Cynic Satire [1 ed.] 9781443882996, 9781443877602

Citation preview

Cynic Satire

Cynic Satire By

Eric McLuhan

Cynic Satire By Eric McLuhan This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Eric McLuhan All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7760-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7760-2

CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................................... ix Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii Introduction ............................................................................................... xv Part I Compass Bearings Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 Menippean Satire, in Brief Chapter Two ................................................................................................ 9 Menippism and Cynicism Part II Concept and Percept Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 21 The Conventional Outlook Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 33 The School of Frye vs. Mimesis Part III Menippism and Cynicism Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 57 Menippism and Decorum: Structural Analysis Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 73 Digressive Structure and Perception Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 83 Epyllion and Transformation Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 89 The Cynic and the Dog

viii

Contents

Digression Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 97 A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés Part IV Cynic Satire and Tradition Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 137 Who Gave You That Numb? The Etymology of Satire Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 149 A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 173 Non-Moral Satire: Serious Art Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 181 In a Word: Three Quartets Part V Make It New—Yourself Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 187 Cynic Satire and the Postliterate Crowd Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 205 The Litmus Test: What Is and Isn’t Cynic Satire Afterword: Boethius OUT, Plato IN? A Final Test Case ........................ 221 Appendix: Outline of the Menippean Tradition ...................................... 225 Bibliography of Works Cited .................................................................. 233

FOREWORD

The term “Menippean satire” has been a prominent one in three periods: the first century BC, the latter half of the sixteenth century AD, and the middle of the twentieth century. To be sure, between these last two eras it was not totally unknown formally, but the actual designation re-emerged among a notable group of scholars and critics only during the 1500s in Western Europe and in the English-speaking world enjoyed a resurgence from 1957 on, thanks to the extraordinary impact of four or so pages published that year in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. Why the identification of this distinctive literary type became of interest at precisely these moments requires some investigation. A closer look at the historical circumstances that led to these revivals reveals much about the nature of literary forms and the cultural background that gave them significance. Eric McLuhan's study seeks to explore the opposition between Dialectic, on the one hand, and Grammar and Rhetoric, on the other, as a means of understanding this peculiar literary category in terms of its intellectual, artistic, and cultural background at each stage of its flourishing. Chapter four of his book is especially valuable in showing how the attention given to the audience by the rhetorical tradition helps explain the appeal of this quirky but sophisticated set of techniques and perspectives (originally inspired by the Cynic movement) in later antiquity, the later Renaissance, and the latter stages of twentiethcentury modernism. He offers a fresh investigation that seeks to overcome the many barriers to a coherent account of an admittedly incoherent-seeming literary type by asking not how a Menippean satire is constructed or how a given work might be identified under some abstract rubric but what effect it has on its audience. It is not the content alone that makes a given work Menippean nor such structural features as the alternation of prose and verse (hardly a unique characteristic, since it occurs in the ancient Greek romance-novel as well). Nevertheless, McLuhan offers a very helpful list of “Menippean clichés” in his “Digression” (chapter nine), which deals with the Cynic attitudes towards reality and fiction, and chapter four, which explores its relationship to the rhetorical tradition. He chooses wisely not to neglect matters of structure and content, but he shows convincingly that they cannot suffice to explain the ultimate nature of that class of works

x

Foreword

named after the third-century BC Gadarean known to us as Menippus. The problem all critics and scholars face is a kind of literary nominalism. Despite concerted efforts, century after century, they have not been able to avoid using such vague terms as “genre” or “novel”; at the same time, those who seek to offer more precise categories or collective terms seldom succeed in imposing their preferred nomenclatures on the scholarly community. A good example is Northrop Frye himself, who, despite the considerable impetus he gave to the study of works in the Cynic tradition, failed to make his preferred term for them, “anatomy,” prevail for very long. He had already begun exploring the subject twenty years before his influential book, Anatomy of Criticism, was published, first in a paper written while he was a student at Oxford and five years later in a published article that incorporated many additions to his original investigations. Beginning with establishing a more exact distinction than that observed at the time between fiction and non-fiction, he sought to drive a wedge between them with a large and important category he identified, drawing on the titles of a number of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury works, as literary anatomies. He was to integrate these preliminary explorations into a more comprehensive theory of fiction, with a revised version of his original remarks, in yet another article, published not long before his signature book appeared. This third version was little changed when it was absorbed into Anatomy. There it was one of four broad narrative “genres”: confession, romance, novel, and anatomy, this last being a substitute for the term “Menippean satire,” which he considered somewhat misleading. Though early followers of Frye's schema often used “anatomy,” in their books and articles, the preponderance of later criticism has stuck with the original designation, Menippean satire. Scholars have debated, since antiquity, the term “satire,” as well, and McLuhan offers some very sensible remarks about the range of references that term might be said to cover, etymology aside. But as with the tendency to style any prose narrative of some (indefinitely defined) length a novel, such terminology often hinders more than aids understanding by either excluding or including too much. A second influential critic, the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin, seems to have anticipated Frye's early interest in Menippean satire, though his writings were not to reach the West in translation until the 1960s. When they did, however, they provided an alternative way of looking at it and consequently were responsible for a further impetus within that initial surge of interest. Bakhtin speaks not of “satire” but of “Menippea,” and he offers a very different prospectus in his discussions that includes anthropological elements, such as “carnival” and “polyphony,” which have

Cynic Satire

xi

proven to be fruitful in expanding our understanding of the cultural underpinnings of the medieval and modern practitioners of literary Cynicism. But in his essays that propose an opposition between epic and novel, he presents the latter as an open form that seems to include the Menippea in its heritage. That distinction goes against the fourfold division of prose fiction that Frye offers in his Anatomy of Criticism and subsequent writings, showing once again that one man's term is another man's poison. McLuhan remains attentive to the positive contributions of his precursors in writing about Menippean satire, but he is also shrewdly aware of their dangers and limitations. At the same time, he looks to certain unpublished works, such as doctoral dissertations, that have escaped the notice of most scholars. In them he finds approaches that offer positive directions that might be further advanced. Most conspicuous in his book, however, is the space he devotes to exploring the historic elements of rhetoric and the trivia, taken for granted by Menippean authors before the twentieth century but now too often neglected. It is there that he presents his most original ideas about the subject, demonstrating that it is above all the effect on the reader, as embodied not only in the author’s intentions but in the work itself as executed, which defines the peculiar nature of Menippean satire. Moreover, he further illuminates this insight by examining not only some recent literary works that fall within the Menippean scholar’s purview but those in other media as well. By demonstrating that Cynic satire goes beyond being limited by an exclusively verbal medium he presents some enticing possibilities for future critical developments in the arts as a whole. I would like to conclude by offering a reflection of my own on the implications this book offers for even broader considerations of the arts. The Menippean challenge, which was given prominence in many a “postmodern” work of “self-reflective” fiction during the later decades of the past century, is a way of calling attention to the constitution of our cultural and historical environment. If the Margites may be enlisted among the earliest known examples of Menippea—coming centuries before the historical Menippus himself—then one concludes that the parodic element emerges precisely when certain works of art have achieved exemplary and canonical status that are taken to define the principal features of a given culture. By calling attention to them through distortion, through humour, and through incongruous mixtures of elements or contradictory, conflicting scenes and presentations, the Menippean artist makes us aware not merely of the artificiality of the intellectual environment that we have created for ourselves but of its necessary existence as a means of avoiding

xii

Foreword

an oversimplified understanding of ourselves and the world we have made. And thereon, doubtless, hangs a tale, full of sound and theory and signifying something or other. R. S. Dupree Dallas, Texas December 2014

PREFACE

This book grew out of my doctoral thesis on arguably the greatest Menippean satire of all, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. It owes a considerable debt to Eugene Korkowski’s slightly earlier dissertation, “Menippus and His Imitators: A Conspectus, up to Sterne, for a Misunderstood Genre.” I have made frequent use here of the fruits of Dr. Korkowski’s labours, and trust that the specific debts have been acknowledged. This will acknowledge the general one. Recently, Garland Publishing brought out Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism by E. P. Kirk, a book that clearly owes a lot to Dr. Korkowski’s ample dissertation. Two things, however, I feel are lacking. First, Dr. Korkowski’s thesis contains many valuable discussions, whereas the catalogue format of Kirk’s book prohibits discursive essay. Second, Dr. Korkowski’s thesis runs only “up to Sterne”: valuable work remains to be done to bring the survey the rest of the way, from Sterne to the present. In the last chapters of the present volume, I suggest some directions such studies might take.

INTRODUCTION

Contemporary interest in the Menippean satire pretty well dates from the publication of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. That celebrated book needs no introduction; its influence on criticism and on more than a generation of students is well known. Although Frye accorded a scant four pages to the topic (virtually an aside), they have formed the manifesto for an entire school of Menippean criticism, one that is still growing. In those four pages, Frye argued cogently for changing the term from “Menippean satire” (he felt it was inadequate) to “Anatomy.” And in fact many Menippean satires are anatomies or include “Anatomy” in their titles, for example, Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. But then Frye, playing possum, quietly named his own book of essays Anatomy of Criticism. Somehow, Frye scholars have overlooked the implicit claim – that his book is a Menippean satire. At least, none have yet offered to discuss the implications. Yet his celebrated Anatomy is not Menippean: it—and he—is far too sober. In a nutshell (and this serves as the rhetorical premise / thesis that underlies the essays that make up this book) … … a Menippean satire is a device for producing a specific kind of effect on the reader. Menippean satire is an active form, not a passive one: any work that produces the effect of a Menippean satire is a Menippean satire. Whereas other kinds of satire work on the reader’s ideas, or decry evil, or expose vice or folly or bad manners and someone else, Menippean satires act on their publics as would a Menippus or Diogenes or other Cynic philosopher on his. The satire stands in for the man: that’s the key. Menippus was a Cynic philosopher (third century BC). Now, Cynics are unique among philosophers. They sling no party line; they have no “school,” no bodies of theories to expound, no policy to promote. Their constant aim is to restore balance to perception: they combat delusion and illusion and pretentiousness and intellectual boneheadedness of every stripe. The Cynics declared war on robotism; their target was—and is— any robot, any somnambulist individual or group, that crossed their paths. They will swipe any technique, resort to any extreme, to jolt the target (the

xvi

Introduction

man-in-the-street reader) into wakefulness, to restore a sense of proportion, and to limber up the senses. Their techniques are satiric; their satires, polymorphic, topsy-turvy, and perverse. They will use any form. The Cynics are utterly democratic: they attack one another and even their own followers as readily as they attack anyone else. But what does this have to do with today? For nearly two centuries, rhetoric attracted little practical interest…until fairly recently, that is. For electric media have profoundly changed the shapes of publics and audiences, and rhetoric, the science of transforming audiences, has revived. A rhetor’s thinking begins with the audience and how to have an effect on it. Cynic-Menippean satires are deeply rhetorical because the satirist begins with the audience and the effect. He builds the work around the audience in order to manage the effect. Our predecessors, the Romantics, were too self-absorbed to summon much sympathy for rhetoric or interest themselves in rhetorical (audience-based) satire. Such is not now the case. We live surrounded by rhetoric most potent—ads, for example. Suddenly, this Menippean technology is yanked from the sidelines onto centre stage. Yet while recent philosophy, from phenomenology on, and the current spate of derivative schools of criticism, have alike an interest in the hidden ground of experience (and all Menippean satires are experiences first and foremost and cerebral last), the critics, still mired in the mind-set of Romanticism, are over a century out of touch and out of practice with the tools needed to come to grips with Cynic satire. Now is the “ground floor” time in the development of Menippean satire as a field of study. Scholarly interest is growing apace; each year, more and more university courses deal with it. As the field grows, awareness of it and its implications is profoundly affecting the way we look at the rest of satire, and at the rest of literature, and at serious art. For the catalogue of Menippean satires includes numerous surprises. It includes many of those wonderful misfits, books that don’t fit into the conventional genres, such as Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, or Don Quixote, or Chaucer’s Tales, or Byron’s Don Juan, or Alice in Wonderland, or Huckleberry Finn, or The French Lieutenant’s Woman, or Tristram Shandy, or Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake. Large numbers of works—many of them major works—hitherto safely accounted lyric, epic, etc., have suddenly been discovered to be part of the Menippean tradition. These include works by Homer, Lucian, Petronius, Seneca, Apuleius, Martianus Capella, Macrobius, Aulus Gellius, Aristo, Boccaccio, Erasmus, More, Cervantes, Nashe, Donne, Butler, Sterne, Swift, Flaubert, Carlyle, Byron, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Wyndham

Cynic Satire

xvii

Lewis, Ezra Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Barth, Fowles, Rooke, Flann O’Brien…and Woody Allen, to drop just a few names. ~ This book approaches this unusual species of satire in an unusual manner. Instead of looking at the satires descriptively, instead of asking do they or do they not, say, mix verse and prose, or high and low subject and style, it operates from rhetorical analysis. That is to say, it begins by looking not at the content of the satire, but at the reader and the reader’s encounter with a mixing of verse and prose or of high subject and low style (or vice versa). Given the multiplicity of tactics that Menippists have used over the centuries since Homer (who considerably antedates Menippus), descriptive approaches and formulas are too cumbersome to be workable. There is the further complication that many other authors over the centuries have employed “Menippean” tactics, such as mixing verse and prose, without making their work satire. The first group of chapters is intended simply to give enough background information to orient the reader in the subject. (I assume throughout that the reader has a general knowledge of Western literature.) In chapter one, I sketch what is and is not Menippism. In chapter two, I relate Menippus and Cynicism to Menippizing. The second group makes a crucial distinction, between Concepts and Percepts, and discusses how and why the conventional approach to Menippism fails to come to grips with this species of satire. Concept-based approaches will not serve to elucidate a percept-based activity. Most classicists stick rigidly to the “verse and prose” formula, as do many literary critics. Other literary critics use other formulas, but nearly all persist in basing their approaches on outward description. Only one of the new approaches, based on how Menippists imitate and plagiarize one another endlessly, does work to a point and is the first breakthrough in many a century. The third group of essays, on Menippism and Cynicism, begins with the heart of the matter. All of the Menippists’ perversities, from mixing verse and prose to mixing high and low styles and subjects to tweaking the reader’s nose in various ways, are directed to a single end, that of violating rhetorical decorum. In turn, such violations produce in the reader a dislocation that stimulates fresh perception—the effect Menippists strive for and the point of all their satirizing. Two other essays examine the same matter from different perspectives. A fourth essay dwells on a purely Cynical and Menippean conceit: doggishness. At this juncture, Intermission arrives in the form of a list of the principal tactics that Menippists have used. It is rather large and

xviii

Introduction

cumbersome, which shows how unwieldy is any descriptive attempt to define Menippean satire. This copia may prove useful if future rhetorical study of these commonplace techniques reveals patterns we don’t suspect. A fourth group of essays looks at Cynic Satire and Tradition. The first essay drags up the centuries-old dispute concerning the proper etymology of the word “satire.” A reconciliation is proposed, using rhetoric to mediate the dispute. The next essay discovers the etymology of each of the three strains of satiric activity in the threefold logos and examines how each strain relates to the trivium and to therapeutics. Menippean satire is found to be the satiric arm of Grammar; Horatian, of Rhetoric; Juvenalian, of Dialectic. Another essay discusses Menippizing as inherent in any serious artistic activity. The last essay in the group gives the tetrads for the three strains of satire. The fifth group looks at Menippism in our time. First comes the matter of how it has begun to spread from literature to newer, electric media: the problem facing the satirist today is that the audiences for these new media are non-literary ones. Second, and finally, we attempt to devise a surefire test for detecting Menippism whatever the medium. “A mixture of verse and prose” is not much use when the medium is film, or TV, or interactive multimedia of one or another kind. Some basic tools (developed earlier in the book) are recapitulated, and the reader is invited to pitch in. Test cases (most Menippean, some not) are presented, for use in checking the litmus test. An appendix briefly outlines the main texts that comprise the Western Menippean tradition.

PART I COMPASS BEARINGS

CHAPTER ONE MENIPPEAN SATIRE, IN BRIEF

Menippism is at once boisterously individual, intensely conservative, and doggedly playful. The two other principal streams of satire—Horatian and Juvenalian—target some private vice or public folly. Menippism instead attacks the audience, the man in the street. By coincidence, that’s just what the Cynics did. All the hijinx in a Menippean satire are artillery levelled at the ranks of readers. Now, here’s the nub: we use two standard critical approaches to Menippism—a theoretical one and a descriptive one. The critic begins with a theory about Menippean satire and its aims and discusses how these pervade examples of the genre. At some point the discussion turns to criteria for admission and lists of membership in the Club Menippean. Alternately, a critic might attempt to define Menippean satire by describing it. The descriptions can get pretty elaborate. Unfortunately, both approaches, which work pretty well with other genres, collapse when they come to bear on Menippism, because both focus on the content and ideas, and neither can account for the special decorum. The most significant feature of a Menippean satire is not the behaviour of the satirist but the behaviour of the satire and the reader. Interpretation of a Menippean satire, then, should be a hermeneutic of the audience as much as of the text. Not everything dressed as Menippean, not everything that puts the Cynic disposition on, is Menippean. Books like John Barth’s The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, filled with wit and horseplay, frolic with Menippean devices, yet they are wide of this particular mark because they are too self-absorbed. The real meaning of a Menippean satire springs wholly from its effect: it is what it does. Consequently, the “meaning” in the usual sense (the content) is beside the point; it could be anything that serves to entice the reader. T. S. Eliot struck at the heart of the matter when he remarked that the “meaning” of a poem is “like the choice piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the housedog” of the mind so that the poem can go about its work unnoticed and unhindered. In consequence, the real content of a Menippean satire is the user. Criticism, then, needs to focus its attention on the audience and the effect the satire

4

Chapter One

produces (i.e., to use rhetoric), rather than on this or that theory of satire or of interpretation (i.e., philosophy). The present essays proceed by the Ancients’ route, using Grammar (etymology and exegesis), on the one hand, and Rhetoric, on the other, rather than by the Moderns’ one, which goes by theory, classification, and descriptive analysis. So: any work in any medium is Menippean that produces the effect of a Menippus, i.e., that does to its audience what a Cynic philosopher would do, behaves as a Cynic would. As Dryden said, it puts on “the Cynic manner of Menippus.” A Menippean satire will, amidst rollicking fun, attack the reader’s sensibilities the way a Cynic goes after the numbskull, robotic, homme moyen sensuel, average guy.

A written Menippean satire, then, is the literary embodiment of a Cynic—of a Diogenes or a Menippus or a Lucian or a Rabelais. Menippean satire, obviously, can and often does arise spontaneously: the author needn’t have joined a club or imbibed a philosophy or set of theories or school of thought. In any case, clubbishness and philosophizing provided routine targets for Cynics. They were a most unphilosophical and unsentimental lot: they never formed or joined a school—unlike Stoics or Epicureans or Phenomenologists or postmodern deconstructionists, for example—and regularly attacked one another and even their own followers. Arch-independents, all. Paradoxically, although it is thoroughly irreverent of its forebears, Menippism is the most intensely conservative and traditional of the three forms of satire exactly because it is through-and-through mimetic: it embodies/mimes a Cynic at work, while the Cynic works by miming the target. So one way to make a Menippean satire is to mime or update (steal) another Menippean satire. Or use (steal) one as a sub-plot or as a second plot. Lucian, for example, has been imitated, parodied, and ransacked continually for nearly two thousand years. Eugene Korkowski used this idea of mimesis, or “pedigree,” as an investigative technique: with it, he mapped the main outlines of Menippism up to the eighteenth century. Menippism springs entirely from a need to stay alive, a refusal to be swallowed or subsumed; it steadily prods one into remaining awake and keeping a sense of proportion and of human scale. In Fairy Queen Spenser sounded the pure Menippean/Cynic strain with

Menippean Satire, in Brief

Sir John Harington, The Metamorphosis of Ajax, 1596

5

6

Chapter One For sure a foole I do him firmely hold That loves his fetters, though they were of gold. (III.ix.67–68)

As our culture continues to shift from the rational left hemisphere to the emotional and irrational right hemisphere—from Attic to Asiatic, as it were—real Menippism is sure to enjoy a renaissance. Certainly, the prevailing drift in North American culture and sensibility has contributed to the rise in interest in Menippean/Cynic satire, satire that is attitudebased rather than theory-based, and to the recent spontaneous surge of Menippism in film and on television.

Menippean Satire, in Brief

7

CHAPTER TWO MENIPPISM AND CYNICISM

The early history of Menippean satire is clouded, for several reasons. We possess only a few titles and shreds of the writings of Menippus himself—but then he was not particularly prolix (Varro produced a much larger corpus of Menippean satires), and his writings were of no special cultural interest or “high seriousness.” Nor, it now appears, was the form original with him. Menippus bestowed his name on a style of attack that had been practised for centuries before him, yet he did set the basic patterns and tone of the form for use by subsequent writers. Because Menippean satire is particularly given to paradoxy and topsy-turvyness, students of the form often point out with some relish that one or another writer who antedates Menippus, such as Isocrates, or Homer, actually wrote the first Menippean satire. A Greek Cynic from Gadara, Menippus lived in the first half of the third century BC.1 Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 1

This note is taken from Eugene Korkowski, p. 70: See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, ed. and trans. R. D. Hicks (The Loeb Classical Library, 1925, l959), 2 vols., VI.8. This date is confirmed by Donald R. Dudley’s A History of Cynicism (London, 1937), pp. 69–70. Oehler is alone in placing Menippus’ floruit at around 60 BC; this date conflicts with the credit given to Menippus by Meleager (fl. ca. 100 BC) in The Greek Anthology (ed. and trans. W. R. Paton, 5 vols. [The Loeb Classical Library, 1917, 1960]), Book VII, Epigrams 417 and 418. The Greek historian Strabo (63 BC–24 AD) refers to Menippus in his Geography (ed. and trans. Horace L. Jones, 8 vols. [The Loeb Classical Library, 1930, 1961]) without assigning any date (XVI.2.29), but he mentions Menippus in a series of famous men from Gadara, only the last of whom, Theodorus, is “of my own time.” Quintilian, furthermore, says that the “other kind” of satire besides the Roman satires that began with Lucilius (ca. 180–103 BC) is “an even older type of satire,” in his Institutes (ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. [The Loeb Classical Library, 1922, 1961], X.1.95). Valerius Probus (first century AD) wrote that Menippus “by far preceded” (“longe praecesserat”) Varro (see A. Riese, Saturarum Menippearum: Reliquiae [Leipzig, 1865], p. 7—though Riese sides with Oehler). Lucian’s claim in “Bis Accusatus” is that he “dug up” Menippus, “a prehistoric dog” (Lucian, ed. and trans. A. M. Harmon et al., 8 vols. [The

10

Chapter Two

the main source for information about Menippus, presents remarkably little, aside from one anecdote about his usury and his death in despair following a robbery of his house. Otherwise, he offers the following key information. There is no seriousness in him; but his books overflow with laughter, much the same as those of his contemporary Meleager.... Some authorities question the genuineness of the books attributed to him, alleging them to be by Dionysus and Zopyrus of Colaphon, who, writing them for a joke, made them over to Menippus as a person able to dispose of them advantageously... However, the writings of Menippus the Cynic are thirteen in number: Necromancy Wills. Epistles artificially composed as if by the gods. Replies to the physicists and mathematicians and grammarians; and A book about the birth of Epicurus; and The School’s reverence for the twentieth day. Besides other works.2

Menippus was not a very orthodox Cynic, if the remarks about his usury be true. (In any case, “orthodox Cynic” is an oxymoron.) The comment that “his books overflow with laughter” is reinforced by Strabo,3 who speaks of him as spoudogeloios, as mixing serious and comic, high and low, in matter as well as manner. This serio-comicality, one of the main ways in which Cynicism informs Menippean satire, is a kind of shock tactic whereby “high” or elevated matters are accorded “low” treatment or style, and vice versa, as when mundane trivialities are accorded all the pomp and procedure of erudite scholarship. Handy examples of the latter process abound in the literature of paradoxical encomia, e.g., Gorgias’

Loeb Classical Library, 1913–1961], vol. 3, p. 147). For Oehler, see William Smith’s article in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, ed. William Smith, 3 vols. (New York, 1967), vol. 2, p. 1042. An archaeological datum that bears on the issue is that, when returning to earth in Lucian’s “Icaromenippus” (an imitation of a Menippus satire), Menippus spies the erect Colossus of Rhodes, a monument that stood only from 283–227 BC Cf. Lucian, ed. and trans. A. M. Harmon, vol. 2, p. 287, note. 2 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, II, pp. 103–105. 3 Strabo, Geography, ed. and trans., Horace L. Jones, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1930, 1961), XVI.2.29.

Menippism and Cynicism

11

Encomium Helenae, Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, and Swift’s “Digression in Praise of Madness.”4 To make of Menippus more than a convenient point of reference is to attribute to him too much originality. He invented neither the Menippean style nor the Menippean structure nor the Cynic attitude. Yet like Shakespeare, whose name adorns a sonnet form he did not invent, Menippus seems to have been regarded in antiquity as the outstanding

4

The use of paradox, as Chesterton has noted, is to awaken the mind, to jolt it into a condition of extra awareness—precisely the effect that Menippean satire strives for at every turn: Take a good paradox, like that of Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with the necessities.” It is amusing and therefore arresting; it has a fine air of defiance; it contains a real if romantic truth. It is all part of the fun that it is stated almost in the form of a contradiction in terms. But most people would agree that there would be considerable danger in basing the whole social system on the notion that necessaries are not necessary; as some have based the whole British Constitution on the notion that nonsense will always work out as common sense. … (Saint Thomas Aquinas—“The Dumb Ox” [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1933, rpt. New York: Doubleday & Company, Image Books, 1955/1956], p. 145) Menippists frequently resort to the paradoxical or mock encomium: practitioners include Varro, Seneca, Lucian, Synesius, Erasmus (Moriae encomium), Rabelais, Burton, Swift. Korkowski discusses many others. In her study Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), Rosalie Colie lists characteristics of paradoxical encomia. Her lists and discussion suggest an almost complete convergence of the paradoxical encomium with Menippean satire. Both forms challenge some orthodoxy via “oblique criticism of absolute judgment or absolute convention” (p. 10). Both work paradoxically “by drawing attention to themselves and to the limitations they question or deny” (p. 12). Both “remove all standards by which the discourse may be measured to keep the reference wholly internal, so that readers are constantly off-balance” (p. 18). A great many examples of both have no formal ending (pp. 21 and 35), and both demand an audience or, rather, include the audience and its assumptions in the structure of the discourse. The more sophisticated the audience, the better. “As an acute critic of paradox has said, a paradox cannot be paraphrased. If it can, it is flat and dull: if it is flat and dull, then it is not a paradox” (p. 35). This is precisely the problem with the critical approaches to Menippean satire used to date. All of the critics define Menippean satire by describing it, and description is a form of paraphrase. Yet even such able critics as John Dryden and Northrop Frye have been frustrated in the attempt to come to grips with Menippean satire descriptively. To date, no single description or set of descriptions has been formulated that will serve adequately to define Menippean satire. My “Digression” (below) on Menippean clichés may illustrate the problem.

12

Chapter Two

practitioner of the form. It was Varro who attached Menippus’ name to the satires. Cynics were, on the whole, uncompromising in their antagonism to “philosophy” of whatever ilk, and to all forms of systematized learning or living. The burden of their barking seems to have been a kind of fundamentalist humanism: to the great, remember you’re human; to the proud, remember you’re limited; to the learned, examine your ignorance; and to the rest, discard all your illusions and pretences. Who would call a constantly reiterated “Wake up, you clowns!” a philosophy?5 As the satirist Wyndham Lewis points out, …the most virtuous and well-proportioned of men is only a shadow, after all, of some perfection; a shadow of an imperfect, and hence an “ugly” sort. And as to laughter, if you allow it in one place you must, I think, allow it in another. Laughter—humour and wit—has a function similar to that of art. It is the preserver much more than the destroyer. And, in a sense, everyone should be laughed at or else no one should be laughed at.6

Pure Cynicism. On these terms, laughing at individuals is just snobbery. So the audience is to be satirized, if anyone. Lewis’ remarks betray him as an ancient Cynic in modern dress. Juanita Williams presents the main tenets of the “practical Cynic”:

5

Wayne Booth found a parallel in his study of irony. Menippean satire rewards the reader for staying awake by increasing the enjoyment. By contrast, but in the same vein, “It is the virtue of irony—perhaps its supreme moral justification—that it wakes men by punishing them for sleep.... No one can be perpetually alert, yet perpetual alertness is in a sense what is required. About all we can say, beyond shouting ‘Wake up,’ is that we should modulate our confidence in our results to the degree of alertness we know ourselves to have shown.” (A Rhetoric of Irony [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974], p. 224) 6 “The Greatest Satire Is Non-Moral,” in Men Without Art (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), p. 109. At this point, Cynicism intersects the venerable tradition of the medieval and Renaissance court fool. The fool, like the street-corner Cynic, had licence to pick on everyone and thus served a valuable function in keeping things in play. When he badgered the king, the court could see plainly just how far the man might be pushed today before he got angry and lost his temper. When, on the other hand, he badgered the courtiers, the king (and other courtiers) could see what temperature that water was today and how deeply he could plunge. As well, the fool could kid someone surly or moody out of a bad humour—or tease someone into a worse one if it suited a purpose. In some ways, the fool was in charge of the court and thereby of the kingdom. The rules of the game forbade attacking or punishing the fool for playing his role.

Menippism and Cynicism

13

The Cynic tradition presented the surly, independent philosopher, the mocker of Platonic universals. The Cynic held that there could be no possible syntheses of things; there were no classes of objects, only the objects themselves. His emphasis on man’s individuality caused him to condemn the artificiality of wealth and social position; religious dogmas and forms of government he held as harmful to the individual. Cynicism rejects the complexities of the philosophical systems of the philosophus gloriosus; it advocates the simple and useful acceptance of fortune with a peaceful mind. The peaceful mind must scorn material goods; the mean and sure estate is best. Lucian shows Menippus painting the portrait of the human pageant; fortune equips men with the costumes of beauty and social position; after death, the costumes are removed and all men are equal.7

Cynic/Menippean satires attack excesses of all kinds, whether of ignorance, of (as Northrop Frye puts it) “maddened pedantry,” of luxury, snobbery, power—in short, anything that obscures continued clear awareness of one’s essential humanity and the limitations it imposes. To hold, however, that the Cynics espoused “the mean and sure estate”8 is to miss the point. An alert Cynic might regard such Icarian advice as preaching bourgeois mediocrity—neither too high nor too low, too athletic nor too bookish, etc. Too often, such fence riding just conceals servile somnambulism. The schlock tactics inherent in low-and-motley satire militate particularly against this sort of escapism, and a great many of the satires (e.g., Bouvard et Pécuchét) take just this mediocrity as a main subject. A marked playfulness characterizes all Menippism and forms its special decorum. This playful quality (or strategy) generally distinguishes Menippism from other forms of satire: it diverts attention to the style and to the satire itself as an object. Style must never show for the serious poetic because that means (1) someone is propagandizing us or (2) someone is having a good time for no good reason. Likewise, style and subject must cohere into a decorum. Just the opposite for play poetic. It aims at style/subject discontinuities. It depends on puns and other false wits. It fails to honour metaphor as a godterm, ignoring it altogether or cooking up outrageous ones.9

7

“Towards a Definition of Menippean Satire,” Diss., Vanderbilt University, 1966, pp. 1–2. 8 Williams, passim. E.g., “Saturarum Menippearum Reliquiae presents a golden mean as the solution to the evils of the excess abundant in the Roman system of life” (p. 2). 9 Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 113.

14

Chapter Two

Play prohibits Menippists from assuming a moral stance. For moralizing seems to demand rigid consistency of attitude and tone, if not of style— shackles shunned by Menippists and actually denied them by their Cynicism. To this day, the wellsprings of Menippean, Cynic satire are to be found in certain traits of the Cynic outlook and attitude.10 As one of Petronius’ modern translators observes, “a main characteristic of Menippean satire was the union of humour and philosophy”—of the long face and the grin.11 Cynics, Diogenes in 10

Accounts of Cynicism are available in Diogenes Laertius, and in Julian the Apostate’s epistles “To the Uneducated Cynics” and “To the Cynic Heracleios”— admonitions to the lazy “new Cynics” to adopt the moral ideals and asceticism of old. Epictetus’ “On the Calling of a Cynic,” less detailed than Julian’s account, was long regarded as definitive. Donald R. Dudley’s A History of Cynicism (London: Methuen and Company, 1937) is a more useful account. 11 Ed., J. P. Sullivan, Petronius—The Satyricon and the Fragments (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1965, 1972), p. 14. In his rejoinder, “To One Who Said ‘You’re a Prometheus in Words,’ ” Lucian discussed his blend of comedy and the philosophic dialogue: Dialogue and comedy were not entirely friendly and compatible from the beginning. Dialogue used to sit at home by himself and indeed spend his time in the public walks with a few companions; Comedy gave herself to Dionysus and joined him in the theatre, had fun with him, jested and joked, sometimes stepping in time to the pipe and generally riding on anapests. Dialogue’s companions she mocked as “Heavy-thinkers,” “High-talkers,” and suchlike. She had one delight—to deride them and drown them in Dionysiac liberties. She showed them now walking on air and mixing with the clouds, now measuring sandals for fleas—her notion of heavenly subtleties, I suppose! Dialogue however took his conversations very seriously, philosophising about nature and virtue, So, in musical terms, there were two octaves between them, from highest to lowest. Nevertheless, I have dared to combine them as they are into a harmony, though they are not in the least docile and do not easily tolerate partnership. (Lucian, vol. VI, pp. 425–47) Lucian defends himself in a suit brought by Rhetoric (for desertion) and another by Dialogue (for maltreatment). Dialogue charges: I was formerly dignified, and pondered upon the gods and nature and the cycle of the universe, treading the air high up above the clouds where “great Zeus in heaven driving his winged car” sweeps on; but he dragged me down when I was already soaring above the zenith and mounting on “heaven’s back,” and broke my wings, putting me on the same level as the common herd. Moreover, he took away from me the respectable tragic mask that I had, and put another upon me that is comic, satyr-like, and almost ridiculous. Then he unceremoniously penned me up with Jest and Satire and Cynicism and Eupolis and Aristophanes, terrible men for mocking all that is holy and scoffing at all that is right. At last he even dug up and thrust in upon me Menippus, a

Menippism and Cynicism

15

particular, like Burton’s Democritus Junior, were oft referred to as “laughing philosophers” for they refused to take seriously any political, private, social, intellectual, or other form of phoney sobriety. Actually, the Cynics did not have a philosophical system: they regarded such things as vanities. Such vanities, they held, all too often became abstract ends-inthemselves that turned the attention from its proper objects, reality and one’s essential humanity. I. G. Kidd gives a succinct account in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Cynic saw himself as “scout and herald of god,” dedicating his own labors as a reconnaissance for others to follow: he was the “watchdog of mankind” to bark at illusion, the “surgeon” whose knife sliced the cancer of cant from the minds of others. Cynics deliberately adopted shamelessly shocking extremes of speech and action to jolt the attention and illustrate their attack on convention...The Cynics did not offer arguments to intellectuals, whose theories they despised as useless....thus the more formal types of philosophical instruction were abandoned and three new literary genres fostered: the chreia, or short anecdotal quip with a pungent moral tang; the diatribe, or popular sermon in conversation; and Menippean satire.12

Korkowski remarks13 that the chreia has little in common with either the structure or themes of Menippean satire as evidenced by Dudley14 and The Greek Anthology.15 Bion is generally credited with inventing the diatribe (he antedates Menippus slightly): Diogenes Laertius reports that he was “fond of display and great at cutting things up, anything with a jest, using vulgar names for things. Because he employed every style of speech in combination, Eratosthenes, we hear, said of him that he was the first to deck philosophy with ‘bright-flowered robes.’ ”16 Korkowski comments: prehistoric dog with a very loud bark, it seems, and sharp fangs, a really dreadful dog who bites unexpectedly because he grins when he bites. Have I not been dreadfully maltreated, when I no longer occupy my proper role but play the comedian and the buffoon and act out extraordinary plots for him? What is most monstrous of all, I have been turned into a surprising blend, for I am neither afoot nor ahorseback, neither prose nor verse, but seem to my hearers a strange phenomenon made up of different elements, like a Centaur. (vol. III, pp. 145–47) 12 Ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1967), vol. II, p. 285. 13 p. 37. 14 p. 113. 15 Ed. and trans., W. R. Paton (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1917, 1960), vol. IV.366. 16 The Greek Anthology, vol. IV.52.

16

Chapter Two This description is not so far from what has been written regarding the structure of Menippean satire: the phrase “to deck philosophy” (ILORVRMLDQ DQTLQD HQHGXVHQ), moreover, points up an ambiguity in the Cynic’s attitudes toward learning which carries over into Menippean writings (especially since it can be translated “to tart up philosophy,” a phrase involving a pun on Bion’s mother, who was a notorious prostitute).17 The problem is: do Bion and the other Cynics mock philosophy? are they trying to make philosophy known to the unschooled? or are they advancing their own doctrine at the expense of rival theories?18

These questions are crucial since, if one adduces to the Menippists an intent to teach or preach content or concepts, with the stylistic and structural oddities of the satires as nothing but a lure to the reader, then the wit and play and themes of Menippean satire can be dismissed as trite and inconsequential. Curiously, many classicists consider Menippean satire as having died out in antiquity. Modern literary opinion, on the other hand, tends to be more wide-ranging and to include as Menippean a great number of works that conform to one or another descriptive formula. The result is a lack of consensus as to both what Menippean satire is and (consequently) what works should be considered Menippean. Writing “On Certain Terms,” Hilaire Belloc made the following observations about the term “cynic.”19 Consider the word ‘cynic,’ and its derivatives ‘cynical’ and ‘cynicism.’ It would be academic and silly to tie down that word to its Greek derivation, which is simply ‘doglike.’ According to that, a ‘cynic’ would be a person who wagged his tail, barked and got in the way of motor cars (which, alas! too few cynics manage to do, and too many dogs). But the Greeks applied it to a set of philosophers who denied convention and even morals. Thus it came to mean a man who, being accused of a shameful action, boasted himself indifferent to blame; a man who despised and neglected morals. It is a very powerful word, powerfully condemning something which is dissolvent of human society, and an enemy thereof; something which it is our business to combat, as we combat any poison. One ought to be able to say, as our fathers said, ‘That is cynical,’ meaning ‘that is abominable.’ It ought to connote indignation against the abandonment of the soul’s duty to maintain rules of right living.

17

The phrase is translated this way by Kidd, op. cit., p. 285. Korkowski, p. 38. 19 From A Conversation with an Angel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928, 1931), pp. 253–55. 18

Menippism and Cynicism

17

Now observe what the popular Press has done with that word. It has obliterated the just meaning and put nothing in its place. It has attached to the word ‘cynic’ the meaning ‘one who is the exact opposite of a cynic,’ to wit, a man who is indignant against evil, notes it, dwells upon it, and protests against it. A man is called ‘cynical’ to-day if he emphasizes the degree in which his fellow-men are falling away from goodness, if he points out corruption in the State, cruelty and hypocrisy in individuals, exposes self-deception (or, rather, the attempt at it, for real self-deception is impossible to sane men), if he traces the motives of avarice, selfishness and cowardice, he will be called a ‘cynic.’ ‘The cynic,’ the writer hurriedly writes, ‘would tell us that the mainspring of commercial activity is covetousness.’ Or, again, ‘Mr. Jones has cynically said that you cannot trust trustees.’ Or, again, ‘The cynic who is perpetually lowering our confidence in ourselves.’ Now all this is not to be cynical; all this is not the action of the cynic; it is the action, perhaps, exaggerated, but clearly intense, of a man complaining of evil; of a man inflamed with anger at the power of evil. Whereas a cynic is a man accepting evil with a smile. No harm would be done if the word had been frankly transposed (as many words have been) to a new meaning, and if some new word had arisen expressing the reality which was formerly expressed by the word ‘cynic,’ in its original sense. But no such word is proposed, nor has any arisen. What has happened has been a breakdown in that instrument of thought necessary to human society called human speech.

The following chapters cover both the traditional outlook and modern opinion on what constitutes Menippism, and they examine the strengths and limitations of these critical approaches.

