An “Epic” Fail?

Published by Breakwater Books, this slim volume provides the written transcript of celebrated poet and critic George Elliott Clarke’s 2018 address, “The Quest for a ‘National’ Nationalism,” which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Pratt Memorial Lecture series. Clarke turns his attention to two of Newfoundland-born E.J. Pratt’s poems—Brébeuf and his Brethren (1940) and Towards the Last Spike (1952)—to re-evaluate Pratt’s status as Canadian epic poet within the complicated socio-political identifications of this country. Previous critics haven’t, it seems, disputed Northrop Frye’s nomination of Pratt as “English Canada’s great epic poet” (Clarke 15), debating instead what kind of epic poetry he has written. When it comes to Brébeuf, for example, Pratt’s poem about the martyrdom of Jesuits in seventeenth-century New France, Sandra Djwa tells us that some “describe it as Christian epic,” while others “are content with the term heroic epic” (82). Clarke’s argument is that in a nation as diverse and fraught as settler-colonial Canada, epic understood as a unifying force is bound to fall short—despite a poet’s lofty ambitions or the fact that they are, as Clarke believes Pratt to be, “yet a mighty poet” (61).

Clarke, with incisive irony, turns to Pratt’s modernist contemporaries, Ezra Pound and Northrop Frye, to frame his discussion of epic, his reference to Frye a collegial nod to the inaugural Pratt Lecturer fifty years previous. Pound argues that the epic genre is defined by a “beautiful tradition,” narrative cohesion, and an epic hero, “men who are more than men” (Clarke 9-10).  Unity is a central feature of the epic form formulated by Frye and Pound—no heteroglossia, heterogeneity or diversity allowed in this imperialist and nationalist genre of the dominant. According to Pound, the epic voice is to be “the speech of a nation through the mouth of one man” (Clarke 12).^[1] Frye similarly defines epic as “the voice of a civilization (or a culture), the vocalization of a unity of cultural experience” (Clarke 13). Clarke grants that “generally, the epic answers the question “Who are we?” but suggests that, problematically, this “we” is rarely a voice from the margins, from the disenfranchised or displaced. One might quibble here that epics don’t so much “answer the question” of who we already are, but instead, if rhetorically successful, constitute such subjectivities in the first place through narrative identification. (Rhetorician Maurice Charland is instructive on this score.) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic Evangeline, for instance, was a tremendously successful piece of constitutive rhetoric for the Acadians, and not surprisingly, Pratt emulated this epic.

Clarke’s most thought-provoking speculation (or “wager”) is that Brébeuf, although written in English by an English Protestant, is best understood as a pro-conscription piece for Catholic French-Canadian readers during World War II, specifically, as “pro-war, pro-Francophone-enlistment propaganda, togged up as a paean to ye olde Christian military slaughter” (29). Only problem is, as he points out, Brébeuf wasn’t translated into French until 1988, so if Pratt was serious about Francophones actually reading his narrative poem and being sufficiently moved by it, he had to have imagined his English narrative being “overheard” by Francophones (30) or believed that, like Longfellow’s wildly popular Evangeline, his poem would enjoy quick translation and circulation—which it didn’t.^[2] Further to that, the poem’s demonization of Indigenous peoples with Fascistic allusions makes it an unlikely epic under “the forensic scrutiny of later generations of multiculturized and/or Indigenous/Métis Canadian poets and scholars” (50).

Pratt’s Towards the Last Spike—an encomium for the glorious completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway westward through the Shield and Prairies to British Columbia—doesn’t fare much better as constitutive epic in Clarke’s view. Pratt lionizes the capitalist who opens up the West to economic opportunity, ignoring the Chinese workers who endure the tortures of physical labour and the Indigenous peoples whose lands are stolen for the capitalist cause, as celebrated by the iconic photograph of Donald Smith, later Lord Strathcona, pounding the last spike at Craigellachie. Ultimately, Clarke says, “Towards the Last Spike is a celebration of Muscular Protestantism, tacit White British Supremacy, and Capitalist Derring-Do” (42). Hope may lie, however, in a re-imagining of the national epic: epic defined not in terms of unity, or one voice, but comprised by many; epic coming not from one, privileged viewpoint, but from the diasporic, the marginalized, the outcast, the multiple.

Works Cited

Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly

Journal of Speech, vol. 73, no. 2, 1987, pp. 133-50.

Clarke, George Elliott. The Quest for a “National” Nationalism: E.J. Pratt’s Epic Ambition,

“Race” Consciousness, and the Contradictions of Canadian Identity. Breakwater, 2021.

Djwa, Sandra. “The Civil Polish of The Horn: E.J. Pratt’s ‘Brebeuf and His Brethren.” Ariel,

vol. 4, no. 3, 1973, pp. 82-102.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Gender and Genre Anxiety: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and

H.D. as Epic Poets.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. vol. 5, no. 2, 1986, pp. 203-

28.

Notes

[1] While Clarke does not engage with gender and epic directly, the epic is also frequently the domain of the masculine: poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H.D. knew all too well that “the epic hero is traditionally male, his heroic qualities are masculine, and the ordeal he faces is a masculine agon,” and worked from within the genre to challenge such norms (Friedman 205).

[2] Particularly interesting is Clarke’s footnote that suggests Earle Birney’s “David” is arguably the closest thing to national epic Canada has because so many students have read it as part of their education, which also brings up the question of circulation and readership.