Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?

William Haskins

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interesting piece.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...-talk-about-feelings?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[h=2]Literature’s evolution has reflected and spurred the growing complexity of society.
[/h]
Reading medieval literature, it’s hard not to be impressed with how much the characters get done—as when we read about King Harold doing battle in one of the Sagas of the Icelanders, written in about 1230. The first sentence bristles with purposeful action: “King Harold proclaimed a general levy, and gathered a fleet, summoning his forces far and wide through the land.” By the end of the third paragraph, the king has launched his fleet against a rebel army, fought numerous battles involving “much slaughter in either host,” bound up the wounds of his men, dispensed rewards to the loyal, and “was supreme over all Norway.” What the saga doesn’t tell us is how Harold felt about any of this, whether his drive to conquer was fueled by a tyrannical father’s barely concealed contempt, or whether his legacy ultimately surpassed or fell short of his deepest hopes.


Jump ahead about 770 years in time, to the fiction of David Foster Wallace. In his short story “Forever Overhead,” the 13-year-old protagonist takes 12 pages to walk across the deck of a public swimming pool, wait in line at the high diving board, climb the ladder, and prepare to jump. But over these 12 pages, we are taken into the burgeoning, buzzing mind of a boy just erupting into puberty—our attention is riveted to his newly focused attention on female bodies in swimsuits, we register his awareness that others are watching him as he hesitates on the diving board, we follow his undulating thoughts about whether it’s best to do something scary without thinking about it or whether it’s foolishly dangerous not to think about it.


These examples illustrate Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?
 

frimble3

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In a way, it's the difference between what works in a book and what works in a movie.

A lot of ancient fiction was meant to be told not read. And it's harder to remember details, telling after telling. I think what's been recorded is the bare bones of a story, to which the teller could vary the details to suit his audience, and his mood at the moment.
Maybe it's being told to a crowd of drunk soldiers, who want lots of fightin' and winnin' , or maybe it's more of story to kill a slow winter afternoon and there's time for all the detail the teller can think of. Of course, people on Harold's side would want to hear how great he is, and his enemies want to hear about his shortcomings.
If you're paid by the performance, you give the audience what they want.
 
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Cobalt Jade

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I remember Gilgamesh being pretty emotional and having feelings.
 

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I don't agree with most of what she says. First, it's too sweeping a statement. Secondly she refers to "ancient literature" but the example she she gives from Harald's Saga is from the 13th century. That's not ancient; it's Medieval. She's talking about the Old Icelandic Sigurðarsonar part of a collection known as Heimskringla.

It's a saga. It's a straight-forward historical narrative. It's about the dude William the Conqueror swooped in to kill at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. This is the guy that in English we call Harold Hardrada.

Not sure that there's much call for emotion in a straight-forward fairly accurate narrative of events.

It's a stupid example if you want to talk about "ancient" or if you want to talk about emotion in early literature.

Moreover, it's a daft thesis that only someone who hadn't read much early literature would try to support. It's too sweeping an assertion, covering too much time and too many languages or cultures, and no clear definition of "emotion." I can't even read a non-Indo European language except minor OT Hebrew, and I know better than to say that.

Take a look at the Song of Songs, or Early Egyptian love poetry or Latin poetry by Catullus.

Those are ancient.

But for Medieval literatures, the era Sedivy focuses on, see Medieval Irish tale of Deirdre, usually titled The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu. Because of a prophecy about the danger of her preternatural beauty, she is kept apart. But eventually she and Noisiu fall in love. This is much against the will of the Ulster king Conchobor. They flee, pursued by the Ulsterman, into Scotland. Eventually Noisiu is killed by Conchobar, who captures Deirdre.

The tale says

A year, now, she was with Conchobor, and during that time she did not smile a laughing smile, and she did not partake of her sufficiency of food or of sleep, and she did not raise her head from her knee.