18

Chapter Two

François Rabelais, Gargantua, 1532

PART II CONCEPT AND PERCEPT

CHAPTER THREE THE CONVENTIONAL OUTLOOK

The consensus among classicists20 has it that Menippean satires intermingled prose and verse (frequently in the form of a dialogue), that in the Latin literature Greek phrases were often mixed with the Latin, and that Menippism died out after the second century AD.21 Mingling— 20

Korkowski has done much of the spadework here. I give his note in full (Korkowski, pp. 71–72, note 9): Nineteenth-century scholars who have characterized Menippean satire as a mingling of prose and verse include J. Lenprière, Bibliotheca Classica (New York, 1836), p. 654; William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (London, 1853), pp. 1008-1009; Charles Anthon, A Classical Dictionary (New York, 1853), p. 1372; Oskar Seyffert, A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, revised by Henry Nettleship and J.E. Sandys (London, 1899), p. 558. Rudolf Hirzel identifies the mixture of prose and verse as the essential characteristic of Menippean form, in Der Dialog: Ein Literarhistorischer Versuch, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1895) vol. 1, p. 382. Among twentieth-century studies...others who point to the characteristic of a verseprose medley are J. Wright Duff, The Literary History of Rome, ed. A. M. Duff, third edition (New York, 1953, 1960), pp. 244-246; Duff’s sequel volume, also edited by his son, The Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age, third edition (New York, 1964), p. 15; G. M. A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics (London, 1965), p. 161; The Oxford Classical Dictionary, eds. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scuddard (Oxford, 1970), p. 672 (their source is Duff); Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities, ed. Harry Thurstone Peck (New York, 1965), p. 1031; The New Century Classical Handbook, ed. Catherine B. Avery (New York, 1962) p. 701; The Encyclopedia Britannica, eleventh edition (New York, 1909), entry for “Menippus”; Alvin B. Kernan, The Cankered Muse (New Haven, 1959), p. 13; Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, 1962), p. 141; Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature, trans. James Willis and Cornelius de Heer (New York, 1966), pp. 670-671; and P. K. Elkin, The Augustan Defense of Satire (Oxford, 1973), pp. 36-37. 21 However, a remark of F. J. E. Raby’s attests a more prolonged virility: “Menippus of Gadara, a Cynic, made a new and fruitful literary creation by mixing prose and verse. We shall trace this mixed form through Martianus Capella and

22

Chapter Three

not blending—verse and prose handily sets this mode of satire apart from the more decorous formal verse satire of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, which preserved a strictly homogeneous style and tone. Scholars generally cite Menippus as the original, and cite Varro’s Saturae Menippae (fragments of which survive), Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (the -cyn- in the title invokes the pun on dog and Cynic: see chapter eight, below), and Lucian’s and Petronius Arbiter’s works as among the earliest Menippean satires. A strong affinity between serio-comicality and the mixing of verse and prose becomes evident when both are regarded as ways to flout or violate decorum. For one thing, verse was ever considered a more elevated and more concentrated form of statement than prose. Yet it is customary to pass over this aspect of verse’s nature when defining Menippism as a species of satiric writing and to focus instead on surface features that can be listed descriptively, an approach that limits scholars and critics by narrowing their view. The nearly complete silence about Menippean satires among ancient commentators may be explained, as Eugene Korkowski suggests, by their “lowness” and by their often pamphlet-like nature. Along with his immense corpus of other works, Varro evidently produced over six hundred Menippean satires—an unlikely feat unless they were brief, poster-like broadsides or pamphleteering.22 Quintilian, our oldest authority on the nature of Menippean satire, had this to say:

Boethius to Bernard Sylvestris and Alan of Lille” (A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957] vol. I, p. 17). 22 Ulrich Knoche observes that “the catalogue of Varro’s writings in Jerome contains mention of 150 books of Menippean satires. Not a single satire has survived complete and none can be reconstructed in detail. What we have consists of about 90 titles and 600 fragments. These have been preserved mainly through the old grammarians, especially Nonius, while a certain number have been added by Gellius, Macrobius, and others.” He adds, “in Latin only Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis provides a clear idea of the nature of the genre,” and calls Varro’s satires “pamphlets”—the modern equivalent would be something akin to the comic book. Knoche, Roman Satire, trans., Edwin S. Ramage (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1975), p. 53. He cites Gellius, Probus, and Cicero as evidence that Varro called his satires “Menippean” (p. 159, n. 6). Probus, the firstcentury-AD commentator on Vergil’s eclogues, notes that, like Menippus, Varro polished his satires with verses of all sorts: “quod est quoque omnigeno carmine Satiras suas expoliverat.” Cited in Isaac Casaubon, De satyrica Graecorum poesi, & Romanorum satira libri duo (Paris, 1605), rpt., vol. 2, p. 262.

The Conventional Outlook

Holbein’s sketch in the margin of a first edition of The Praise of Folly.

23

24

Chapter Three There is, however, another even older type of satire which derives its variety not merely from verse but from an admixture of prose as well. Such were the satires composed by Terentius Varro, the most learned of all Romans.23

Aside from comments by the Menippists themselves, either through imitation—a form of commentary—or through their apologiae, the only other critical remarks from antiquity that concern the structure of Menippean satire occur in Cicero’s dialogue Academica. In it, Varro observes that when, in his Menippean works, Cicero satirized early Roman thinkers he used the same manner of speech as Menippus used to ridicule Greek philosophy (dialectic): And nevertheless in those old writers of our country whom in my imitation (it is not a translation) of Menippus I treated with a certain amount of ridicule, there is a copious admixture of elements derived from the inmost depths of philosophy, and many utterances in good logical form; and though in my funeral orations these were more easily intelligible to less learned readers if they were tempted to pursue them by a certain attractiveness of style, when we come to the prefaces to my Antiquities, in these my aim was, if only I attained it, to write for philosophers.24

Though he doesn’t mention the prose-verse mixture outright, he makes it clear that he did put on the serio-comic attitude, at least in those works in which he dealt with dialecticians. Since the favourite targets of Menippists have traditionally been philosophers and schools of philosophy (and particularly their efforts to systematize knowledge), Varro was probably alluding in these remarks to most of his satires. Further, he refers to a group of the satires as “jocund laudations,” or mock encomia. He suggests the “lowness” of nearly all of this output when he calls his audience the “minus docti” and admits that he courted their attention by being amusing. Varro’s Menippism stands in contrast to the serious style he claims to have employed in the Antiquities, one designed to attract and hold the attention of philosophers. In Cicero’s Academica, Varro is depicted as being an adherent of the old Socratic academy, a conservative position quite in line with his standing as a Grammarian and as head of the library that was attached to

23

Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans., H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1922, 1961), X.i.95, vol. 4, pp. 54–55. 24 Cicero, Academica, ed. and trans., H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1935, 1961), I.2.8, pp. 420–21.

The Conventional Outlook

25

Augustus’ temple of Palatine Apollo.25 Korkowski claims that, “outside of the apologies of Menippists for their own works,”26 no other criticism 25 Julius had commissioned Varro “to gather as many Greek and Latin works as he could into a library, which was then to become a centre of studies with the indefatigable antiquarian Varro himself at its head...Scholars disagree whether the Palatine Library and Temple of Apollo subsequently opened by Augustus in 28 AD was the successor to this scheme of Julius, or whether it was an independent foundation made after Asinius Pollio had completed Julius’ original project, but the main idea seems clear. Just as in Alexandria, so in Rome poetry and the arts were to be under the special protection of the court and government...” (J. K. Newman, Augustus and the New Poetry [Bruxelles-Berchem: Latomus, 1967], p. 37). In these remarks in the Academica, Varro is debating with Cicero the relative merits of schools and academies of philosophy, old and new, Greek and Roman. There seems to be in his statements an undercurrent of the antipathy between Grammar and Dialectic that in later centuries erupted into open warfare as the prolonged battles of “the Ancients and the Moderns.” As a reform emperor, Augustus tried to revitalize and reunite aspects of Roman culture that had become diluted or moribund under his predecessors. One of his reforms involved a convergence of poetics (and poetic wisdom—Grammar and the tradition of commentary) and priestcraft. A coterie of serious scholars and writers including Horace and Virgil was established, and with them arose the concept of Vates as priests of Apollo and of Roman culture. J. K. Newman discusses the matter at length in Augustus and the New Poetry, op cit. For example, he notes: “In his priestly character...Apollo was well suited to the new concept of the poet—a character which, in view of the prominence of Apollo in Alexandrian poetry, did not at all mean that older traditions had to be repudiated. Virgil made the foundation of this temple, and the cult of the God associated with it, a key concept in the Aeneid” (p. 115). The vates were more than merely priests, poets, or soothsayers: they were in the vanguard of the culture as leaders, explorers, navigators. Their task was to point to a better world and guide their hearers to new and bold adventures. This task is not unrelated to that of Menippism in that it also places great emphasis on perception via the arts. In our time, it has been announced anew in the writings of such poets as Pound and Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. Horace states the matter majestically in the Ars poetica: ...a new concept of what the poet ought under Augustus to feel about his calling is put before us. Like Orpheus and Amphion he is to found civilisation and cities: the language is reminiscent of the tasks assigned to the great heroes, with whom Augustus himself is so often compared. It is after them that Homer acquires his fame. Lyric too comes into the list of genres named. Horace is, as we remarked, part of the battle still, one of the vates. The whole section ends with Musa lyrae sollers et cantor Apollo—an allusion to the temple of the Palatine Apollo and its cult statue of FLTDUZGRV ‘ASROOZQ, standing as it did so close to the emperor’s own palace. (Newman, op. cit., pp. 334–35)

26

Chapter Three

touches on the structure of Menippean satire until that of Julius Caesar Scaliger in the sixteenth century. The principal difficulty faced by those who have attempted to define Menippean satire arises from their attempts to approach it objectively and descriptively instead of tackling it as a rhetorical strategy concerning an audience. Dryden is among them: he proposes Varro as the first author of Menippean satires because he imitated the Cynic manner of Menippus: ...not that Menippus had written any satires (for his were either dialogues or epistles), but that Varro imitated his style, his manner, and his facetiousness. All that we know further of Menippus and his writings, which are wholly lost, is that by some he is esteemed, as, amongst the rest, by Varro; by others he is noted of cynical impudence and obscenity: that he was much given to those parodies, which I have already mentioned; that is, he often quoted the verses of Homer and the tragic poets, and turned their serious meaning into something that was ridiculous; whereas Varro’s satires are by Tully [Cicero] called absolute, and more elegant and various poems.27

This comment suggests (and supports Korkowski’s contention) that the Menippean tradition is a mimetic, rather than an ideal, one. Yet Dryden makes it clear that a prose-verse mixture is not a sine qua non when he remarks, “amongst the moderns we may reckon the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus, Barclay’s Euphormio,” and, “of the same stamp…Mother Hubbard’s Tale” in Spenser as well as his own “Absalom” and

The obvious question is why did Varro, so evidently and completely conservative, stoop to “low” Menippean pamphleteering? That he did so strongly suggests that he saw in the activity no contradiction or compromise of his position, and that the Menippean form of satire could in fact be regarded in his time as (or was being fashioned by him into) a form of attack consistent with conservatism and traditional Grammar. This point deserves further attention for in our own traditions Menippean satire developed into the satiric arm of Grammar, a position reaffirmed by Joyce. 26 Korkowski, p. 22. 27 “A Discourse Concerning the Originall and Progress of Satire,” in Essays of John Dryden, sel. and ed., W. P. Ker, M.A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), p. 66. He cites (p. 65) the passage in the Academica and draws out of it that Varro “so tempered philology [grammar] with philosophy, that his work was a mixture of them both,” and concludes “that Varro was one of those writers whom they called spoudogeloioi, studious of laughter; and that, as learned as he was, his business was more to divert his reader, than to teach him.” Dryden’s tone suggests some disapproval of such frivolity on the part of an otherwise serious scholar.

The Conventional Outlook

27

“MacFleckno.”28 When he comes to define Menippean satire, however, Dryden falls back on the conventional descriptive formula: “This sort of satire was not only composed of several sorts of verse, like those of Ennius, but was also mixed with prose; and Greek was sprinkled amongst the Latin.”29 Of the deficiencies of this approach Dryden was clearly aware, for he buttressed it with remarks about imitation and the Cynic manner. Evidently, too, he felt uncomfortable with his own treatment: he made it a digression bridging the two main parts of the essay. Part one discusses definitions of satire; it paves the way for his main objective, an essay on the Roman satirists Horace and (to a lesser extent) Juvenal, the darlings of the English Augustans.30 Most of our modern commentators have fared no better than Dryden. Perhaps the dean of modern classicists is C. A. van Rooy. He, using Varro’s satires as the touchstone, adheres to the stock formula, “a medley of verse and prose,” but adds, surprisingly, “with a strong moral function.”31 J. P. Sullivan carries this only slightly further in his introduction to Petronius, where he notes that the Menippean was “a branch of Roman satire, whose characteristic content became—despite its earlier broadness—a commentary on life and morals.”32 So general a description might apply to nearly anything, so he adds: “the one difference there might be between Menippean and regular satire is the strong 28

Dryden, p. 67. (By mimesis, this would draw in the “Dunciad” as well.) A bit later, however, he proposes that his own manner in Absalom and Achitophel has been Horatian as it is “the best for amending manners...” (pp. 93–94). 29 Dryden, p. 64. 30 It would appear that Dryden realized, as he wrote, the insufficiency of his treatment of the Menippists: he offered the descriptive definition, tried to emend it with remarks on imitation, found that inadequate, and tried to gloss over the matter by tossing a list of names before the reader’s gaze. (Lucian, Petronius, Apuleius, Seneca, Julian the Apostate, Erasmus, Barclay, Spenser, and his own—all occur within a few lines.) Then he abruptly drops the subject, returns briefly to the etymology of “satire,” and proceeds to his preferred objective, Horace and Juvenal. 31 C. A. van Rooy, Studies in Classical Satire and Related Literary Theory (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1965). Of Petronius he says that if “this novel cannot be called a Menippean ‘satura’ in the original Varronian sense (i.e. a medley of verse and prose with strong moral function), the form at any rate is Menippean” (p. 154)—that is, “consisting of a medley of prose and a large variety of metres” (p. 155). In fact, as I shall demonstrate, the extreme playfulness of Cynic satire precludes adopting a sober, strong, and consistent “moral” posture: that is more Juvenal’s bailiwick. 32 Ed., J. P. Sullivan, Petronius—The Satyricon and the Fragments (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1965, 1972), p. 15.

Chapter Three

28

tradition of humour and fantasy, which is clearly indicated in the titles of Varro’s lost works.”33 It is useful to know that Menippism is irregular satire. But the weakness of the descriptive approach—paraphrase in disguise—arises chiefly from its strengths. Description implies objectivity: it allows the user to deal with the subject from a distance, from the outside, as an isolable thing-in-itself, as something that can be formulated and thus known by listing its contents or surface features. Unfortunately, as Cynics, the Menippists always tend to aim their shafts directly at the audience of the moment; they do not confine themselves to any one ideal pattern or form or set of themes or styles. The result: innovations of both form and structure occur frequently in Menippean satire, and the catalogue of features and themes soon grows unwieldy. One early innovation is Martianus Capella’s encyclopedic De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae. Composed between AD 410 and 429, it became the most popular book of the Middle Ages. The basic Menippean strategy of digressiveness (discussed infra) is of two orders in this work, for Martianus combines the prose-verse mixture with the Milesian tale or frame tale. (Notable examples of this last are The Thousand and One Nights and The Canterbury Tales.) An additional Menippean trait—or strategy—of the De nuptiis is an unprecedented playfulness with language, e.g., using puns allusively or to carry additional levels of meaning (another kind of digressiveness). Menippists have resorted to this tactic in every period from Apuleius to Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake is founded on it. Van Rooy tries description on Martianus: it fails, and he surrenders: In the contemporary encyclopedic work of Martianus Capella, the De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, which was composed between A.D. 410 and 429, we meet with a new development in respect of substantive ‘satura’. The poet proposes to set out in his ‘fabella’ the teaching on the seven liberal arts which he has derived from ‘Satura’ or ‘Satyra’...which under the influence of the allegoric tendency of the period appears as a personification. Though the manuscript tradition, which derives from one archetype, follows the orthography ‘Satyra’ in most of the eight passages in which the word occurs, the possibility cannot be ruled out that Martianus in fact wrote a ‘Satura’, and derived his orthography from Varro, who was one of his chief sources. Particularly significant in this respect is the fact, pointed out by Ullman, that the author at the conclusion of his work appears to allude directly to Varro’s etymology of “satura” as a medley. The form of the work, a medley of prose and verse, is comparable to the Menippean Satires of Varro, but in content and spirit it contains nothing either of the Varronian work or of Latin satire proper. At the same 33

Ibid.

The Conventional Outlook

29

time, while the word ‘satyricus’ is completely absent in the work, the author’s characterization of his personified ‘Satura’ or ‘Satyra’ is a pedantic medley of ‘satyricus’ in both its metaphorical senses ‘censorious, polemical’ and ‘jocular, witty,’ and of the preliterary ‘satura’ as a ‘miscellany.’34

The simple formula, prosimetrum style, used by classicists to identify Menippism, actually works for only a few of the satires—mainly those produced in antiquity. The first English novel, The Adventures of Master Freeman Jones (A discourse of the adventures passed by Master F.I., published as the work of “Meritum peter, grave and other sundry gentlemen”), also qualifies as a Menippean satire inasmuch as it consists of a mixture of verse and prose. In true Menippean fashion, none of the verses are attributed. A loose—and risqué—prose narrative joins them together. The novel is contained in the collection, A Hundredth Sundrie Flowres by George Gascoigne (1573).35 In his review36 of the recent publication of the volume, Colin Barrow summarizes the “plot”: It tells how a young man called F.J. visits a castle and falls in love with a woman (whom Gascoigne belatedly reveals is married) called Elinor. They begin their courtship by exchanging ambiguous and semi-anonymous letters. From verses ‘privily lost’ in Elinor’s chamber, passion grows to the point where she takes to her bed with a nose-bleed (which was, as Pigman’s excellent notes show, a symptom of passion). F.J. then intermingles prayers for her health, quack-doctoring, and whispers of flattery in an attempt to cure her. F.J. and Elinor eventually couple on the floor of a gallery, after he has stolen through the castle at night wearing nothing but his nightgown and his ‘naked sword’ (cue much ribald byplay). F.J. almost immediately becomes suspicious of his mistress’s manifest affection for her secretary, who returns after a period of absence with ‘his pens much sharpened’ (cue more ribald by-play). During another nocturnal assignation F.J. rapes his mistress in jealous rage. He then cannot quite understand why her attitude cools. The whole affair is punctuated and in part inspired by lyric poems written (purportedly) by F.J., either to his mistress or to express (variously) his delight and sufferings. These poems are frequently introduced by comments from the fictional narrator of the

34

Van Rooy, pp. 162–63. George Gascoigne, A Hundredth Sundrie Flowres, ed., G. W. Pigman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Full title of the novel: A Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F. J. 36 Colin Burrow in London Review of Books, vol . 23, no. 13, 5 July 2001. 35

30

Chapter Three

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy 1628

The Conventional Outlook

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy 1628

31

32

Chapter Three volume, G.T., which often suggest that they are not in fact the work of F.J., or that they are actually translations (‘I have heard F.J. saye, that he borowed th’inventiun of an Italian’). Gascoigne, like many Elizabethan poets who attempted to establish their courtly credentials, insists on a virtual identification between indirectness of expression and intensity of passion: so (and it is one of the best jokes in the work) when F.J. is at the peak of his pleasure, glorying in his possession of Elinor, he writes a string of love poems. But G.T. apologises that he has been unable to obtain them: the lover ‘being charged with inexprimable joyes’ is ‘enjoyned both by dutie and discretion to kepe the same covert’. The height of courtly passion is epitomised by perfect secrecy. And the representation within the work of passion as a secret tallies exactly with the pretence which frames it, that the whole narrative was a secret passed from F.J. to G.T. and from G.T. to H.W. and then mischievously passed from H.W. to the printer A.B.; for a ‘minde being fraught with delightes … having once disclosed them to any other, strayghtway we loose the hidden treasure of the same.’ A printed work purporting to derive from a private manuscript, F.J. was the centrepiece of Gascoigne’s attempt to create fictions which seemed to be connected with actual networks of people and their conduct. G.T. several times insists that this is a coterie work directed in manuscript to a tiny inner circle of observers. He does this immediately before he describes F.J. having his way with Elinor on the floor of the gallery: ‘Were it not that I knowe to whom I write, I would the more beware what I write.’ The work creates a particularly powerful illusion of reality as a result: even its areas of darkness, such as F.J.’s missing poems of courtship, contribute to the impression of its documentary authenticity as a record of inexpressible, unpublishable secrets. A fiction, after all, would have made up the missing poems too. It also stages itself as a work of massive indiscretion, as a secret affair which has stolen into print, and which has reached an audience for whom it was never intended.

The “medley of verse and prose”formula does not help with the broad spectrum of Menippizing that has developed since, particularly because the Cynic impulse has in our time invaded media other than print. In addition, modern audiences are not nearly as sensitive as were audiences in antiquity to the jarring effect of juxtaposing prose and verse in the same passage; consequently, much of the efficacy of that ploy is now lost. Our present-day attempts to define the form continue to rely heavily on description (a form of paraphrase), with one exception: the proposal that, since Menippists endlessly imitate and parody each other, one certain way to identify a Menippean satire is by examining it for pedigree.

CHAPTER FOUR THE SCHOOL OF FRYE VS. MIMESIS AND PEDIGREE

Contemporary literary criticism continues to approach the Menippea descriptively. Northrop Frye’s four pages on Menippean satire, in his essay “Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres,” have exerted considerable influence over scholarship on the subject in our time.37 It may not have been Frye’s intention to define Menippean satire or any other genre but rather to observe and discuss a number of broad literary constructs. Frye eludes the specific “prose-verse” description by this proposal: “At its most concentrated the Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern. The intellectual structure built up from the story makes for violent dislocations in the customary logic of narrative...”38 However, Frye adduces no reasons for digressiveness (“dislocations”), and he avoids according the audience any formal or causal relation to the work. He tries stretching the definitive description / descriptive definition to embrace the full variety of Menippean satirizing. Next, he tries descriptions from several other angles. The term “Menippean” can be applied to a form or to an attitude: “As the name of an attitude, satire is, we have seen, a combination of fantasy and morality.”39 The “Menippean adventure story” may thus be found at either pole, or anywhere between: “it may be pure fantasy, as it is in the literary fairy tale” (e.g., the Alice books), or it may be a “purely moral type,” a “serious vision of society as a single intellectual pattern, in other words a Utopia.”40 This description is so vague and abstract that it will fit anything from “Humpty Dumpty” or Peter Pan to “The Dunciad” or last year’s prognostications by futurologists at the Hudson Institute or the Club of Rome. 37 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, rpt. 1971), pp. 309–12. 38 Anatomy, p. 310. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid.

34

Chapter Four

Trying a different tack, he writes: “the short form of the Menippean satire is usually a dialogue or colloquy, in which the dramatic interest is in a conflict of ideas rather than of character.”41 This remark certainly applies to a great many of the satires but, again, is too broad to be of practical service in identifying the form. Frye does point out that, in one extension, dialogue is realized as “a full length cena or symposium, like the one that looms so large in Petronius.”42 At least one other critic has seized on a similar concept of dialogue and tried it out as a basis for understanding all Menippean satire.43 In a final attempt to come to grips with this elusive form, Frye discusses the Menippean attack on intellectual pretension: The novelist shows his exuberance either by an exhaustive analysis of human relationships, as in Henry James, or of social phenomena, as in Tolstoy. The Menippean satirist, dealing with intellectual themes and attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon. A species, or rather sub-species, of the form is the kind of encyclopedic farrago represented by Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists and Macrobius’ Saturnalia, where people sit at a banquet and pour out a vast mass of erudition on every subject that might conceivably come up in a conversation.44

Earlier, Frye has amplified on the theme of satiric deployment of erudition, mock or real, in attacking the maddened pedantry of the philosophus gloriosus, or glorified philosopher.45 Here, he extends the 41 Ibid. On a more helpful note, Frye points out (pp. 230–31, 309) that there are no characters in Menippean satire, but rather caricatures. In other words, the form makes no pretensions to realism or representational verisimilitude. 42 Ibid. 43 I.e., Bakhtin. Vide infra. 44 Anatomy, p. 311. Of the relations between Encyclopedism and Grammar in the ancient world, and of the antipathy between Grammarians and Dialecticians, more will be said in the next two chapters. 45 Anatomy, pp. 230–31. Juanita Williams has made this a basis of her study, “Towards a Definition of Menippean Satire” (Diss., Vanderbilt University, 1966). Frye amplifies: “the satiric attitude is here neither philosophical nor antiphilosophical, but an expression of the hypothetical form of art. Satire on ideas is only the special kind of art that defends its own creative detachment...Satire on systems of reasoning, especially on the social effects of such systems, is art’s first line of defence against all such invasions” (p. 231). At this turn, Menippean satire is rendered abstract and ideal, more than ever removed from rather than placed in relation to experience, treated as a matter of absolute concepts rather than of

The School of Frye vs. Mimesis and Pedigree

35

notion of encyclopedic farrago so that it will embrace the literary anatomy as essentially Menippean. Certainly, The Anatomy of Melancholy is a thoroughgoing Menippean satire. But to argue, as Frye does, that “we may as well adopt Anatomy as a convenient name to replace the cumbersome and in modern times rather misleading ‘Menippean satire,’”46 is unjustified. Using Burton and ignoring Donne, Frye’s argument amounts to attributing to the Anatomy the characteristics of Menippean satire and then claiming that a number of Menippean satires (e.g., The Compleat Angler, Tristram Shandy, Sartor Resartus, Don Quixote, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake), and a number of works that are not Menippean (e.g., The Consolation of Philosophy), are actually Anatomies.47

perception. In these terms, Menippean satire itself becomes another form of “philosophical pedantry”—the very thing Frye says it attacks—“a form of romanticism or the imposing of oversimplified ideals on experience” (ibid.). Nothing could be further removed from the Cynic impulse or spirit that invests the satires. As elsewhere, Frye has seized on a valid characteristic, but his own abstractionism in both treatment and conclusion renders his observations less than useful. 46 Anatomy, p. 312. 47 Anatomy, pp. 312–14. No one has, to date, taken up Frye’s tacit claim that his Anatomy of Criticism is a Menippean satire. Of course, it is not. Somewhat exasperated by Frye’s remarks, Eugene Korkowski retorts (pp. 442–43): Northrop Frye has suggested, in his own Anatomy, that the label “anatomy” should be used to replace the term “Menippean Satire” as a descriptive convenience for the genre that began with Menippus. The “Anatomy” has its heyday in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and if the term “anatomy” does not serve better here as a description of the genre, I suggest that it ought to be scrapped as a name for the genre, in relation to any period. While those sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works that are titled (or sub-titled) “Menippean satires” are much alike from one instance to the next— prose-verse moon-journeys ridiculing some philosophical or theological sect— no such homogeneity exists among examples of the “anatomy.” Paul JordanSmith has gone to the trouble of listing some “anatomies” antecedent to Burton’s first edition, and these turn out to be anything from “physiological” treatises (the anonymous Anatomy of a Hande in a Manner of a Dyall, [1544]), to poems on a cosmological theme (John Donne’s “Anatomie of the Worlde” [1611]), to prose excursions into the world of crime (Phillip Stubbes’ Anatomy of Abuses, [1583]). The Euphuists used the term for their episodic romances; John Lyly’s Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit was the first in this kind, and Robert Greene’s Arbasto, The Anatomy of Fortune (1584) was by no means the last. Thomas Nashe, a proven Menippist by the late 1590s, is only an incipient satirist, still trammelled by Euphuism, in his Anatomy of Absurdity (1589). (Nashe cites no Menippean precedents for his work, not even the ubiquitous

36

Chapter Four

Frye’s importance lies more in his broad influence than in his remarks about Menippean satire. His approach is entirely descriptive and classificatory and ultimately does not contribute to an understanding of the form. Moreover, he sedulously confines his discussion to a dialectic of thematic polarities in his search for an abstract, ideal generic formula.48 Frye is an able critic, with the entire range of Menippean satires from Varro to Joyce in his purview, so his recourse to several descriptive approaches to dissect his subject would seem ample confirmation that no single description or group of them will serve to define the form. In fact, it cannot be adequately approached in a descriptive or abstract manner, as the wealth of topics in the Digression chapter (below) illustrates. Probably, Frye resorted to arguing for the term “Anatomy” because his efforts at describing Menippean satire did not succeed. Description is a form of paraphrase and no substitute for analysis. Whatever the case, more than one dissertation has been based on Frye’s observations. Juanita Williams, in “Towards a Definition of Menippean Satire,” confines her examination to five ancient Menippists— Varro, Seneca, Lucian, Petronius, Apuleius—and three modern—Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire. She, too, approaches Menippean satire descriptively: ...as a serio-comic dramatic presentation, often allegorical and ultimately Cynical, involving the twofold error of attempting, on the one hand, to enclose the mutable world by means of the irrelevant and static abstract, and, on the other, of submitting to chaos itself through tangible indulgence and appeal to arms; and offering, in place of either, the solution of the mean and sure estate, the simple, useful life. It will be seen how the vehicles of dialogue, travelogue, and metamorphosis literature will best present the Menippean intent of contrasting the system of the philosophus gloriosus with that of the more practical Cynic.49

Encomium Moriae.) Definite application of the term “anatomy” to Menippean satire does appear in Harington’s Anatomie of the Metamorphosed Ajax, but it would be a fruitless task, I think, to search for Harington’s sources in other anatomies, unless in the example of Rabelais’ “Anatomy of Lent” (Le Quart Livre, 30, 31, 32). Yet few Englishmen, according to Brown, knew Rabelais’ work; Harington was among the first to do so. As a descriptive term for a consistent kind of writing, then, the term “anatomy” is much inferior to the term “Menippean satire”—though Frye claims it is “misleading.” 48 E.g., summing up his remarks on Menippism, he proposes, “The care that Joyce took to organize Ulysses and Finnegans Wake amounted nearly to obsession, but as they are not organized on familiar principles of prose fiction, the impression of shapelessness remains. Let us try our formulas on him” (p. 313). 49 Williams, “Towards a Definition of Menippean Satire,” op. cit, p. 1.

The School of Frye vs. Mimesis and Pedigree

Samuel Butler, The Loyal Satyrist, or, Hudibras in Prose, 1682

37

38

Chapter Four

Though her quarrels with Frye are negligible, she singles out his inclusion of Boethius as an indicator that this form of satire has been inadequately examined and defined. Her awareness of the Menippea is presented in terms of (descriptive) content analysis and comparison, and she neglects the interaction of the satire with its audience. Her conclusion draws together many of the characteristics noted by other authors, including lowness, digressiveness, joco- seriousness, and macaronic medleys of styles and of prose and verse: We have seen, then, that from its earliest definition as a medley of verse and prose, Menippean satire has itself undergone a metamorphosis, though with no loss of its original essence. The genre has evolved a more relaxed medley of the grave and comical, narrative and dialogue, banquetsymposium and storm-tossed journey, in order to mirror the essentially Menippean contention that life itself is a medley of circumstances which defy any easy metaphysical unity. The original olio of verse and prose was revived by the authors of the Satyre Menippée and by Samuel Butler; but those writers, too, were conscious of the Menippean principle that the lure of irrelevant semantics engenders falsehood and chaos. The Frenchmen and Samuel Butler present at the end of their satires the truth behind the sham of words; and in A Tale of a Tub, Swift uses the olio of narrative and digression to expose the fallacies of false semantics. Gulliver and Candide are mixtures of the serious and fanciful, narrative and dialogue.50

Unlike Frye and the Classicists, Williams does examine ways in which Cynic philosophy informs this particular branch of satiric activity, by way of explaining why it is termed Diogenical or Menippean.51 In this she has been successful, and therein lies her chief contribution to the study and understanding of these satires. An important contemporary Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, has written independently of Frye on the Menippean tradition. He argues that Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic novels” revive Menippean traits: The genre characteristics of the menippea were not only reborn, they were renewed in Dostoevsky’s works. In his creative utilization of the possibilities of the genre Dostoevsky departed widely from the authors of antique menippea. In the philosophical and social problems with which they deal, as well as in their artistic qualities, the antique menippea seem primitive and bland in comparison with Dostoevsky. The most important distinction is that the antique menippea does not yet know polyphony. The menippea, like the “Socratic dialog,” was able only to prepare certain

50 51

Ibid., p. 273. This will be taken up in the next chapter.

The School of Frye vs. Mimesis and Pedigree

39

conditions present on the genre which were conducive to the emergence of polyphony.52

Polyphony, as Bakhtin describes it, means that personalities, events, or ideas are presented in multiple perspectives simultaneously.53 Whatever 52

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans., R. W. Rostel (Ardis [USA], l973), p. 100. Cf. also pp. 113ff. He notes the existence of a tradition: Menippean satire exercised a very strong influence on ancient Christian literature (of the antique period) and on Byzantine literature (and through it, on old Russian writing as well). It continued its development, in various forms and under various names, during the Renaissance and the Reformation, and in modern times; it continues, actually, to develop even now (both with a clearcut recognition of its genre and without it). (p. 93) Dostoevsky, he points out, is separated from these earliest sources by two millennia, during which the tradition of Menippean genre continued to develop, became more complex, and changed in form and in meaning (preserving, however, its unity and continuity). (p. 112) Bakhtin’s approach derives from the structuralist work of de Saussure, de Courtenay, and Jakobsen. As the translator of his Rabelais and His World notes in her foreword, Bakhtin not only operates with the categories elaborated by the Formalist school in both its periods—such as device, dominant, function—but also, and most important, he actually treats a literary work structurally, definitely in accordance with Tynianov’s and Jakobsen’s procedure. The main operation here lies in relating the whole and the part. In the case of Dostoevsky’s novel, the following relations are involved: (1) the relation of the dialogue and the monologue to the speaker and the listener; (2) the connection between the concrete literary work and a given genre. Bakhtin also treats (3) the changes of genres with respect to a given tradition. (Trans., H. Iswolsky [Cambridge, MA, and London, England: MIT Press, 1965], p. ix) 53 The “polyphonic” in Dostoevsky derives from his “extraordinary artistic capacity for seeing all things in terms of their coexistence and interaction...” (Problems, p. 25). Bakhtin explains (ibid.): Where others saw a single thought, he was able to feel out and find two thoughts, a divarication: where others saw a single quality, he revealed in that quality the presence of another, contradictory one. All that was simple became in his world complex and multi-structural...In every voice he could hear two contending voices, in every expression a split and a willingness to immediately turn into another, contradictory expression. In every gesture he perceived confidence and lack of confidence simultaneously: he perceived the profound ambiguity (...) of every phenomenon. But all of these contradictions and divarications did not become dialectical, they were not developed temporally, in an evolutionary series, but rather were manifested as standing side by side or opposed face to face in a single plane, either consonant but not merging, or

40

Chapter Four

the validity of his claims for Dostoevsky as a Menippist, Bakhtin devotes some twenty pages to discussing and attempting to define the “genre,” Menippean satire. He sees it as deriving in large measure from the time of the disintegration of the Socratic dialogue, a time when other dialogical genres were formed, among them the Menippean satire: “its roots reach directly back into carnivalistic folklore, whose definitive influence is even more significant here than in the ‘Socratic dialog.’ ...the genre itself arose much earlier than Varro or Menippus; its first representative was, perhaps, Antisthenes, a pupil of Socrates and an author of ‘Socratic dialogs.’”54 Among others, he includes as Menippists Heracleides of Ponticus (founder of the “logistoricus”), Bion Borysthenes, Varro, and Seneca, and he includes the “Hippocratian novel.” He views Boethius’ De consolatione as the terminus of ancient Menippean development, and finds elements of the genre present in “certain varieties of the ‘Greek novel,’ in the ancient utopian novel, and in the Roman satire (Lucilius and Horace).”55 Bakhtin’s approach to defining the “genre” is entirely descriptive. Although more extensive in his description than any other commentator— he discusses fourteen “basic characteristics”—his outlook is, in the final analysis, no more helpful than that of other descriptions, ancient or modern. He remarks the presence in Menippean satire of the aspects, farrago of styles, and violations of verbal and social etiquette, but, like most other commentators, he attaches no pertinence to irreconcilably contradictory; either the eternal harmony of unmerged voices, or a ceaseless, hopeless argument. Dostoevsky’s vision was locked up in that instant in which this diversity manifests itself, and it remained locked up there, organizing and formulating this diversity within the cross-section of a given moment. He also notes (Problems, p. 171), “In Dostoevsky’s artistic world there is always a profound organic bond between the superficial elements of a character’s verbal manner, his way of expressing himself, and the ultimate foundations of his Weltanschauung. The whole person is presented in every one of his manifestations. The orientation of one person to another person’s word and consciousness is, in essence, the basic theme of all of Dostoevsky’s works.” 54 Problems, p. 92. 55 Ibid., pp. 92–93. His list of fourteen characteristics of Menippea occurs on pp. 93–97. Anne Payne summarizes them and adds seven traits of her own, all “related to the dominant concern of the satire, the satirization of the possibility of an acceptable norm.” (Chaucer and Menippean Satire [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981], pp. 7–11). Payne’s whole approach is Frye-based; that is, descriptive.

The School of Frye vs. Mimesis and Pedigree

41

these aspects of Menippean satire as regards any effect they might have on the sensibilities of a reader. Yet the Menippist, like the Cynic philosopher, is particularly concerned to stimulate the awareness of his audience. Like Frye, Bakhtin does not consider the significance of the relation between Cynicism and Menippism. He does, however, present the free-ranging playfulness as emanating from a different, social quarter: “We call the transposition of carnival into the language of literature the carnivalization of literature.”56 Carnival attitudes and forms are well represented in the Roman saturnalia. Bakhtin provides an annotated list of carnivalistic properties, such as these: 56

Problems, p. 100. “The problem of carnival (in the sense of the totality of all the various festivals, rituals and forms of a carnival type), its essence, its roots deep in the primordial order and the primordial thinking of man, its development under the conditions of the class society, its extraordinary vitality and undying fascination is one of the most complex and interesting problems of cultural history” (ibid.). Alvin Kernan, who also approaches Menippean satire descriptively, seizes on two traits he feels characteristic of Menippea in general. For the first, in contrast to the (sometimes extreme) realism of formal verse satire, the Menippea have “come to include any satire work obviously written in the third person, or, to put it another way, where the attack is managed under the cover of a fable...In the traditional scheme all works short of extreme realism would then be classified as Menippean” (p. 13). His second trait converges on Bakhtin’s observations about carnivalism: whereas “in formal verse satire the satirist is stressed and dominates the scene, in Menippean satire the scene is stressed and absorbs the satirist, to some degree or altogether” (The Cankered Muse, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959, 1962). While such distinctions are too broad to be serviceable, the second does accord with notions of carnivalism, if both Bakhtin and Kernan are understood as indicating that in Menippean satire the various figures, whether of author or speaker or evident target(s) of attack, are somehow of secondary importance. Given that, the immediate problem to which each proposes his own solution is, what then is of first import? Kernan avers that the scene, or cultural surround, is stressed; Bakhtin, that the scene is an encyclopedic mosaic of the culture contemporary with the satire. One slight further step brings us to realize that that scene necessarily includes the (contemporaneous) reader as the ultimate target of the satire. The relative unserviceability of such categorical polarities appears, for example, as Kernan contrasts medieval and Renaissance modes of satire (p. 63): “In all Renaissance discussions of satire little or nothing is said about the satiric scene...critics and authors, with only rare exceptions, concentrate all their attention on the satyr-satirist...This is a direct reversal of the situation in medieval satire, where the satirist is repressed (and the scene featured...).” In light of his earlier distinction, these remarks imply that medieval satire is all or nearly all Menippean.

