. (Trojans die, too, of course, including my bae Hektor.) Then there’s that disturbing phrase, that this massive sacrifice ensured that “the will of Zeus was accomplished.”

These men would pray and sacrifice, offering the best cuts of meat and best wines, to Zeus and the twelve Olympians over and over again — but all that meant nothing if the gods had other plans in mind.

In The Odyssey, Homer tells the story of the 20-year struggle of Odysseus, the wily Greek from Ithaca who designed the Trojan Horse, to get home to his family. Here’s his invocation for this one (again, in Lattimore’s translation):

Tell me, Muse, of the many of many ways, who was driven

far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.

Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,

many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea,

struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.

Even though he could not save his companions, hard though

he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness,

fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God,

and he took away the day of their homecoming. From some point

here, goddess, daughter of Zeus3, speak, and begin our story. (1.1-10)

In these earliest texts of western literature, we see an engagement with one of the foundational questions of humanity: how much of our lives can we control, and how much is determined by other forces, from gods to wars to government policies to our parents.

In The Iliad, the anger of one guy kills thousands. In The Odyssey, Odysseus’s men — not Odysseus himself — f*ck up big time, and they are punished with a 20 year delay in getting home.

But, as we soon learn, their f*ck-up isn’t the only reason they’re delayed. Poseidon has some beef with Odysseus himself, but ultimately Zeus decides the kid’s suffered enough and tells Athena to put in motion his sea journey home. The gods are fickle, we learn. They don’t work on reason, they turn on a dime. They hold grudges. Much like fate can seem to do when bad things happen to good people.

Virgil (ca. 29-19 BCE)

Virgil was “asked” by Augustus to write an epic poem celebrating the rise of the Roman empire. The Romans were great cultural absorbers: they saw the works of classical Greece and thought, “yeah, let’s do that, but put our own flair on it.” While the Homeric epics were likely propaganda pieces in themselves, sung by bards who visited noble families and celebrated their “ancestors” with songs like The Iliad, The Aeneid is a political project to ret-con the Roman story to make its rise seem all but inevitable.

Virgil borrows a LOT from the Homeric epics: like The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid is 24 books of poetry. It begins in medias res, or in the middle of things, just as The Iliad occurs many years into the Trojan War and The Odyssey starts after 20 years of exile. It features a journey to the underworld, like in The Odyssey. The hero is also a veteran of the Trojan War, this time a Trojan named Aeneas.

But one of the things that’s great about The Aeneid is how Virgil follows the instructions he’s given but refuses to be a pure shill for pax Romana.

Here’s the invocation:

I sing of arms and of a man: his fate

had made him fugitive; he was the first

to journey from the coasts of Troy as far

as Italy and the Lavinian shores.

Across the lands and waters he was battered beneath the violence of High Ones, for

the savage Juno’s unforgetting anger;

and many sufferings were his in war —

until he brought a city into being

and carried in his gods to Latium;

from this have come the Latin race, the lords

of Alba, and the ramparts of high Rome. (1.1-12)

“I sing” — already, we’ve got more of an authorial assertion here. I also love that Virgil speaks of “arms” first and then the “man.”

It reminds me of the most direct propaganda moment in the whole epic, when Aeneas’s dead father, Anchises, lectures him in the underworld about the great history of the Romans, the people who will spring from Aeneas. While the Greeks have their pretty statues and great literature, Anchises says, “remember, Roman, these will be your arts: / to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer, / to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud” (6.1135-37).

“Teach the ways of peace,” my ass. Teach the ways of peace by shoving our superior military power up your butt, you mean. It’s hilarious. But it’s also true: Rome admitted, hey we suck at culture. That’s why we take yours and SUPERSIZE it.

So it’s not Aeneas himself who matters so much — in the lines right after this invocation, we see him spewing water because the goddess Juno is mad at him and created a storm to f*ck up his fleet. His mother Venus has to pluck him from near death. He’s a pretty limp dick in a lot of ways, and not only because he turns down Dido of Carthage. It’s his arms that matter, because it’s the arms of Rome that matter. Not so much — no matter what Augustus might want — the person wielding those arms.4

I love how Virgil takes the epic and keeps undermining the supposed bravery of the men at the heart of it. It’s a wonderful dance on a razor’s edge: writing just enough propaganda to keep Augustus from going after him while critiquing the project of empire throughout.

