ABSTRACT
This chapter retraces a shift in preoccupation from physical violence in classical epic to linguistic and representational violence in post-imperial epic. This generic development can be largely explained by the influence of poststructuralism on postcolonial epic. The methodological framework brings together the classicist model of Achilles’s choice formulated by Susanne Wofford, Indian classical and neo-Romantic aesthetics of the symbol, as well as postcolonial poetics of allegory theorised by Fredric Jameson, Stephen Slemon and Jahan Ramazani. The chapter takes as its starting point Susanne Wofford’s argument that classical epic figuration is characterised by a disjunction between the disruptive finality of death on the one hand, and the tropes of continuity drawn from the natural world of seasonal renewal on the other. Such disjunctions and linguistic violence, while implicit in classical epic, are explicitly brought to the fore in postcolonial epic, which juxtaposes incommensurable orders of reality through multi-directional ‘heterotropes’, self-knotting negative similes and the figure of the ‘mad’ Quixotic reader. While the violence done to language and regimes of truth would seem emblematic of postcolonial epic, the germ of this subversive potential is already present in the Woffordian disjunction between diegetic violence and aesthetic figuration in classical epic.