42

Chapter Four

x Carnival is a pageant without a stage and without a division into performers and spectators. In the carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act. x All distance between people is suspended and a special carnival category goes into effect—the free, familiar contact among people...a new modus of interrelationship of man with man which is counterposed to the omnipotent hierarchical social relationships of non-carnivalistic life. Man’s behaviour, gesture and word are liberated from the authority of all hierarchical positions...which define them totally in non-carnivalistic life, eccentric and inappropriate. x The unfettered familiar attitude encompasses everything: all values, thoughts, phenomena and things... Carnival brings together, unites, weds and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the lowly, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid, etc. x ...profanation: the carnivalistic blasphemies, a whole carnivalistic system of lowering of status and bringing down to earth, the carnivalistic obscenities connected with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, the carnivalistic parodies of sacred texts and apothegms, etc.57 That these are all commonplace Menippean attitudes is clear, despite the political bias injected by the writer. The first item on the list presents the audience as actively involved in, rather than passive consumer of, the satire. The second item amplifies it, deriving directly from aspects of the Cynic approach to human fallibility, self-aggrandizement, and selfdeception. This in turn forms an element of the third and fourth points, which also bring forward the aspects of Menippean spoudogeloion and “low and motley” satire. Bakhtin feels that two further features are the most important ones: “the mock crowning and subsequent discrowning of the king [of] the carnival,”58 and laughter. Of the latter, he observes that

57

This continues: “These carnivalistic categories are not abstract thoughts on equality and freedom, on the interrelatedness of all things, or on the unity of opposites, etc. No, these are concretely sensuous ritual-pageant ‘thoughts,’ experienced and played out in life itself, which have taken shape and survived over a period of millennia in the broadest masses of the European peoples. They were therefore able to exercise such an immense formal, genre-determining influence on literature” (Problems, p. 101; the “characteristics” cover pp. 100–102). 58 Bakhtin places great social emphasis on this feature (Problems, p. 102):

The School of Frye vs. Mimesis and Pedigree

43

Carnivalistic laughter is also directed toward a higher order—toward the change of authorities and truths, toward the change of world orders. Laughter encompasses both poles of change, to crisis itself. In the act of carnival laughter death and rebirth, negation (ridicule) and affirmation (joyful laughter) are combined. This is profoundly ideological and universal laughter.59

As Bakhtin points out, there are elements of the carnival in every Menippean satire, both in joco-seriousness of attitude and tone, and often in content, e.g., symposia-banquets such as Trimalchio’s cena in Petronius, or the many exuberant feasts in Rabelais. He proposes that carnivalism serves to renew or refresh readers’ concepts (and social ideology) and their nostalgia for a simpler era.60 The real function, The basis of the ritual performance of crowning and discrowning the king is the very core of the carnivalistic attitude to the world—the pathos of vicissitudes and changes, of death and renewal. Carnival is the festival of alldestroying and all-renewing time... Crowning and discrowning is a two-in-one...ambivalent ritual expressing the inevitability, and simultaneously the creativity of change and renewal, the jolly relativity of every system and order, every authority and every (hierarchical) position. The idea of immanent discrowning is contained already in the crowning: it is ambivalent from the very beginning. The antipode of a real king—a slave or a jester—is crowned, and this seems to reveal and sanctify the inside-out world of the carnival. 59 Ibid. p. 104. 60 Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 98–99. In this work, Bakhtin vastly amplifies the structuralist observations on laughter and its manifestation in the various forms of folk rites and festivities—carnival— made in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, by means of a semeiological approach to verbal, pictorial, gestural, and situational sign systems. His work is being pursued by other modern continental theorists. Kristeva, for one, has tried to semeiologize Menippean satire using Bakhtin, and includes (along with Varro, Seneca, Petronius, and Lucian) Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the satires of Horace. The weaknesses of a descriptive approach were never more evident. Kristeva proposes, for example, that la ménippée se construit-elle comme hiéroglyphe, tout en étant spectacle, et c’est cette ambivalence qu’elle va léguer au roman, au roman polyphonique avant tout qui ne connaît ni loi, ni hiérarchie, étant une pluralité d’éléments linguistiques en rapport dialogique. Le principe de jonction des différentes parties de la ménippée est, certes, la similitude (la ressemblance, la dépendance, donc le “réalisme”), mais aussi la contiguité (l’analogie, la juxtaposition, donc la “rhétorique”, non pas au sens d’ornement que Croce lui donne, mais comme justification par et dans le langage). L’ambivalence ménipéenne consiste dans la communication entre deux espaces, celui de la scène et celui du hiéroglyphe, celui de la représentation par le langage et celui

44

Chapter Four

however, of Menippean carnivalism is to renew readers’ percepts and sensibilities. A further point: Menippean satire is “impersonal” in the sense suggested by Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”61 for the additional reason of the role of the audience in the satire. Bakhtin observes that corporate (“universal”) carnivalistic laughter—in Rabelais as in other Menippists—is the agency by which the collective or crowd inside the satire is transmogrified into hero: In Rabelais abuse never assumes the character merely of personal invective; it is universal, and when all is said and done it always aims at the higher level. Behind each victim of abuse and blows Rabelais sees the king, the former king, the pretender. But at the same time the images of all these uncrowned personages are real and very much alive...62

Bakhtin’s chief contributions to the present study are the notions of polyphony and carnivalism. Both pervade Menippean satire in various forms. Menippean satire is “impersonal” insofar as the sensibility that operates in the satire and the sensibility on which it operates are corporate, not simply private. This necessarily produces polyphony. (The doubleplot, as in the Milesian tale or frame tale, is formal polyphony.) In fact, the two sensibilities of polyphony and carnivalism are inseparable from each other and from the satire, both because of the inclusion of the audience in it and, as will be seen in the next chapter, because of the special function of language (which is also corporate) in the satire. Various kinds of heterogeneity, whether of plot, style, subject matter, or layered meaning, are all aspects of carnivalism, as are the crucial matters of decorum and renewal of audience sensibilities. Polyphony and carnivalism, then, are inextricably linked in the Menippea through impersonality and renewal, and also through the common ground of audience involvement. Bakhtin’s polyphony and carnivalism point to an important strategy for dispelling much of the confusion about the nature of satire and about Menippean satire in particular, by approaching these and other common traits in terms of rhetorical decorum and style.

de l’expérience dans le langage, le système et le syntagme, la métaphore et la métonymie. (From “La Ménippée: le texte comme activité sociale,” in 6(0(,27,.( (Sèméiôtikè) (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969, pp. 106–107) 61 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen & Co., 1920). Also in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932, third ed., 1951, 1972; much reprinted). 62 Rabelais and His World, p. 212.

The School of Frye vs. Mimesis and Pedigree

45

E. P. Korkowski, too, has remarked on the inherent limitations of definition-by-description, and consequently has developed what may prove to be the greatest contribution to critical examination of Menippean satire since Dryden. Descriptive definition has behind it the tacit quest for an ideal (abstract idea or pattern) of the form under examination. This quest Menippean satire always eludes. Korkowski has proposed a more functional, less essentialistic notion of the genre. The shaping of Menippean satire, he feels, was not managed by adhering to critics’ opinions but rather by imitating previous literary models. Menippean satire is a kind or tradition of writing undertaken by learned men, usually addressed to less learned men, telling and showing them what they should (or should not) have in the way of learning, especially where learning is concerned with ethics or ultimate beliefs. Menippean satires display what false (or true) learning is, and have startling features of both thematic and structural attractiveness, to keep the unlearned reader interested. The genre has two species, a negative (the earlier, sprung from Greek cynicism) and a positive (the later, sprung from Roman didascalism). The Greek involves “satire,” understood as ridicule or attack, upon the philosopher, theologian, or other learned individual; the Roman sometimes is not satirical, but follows (as does the Greek) the concept of a satura, a medley of diverse topoi and literary forms, usually a mixture of prose and verse. Menippean authors either admit they have followed Menippus or one of Menippus’ known imitators, or else borrow both manner and matter (structure and theme) that could only have come from a Menippean text to which they had certain access.63

As the tradition is based on imitation, a crucial test for the inclusion of a particular work among the Menippeans is that of pedigree: The picture of the Menippean tradition that authors’ pedigrees give us, I submit here, is a consistent picture: it is consistent because they really are imitating the original Menippean works they cite; they cite them because the apparent lack of structural and thematic decorum in their imitations requires some defense, and historical precedent is the best defense possible; they imitate Menippean satire in the first place, because the form lies ready to hand, is a very appealing kind of controversial writing, and is

63

Korkowski, p. 11. The sense of mimetic tradition brought forward by Korkowski is in many ways consonant with that proposed by Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in that it forms a simultaneous whole and is continually being updated by each new practitioner.

46

Chapter Four

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605

The School of Frye vs. Mimesis and Pedigree

47

adaptable, with only very minor adjustments, to almost any dispute involving the authorities or gloriosi in learning and in theology.64

There is evidence enough in Korkowski’s study to refute Frye’s contention that “Menippean satire” is an outdated and misleading term, for Korkowski demonstrates that such imitation occurs in every age, from Menippus’ through Varro’s to and including Sterne’s (the term of his survey). Here, at last, is a genuine test: the work in question must bear Menippus’ signature. This approach bypasses all of the difficulties imposed by a simple descriptive paraphrase or listing of contents and themes, or by resorting to analysis and classification by period or the tastes of a period. Korkowski’s “conspectus” demonstrates both that the “genre” was actively practised in every period of our culture and that it extended (or has spread) to other cultures as well. It is the reader, therefore, who without abstract criteria must educate himself by study and extensive awareness of the Menippean tradition. That is to say, low-and-motley Menippean satire is available to the serious student on the terms of literary erudition. Korkowski has performed a valuable service in tracing the vast labyrinth of Menippean imitation as far as the eighteenth century. He finds that the very flexibility and chameleon-like adaptability of Menippean satire is itself one of the chief obstacles to definition by description. From Menippus onward, this polymorphism includes the parody of different forms of philosophical discourse such as the dialogue, the symposium, the sophistic oration, the tour of the cosmos, the treatise, and the learned epistle. These are all, he remarks, one “genre” because Menippus wrote them himself, because both the structural and the thematic concerns of these early writings are used by later Menippists, and because later imitators—whom he has surveyed—regard them as a single “genre.” The principal difficulty with Korkowski’s approach is that it tends to present the Menippean (mimetic) tradition as an enclosed one that makes little provision for genuine structural or stylistic innovation. I contend that any work whose author deliberately fashions it to produce the effect that Menippean satire produces—whether or not he copies, consciously or unconsciously, another Menippean work—deserves to be considered a Menippean satire. This position does not imply that almost anything may qualify as Menippean: it does presuppose that there is more than one kind of mimesis. And it does focus on the effect

64

Korkowski, p. 13.

48

Chapter Four

produced as the means of defining this species of satire.65 But what do we make of a work that has lost its power to shock or to jolt its audience? After all, what one generation finds shocking or outré will frequently seem 65

At the end of this book I have appended a list that attempts to give some idea of the extent of the tradition of Menippean writing. Instead of “Outline of the Menippean Tradition,” perhaps it should be called “A List of Works That Are or Once Were Menippean,” for many of them are now just curiosities, or merely naughty. Period pieces, most of which have lost their teeth but that once bit deeply enough. Swift, Sterne, Joyce (Finnegans Wake)—these and a few others endure, at least for now and for those capable of reading them, and many of the double-plot satires, too, retain their potency. Others, though, are much diminished; for example, Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is now so frequent and so respectable a staple of the freshman curriculum that it has ceased to enrage or even to annoy the reader. Or again, Byron’s Don Juan and Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo (when rendered on the television screen instead of in a theatre). Byron has lost nearly all of his striking power because of the change in the audience; as Eliot observed, a generation ago: That there is to-day no definite standard of taste in poetry is partly the result of conditions of society and historical origins, beyond our control and beyond our responsibility. The most, perhaps, that we can do, and that is worth the doing, is to learn to recognize the benefits to the writer and to his critic of common style in poetry. It is in fact only when a common style is recognized, from which the poet may not depart too far without censure, that the term ‘poetic diction’, in any but a derogatory sense, has meaning. When such standards for a common style exist, the author who would achieve originality is compelled to attend to the finer shades of distinction. To be original within definite limits of propriety may require greater talent and labour, than when every man may write as he pleases, and when the first thing expected of him is to be different. To be obliged to work upon the finer shades is to be compelled to strive for precision and clarity: a good deal of what is blamed as wilful obscurity on the part of modern writers is the result of the lack of any common style, and the consequent difficulty of communication. (From “Johnson as Critic and Poet,” in On Poetry and Poets, p. 216) At present, new media and new modes of awareness and expression are developing at a pace that ensures that no one style can dominate the others as a common style. In such circumstances, when change is rapid, the Menippist turns to satirizing the media themselves. These problems are absolutely confined to Menippean satire and do not apply in any measure to Horatian or Juvenalian satire, where the satire and the satiric nature reside more in the sense and the feeling and the tone of the writing. But in Menippism, the satiric quality lies mostly in the effect (and somewhat in tone), and decidedly not in the choice of topic or in how the writer presents himself as feeling about it. Juvenalian satire relies more on the blend of sense and feeling (often outrage and indignation); Horatian, of sense and tone (generally urbanity and civility).

The School of Frye vs. Mimesis and Pedigree

49

banal or cliché to the next. Here we confront one of the many perversities and paradoxes of Menippism: that a potent and powerful Menippean satire can with the passage of time lose its effectiveness, that is, cease to be Menippean and turn into something else. A Menippean novel or poem could, its Cynic teeth drawn, revert to simply a novel or poem, albeit perhaps an odd one. Or a work might become Menippean after a long sojourn in another department of literature entirely—or one might even resume its lost Menippism. Cynic satire depends for its being and essence entirely on its ability to perform as a Cynic, that is, to provoke a certain effect or range of effects. When a particular satire loses its power to administer the requisite “jolt,” when this or that central ploy no longer works on a current audience— either because the audience has changed or because the audience has become too accustomed to the tricks or the style—then that satire is no longer Menippean. For example, if the mixing of prose and verse doesn’t grate on today’s ears as once it did, like scratching fingernails across a blackboard (who now remembers blackboards?), then the mixture no longer serves as a Menippean technique. Prosimetrum satires no longer produce the required effect, and so they are no longer Menippean. They are former Menippean satires. No present-day satirist would mix verse and prose and expect thereby to provoke the same outrage and glee that Petronius did, or Varro, or Apuleius, or Martianus Capella, or Alan of Lille. Today’s audience has lost all sophistication with regard to verse and would find its mixture with prose in a serious work merely odd rather than shocking or arousing. Subtract from the satire the effect of mixing verse and prose, of mixing high style and low, and you have subtracted the satire: the remaining horseplay and fun and silliness is…just horseplay and fun and silliness. Nothing beside remains, to corn a phrase. Let us come at the matter from another direction. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot points out that, in the tradition of letters, the existing works, from Homer to the present, form a simultaneous whole rather than (as it is conventionally taught) a sequence; that “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of [our] own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”66 As a consequence, for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, 66

The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen & Co. 1920, p. 49). Also in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932; 3rd ed., 1951, 1972), much reprinted.

50

Chapter Four values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. (p. 50)

Eliot then points out the effect of adding a substantial work to the tradition. Add a strong ingredient to the soup and you transform the entire soup, not just this or that area of it. As the Menippean tradition is a mimetic one (and so is simultaneous as well by virtue of its mimesis) and as it depends entirely on the sensibilities of the audience for both its effect and its essence, we have to accept that, at least for the Menippean component of our wider literary tradition, any modification to the character or the sensibilities of the audience will equally affect the entire order from Homer to the present. The mimetic tradition of Menippean satire includes Cynicism and the Cynic impulse, along with the tactics that inform Menippean authors, not simply the tradition of the products outlined by Korkowski. Numerous works that antedate Menippus are Menippean in all essential respects. Possibly the first example is Homer’s Margites, which, from the remarks in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata and in Aristotle’s Poetics, would seem to have had the necessary Menippean characteristics.67 Likewise, the silloi (lampoons) of the Pyrrhonist, Timon

67 Margites was a kind of jerk-of-all-trades. Clement of Alexandria begins Bk. I, ch. IV of the Stromata with this: “Homer calls an artificer wise; and of Margites, if that is his work, he thus writes: ‘Him the gods made neither a delver nor a ploughman. Nor in any other respect wise; but he missed every art.’ ” Plato also gives in the Second Alcibiades (147b): “He knew many things, and all of them badly.” The chief reason for ascribing this comic epic to Homer is Aristotle’s immense authority. In the Poetics he remarks: We cannot mention any satiric work before Homer, though there were probably many, but we can begin with his Margites and other things of the kind. The iambic metre was introduced because it was particularly suitable to this type of poetry, and such a poem is called iambeion to this day, because men used to satirize each other in this metre. ... Homer was also the first to exhibit the different forms of comedy, and he dramatized the laughable, but not the personal satire. His Margites bears the same relation to comedy as the Iliad and the Odyssey do to tragedy. (ch. IV; 1448b) Regarding the irregular metre, Gilbert Highet notes that “the poem was in a lopsided rhythm, dactylic hexameter, which to Greek ears would sound awkward and preposterous like Margites himself.” (The Anatomy of Satire [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962], p. 39)

The School of Frye vs. Mimesis and Pedigree

51

Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, 1517

of Phlius (c. 320–230 B. C.), which attack sects and professors of philosophy as futile and frivolous appendages to society, are clearly concerned with attacking philosophi gloriosi. According to R. G. Bury, Timon of Phlius wrote three volumes of silloi, all in hexameters in the

52

Chapter Four

heroic style. “This exposure of the futility of philosophy served to support the indifferentist attitude of Pyrrho; and Timon by his writings (for Pyrrho wrote nothing) popularized the Sceptical view that the way to make the best of life is to eschew dogma and cultivate mental repose.”68 Timon’s approach, in using the hexameter satirically—that is, inappropriately— appears to have produced the Menippean effect of jarring the reader into wakefulness.69 The silloi embody themes that are to be found as early as Aristophanes, who also anticipates Menippus, and as late as Lucian, who was in some senses a follower of Menippus. For the most part, only the Menippists themselves have shown an awareness of the tradition of Menippean satirizing: the consensus of classical scholars is that it died out after the second century AD. Their definition, “a mixture of verse and prose,” is not definition but description. As Korkowski and others have pointed out, descriptive approaches are inadequate to define Menippean satire chiefly because it is so macaronic and polymorphous. The Menippist’s tone and its relation to Cynic philosophy, the relation between the audience and the satire— these elements clearly have not received adequate attention in critical appraisals of the satires, yet the evidence suggests that they have guided Menippists’ approach to language, style, and form. While the descriptive approach of Frye and the historical-mimetic approach of Korkowski are useful, they need to be completed by a more rigorous rhetorical investigation. Menippean satire obtains its distinctive character by means of a certain decorum. This decorum consists of including certain key elements, indispensable and mutually compatible, whereby an audience recognizes the Menippean form as an independent entity. The next chapter presents three broad but basic features of this decorum. They are undeniably part of the Menippean tradition but do not restrict it to historical influence. They are, nevertheless, specific enough to distinguish Menippism from other narrative and satiric literature.

68

From R. G. Bury’s introduction to Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1933, 1961), vol. 1, pp. xxxi–xxxii. 69 Heroic metre is more frequently used to parody the active life than the contemplative. Dryden remarks: “...in Timon’s Silli the words are generally those of Homer, and the tragic poets; but he applies them, satirically, to some customs and kinds of philosophy, which he arraigns” (“Originall and Progress...,” p. 52). Other silli were “satytric poems full of parodies; that is, of verses patched up from great poets, and turned into another sense than their author intended them” (ibid.).

The School of Frye vs. Mimesis and Pedigree

Ulrich Von Hutten, The Epistles of Obscure Men, 1581

53

PART III MENIPPISM AND CYNICISM

CHAPTER FIVE MENIPPISM AND DECORUM: STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

But how come lowness of style and the familiarity of words, to be so much the propriety of satire, that without them a poet can be no more a satirist, than without risibility he can be a man? —Dryden, “Originall and Progress of Satire” Difficile est proprie communia dicere. —Horace, Epist. ad Pison. Toute vue des choses qui n’est pas étrange est fausse. —Valéry

The perverse decorum of Cynic satire wants examining from at least three standpoints. In the first place, the style of these works is a mixture of the high and the low, the abstruse and the familiar, the native and the foreign: they are through-and-through macaronic. Burton calls his Anatomy of Melancholy “this my Macaronicon,” which he describes as “a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, phantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry.”70 Secondly, their structure is digressive rather than straightforward, linear narrative. They tend to operate at several levels at once, paralleling the main plot with separate but equally important stories. Frequently there is no plot at all. Menippean satires never promote mere simplicity or clarity; above all, they avoid creating worlds of only one dimension. Thirdly, they all descend, directly or indirectly, from a single intellectual perspective and drive that has its roots in Cynicism. That Cynical drive to attack or arouse

70

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Intro. by H. Jackson. 3 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1932: Everyman’s Library, No. 886), p. 26. “Macaronicon,” p. 25.

58

Chapter Five

the reader for his own good provides the essence of Menippism that unites the works constituting this tradition. Eugene Korkowski places some emphasis on this key element: Menippus was imitated because his techniques of display and of ridicule were attractive, easy to emulate, and adaptable to many applications in learning and theology. His kind of writing was seldom regarded as an exalted classical form—it sent up everything of that kind—and consequently authorities on literary genres, until the mid-Renaissance, passed over Menippean satire as unworthy of comment. Quintilian, Cicero and a few other ancients mention Varro’s Saturae Menippae, but only out of apparent amazement that he wrote in such a low form.71

The very “lowness” of Menippean satire, combining broad comedy and gags with spoof and burlesque of higher and more serious matters, is one of its consistent characteristics. Rosalie Colie has pointed to the way that this seeming inconsistency functions in what she calls the “macaronic”: “Abrupt juxtapositions of the frankly fictional with the fictionally real worlds shock the reader into criticism of both, and shock him also into a critical realization of fiction’s operation...”72 The “lowness” of Menippean satire is a key to its usual macaronic character. It is the source of much of the enjoyment to be derived from the satires and is central to their satiric operation on the sensibilities of the reader. Paradoxically, this lowness requires that the author sustain a high and flexible wit. As Colie remarks of Rabelais, “Macaronic” is the name given to literary constructions, usually verse, in more than one language; the genre crudely, often primitively, combines elements from different contexts, thereby invoking certain relativities to its own aid. Though the spoof of macaronic denies its claim to more than cursory reflection, such success as the genre has, derives from its creators’ and its hearers’ learning in languages. Macaronic involves the kind of wit demonstrated in puns, calembours, conundrums, clerihews, and even limericks: its violation of linguistic convention and expectation depends upon profound control of just that convention. Macaronic is only occasionally serio ludere, but its play derives from a great deal of serious application in the past.

71

Korkowski, p. x. Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 45. Perhaps the most recent example of this technique is to be found in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Textermination (New York: New Directions, 1992). 72

Menippism and Decorum

59

The pleasure in macaronic—its “ludic” recreative appeal—results from its sprightly combination of elements from systems conventionally regarded as totally disjunctive. In this sense, Gargantua and Pantagruel may be regarded as macaronic, not only because of its remarkable juxtapositions of languages, but as a ludic combination of different styles, episodes, tones, and genres in addition.73

All of the Menippean “touchstone” authors—including Petronius, Apuleius, Lucian, Martianus Capella, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, and Joyce— employ the macaronic to a marked degree, each in his own manner. Colie goes on to say, of Rabelais’ use of the macaronic, that Gargantua and Pantagruel mingles ...its gifts in a limitless tumble of language, incident, character, style, tone, and genre, each of which requires intense scrutiny for its overt, halfconcealed, or covert implications. As for language, Panurge’s identification of himself fulfills the first requirements of macaronic: he answers Pantagruel’s question in German, Arabic, Italian, English, Dutch, Spanish, Danish, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as in several garbled and some altogether invented tongues. Throughout, Rabelais manages dialect and patois—Limousin, Parisian, Gascon—as well as languages of traders and social classes, such as the humanist Ciceronian style of Eudemon; the scholastic Latinate style of the sophister and of the Limousin (who in crisis reverts to his native dialect); Bridlegoose’s judicial droning; the allegorical obscurity of the alchemists. Rabelais’ interest in terms of art, the languages by which the professions shaped their existence and their view of the larger world, is evident both from his parodies of such languages (from that of cake-bakers through that of the men-at-law), and from the encyclopedic lists with which the book is punctuated, separate worlds of apprehension included in the universe of his tolerant book. His propensity for lists, parodies of epic catalogue, lead him to many subjects not immediately relevant to the canons of his narrative...Even a catalogue of the catalogues makes epic reading.74

73 74

Ibid., pp. 43–44. Ibid., pp. 48–49. Richard Lanham provides a sidelight: This explains, I think, what seems Rabelais’s share in the basic disingenuity of satire. Most satirists—Juvenal offers the best example—gain their power by exposing human fondness for pretending a serious purpose when seeking only play. Yet the satirist himself, and the more so the better he is, does just this himself. He pretends to reform, but his zest betrays him. He likes to castigate. His motive is a play one too. The great satirist sympathizes with his targets. He stands one of them. Rabelais recommends all the stages of the process, of the model for motive, but he gains his satiric power, his laughter, by juxtaposing discontinuous phases from different models, laughing first at play from a

60

Chapter Five

Bonaventure des Périeres, Cymbalum Mundi, 1537

Rabelais, while more exuberant than the average, is no more Menippean than others in the tradition. He is simply more often read and better known than Bonaventure Des Périeres (Cymbalum mundi) or Beroalde de Verville serious point of view and then vice versa. He thus manages both to gain the full range of comic effect and to avoid the fundamental Juvenalian inconsistency. The humorist takes carnival as a reference; the satirist, atonement. Rabelais has it both ways, embraces first one then the other. The alternation of play and purpose observes no temporal priority. We are tempted to demand that pleasure precede knowledge, that we must savor the fable before we can allegorize it. We must be filled, satisfied, before we can think. It is true, but it is true too that such pleasure depends on the need to know and is conditioned by it. The process is just that, a continuous process, however and whenever we break into it. The games Alcofribas plays commemorate this endlessness. They are always moving from play to purpose. (The Motives of Eloquence, p. 183)

Menippism and Decorum

61

(Le Moyen de parvenir) or Harington or Nashe or the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. All Menippists stick close to the root meanings of “satire” when brewing and stirring their mixtures of matters and manners, of high and low in style and culture, of ancient and modern, of the trivial as well as the quadrivial. Macaronic and burlesque are not forced on them; they are as natural as breathing. Menippists don’t so much hate uniform stylistic decorum as they love being perverse. Decorum, in fact, is the key element in the Cynic’s approach to the reader and his sensibilities. Menippists’ use of joco-seriousness, their constant and systematic violation of all rules of propriety—they show respect for elevated or serious matters by using broad comedy and low style—is tapinosis and meiosis writ large. (There is no common name for the reverse figures.) Decorum meant the proper attuning of words and matter and occasion, regulated with regard to the effect desired Considered as a matter of decorum, the reason for using a prose-verse mixture becomes clearer. In rhetoric, the style of any expression or utterance had to be adjusted— usually done on the fly—to align the subject and situation with the sensibilities of the audience. This was communication theory and practice at a high degree of refinement. Dialectic emphasizes principally the logic and connections and concepts; rhetoric, managing the awareness (including emotions) of the audience. The chief means of controlling these adjustments were style and delivery, the third and fifth divisions of rhetoric, both governed by decorum (appropriateness). The rules of decorum constitute the ancient rhetors’ theory of communication. It was generally considered the chief virtue of style to be translucent and subliminal (even occasionally sublime). Always, style provides the “way of seeing” the subject by organizing aright the perceptions of the audience. It would greatly impede efficacy were the style of an utterance inadvertently to become opaque, to obtrude, as an object of attention, between audience and subject. For example, here is how Cicero discusses the subconscious effect of general style on audience: But do not let anybody wonder how these things can possibly make any impression on the unlearned crowd when it forms the audience, because in this particular department as in every other nature has a vast and indeed incredible power. For everybody is able to discriminate between what is right and what wrong in matters of art and proportion by a sort of subconscious instinct, without having any theory of art or proportion of their own; and while they can do this in the case of pictures and statues and other works to understand which nature has given them less equipment, at the same time they display this much more in judging the rhythms and pronunciations of words, because these are rooted deep in the general sensibility, and nature has decreed that nobody shall be entirely devoid of

62

Chapter Five these faculties. And consequently everybody is influenced not only by skillful arrangement of words but also by rhythms and pronunciations. For what proportion of people understands the science of rhythm and metre? Yet all the same if only a slight slip is made in these, making the line too short by a contraction or too long by dwelling on a vowel, the audience protests to a man. Well, does not the same thing take place in the case of pronunciation, so that if there are not only discrepancies between the members of a troupe or a chorus but even inconsistency in the pronunciation of individual actors, the ordinary public drives them off the stage?75

Whereas the dialectician’s eye is on the subject, the rhetor’s remains fixed on the audience and the most efficient way to produce the desired effect.76 A smooth consistency of style—for the rhetorician the way of handling, for the audience the way of seeing or very shape of perception of the subject—most quickly becomes unobtrusive or subliminal. The chief exception to this rule, it may be argued, is “high style,” the mode of display oratory as well as that of the most elevated subjects,77 which often drew the attention by means of pyrotechnics. Nevertheless, 75

Cicero, De oratore, III.1.195–96, trans., H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1942, 1967–1968), vol. II, pp. 154–56. 76 Cicero adopted the traditional Rhetorical attitude that Dialectic provided no means for ascertaining truth but rather was useful for testing truth because of its heavy emphasis on logical thought, arrangement, and classification. He warns of its invasion of Rhetoric in his time while insisting on the absolute necessity of sure and even decorum: ...for my subject is not what I myself can achieve but what the orator as such can—and against these exponents of the science of rhetoric, who are exceedingly foolish persons, as they only write about the classification of cases and the elementary rules and methods of stating the facts; whereas eloquence is so potent a force that it embraces the origin and operation and developments of all things, all the virtues and duties, all the natural principles governing the morals and minds and life of mankind, and also determines their customs and laws and rights, and controls the government of the state and expresses everything that concerns whatever topic in a graceful and flowing style. (De Oratore, III.xx: vol. II, pp. 60–62) The continuing rivalry between the camp of Rhetoric and Grammar, on the one hand, and that of Dialectic (composed of logic and philosophy), on the other, is a main, if often implicit, subject of Menippean satire. The crucial function of the audience is taken for granted by orators: e.g., Cicero casually observed in passing, “...for the effect produced by numbers is of such a kind that a speaker can no more be eloquent without a large audience than a flute-player can perform without a flute” (De oratore, II.lxxxiii; vol. I, p. 455). 77 Vide, for example, Quintilian, VIII.iii.11–14.

Menippism and Decorum

63

style always functions to adjust the awareness and inform the perceptions of the audience, so that in the case of high style the elevated treatment should serve not so much as an object of attention but rather for retuning and elevating the audience’s imaginative capabilities. (Consequently, Asianism in rhetoric, like any other gratuitous display unwarranted by decorum, was instinctively recognized by serious rhetors as a cancer that endangered their enterprise.) Decorum, the heart of rhetoric, helped the speaker juggle and balance audience, subject, occasion, desired effect. All had to be adjusted with prudence.78 Near the end of De Oratore, Cicero sums up the entire theory of stylistic decorum: Consequently as the whole subject of decoration in oratory has now been, if not thoroughly explored, at all events fully indicated in all its departments, now let us consider the subject of appropriateness, that is, what style is most suitable in a speech. Although one point at least is obvious, that no single kind of oratory suits every cause or audience or speaker or occasion. For important criminal cases need one style of language and civil actions and unimportant cases another; and different styles are required by deliberative speeches, panegyrics, lawsuits and lectures, and for consolation, protest, discussion and historical narrative, respectively. The audience also is important—whether it is the lords or the commons or the bench; a large audience or a small one or a single person, and their personal character; and consideration must be given to the age, 78

As the means of managing this equilibrium, decorum penetrated not only style and delivery but all five of the divisions of Rhetoric (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio). For example, Quintilian notes: While, then, style calls for the utmost attention, we must always bear in mind that nothing should be done for the sake of words only, since words were invented merely to give expression to things: and those words are the most satisfactory which give the best expression to the thoughts of our mind and produce the effect which we desire upon the minds of the judges.... What the Greeks call ijȡĮıȲı, we in Latin call elocutio or style. Style is revealed both in individual words and in groups of words. As regards the former, we must see that they are Latin, clear, elegant and well-adapted to produce the desired effect. (Bk. VIII; Vol. III, pp. 194–95. Vide also Cicero, Orator, xx.71, and Horace, “Ars poetica,” 87–119) Not only were metaphors and analogies drawn from the same areas as the subject, but these and other tropes and schemes and vocabulary were drawn from the fund provided by the audience’s experience and its conventions of thought and expression. Thus Cicero notes that elocutio, governed by decorum, could serve as a technique or resource of inventio by means of complementing the situation (audience, occasion): “elocutio est idoneorum verborum ad inventionem accomodatio” (De Inventione, I.vii.9). Quintilian notes that “we should treat language as currency minted with the public stamp” (Inst. orat., I.vi; vol. I, p. 113).

64

Chapter Five station and office of the speakers themselves, and to the occasion, in peace time or during a war, urgent or allowing plenty of time. And so at this point it does not in fact seem possible to lay down any rules except that we should choose a more copious or more restrained style of rhetoric, or likewise, the intermediate style that has been specified to suit the business before us. It will be open to us to use almost the same ornaments of style in a more energetic and on others in a more quiet manner; and in every case while the ability to do what is appropriate is a matter of trained skill and of natural talent, the knowledge of what is appropriate to a particular occasion is a matter of practical sagacity.79

The decision whether or not to employ verse in a text that is otherwise prose clearly must be governed by decorum—“a matter of practical sagacity.” The rule of thumb was to use verse very sparsely, if at all, because of the implicit danger of misdirecting the reader’s attention towards the shift in register or towards the skill (or ineptitude) of the writer.80 Sustained expression in verse would be accompanied by elevation 79 De oratore, III.iv; vol. II, pp. 166–68. Cf. also Quintilian, VIII.iii.42–43. General discussions of decorum may be found in Cicero, Orator, xxi.70ff., and De officiis, I.xxvii ff. It conveyed the notion of appropriateness, aptness, seemliness, etc. It extended beyond rhetorical and literary concerns to personal, moral, and social ones: “If there is any such thing as propriety at all, it can be nothing more than uniform consistency in the course of our life as a whole and all its individual actions” (De officiis, trans., W. Miller [Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1913, 1951], I.xxxi). 80 In Latin or Greek, since end-rhyme is too easy, the question is one of metrics and concerns regular and repeating linear patterns and line-groups (stanzas). Quintilian, for one, cautions: As a general rule, however, if the choice were forced upon me, I should prefer my rhythm to be harsh and violent rather than nerveless and effeminate, as it is in so many writers, more especially in our own day, when it trips along in wanton measures that suggest the accompaniment of castanets. Nor will any rhythm be so admirable that it ought to be continued with the same recurrence of feet. For we shall really be indulging in a species of versification if we seek to lay down one law for all varieties of speech: further, to do so would lay us open to the charge of the most obvious affectation (a fault of which we should avoid even the smallest suspicion), while we should also wear and cloy our audience by the resulting monotony; the sweeter the rhythm, the sooner the orator who is detected in a studied adherence to its employment will cease to carry conviction or to stir the passions and emotions. The judge will refuse to believe him or to allow him to excite his compassion or his anger, if he thinks that he has leisure for this species of refinement. It will therefore be desirable from time to time that in certain passages the rhythm should be deliberately dissolved... (IX.iv.142–44)

Menippism and Decorum

65

of matter, thought, sentiment, and diction—and audience. Thus, style is adjusted according to subject, audience (effect), and occasion. Because verse was to be introduced sparingly, if at all, the copious medley of verse .

Cicero (De oratore, III.xlix–l) gives similar advice: Nor need you worry about the paeans or the dactyls we were talking about: they will turn up in prose of their own accord—yes, they will fall in and report themselves without being summoned. Only let your habitual practice in writing and speaking be to make the thoughts end up with the words, and the combination of the words themselves spring from good long free metres, specially the dactylic or the first paean or the cretic, though with a close of various forms and clearly marked, for similarity is particularly noticed at the close, and if the first and last feet of the sentences are regulated on this principle, the metrical shapes of the parts in between can pass unnoticed, only provided that the actual period is not shorter than the ear expected or longer than the strength and breath can last out. However, the close of the sentences in my opinion requires even more careful attention than the earlier parts, because it is here that perfection of finish is chiefly tested. For with verse equal attention is given to the beginning and middle and end of a line, and a slip at any point weakens its force, but in a speech few people notice the first part of the sentences and nearly everybody the last part; so as the ends of the sentences show up and are noticed, they must be varied, in order not to be turned down by the critical faculty or by a feeling of surfeit in the ear. For there are perhaps two or three feet that ought to be kept for sentence endings, and thrown into relief, providing the preceding rhythms are not too short and jerky; these will have to be either trochees or dactyls, or else either trochee or dactyl alternating with the posterior paean that Aristotle approves of or with its equivalent the cretic. To ring the changes on these will prevent the audience from being bored with monotony, and we shall avoid appearing to have taken a lot of trouble to prepare for the task in front of us. But if the great Antipater of Sidon, whom you, Catullus, can remember well, had a habit of pouring out hexameters and other verses of various forms and metres impromptu, and as he had a quick wit and a good memory, made himself such an adept by practice, that when he deliberately decided to throw his ideas into verse, words followed automatically, how much more easily shall we achieve this in prose, given practice and training! (III.xlix–l) Just prior to these remarks, Cicero notes that the speaker’s main task was to see that the language be controlled and the structure of the whole orderly—“that the parts of the structure shall be distinct and the periods finished.” It is clear from these remarks and those in other ancient commentators that a lapse from prose into verse was considered inept or gimmicky, and that the whole matter was so broadly understood as scarcely to warrant mention.

66

Chapter Five

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 1710

Menippism and Decorum

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 1710

67

68

Chapter Five

with prose employed in “low” Menippean satire constituted a deliberate wrenching of decorum.81 Now, a Cynic’s every impulse was satiric, as his behaviour shows: his aim, like the Menippists’, was ever to adjust the perceptions of the target—the public. To illustrate: Diogenes styled himself a “Socrates gone mad.” Korkowski comments: This “madness” was Diogenes’ habit of unconventional behaviour— reviling great men to their faces, fornicating in public, relieving his bowels in the middle of the market place, and breaking wind in polite gatherings— for he insisted that the beginning of human evil was the delusion that man was above the natural state, and he would go to any length to remind of what the state was. The Cynics, following Diogenes’ example, took to wearing rough cloaks, both winter and summer, and a life of wandering, carrying staves and wallets, eating only bread and lupines, and sleeping out of doors. For a time Diogenes took to living in (actually, wearing) a tub from the temple of Cybele, and this tub reappears often in the later Menippean landscape.82

Appositely, Diogenes also likened himself, as a messenger from the gods, to a choirmaster “pitching the note too high, that the rest may get the right one.”83 A common Menippean ploy involves dialogues with the gods or the dead, as they provided opportunities to observe worldly folly from a distance—which perhaps underlay the Cynics’ notion of themselves as messengers from another world. Similar opportunities were available by 81 E.g., as the translator noted, “...I wanted to find credible English equivalents for Petronius’ mercurial shifts from one style to another: from low Latin to educated Latin, from bathetic or frivolous parody-doggerel to flatulent epic to sheer lyric loveliness; from the rhetorical fustian of set-pieces to the sudden discovery of a true passion in language” (The Satyricon, trans., W. Arrowsmith [New York: New American Library, Mentor Books, 1959], pp. xvii–xviii). Language itself is a prime “subject” of Menippean satires: no better example exists than Finnegans Wake. Richard Lanham observes that Rabelais forces awareness of words as things, objects, ends as well as means, just as he does with body vis-à-vis mind. The parallel is obvious. We are not to leave the body behind in a transcendent high seriousness. It remains always there. Nor are we to look through words to a transcendent truth beyond them. Our noses are rubbed over and over in both word and body. Both are ends in themselves and we continually use them as such. The pressure to forget body and word must be resisted. (The Motives of Eloquence, p. 184) 82 pp. 42–43. 83 Dudley, pp. 31, 59. Cf. Korkowski, p. 104.