(My notes on my teaching copy of The Aeneid.)

Dante (ca. 1308-21)

See Also

Dr. Lowin on the wonders of Hebrew.

Jump forward a millennium and some, and we have Dante. He’s not interested in celebrating any civilization, having recently become exiled from his beloved home of Florence because he backed the wrong side in a civil war.

On the eve of the Italian Renaissance and having a frankly understandable mid-life crisis, Dante finds himself thinking not of the collective but of the individual, not of earthly kingdoms but spiritual ones, and finally not in the exclusive language of politics and power, Latin, but the everyday Italian used on the street, in the market, and at home.

The Divine Comedy consist of three separate books, each of 33 1/3 cantos, or stanzas (to equal 100). In them, “Dante” (not exactly the author, but very similar) journeys into the bowels of Hell and then through Purgatory, led by his poetic brother-from-another-mother Virgil, and finally Paradise, led by his beloved Beatrice5, whom he admired from afar until she died young. (Beatrice appears to be real and to have married someone else — whether the actual Dante truly loved her or rather used her as a symbol for things like unattainable love, Dante scholars will know far better than I.)

Yet, for all this humility and individual focus, he’s jumping far beyond the political concerns and wars of the earthly world. He’s going to walk his readers through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise instead, though he shows the ramifications of making the right or wrong political decisions on Earth throughout these spiritual worlds.

Here’s how Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of Inferno begins (these are great because they have the Italian on the opposite page):

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,

for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

that savage forest, dense and difficult,

which even in recall renews my fear:

so bitter — death is hardly more severe!

But to retell the good discovered there,

I’ll also tell the other things I saw. (1.1-9)

We start in medias res again — “half of our life’s way” — but there’s no divine invocation. He has “lost the path that does not stray:” he’s lost his spiritual and moral compass, and there is the sense that if he called, no one would answer. In the rest of the canto, Dante becomes more lost and more lost in that terrifying maze of trees and suddenly is faced with a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. Just then, Virgil arrives to save him…by taking him on a journey through hell.

(My teaching copy of Inferno, with the Italian on the verso and the English on the recto. “Aug, Bk. 7, 131 is a reference to Augustine’s Confessions, another influence Dante is working with here.)

Milton (1660s)

Finally, we have my boy, John f*cking Milton. (That’s his middle name. I checked.) As a young man, he made it known he wanted to write an epic poem and was dutifully following the path laid out by Virgil, who first wrote happy pastoral poems about the countryside (Eclogues), then more complex pastorals (Georgics), and then the epic Aeneid. (This is a gross oversimplification. Apologies.)

Milton published his pastoral, the lovely Lycidas, but politics intervened. When England lopped off the head of Charles I in 1649 and Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of the English Republic, Milton became his “Secretary for Foreign Tongues,” aka the propaganda man. (How Virgilian!) When the monarchy is restored in 1660, Milton is imprisoned, sees his works publicly burned, and barely escapes execution. He’s also completely blind, having lost his sight in 1652.

It’s here, at this point, blind and broken, persona non grata, that he composes his epic, Paradise Lost, in which he tells of the battle between God and Satan in heaven and the Fall of Adam and Eve. He’s writing it all in his head, dictating to people writing down his words (if you want to be pretentious, the role is amanuensis) who then read it back to him for revision. f*cking superhuman.

Paradise Lost adheres more to the Greco-Roman epic structure than Dante does in many ways. It has an invocation in Book 1. It’s 12 books, a nod to the 24 of Homer and Virgil. Though he’s writing in English, his syntax is heavily Latinate. He not only includes a trip to the underworld, he starts in Hell, just when Hell is created.

But Milton’s project is a little ballsier, in my opinion, than all of those that precede it. (Many would say arrogant beyond belief.) Because he’s decided that people don’t understand why God does what he does, and he’s going to explain it to them.

Of man’s first disobedience [the Fall], and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater man [Christ]

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing heavenly muse [Urania, the Greek muse of astronomy], that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd [Moses], who first taught the chosen seed

In the beginning6 how the heavens and earth

Rose out of chaos: or if Sion hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook [where Jesus healed a blind man] that flowed

Fast by the oracle of God; I thence

Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,

That will no middle flight intends to soar

Above the Aonian mount [the mountain sacred to the classical muses], while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme7.

