Abstract
In the late 1580s Christopher Marlowe obtained a copy of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis, a book of maps of the then known world. Poring over the folio pages he came upon a map of the Turkish Empire. It is a richly detailed map with the inscription in the top right-hand corner: ‘Samarchand, once the seat of the great Tartar emperor, Tamburlaine’.2 This map provided part of the basis of Marlowe’s imagining of the world of the Tartar emperor in his play Tamburlaine the Great.
When we all understood everything, the epic was possible. But not fiction. The novel is born from the very fact that we do not understand one another any longer, because unitary, orthodox language has broken down.
Carlos Fuentes1
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Notes
Carlos Fuentes,AAA Guardian Weekly, vol. 40, No. 10 (March 1989) 9.
‘Samarchand Tamberlanis magni Tartorum imperatoris quondam regia’, Abraham Ortellius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp 1570) (Amsterdam: Meridian, 1964), between 50–1. My translation.
John Holloway, Widening Horizons in English Verse (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) 109.
Wilson Harris, Tradition, The Writer and Society (London: New Beacon, 1967) 28.
See Michael Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1980) 8.
Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1910) 228.
Keri Hulme interviewed by Harry Ricketts, Talking About Ourselves: Twelve New Zealand Poets in Conversation with Harry Ricketts (Wellington: Mallinson Rendell, 1986) 28–9.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978) 194.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988) 398.
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© 1991 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Williams, M. (1991). The Novel As National Epic: Wilson Harris, Salman Rushdie, Keri Hulme. In: King, B. (eds) The Commonwealth Novel Since 1960. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-64112-3_13
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