Menippism and Decorum

69

travelling to the moon (Lucian and Butler), or to imaginary countries (Lucian, More, Rabelais, Swift), or to exotic foreign lands (as in Sartor Resartus, or Byron’s Don Juan’s sojourn in Turkey). Even one’s own culture could be explored as if it were bizarre and exotic (e.g., Utopia, Don Quixote, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake). Susan Sailer comments on the “encyclopedic form” of such works as Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Blake’s The Four Zoas, Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony, and Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, with which Finnegans Wake maintains ties in that these texts, besides their encyclopedic quality, tend to share the qualities of being extravagant, carnivalesque, heavily intertextual, nonlinear, multiply dialogued, and fragmentary. Like the Wake, The Anatomy of Melancholy is a compendium of all sorts of information about the times in which Burton lived. Defying genre categories, Anatomy draws widely on other works and is concerned with the Fall, which it views as the root cause of melancholy. Another similarity includes the many different modes and genres that it inscripts— digression, poetry, lyric description, Latin passages, outline, treatise (on hunting), retelling of love stories.84

Michel Foucault credits The Temptation of St. Anthony as being the precursor of Finnegans Wake: “In writing The Temptation, Flaubert produced the first literary work whose exclusive domain is that of books: following Flaubert, Mallarmé is able to write Le Livre and modern literature is activated—Joyce, Roussel, Kafka, Pound, Borges.”85 However it is managed, the basic strategy is still to provide the audience with a means of seeing itself and its own culture afresh—“the same anew.”86 84

Susan Shaw Sailer, On the Void of to Be: Incoherence and Trope in Finnegans Wake (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 164. 85 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed., Donald F. Bouchard, tr. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 92. 86 This effect has recently been dubbed “defamiliarization”: here is the entry in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, ed., Chris Baldick (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). “Defamiliarization” is ...the distinctive effect achieved by literary works in disrupting our habitual perception of the world, enabling us to ‘see’ things afresh, according to the theories of some English Romantic poets and of Russian Formalism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) wrote of the ‘film of familiarity’ that blinds us to the wonders of the world, and that Wordsworth’s poetry aimed to remove. P. B. Shelley in his essay ‘The Defence of Poetry’ (written 1821) also claims that poetry ‘makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’ by stripping ‘the veil of familiarity from the world’. In

70

Chapter Five

Casting the familiar in unfamiliar terms and vice versa is but a variant on techniques already discussed: mixtures of verse and prose, of styles, of serious and comic, of plot and digression, and so on. Given the functioning of decorum and of Cynicism in the satires, it is clear why Menippean satire cannot be defined descriptively. Description limits the observer to the surface (the contents) of the work: for that kind of analysis the work has to be isolated from considerations of audience. Most commentators prior to Ramus or Erasmus were still so thoroughly imbued with rhetoric and decorum that the role of the audience was taken as obvious. By Dryden’s time, dialectic had won the battle for supremacy in the trivium, thereby entrenching the abstract, descriptive approach as correct. Even Dryden approaches things descriptively, but he does make the all-important observation that Varro’s satires imitate the “Cynic manner” of Menippus. Dryden would appear, then, to have been the last critic to ascribe even passing significance to the function of decorum as related to audience sensibility. By contrast, classical scholarship of the last few centuries has ignored decorum and audience and paid scant attention to Menippean satire. Northrop Frye, while noting digressiveness and other Menippean tactics, disregards the audience as having any formal, causal relation to Menippean satire; but then Frye is one of those critics who uphold the dialectic notion of the abstract and ideal character of formal cause in a work of art.87 Anne Payne’s approach descends from Frye’s (one critic calls the followers the “small Frye”) and shows the characteristic blindness to audience and effect that good dialectic and description impose. After reviewing Bakhtin’s fourteen characteristics, and after adding seven of her own, she observes that ...the changing tone, the nonpornographic obscenity, the heterogeneous catalogues which ignore hierarchical subordination, are all ways of modern usage, the term [defamiliarization] corresponds to Viktor Shklovsky’s use of the Russian word ostranenie (‘making strange’) in his influential essay ‘Poetry as Technique’ (1917). Shklovsky argued that art exists in order to recover for us the sensation of life which is diminished in the ‘automatized’ routine of everyday experience. He and the other Formalists set out to define the devices by which literary works achieve this effect, usually in terms of the ‘foregrounding’ of the linguistic medium. Brecht’s theory of the alienation effect in drama starts from similar grounds. (pp. 53–54) Clearly, this is familiar-sounding territory. It is essential, however, that we keep our gaze firmly fixed on Cynicism as providing the deep structure of Menippism, and remember that the Cynic attacked, not the passer-by’s ideas of this and that but his perceptions of himself, his limits, his fallibility, etc. 87 Cf. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 132.

Menippism and Decorum

71

violating decorum, consistency, traditional expectation, and are thus antiestablishment. They deny the possibility of an unquestionable standard, answer, method, attitude which some people mean to force down other people’s throats.88

All true, but all beside the point. Korkowski has proposed mimesis as a defining characteristic of the Menippean tradition; but even he overlooked the significance of Cynic mimesis (putting-on) of the audience and its sensibilities. Finally, is there after all a decorum for Menippean satire? Certainly, since decorum means attuning the style, i.e., the reader’s way of seeing— via spoudogeloion, joco-seriousness—for a dérèglement de tous les sens.89 88

F. Anne Payne, Chaucer and Menippean Satire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), p. 11. Payne frequently has her hands on the key elements, and, because of her unfortunate adherence to the Frye approach, just as consistently misses the mark. For example, and again in respect to decorum: Menippean satire affords a constructive method of containing ideological disagreements, a method of broadening the base upon which we must stand in order to investigate the conflicting evidence that creates the spiritual dilemma of man. Arnold’s famous remark that Chaucer’s poetry lacks high seriousness is after all correct. (His error was that he made the term the only synonym for profundity.) High seriousness belongs to the concerns of epic and tragedy, Arnold’s preferred literary forms, with their single-minded commitment to revealing the exalted if momentary significance in human effort, to negating what is for them the dominant fact of human life: death. High seriousness has only a minor place in the dialogical confrontations of Menippean satire. Anyone within its boundaries disposed to be highly serious awakes “the dog who grins when he bites.” (p. 35) In these terms, the proper decorum of Menippism is, rather, low seriousness: low and motley, and never so serious as when playing, hard. Another example: she notes that, in the Nun’s Priest, we have the most destructive possible presentation of the omniscient catechist, one “whose conclusions...fall over the edge altogether into the cheerful, negative glee of the arch-scoffer. The reader is the potential victim of the Nun’s Priest (a position he will do well to avoid if he can)...” (p. 181). Tantalizing, but the discussion remains at the level of the reader’s concepts. 89 A counter-example: the Folio Society’s illustrated Tristram Shandy loses much of its punch precisely because of the illustrations. The woodcut illustrations interfere with the book’s Menippism, so completely at odds with the text are their attitude and tone. The result is comparable to that of putting the wrong frame around a picture: they hinder its working properly. The tone of the illustrations is direct and mildly witty; that of Tristram Shandy, serious kidding, joco-seriousness with a sting. The attitude of the illustrations veers towards representational cliché; that of Tristram Shandy, towards spoudogeloion and riot. The aim or effect of the illustrations is to show something to the reader; that of Tristram Shandy, to show up the reader.

72

Chapter Five

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 1710, Fake Treatises

CHAPTER SIX DIGRESSIVE STRUCTURE AND PERCEPTION

Digressive discontinuity comes closest to being a sine qua non of Menippean satires since they employ medleys not only of styles but of attitudes, languages, tones, and subjects.90 As a consequence, Menippists tend to extremes of playfulness. Their play is frequently if not deliberately 90

Digression in narrative content is a favourite Menippean ploy. Menippists often remark that they will set down anything that enters their heads (the “autonomous pen” topic). The many ways of managing this range from Lucian to Chaucer, where each tale is a digression from the pilgrimage, to the digressive interlacing of Tale of a Tub, Sterne’s (Tristram Shandy) abrupt and witty leaps, Carlyle’s bags (Sartor Resartus) with the contents helter-skelter, the jumps in “stream of consciousness” in Ulysses, and the puns in Finnegans Wake. Byron’s aside (Don Juan) is typical in its way: But what’s this to the purpose? You will say. Gent. reader, nothing; a mere speculation, For which my sole excuse is—’tis my way; Sometimes with and sometimes without occasion. I write what’s uppermost, without delay; This narrative is not meant for narration, But a mere airy and fantastic basis, To build up common things with common places. Beside him, put Burton: I must…do my business myself, and was therefore enforced, as a bear doth her whelps, to bring forth this confused lump; I had not time to lick it into form, as she doth her young ones, but even so to publish it as it was first written, quicquid in buccam venit, in an extemporean style, as I do commonly all other exercises, effudi quicquid dictavit genius meus, out of a confused company of notes, and writ with as small deliberation as I do ordinarily speak, without all affectation of big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms, tropes, strong lines, that like Acestes’ arrows caught fire as they flew, strains of wit, brave heats, elogies, hyperbolical exornations, elegancies, etc., which many so much affect. I am aquae potor, drink no wine at all, which so much improves our modern wits, a loose, plain, rude writer, ficum voco ficum et ligonem ligonem, and as free, as loose, idem calamo quod in mente [what my mind thinks my pen writes]... (p. 31)

74

Chapter Six

in bad taste—which, in part at least, may account for the dearth of serious scholarly attention paid to this “low and motley” form.91 Their frequent recourse to a potpourri of the serious and comic (spoudogeloion) also constitutes digressiveness. Discontinuity, mixed with work and play, forms the principal technique for engaging and retuning the reader. Why bother to make sense of it? The narrator has not. But we cannot afford a similar luxury—and Rabelais knew it. We cannot read just for the fun of it. The mixed form is problematic by nature, draws us in. To enjoy, we must know. To enjoy more, know more. Our laughter depends on comparisons, discontinuities, absurd contrasts of style and subject, situation and topic. The more we try to keep our patterns of expectation straight, the funnier the narrative gets. Our own pleasure draws us in. Our laughter depends on trying to make sense of the senseless. The most open form turns out to be the least. We must enter Gargantua and Pantagruel’s 91 As spokesman for Roman oratory, Cicero inveighed against lapses of decorum in life equally as in language; he constantly reiterates that “the universal rule, in oratory as in life, is to consider propriety [quid deceat].” In De oratore, he remarks, concerning violations of decorum, How inappropriate it would be to employ general topics and the grand style when discussing cases of stillicide before a single referee, or to use mean and meagre language when referring to the majesty of the Roman people. This would be wrong in every respect; but others err in regard to character—either their own or that of the jury, or of their opponents; and not merely in the statement of facts, but often in the use of words. Although a word has no force apart from the thing, yet the same thing is often approved or rejected according as it is expressed in one way or another, Moreover, in all cases the question must be, ‘How far?’ For although the limits of propriety differ for each subject, yet in general too much is more offensive than too little…Since we say ‘This is appropriate’—a word we use in connexion with everything we do or say, great or small,—since, I repeat, we say ‘This is appropriate’ and ‘That is not appropriate,’ and it appears how important propriety is everywhere (and that it depends upon something else and is wholly another question whether you should say ‘appropriate’ or ‘right’;—for by ‘right’ we indicate the perfect line of duty which everyone must follow everywhere, but propriety is what is fitting or agreeable to an occasion or person; it is important often in actions as well as in words, in the expression of the face, in gesture and in gait, and impropriety has the opposite effect); the poet avoids impropriety as the greatest fault which he can commit; he errs also if he puts the speech of a good man in the mouth of a villain, or that of a wise man in the mouth of a fool.… (xxi– xxii.74) Menippean tactics frequently employ these “errors,” as well as others more heinous, e.g., paraphrasing or misappropriating well-known lines from poets and philosophers for uses quite other than their originators intended.

Digressive Structure and Perception

75

world on Rabelais’s terms. We try to make sense of his world and feel foolish doing so. We seem to be offered and alternative—only enjoy— which involves remaining silent, failing to specify the sources of our enjoyment. Even if you think that Rabelais and his narrator are only playing games with forms of discourse, still you have begun, by so thinking, to take Rabelais’s generic cornucopia seriously, begun to resist Gargantua and Pantagruel’s declared invitation. Gargantua and Pantagruel makes the same point on two other levels. Besides the narrative invitation, we confront an allegorical and a stylistic one, both working in the same way. The allegorical invitation is perhaps the stronger. Rabelais reinvites us to penetrate to the heart of his mystery at intervals throughout. The allegorical impulse, in this respect, rather resembles the impulse to bawdy innuendo. It is synergistic. Once such an atmosphere of expectation has been created, all is drawn into it. No cigar, to borrow Freud’s familiar example, remains just a cigar. So with the allegory. The more puzzling and discontinuous, arbitrary or grotesque an event, the more strongly do we suspect hidden meaning. Thus Rabelais invites us to reweave his loose ends for him.92

In fact, any mixing constitutes digressiveness: begin in one mode and switch abruptly to another, then back, dress your subject in clothes fit for another, present high in prose and low in verse, deliberately wrench decorum for shock or comic effect—all is digression from consistency and homogeneity, from the proper and the expected. It is equally common for the author to frisk with the reader: for example, he may swear soberly that all that follows is truth (as did Lucian in A True Story), and a few lines later remark that he will say anything that comes into his head. This is tantamount to the logical paradox of the Cretan, Epimenides, “All Cretans are liars.” Seneca opens his mock-apotheosis, nearly a third of which is in verse, with this sally: I wish to place on record the proceedings in Heaven October 13 last, of the new year which begins this auspicious age. It shall be done without malice or favour. This is the truth. Ask if you like how I know it? To begin with, I am not bound to please you with my answer. Who will compel me? I know the same day made me free, which was the last day for him who made the proverb true—One must be born either a Pharaoh

92 Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 168–69.

76

Chapter Six or a fool. If I choose to answer, I will say whatever trips off my tongue. Who has ever made the historian produce witnesses to swear for him?93

Lucian’s A True Story is one of the most imitated of all Menippean satires, though it contains but scant verse. In it he mocks a delightfully motley crew of philosophers, scientists, poets (Homer among them), and writers of travel literature. Large portions of A True Story appear in up-todate form in Gargantua and Pantagruel and in Gulliver’s Travels.94 In his 93 Senecae Apocolocyntosis, or Ludus de Morte Claudii: The Pumpkinification of Claudius, trans., W. H. D. Rouse (bound with Petronius’ Satyricon [Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1919]), p. 371. 94 Dorothy Coleman has analysed Rabelais as a Menippist, and points to “the listener/speaker conspiracy” in Gargantua and Pantagruel: Rabelais has made out a large contract between author and reader; and in his choice of the type of fiction he is writing—Menippean satire—he has emphasized that he asks of the reader a certain kind of attention and promises him something in return. Rabelais’ ebullient creativeness in linguistic formation demands from his reader not only suppleness of mind and imaginative sympathy but also a certain degree of self-discipline. The sheer delight the author has in creating something new from the raw materials of syllables and words; the thesaurus of words from Greek, Latin, dialects, jargon and slang which he exploits; the associations and semantic overtones he has recourse to and the different patterns speech itself embarks on—all this means that the reading of his work is at first rather slow.” (From Rabelais: A Critical Study in Prose Fiction [Cambridge: At the University Press, 1971], pp. 204–205) She points out that one of Rabelais’ Menippean tactics is to blur the normal distinction between the inside and the outside of the work, and that between author and reader—traits, she notes, shared by Don Quixote and Tale of a Tub: Thus in the first chapter and in the last we have the created author and the envisaged reader travelling along the same track: both are looking from above at the fictional world which is being created. From the envisaged reader’s point of view, there is a constant shifting of viewpoints because the created author does not allow him to settle down comfortably into a state of disbelief. (p. 56) This is one of Rabelais’ techniques for satirizing the reader. Menippean decorum is obviously present, as Coleman remarks in her conclusion: Where both Cervantes and Rabelais start with a parody, Cervantes takes the reader deeper into the truth and reality of the world through his characters, while Rabelais takes the world and transforms that into something entirely different from what we as readers are used to. As a Renaissance doctor and as a Renaissance humanist he offers laughter to the world; and that laughter he clearly defined in the poem at the beginning of his work—Amis lecteurs, qui ce livre lisez. We can recognize ourselves as his readers: the conspiracy between author and reader, without whose relationship there would be no comedy; a social phenomenon transmuted to a literary one; the reminder that there is no room for

Digressive Structure and Perception

77

prefatory remarks to the reader, Lucian promises “pure amusement based on wit and humour,” plus “a little food for thought,” then adds, contradicting the title, ...I tell all kinds of lies in a plausible and specious way...every thing in my story is a more or less comical parody of one or another of the poets, historians and philosophers of old...95

An explanation is not long in coming: after jibes at some of those authors, he concludes the opening digression: I did not find much fault with them for their lying, as I saw that this was already a common practice even among men who profess philosophy. I did wonder, though, that they thought that they could write untruths and not get caught at it. Therefore, as I myself, thanks to my vanity, was eager to hand something down to posterity, that I might not be the only one excluded from the privileges of poetic license, and as I had nothing true to tell, not having had any adventures of significance, I took to lying. But my lying is far more honest than theirs, for though I tell the truth in nothing else, I shall at least be truthful in saying that I am a liar. I think I can escape the censure of the world by my own admission that I am not telling a word of truth. Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others— which, in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist. Therefore my readers should on no account believe in them.96

At the same time, in the course of the “true story” he occasionally makes such remarks as “I have never told a lie that I know of,”97 and he ends the narration with what one disgruntled Greek scribe marginally glossed as the biggest lie of all: “What happened in the other world I shall tell you in the succeeding books.”98 pity or sympathy in his comic work, that moral reactions are as irrelevant as emotional ones, that laughter distracts one’s attention from judging moral issues but not from moral meditation. The balance between his work and his audience entails a certain level of intelligence, a certain sophistication and above all the readiness to participate in his linguistic fun. This, in fact, completes the circle of our study: everything, from the introduction of a conspiracy in the prologues to the awareness of the poetic prose of the last chapter, is dependant on the conditional if: if we are prepared to sign that contract and open the door to the two-way making of fiction. (p. 229) 95 Lucian, I, 249. 96 Ibid., I, 251–53. 97 Ibid., I, 337 98 Ibid., I, 357.

78

Chapter Six

Another digressive strain, in continual use since ancient times and one that may be admitted as Menippean, is the Milesian tale or “frame tale.” In this form, two situations (or more) are used, one of which enframes the other(s). The basic situation (frame) is so flexible as to allow potentially infinite episodic digression and commentary with little or no necessity of sequence. Examples include Apuleius’ Metamorphosis (and Lucian’s shorter version of the same), The Thousand and One Nights,99 Martianus’ De nuptiis, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Most importantly, there is no connection between the frame tale and the digression tale. In some frame tales the balance between frame and digression is so even that the structure becomes a double-plot. The frame tale has Menippean character in its tactic of switching the reader back and forth between the enframing situation and the digressions, and between one digression and another, toying with the reader’s expectations. Because of its construction, the frame tale has Menippean potential, but not all frame tales are Menippean satires. Of the examples cited, Chaucer, Apuleius, and Martianus all work with the language in a Menippean fashion: the riot of puns in Martianus and Apuleius, as well in Alan of Lille’s De planctu naturae100 (in many ways comparable to Finnegans Wake), are likewise Menippean elements. With exact decorum, Chaucer’s tale-digressions from the frame (the journey to Canterbury) are each differently rendered, each in a style appropriate to the speaker. His mixing of styles and his treatment of the main narrator echo devices in Lucian’s dialogues and A True Story, and they add a dimension to joco-seriousness: This deliberate undermining of seriousness through contextual dislocation, indecorous confusion of levels and types, has troubled Chaucerians for some time. Bertrand Bronson, for example, remarked nearly [thirty] years ago that “We are not merely disturbed, we are sometimes disoriented and amazed by the rapid shifts of stylistic level, of apparent sacrifice of achieved effects, the reversals of mood and tone, the abrupt stoppage of narrative momentum, the comingling of colloquial and artificial diction, the breathtaking incorporation of the whole range of language into the

99 Further, as Gilbert Highet notes, “the Arabian Nights constantly slips into rhyming prose, and thence into verse.” The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 251, n. 23. 100 Vide: Plaint of Nature—Alan of Lille, trans., J. J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980), Foreword, and p. 33.

Digressive Structure and Perception

79

working texture of the verse.” These Ovidian antics seem both to compromise ordinary seriousness and to suggest some other kind.101

Nevertheless, while The Odyssey is in some respects a frame tale, it must be distinguished from an obviously Menippean work like The Satyricon. In both works, the frame is the hero’s flight from the wrath of a god, and both narratives are encyclopedic and potentially endless sets of adventures. But only one, The Satyricon, wrestles satirically with the sensibilities of the audience, and so only it is a Menippean satire. The frame tale, then, is not sui generis purely Menippean. Whereas the singleplot story line quickly becomes hypnotic and invites the reader to “sink 101

Richard A. Lanham, Literacy and the Survival of Humanism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 41. Cf. Bertrand H. Bronson, In Search of Chaucer (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1960), p. 22. Lanham returns to the theme of how joco-seriousness and digressiveness support each other: ...it is this continual movement in and out of the domain of conventional ethical seriousness, in both activity and attitude, which generates the characteristic Chaucerian “seriousness.” We never know, at any one point, which world we are in. We are always doing—or suspecting that a character is doing—the most serious things just for the hell of it, threatening his, and our, serious life with a radical sentimentalizing, with feeling for its own sake. (p. 48) The “low seriousness” of Chaucer’s wit in the Tales extends to the structure and presentation of characters as well as to narrative: This represents the Chaucerian situation par excellence. Do we see a neutral, transparent, literal description of an odd literary reality or a literary, conventionalized picture of a normative reality? Chaucer is continually playing variations on this dilemma. He creates as narrator a “walking literal” who offers a “transparent window” invitation. But he is too obviously a literal, and so Chaucer the poet reenters and the transparent window becomes—another possibility— opaque. He offers a set of characters, pilgrims say, some of whom seem to be— so far as we can tell—certified genuine slices of life. But then he also gives us others, like the Wife of Bath, who seem slices of pure literature, “olde books” literally incarnate but presented as slices of life, as their own norm. The question of genre in Chaucer is always, sooner or later, confused by this continual double variation. From one point of view, every genre he uses is a deformation of experience. From another, life itself, ipse ille. So, in the Troilus, we are given the courtly code and made to see it, over and over, as a convention. Pandarus sees to this. At the same time the narrator, with a little help from the principals, takes it as a literal transcription of life. Given two possible normative realities, we can depend on neither—a perfect multistable puzzle. This sense of permanent potential displacement, so characteristic of Chaucer, is far from easy to manage. That Chaucer succeeds in managing it so well makes a little sad the immense labors of modern critics to undo it, to insist on holding one variable as constant. (From pp. 52–53; the rest of the discussion deserves attention.)

80

Chapter Six

Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, 1710

into” the narrative, the frame tale can frustrate the reader’s natural inclination to merge with the narrative by keeping him continually suspended between (or alternating between) the two situations. The effect is to keep the reader alert, outside the work, and conscious of it as a fiction,

Digressive Structure and Perception

Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, 1710

81

82

Chapter Six

of the author as manipulator, and of himself as a reader interacting with the work. Be alert: this country needs lerts! As Derek Attridge notes, there are “works in which the ‘digressions’ are so long or draw so much attention to themselves that they insist on a status equal, or even superior, to that of the central narrative.” He continues with examples: In Swift’s Tale of a Tub the tale itself occupies about a quarter of the text; in Tristram Shandy Sterne weaves a web of digressions that prevent the ostensible autobiography from getting properly underway (we might note in passing here that Swift and Sterne are among the authors most frequently cited in Finnegans Wake); the digressions in Byron’s Don Juan are as memorable as the story of its antihero; Melville’s accounts of whaling in Moby-Dick vie for attention with the story of Ahab’s quest for the White Whale. In such texts all the strategic systems for the recuperation of digression fail, because they all rely on digression’s having a subordinate status; the hierarchical opposition between progressive and digressive, it might be argued, is deconstructed by the text itself. The result is that the reader is weaned from dependence on the illusion that novels are reports on the real world and is encouraged to enjoy the writing as writing, in all its uncertainty, prolixity, contradictoriness, and materiality.102

Indeed, A Tale of a Tub is actually two satires interlaced, one on religion and one on learning. The former serves as a frame, while the latter is for the most part carried on in the digressions. In a variation, Joyce fashioned the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of Ulysses so that the forty weeks’ period of gestation in the womb are mimed for the reader as a developmental passage through forty major prose styles: from ritual chant to legalistic Sallust-Tacitus, to Anglo-Saxon, through the centuries to Carlyle for the delivery, which is accompanied by an amalgam of slang dialects signalling the newborn’s cries. During this stylistic tour de force, the narrative “plot” presents characters and their chitchat at a lying-in hospital while a woman labours and gives birth. Which is the frame? In the next chapter (“Circe”), Joyce abandons narrative prose altogether for the form of a playscript: using (parenthetic, i.e., digressive) stage directions between and interrupting speeches, he plunges the reader into a kaleidoscopic vortex of Circean transformation. The whores in “Nighttown” function at the brute animal level of human appetites, “charming” men into beasts. At this juncture, the frame tale and another form, the epyllion, converge in Menippean satire, by means of a more general structure: the double-plot. 102

Attridge, Derek, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 228.

CHAPTER SEVEN EPYLLION AND TRANSFORMATION

The epyllion, the little epic, is generally defined as a short narrative poem containing a digression and “dealing with human beings.” The general style of the classical epyllion, as Marjorie Crump relates, “is that of all Alexandrian poetry, formal, allusive, learned.”103 She also remarks that “in the epyllion the digression is often as important as the main subject, and sometimes even becomes the more important of the two, the main subject acting as a framework.”104 With many frame tales, the presence of the frame is so slight, so overwhelmed by the digressions, that the frame becomes as a sub-plot to or digression from the main business of the tale. Such is the case with Milton’s “Lycidas,” for example (which is not Menippean), and also with the writings of Apuleius, Martianus, and Chaucer (which are). Such structural ambiguity and reversibility can easily be turned to tactical account in the hands of a Menippist, affording him the opportunity to bring two situations to bear simultaneously on the reader’s sensibilities. The ideal form for this purpose is that in which frame and 103

Marjorie Crump, The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931), p. 24. 104 Ibid. The epyllion, far from dying out in antiquity, remains a vital part of our poetic tradition. It is also called “little epic.” Examples abound, from Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale” to the Elizabethans (cf. Elizabeth S. Donno’s Elizabethan Minor Epics [New York: Columbia University Press / London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963]) to Milton’s “Lycidas,” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and a number of Tennyson’s poems, including the Idylls, etc. Crump summarizes: Except the Hylas of Theocritus, all the extant epyllia before the time of Ovid possess digressions. The digression is a second story, often of great length, contained within the first, and frequently quite unconnected with its subject. Usually it appears as a story told by one of the characters; less commonly as a description of a work of art. Judging from the extant examples it seems to have been the practice to secure an artistic connection between the two parts of the poem by using parallel subjects and contrasting the details; or two definitely contrasting subjects might be chosen; in many cases there is also a contrast of style. It is uncertain who was responsible for this curious form. It does, however, bear the marks of its descent from early epic. (p. 23)

84

Chapter Seven

digression are so evenly balanced as to present a double-plot structure. Each situation, then, is a digression from the other. While this would constitute a special form of the frame tale, it exists as one of the varieties of the epyllion. However, not all multilevel (or polyphonic) narratives are necessarily Menippean: there is a significant difference between an allegory and a double-plot structure. For, while the impact of an allegory is lost if the reader is unaware or only partly aware of the symbolism, the mode of action of a double-plot remains constant regardless of the reader’s consciousness of it. The only criterion is that the two plots run in parallel, and without connection. When they do, the effect of the double-plot is to rouse in the reader what W. B. Yeats called “The Emotion of Multitude”— a sense that one is observing the human condition. Another way of putting it is to note that allegory does indeed depend on connections, on careful character-for-character and action-for-action matching of persons, situations, and events inside with those outside the work: it is conceptual, whereas the double-plot has its main effect through its action on the sensibilities (percepts) rather than on ideas (concepts). The ideas are, as it were, of secondary importance. William Empson, who discusses doubleplots as a “version of pastoral,” uses this feature to substantiate his observation that “the interaction of the two plots gives a particularly clear setting for, or machine for imposing, the social and metaphysical ideas on which pastoral depends.”105 The double-plot, then, is a form of structural ambiguity, which may have been what attracted Empson to it after he published Seven Types of Ambiguity. Structural ambiguity—digressiveness—is a specifically Menippean tactic, so a relatively balanced prose-verse alternation may fairly be regarded as a structural double-plot. Empson opens his discussion of the topic with this summary: 105

William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), p. 30. In his essay on John Marston, T. S. Eliot suggests that the double-plot form constitutes poetic drama as distinct from prosaic drama: It is possible that what distinguishes poetic drama from prosaic drama is a kind of doubleness in the action, as if it took place on two planes at once. In this it is different from allegory, in which the abstraction is something conceived, not something differently felt, and from symbolism (as in the plays of Maeterlinck) in which the tangible world is deliberately diminished—both symbolism and allegory being operations of the conscious planning mind. In poetic drama a certain apparent irrelevance may be the symptom of this doubleness; or the drama has an under-pattern, less manifest than the theatrical one. (Selected Essays [London: Faber and Faber, rpt. 1972] p. 229)

Epyllion and Transformation

85

The mode of action of a double plot is the sort of thing critics are liable to neglect; it does not depend on being noticed for its operation, so is neither an easy nor an obviously useful thing to notice. Deciding which sub-plot to put with which main plot must be like deciding what order to put the turns in at a music hall, a form of creative work on which I know of no critical dissertation, but at which one may succeed or fail. As in the music hall, the parts may be by different hands, different in tone and subject matter, hardly connected by plot, and yet the result may be excellent; The Changeling is the best example of this I can find. It is an easy-going device, often used simply to fill out a play, and has an obvious effect in the Elizabethans of making you feel the play deals with life as a whole.106

Empson’s discussion leads the reader to suspect that the double-plot was a device used almost solely by the Elizabethans. There is, in fact, very little of substance on the subject of double-plots. Crump’s remarks are all that relate them to epyllion, while the essays of Yeats and Empson appear to represent the only modern interest in them as a feature of more recent Western literature. It was T. S. Eliot who, in his essay, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” pointed out (by an oblique reference to Yeats’ “The Emotion of Multitude”) that Joyce’s Ulysses has a double-plot structure.107 The double-plot writ large is the two-book structure. Eugene Korkowski’s observation that many medieval and later Menippean satires turned towards didascalism assists in identifying as Menippean a great range of double-book works that omit connections between the two books: for example, the Cosmographia of Bernard Sylvestris and More’s Utopia work in this fashion. So, in their ways, do Goethe’s Faust, Parts One and Two and the two books of Don Quixote. Joyce’s innovation, and his economy, was to make one book explicit (Bloom’s Dublin odyssey) and 106

Some Versions of Pastoral, p. 27. Ten years later, in 1927, Wyndham Lewis discussed Ulysses in Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927, rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). There, he noted the derivation of Bloom from Flaubert—as a mimesis of Bouvard (another Menippean satire): “Another thing that can be discussed...is the claim that Bloom is a creation, a great homme moyen sensuel of fiction. That side of Bloom would never have existed had it not been for the Bouvard and Pecuchét of Flaubert, which very intense creation Joyce merely takes over, spins out, and translates into the relaxed medium of Anglo-Irish humour. Where Bloom is being Bouvard and Pecuchét, it is a translation, nothing more” (p. 104). It follows that Ulysses is actually a three-book structure, incorporating both Homer and Flaubert. On the next few pages of his chapter, Lewis explores Ulysses further, as regards its linguistic indebtedness to Rabelais and to Nashe, and he extends these remarks to include Joyce’s next work, Finnegans Wake, at the time appearing seriatim as “Work in Progress.”

107

86

Chapter Seven

one implicit (Homer’s epic Odyssey). Joyce’s technique, “continuous parallel,” illuminates the discontinuous relation between the two plots or books in this structure as one of mimesis, understood in the old sense of putting-on or becoming. It has been said that in Ulysses Joyce “brings Homer up-to-date”; evidently he has done more: he has made Homer coauthor of his Menippean satire. It has been my aim, in these last few pages, to arrive at an understanding of Menippean satire, as distinct from other modes of satire, that will embrace the variety of forms and innovations through which Menippism has passed and continues to pass. The pitfalls inherent in descriptive definition, the form identified from the outside and by its surface features, may be avoided by recourse to the structural principle of rhetorical decorum. Structural analysis by means of decorum reveals that Menippean satire proceeds by a “dérèglement de tous les sens,” by attacking the perceptions (percepts) rather than just the ideas (concepts) of the audience, playfully and therapeutically, so as to readjust the audience’s ability to see itself and its world clearly. The various mixtures, of prose and verse, styles, languages, etc., become in terms of decorum tactics towards this end rather than simple descriptive attributes. Literary Menippean satire is a mimesis of Cynicism in that it proceeds towards the same end as that pursued by the Cynics but by means of strategies and tactics afforded by the media of writing and print. Our purview of Menippean satire is now widened beyond the mimetic tradition outlined by Korkowski to include (a) satires that antedate Menippus (e.g., the Margites), the Timon silloi, the Milesian tale (e.g., Arabian Nights, Canterbury Tales, Tristram Shandy) and (b) the doubleplot form (e.g., More’s Utopia, the two-book scientific epics of the twelfth century, Donne’s Anatomies taken together, Ulysses). The last is proposed as the only inherently Menippean form of literature. A Menippean satire is definable as any work whose author fashions it so as to produce the effect of a Menippean satire. This is not a circular definition, but a mimetic one. Descriptive definition would simply require the work to exhibit certain outward features or to resemble another work or group of works. Outwardly and mimetically, this chameleon of satires can resemble anything under the sun, as long as it uses its weaponry properly and the reader is accurately targeted.

Epyllion and Transformation

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. I, 1760

87

CHAPTER EIGHT THE CYNIC AND THE DOG

As I have tried to show, the various mixtures—of prose and verse, of serious and comic, of puns, styles, targets, plots, languages—are each a kind of structural digression. Each works to awaken and inform not the concepts but the perceptions of the users. On the whole, classical scholarship has no general explanation of what a prose-verse alternation means or meant. Nor have modern critics addressed the problem: most often they use prose/verse as simply one of many classifications. (Not to forget that the riot of wit and play standard in Menippean satires would completely subvert a sober or moralizing reader, or writer for that matter: it is easy to see how readers and critics in that crowd would be vexed and puzzled by the shenanigans in Menippean satires.) Cynicism, which underlies Menippism to this day, had no established canon of doctrine moral or otherwise but was advanced by a series of rather erratic individuals. (Korkowski examines the questions, and the arguments, of the advocates of Cynic didascalism—especially Gilbert Highet108—and shows them to be based on an incomplete understanding of the Cynic outlook.) Nor did they—Antisthenes, Diogenes, and Crates, for example—attempt to build followings or show any special reverence for their Cynic predecessors. Lucian, for one, frequently displays Diogenes and other Cynics as utter fools. Cynics were called “dog-philosophers” because they snapped and snarled at folly and pretence, lived in the streets, emphasized the natural life, and so on, combining in various degrees bohemian indigence and anti-social individualism. As everyone knew, Greek provides a deliciously tempting pun on “dog” and “Cynic” as a wry, self-conscious comment. From the earliest to the present, the satires themselves often play with the pun as a comment on the “low” nature109 of the activity. 108

pp. 38ff. Streetcorner Cynics were frequently caricatured as dogs that barked and nipped at the heels of ostentatious passers-by. Lucian’s works, which are a touchstone for Menippists, abound with the pun. In “The Lapiths,” he calls Meidamas “the

109

90

Chapter Eight

Cynics were called “dog-philosophers” because they snapped and snarled at folly and pretence, lived in the streets, emphasized the natural life, and so on, combining in various degrees bohemian indigence and anti-social individualism. As everyone knew, Greek provides a deliciously tempting pun on “dog” and “Cynic” as a wry, self-conscious comment. From the earliest to the present, the satires themselves often play with the pun as a comment on the “low” nature110 of the activity. Critics continually remark on Menippean traits and commonplaces in familiar works, and without realizing that they are Menippean satires or that they have a tradition. William Empson devotes two chapters to the word “dog” in The Structure of Complex Words111: “Timon’s Dog” (referring to Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens) and “The English Dog.” His observations in the chapter on Timon (especially those on pp. 178–79) noisiest of all the Cynic barkers” (Lucian, vol. I, p. 425). In “Philosophies for Sale,” Hermes, as the auctioneer, discusses Diogenes: “...if you make him door keeper, you will find him far more trusty than a dog. In fact he is even called a dog” (vol. II, p. 463). Diogenes opens “Dialogues of the Dead” with a reference to “Menippus the Dog” (vol. VII, p. 3). Among many additional puns in that piece, Menippus addresses Cerberus with “My dear Cerberus—I’m a relation, being a Dog myself...” (vol. VII, p. 19). One last example: “Hermatimus” is Lucian’s longest work and his most sustained attack on the schools of philosophy. Hermatimus, a Stoic, is put through the mill of Socratic inquisition, loses— badly—to the Skeptic, and resolves to adopt the lifestyle of an ordinary man. He says (the last words of the dialogue), “If in the future I ever meet a philosopher while I am walking on the road, even by chance, I will turn round and get out of his way as if he were a mad dog” (vol. VI, p. 415). 110 Streetcorner Cynics were frequently caricatured as dogs that barked and nipped at the heels of ostentatious passers-by. Lucian’s works, which are a touchstone for Menippists, abound with the pun. In “The Lapiths,” he calls Meidamas “the noisiest of all the Cynic barkers” (Lucian, vol. I, p. 425). In “Philosophies for Sale,” Hermes, as the auctioneer, discusses Diogenes: “...if you make him door keeper, you will find him far more trusty than a dog. In fact he is even called a dog” (vol. II, p. 463). Diogenes opens “Dialogues of the Dead” with a reference to “Menippus the Dog” (vol. VII, p. 3). Among many additional puns in that piece, Menippus addresses Cerberus with “My dear Cerberus—I’m a relation, being a Dog myself...” (vol. VII, p. 19). One last example: “Hermatimus” is Lucian’s longest work and his most sustained attack on the schools of philosophy. Hermatimus, a Stoic, is put through the mill of Socratic inquisition, loses— badly—to the Skeptic, and resolves to adopt the lifestyle of an ordinary man. He says (the last words of the dialogue), “If in the future I ever meet a philosopher while I am walking on the road, even by chance, I will turn round and get out of his way as if he were a mad dog” (vol. VI, p. 415). 111 London: Chatto & Windus, 1969.

The Cynic and the Dog

91

strongly suggest that that play is a Menippean satire. In the other chapter, “The English Dog,” he remarks: The more obvious Elizabethan view, the idea of the dog as a cynic (which Nashe throws into his set of claims), seems to be in part a learned innovation. Few people nowadays do observe their dogs to grin, and those who do take it as a charming smile, but the grin of dogs then seems to have been a part of their reputation for satire. I take it that the medical use (1615), ‘Convulsions we call Cynic or dog-spasms because by the contraction of these, men are constrained to writhe and grinne like dogs,’ is a foreign or ancient association of ideas that still need to be explained.112

The chapter is rich with associations and with pointers to a variety of other Elizabethan Menippists (Nashe has long been identified as one). Educated Elizabethans knew enough of Greek and Latin and the classics that the Cynic/dog pun that escapes Empson was not hidden from them—as the curricula of the time demonstrate.113 Menippists were not slow to adopt doggishness as a badge of honour. Rabelais advises his reader to adopt it (Cynically): Have you ever uncorked a bottle of wine? God help us, do you remember the look on your face? Or have you ever seen a dog fall on a marrow bone? (The dog, I may add, is, as Plato says in Book II of the Republic, the most philosophic beast in the world.) If you have seen my dog, you may recall how intensely he scrutinizes his bone, how solicitously he guards it, how fervently he clutches it, how warily he bites his way into it, how passionately he breaks it, how diligently he sucks it. What force moves him to act so, what hope fosters such zealous pains, what recompense does he aspire to? Nothing but a little marrow. (To be sure this little is more toothsome than large quantities of any other meat, for—as Galen testifies in chapter III of his Concerning the Natural Faculties, and chapter XI of Concerning the Uses of the Various Parts of the Human Body—marrow is the most perfect food elaborated by nature.) Modelling yourself upon the dog, you should be wise to scent, to feel and to prize these fine, full-flavored volumes. You should be fleet in your pursuit of them, resolute in your attack. Then, by diligent reading and prolonged meditation, you should break the bone of my symbols to suck out the marrow of my meaning—for I make use of allegory as freely as Pythagoras did. As you read you must confidently expect to become valiant and wise. For here you will find a novel savor, a most abstruse 112

Op. cit., p. 164. Vide T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944).

