It started when I decided to listen to Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas ("Der Ring des Nibelungen", officially). I had heard a lot of peripheral stuff about it for a long time -- how it influenced The Lord of the Rings, how its use of "motifs" has changed how we listen to music ever since, and of course the Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?", which I've seen probably a hundred times.
So over a course of weeks, I listened to all twenty hours of its length. I enjoyed following the story and recognizing where it has been echoed by other fantastic works, most notably how it all comes down to gods, dwarves, giants and men fighting for possession of one magical ring that gives the wearer nearly unlimited power.
But what struck me even more as I followed along with the translated libretto was how ambitious the whole thing was. At the same time, I had to keep in mind that this was all coming from the mind of Richard Wagner, a racist egomaniac who seemed to be fine with twins falling in love and having children together.
What he envisioned for his operatic cycle was to pick a small town, build a massive theater, stage four epic operas on consecutive nights, and conclude the whole festival by *burning* *the* *theater* *down*. It makes sense from a story point of view -- the story does end in a conflagration that destroys Valhalla, the home of the gods, after all -- but from a safety standpoint I have no idea how the whole thing would be pulled off.
But that's what grabs me most about the whole thing. This one tale, that encompasses generations, and presents locales from the underground kingdom of the dwarves all the way to the rainbow bridge that leads to the dwelling of the Norse gods, has been brought together by one man's uncompromising artistic vision alone. And now, there are people who spend their careers researching both the mythology and musicality of it.
Second, this summer I started listening to all seven Harry Potter audiobooks during my commute. I started a little before Harry's birthday (July 31), and heard Jim Dale read the last book's epilogue from disc 99 on my own (Nov. 14).
Again, you have to marvel at the scope and subtext of the whole thing. If the stories are true, J.K. Rowling wrote the first book in coffee shops while caring for her infant child. And as far as I can tell, there is nothing inconsistent in the magical world that she created during those humble beginnings that doesn't perfectly match with the events of the seventh book, which she wrote when she was a renowned world figure and a multi-millionaire.
There's such a clear thematic progression through the books as Harry and his friends mature and the threat to the wizarding world grows, and that clarity only becomes magnified when you go right from one book into the next. Every question you have gets answered, and many things mentioned in passing have payoffs three or four books later. Either Jo had an unbelievably detailed idea of this world when she first started jotting the story down on a legal pad at a coffeehouse, or she is the world's most adept plot-juggler, tying things together and making up magical rules and backstories on the fly that make perfect retroactive sense. Either way, I'm in awe.
Of course, it's almost pure luck that America really grew to love the HP books in the early 2000s, at a time when they felt threatened by dark outside forces, and had to back a government that wasn't entirely trustworthy, which is exactly what happens in Harry's world. But even if such strange real-world parallels hadn't happened, clearly the series will stand for generations as the right way to tell a human story set against a massive, fantastical backdrop.
The third artist I experienced was one that I've been following for a long time, although until recently there's been very little known about him. His name was Henry Darger, and he lived around the turn of the twentieth century in Chicago, By all accounts, he was a grumpy, eccentric hoarder, who worked as a janitor at various Catholic institutions most of his life. When he passed away and his one-room rented apartment was cleaned out by its owners, they found massive works of art, including three huge, handwritten novels (30,000 pages in all) and hundreds of watercolors and collages, some twelve feet in length.
The longest of the novels (at 15,000 pages) is called "The Vivian Girls in the Realms of the Unreal" and details a sort of parallel-universe version of the Civil War. In his retelling, seven young sisters are the leaders of a massive army leading a revolt against a nation of child slavers. The work is expansive and visceral, never shying from violence despite the innocence of its heroines. Some of the paintings depict the strangling and evisceration of children. This, along with the fact that the little girls are often depicted naked and with penises, led many to believe that Darger was sexually naive at best, and a homicidal pedophile at worst.
The truth, it turns out, makes much more sense. In the book "Henry Darger: Throwaway Boy", author Jim Elledge delves into the artist's past, and finds a cruelly mistreated boy, left alone by a deceased mother and alcoholic father, sexually abused and needlessly institutionalized for most of his childhood, compounded by confusion about his homosexuality. The novels and paintings, it turns out, were his way of working through all the things that happened in his life. It's no surprise, then, that the little girls have boys' bodies, or that "Sweetie Pie", a tornado in the shape of a child's face, spends thousands of pages obliterating most of the locales that Henry knew growing up.
He had been working on these projects secretly for decades, which is what I find so astounding about it. This endeavor made up nearly his entire life, and took his entire life. He did find love eventually, but never lived with his paramour in the thirty years they were a couple, and the relationship ended when Whillie (as Henry called him) moved south for health reasons. But of course, multiple versions of the couple appeared in Henry's books, always depicted as younger, stronger, and working together to help the oppressed children.
And that's what makes me think that there's more to epic storytelling than just weaving a complex, consistent story. Henry's tale is the most obvious example of how art can be a device to help you work through issues, to come to terms with your past and, hopefully, direct your future. If done right, they make it nearly impossible for the author to stop telling them, at least until they're done. And sometimes -- as you can see with Rowling's occasional Potter stories in the years since she concluded the series -- not even then.
That's what makes epics so fascinating to me: it's impossible to tell such a huge, sprawling story without putting more than a little of your true self in it. That's the kind of connection I find with these artists; even if I don't agree with or fully understand them, I can tell that there's something running profoundly deep under the surface. Whether it was Wagner's twisted ideology that cautioned against both foreigners and the lure of power, Rowling's boy wizard hoping to live up to expectations he doesn't really believe he can fulfill, or Darger's fractured psyche trying to make sense of itself, what impresses me about all three of these artists is the scope of what they committed to. You can't fake that kind of passion. They felt compelled to tell these stories, and would not stop until they were completed.
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