Telling Other Tales

Chapter 6 examines the various ways in which the Bakhtinian heteroglossia of epic performances has been created: by the use of a participating bardic figure, who extends the Brechtian role of narrator/commentator to assume agency within both the fictional and actual worlds of the spectators; by their space-time settings; and by both their live-ness in, and their aliveness to, the immediate performance context. Since the time of the Modernists, led by Joyce and Woolf in Britain and Oswaldo de Andrade in Brazil, epic has begun to be re-envisioned; rather than a genre in which to retell the heroic narratives of a nation, it has become a place where the voices of those previously overshadowed and neglected are finally given space. Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Father Comes Home from the Wars, and Lisa Petersen and Denis O’Hare’s An Iliad each do this in different ways, giving voice to those whose narratives were occluded in the ancient epics.