113

92

Chapter Eight doctrine; here you will learn the deepest mysteries, the most agonizing problems of our religion, our body politic, our economic life.114

Lucian is another who makes frequent use of the pun, as when in “The Carousal, or the Lapiths”115 he calls Alcidamas “the noisiest of all the Cynic barkers, for which reason he was considered a superior person and was a great terror to everybody.” In “Demonax”116 he tells how “When Peregrinus Proteus rebuked him for laughing a great deal and making sport of mankind saying: ‘Demonax, you’re not at all doggish!’ he answered, ‘Peregrinus, you are not at all human!’ ” (The editor notes, “Peregrinus Proteus, of whose death and translation to a higher sphere Lucian has written in ‘The Passing of Peregrinus,’ carried his ‘doggishness’ [Cynicism] to extremes.”) More recently, Hilaire Belloc gave rein to this topic in his The Four Men: A Farrago: For he stopped outside the door behind which we could hear the voices of the disputants still at it with their realities and their contents, and their subjectivities, and their objectivities, and their catch-it-as-it-flies, and he said to us: The Sailor. ‘Have you not seen two dogs wrangling in the street, and how they will Gna! Gna! and Wurrer-Wurrer all to no purpose whatsoever, but solely because it is the nature of dogs thus dog-like to be-dog the wholesome air with dogged and canicular noise of no purport, value, or conclusion? And when this is on have you not seen how good housewives, running from their doors best stop the noisome noise and drown it altogether by slop, bang, douches of cold wet from a pail, which does dispirit the empty disputants, and, causing them immediately to unclinch, humps them off to more useful things? So it is with philosophers, who will snarl and yowl and worry the clean world to no purpose, not even intending a solution of any sort or a discovery, but only the exercise of their vain clapper and clang. Also they have made for this same game as infernal a set of barbaric words as were ever blathered and stumbled over by Attila the king when the Emperor of Constantinople’s Court Dentist pulled out his great back teeth for the enlargement of his jaw. Now this kind of man can be cured only by baptism, which is of four kinds, by water, by blood, and by desire: and the fourth kind is of beer. So watch me and what I will do.’ Then he went in ahead of us, and we all came in behind, and when we came in neither Grizzlebeard nor the Stranger looked up for one moment, but Grizzlebeard was saying, with vast scorn: ‘You are simply denying cause and effect, or rather efficient causality.’ 114

Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, op. cit., pp. 4–5. Lucian, op. cit., vol. 1. 116 Lucian, op. cit., vol. 1. 115

The Cynic and the Dog

93

To which the Stranger answered solemnly, ‘I do!’117

But the highest expression of the Cynic/dog pun and trope came with Leon Rooke’s (1981) Shakespeare’s Dog, a wonderful romp with a dog as narrator, whose perspective on humans and the world in general is decidedly Cynical: “...O sainted dog that is in heaven, where’s the dignity, where’s the decorum, what tree trunk of poisoned hemlock have these fools eaten?”118 And Martianus gives the barker pride of place, in the last dozen lines of De nuptiis: he has Satire, his narrator, say, I could have come forth in a grand robe, to be admired for my learning and refinement, decorous in appearance, as if just coming from the court of Mars. Instead I have been inspired by Felix Capella—whom ignorant generations have observed ranting as he passed judgment on barking dogs, giving to the high office of proconsul a bumble bee long separated from his blossoms by the sickle, and in his declining years; a man whom the prosperous city of Elissa has seen as a fosterling settled in a neighborhood of slothful herdsmen, barely managing on a small income, drowsy by day and blinking his eyes with effort—when I could fittingly quaff the Pegasean draught.119

117

The Four Men: A Farrago (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1911, rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 137. 118 Shakespeare’s Dog (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; Don Mills, ON: Stoddart/General Publishing, 1981, rpt. 1983), p. 96. 119 De nuptiis, op. cit., pp. 381–82.

DIGRESSION

CHAPTER NINE A CORNUCOPIA OF MENIPPEAN CLICHÉS

The chief techniques for defining a work as Menippean satire have been three. (a) By the simple formula “a mixture of verse and prose” (b) By comparing its contents with those of a known Menippean satire (c) By comparing it against a list of “definitive” features Each of these techniques is inadequate to deal with the problem of defining the form. The first fails both because it allows for the inclusion of works so mixed but that have no intention of being satirical and excludes a great variety of works that are more, or less, than the definition allows—that are wholly in verse (Don Juan) or wholly in prose (The French Lieutenant’s Woman). The second fails because it, too, makes no provision for innovation. All it can tell is whether a particular work does or does not resemble (I leave the matter of “adequately” for another discussion) a work that all have agreed is Menippean. While the third (and most popular) likewise does not provide for innovation and fails on that count, it fails because critics have not agreed on what such a list should contain. As this Digression illustrates, a complete and thereby definitive list would be unwieldy—even were it in fact possible to compile one, which I doubt. No Menippean satire would use all of the ingredients of such a list. How many, then, would be enough? Five? Fifteen? Fifty-one? Moreover, all three techniques are inadequate for two reasons: they result from appraising Menippean satire abstractly and descriptively, from a distance, and they ignore the interaction of the satire with the reader. Descriptive (abstract) approaches fail because Menippean satire is inseparable from its effect on its audience. It does not exist alone, in a vacuum. When the readers’ sensibilities become ossified or anaesthetized, they need a Cynic’s frontal assault to revivify them and restore proportion. If the catalogue of features expands during each period of Menippism, it

98

Chapter Nine

does so because the satirists had a new (or at least a different) audience sensibility to contend with and a new set of tools to work with. Each change of sensibility means both a sharpening of awareness in some areas of experience and a blunting of awareness in others. The catalogue will grow as the Menippist adds new literary patterns and techniques. Every literary innovation adds to the arsenal. This may in some measure account for the paradox that Menippean satire is highly experimental and at the same time highly conservative of tradition (it is mimetic).

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

99

Menippean Topics Warning This list of Menippean ploys—“topics,” clichés—does not attempt to be exhaustive. It incorporates the most common features mentioned by Frye, Williams, Bakhtin, and Korkowski. While its length may illustrate the futility of a merely descriptive approach, the list might serve another purpose. A structural study of these and other Menippean topics may eventually yield basic patterns of Menippean decorum-violating, which may in turn help us to enlarge our knowledge of how human perception is structured, desensitized, altered, managed.

Almanackers. They were often used as the butts of the satires, as street-level philosophi gloriosi. See The Owle’s Almanacke by Thomas Dekker. Astrologers have been attacked regularly by Menippists since Lucian’s Astrologia. Vide Nashe (“Adam Fouleweather”), Rabelais, Swift. Anonymous Author. The author’s anonymity is apologized for—in a fake introduction, for example, one “written by the printer” or by the “bookseller” who might plead any of several reasons. A common reason is that the author, a man of quality, wishes not to reveal himself as a writer of this sort of trashy production. E.g., Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave, Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. In a variant of this topic, James Joyce often averred that not he but the people he conversed with, even passersby in the street, were the real composers of Finnegans Wake. Apologia for the Work. A frequent device: one or more apologies are used to establish relations to other Menippists, by citation, by reference, or by plagiarism. Apologies can be used to establish tone, to banter with the reader, or to lay trails of red herring. They may appear at the beginning of the work (as in Donne’s Ignatius or in French editions of La Satyre Menippée) or anywhere inside as a digression (as in Harington’s Ajax, and in Tristram Shandy). Autonomous Author. The author exults in a freedom to do whatever occurs to him. This topic is also frequent. Examples include Lucian, Seneca, Fronto, Synesius, Erasmus (Praise of Folly), the Obscure Epistolers, Agrippa, Despérieres’ dogs, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, Byron. Sterne: “I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy. —Accordingly I set off thus” (Tristram, p. 74). Autonomous Character. The characters in a novel, play, etc., come to life and take over. In At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien’s characters co-

100

Chapter Nine

opt the author and begin to plot the rest of the story. They try various twists and rough drafts, and even manage, a scant few pages before it ends, to burn the rest of the manuscript of the book. In Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, the characters on the screen halt the film and go on strike. The strike spreads across the nation, bringing theatres to a halt and trapping audiences. Autonomous Pen. The pen, or the sheer act of writing, takes control of the author or narrative and takes its own course. This is all duly observed and commented on by the author, who claims powerlessness to control it. Ancient mock-eulogists had similarly feigned powerlessness to control their rambling oratory. E.g.: Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1516); Swift, A Tale of a Tub; Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Nashe, Lenten Stuffe. Sterne: “In a word, my pen takes its course...I write a careless kind of civil, nonsensical, good humoured Shandean book, which will do all your hearts good—” And: “But this is neither here nor there—why do I mention it? — ask my pen, —it governs me, —I govern not it” (Tristram Shandy, ed., Work, pp. 436, 416). Banquet. A favoured Menippean device for displaying gluttony and other excesses, this topic also serves as both a strategy and a symbol of Menippean encyclopedism. As a strategy, it allows the writer to indulge the Menippean fondness for catalogues and inventories. Users range from Petronius (Trimalchio’s banquet), through Rabelais, to Finnegans Wake. (In the original ballad of Tim Finnegan’s wake, the party at the wake turns so rowdy that the corpse rises and joins in the fun.) Joyce’s Wake is a banquet in many senses: it spreads a feast of history, of learning, of languages, of personae, of words, of puns, etc. Other examples abound, e.g., Lucian’s Convivium, the symposia of Varro, Athenaeus’ DeipnoSophists, Macrobius, Beroalde’s (François Beroalde de Verville’s) Moyen de parvenir (a philosophic banquet of the dead), La Satyre Menippée, and Bouchet’s Les Serées (1583–1584) Evidently, in the sixteenth century, the French particularly enjoyed Menippean banquets. Possibly this topic links directly to the derivation of “satire” from satura lanx. Vide also Michael Coffey’s article in the Oxford Classical Dictionary for a brief conspectus of ancient symposium literature. Blustering Narrator. The author asserts his authority (extreme), an assertion often couched in Herculean terms and often accompanied by teasing the reader and chitchat or feigned worry about the book’s organization. Swift’s is perhaps the most complete example. The hack writer of A Tale of a Tub claims “Absolute Authority in Right, as the freshest Modern, which gives me a Despotic Power over all authors before me” and so on. This remark is contained in a “Panegyrical Preface,” which

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

101

is found in Section V of the Tale. The long line of Menippean antecedents includes Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet, Cornelius Agrippa’s De incertitudine, Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (e.g., II.4.2.1, III.2.3, and I.2.4.7), and John Taylor. In A Voyage Round the World, Dunton demands, as he opens a new chapter, “Room for a Rambler—(or else I’ll run over ye).” Bookseller. The bookseller is used as an alternative persona by the (sometimes anonymous) author. In this guise remarks can be made that bridge lacunae (q.v.) in the text, to provide prefaces or editorial marginalia or footnotes, or all of these. Swift’s Tale is a representative example; others include John Taylor and Dunton (“Nimshag’s” treatise on gingerbread). The anonymously provided Catalog appended to C. G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao serves as a more recent example. Catalogues and Inventories. This digressive device shatters narrative and disrupts any attempt to establish single point of view or logical sequence. Arch-practitioners: Rabelais, Burton, Joyce. In the more learned writers (Menippean or not), it serves to move the basis of the discussion from efficient (narrative, sequential) cause to formal (simultaneous) cause of an event or situation. It can also become a linguistic activity of the text itself, as with Joyce’s thunderclaps (100-letter words). Korkowski points to Rabelais as having invented this topic and attributes its discovery to the “new directions” in reading made possible by the printing press. This topic would seem to be another descendant of satura lanx, and to be writ large in such other topics as Banquet and Encyclopedism. In its relation to the latter, it is often used to lampoon the cullings, anthologies, and sham learning (reduced and systematized for efficiency) promoted by the gloriosi. The catalogue technique is essentially grammatical. Catalogues can (and do) include anything—the contents of pockets, grocery lists, pawnshop tickets, ships’ names, book titles (real or fake, or both). Vide the paper bags in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus for a twist on the theme. They offer the typical rag-and-bone-shop of low matter: Whole fascicles there are, wherein the Professor, or, as he here, speaking in the third person, calls himself, “the Wanderer,” is not once named. Then again, amidst what seems to be a Metaphysico-theological Disquisition, “Detached Thoughts on the Steam-engine,” or, “The Continued Possibility of

102

Chapter Nine

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

103

Prophecy,” we shall meet with some quite private, not unimportant Biographical fact. On certain sheets stand Dreams, authentic or not, while the circumjacent walking Actions are omitted. Anecdotes, oftenest without date of place or time, fly loosely on separate slips, like Sibylline leaves. Interspersed also are long purely autobiographical delineations; yet without connection, without recognizable coherence; so unimportant, so superfluously minute, they almost remind us of “P. P. Clerk of this Parish.” Thus does the famine of intelligence alternate with waste. Selection, order, appears to be unknown to the professor. In all Bags the same imbroglio; only perhaps in the Bag Capricorn, and those near it, the confusion a little worse confounded. Close by a rather eloquent Oration, “On receiving the Doctor’s-Hat,” lie wash-bills, marked bezahlt (settled). His Travels are indicated by the Street-Advertisements of the various cities he has visited; of which Street-Advertisements, in most living tongues, here is perhaps the completest collection extant. (Chapter XI, “Prospective.” The list continues.)

Descent into the Underworld or the Afterlife. This cliché is related to those of the tour through hell (or heaven), the fantastic journey, travel to the moon, Dialogues of the Dead, and imaginary conversations (cf. Landor and Fénelon). A fundamental Menippean strategy related directly to Cynicism, the descent is useful for exposing folly and pretence in this life by way of the “democratic” levelling and occasional comeuppances of the next. Swift’s tour of the madhouse is a variant of the tour though hell; several of his “madmen” are doing, by their own inclination, exactly what the damned in other Menippean satires—particularly Dunton’s Second Part of the New Quevedo—were doing as a punishment in the next world. This topic is especially used against the philosophi gloriosi, all manner of intellectual and social cranks, fads, and snobs. Menippus probably wrote one: his two greatest imitators—Varro and Lucian—did. Seneca’s Pumpkinification of Claudius is of this type. Recent additions to the list must include works as diverse as Bangs’ A House-Boat on the Styx and the pulp science-fiction series Heroes in Hell. Diagrams and Drawings. The author reproduces in the text engineering plans for assembling real or imagined machines, ones that may or may not be referred to in the text of the satire, and that may or may not work when assembled according to instructions (which may or may not be provided). This topic is often used to lampoon physicists, engineers, and other “projectors” and schemers. In Harington’s Ajax, to cite one example, none of the parts in the “disassembled” drawing can be found in the “assembled” drawing. Swift gives fake maps of Gulliver’s islands, to cite another.

104

Chapter Nine

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

105

Joyce gave not a drawing but a verbal “technical” description of a radio set in Finnegans Wake. It is the first Menippean radio in all of literature: ...and as for Ibdullin what of Himana, that their tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute (hearing that anybody in that ruad duchy of Wollinstown schemed to halve the wrong type of date) equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance getting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emitences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes. This harmonic condenser enginium (the Mole) they caused to be worked from a magazine battery (called the Mimmim Bimbim patent number 1132, Thorpetersen and Synds, Jomsborg, Selverbergen) which was tuned up by twintriodic singulvalvulous pipelines (lackslipping along as if their liffing deepunded on it) with a howdrocephalous enlargement, a gain control of circumcentric megacycles, ranging from the antidulibnium onto the serostaatarean. (309.25–310.08)

106

Chapter Nine

Whether a radio built to these specifications would work or not—since this is a Menippean radio, it almost certainly wouldn’t—is irrelevant. Joyce is simply following the traditional rules of decorum by employing as much as possible of the language of radio and hams (amateurs) to give formal structure and texture to his discourse. Nevertheless, his description of the radio set develops logically, from an engineering point of view, beginning with the antenna and ending with the output “gain” control—volume control. Dialogues of the Dead. A variant of the topics Banquet and Descent into the Underworld or the Afterlife, this device allows a cast of characters widely separated in time to be brought together. Their conversation, sometimes with the narrator, may run to anything at all, often trifles, or with each other, or even with the reader of the satire, or all of these. (Vide Fénelon’s Dialogues des morts.) Digressiveness. Digression, the heart and soul of Cynic satire, is managed in many ways. Nearly every Menippean topic is a form of digression from the normal or expected, ranging from violations of stylistic decorum to violations of narrative sequence, of time (Dialogues of the Dead), of probability (the author writes before birth or after death), of physical size or capacity (Rabelais, Joyce), and so on. Stylistic digressiveness includes the classic technique of switching from verse to prose and vice versa, and from one language to another. It includes seriocomicality, treating “high” subjects in low style, and giving trivial matters all the pomp that style and citational erudition afford. Digressiveness can also take the form of repeatedly promising to come to the point and never doing so, as in Harington, Dunton, Swift, and Sterne. The point of a passage in Finnegans Wake is seldom found except after extreme labours with the text, and even then it may be an irrelevancy. For the Menippist, the labours are the point. In a variant, John Fowles provided several alternative endings to The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Inherent in the structure of the frame tale (Milesian Tale) and the double-plot epyllion, digressiveness is a strategy for manipulating and limbering-up the reader’s sensibilities. It is a form of structural ambiguity.120 Diogenes. He and other Cynic philosophers may appear in a satire as key characters, or may just be referred to now and then, or they can be used to provide running commentary on the satire and its progress or the author’s ineptitude (or the reader’s) from the sidelines. Rabelais gives his reader “licence” concerning his “pantagrueline Sentences” (sending up Peter Lombard et al.) “to call them Diogenical.” He parodies and greatly 120

So too, for that matter, are footnotes.

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

107

expands the account of Diogenes’ tub in Lucian’s “How to Write History” (Prologue to Tiers livre). The tub, far more to Menippists than merely clothing, is often to be found rolling about the Menippean landscape. It reappears overtly in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. A “tale of a tub,” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was an epithet for a kind of writing “suited to flimflam, idle discourse and a tale (sic) of a roasted horse” (A. C. Guthkelch and D. N. Smith, eds., A Tale of a Tub). Equally, doggishness is invoked, as here by Dunton: ...there stood Diogenes the Cynic, snarling at two devils, that were going to muzzle him, for he was so abominable Currish, he bit the devils that came near him. His chief Clamour was...the Devils to quiet him, had promis’d to release him in Fifty years. (Second part of The New Quevedo, p. 78)

Menippus also appears frequently in Menippean literature, in Lucian, for example, or in Butler’s “Hudibras in Prose,” Mercuriis Menippeus. Burton’s use of Democritus is proverbial. This topic is related to the establishment of the pedigree of a satire, and to the topics Dialogues of the Dead and Digressiveness of time. It permits the Cynic spirit to be injected directly into the work. Do It Yourself (Autonomous Reader). The reader is instructed to add to, subtract from, or rearrange the materials of the text to suit himself. In a muted form, the reader is advised to skip certain chapters or sections of the work as worthless or as potentially offensive (so Sterne would periodically advise his delicate female reader). In a variation, the reader is told to refer immediately to other places in the text, which may be real or imaginary, apposite or not. An aspect of digressiveness, this device breaks narrative and continuity and helps divert attention to the reader as reader, to the act of reading, and to the text as an artefact. Thus it is related to the topics related to Lacunae (lacunae-making and lacuna-pretending; more digressiveness). Swift: THE necessity of the Digression will easily excuse the length; and I have chosen for it as proper a Place as I could readily find. If the judicious Reader can assign a fitter, I do here empower him to remove it into any other Corner he pleases. And I so return with great Alacrity to pursue a more important Concern.

Sterne opens vol. V, chapter X, by inviting the reader to fill in his own reasons for the pause in Trim’s oration. Doggishness. This topic includes dog-conversation, dog-philosophy, and other references to and uses of dogs. Directly related to the pun in Greek on dog and Cynic, this topic serves to establish Menippean pedigree

Chapter Nine

108

and to introduce the Cynic tone and attitude into a satire. Vide, among others, Lucian, Rabelais, Byron, and the whole of Shakespeare’s Dog. The fourth dialogue in the Cymbalum Mundi of Despériers is a conversation between two dogs, Hylactor, or “Barker,” and Pamphagus, or “Devour-all,” who are well-versed in the anti-conventional sentiments of early Greek Cynicism; they look upon the human race with snarling disdain. (Korkowski, p. 231)

Vide also chapter eight, above.

Andreas Guarnas, Bellum Grammaticale, 1511

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

109

Encyclopedism. A first love of Grammarians, who regard the encyclopedia of all literature as their province (gramma is Greek for Latin littera—letters—literature). Cicero’s ideal orator was the man of “wisdom and eloquence,” one possessed of encyclopedic learning and readiness to deploy it on any topic at any time. The juncture of “wisdom and eloquence”—of Grammar and Rhetoric—came directly from the Roman translation of the Greek word logos: Latin has no single term that will translate logos, hence the use of the hendiadys ratio atque oratio (reason and speech—i.e., wisdom and eloquence). Ciceronian oratory, which traces itself back through Isocrates, thus consciously invokes the ancient power of the logos. Reading and interpreting either the written book or the Book of Nature called for encyclopedic awareness and technique. Menippists use encyclopedism lightheartedly, or spoof it savagely when fraudulent. Vide Catalogues and Inventories. Euphuism. Though not necessarily a Menippean topic, Euphuism yet has the potential to be one and exhibits a number of Menippean features including the display of learning, the use of incidental verses, and (sometimes) the dialogue form. Euphuism was practised chiefly by John Lyly, William Painter, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, and Nicholas Breton. Greene moved on to Menippism, with his Planetomachia and a series of “deathbed” productions. Whereas Menippean epistolary writings tend to come from the next world, Euphuistic “letters” are exchanged between romantic heroes and heroines, their friends, rivals, parents, and enemies. There is little mock or ridicule of learning in Euphuism. Still, Euphuism is so extremely self-conscious a style, so (as it seems) compulsively mannered, so demanding of continued conscious attention TO the writing, that it produces at least at first acquaintance the requisite shock and awareness. Excess Baggage. Under this topic may be grouped all manner of illusion, pretence, false learning, or assumptions, etc., to be shed. This topic is a typically Cynic aspect of Menippism. Antisthenes, a student of Socrates and the man generally regarded as the first Cynic—in belief if not in outlandish behaviour—replied, when asked what learning was most necessary, “how to get rid of anything to unlearn.” Lucian’s Charon observes, ...Hermes, you see what [normal people] do and how ambitious they are, vying with each other for offices, honours, and possessions, all of which they must leave behind them and come down to us with but a single obol... Nothing that is in honour here is eternal, nor can a man take anything with him when he dies; nay, it is inevitable that he depart naked... (Lucian, vol. II, p. 437)

110

Chapter Nine

Fake Books. In some Menippean satires, these are promised to the reader (and never delivered). In variations, they are alluded to or cited as authorities, or whole libraries are invented (e.g., Rabelais’ Thélème). Mock erudition is one of the devices for satirizing academic or learned pretentiousness. For example, Harington’s “tenth decad” of “the reverent Rabbles” A Catalogue of Books of the Newest Fashion, “to be sold by Auction, at the Whigs Coffee-house, at the sign of the Jackanapes, in Prating Alley,” included in The Harleian Miscellany, V. 6 Thomas D’Urfey’s An Essay Towards the Theory of the Intelligible World...(etc.) Burnet and Duckett’s A Second Tale of a Tub: or, the History of Robert Powel the Puppet-Show-Man (they “refer the dispute”—over whether the dead have sensation—“to my Eighteen Volumes in Folio coming out as a Comment upon Duns Scotus”) Johann Fischart’s Catalogus catalogorum perpetuo durabilis. Das ist: Ein Ewigwerende, Giordanischer, Pergamischer und Tirraninoschar Bibliotecken gleichwichtige und richtige Verzeichnuss und Registratur (1590)

—and countless others, including the Obscure Epistolers of Erfurt, Erasmus, Swift, Sterne, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and Finnegans Wake. Swift opens A Tale of a Tub with a list of fake treatises, “which will be speedily published.” Fake Preface. Let this topic include all manner of fake prefatory, dedicatory, and introductory material. The locus classicus for this topic is Swift’s A Tale of a Tub: it presents the reader with a (digressive) dedicatory note “to the right Honourable John Lord Sommers” (by “the Bookseller,” of course, since the Tale itself is anonymous); a note from “the Bookseller to the Reader,” citing Menippean relatives; “the Epistle Dedicatory, to His Royal Highness Prince Posterity,” using the Senecan/Lucianic claim of truth; “the Preface,” lengthy and digressive, and replete with (fake) lacunae and citations and descriptions of fake texts. Sterne places a (digressive) dedication at the end of vol. I, Ch. VIII, and uses the next chapter to comment on and slightly emend it: “...the rest I dedicate to the MOON, who... has most power to set my book a-going, and make the world run mad after it...” His “The Author’s Preface” appears in vol. III, ch. XX. (Vide also D’Urfey’s An Essay...: the section “Of Prefaces” is not a Preface.) Near the end of the book, a pointing hand indicates the centred message,

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

111

HERE ENDETH THE PREFACE Fake Table of Contents. This topic is of a piece with the preceding one and includes misplaced Tables of Contents (as in Du Cliché à l’archétype: la foire du sens, where the chapters are given in alphabetic order—and interspersed with the Dictionnaire des idées reçues from Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet—and with the contents page placed not at the front of the book but near the end, under T). Principally, however, this topic refers to a Table of Contents that lies, that promises matter and chapters not in the book. D’Urfey sets out a prefatory contents page for his Essay, announcing “sections” never to be found, or given in vastly different form. Force the Reader to Think. Basic to all Menippism, this topic derives from the Cynic demand to “wake up!” A certain means of accomplishing this is by challenging the reader’s assumptions and by violating his expectations—about narrative continuity, truthfulness, decorum of style, literary conventions (e.g., that diagrams refer to textual matter, that promises will be fulfilled, that books cited are real). One means is Joco-seriousness (q.v.), the expenditure of lavish erudition on trifles, and vice versa. Another means is using paradox (including paradoxical encomia) to involve and intrigue the reader, to generate intellectual detachment and reflection. Gibberish. Properly one of the language topics, this includes nonsense words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. The result can be hilarious. E.g., the ponderous scholarly labour thus far expended in attempts to decipher the “languages” in Gulliver’s Travels are a Menippean side-effect of that satire whereby the subsequent scholars’ efforts and reports and essays become an additional “chapter,” one in which they satirize themselves unwittingly—and unmercifully, because they’re not playing. Users range from Rabelais’ “Corrective conundrums” (Gargantua, 2: gibberish punctuated by gaps), to Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” to Finnegans Wake, which some humourless critics have argued is entirely gibberish, “a monstrous joke.” At one point in Finnegans Wake, Joyce turns his/our attention to the physical features of a letter that some exegetes are trying to interpret, having exhausted grammar and syntax. The text at this point mimes the learned idiocy of the exegetes in characteristic Cynic fashion. The letter, it is found, …was but pierced but not punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively, and following up their one true clue, the circumflexuous wall

112

Chapter Nine of a singleminded men’s asylum, accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina,—Yard inquiries pointed out » that they ad bîn “provoked” ay ‫ ޔ‬fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak—fast—table; ;acùtely profèššionally piquéd, to=introdùce a notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ’ ’ fàç’e’] by pùnct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?! (124.01–12)

Joyce here stops just short of Swift, whose “hack” narrator in A Tale of a Tub drivels on to writing about nothing (vide Nothing). Glosses. This topic embraces fake glosses, false erudition, irrelevant glosses, and similar play with footnotes and other marginalia and “editorial” digression from the text. A sub-topic of Digressiveness. Examples: Dekker, The Owle’s Almanacke (mock-serious marginalia), Swift, Dunton. Sterne used a variation by putting his characters into tableaux (his “Shandean way of writing”) for sentences, paragraphs, or even chapters at a time, so he could mount digressive hobby horses. Joyce used it all in the “Triv and Quad” chapter of the Wake. Often, fake and real are interspersed, leaving matters to the reader to sort out. Swift glossed A Tale of a Tub with remarks made by one of its (disapproving) critics. Groping. There are several forms, one being groping for “le mot juste.” The author might pretend to have lost his way (perhaps due to digressions), and to be unable to find it again (Sterne does this often). Or the author pretends to reach for the ineffable and to lose it, while commenting and remarking to the reader that in any case no direct understanding is possible. Korkowski points out (p. 281) that Beroalde goes a stage further in noting that his own work, which admits of being only a “moyen de parvenir” and not an actual arrival, “is more honest than other books which offer definitive statement but no comment on the lack of ontological certainty in reading and language”: Sur quoy je vous diraiy un grand secret, et puis l’autre; c’est que vous ne trouverez point en cecy de truandage de pedantisme, comme des autres, pleins du ravaudage de folle doctrine qui n’aporte pointe à disner. Et davantage, je vous diray le secret des secrets; mais je vous prie, afin qu’il soit secret, de vous embeguiner le museau du cadenac de taciturnité, et ecoutez: CE LIVRE EST LE CENTRE DE TOUS LES LIVRES. (Le Moyen de parvenir, p. 32)

Honesty. “I promise you purest truth,” followed by whopping lies. A basic and frequent topic, this ploy includes all the varieties of misrepresentation, misleading, and fakery. Lucian’s True Story is the touchstone. Here is Byron (Canto the First):

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés CC My poem’s epic, and is meant to be Divided in twelve books; each book containing, With Love and War, a heavy gale at sea, A list of ships, and captains, and kings reigning, New characters; the episodes are three: A panoramic view of Hell’s in training, After the style of Virgil and of Homer, So that my name of Epic’s no misnomer. CCI All these things will be specified in time, With strict regard to Aristotle’s rules, The Vade Mecum of the true sublime, Which makes so many poets, and some fools: Prose poets like blank-verse, I’m fond of rhyme, Good workmen never quarrel with their tools; I’ve got new mythological machinery, And very handsome supernatural scenery. CCII There’s only one slight difference between Me and my epic brethren gone before, And here the advantage is my own, I ween, (Not that I have not several merits more, But this will more peculiarly be seen); They so embellish that ’t is quite a bore Their labyrinth of fables to thread through, Whereas this story’s actually true. CCIII If any person doubt it, I appeal To history, Tradition, and to Facts, To newspapers, whose truth all know and feel, To plays in five, and operas in three acts, All these confirm my statement a good deal, But that which more completely faith exacts Is, that myself, and several now in Seville, Saw Juan’s last elopement with the Devil.

113

114

Chapter Nine

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. VI, 1762

How to Read the Book. The reader is given clues or instructions by the author. A feature of most Menippean satires. E.g., Sterne, vol. I, Ch. 13 (instructions promised), Rabelais, Byron, Joyce... Inability to Edit Anything Out (feigned, of course). This is related to such other topics as Catalogues and Inventories and Encyclopedism. Examples: Harington, Sterne, Nashe, Swift.

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

115

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. VI, 1762

Joco-Seriousness. See Spoudogeloion. Kidding or Teasing the (Female) Reader. Digressive chitchat with female readers (possessed of delicate sensibilities), which may include lines that the writer supposes will come from the reader. This topic is best exemplified in Beroalde and Sterne. Vide remarks in Tristram Shandy, I.vi, I.xviii and passim, to “Sir,” “your Lordships,” “Madam,” or “Dear Jenny.”

116

Chapter Nine

See especially the thinly veiled innuendoes of sexual horseplay he gives her, at p. 226, facing the (in this context, suggestive) marbled page (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. James Aiken Work. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1940). Beroalde litters Moyen de parvenir with such asides, as do Bouchet, Dunton. Lacunae, various. Vide also Digressiveness. The fake lacuna, a form of caprice with narrative continuity and order, is used commonly by Menippists to tease the reader: Cf. Beroalde, Swift, Sterne. Sterne is the handiest English paradigm. He used blank pages, black pages, marbled pages (the end-papers in the middle = the book inside-out: “Motley emblem of my work,” III.xxxvi), and even omitted chapters. He also left two blank pages for the reader to fill in for himself (vol. 9, chs. 18 and 19). Immediately after, when asked a question so private as to raise a blush, the print blushes, too. At the end of Part Two of “Anonymiad,” a tale in Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth’s narrator discusses the events to occur in Part Three: Part Three, consequently, will find the young couple moved to new lodgings in the palace itself, more affluent and less happy. Annoyance at what he knows would be her reaction has kept the minstrel to confiding to his friend the conditions of his Acting Chief Minstrelship; his now-nearlyconstant attendance on the No use, this isn’t working either, we’re halfway through, the end’s in sight; I’ll never get to where I am; Part Three, Part Three, my crux, my core, I’m cutting you out; _______; there, at the heart never to be filled, a mere lacuna. IV The trouble with us minstrels is, when all’s said and done we love our work more than our women...[etc.]

And so he ushers us into Part Four. Carlyle found a variation: he told the reader that the materials for the Autobiography with “fullest insight” of Teufelsdrökh arrived in the editor’s hands in six “considerable PAPER-BAGS, carefully sealed, and marked…with the symbols of the Six southern Zodiacal signs.” These bags contained a hopeless jumble of assorted Sheets, Shreds, and Snips on every imaginable trivial and inconsequential subject (Sartor Resartus, ch. XI). D’Urfey is replete with chasms, even to a section titled “the Method of Making a Chasm or Hiatus, judiciously; the great Reach of thought

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

117

Tristram Shandy, Vol. IX, 1767, p. 71.

requir’d for the Contrivance thereof, together with the Difference between the French Academies and the English.” Closely related is Francis Bacon’s use of aphoristic style (in Novum organum, for example): he deliberately chooses discontinuity over continuous narrative, for, he explains, aphorisms involve the reader in completing the gaps and thereby are suitable in teaching. Serious rhetorical and grammatical purpose lurks beneath the surface of horseplay.

Chapter Nine

118

Language. Hereunder, a variety of topics pertaining to the language found in Menippean satires. Language itself is a constant object of attention of Menippists and their readers. Bad Language. Mis-users of language are often a target of the satirist: this is one aspect of the Menippists’ relation to Grammar and its concerns. Korkowski: One particular fraternity pretending to learning that has incurred Menippean censure, regardless of periods, is the mis-users of language: the rigid Grammarian, the sophist who deals in glittering speech, the hack poet, the fanciful etymologist, the word-torturer, and the “systematizer” of language are the genuine bêtes noires of the Menippist...on the theme of correct language and in degree of linguistic brilliance, Menippism as a species of controversy has no equal in quality. Bonaventure Despérieres’ Cymbalum Mundi, Beroalde de Verville’s Moyen de Parvenir and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub are to the problems of words what the very greatest thinkers’ works have been to problems of philosophy. (pp. 61–62)

Also from Korkowski: Cf. Pope’s Peri Bathous (the Art of Sinking—part of the “Martinus Scriblerus” project that spun off such other, independent Menippean products as Gulliver’s Travels). Finnegans Wake uses every rhetorical device known, and every resource of the language-as-storehouse-ofexperience. Joyce remarked that he had to “put the language to sleep” to obtain the necessary freedom. The linguistic hi-jinx of the Wake are not without precedent, however. Rabelais indulged the Menippean form of language-tinkering. Apuleius, Martianus Capella, and Alan of Lille wrote the most playful (to a Menippist; pure torture to the sober critic) Latin extant. Following Rabelais, Etienne Taburot published Les Bigarrures, a playful and exhaustive tampering with the humorous possibilities of language by disrupting ordinary, conventional logical structure, sentence structure, word order and even letter orders; puns, obscenities, parodies of printed symbols, and relentless para-logical hopping from one word to some strange equivalent or associated term, occur. His displays, however, tend to be little more than catalogs, set out one after another, of ingenious lingual transpositions. (p. 267)

Deluding Word. Words’ numinosity, a part of the topic of how to use them, persists throughout the Menippean tradition. (All of the language topics—chief Menippean concerns—show the direct relation of these satirists to Grammar.) Examples: the Obscure Epistolers, Martianus Capella (the aptness of the marriage of Mercury and dame

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

119

Philology—Rhetoric and Grammar), Alan of Lille’s De planctu naturae. Fake Etymologies. This kind of Grammatical horseplay by Menippists satirizes the sober ineptitude, clumsiness, or superficial learning of the Dialectician who tries to take over Grammar with logic and philosophy. Equally, it is used to lampoon inept Grammarians. Mostly in use since the nominalist/realist controversy, it is related to the definition of, or the absolute meaning of, or the nature of, things. Cf. Beroalde, Des Périers, Rabelais, Sanford’s The mirror of madness, Swift (e.g., “Antiquity of the English Tongue”). Its use is frequently accompanied by a display of (real or fake, or a mixture of both) erudition of authorities. “The abnihilization of the etym” (Finnegans Wake, 353.22). Gibberish as language (see above). Letters of the alphabet, as things, as praised, blamed, at peace or at war with each other, etc. This topic occurs often, from Lucian (the Consonants at Law) to Joyce (Finnegans Wake, pp. 119–23). Punctuation is also a topic, similarly handled (Wake, p. 124, for example), as are parts of speech. Cf. Guarnas’ Bellum Grammaticale, Sterne on verbs (copular—copulation, naughtiness) and “auxiliaries,” Alan of Lille. Mixed Languages/Polyglottism. This topic refers to the use of more than one language in a text, usually without adequate—or any— justification. A form of digressiveness, it can be related to tactics of violating decorum, for each language embodies the perceptions and experiences of the users’ culture. It can include fake languages (as in Gulliver’s Travels). Among others, Varro and Burton make much use of polyglottism. Sterne provides Slawkenbergii Fabella at the outset of vol. IV (Tristram Shandy), accompanied by a facing-page translation that is six times as long as the Latin original. Joyce inserted sections in Latin and in French into Finnegans Wake, in “Finneganese,” and his puns and thunders resound with fifty or more languages. Here is Wyndham Lewis’ opening of Part II of One-Way Song: Again let me do a lot of extraordinary talking. Again let me do a lot! Let me abound in speeches—let me abound!—publicly polyglot. Better a blind word to bluster with—better a bad word than none lieber Gott! Watch me push into my witch’s vortex all the Englishman’s got To cackle and rattle with—you catch my intention?—to be busily

120

Chapter Nine balking The tongue-tied Briton—that is my outlandish plot!

Prose-Verse Mixture. Used in antiquity as the litmus test for Menippism and still adhered to as a sine qua non by many classicists and critics. A digressive technique related structurally to both etymologies of the word satire, the mixing of verse and prose constituted a violation of decorum calculated to shock the sensibilities of the percipient reader or hearer into a state of alertness. It is often combined with Joco-Seriousness (and related topics) as high style is employed on base matters, and vice versa. A variation was the sprinkling, through a prose text or dialogue, of lines and verses misappropriated (and misapplied—used on quite different subjects) from ancient or epic poets. Cf. Lucian’s Charon. Words as Gestures and Vice Versa. Words and language are used on a supra-semantic level where they shed their “contents” of usual Menippean language-tinkering, the prime example being the hundredletter thunderclaps in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. For the reverse, gestures as words, see Rabelais, Gargantua 2; Pantagruel 19. In either variant it is a form of digression—from ordinary accidence and syntax. Words as Things and Vice Versa. The preceding topic draws attention to eloquence inherent in the formal character of utterance; this topic deals with the relation between language and artefacts (incidentally, the foundation of realism, as opposed to nominalism). Both topics are Grammatical and formal; though serious, this device is most often used ludicrously. Vide Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub. In Gulliver’s “Voyage to Laputa” (Sp., the whore), at the School of Languages at the Grand Academy of Lagado, the professors proposed replacing words entirely with things. For it is plain that every word we speak is in some way a diminution of our lungs by corrosion and consequently contributes to the shortening of our lives. An expedient was therefore offered that, since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on. And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which hath only this

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

121

inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great and of various kinds, he must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of these sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who when they met in the street would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burthens, and take their leave. But for short conversations, a man may carry implements in his pockets and under his arms, enough to supply him, and in his house he cannot be at a loss; therefore the room where company meet who practise this art is full of all things ready at hand, requisite to furnish matter for this kind of artificial converse.

The image left by this household room is reminiscent of the traditional memory theatre, well-stocked with things to prompt the memory of an orator. Joyce’s hundred-letter words in Finnegans Wake, his “thunderclaps,” are both words and things. That is, they are clearly things that the writer has made and are so extraordinary that every reader regards them as things, oddities. Yet they are also compound words that announce and dramatize and sound (provide the soundeffects of/for) the transformations in the Wake that they portend. (Vide my The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake.) Things-as-words also stand in direct relation to the medieval Grammarian’s techniques of exegesis of the Liber Natura, a parallel text to the Liber Scriptura—both “words” spoken by God to us, echoes of which survive and persist in the poets. Rabelais played with this trope in Le quart livre when (ch. LVI) he has Pantagruel visit the edge of the “Frozen Sea.” Early the previous winter there had been a great and bloody battle on the spot, a place so cold that “the whole tumult of battle froze in the air” and the words and sounds—frozen—fell to the ground: “Hark, hark!” cried Pantagruel. “Here are some more that have not yet thawed out.”S.s. to next para So saying, he threw on to the deck whole handfuls of frozen words. They looked like sugarplums of various colors. Some were gules or red, others sinople or green, others azure or blue, others sable or black, others or or gold. As we warmed them between our hands, they melted like snow; we could hear them clearly, but we did not understand them, for they were in barbaric idiom. A somewhat large one, warmed

122

Chapter Nine between Friar John’s hands, popped like unslit chestnuts thrown on a fire. We shuddered in alarm.S.s. to next para “Don’t worry,” the monk told us, “that was the report of a cannon!” (Gargantua and Pantagruel [Modern Library ed.], p. 650)

On this theme, also cf. Don Juan, III.88 (note the Cynic tone): But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think; ’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail men, when paper—even a rag like this, Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his!

