The Kingdom and the Pilgrim's Way: Epic, Irony, and Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Abstract:This article offers a reconsideration of the epic in modernity by situating Rebecca West's monumental travelogue and chronicle of Yugoslavian history—Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)—as a central example of a "modern epic." A revision of the theopolitical logic of the epic as unfolded in Black Lamb is charted: while the epic—after Hegel and Lukács—has often been taken to present the Kingdom of Heaven in its immanent realization on earth, Black Lamb formulates instead a divergence between the earthly and heavenly Kingdoms. In articulating both division and relation between the secular and sacred Kingdoms, West develops a political theology through a rereading of Saint Augustine's City of God. The teleological trajectories of the secular politics of a particular European state and the horizon of a universal spiritual eschatology thus find a formal relation in Black Lamb through an epic narrative that incorporates the transformational dimension of a pilgrimage. On the one hand, literary craft and statecraft are folded together in West's reconstruction of the "racial destinies" of the South Slavs ("the history of resurrected Serbia"), spanning the long historical bracket from the 1389 Battle of Kosovo to the 1918 establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. On the other hand, the consecration of the earthly Kingdom is itself relativized against the spiritual eschatology of humanity as a whole through West's incorporation of the mode of ironic negation. The establishment of the earthly state and its projected transformation in the heavenly Kingdom are thus interwoven to form the epic tapestry of Black Lamb, which elaborates a formal analogy between art and liturgy as common means of relating historical suffering to its overcoming. This article thus concludes with a consideration of the role of liturgical temporality in epic narration.