And chiefly thou O Spirit [the Holy Ghost], that dost prefer

Before all temples the upright heart and pure,

Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first

Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread

Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss

And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support;

That to the height of this great argument

I may assert eternal providence,

And justify the ways of God to Men. (1.1-26)

(The opening lines of Paradise Lost from my 1998 version of the Riverside Milton, with notes up the wazoo. Keep in mind that Milton would literally switch seamlessly from Latin to ancient Greek to Hebrew when randomly making notes in his books, so he alluded to anything and everything with ease.)

I love “what in me is dark / Illumine,” because it’s both an admission that he’s a mere mortal and needs divine assistance to accomplish this major enterprise and also a poignant acknowledgment of his blindness.

But it’s the final lines that always get me: “That to the height of this great argument / I may assert eternal providence, / And justify the ways of God to Men.” You know, no biggie — I’m just explaining God to you people, because you don’t get Him like I get Him.

Oh, Milton. I can never decide if you’d be insufferable in person or actually quite fun.

***

In Lit-Hum, we read all of these works except Paradise Lost, and it was so much fun to show my students how each author was building on, and playing with, the words left by their predecessors. I didn’t even include here how Ovid responds to Virgil with his Metamorphosis, or how Boccacio engages with Dante in The Decameron. (And there were many more epic poems in the early modern period, like Arisoto’s chivalric romance Orlando Furioso or Spenser’s The Faerie Queene that Milton engages with. See footnote 7 below.)

It’s this beautiful conversation across time and space, made possible by the conventions of genre.

One final thought: I wrote, and then removed, a lot of words here about why it’s useful to know THE CANON because it has had an indelible effect on western culture, from the pace of science to political movements to phrases we use every day.

I still believe this, though I believe that we should also start reshaping THE CANON to include historical and current works that chronicle the experiences of people considered unimportant or even transgressive before: slave narratives, indigenous legends, women’s writing, and literature from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

I was raised with THE CANON, and I’m shaped by it. And I’ll be the first to say that the epic poems above are AMAZING. I really love them. But what other epic poems never got written down because they were told by female or African bards, or because they spoke not about war heroes but about everyday people just getting on with their lives?

I’m all for changing THE CANON. But I also believe that knowing the works that have been used by European patriarchal, white supremacist, and Christian cultures to erase or negate other cultures and people is important. You can’t understand how the system works until you know its building blocks. And literary works — especially the earliest ones from ancient Greece and Rome and the Bible — are more influential building blocks than most people realize.

The funniest part of all this is that I began this post with a desire to explore the history of a genre I don’t know: that of the short story.

But I had to establish the foundation — THE CANON — first. And, short stories seem to mostly fall outside THE CANON. I’m curious as to why that is.

But, given the length of this post, that’ll be for next time.

Recommendations

It seems cheeky to recommend these giant epic poems above, so I won’t. But if I had to recommend one….probably The Odyssey. Not my favorite, but so many of its tropes survive today: the term “odyssey” itself, the mermaid-like sirens who sing sailors to their deaths, the faithful dog who dies once his master has returned, the Cyclops with his all-seeing but easily tricked eye (Sauron, anyone?), Circe the sorceress (Cersei Lannister, anybody?)…..

Actually, scratch that. You already know all this stuff.

I’d go Dante’s Inferno. It’s WILD and is a brilliant reflection on the various kinds of transgressions that we humans can do to each other and perhaps what a just punishment might look like. It’s also relatively shorter, as you can read Inferno without reading the other two books. Our understanding of hell is very much shaped by his architecture.

(A diagram of Dante’s depiction of Hell.)

PBS recently did a four-hour series on Dante that was FABULOUS. He was such a badass. Love him.

This Week’s Dose of K-Pop: Red Velvet (레드벨벳), “Feel My Rhythm”

Speaking of western music, this Red Velvet song uses one of my favorite classical pieces, Bach’s “Air on G String” as the background music.

The video also incorporates famous works of western art, including Fragonard’s The Swing, Millais’s Ophelia, and even my favorite medieval madman, Hieronymus Bosch and his Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. (And its residence in the Prado is yet another reason why the Madrid institution is the best art museum in the world when it comes to western paintings.)

I’ll be honest: I don’t love the song. But it’s grown on me, and I like it when K-pop groups take chances. Red Velvet is one of the best groups out there when it comes to trying new things.

Love y’all,

Sara