The written or printed word IS a thing, inarticulate in itself. And things as words? Marshall McLuhan and I wrote a book (Laws of Media: The New Science) in which we showed that all human artefacts are human speech and have an explicitly verbal structure: each of them is a word and intelligible as such. Q.v. Laughter. Laughter may be Democritean (e.g., Lucian, Burton), Diogenical, Rabelaisian, Joycean, or just plain Cynical-Menippean. Both a topic and a tactic, laughter is indispensable to Cynic joco-seriousness, to retuning the reader’s sensibilities by engendering playfulness, and to curing his misplaced or undue sobriety. In this regard, it is related to Digressiveness and to violations of decorum. Bakhtin has this as the quintessence of carnivalism, which he identifies with Menippism. Burton resounds with Democritus’ laughter. Cynic wit and risibility run through Beroalde, who notes in his first chapter that he directs laughter at the philosophers “because mirth must be restored.” There’s “lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake,” too. Learning. Vide Encyclopedism, Fake Books. Respect for maintaining the traditions (Grammatical) of genuine learning and encyclopedic wisdom is concealed behind ridicule of all forms of easy, simplified, or systematized “learnedness,” pseudo-intellectual and philosophical extremism and universalizing. Examples: Menippus, Varro, Petronius, Seneca, Lucian, Erasmus, Rabelais, Swift, Flaubert, Joyce. The Scriblerians (Pope, Arbuthnot, Swift, Gay) aimed to produce periodically a Works of the Unlearned: Flaubert got somewhat further with the idea with Bouvard. Cf. Sterne on noses (gnosis).

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

123

Medicinal. This topic is related to the sanative powers of both satire in general and Menippean satire in particular. Menippists frequently refer to their satires as having curative properties. This claim can be expressed in generalities, such as “Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind” (Swift, title page of A Tale of a Tub, spoofing the gloriosi), or in more pointed claims that the work is a “medicine,” as in Rabelais, or in Burton, or in Dekker: ...more potent, and more precious, than was ever that mingle-mangle of drugs which Mithridates boyld together. Feare not to tast it...the Receipt hath beene subscribed unto, by all those that have to do with Simples, with this moth-eaten motto: Probatum est: your Diacatholicon aureum... pledge me, spare not...take a deep draught of our homely counsel. (Dekker, The Guls Horne-Booke, in Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed., A. B. Grosart, 4 vols., 1884–1885. Rpt. [New York: Russell & Russell, 1963], vol. II, pp. 213–14)

Memory of Time before Birth. The author discusses (as a spectator) events that occurred before his birth. Tristram Shandy is not born until his tale is well into the third book: Sterne gives a mass of detail—quite irrelevant—on the events that preceded and surrounded Tristram’s conception and his birth. Dunton rambles through memoirs of his earliest years, including the years before he was born: the first chapter of vol. I treats “Of my Rambles before I came into my Mother’s Belly, and while I was there.” His rambling narrator Kainophilus adds a twist to the theme, complaining that he made no notes on the moment of his birth (though, somehow, he made plenty of notes in utero) because he was born without anything to write with—in fact, “Because I was dead born, I can’t remember anything on it to save my life.” Method. Dialectical systematizing and universalizing are common butts for Menippists, and as such continue the Grammarians’ attacks in the battle of Ancient vs. Modern. The true Cynic disdains all forms of easy or systematic (abstract) answers to any of life’s problems, answers which result in the individual’s not thinking for himself. Swift spoofs the gloriosus gently in presenting the Tale “for the Universal Improvement of Mankind,” and savagely in the stupidity of his hack. Sterne lightly but thoroughly dissects Locke; Carlyle; the German gloriosi. The structure of Burton’s Anatomy parodies post-Ramist branched-logic systems. Vide Moderns.

124

Chapter Nine

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

125

Mock Eulogy. Taken directly from epideictic rhetoric and its topics, laus et vituperatio, the paradoxical encomium goes back at least as far as Isocrates’ Praise of Helen. Just at what point it enters Menippean lists is hard to say. One of Varro’s Menippean satires has the title “Two Asses will praise each other”—Mutuum muli scabunt. Lucian wrote many mock eulogies, e.g., Phalaris I and II, Peregrinus, Alexander, Saltatio, and Muscae laudatio. Cf. also Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, Panurge’s “Praise of

126

Chapter Nine

Debtors” (in Le Tiers livre, ch. 22), the “harangues” of La Satyre Menippée (1594), Burton’s Anatomy (III.2.1.1), Swift’s praise of Madness in the Tale, Nashe’s praise of the red herring in Lenten Stuffe. Further examples in Rabelais and others are discussed in Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica. Sterne is careful always to praise Locke while demolishing his theories. Korkowski notes that ...after Lucian (and even before him) the satirical eulogy is identified with the Menippean tradition by knowledgeable authors. To men of the Renaissance, for example, Lucian’s mock-praises appeared germane to snarling Cynicism; almost anything by Lucian, for that matter, was regarded as proceeding from a common Menippus-Lucian temperament... That the mock-encomium and “other” Menippean forms were perceived as identities can be gathered from Erasmus’ epistle to Thomas More, introducing the Praise of Folly... (p. 98)

Moderns. The Moderns, or Dialecticians (gloriosi) in all ages, are standard targets of Menippists. The line of attack runs through Menippus, Varro, Petronius, Lucian (e.g., The Sale of Philosophers), Erasmus, Cervantes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Butler, Dekker, Nashe, Swift, Sterne, Carlyle, Flaubert, Joyce. Vide Method. Musical Notation. The verses interspersed with the prose frequently have the potential of being used independently as songs. However, this topic refers particularly to interrupting of the running text by offering the reader the notes and musical notation of songs, with or without the verses, and which may or may not be musical or euphonious. Examples: Bishop Francis Godwin’s (1638) The Man in the Moon (the moon-giants discourse in a wordless language of music made up of standardized tunes, several pages of which are presented to the reader as a message of moment to Englanders) and Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune et du soleil (his moon-folk are like Godwin’s: they speak a language of tunes that appears in the text as musical notation). Korkowski notes (p. 330), “this was not new in Menippean satire” and refers the reader to the Sermo quodlibetus de podagrae laudibus in Dornavius, and Taburot’s Bigarrures, for precedents. Harington includes pages of music in Ajax. Joyce includes the lyrics and written melody for “the Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” in Finnegans Wake (pp. 44–47), and two other written melodies in the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses. Mutilated Text. The author, either as himself or in the person of a publisher or editor or critic, presents or comments on a text that he claims is corrupted, mutilated, or otherwise interrupted by lacunae. Vide Lacunae.

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

127

Natural Scale. Inseparable from the other Cynic topics, this one refers to the Cynics’ insistence on not exceeding the limits of human scale, which entails constant attention to our human frailties, limitations, susceptibilities to pride, self-aggrandizement, and so on. In Menippean satire, this provides a constant direction for the Cynic wind that blows through the satire; equally, it forms one of the purposes of the satire. The reader’s sensibilities are to be so revivified that he becomes aware of his deviation from, and will develop a preference for restoring, human or natural scale in his life and activities, psychic and social. Non-sequitur. Deliberately used by Menippists, the non-sequitur is related to Lacunae, Digressiveness, and all manner of interruption or frustration of narrative and logical sequence, q.q.v. Non-sequiturs are the order of Beroalde’s book. To make his readers aware that “straight-line” narration is a purely arbitrary order, Sterne, sending up Locke, denies his reader what is expected, interrupts the continuity of narrative logic at every turn, displays the pieces, and then asks innocently what they might be and how they might be assembled. In Ulysses, Joyce found new variation on this topic in the technique of “continuous parallels” with Homer, as well as in the discontinuities of “stream of consciousness” style. Nothing. This topic, a frequent subject of Menippean satirists, includes writing on recondite trivialities (“nothings”), often with a display of (real or feigned) immense erudition, or, literally, writing entire chapters on “nothing.” This latter is related to satirizing gloriosi logic-choppers who cut matters so fine that their weighty systems are brought to bear on “nothings.” Dunton’s Voyage offers “admirable and surprizing Novelty of both Matter and Method; a Book made, as it were, out of nothing, and yet containing every thing...” Ulysses and Finnegans Wake may equally be said to “contain everything.” Vide also Nashe, Sterne. Most Menippists try their hand at this topic at one time or another as sustaining it calls for high wit and inventiveness. Swift: “I am now trying an experiment very frequent among modern authors; which is, to write upon nothing; when the subject is exhausted, to let the pen still move on; by some called the ghost of wit, delighting to walk after the death of its body...” (etc., from the “Conclusion” to the Tale). Rabelais lavishes formidable amounts of attention on bagatelles, as does Macrobius on the egg, and Athenaeus on odd kinds of fish. Panurge’s decision to marry, for another example, becomes the focus of an enormously prolonged, prolix, and pettifoggish debate leading to—nothing. Parody of New Forms. The chameleon-like, mimetic nature of Cynic satire, which contributes to the impossibility of accounting for it descriptively, gives it immense flexibility and adaptability to new forms

128

Chapter Nine

and new situations. As soon as new genres or modes or media for expression appear on the scene, Menippists quickly adapt to the new form and begin to experiment with its satirical possibilities. This was done, for example, by Rabelais, Nashe, Dekker, and Aretino, as Korkowski points out. It has been done by Sterne, Flaubert, Orson Welles, and Woody Allen. Rabelais puts on the pretensions of the new “learned” genres made popular by printing. Somewhat later, Swift creates hiatuses with a new symbol, the *, and Sterne toys with all the devices of the printed book, even to turning it inside-out by putting the marbled end-papers in the middle. Flaubert aped the popular press in Bouvard and declared that his ideal novel would be all style and no content. Joyce used cinematic technique in Ulysses and remarked that the Wake was written “after the style of television”—that is, in mosaic, not narrative, form. The study of Menippism in modern media has not yet begun. I suggest that there is no reason why it should not have expanded beyond the confines of written or printed texts once audiences were formed by and could be hypnotized by other-than-literate media. One might begin such a study with Orson Welles (radio and film), Woody Allen (film), and Steve Allen or Norman Lear (television). The mind boggles at what havoc a determined Cynic might wreak with the telephone, or computer databases and systems analysis, or satellites. We may yet find out. See Printing Conventions Trifled With. Philosophus Gloriosus. He is the Menippists’ favourite whipping-boy. Philosophers (Dialecticians) are open to Menippists’ attacks on several grounds. First, their whole enterprise is traditionally based on abstraction of ideas and of reason, which the Cynic can castigate as either a form of undue exaggeration or a retreat from reality. Second, their reliance on logic as a tool and the fine distinctions and rare abstractions into which that often leads also fuels the Menippean fires. The Grammatical side of Menippism would have at the gloriosi in any case, as a skirmish in the quarrel of Ancient with Modern. Those are general terms: particular targets are more usually members of fashionable and pseudo-intellectual groups, as in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (the ignoramus Claudius and his retinue of hack poets), or Petronius’ Satyricon, or in Erasmus or Lucian, or in Hudibras or Tristram Shandy. Swift sent up one group in A Tale of a Tub, quite another (the equivalent of today’s mad scientist) in Gulliver’s Travels. Carlyle takes aim at the invasion of earnest German philosophizing in Sartor Resartus (Tailors are second only to philosophers as Menippists’ targets), and Wyndham Lewis at Bloomsbury pretentiousness in his Apes of God. The pseudo-learned of all sorts are the favourite quarry: these fakes—the real gloriosi—have usurped the place of the genuinely learned, have bamboozled the less educated and the gullible,

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

129

and have used the appearance of learning and wisdom for worldly profit. They are as thieves and polluters. In our time, the bestseller writer is as much a gloriosus as was Locke in Sterne’s. Vide Pound on the punishment due to fraudulent artists, in “The Serious Artist.” Printing Conventions Trifled With. Vide Parody of New Forms. This topic concerns horseplay with the conventions of printed books. Practitioners include Rabelais, Nashe, Harington, Sterne, Joyce. In a variant, Rabelais complained (as did Swift et al.) that his text had been botched by incompetent printers (a common enough complaint even now by authors): “For the benefit of the warriors I am about to rebroach my cask, the contents of which you would sufficiently have appreciated from my two earlier volumes if they had not been adulterated and spoiled by dishonest printers...” In our time, this topic expands to include any fooling with the conventions of the medium used so as to make it conscious, to make the user conscious as user, etc. Vide, for example, the work cited infra of Woody Allen, Orson Welles, and others. Projectors as Targets. Mad scientists and crazed philosophers (i.e., the philosophi gloriosi) generally. The “Projector” is the same, in Swift’s time. Of the same family: astrologers, alchemists, futurologists, etc. Swift’s “Grand Academy of Lagado” had an ancestor in Joseph Hall’s Mundus alter et idem, an account of the fabulous goings-on at “Terra Australa Incognitis.” The most populous region of Australia, Fooliana, has a university called Whether-for-a-pennia, where specimen sciences are taught, including penny astrology. In one college, Gewgawiasters are busy inventing a way to blow soap bubbles from walnut shells: they have also invented projects and novelties in “games, buildings, garments and governments,” and have devised a new language, the “Supermonicall tongue.” What fun a Menippist might have today with the proponents of Artificial Intelligence and its (idiot-level) applications: the real ones would be hard to top by any satirist! The very name “Artificial Intelligence” is a succulent morsel for any dog of a Cynic to begin feasting on. Or the merest glance at recent patent-office applications would set up a good barking, never mind the parade of howlers that granting agencies are gulled into funding. Periodically, the press gets a laugh (or groan) or two out of these. But set a Cynic on the trail...! Juvenal had a point: how can you not write satire? Reader. The real target of the Menippist. The reader is kidded, cajoled, threatened, flattered, etc. by turns, and if the satire is successful he will enter into or put on the spirit of the work. Cervantes devised ways to embroil the reader in the process of telling the story:

130

Chapter Nine Cervantes invented endless ways of disrupting his own narrative to compel the reader to tell the story in place of the wary author. The wily and wicked enchanters who supposedly work without ceasing to frustrate the magnificently indomitable Don Quixote are also employed to make us into unusually active readers. The Don supposes the sorcerers to exist, and Cervantes pragmatically realizes them as crucial components of his language. Everything is transformed through enchantment, is the Quixotic lament, and the wicked sorcerer is Cervantes himself. His characters have read all of the stories about one another, and much of the novel’s second part concerns itself with their reactions to having read the first. The reader is educated into considerably more sophistication of response, even when Don Quixote stubbornly refuses to learn, though that refusal has more to do with his own “madness” than with the fictive status of the chivalric romances that have crazed him. The Don and Cervantes together evolve toward a new kind of literary dialectic, one that alternates in proclaiming both the potency and the vanity of the narrative in its relation to real events. (Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, pp. 130–31)

This ploy effectively reverses the usual dichotomy between inside and outside the novel: “Every reader recognizes that the difference between the two parts of Don Quixote is that everyone who matters most in part two is either explicitly credited with having read part one or knows that he was a character in it” (Bloom, p. 142). So Don Quixote and Sancho are surrounded in part two by their own readers: not a formula guaranteed to help them in their adventures, but one calculated to jolt the reader into awareness. Flann O’Brien sported with his reader in divers ways: for one, he suggests that the reader leave out the last few pages: “It will be observed that the omission of several pages at this stage does not materially disturb the continuity of the story” (At Swim-Two-Birds, p. 207). Frequently, in other satires, the author (as himself or while wearing one or another narrator’s persona) will engage in lively discourse or backchat with the reader…on any topic that comes to mind, including such matters as the right arrangement of the book (The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Tristram Shandy), the reader’s habits or dress, etc. As Swift’s narrator before him, and Sterne’s after, D’Urfey’s Gabriel John empowers his reader to transpose things to his own liking (in the section, “Which end of a Book to begin at”). Since Finnegans Wake is written in a circle (it begins and ends in the middle of the same sentence), the reader can begin anywhere. Joyce expected his reader to abandon all other pursuits and devote full time to studying the Wake. Rabelais makes the same demand:

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

131

I intend every reader to lay aside his business, to abandon his trade, to relinquish his profession, and to concentrate wholly upon my work. Rapt and absorbed, all might then learn these tales by heart, so that if ever the art of printing perished and books failed, these tales might be handed down, like mystic religious lore, through our children to posterity! Is there not greater profit in them than a rabble of critics would have you believe? (Prologue to the Second Book)

Joyce envisioned an “ideal reader with an ideal insomnia.” Evidently Menippists, like the Cynics, regard “staying awake” as a full-time occupation. Simultaneity of Past and Present. The cast of characters in a Menippean satire will often include persons widely separated in chronological time. Linear, chronological time may be circumvented by devices such as setting the scene in the underworld (Dialogues of the Dead, etc.) or may simply be ignored altogether as in Beroalde’s Moyen de parvenir, in some of Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, in Pound’s Cantos, and in Finnegans Wake, to mention but four. The same disregard for mere chronology was present in the translatio studii of the Grammarians (everybody is my contemporary), and marks another affinity between their enterprise and the Menippists’. As already pointed out, this topic is also implicit in the mimetic nature of Menippean satire. In our time, it has received explicit statement in T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and has been used extensively in his poetry, notably in “The Waste Land” and Four Quartets. Spoudogeloion. Vide Joco-Seriousness. Tailors. Tailors are common as the butts of Menippean satires: in some periods they are second only to philosophers as objects of ridicule. Carlyle mounts attacks against both at once in Sartor Resartus. Tailors receive attention via Cynic attacks on pomposity and pretentiousness, for covering up bodily defects or for distracting attention from real matters to squander it on illusory corporal beauty—a kind of seduction. Diogenes wore his tub; Dunton has his Parable of the Top-Knots; Swift, his Shoulder-Knots, etc. Satires on tailors are to be found in l’Estrange’s Quevedo and in Greene’s and Dekker’s treatments of tailors in Hell. (Dekker weighed the old world’s tailors and the new’s together in The Guls Horne-Booke.) In the Wake, Joyce explores the seduction-viaclothing motif with his Prankquean, and riots with the story of Kersse the tailor trying to fit a wedding suit to a recalcitrant hunchbacked Norwegian ship’s captain. Talking Animal. Korkowski notes (p. 170, n. 49) that “the talking animal, in ancient literature, hardly appears outside of Menippean writings

132

Chapter Nine

(i.e., Lucian’s Gallus, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Plutarch’s Gryllus).” In Menippean satires, anything and everything, including animals, and even words or letters, may give voice. In the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses, speeches are delivered by a gong, a bar of soap, wreaths, gulls (birds, that is, not fools), a timepiece, the quoits of a brass bed, bells, chimes, a crab, a hollybush, bronze buckles, a cap, a gramophone, a gas-jet, a doorhandle, a fan, a hoof, the sins of the past, Sleepy Hollow, Yews, a waterfall, halcyon days, a mummy, characters’ voices, Orange Lodges, a pianola, bracelets, “the hue and cry,” the voices of “all the damned” and “all the blessed,” and a horse. Tradition. Tradition may be singled out as an object of attack: the Menippist impersonates an enemy of (Grammatical) tradition, of the Ancients, and bungles the job. Cf. Dekker’s The Guls Horne-Booke and Swift’s “Digression in Praise of Digressions.” Universalizing. Glib universalizing appears as the butt of many satires. Cf. Philosophus Gloriosus. Practitioners include Cynics, Lucian, Rabelais, Swift, Von Hutten, Erasmus, Flaubert. Universal Schemes (treated variously, above). This refers to Menippean mockery of Dialectical or scientific universalizing by projecting crazy schemes of their own, as in Sanford’s Mirrour of Madnes, Swift’s Modest Proposal, or his “Digression concerning the original, the use and improvement of madness...” (which derives from Sanford). Such schemes are proposed, as are many of the satires, “for the universal improvement of mankind.” Rabelais and Cervantes are thoroughgoing and merciless, as is Flaubert. Updating the Reader. The narrator imitates announcers from serials in film and broadcast media who periodically interrupt the show with a synopsis for “those who have just joined us” of “the story thus far.” Flann O’Brien announces one a quarter of the way through At Swim-Two-Birds: “Synopsis, being a summary of what has gone before, FOR THE BENEFIT OF NEW READERS.” Half-way through the book, the reader is directed to return to the first notice: “Note to Reader before proceeding further: Before proceeding further, the Reader is respectfully advised to refer to the Synopsis or Summary of the Argument on Page 85.” At threequarters through the book, the reader stumbles through a brief digression and into a “Further synopsis, being a summary of what has gone before, for the benefit of new readers…Now read on.”—followed by a digression into a manuscript. Whatever Enters My Head. An aspect of the Autonomous Author and Autonomous Pen, this topic is related to pretended inability to manage a discourse. Seneca has, “dicam quod mihi in buccam venerit.” A

A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés

133

host of others followed suit, including Burton, D’Urfey, Sterne, and the writers of Finnegans Wake (the public, the users of the language, whom Joyce patiently studied and copied). Its relation to “stream of consciousness” style is easily seen, for the one is the other writ large. Both reinvent narrative technique to bring the ground, the trivial, to the surface.

134

Chapter Nine

PART IV CYNIC SATIRE AND TRADITION

CHAPTER TEN “WHO GAVE YOU THAT NUMB?”121 THE ETYMOLOGY OF SATIRE

Given satire’s essential heterogeneity—of styles, decorum, structure, vision—Menippism, of all the forms and variety of satire, approaches closest to the very roots of the satiric enterprise. For all its playful perversity, its wit and Cynicism, its originality, conservatism and plagiarism, Menippean satire is ur-satire. W. H. D. Rouse notes that Petronius “was following, as a model, Varro’s Menippean satires, and had before him the libel of Seneca on Claudius, the Apocolocyntosis.” Rouse points out that the title of the Satyricon “is derived from the word Satura, a medley, and means that [Petronius] was free to pass at will from subject to subject, and from prose to verse and back...”122 How, then, to resolve the debate—still before the judge—over whether the Latin or the Greek word provides the etymology of “satire”? The etymological debate points to the set of cultural assumptions, Greek or Roman, that nourish the roots of our satire and our satirizing.

121

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 546.25. Op. cit., p. x. On the same page he remarks, “It is difficult to grasp any structural outline in the Satyricon as it is in Tristram Shandy. Both alternate with flashing rapidity between exhibitions of pedantry, attacks on pedants, and indecency, in which Sterne is the more successful because he is the less obvious.” As far as I know, in 1913, when this edition of Petronius was issued, no one had yet identified Tristram Shandy as Menippean. It is remarkable how often editors of various Menippean satires, in quest of parallels, will name other examples of the art, often without realizing that either work is Menippean. No one has written on either Finnegans Wake or Pound’s Cantos as Menippea. Yet J. P. Sullivan introduces his Petronius with this: “The disconnected nature of the fragments, the loss of so much of the work, and the diversity of what remains, all make it hard to classify, even though there is something critically inadequate about throwing up one’s hand and agreeing to regard it as something of a beau monstre, some unique portent like Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake, or Pound’s Cantos, works that are at once a beginning and an end” (p. 14).

122

138

Chapter Ten

In the case of Petronius, it would seem reasonable to regard his title as deliberately invoking the Greek. Satyrikos, -eh, -on means “suiting a satyr, like satyrs,123 or, diminutively, ‘a little Satyre’ (OED): it derives from satyros, a satyr,124 half-human, half-beast. Satyros also gives rise to the apposite satyriasis, -eh, -iasmos and -ismos, “a swollen state of the genital organs, Priapism.”125 A parody of Homer’s Odyssey, the Satyricon presents the lustful odyssey of Encolpius (whose name means, roughly, “the crotch”), driven and hounded by the wrath of Priapus, even as Odysseus was driven and hounded by the wrath of Poseidon. The reason the etymological debate remains unresolved would seem to stem from the break made by our culture with the ancient and medieval alliance between Grammar and Rhetoric, a break aggravated and enlarged since the advent of print, when dialectic rose to preeminence in the trivium. With that break, and the new stress on idea content, easy familiarity with and sedulous adherence to the ancient canons of decorum gradually declined.126 123 Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1848), p. 1334. 124 Ibid.: “companion of Bacchus, at first represented with long pointed ears, a goat’s tail, and small knobs like horns behind their ears; later, goats’ legs were added, and to this half-beast’s form was assigned a lustful, half-brutal nature...” 125 Ibid. In spite of the evidence, even so astute a modern translator as Arrowsmith remains ambivalent: “Satyricon seems to be formed from a Greek genitive plural, though it seems impossible to decide whether we should read Satyricon or Satiricon, and perhaps it hardly matters. For it may be that the author was punning off both satura (i.e., ‘satire’ in its specifically Roman sense—a potpourri or farrago of mixed subjects in a variety of styles) and saturika (that is, concerned with satyrs, which is to say, lecherous, randy). On this interpretation, the Satyricon (or Satiricon) would mean a book of randy satires, of satyr-things satirically treated, and it is precisely this that the extant fragments seem to show us” (pp. vii–viii). 126 Vide H. M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) and Walter Ong, S.J., Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (New York: Octagon Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974 rpt.), especially chapter XII. Ramus’ Dialectic dominated the intellectual scene in the sixteenth century (cf. Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass [New York: Oxford University Press, 1916], pp. 148 ff). It has been often remarked that, whereas the twelfthcentury Renaissance was a renaissance of Grammar, the sixteenth century saw a renaissance of Rhetoric. Discussions such as Craig’s and Rosemond Tuve’s (Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1947]) testify both to the vitality of interest in Rhetoric at the time and to the new (Ramist, “Modern”) bias that informed that interest. Ancient Rhetoric had two full divisions amputated by the Moderns after Ramus—pronuntiatio and memoria—and elocutio was considerably revised, particularly as regards the

Who Gave You That Numb? The Etymology of Satire

139

When the matter is examined in terms of decorum, clearly, it little matters whether “satire” is derived from a Greek satyr or from a Roman satura. Yet to those involved in it, the debate holds more than a mere recondite quibble: two rival understandings contend, each with its own critical approaches. Did satire begin in Greek or in Roman culture and literature? The answer, it is assumed, will guide us in determining the literary mode, or genre—if it is a genre—of “Satire.” To writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, for example, the question was crucial: they figured that the answer would help them to determine the proper attitude to satire itself, as also their approach to subject matter and to audience. The satiric ideal that attracted the Augustans was rooted naturally enough in the newly current view that “satire” derived from satura, not from Satyr.127 doctrine of decorum. The principal revision appears to have been virtual exclusion of the audience as a determinant of decorum, with a concurrent redirection of attention inward upon the work itself and towards only the matching of style with speaker and subject. The effects of this change persist in literary criticism and are largely responsible for the impotence of and conflicts in theories about Menippean satire today. 127 P. K. Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 26. Alvin Kernan points out, in The Cankered Muse (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959, 1962), that the Elizabethans were at some pains to enunciate a theory of the decorum of satire (pp. 54–63). Theirs is, to my knowledge, the only consciously developed theory of satiric decorum, and his the only discussion of the matter. Evidently the Elizabethans were working from remarks in Donatus’ history of comedy and tragedy, which was regularly prefixed to the editions of Terence “read in all Elizabethan grammar schools. Donatus says that satire descended from the vetus comoedia which was repressed because of its scandalous attacks on personalities. The dramatic type that succeeded was, according to Donatus, the satyr play, in which actors assumed the character of satyrs and under this mask attacked individuals in the rough, savage fashion befitting such woodland creatures” (pp. 54–55). Satyr or satyre was the common Elizabethan spelling. It first appears in English to denote a form of writing in Alexander Barclay’s The Ship of Folys of the Worlde (1509), with “this present boke myght have been callyd not inconvenyently the Satyr...i.e., the reprehencion of foulysshnes.” The majority of Elizabethan critics accepted as given the derivation of satire from Satyr, although other etymologies were also entertained, e.g., by Thomas Drant (cf. “Thomas Drant’s Definition of Satire, 1566” by Marie Claire Randolph, Notes and Queries, 180, 1941, pp. 416–18). These include Thomas Lodge, Thomas Langley, George Puttenham, et al. Using Donatus, they saw satire, literally and descriptively, as deriving from a play wherein actors portrayed satyrs and attacked their victims in a rough and savage manner. This allowed the Elizabethan satirists to stress the satyr-satirist rather than the situation,

Chapter Ten

140

Diomedes provides the locus classicus for the debate. Satura is the name of a verse composition amongst the Romans. At present certainly it is defamatory and composed to carp at human vices in the manner of the Old (Greek) Comedy: this type of satura was written by Lucilius, Horace, and Persius. Previously however satura was the name of a composition in verse consisting of miscellaneous poems, such as Pacuvius and Ennius wrote. Now satura is so called either from the Satyrs, because in this type of poem (i.e., satura) laughable and shameful things are related in the same way even as those recited and performed by the Satyrs. Or it is called satura from a platter which was laden full with a large variety of first-fruits, and used to be offered to the gods in the cult of the ancients; and from the abundance and fulness of the dish it was called satura. Vergil also makes mention of this kind of platter in his Georgics, when he writes as follows: and we offer the steaming entrails on bulged platters; also and platters and cakes we shall bear. Or [it is called satura] from some kind of stuffing which was crammed full with many ingredients and called satura according to the testimony of Varro. Now this is stated in the second book of the Plautine Questions: ‘satura consists of raisins mixed with honey-wine.’ To this others add also pomegranate seeds. Others however think that it derives its name from a law, satura, which includes many provisions at once in a single bill, for it is evident that the verse composition satura also comprises many poems at once. Lucilius makes mention of this law, satura, in his first book:

Kernan contends; and they consequently attended to the decorum of that figure’s speeches as a governing characteristic. “The Elizabethan definition of satire as it appears in formal pronouncements amounts to little more than, a poem in which the author playing the part of the satyr attacks vice in the crude, elliptic, harsh language which befits his assumed character and his low subject matter.’ Decorum is the guiding critical principle, and the definition turns on the connection of satyr with satire” (p. 62). Isaac Casaubon opposed both this established theory and the immense authority of the Grammarian Donatus (which still held critical sway well into the seventeenth century) when he “exposed the fallacy” of the derivation from Satyr, and advanced satura as correct, in his (1605) De satyrica Graecorum poesi et Romanorum satira.

Who Gave You That Numb? The Etymology of Satire

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. V, 1762

141

Chapter Ten

142

which frees a duly elected aedile from omnibus laws and Sallust in his Jugurtha: thereafter a vote was taken so to speak in the lump, and his offer of surrender was accepted.128

Except for that which was written very early, the verse of Roman satire is dactylic hexameter—the high-toned verse-form of epic poetry. The satirists, “beginning with Lucilius, gradually molded it into a suitable blend of formality and informality that suited the every-day subject matter and at the same time met the demands of a formal literary genre.”129 Here there is mixture (satura) aplenty—of epic style and the commonplace: undoubtedly it was the Romans’ labour to give refinement and polish to this blend that caused Quintilian to exclaim, “Satira quidem tota nostra est...”130 Curious: Diomedes gives the Greek derivation first, yet he does not propose that Latin satire as a species of writing developed out of the Satyr plays. Rather, he theorizes that the term or name satura derives from the Greek on the basis of similar treatment of laughable or shameful themes. His solution, however, approaches both strains descriptively. (Well enough; the Augustan age toiled at detachment. So, too, did the Augustans of the eighteenth century. It is well to bear in mind their bias: as Augustans—retrievers of the high culture of Augustus—they were engaged in dusting off and updating Roman rhetorical sensibility and outlook, and just so would their sympathies be aligned.) 128

Trans. C. A. Van Rooy, Studies in Classical Satire and Related Critical Theory (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1965), p. iii. He faces his translation with the Latin (from Diomedes, Ars Grammatica, III). 129 E. S. Ramage, D. L. Sigsbee, S. C. Fredericks, Roman Satirists and Their Satire (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Press, 1974), p. 3. 130 Institutio oratoria, op. cit., X.1.93-94: he continues, “...Satire, on the other hand, is all our own. The first of our poets to win renown in this connexion was Lucilius, some of whose devotees are so enthusiastic that they do not hesitate to prefer him not merely to all other satirists, but even to all other poets. I disagree with them as much as I do with Horace, who holds that Lucilius’ verse has a muddy flow, and that there is always something in him that might well be dispensed with.” For his learning is as remarkable as his freedom of speech, and it is this latter quality that gives so sharp an edge and such abundance of wit to his satire. Horace is far terser and purer in style, and must be awarded the first place, unless my judgment is led astray by my affection for his work. Persius also, although he wrote but one book, has acquired a high and well-deserved reputation, while there are other distinguished satirists still living whose praises will be sung by posterity” (vol. IV, pp. 52–55).

Who Gave You That Numb? The Etymology of Satire

143

As Van Rooy remarks, most modern scholars now reject both the etymology satura < satyroi along with the “theory of development of the genre satura from the Satyr-drama.”131 However, just after Juvenal there was a revival of adherence to the Greek etymology. That Greek remained the normal derivation from Juvenal to Dryden132 provided a respectable classical precedent for its proponents. 131

Studies, pp. 124; 21, n. 14; 138; 145. Contemporaries include Ulrich Knoche (Roman Satire, trans., Edwin S. Ramage [Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1975]), Michael J. Coffey (Roman Satire [New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976]), R. C. Elliot (The Power of Satire [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960]), among others. Ian Jack (Augustan Satire [Oxford University Press, 1952, 1970]) notes, quoting Dryden: ‘The basic meaning of the word in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is best .understood when one remembers that poetry and rhetoric were closely akin. As has already been pointed out, the poet’s task, like the orator’s, was to arouse in his audience certain emotions about the subject of his poem. When scorn, hatred, or contempt was the emotion he wished to arouse, he was writing satire. The essence of the meaning of the word was simply a composition against someone or something.’ Whereas satura referred primarily to a form of composition, satire at this period referred primarily to the poet’s rhetorical intention. (p. 98) Important recent studies include Henry Nettleship, “The Original Form of the Roman Satura” (reprinted in his Lectures and Essays, second series, Oxford, 1895); G. L. Hendrikson, “The Dramatic Satura and the Old Comedy at Rome” (American Journal of Philology, XV, 1894, pp. 1–30) and his “Satura—The Genesis of a Literary Form” (Classical Philology, VI, 1911, pp. 129–43); C. Knapp, “The Skeptical Assault on the Roman Tradition Concerning the Dramatic Satura” (American Journal of Philology, xxxiii, 1912, pp. 125–48); A. L. Wheeler, “Satura as a Generic Term” (Classical Philology, VII, 1912, pp. 457–77); B. L. Ullman, “Satura and Satire” (Classical Philology, VIII, 1913, pp. 172-–94), and his “The Present Status of the Satura Question” (Studies in Philology, XVII, 1920, pp. 379–401); and J. Wright Duff, Roman Satire, ch. 1, pp. 1–22. 132 To balance Diomedes (later fourth century), there is the account of the Grammarian Evanthius (early fourth century), who gives, in his “De Fabula” or “De Comoedia”: From this source thereupon another kind of drama, viz. the satyra took its beginning. Its name is derived from the satyrs who, we know, are gods who always indulge in jesting and wantonness; though some think wrongly that its name is derived from some other source. This satyra, then, was such that it consisted of a verse composition with somewhat rough and as it were rustic jesting about the vices of the citizens, yet without any mention of proper names. This same kind of comedy was prejudicial to many poets, since they incurred the suspicion of the influential men among the citizens that they described their deeds for the worse, and deformed the genre by the style of

144

Chapter Ten

John Dryden wrote the first critical and theoretical essay in English on the “Originall and Progress of Satire.” There, he remarks on the confusion arising from “a long dispute among the modern critics”133 as regards both the etymology of “satire” and the source of satirizing. When satire is considered not as a form of invective but as a species of poetry, the “war among the critics” gets under way. Dryden summarizes: Scaliger, the father, will have it descend from Greece to Rome; and derives the word Satire from Satyrus, that mixed kind of animal, or, as the ancients thought him, rural god, made up betwixt a man and a goat; with a human head, hooked nose, pouting lips, a bunch, or struma, under the chin, pricked ears, and upright horns; the body shagged with hair, especially from the waist, and ending in a goat, with the legs and feet of that creature. But Casaubon, and his followers, with reason, condemn this derivation; and prove, that from Satyrus, the word satira, as it signified a poem, cannot possibly descend. For satira is not properly a substantive, but an adjective; to which the word lanx (in English, a charger, or large platter) is understood; so that the Greek poem, made according to the manners of a Satyr, and expressing his qualities, must properly be called satyrical, and not Satire. And thus far ‘tis allowed that the Grecians had such poems; but that they were wholly different in specie from that to which the Romans gave the name of Satire.134

Dryden ranges Julius Scaliger and Heinsius against Casaubon and Dacier; the last, as it were, his Mentor. To any Grammarian, etymology of the term and origin of the activity are natural parallels as words and deeds, the Greek or Latin derivation implying strongly which culture initiated satire. Dryden’s concern, then, is Grammatical: he assumes etymology will provide essential clues to the formal nature and structure of satire.

their composition. This genre was first composed by Lucilius in a new mode, so that thereupon he made it a poesis, that is a continuous verse-composition composed of several books. (trans., Van Rooy, p. 188; original on p. 199) The learned John Milton seems to opt for the Greek derivation when, in An Apology &c., he notes, “A Satyr as it was borne out of a tragedy, so ought to resemble his parentage, to strike high, and adventure dangerously at the most eminent vices among the greatest persons” (Works, Columbia edition, 1931–1940; III.i, p. 329). 133 pp. 44–57. It is not clear whether Dryden uses “modern” to refer to recent critics, to Dialectic-based ones (the moderni), or to both at once. 134 “Originall and Progress,” p. 45. Cf. pp. 54ff. Dryden opts for “the true derivation from satura...” (p. 67).

