Monday, July 23, 2007
Epic and Local
Posted by Zach in News

This weekend I finished reading All the King’s Men.

I’ve been ingesting information on Beowulf lately, and it has made me crave a book on southern politics the way a pregnant woman craves dirt. (A point of clarification: I’ve been told that pregnant women sometimes have urges to eat dirt, because their body craves iron. Who knows if that’s true? The guy who told me this seemed to think that it was common knowledge).

In retrospect, I think I was experiencing something I heard in a lecture. The lecturer proposed that the best art combines the epic and the local. That does seem to make sense a little, doesn’t it? Epic events are so heavy that unless you hammer into a very sturdy “local” moment, the nail won’t hold the weight. Conversely, an isolated sturdy nail seems to have questionable value, unless of course, you have something “epic-ish” to hang on it. For example, a coronation is an event too big to possess much emotional resonance, but the image of a lone janitor, who sweeps up confetti in a deserted hall, has a much stronger pull. The second has both the epic (coronation) and the local (janitor). Of course, not every cultural possession has an equal measure of both. Some lean toward the more epic side (Njal’s saga) and some lean more towards the local (The Boxcar Children).

At any rate, after reading about men who swim in their armor for seven days and kill sea beasts, it’s a pleasant literary palate cleanser to read about a man who stops at a rusted out gas station in the desert and does nothing more extraordinary than order a soda pop.

2 Responses to “Epic and Local”

fifthofeight comments:
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

Reminds me of the the way the Shire seems to play in The Lord of the Rings.

Bear comments:
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

American writing doesn’t get much better than when Willie Stark is explaining how digging up dirt isn’t a bad thing, we are all made of dirt, diamonds are made of dirt etc. Of course, my paraphrasing does it no justice, so I encourage you all to read the original work.

Hell, the opening scene explaining the car racing down the road, that alone is worth the cost of the book.

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