The actual text contains love-poetry from Deirdre about Noisiu. But the end of the tale is this:

‘What do you see that you hate most?’ said Conchobor. ‘You, to be sure,’ she said, ‘and Eogan mac Durthacht!’ ‘You shall be, indeed, a year with Eogan,’ said Conchobor.

Thereupon he brought her beside Eogan. On the following day, they went to the assembly of Macha. She was behind Eogan in the chariot. She had promised that she would not see her two companions on earth on the same occasion.

‘Well, O Derdriu,’ said Conchobor, ‘it is a sheep's eye between two rams that you make between me and Eogan.’

There was a great stone boulder in front of her. She dashed her head against the stone until she had made a mass of fragments of her head so that she died.

That [is] the exile of the Sons of Uisliu and the exile of Fergus and the violent death of the Sons of Uisliu and of Derdriu.

One of the issues in discussing Medieval literature is that we mostly read it in translation; the actual text has, very often, a different kind of emotional layering. That's true of this translation too. It translates some of the poetry but not all. And my brief snippet leaves out the poetry completely. This was a text where, as is common with Medieval Irish, prose and poetry mingle. And the text was meant to be performed, probably with musical accompaniment.

I think it is ethnocentric to label multiple cultures and texts as lacking in emotion; as is drawing conclusions about their original audiences.

I particularly take issue with this passage:

Unlike formulaic popular fiction, which tends to rely on stereotypical characters and transparent motives, characters in literary fiction act in surprising and ambiguous ways that spill beyond the confines of familiar scripts.

What we have of ancient literature is mostly "pop lit." We suspect that Beowulf was a big deal contemporarily, but we don't know. We've only got one ms. But there's a thing about emotional states and Old English poetry; it's poetry. It's metered. And the meters were classified in terms, in part, of emotional affect; there is for instance a battle meter, associated with emotionally stirring heroic speeches. This is lost to non-specialists, and it's absolutely lost in translation. And that brings me to a point made by frimble3: Early literature was performed. This was the convention right through the era of Chaucer and even later; reading was a communal activity. Poems and sagas were performed by skilled people, whether from memory or from a written prompt. They conveyed the emotion in their performance. It's the classic issue of show vs tell, in some respects.

There are vast numbers of mss. of popular stories like Bevis of Hamptoun. I also take issue with the usual dig at popular literature vs literary fiction; it's an eye of the beholder thing, and, again, is much too broad and sweeping a statement, and one that is strikingly ignorant about the history of literature and the canon.

Finally, regarding emotion and early literature, here's another example that I think shows emotion clearly. The c. 1300 Middle English Sir Orfeo, derived from the myth of Orfeo and Euridice, but taken somewhat sideways. Here, Orfeo is an English king, and his queen Herodis is taken while she sleeps by the king of the fairies.

Orfeo has the conventional emotional gestures of hand-wringing, but it's how they're used that makes all the difference, and how the characters react. This too would have been performed; its source is a now lost lais; a piece designed to be recited to harp accompaniment. There's even a fragment of the tale in the Child Ballads, under the title King Orfeo. And Scottish folk singer Archie Fisher has a credible performed version of King Orfeo that gives a hint of what a Medieval performance might have been like.

I think at the heart of this argument (which, by the way is made by a linguist, not a literary scholar) is a desire to push the argument that we are better than them, whether it's Medieval readers or non-readers, or people who prefer genre "popular fiction" vs "literary fiction." It's an argument based on a false feeling of superiority.
 
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neandermagnon

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I'd like to point out the very obvious (and regrettable) fact that none of the stories told by Neandertals, Homo heidelbergensis, early Homo sapiens or any other early humans who had complex language survive to the present day so we have no idea what emotions they had in them.
 

Chris P

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Styles change. If anyone is surprised they aren't paying attention. [Sweeping overgeneralization]I think the short stories getting published today (or at least the ones I'm reading) focus less on feelings than they did 25 years ago. [/Sweeping overgeneralization]

Edit: Neandermagnon: I so so so so much I almost cry want to be a time traveler partly for this reason. To hear the stories.
 
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