Who Gave You That Numb? The Etymology of Satire

145

What compels our critics to tackle their subjects descriptively? Do they suppose that doing so confers a mantle of detachment, intellectual or otherwise? They decline to look directly at the Satyr: they see instead a symbol (of drunkenness, licentiousness, satyr-plays, Old Comedy, etc.), that is, a term referring to some other situation. Even Dryden, having said as much as he did about the derivation from Satyr, misses the essential point. Both derivations may be applied descriptively to the content of a satire without the need to refer to Satyr-drama. Moreover, they apply equally well to satire in terms of its decorum. On these latter terms, the difference between etymologies is negligible. Why not abandon description entirely as unprofitable and approach the matter afresh? Look at them. Both a satura and a Satyr are medleys, hodgepodges: one is vegetable; the other, animal. (The Satyr mingles low and high—beast and human.) The rest is quibble. Or resolve it by another route, less commonsense and more technical. Each, a Satyr and a satura, provides an image by which the mind draws nearer to the subject; each represents the use of a rhetorical figure. The Roman adjective certainly describes, and by metonymy can replace its noun, lanx; the Greek term enacts, dramatizes the matter by an icon or by prosopopoeia. Where does one begin in choosing between rhetorical figures? The first is relatively passive or static, even if steaming hot; the other, steamy in another way—actively licentious. One is for the more detached observer; the other, feral, seductive, aggressive. One, editorial; the other, dramatic. Their difference is less one of attitude to subject than one of tone respecting reader. Perhaps the rivalry or confusion of the two springs from assuming that both figures are meant for the same audience, i.e., from ignoring the audience, or, what is tantamount to the same thing, from assuming the audience is homogeneous (and, therefore, that it can be taken for granted). This troublesome notion of a uniform audience actually gelled as doctrine in the eighteenth century. Paul Fussell explains how: The humanist persuaded of the uniformity of human nature reasons on this matter as follows: each unchanging element or capacity of the general human mind naturally has a literary form which accords with its expectations, and, since human nature is historically uniform and since thus the same few basic human actions are played out ad infinitum, the genres devised and practised by the ancients should serve for eternity. The part of the mind that relished gentle melancholy is gratified by elegy; the part that responds to enthusiasm or devotion is gratified by ode; the part that craves ideas of justice is gratified by tragedy or satire or comedy; the

146

Chapter Ten part that responds to images of dissipation and irresponsibility is gratified by the song.135

In this way of thinking, a writer deals not with an audience but with human nature itself, in the abstract, as a figure minus a ground. The several genres are archetypes of the spirit. Here, then, are the roots of Frye’s whole approach: literature is human nature formalized and realized in another medium, purged of the messy actuality. Surely Menippism is the most fundamental of the varieties of satire. It compounds the mixture. It sidesteps the restriction to a “formality and informality that suited the subject matter and at the same time met the demands of a formal literary genre.” It indulges in a free-ranging carnivalistic farrago/mixture/satura/medley/mélange/hodgepodge/gumbo of styles, languages, prose and verse, comic and serious, levels of decorum, and participants. Look how Horace, Juvenal, and Persius made satire Roman, that is, how they civilized it. They sought to smooth the rough edges, to temper the mixture, to impose on it a smooth consistency of written style. Homogeneous style has two aspects: it is a specializing of sensibilities, calculated to focus one or another sense and mode of knowing. But getting that intensity means anaesthetizing other faculties. The reader is selectively benumbed. Uniform style, uniform reader. Such was the great Roman discovery and the source of their power as writers. Roman satire turned the direction of attack inward, away from the audience and towards the content or subject matter and the personal views of the writer.136 135

Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, l965, l969), p. 66. This sheds light, too, on their pursuit of a workable doctrine of the ruling passions. Not far in the background looms the pervasive influence of Locke’s mechanistic Essay Concerning Human Understanding—satirized by Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Fussell sums up: “The humanist tends to believe that, in all the essentials, human nature is permanent and uniform, quite unchanged by time or place. It is this idea in the eighteenth-century that sanctions the orthodox conception of the permanence of the literary genres, each of which is thought to address itself to one unchanging element of the human consciousness” (p. 4). Frye set out, in Anatomy of Criticism, to chart this abstract territory in detail. 136 As Horace notes, “Difficile est proprie communia dicere” (Epist. ad Pison.). Van Rooy remarks this shift from corporate to private in the development from Lucilius to Horace: While Horace considers in detail the first charge made by his critics, no doubt because it reflected an authentic situation arising out of the publication of his first book, he gives only a perfunctory glance at the criticism directed at the

Who Gave You That Numb? The Etymology of Satire

147

Homogeneous style would neutralize Menippean aims and tactics. It sets aside the broad grin and savage leer and enhances the long face and sober moralism of both the satire and the satirist. Quintilian’s tota nostra est announces that the Romans had solved the problem of style by inventing formal verse satire: the old rough Satyr is bathed and shaved and manicured and taught manners and made respectable—the satura tidily packaged, like a box of Black Magic chocolates. A decorum has been found for the indecorous. Menippists alone retained the rough and hairy outlines of the beast, one foot swinging to kick the contents of the satura lanx into the faces of the audience. Homogeneous style, then, allows the writer to direct full attention to the subject—and away from the writer and the writing and the reader. It certainly does not produce a self-conscious reader. Consistency and uniformity always serve to numb sensibility; they create areas of inattention as a means to intensify awareness elsewhere. This is the technique of good taste and refinement, and of moral outlook: to the Cynic, the enemy.

plain style of his satires. Obviously he was now quite secure in the knowledge that his compositions were bona carmina, not merely because some of them had met with the approval of Augustus, but because within the limits of the plain style they satisfied the higher stylistic requirements of the Augustan age as formulated by himself. Horace, then, accepted the generic term satura, in the first place because he was conscious that in regard to artistic form he had established a new standard in the genre. (p. 68) Horace thus manages to shift “the personal emphasis in Lucilius from satire by name to satire as a means of self-revelation” (ibid.). Moreover, and “in contrast both to Lucilius and his own belligerent ancestors...he will no longer assail any living person unprovoked, but only by way of self-protection. In developing his concept of satire as his natural instrument of self-protection, Horace once more—but this time in regard to himself—in a most subtle manner shifts the personal emphasis from satire by name (Cf. vs. 46) to satire as a means of self-expression: whatever the circumstances of his life, he will continue writing (vss. 57–60)” (p. 69).

CHAPTER ELEVEN A TRIVIAL PURSUIT: THE ROOTS OF SATIRE

When the two etymologies of “satire” are considered in terms of decorum and as figures of rhetoric rather than as descriptions, the separation between them evaporates, and Menippism turns out to be that form closest to the roots and definition of “satire.” All satire has therapeutic effect; but whereas in other varieties the therapy is intended to treat the subject or person being attacked, in Menippean satire the reader is the patient. The therapy is administered in the process of his learning to read the satire, and has as its objective retuned and revivified perception. The satire itself is the medicine, which the reader imbibes in the process of reading, that is, by accommodating himself to the demands of the style. Hence the irrelevance of the “content,” in the ordinary sense of the term (story, etc.): the user is the content. Menippists, then, have two chief concerns, one literary (the satire) and one worldly (the reader): in this form of satire the two are frequently indistinguishable. That they are equally and simultaneously active in both spheres is no mere coincidence, for this mode of satire is the satiric arm of Grammar. Traditional Grammar has two concerns, etymology and exegesis; these it brings to bear on the traditional “two books,” the written text and the Book of Nature (or Book of the World as it is sometimes called); here, on the written satire and the reader. In the eighteenth century, satire was generally regarded as a species of exhortation, and it was agreed that “delight was the indispensable means through which satire acted, as did all poetry.”137 The men of the time preferred smiling satire to savage, Horace to Juvenal, Menander to Aristophanes, Terence to Plautus, on the grounds that “if there is anything which will penetrate dull minds it is smiling satire”—a commonplace of

137

P. K. Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 146.

150

Chapter Eleven

the period.138 “A Satyr’s smile is sharper than his frown...” In the words of Edward Young, ...as good books are the medicine of the mind, if we should dethrone these authors [Pope and Swift], and consider them, not in their royal, but their medicinal capacity, might it not be said, that Addison prescribed a wholesome and pleasant regimen, which was universally relished, and did much good; that Pope preferred a purgative of satire, which, tho’ wholesome, was too painful in its operation; and that Swift insisted on a large dose of ipecacuanha, which, tho’ readily swallowed from the fame of the physician, yet, if the patient had any delicacy of taste, he threw up the remedy instead of the disease?139

Addison and Steele both wrote frequently on laughter, raillery, and satire in The Spectator and The Tatler; the touchstone essay of the period was Tatler 242.140 Medical terminology and allusions are ever near the surface of discussions of satire’s nature and efficacy. The therapeutics of satire have a long history. Horace regarded satire as moral and educative, and does “invite his audience to join him in his own efforts of poetic therapy.’”141 Juvenal’s savage lash is as proverbial as Pope’s well-attested scourge is fearsome.142 In fact, Pedro Lain-Entralgo’s Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity strongly suggests that the various forms of satire handed us by tradition embody the several forms of logos that he discusses. The therapeutic logos persists, in a general way, in the science of Rhetoric, and specifically in consolation literature (e.g., Boethius’s Consolatio and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess). Alan of Lille’s (Menippean) De planctu naturae is overtly cast as a remedial prescription: in it, Nature complains, “No one brings medicinal remedies to bear on these diseases of vice...” etc.143 To cite but one other well138

Ibid. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, 1759. In Hazard Adams, Ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1971), pp. 338–47. 140 Only slightly less important in expressing the views of the age were the essays in Spectator 23 and 209, Examiner 38 and Tatler 61, and Pope’s letter to Arbuthnot of 26 July 1734. 141 J. K. Newman, Augustus and the New Poetry (Bruxelles-Berchem: Latomus, 1967), p. 285. 142 Vide, for example, Elliott, The Power of Satire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), especially the first two chapters. 143 Plaint of Nature, trans., Sheridan, p. 207: Prose 8. As testimony to the common acceptance of therapeutics in the ancient world, vide: “Finally, one should remember that the word was considered a remedy of the soul...,that the logos was 139

A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire

151

known example, Burton proposes that his Anatomy of Melancholy will cure melancholy in both author and reader. As melancholy results from idleness, he writes to keep both himself and his reader occupied. But, “Democritus” concludes, all the world is mad, crazed, saving a few: “I should here except some Cynics, Menippus, Diogenes, that Theban Crates...” His solution? “What remains then but to send for lorarios, those officers to carry them all together for company to Bedlam, and set Rabelais to be their physician” (pp. 118–19). He offers the Anatomy—a common Menippean pose, this—for the universal improvement of mankind: “Being then a disease so grievous, so common, I know not wherein to do a more general service, and spend my time better, than to prescribe means how to prevent and cure so universal a malady, an epidemical disease, that so often, so much, crucifies the body and the mind” (pp. 120–21). Marie Claire Randolph’s excellent study “The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory” amply demonstrates a pervasive awareness of therapeutics via satire in the period when the revival (i.e., retrieval) of rhetoric was at its peak. She notes that ...whereas the magician-satirist of oral culture, e.g., in Ireland, had actually sought to raise sting-blisters and facial blemishes, the Renaissance satirist, under culture influences, seeks metaphorically to cure them. Later, when the theory of satire becomes practically regarded in the vocabulary of rationalism, the physical blemish becomes practically the ruling passion, e.g., melancholy, for Burton; gravity, for Sterne, or satiric flaw in a man’s character. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, satirists were still metaphorically applying “wholesome remedy” to “ugly, foul disease,” a remedy first cleansing, that is, stinging, cutting, or burning, and then healing.144

As she shows with a brief list (pp. 146–47), even our own present-day words to describe satire “preserve...the primitive notion of destroying or harming the human body”: the converse is therapy. The etymologies of the same terms lead straight back to the original function of incantational satire. Vivian Mercier has studied the roots of satire in magic and poetics: About the origin of Gaelic satire in verbal magic there can be no doubt at all: it is a well-attested fact that a superstitious fear of the power of satire, often named a physician” (Emma J. and Ludwig Edelstein, Asclepius [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945], pp. 207–208). 144 Studies in Philology, XXXVIII, April 1941, pp. 125–57; rpt. in Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed., Ronald Paulson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 148.

Chapter Eleven

152

which was believed capable of causing physical injury or even death, persisted in Ireland down to at least the beginning of the nineteenth century and may not be entirely extinct today.145

Further, Satire, unlike wit or humour, is an official function of the trained poet, though one which he soon begins to exercise for his own power and prestige rather than for those of his patrons or his tribe. There is evidence in the sagas of its having been used as a weapon of war to hamper the enemy’s strength by its magical operation; however, the earliest examples which survive suggest that satire was in fact chiefly used to punish niggardly patrons and other enemies of the individual poets. Satire was also institutional in the sense that regulations for its use and punishments for its improper use occur frequently in the Early Irish laws. Early Irish satire as we know it, then, is associated with a fairly complex society.146

145

Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 7. Ibid. In the chapter on “Satire in Modern Irish,” we find the following comments. As well as categories based on content, a full-length study of Irish satire should attempt what I lack space for, the establishment of categories based on form. It ought to inquire what metres are most commonly employed for satire in general; whether any metres are considered especially appropriate for certain kinds of satire; whether undiluted prose has ever been widely employed for satire; and how common a mingling of prose with verse was in the satire of this or that century. (p. 130) In ancient Rome, fear of the power of satire is adequately attested by the punishment prescribed by the Twelve Tables of the Law, which, remarks Gibbon, “afford a more decisive proof of the national spirit, since they were framed by the wisest of the senate and accepted by the free voices of the people…” He goes on to observe: They approve the inhuman and unequal principle of retaliation; and the forfeit of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a limb for a limb, is rigorously exacted, unless the offender can redeem his pardon by a fine of three hundred pounds of copper. The decemvirs distributed with much liberality the slighter chastisements of flagellation and servitude; and nine crimes of a very different complexion are adjudged worthy of death…7. Libels and satires, whose rude strains sometimes disturbed the peace of an illiterate city. The author was beaten with clubs, a worthy chastisement, but it is not certain that he was left to expire under the blows of the executioner…. Gibbon notes at this point that “Cicero (de Republica 1. iv. apud Augustin. de Civitat. Dei, ix, 6, in Fragment. Philosoph. tom. iii. p. 393, edit. Olivet) affirms that the decemvirs made libels a capital offence: cum perpaucas res capite sanxissent—

146

A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire

153

As well, Dryden gave us both “Jack Ketch’s wife” and remarks such as these on Horace and Juvenal: Horace’s technique afforded “a pleasant cure, with all the limbs preserved entire...without keeping the patient indoors for a day,” while “Juvenal’s times required a more painful kind of operation.”147 Dryden simply assumes that all satire is medicinal: “Satire is a kind of poetry, without a series of action, invented for the purging of our minds...”148 More recently, Wyndham Lewis remarked, You may compare the satirist to the Doctor in a French Colony, stealing up behind the native, and plunging his hypodermic into his arm. And the characters in my book are creatures of the blood stream more than anything else. I handled my hypodermic. Each selected, enormously enlarged bacillus has been extracted to play his part upon the written page.149

Ezra Pound, pursuing a parallel between ethics in medicine and in serious art, observed: As there are in medicine the art of diagnosis and the art of cure, so in the arts, so in the particular arts of poetry and of literature, there is the art of diagnosis and there is the art of cure. They call one the cult of ugliness and the other the cult of beauty. The cult of beauty is the hygiene, it is sun, air, and the sea and the rain and the lake bathing. The cult of ugliness, Villon, Baudelaire, Corbière, Beardsley are diagnosis. Flaubert is diagnosis. Satire, if we are to ride this metaphor to staggers, satire is surgery, insertions and amputations.150

perpaucas!” (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. [London: Methuen & Co., 1909], vol. IV), pp. 529–30. 147 “Originall and Progress...”, p. 94. 148 Op. cit., p. 100. 149 The Apes of God (London: Arco Publishers, 1955), from the “Introduction to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition,” n.p. 150 “The Serious Artist,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited and with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 45. Vide also Pound’s remarks à propos Joyce’s Ulysses in Guide to Kulchur (p. 96): In 1912 0r eleven I invoked whatever gods may exist, in the quatrain: Sweet Christ from hell spew up some Rabelais, To belch and . . . . . and to define today In fitting fashion, and her monument Heap up to her in fadeless excrement. “Ulysses” I take as my answer….“Ulysses” is the end, the summary, of a period, that period is branded by La Tour du Pin in his phrase “age of usury.” The katharsis of “Ulysses”, the joyous satisfaction as the first chapters rolled into Holland Place, was to feel that here was THE JOB done and

154

Chapter Eleven

If therapeutics of one or another sort, deadly or sanative, has always been assumed as inhering in satire, it is because satire as we know it is a comparatively recent manifestation of the tradition of verbal therapeutics that extends well beyond our civilized strains and into prehistory. As the Edelsteins aver in their classic work on Asclepius, “Finally, one should remember that the word was considered a remedy of the soul..., that the logos was often named a physician.”151 In The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity, Pedro Lain-Entralgo has documented in detail “the constant Greek concern for the psychological action of the word.”152 His basic aim is to show how Greek logotherapy used the power of the uttered word to secure a medicinal effect. To begin with, he avers, it is certain that charms for therapeutic purpose already existed at the dawn of Greek culture. Supplicatory language was used to cure disease or to coerce the gods. The speaker of the charm always endeavors to compel Nature in some measure. ...there is an unbroken transition between charms and conjuration; one who prays, on the contrary, merely asks the gods for a favorable course of natural events.153

He found evidence of three distinct strains of logotherapy, or use of spoken words in relation to the curing of disease, in Homer. The spoken word is used in the Homeric epic with respect to disease for three different purposes: for supplication, for magical effect, and with a psychological or natural aim. The language of supplication is the “prayer” (euchê), of magic the “charm” (epôdê), for a psychological purpose “pleasant speech” (terpnos logos) or “beguiling speech” (thelktêrios logos).154

The introduction of the phonetic alphabet had a cataclysmic impact on words and speech and their effects on their users. Alphabetic writing translates a profound multisensory experience, the normal experience of finished, the diagnosis and the cure was here. The sticky, molasses-covered filth of current print, all the fuggs, all the foetors, the whole boil of the European mind, had been lanced. 151 Emma J. and Ludwig Edelstein, Asclepius (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945), pp. 207–208. 152 Lain-Entralgo, The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity, ed. and trans., L. J. Rather and John M. Sharp (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 239. 153 Ibid., p. 23. 154 Ibid., p. 25.

A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire

155

words, into terms of one silent sense operating in relative isolation from all the others. Because the alphabet spread slowly, the transformation it brought about was centuries-long in the making. Though Homer’s world was still largely unaffected by writing, we can detect, in his record, lines of force that give shape to the patterns of later developments that we find familiar. The power of the magical charm (epôdê) is directed at influencing and reconfiguring the ground or whole situation: its efficacy ...does not come from secretly and magically “naming” reality—recall the “Open, Sesame!” of the Arabian tales—but from charming or seducing the mind of the divine invisible powers governing the process to be modified; this is the reason why the verbal formula of the Greek incantations is not customarily a secret language but rather a functional expression more or less in harmony with the nature of the end to be achieved.155

In contrast, the newer form, “beguiling” or “cheering” or “pleasing” speech (thelktêrios logos, terpnos logos), acts in a more psychological and rational manner. It displays two principal features: first, In contrast to what occurs with prayers and incantations, cheering speech is addressed to the patient as a human individual; not to his innermost moral being, however, ...but rather to his mind or thymos, that is, to the element within him capable of producing affective and somatic activity.156

So, for example, Nestor and Patroclus address “the individual nature of their patient.” A second feature: the newer form, then, the one that directs its energies at the individual figure, the patient, shows the pattern we recognize later as Rhetoric; the older form, working through ground effects and forces of nature, as the pattern of Grammar. Dialectic— philosophy—invented a third way by retrieving one of the more ancient tenets of religion.157 From the point of view of their effect on the one who hears them there are three distinct logoi: a dialectical or convincing logos, a second, rhetorical or persuasive, and a third, tragic, purgative, or cathartic. The Aristotelian study of the persuasive logos is implicitly related to verbal psychotherapy;

155

Ibid., p. 28. The Greek gods were personifications of natural forces. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 157 Ibid., p. 30. He comments, “The rhetoric of Pindar’s odes, the poetic word of the bard, acts accordingly by enchanting the minds of its hearers and effacing the inevitable pains of daily existence” (p. 51). 156

156

Chapter Eleven in contrast, the purgative or cathartic logos has in the work of the philosopher an essential and express relation to medicine.158

This observation helps us detect the deep resonance between tragedy and therapeutics in the philosophic mind. Philosophers felt little or no affinity for the comic muse, but tragedy held them in thrall. For tragedy dramatizes a process of separation of a figure from a ground—a character from a social flux—and the excruciating process of finding and forging a private identity. Oedipus, the archetype, is driven to pursue his tragic quest “because I must know who I am,” as he tells Tiresias. Exactly paralleling that reckless and relentless process of forging private awareness at any cost was the new scientific philosophic enterprise: they were exploring and mapping mental abstraction, under the spell of ideas purified of the ground-mess of worldly embodiments and everyday concerns. The word-in-the-mind, the old mental flux of consciousness, when newly tidied up and systematized, turned into logic, the science of connected reasoning and right thought.159 Comedy, by contrast, dramatizes the happy merging of a figure and its ground and consequently celebrates group experience and play: not very philosophical, or particularly rational. Prior to writing, the universe or kosmos was perceived as a verbal universe, shot through, penetrated, informed by Logos. Therefore, understanding the Logos would provide a certain route to understanding the universe (the kosmos). That by means of which man can “give an account” of reality and express in his mind or with words what is rational or at least reasonable in things received from the Greeks the name of logos; which is the same as to say that the logos is the highest means of intellectual knowledge. If the mind or nous of man is able to know reality it is because he has logos, because man is by nature an animal endowed with logos: logon echon, “possessor of logos,” Aristotle will later say. If reality in turn can be known by man it is because the cosmos has deep within it an immanent reason or order, a sovereign logos. Such was the brilliant discovery of Heraclitus that

158

Op. cit., p. 242. Lain-Entralgo observes, “The katharsis which the Phaedo defines and advocates—that the mind purify or free itself of the body by the practice of the theoretical life—is on the other hand a strictly philosophical concept.” He glosses this remark as follows: “Whenever we speak of ‘pure reason,’ ‘pure knowledge,’ etc., our expressions have behind them, whether we know it or not, the katharsis of the Platonic Phaedo” (p. 128). 159

A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire

157

Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus subsequently inherited and put to use.160

After the transformation, which F. M. Cornford has styled the shift in the title of his book From Religion to Philosophy, rationalism supplanted magic, and Dialecticians brought their new sense of the logos to bear both on the problem of rationalizing the kosmos and on abstract processes of being and becoming. In the process, Plato and Aristotle invented a completely new theory of therapeutics, one that reached back to the ancient epôdê yet was consonant with the new abstract science. Beyond the shadow of a doubt Plato thus becomes the inventor of a rigorously technical verbal psychotherapy. Gorgias and Antiphon are but prehistory beside Plato. Thanks to his vigorous and subtle rationalizing endeavor the old therapeutic epôdê, the magic charm or conjuration of ancient times, is resolved into three elements very different from one another: The magical, the rational, and the beseeching. The magical element, sharply and persistently opposed by Plato, will be the only one to live on in the epôdai of superstitious medicine. The rational element, beginning as a pure and undifferentiated suggestive action in the archaic epôdê, takes on the form of logos kalos and becomes technical psychotherapy. Technically utilized, the word acts by what it is, by the joint power of its own nature and the nature of the patient, rather than as a

160

Op. cit., p. 142. As C. H. Kahn (in his analysis of Heraclitus’ Fr. 30: Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, pp. 224–25) shows that both the kosmos and the logos that informs it are encyclopedic as they concern the universe, “the world of nature taken in its widest sense,” and both are concerned with metamorphosis. These lines of force in the logos are of particular importance to the development of Stoic and Roman Grammar and Rhetoric. Heraclitus made it far clearer than his immediate predecessors that “man himself is part of his surroundings” and not merely a contained or detachable figure: “in him, too, the logos is operative, and his effective functioning depends upon action in accordance with it”—and so upon his understanding of it. (G. S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975], p. 403). In Fr. 112 is found, “the greatest superiority is to have wisdom, and wisdom it is to tell the truth and act in accordance with nature (i.e., the will of Logos), listening for it (i.e., in intuitive comprehension)” (F. M. Cleve, The Giants of Pre-Sophistic Greek Philosophy, 2 vols. [The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965], vol. I: 107). In short, Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, and is responsible for their nature and configuration. Exactly that sense of things is now forming around the “information superhighway” or electric information environment. It, too, is highly participational.

158

Chapter Eleven result of any magic power. The beseeching element, finally, will live on in the form of euchê, or prayer to the gods.161

Plato, in fact, was the first to make the mind subject to “purification” or katharsis.162 Lain-Entralgo outlines the essential connection between katharsis and the new, non-superstitious epôdê. Every epôdê is a verbal katharmos, a means for the purification of the soul by means of the word. The epôdê engenders sôphrosynê; and the latter, whatever its ultimate essence may be, manifests itself descriptively as a well-regulated and lucid composure of all that which makes up the soul of man: beliefs, knowledge, feelings, and impulses. More than temperance or moderation derived from contempt for the body, as the extreme puritanism of the Phaedo could maintain, sôphrosynê is kosmos, “good order and control of the pleasures and appetites,” so that “that which by nature is best may prevail over that which is worst” (Rep., IV, 430e-431a). And is not the serene possession of this emmetria or well-ordered proportion of the soul (Rep., VI, 486d) perhaps the end to which verbal katharsis should lead, as Plato understood it? It cannot be surprising that the Platonist Chion, or the writer who later took that name, asserts that philosophy is epôdê, 161

Lain-Entralgo, op. cit., p. 126. And it is the mind (abstracted from the body) and moral state of the “patient” that Plato seeks to cure, or cleanse: “it is wholly evident that the proper katharsis for moral disorder can be no other than the suitable and suasive word, the epôdê, in the most platonic sense of the term” (p. 135). Lain-Entralgo distinguishes five senses in which the term katharsis is used in Plato’s writings (pp.127–28). In his In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 110, Brian Vickers is emphatic about Plato’s splitting apart of mind and body: In Socrates’ distinction between genuine arts ministering to the body or mind and their spurious imitations (463 e–466 a), [E. R.] Dodds describes ‘the most important element’ as being ‘the distinction of principle which Plato draws between “scientific” and “unscientific” procedures.... It is one form of that distinction between being and seeming, inner reality and outward appearance, which runs through the whole of the dialogue from this point.’ (E. R. Dodds, Plato, Gorgias. A Revised Text with Introduction and Notes [Oxford, 1979], p. 227). The distinction is between a techne (based on a rational principle) and an empeiria (discovered by trial and error), which seems to have been coined for this occasion. ‘The sharp antithesis between the two terms appears nowhere in the Hippocratic corpus; it is typically Platonic, and is probably due to Plato himself’’ (Dodds, p. 229). The other binary opposition underlying the whole dialogue is between mind and body, and again Plato innovated: ‘the sharp Platonic antithesis between mind as the dominant and body the subject part of man appears here perhaps for the first time’ (Dodds, p. 231). The distinction— and the superior valuation of the mind—recurs many times, indeed ‘Plato never tires of restating’ it (Dodds, p. 252). 162

A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire

159

beneficent charm (Ep., 3, 6 p., 196 H). Such had been the innermost nerve of the intellectual and ethical teaching of his master.163

Nicolas Rapin, Jean Passerat, and Florent Chrestien, La Satyre Ménippơe, 1593-4

Aristotle identified tragedy as the ideal vehicle through which katharsis can operate minus the moral dimension in which Plato had clothed it. ...the Aristotelian katharsis should be understood without recourse to motives or demands of, as it is usually put, a “higher” order, and by seeing in it only an elemental psychosomatic process. The proper effect of tragic 163

Lain-Entralgo, op. cit, p. 137. Vide also p. 123.

Chapter Eleven

160

katharsis is not moral: it is purely and simply pleasure (hêdonê), the pleasure for which attending the spectacle of tragedy specifically is designed. The ergon of the drama, what the tragic spectacle does and produces in one who views it, is a pleasure, and in the latter the psychosomatic “purgation” of which the katharsis consists has its ultimate effect...When Aristotle was writing his famous definition he was not thinking of referring particularly or remotely to a purifying, improving, educative or moral effect of katharsis; faithful to his purpose of determining or delimiting the essence (horos tês ousias) of the Attic tragedy he was attempting only to characterize accurately and truly the pleasure and the happiness that tragedy specifically produces. Now for Aristotle as for Plato (Philebus, 32a-b; Tim., 64d) pleasure is primarily the return of the organism from a state of disturbance to the harmony proper to its particular nature...The well-being that the action of a purgative medicine produces, the calm following religious enthusiasm, and the pleasure caused by viewing a tragedy are not only “purgative pleasures”...but also—and this is extremely important—“harmless pleasures,” “innocent pleasures”...Thus Aristotle understood it, and thus he puts it to everyone who can read, placing in mutual relation Chapter VI of the Poetics and Book VII of the Politics. With this the philosopher accomplished two main purposes: to do away with the political distrust of the drama on the part of Plato and to delimit precisely and strictly the “essence” of tragedy.164

This alliance of philosophy and tragedy, and katharsis—the mode of therapy for the rational mind—provides the matrix from which is born Juvenalian satire. The other two forms of satire developed along somewhat different lines. Rather than breaking with tradition and inventing katharsis for a comparatively detached spectator, they retained the element of play and the tie to comedy and kept alive the old technique of mimesis. In Rhetoric the division that uses mimesis to the hilt is decorum, in the putting-on of the sensibility of the audience. The relation between Rhetoric, as the art of the uttered, transforming logos, and medicine becomes evident only when examined in the light of the further relation between kosmos and mimesis, the technique of knowing. Kosmos can mean the universal order as well as the human one. In the Hippocratic texts the notion of kosmos is applied in detail to the structure and function of men’s bodies. As Polybius, about the end of the fifth century, wrote, The body of man always possesses all of these [the four humours, characterized by the four primary opposites], but through the revolving

164

Op. cit., pp. 195–96.

A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire

161

seasons they become now greater than themselves, now lesser in turn, according to nature. For just as every year has a share in all, in hot things as well as cold, in dry things as well as wet (for no one of these could endure for any length of time without all of the things present in this kosmos; but if any one of these were to cease, all would disappear; for from a single necessity all are composed and nourished by one another); just so, if any one of these components should cease in a man, the man would not be able to live.165

The science of diagnosis then was of a Grammatical character, entailing an exegesis of the kosmos in question and of the disharmonies in its inner structure, a process that called for encyclopedic knowledge in the physician-orator (for the human order and the universal one were attuned as microcosm and macrocosm). The cure, as Lain-Entralgo has shown in detail, would be by means of a logos that reconstrued the patient’s kosmos into “proper” inner resonance and harmony with its ground, the larger kosmos. Writing perhaps a few years after Polybius,166 the author of De victu holds a similar view of the resonant complementarity of natural factors: A good doctor, he claims, “must be familiar with the risings and settings of the stars, that he may be competent to guard against the changes and excesses of food and drink, of winds, and of the kosmos as a whole, since it is from these [changes and excesses] that diseases arise among men.”167

His kosmos, too, is musical, harmonious and rhythmic, and is in a state of “dynamic equilibrium.” Just how a logos could effect “cures” by transforming and reconstituting a human kosmos is a matter particularly relevant to the later development of formal rhetoric. The decisive aspect involves the real transformation of the hearer: ...from our present point of view the decisive part is that the man Empedocles feels himself personally and dramatically included in the process of the cosmos. “I have been a young man and a girl and a shrub and a mute fish that has leaped from the sea,” one of his more famous statements says (frag. 117). The man who says this is not a humbug or a madman; he is a man who in the depth of his soul knows and feels his

165 Nat. hom. 7, Jones, IV, 20–22. From Charles H. Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 189. 166 Kahn, op. cit., p. 189, notes Polybius was probably contemporary with Empedocles and Archelaus. 167 Ibid., pp. 189–90.

162

Chapter Eleven living community with the reality of the universe and with all the forms which the cyclical movement of that reality adopts.168

The poet has “become” the things he talks about, by physically and imaginatively “putting on” or miming them, in the most profound sense possible, as modalities of his own being and sensibilities. This process, abhorred and repudiated by Plato, Eric Havelock has been at pains to elucidate for us: the participational dimension of the logos that was its medium before the existence of writing: You threw yourself into the situation of Achilles, you identified with his grief or his anger. You yourself became Achilles and so did the reciter to whom you listened. Thirty years later you could automatically quote what Achilles had said or what the poet had said about him. Such enormous powers of memorization could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity.169

Such a state, of willing, fluid susceptibility, of total personal involvement, and therefore of emotional identification with the substance of the poetized statement, obviously would make the entire event unforgettable. It could well yield the sort of therapies that Lain-Entralgo discusses, therapies of a sort that our term “psychosomatic” can only hint at. For what is involved is the functional transformation of both reciter and hearer:

168

Lain-Entralgo, op. cit., p. 84. F. M. Cleve adds, “this Empedocles says of himself. But it holds true of every human being. The difference is merely: he knows it and the others know it not” (op. cit., pp. 386–87). It was this process Aristotle referred to when he noted “the cognitive agent is and becomes the thing known.” More recently, this maxim has been rendered “the user of any medium or situation is the content”—a corollary to “the medium is the message.” 169 Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, The Belknap Press, 1963), p. 84. The astonishing persistence of this power to subsume and transform the hearer is evident in the testimony of Dionysus of Halicarnassus, who, late in the first century BC, “anticipates Longinus in applying as his test the emotional appeal or transport; ‘and then we get criticism of the most convincing kind. When I take up one of his speeches,’ writes Dionysus (On Democritus, c.22 [trans. W. Rhys Roberts]), ‘I am entranced and carried hither and thither, stirred now by one emotion, now by another. I feel distrust, anxiety, fear, disdain, hatred, pity, good-will, anger, jealousy. I am agitated by every passion in turn that can sway the human heart, and I am like those who are being initiated into wild mystic rites’ ” (J. W. H. Atkins, Literary Criticism in Antiquity, a Sketch of Its Development, 2 vols. [Cambridge: The University Press, 1934], vol. II, pp. 125–26).

A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire

163

...the minstrel recited effectively only as he re-enacted the doings and sayings of heroes and made them his own, a process which can be described in reverse as making himself ‘resemble’ them in endless succession. He sank his personality in his performance. His audience in turn would remember only as they entered effectively and sympathetically into what he was saying and this in turn meant that they became his servants and submitted to his spell. As they did this, they engaged also in a re-enactment of the tradition with lips, larynx, and limbs, and with the whole apparatus of their unconscious nervous system. The pattern of behaviour of artist and audience was therefore in some important respects identical. It can be described mechanically as a repeating of rhythmic doings. Psychologically it is an act of personal commitment, of total engagement and of emotional identification.170

By this process of the ancient logos, called mimesis, learning and knowing, by becoming the thing known, were regulated, the culture was preserved and transmitted, and power, real power over men and nature, was exercised. (A mildly similar kind of participational “knowing” survives in our expressions “knowing in the Biblical sense” and “carnal knowledge.”) The hearer could let himself become as it were a medium for the sound to resonate in, like a field of grass in which the wind sports and plays. Mimesis, then, is not some abstract property but a real vortex of tangible affective power surrounding and forming the entelechy of the logos. Knowing this, the logos is a sort of master key to the control of Nature. Solemnly does the final fragment of Peri physeos proclaim this. Medicaments against illness and old age, mastery over the wind, drought, and rain, and even some power over death: all this will he attain who knows how to hear with faith the revealing and saving word of the sage.171

The new technology of phonetic writing surprised the Greeks with an entirely different aesthetic of the logos. Once, there had been the terrible resonant and mimetic word, with all its awesome power to transform and to structure existence. Now, in addition to the spoken word they had the written word, the word shorn of all resonance and lying inert on the page.

170

Havelock, op. cit., p. 160. Compare Wyndham Lewis’ “The Dithyrambic Spectator: An Essay on the Origins and Survivals of Art.” In The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator. London: Chatto & Windus, 1931. Rpt. Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913–1956. Ed. and intro., Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969).. 171 Lain-Entralgo, op. cit., p. 85.

164

Chapter Eleven

Paradoxically, mimesis, which provided the bond of culture and power of the oral poets and rhetors, was the downfall of the poetic establishment. For when used to “know” the alphabet, as it had been used to “know” everything else, the result was catastrophe. Preliterate mimesis binds by involvement, but the alphabet’s source of power lies in its ability to fragment experience and knower from known.172 Mimesis allows neither objectivity, nor detachment, nor any rational uniformity of experience, three reasons why Plato was at some pains in The Republic to denounce and discredit its chief practitioners. Under the spell of mimesis, the hearer of a recitation loses all relation to merely present persona, person, and place, and is transformed by and into what he perceives. Putting on a completely new mode of being means surrendering all possibility of objectivity and detachment, and rationality. So when the Greeks approached alphabetic technology and put it on, they put on its fragmenting stress: the new ground effectively alienated them from their tribal culture, and so there came to be an intense rivalry between the two modes of culture, represented by the poets and the philosophers. In The Republic, Plato vigorously attacks the control exercised through mimesis by the poetic establishment, for it ...constituted the chief obstacle to scientific rationalism, to the use of analysis, to the classification of experience, to its rearrangement in sequence of cause and effect. That is why the poetic state of mind is for Plato the arch-enemy and it is easy to see why he considered this enemy so formidable. He is entering the lists against centuries of habituation in rhythmic memorised experience. He asks of men instead that they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the ‘subject’ who stands apart from the ‘object’ and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just ‘imitating’ it.173

Brian Vickers gives additional motives for Plato’s all-out war on the establishment poets and rhetors. (By attacking mimesis he is trying to cut the ground from under them, rather as some modern Luddite might attack the computer establishment by trying to impose a ban on electricity.) Plato, he shows, bitterly resented the way Socrates had been railroaded by

172

Vide the detailed analysis of the properties of the alphabet and their effects on the psyche, in my Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), pp. 13–30. 173 Preface to Plato, p. 47.

A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire

165

the rhetors, and he turned, therefore, into an implacable foe of Athenian democracy. It is important to register the intensity of Plato’s hatred of Athenian democracy, and especially its use of oratory as the main visible means of influencing opinion at public gatherings. To reconstruct this alienation from the norms of a society in which, as commentators have noted, Plato himself felt as isolated as the historical Socrates ... is to realize the extent to which the Gorgias is the product of a specific time and place, and the work of a very individual writer. It is not, as some critics suggest, a universally valid critique of rhetoric.174

All of Plato’s dialogues on rhetoric, then, must be read not as accounts of the art but as satiric or ironic polemics intended to discredit and subvert rhetoric and rhetoricians. Alphabetic writing brought into play exotic new forms of verbal experience: it could exist on its own, apart from a speaker or a hearer—in the abstract. Full attention could thereby be focused on meaning and content, now isolable for the first time. There, silent, on that paper or tablet—those are words! And since the word could now be imagined and even contemplated as a silent, fixed thing, another science arose, that of studied interpretation. Eking out meaning and significance from the one text quickly yielded its technical parallels for the other: the logos embedded as of old in the kosmos and the logos embedded in the writing. So arose the idea of the “Two Books,” Nature and scripture. Both texts, at first mysterious, succumbed to the new sciences of symbology (exegesis) and its handmaid, etymology.175 The Stoics proposed a pattern for the logos that accorded neatly with the new Greek experience of the word.176 Aristotle was one such, As LainEntralgo notes: “Aristotle, in short, attributes to the word—to the express and communicative logos—a threefold power. When the human word is 174

Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, op. cit., p. 88. In Laws of Media: The New Science (op. cit., p. 218), I show the parallels between the techniques for manifold interpretation of the two texts: the four causes for the Book of Nature, and the four levels (literal, allegorical, tropological, eschatological) for the written book. Manifold interpretation was far from new: Anaximander and his school were adepts at allegorical interpretation of Homer and Hesiod. 176 When the logos shattered, it broke into multiple fragments, each bearing one or another of its original properties. For more than a century, a great number of systems of logos were proposed by poets, exegetes, philosophers, rhetors, and so on, but it was the Stoics who formulated the essential tripartite relationship that our culture found so congenial. Laws of Media, op. cit., p. 124. 175

166

Chapter Eleven

dialectical reasoning it convinces; when it is rhetorical discourse it persuades; when it is a tragic poem it purges and purifies” (p. 239). The Stoics proposed a threefold logos, consisting of the logos prophorikos, the spoken or uttered word; the logos hendiathetos, consisting of the word in the mind before utterance, that is, abstract from speech and speaker and hearer; and the logos spermatikos, or the word embedded in things as seeds or crystals that embody their formal patterns and principles of growth. These were eventually institutionalized as the new arts/sciences of the logos, which we came to call the trivium. From the logos prophorikos we developed Rhetoric, the art of using spoken words to transform a hearer. From the logos hendiathetos we developed Dialectic, the mental science of logic and correct thought. From the logos spermatikos (sperma, seeds) we developed Grammar, the science and art both of etymology (roots) and of manifold interpretation of texts. The trivium, then, derives directly from the fissioning of the old oral logos: it had cracked under pressure exerted by the new manner of relating to words and ideas, the phonetic alphabet. Insofar as satire attacks (rather than reflects or analyses, for example), it uses the Rhetorical logos, the one that goes forth and transforms. But insofar as satire cleanses or cures or purifies or vivifies, it draws on one of the strains of therapeutic logos that Lain-Entralgo has revealed. Furthermore, satire reaches back to that therapeutic potency through one of the three modes in which the logos has survived into our time, the tripartite Stoic logos we call the trivium. Satire’s source of power lies in fusing these several logoi—therapeutic, Stoic, trivial—and using Rhetoric to project them at a target. We have already traced the line of development of rational therapeutics that leads to Aristotle’s theory of katharsis. With this pattern in mind, the merest glance at the tradition of “consolation” literature, from Boethius to, say, Gower’s Confessio Amantis or to Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, instantly reveals its close affinity with Aristotelian katharsis and its ancient roots. (Here, then, is the technical reason for disqualifying The Consolation of Philosophy as Menippean: its feline ancestry prohibits doggishness.) Horatian satire uses the logos prophorikos to reach back and retrieve “cheering” or “beguiling speech” (terpnos logos, thelktêrios logos), and that marriage produced Rhetorical satire. Menippean satire, for its part, fuses the ancient epôdê with the logos spermatikos, resulting in Grammatical satire—the most playful and most mimetic form of all. Juvenal’s relation to tragedy, meanwhile, and the Dialectical line of development, and Horace’s to comedy and the Rhetorical line, were

A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire

167

proverbial as late as the eighteenth century. Dennis’s celebrated letter to Matthew Prior makes the matter explicit: There can be no true Preference where there can be no just Comparison, and ... there can be no just Comparison between Authors whose Works are not ejusdem generis, and ... the Works of those two Satirists [Horace and Juvenal] are not ejusdem generis. For do not you believe, Sir, that Mr. Dryden is in the wrong where he affirms that the Roman Satire had its Accomplishment in Juvenal? For is there not Reason to believe that the true Roman satire is of the Comick Kind, and was an Imitation of the old Athenian Comedys, in which Lucilius first signaliz’d himself, and which was afterwards perfected by Horace, and that Juvenal afterwards started a new Satire which was of the Tragick kind? Horace, who wrote as Lucilius had done before him, in Imitation of the Old Comedy, endeavours to correct the Follies and Errors, and epidemick Vices of his Readers, which is the Business of Comedy. Juvenal attacks the pernicious outragious Passions and the abominable monstrous Crimes of several of his Contemporaries ... which is the Business of Tragedy, at least of imperfect Tragedy. Horace argues, insinuates, engages, rallies, smiles; Juvenal exclaims, apostrophizes, exaggerates, lashes, stabbs. There is in Horace almost every where an agreeable Mixture of good Sense, and of true Pleasantry, so that he has every where the principal Qualities of an excellent Comick Poet. And there is almost every where in Juvenal, Anger, Indignation, Rage, Disdain, and the violent Emotions and Vehement Style of Tragedy.177

“Dignified satire” is an oxymoron, like “tight slacks.” Horace fingered the matter precisely when he remarked, “difficile est proprie communia dicere”: it’s not easy to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Even so, Horace did manage to find an even and decorous style for the commonplace; he harmonized the medley. Ovid had even found a style for his own medley, the encyclopedic Metamorphoses (a satire on Augustus that got him kicked out of Rome). And Quintilian could make his claim: Rome had done the impossible, Rome had conquered satire, Rome had made satire decorous. Well, some of satire.

177

Dennis’s letter To Matthew Prior, Esq.: Upon the Roman Satirists (1721), here taken from Ian Jack, Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 1660–1750 (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1952, rpt. 1970), pp. 102–103. In a later remark, quoted by Jack, pp. 137–38, Dennis ties Juvenal to philosophy and tragedy, Horace to the public, manners, and comedy.

168

Chapter Eleven

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. IX, 1767

Formal verse satire, variously developed by Callimachus, Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, is “a poem without a plot which contains a mixture of moralizing and satire in our sense of the word,” writes Ian Jack.178 Though it may lack narrative plot, formal verse satire is nonetheless tightly controlled. It preserves a scrupulous consistency of attitude, tone, and focus or subject matter. These disciplines in turn afford the writer both refinement and detachment, forms of abstraction necessary to civilize the satire and to make it respectable. No such tactic is available to—or wanted by—Menippists. The Augustans were impelled to retrieve formal verse satire from the Romans because they were unexpectedly confronted by a new form of audience: the reading public had supplanted the patron. They had the formula down pat. Here, from the Spectator (No. 618), are “The Qualifications requisite for writing Epistles, after the Model given us by Horace.” 178

Augustan Satire, op. cit., p. 97.

A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire

169

He that would excel in this kind must have a good fund of strong masculine sense: to this there must be joined a thorough knowledge of mankind, together with an insight into the business and the prevailing humours of the age. Our author must have his mind well seasoned with the finest precepts of morality, and be filled with nice reflections upon the bright and dark sides of human life; he must be master of refined raillery, and understand the delicacies as well as the absurdities of conversation. He must have a lively turn of wit, with an easy and concise manner of expression: every thing he says must be in a free and disengaged manner. He must be guilty of nothing that betrays the air of a recluse, but appear a man of the world throughout. His illustrations, his comparisons, and the greatest part of his images, must be drawn from common life. Strokes of satire and criticism, as well as panegyric, judiciously thrown in (and as it were by the by), give a wonderful life and ornament to compositions of this kind. But let our poet, while he writes epistles, though never so familiar, still remember that he writes in verse, and must for that reason have more than ordinary care not to fall into prose, and a vulgar diction, excepting where the nature and humour of the thing do necessarily require it. In this point Horace hath been thought by some critics to be sometimes careless, as well as too negligent of his versification; of which he seems to have been sensible himself.179

Imitators of Horace were expected to mirror his characteristic poise, wit, urbanity, and sensitivity to bad taste. Juvenalian satires, by contrast, were supposed “to strike high and adventure dangerously at the most eminent vices among the greatest persons.” Immorality? Lash the culprits naked through the world! A Juvenal would leave no turn of vice unstoned. The lively Augustan debate about the respective merits of Horace and Juvenal was a specialized form of the more general argument concerning the whole nature and status of satire. Practically every point in the debate had been established by the scholars of the Renaissance. “The success of Dryden’s Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire was largely due to the fact that it summarized, dramatically and in brilliant

179

Spectator No. 618, Wednesday, Nov. 10, 1714. The issue opens with this epigram: ————Neque enim concludere versum Dixere esse satis: neque siquis scribat, uti nos, Sermoni propriora, putes hunc esse poëtam. —HOR. I. Sat. iv. 49. Tis not enough the measur’d feet to close; Nor will you give a poet’s name to those Whose humble verse, like mine, approaches prose.

170

Chapter Eleven

prose, a debate that had already been carried on, in Latin and the various vernacular languages, for more than a century.”180 The main point at issue revived Horace’s familiar dictum of the difficulty of decorum for the indecorous—a characteristically rhetorical wrangle: what style and tone are most suitable in satire? Serious poetic insists that the poet keep faith with some vision of experience, realistic or apocalyptic. He must want to share this vision. And must have felt it. So Horace famously si vis me flere, dolendum est / primum ipsi tibi (Ars Poetica 102–03). A poet may write to eat but this remains incidental to keeping the faith. A rhetorical poetic allows the whole range of sordid motive—money, spleen, urge to shine, narcissistic posturing—as interpretive categories. So too with the category of pure play. From a serious point of view, this category is yet worse. A serious poet does not play games just for his own amusement. He will know moments of exaltation if he is lucky; he will by definition know many of despair; but he cannot just delight. No pot-boilers, then, and no games.181

Horatian as well as Juvenalian satirists exhort both reader and target to reform. Not so the Menippist. Because the reader is so completely a participant in the satire, he could never be permitted the luxury of the spectator emotion (katharsis). He cannot be exhorted from a distance: there is no distance between the reader and a Menippean satire, no consistent reference point outside it to take bearings from. But formal verse satire—serious satire—derives its equilibrium from exactly such abstract reference points. While formal verse satire keeps its focus narrow, as is proper to good, responsible, sober composition and unity, Menippean satire remains broad: encyclopedic and polymorphous and playful.

180 181

Augustan Satire, op. cit., p. 102. Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence, op. cit., pp. 112–13.

A Trivial Pursuit: The Roots of Satire

Joseph Hall, Mundus Alter et Idem, 1607

171

CHAPTER TWELVE NON-MORAL SATIRE: SERIOUS ART

The arts give us a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature. They begin where the science of medicine leaves off or rather they overlap that science. The borders of the two arts overcross. —Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist”

It is almost universally asserted that the chief function of satire is moral and therapeutic. Satire aims to reform the target, or to cleanse or purge society of some malignancy or cancer, personal or corporate. Wyndham Lewis raised eyebrows as well as critics’ hackles by insisting that, to the contrary, the greatest satire is non-moral. Any attack that is prosecuted on moralistic grounds has an inherent weakness: it can actually be turned to account by the target. “For all those satirized by Juvenal or smarting beneath the scourges of most other satirists, have been able at a pinch to snigger and remark that ‘Yes, they knew that they were very wicked!’ and to make, even, of such satire an advertisement.”182 Remove the moralism, and the satire is doubly deadly for then it can have no advertisement value whatever. Instead, attack the target for being stupid, or—worse, as Dryden and Pope did—for being dull.183 Lewis’ pose is essentially Menippean—putting aside for the moment the moral function of satire in general—both because carnivalistic playfulness precludes maintaining a consistent moral outlook and the very dullness of the readers’ perceptions is the motive for and the principal

182

Satire & Fiction…by Wyndham Lewis Preceded by the History of a Rejected Review by Roy Campbell, ed., Wyndham Lewis (London: The Arthur Press, 1930), p. 43. 183 Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (New York: Russell & Russell, l964), pp. 107–108. This book contains an entire chapter on the subject: “The Greatest Satire Is Non-Moral” (pp. 103–104).

174

Chapter Twelve

object of attack. To illustrate the first, here, for example, is Byron’s attack on “the lakers”: ...there poets find materials for their books. And every now and then we read them through, So that their plan and prosody are eligible, Unless, like Wordsworth, they prove unintelligible. ...[Juan] did the very best he could With things not very subject to control, And turned, without perceiving his condition, Like Coleridge into a metaphysician.184 We learn from Horace “Homer sometimes sleeps;” We feel without him,—Wordsworth sometimes wakes,— To show with what complacency he creeps, With his dear “Waggoners,” around his lakes, He wishes for “a boat” to sail the deeps— Of ocean?—No, of air; and then he makes Another outcry for “a little boat,” And drinks seas to set it well afloat.185

To illustrate the second, from the same source, consider these remarks to and about the reader that follow several stanzas of citing Cynic and Menippean forebears (VII.ii-v): Ecclesiastes said, “that all is vanity”— Most modern preachers say the same, or show it By their examples of true Christianity; In short, all know, or very soon may know it; And in this scene of all-confessed inanity, By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by Poet, Must I restrain me, through fear of strife From holding up the nothingness of Life? Dogs, or men!—for I flatter you in saying That ye are dogs—your betters far—ye may Read, or read not, what I am now essaying To show ye what ye are in every way. As little as the moon stops for the baying Of wolves, will the bright muse withdraw one ray

184

Don Juan, Canto I.xc–xci. Any Menippist will serve: Byron is ready to hand, and more outspoken than most. 185 Don Juan, Canto III.xcviii; similarly in stanzas xc to c.

Non-Moral Satire: Serious Art

175

From out her skies—then howl your idle wrath! While she still silvers o’er your gloomy path.186

No potential for publicity lurks in these lines, yet the moral and therapeutic function looms large. The public’s evident confusion over the morality, immorality, or amorality of satire resides on the surface only. Much ink, for example, has been spilled over Lewis’ insistence that “the greatest satire is non-moral” by quoting him out of context, or by juxtaposing that remark with a later one by Lewis such as the following: ...without abandoning my claim as a moralist, which is the justification of all satire (for Dryden, for instance, could not fly over the world and drop molten lead upon it otherwise than as a moralist), let me say that, luckily for myself, I am an artist as well as a moralist, and I experience amusement as well as scorn in coming to you with human material which is often, a good deal of it, only fit for the dustheap, if not the Pit... In the case of more serious offences against a society, calling down upon them the utmost weight of the satirist’s punishment, one may imagine some such dialogue as the following. “I am able to reveal a bacillus which threatens your life; I can do you this great service, if I am allowed to move among these deadly parasites in company with the Comic Muse.” Surely no objection would be taken to such a proviso.187

Lewis is not the most helpful of writers: superficial readers complain that he appeared to contradict himself from time to time.188 But contradiction turns to consistency if you hold (as Lewis evidently did) that while satire clearly has a moral and social function, nevertheless the greatest and hardest-hitting satire avoids moralizing as a basis for attack. Both tenets apply specifically to Menippean satire. Its innate playfulness denies it any chance of attacking, on moral grounds, whatever figures it parades before the reader. (After all, how appropriate that doggish satire should, like the dog, not be distracted by moralizing! For a dog has no care whether its master or mistress be morally upright or wallows in turpitude: it’s all one to the dog, who just wants to play or gnaw a bone.) And yet is not Menippism the most moral and social of all 186

Don Juan, Canto VII.vi–vii. The Menippean reader would note the Cynic touches, the reference in “Dogs, or men!” as well as the Cynic observations that end the first Canto (I.ccxvi–ccxxii). 187 Introduction to The Apes of God, op. cit., n.p. 188 As, for instance, by R. C. Elliott, in The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 227ff.

176

Chapter Twelve

the forms of satire? For, ultimately, it satirizes the whole society—by manipulating and readjusting the sensibilities of all its readers. This is to shift the final moral responsibility off the writer’s shoulders, or off those of one or another figure attacked in the satire, and onto the reader's. When you consider that playful oscillation between high and low, prose and verse, etc., together with the moral—that is, social—function of Menippizing, the nature and aims of this form of satire clearly converge with those of serious art. Both act to enliven enervated perceptions. Ezra Pound made the point in his contentious essay, “The Serious Artist.” Crowd-pleasing, a need or desire for acceptance, or adulation, or respect, or money, or to be thought sensitive and artistic—these are understandable enough. But while a desire for adulation is human and understandable, it has nothing to do with art: it resides more in the area of private insecurity, market-driven production, and “good taste” snob-ism. The desire to stand on the stage, the desire of plaudits has nothing to do with serious art. The serious artist may like to stand on the stage, he may, apart from his art, be any kind of imbecile you like, but the two things are not connected, at least they are not concentric. Lots of people who don’t even pretend to be artists have the same desire to be slobbered over, by people with less brains than they have.189

Pound had a helpful approach to the matter of “moral art” (evidently he was somewhat exasperated by people’s basic blindness to art in general and to serious art in particular): Yet it takes a deal of talking to convince a layman that bad art is ‘immoral’. And that good art however ‘immoral’ it is wholly a thing of virtue. Purely and simply that good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise. You can be wholly precise in representing a vagueness. You can be wholly a liar in pretending that the particular vagueness was precise in its outline. If you cannot understand this with regard to poetry, consider the matter in terms of painting.190

The Cynic, who sets out to please neither the mob nor the elite, is more often accused of poor taste and insensitivity. Crowd-pleasing caters to established sensibility and increases numbness rather than revivifying

189

Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. with an introduction, by T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, rpt., 1968), p. 47. 190 Ibid., p. 44.

Non-Moral Satire: Serious Art

177

perceptions constantly deteriorating through languor or laziness.191 Pound is relentless on the point: This brings us to the immorality of bad art. Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports. If a scientist falsifies a report either deliberately or through negligence we consider him as either a criminal or a bad scientist according to the enormity of his offense, and he is punished accordingly.... If an artist falsifies his report as to the nature of man, as to his own nature, as to the nature of his ideal of the perfect, as to the nature of his ideal of this, that or the other, of god, if god exist, of the life force, of the nature of good and evil, if good and evil exist, of the force with which he believes this, that or the other, of the degree in which he suffers or is made glad; if the artist falsifies his reports on these matters or on any other matter in order that he may conform to the taste of his time, to the proprieties of a sovereign, to the conveniences of a preconceived code of ethics, then that artist lies. If he lies out of deliberate will to lie, if he lies out of carelessness, out of laziness, out of cowardice, out of any sort of negligence whatsoever, he nevertheless lies and he should be punished or despised in proportion to the seriousness of his offence. His offence is of the same nature as the physician’s and according to his position and the nature of his lie he is responsible for future oppressions and future misconceptions.192

191

Much of the serious poet’s struggle is to keep the language itself in good working order. Cf. Eliot’s frequent remarks on this problem in his essays, or, in Four Quartets, these observations: ...And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope to emulate—but there is no competition— There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again; and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss, For us, there is only the trying... (“East Coker,” V) 192 Ibid., pp. 43–44. I am giving Pound at length here both because his is the only essay ever to address the problem (and it needs a great deal more airing than one essay can provide, especially considering the degree of discomfort even the idea raises), and because the ideas are worth careful consideration. Better: let my excerpts entice you to read the entire essay.

178

Chapter Twelve

W. B. Yeats brought the matter into focus in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”193: Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. (lines 34–38)

The poem concerns the root question of how and where a serious poet obtains material and inspiration. Suddenly unable to scale the heights of poetic creativity, he finds inspiration aplenty in the “low” lands. High and low constitute a fruitful mixture: Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. (lines 38–40)

193

W. B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, eds., Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957).

In a Word: Three Quartets

François Rabelais, Pantagruel, 1552

179

CHAPTER THIRTEEN



182

Chapter Thirteen

  

In a Word: Three Quartets

183

 

184

Chapter Thirteen



PART V MAKE IT NEW—YOURSELF

Once more, Democritus, arise on Earth, With chearful Wisdom and instructive Mirth, See motley Life in modern Trappings dress’d, And feed with varied Fools th’ eternal Jest : Thou who couldst laugh where Want enchain’d Caprice, Toil crush’d Conceit, and Man was of a Piece ; Where Wealth unlov’d without a mourner dy’d ; And scarce a Sycophant was fed by Pride ; Where ne’er was known the Form of mock Debate, Or seen a new-made Mayor’s unwieldy State ; Where change of Fav’rites made no change of Laws, And Senates heard before they judg’d a Cause ; How wouldst thou shake at Britain’s modish Tribe, Dart the quick Taunt, and edge the piercing Gibe? Attentive Truth and Nature to descry, And pierce each Scene with Philosophic Eye. To thee were solemn Toys or empty Shew, The Robes of Pleasure and the Veils of Woe : All aid the Farce, and all thy Mirth maintain, Whose Joys are causeless, or whose Griefs are vain. —Samuel Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN CYNIC SATIRE AND THE POSTLITERATE CROWD

The modern world is madder than any satires on it. —G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Historians of Menippean/Cynic satire have heretofore restricted their discussion to products of alphabetic culture: books, prose, verse, novels. One possible exception: Homer’s Margites. It was composed, presumably, just the other side of the line dividing the oral from the written stage of our experience. (Plays should be included. No truly Menippean plays have crossed my path yet, although Empson’s remarks suggest that a strong case may be made for Shakespeare’s Timon. I own to a large ignorance of stage literature.) Literary and classical scholars, naturally, preserve a uniform silence about Cynic satire in the electric age: they ignore all media except manuscript and print. Not so the modern Cynics. Consider these remarks by Richard Lanham about the effect of the personal computer on the teaching of literature. Conventional literary study is pretty much stood on its ear by a changeable, interactive, and nonlinear text that has no final beginnings, middles, and endings, no unchanging dominant tonalities, and no non-negotiable rules about verbal excess and expressive self-consciousness. ... If the reader can adjust the writing by becoming the writer, and to any extent desired, a great deal of the current controversy about the role of the reader can be conveniently shelved. There is as much connection between reader and writer, or as little, as you want to dial in. Is every critic a creator and viceversa? Is textual order a product of our rage for it, more than of the text itself? We can shelve that debate too: contrive whatever mixture you want. Is there a neutral language of conceptual expression or is all expression radically metaphorical? If we cannot settle this controversy finally, we can at least point now to a very broad spectrum of expressivity that includes

188

Chapter Fourteen

François Rabelais, Pantagruel, 1552 not only words but also images and sounds, a spectrum controlled by a general theory of expressivity (which is what a theory of prose must become). This spectrum runs from least to most metaphorical, and you can locate yourself wherever you want. An identical spectrum exists for the

Cynic Satire and the Postliterate Crowd

189

reader as for the text. Mix and match as you like, anywhere along either one.194

Sound familiar? He might have been discussing Menippean satire in general or Finnegans Wake in particular. How ironic that this new technology, the personal computer, embodies so many of the ludic forms that have till now been the exclusive sandbox of Menippists! But these features are not quite the same madcap Menippizing and reader-provoking that developed in the satires: they are routine options of the PC. The PC, like the book and every other medium, imposes its own bias on the user’s awareness, its own blindness and insouciance as well as its own hyperaesthesia; in time, it will raise up a new Menippus to wield them and to make us uncomfortably aware of the biases. From the first, electric technologies pressed our culture to explore discontinuous and irrational forms of sensibility. Symbolist literature has its parallels in Cubism, in atonality, in Relativity, in non-Euclidean mathematics, in surreal philosophy (“Phenomenology”). Menippean satire has, in the electric age, discovered completely new forms and horizons. Though the tradition of Menippean writing may extend unbroken from Homer’s Margites to Fowles’ Mantissa, this kind of satire has only now come into its own. It is the dominant form of serious art in our time. Literary Menippism has developed its counterparts in other media, including press (in France, the paper Le Canard enchainé shows definite Menippean traits), radio, film, and television—a situation for which our literary training had not prepared us, and one to which few critics have responded intelligently, or at all. Some Cynic tactics have even found their way into the business office and the home, embedded in the lowly PC as routine features and options. In this chapter and the next, we try to grapple with how today’s world relates to Menippean satire. As both we and our world are changing rather rapidly, and in the interests of keeping the discussion current, you, gentle reader, are invited to supply present-day developments in Menippism as you come across them. Work them into the discussion in this chapter; add to, ignore, delete, or rearrange the materials that follow in any manner you feel appropriate to keep the discussion up to date. The easiest way for us to begin might be to take up the media one at a time.

194

Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 129.

190

Chapter Fourteen

Radio You might begin by examining the on-air antics a few years ago of Stan Freeberg. And then... What about Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds about the invasion from Mars?195 He adapted the book to the new medium, used its news-bulletin 195

Orson Welles, “The War of the Worlds,” radio broadcast on the prime-time show Mercury Theatre on the Air, October 30, 1938 (CBS). Welles opened with an elderly voice that seemed to speak reminiscently: “We know that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s...” The opening monologue was followed by a weather forecast. Then began “the show,” consisting of “potted palm” dance music from a rooftop hotel ballroom. The music was soon interrupted in turn by a news bulletin reporting several explosions on Mars and something’s being propelled at great speed towards Earth. Cut back to the ballroom muzak-in-progress. Another few moments, another interruption: a bulletin reported that seismologists had detected earthquake-like shocks emanating from nearby New Jersey. Quickly, the pace accelerated, and the bulletins overtook the dance music, coming one after another. A huge cylinder had smashed down on New Jersey farmland. A reporter just happened to get there in time to catch the farmer’s first impressions. Farmer: A hissing sound. Like this: sssssss ... kinda like a fourt’ of July rocket. Reporter: Then what? Farmer: Turned my head out the window and would’ve swore I was to sleep an’ dreamin’. Reporter: Yes? Farmer: I seen a kinda greenish streak and then zingo! Somethin’ smacked the ground. Knocked me clear outta my chair! With this, the story moved into high gear. To the surprise of Orson Welles and his crew, the drama triggered widespread mayhem. Neighbors gathered in streets all over the country, wet towels to their faces to slow the gas. In Newark, New Jersey, people, many undressed, fled their apartments. Said a New York woman, “I never hugged my radio so closely…. I held a crucifix in my hand and prayed while looking out my open window to get a faint whiff of gas so that I would know when to close my window and hermetically seal my room with waterproof cement or anything else I could get ahold of. My plan was to stay in the room and hope that I would not suffocate before the gas blew away.” A Midwest man told of his grandparents, uncles, aunts and children, the whole family, on their knees, “God knows but we prayed….. My mother went out and looked for Mars. Dad was hard to convince or skeptical or sumpin’, but he even got to believing it. Brother Joe, as usual, got more excited than he could show. Brother George wasn’t home. Aunt Gracie, a good Catholic, began to pray with Uncle Henry. Lily got sick to her stomach. I prayed harder and more earnestly than ever

Cynic Satire and the Postliterate Crowd

191

format to interrupt a bland, cliché‚ show, to surprise and arouse the audience. Then, as now, listeners switched stations briefly during commercials. Welles’ Mercury Theatre on CBS shared the same time slot as the immensely popular Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy show on NBC. He knew that, twelve minutes in, Bergen would take a commercial break: he timed the drama so that was when his Martians landed. War of the Worlds had a terribly upsetting effect on the audience at the moment, and not a Cynic effect at all. (In fact, Welles later commented that he was the only one ever to use this technique of parody of the medium successfully, and that “People who tried it in other countries were all put in jail.”) The Cynic effect of drawing attention to the medium and the user’s (ignored) interaction with it came in the succeeding days and weeks. When people realized how they had been taken in, they became quite nervous and edgy, and began to notice how radio worked on and manipulated them. A healthy paranoia reigned for a short while: the Cynic effect in full swing. Then, the moralizers moved in—and they’re still with before. Just as soon as we were convinced that this thing was real, how petty all things on earth seemed; how soon we put our trust in God.” In one Pacific Northwest village, a power outage reinforced the panic. Switchboards throughout the country were swamped by people trying to call relatives, fuelling the hysteria. The telephone volume in northern New Jersey was up 39 percent. Most CBS stations reported a six-fold increase in calls. Many people jumped in their cars to drive to safety but did not know where to go so just drove around, which put hysterical strangers in touch with each other. Researchers estimate that one out of six people who heard the program, more than one million in all, suspended disbelief and braced for the worst. (John Vivian, The Media of Mass Communication [Boston: Allyn and Bacon/Simon & Schuster, 1991]) The effect of the show was not limited to the immediate area of the broadcast. The following results were reported on October 31, the morning after the show: Pittsburgh A man returned home in the midst of the broadcast and found his wife, a bottle of poison in her hands, screaming “I’d rather die this way than like that.” Indianapolis A woman ran into a church screaming, “New York is destroyed! It’s the end of the world! You might as well go home and die!” Services were dismissed immediately. Providence, RI The power company received scores of calls to turn off all the lights so the city would be safe from the enemy. Kansas City, MO One man loaded all his children into his car, had it filled with gasoline, and was going somewhere. “Where is it safe?” he asked. Atlanta Listeners throughout the Southeast called newspapers reporting that “a planet struck in New Jersey, with monsters and almost everything, and anywhere from 40 to 7,000 people were killed.” (From John Vivian, op. cit.)

192

Chapter Fourteen

us, pontificating away about cultural content and violence in the media. No age is ever short of robots.

Film The investigation here might begin by focusing on Woody Allen. His Zelig196 includes various old film clips—of presidents, movie stars, baseball heroes of a half-century and more ago—with Allen (playing Leonard Zelig) worked into the scene. Zelig has no stable private identity but instead is a chameleon. He has only to associate with someone to begin to transform into that character or become a part of his or her ambience. He becomes a politician, a sportsman, a black musician (actually changing skin colour), and others by turns. The narrative is intercut with interviews with present-day psychologists and critics. Zelig not only satirizes the learned academic essay (or quasi-TV-documentary essay), it also had the Cynic effect on its audience by dislocating their perceptions of film, scientific and academic learning, and the North American obsession with identity. What’s Up, Tiger Lily?197 uses the Cynic hodgepodge of stolen footage combined with a pointless, silly narrative to spoof shoot-em-up spy flicks. Allen added his own sound track to a re-edited Japanese action movie. The characters kill each other while searching for the secret recipe for—a chicken salad sandwich. The Purple Rose of Cairo198 will not translate to video or to TV latemovie reruns: it is designed to run on theatre screens and has its proper effect there only. It satirizes the medium of film rather as Sterne satirized the medium of the book by turning it inside-out, printing the marbled endpages in the middle, printing a page of solid ink, etc. Allen turns a spoof on sappy escapist romantic films and their addicts into a satire on film itself. His filmgoer (cliché‚ featherbrain female) falls in love with a (cliché‚ romantic) screen character, who promptly walks off the screen and into the audience to join her and escape his proscenium prison. He leaves the other characters trapped on the screen and unhappy about it. They are in a quandary: they cannot escape, and their film cannot continue without him. Somehow they, and the audience, are trapped in a moment in time. 196

Woody Allen, writer and director, Zelig (distributed by Orion Pictures and Warner Brothers, 1985). 197 Woody Allen, co-screenwriter, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (distributed by American International Pictures, 1966). 198 Woody Allen, writer and director, The Purple Rose of Cairo (distributed by Orion Pictures and Warner Brothers, 1985).

Cynic Satire and the Postliterate Crowd

193

He proceeds to run off with the girl and tries to get her to leave her husband. Similar events begin to occur in other theatres around the country as he disappears from their screens, too, causing national mayhem, threatening the film industry, and leading to social chaos. While this goes on on the screen, actual patrons in the real movie theatre become disturbed—here comes the Cynic effect—because of the byplay between the events on the screen and those occurring about them as other patrons enter and leave to attend the bathrooms or the refreshment counters. Attention is focused on the medium; the spectator ceases to spectate and becomes uncomfortably aware of being a spectator, of the rest of the audience, the theatre, the film on the screen, the projector, et al. Shadows and Fog199 also satirizes film: it has no clear narrative of the usual kind, no “story,” and the character Allen plays repeatedly asks such questions as, “Why am I here?” “What am I doing this for?” “Where am I?” “What is this about?” Mighty Aphrodite200 achieves its Menippean effect largely by mixing low and high style and subject. The film is the first to resuscitate the Chorus as a satiric actor, drawn from ancient Greek plays and here used in costume complete with personae of sorts (they cover the sides and upper parts of the faces, not the entire faces), choric dance, and even song. Merely using a Chorus of itself bespeaks high style and formality: none of the characters are royal or stately; most are middle class and one principal is a prostitute. The songs are “low”—not “high” as in classical—and are modern American; they span a broad range and blend of styles. The subject matter includes marital infidelity and whoring of the most explicit sort. In addition, the classic characters include a Tiresias (in the person of a blind New York City street beggar: high mixing with low) and a Cassandra. Broad (low) comedy abounds, and the general movement of the film is comic, not just because it ends with a wedding but also because of the elevation (rather than downfall) of key characters. Woody Allen’s films will be difficult to study for our purposes because of the interposition of other media: videotape (and television playback), and the (digital) DVD. Allen thinks, writes, scripts, directs, designs in terms of the film screen and the movie-theatre audience. His films are not intended to be experienced as books any more than as television shows: neither form will provide the effect of film. I give this caution because

199

Woody Allen, writer and director, Shadows and Fog (distributed by Orion Pictures, 1991). 200 Woody Allen, writer and director, Mighty Aphrodite (distributed by Miramax Films, 1995).

194

Chapter Fourteen

they may be difficult to obtain in film form and comparatively easy as DVDs. Accept no substitutes. Little Shop of Horrors201—not by Allen—might serve as another candidate: it frolics with lots of film clichés and conventions. But does it have the same unsettling effect as Allen’s films? Or is it merely an entertaining spoof? Test case. Can you think of any other films? Directors?

Television There isn’t much to speak of here, yet. Early talk-show hosts played about with the medium and its formats: Steve Allen, for example. And David Letterman more recently. But enough to make a case? TV is a satire waiting to happen. Perhaps it will: now that TV is obsolete, we can expect it to begin getting æsthetic attention. It is presently being recast as the content of the computer, so we may expect it to receive the art form treatment before much longer. Norman Lear’s shows often have the effect, at least at their inceptions... Well, keep your eyes open (somewhat of an oxymoron: we’re talking of TV, a non-visual medium).

201

Little Shop of Horrors. Original 1960 version. Dirs. Roger Corman, Charles B. Griffin.

Cynic Satire and the Postliterate Crowd

Étienne Taburot, Les Bigrarrures du seigneur Des Accordz, 1614

195

196

Chapter Fourteen

Telephone? Nil—yet. But there appears to be a fair amount of room for horseplay with answering machines. . And now the telephone has been taken over by the Internet and scads of apps…

Computer? Nil—yet, though there is hope of encountering a Cynic or two strolling down an information highway, thumbing from one database to another. Perhaps something really interesting, creative, artistic can even be done with viruses, rather than something simply—and selfishly—nihilistic or destructive. The Internet and worldwide web of interlaced computers and users holds great promise for the advent of a tribe of Fools and Clowns to thump about on the stage of this global theatre. And while the computer is swallowing TV as its new content, the reciprocal process is taking place apace: the computer is increasingly becoming available over cable and satellite TV. For the first time in human experience, two major technologies are beginning each to use the other as content. Here is a new kind of double-plot, and a new set of opportunities. How long will it take for them to be realized? Stay tuned…

Concrete Poetry? Admittedly, we’re back in print here. But with concrete poetry, typography becomes fully allegorical; it comes to stand for a way of looking at the world. The style is fully opaque; writing and poster art merge. Meanings are almost irrelevant, or certainly secondary. For this species of writing—or “writing”—exists against the backdrop of conventional prose and verse, neatly arranged, and that of billboard and magazine advertising. The words, where they are used, are there mainly to be looked AT, not through.

Poetry? One poem stands above all others in our time as a candidate for inclusion in the rolls of Menippism: “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound).202 We should include Pound as co-author because of his profound 202

T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” in The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1934, and often reprinted). Vide also Eliot’s

Cynic Satire and the Postliterate Crowd

197

contributions to the final poem: Eliot sent him a mess of drafts and fragments; he hammered them into shape. As to the effect: readers at the time, and for many decades afterward, were horrified, scandalized, thoroughly deranged. The poem was called “the ravings of a madman” and worse, and Eliot vilified. It certainly roused the readers. (And Eliot passed the traditional test of the first-rate poet: all the second-raters ganged up against him.) Eighty years later, all (or nearly all) agree that “The Waste Land” is of signal import to poetry—though no one’s certain exactly why. Good Menippism, but in some danger of being killed by the poem’s universal acceptance in the freshman-survey Canon of Great Poems. (Want to kill all interest in TV forever? Simply give undergraduates a weekly exam in that week’s programs. Think about it. The exam is the school’s most potent cultural weapon: we’ve used it to make really valuable things unpalatable. It works on Shakespeare: why not on TV?) Although few will own to it, “The Waste Land” does mix prose and verse—seriatim. The verse part is the five-part poem; the prose part is the footnotes slyly added by Mr. Eliot to frustrate, or rather subvert, Mr. Pound’s five-part rhetorical structure. By adding the notes—in effect a (discontinuous parallel) poem—Eliot created a two-book Grammatical structure, and shifted the whole poem into the familiar Grammatical pattern of epyllion—little epic. Another major poem, The Cantos, by Ezra Pound,203 elicited a comparatively milder response, but yet the proper one.

Collected Poems and Plays, and other volumes and anthologies. The poem opens with a tip of Menippus’ hat: it bears an epigram taken from Petronius’ Satyricon. The extent of Pound’s editorial contributions—co-authorship, really—is clearly evident in T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. and introduced by Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1971, 1974). A very strong argument may be made (but hasn’t, yet) that the poem was written as a test case, to “prove” the essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot and Pound were not, it seems, in sweetly harmonious agreement about the direction that the final poem should take. Pound-the-Rhetor pulled in one direction (a five-part oration) and Eliot-the-Grammarian in another (a two-book epic). Eliot beat Pound by adding the notes. For a brilliant analysis of the collaboration, vide “Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land,” by Marshall McLuhan in New Literary History, 10 (1978–1979), pp. 557–80. Rpt., Theories of Communication, by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 31–52. 203 Pound, Ezra, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1934; oft reprinted). Here, as a sample, is W. B. Yeats’ reaction to the first thirty or forty cantos as they appeared. As Yeats was a close friend and confidante of Pound’s and a fellow-

198

Chapter Fourteen

Menippism in Music? John Cage writes didactically in both music and prose. But he does not sink to philosophical didascalism as do the gloriosi. Richard Lanham observes that “Cage’s music is often really music criticism, makes us listen to how we listen, how listening conventions construct, as well as transmit, musical reality. The same resolute didacticism carries over into his prose.”204 Lanham tries a little experiment. He takes a page from Cage’s prose compendium Silence, translates it into conventional layout, and then examines the contrast. “It makes,” comments Lanham, “perfectly good sense in conventional typography. We forget the columnar presentation and follow a rambling, not specially remarkable disquisition on Zen quietude and the oneness of life.” He continues: poet, one would expect from him a close discernment of Pound’s aim and execution. I have often found there brightly printed kings, queens, knaves, but have never discovered why all the suits could not be dealt out in some quite different order. Now at last he explains that it will, when the hundredth canto is finished, display a structure like that of a Bach Fugue. There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes, the Descent into Hades from Homer, a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and, mixed with these, mediaeval or modern historical characters. He has tried to produce that picture Porteous commended to Nicholas Poussin in Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu where everything rounds or thrusts itself without edges, without contours— conventions of the intellect—from a splash of tints and shades; to achieve a work as characteristic of the art of our time as the paintings of Cézanne, avowedly suggested by Porteous, as Ulysses and its dream association of words and images, a poem in which there is nothing that can be taken out and reasoned over, nothing that is not a part of the poem itself. He has scribbled on the back of an envelope certain sets of letters that represent emotions or archetypal events—I cannot find any adequate definition—A B C D and then J K L M, and then each set of letters inverted and this repeated, and then a new element X Y Z, then certain letters that never recur, and then all sorts of combinations of X Y Z and J K L M and A B C D and D C B A, and all set whirling together…. (W. B. Yeats, A Vision [London: Macmillan & Co, 1925, rpt. 1937, 1962], pp. 4–5) Yeats had little sympathy either for Pound’s interest in the carpentry side of the business of poetry or his insistence on craft and on the primacy of the reader, being himself a poet of the kind that hearkens more to intuition and the urgings of the spirit. 204 Richard A. Lanham, Analyzing Prose (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), p. 87.

Cynic Satire and the Postliterate Crowd

199

So what have we lost? Well, we have lost Cage’s main point—what we’ve lost when we unthinkingly accept the convention of prose typography. Cage points to opportunities lost, extraordinary typographical limitations taken for granted. The first thing that occurs to him, as a composer, is vertical chord-harmony, and so he suggests this. But since his subject is, at least partly, the artificiality of beginnings and endings, he breaks the left and right margins of these columns as soon as he sets them up. By doing so, he breaks the continuity of sense which prose typographical convention makes us think inevitable. All those convenient beginnings, middles, and endings prose style has cherished since Aristotle inhere in us the observers, not in reality itself. He exposes the force of our own conventional expectations by altering the stimulus which usually evokes them. The classic example of this basic technique in postmodernist art remains Cage’s own piano piece 4’33”. During this performance, he sits on stage silently for four minutes, thirty-three seconds. The audience, deprived of their object of contemplation, must “listen” to their own expectations and reflect upon them. So in this prose.205

Some years ago (in the book City as Classroom), I proposed a “media playlet” to be called “Telephone”206:

Telephone Curtain opens on a living-room set; no actors. After a few moments, a telephone on the set begins to ring. It rings eight or ten times, then it stops. After a long pause, the curtain closes.

The idea was to draw attention to the power of the telephone to involve audience attention. In films and in the background of news programs on TV a ringing telephone is used to create drama and suspense.

205

Lanham, op. cit., pp. 89–90. Marshall McLuhan, Kathryn Hutchon, and Eric McLuhan, City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media (Toronto: Book Society of Canada, 1977).

206

200

Chapter Fourteen

Cynic Satire and the Postliterate Crowd

201

Here’s the translation: It is perfectly clear that walking along the river is one thing and writing music is still another and being interrupted while writing music is still another and a backache too. They all go together and it’s a continuity that is not a continuity that is being clung to or insisted upon. The moment it becomes a special continuity of I am composing and nothing else should happen, then the rest of life is nothing but a series of interruptions, pleasant or catastrophic as the case may be. The truth, however, is that it is more like Feldman’s music—anything may happen and it all should go together. There is no rest of life. Life is one. Without beginning, without middle, without ending. The concept: beginning, middle, and meaning comes from a sense of self which separates itself from what it considers to be the rest of life. But this attitude is untenable unless one insists on stopping life and bringing it to an end. That thought is in itself an attempt to stop life, for life goes on, indifferent to the deaths that are a part of its no beginning, no middle, no meaning. How much better to simply get behind and push! To do the opposite is clownish, that is: clinging or trying to force life into one’s own idea of it, of what it should be, is only absurd. The absurdity....[etc.]207

Literary Menippean Satire Today John Fowles’ efforts deserve primary consideration. Include The French Lieutenant’s Woman, both the book208 and, separately, in its own right, the film.209 The book featured Sterne-like toying with the reader and offering of compositional options. The double-plot in the book includes the narrative of the novel and, in digressions, chitchat about it between the author and reader. The double-plot in the film includes the narrative from the novel and, intercut, scenes from the cast party at which the actors and actresses and hangers-on perform as private personae (pretending to be off-camera). Include his Mantissa210 and A Maggot.211 Go read them to see why.

207

John Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), 1961. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1969; rpt., Signet, 1970). 209 John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Juniper Films, 1981). 210 John Fowles, Mantissa (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1982). 211 John Fowles, A Maggot (Toronto: Collins Publishers, 1985). 208

202

Chapter Fourteen

Also, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds212 clearly deserves inclusion: the characters take over the story and manipulate the plot, rather like those in Purple Rose of Cairo. Menippists have always kept one foot sloshing about in the literary gutter: as familiar examples, think of Don Juan, or “The Waste Land” before the literati grudgingly accorded it respectability (and insofar as that still is not unanimous, so far it still works). Today is no exception. Today’s cheap lit production is actually rather rich territory. For example, the pulp fiction/sci-fi arena offers the Heroes in Hell etc. series.213 (Will they make another good “Admission test”? You decide: do they, for all their use of Menippean ploys, actually qualify as Menippean satires?) What other candidates can you find? Naked Came the Stranger? Rummage about in the “foul rag-and-bone shop” of our culture. Well, there you have some starting points. See what else you can find: new stuff turns up every week. I offer a few concluding thoughts. Postliteracy means hijinx with literacy. It means that a retrieval of Menippean satire is in store. Have another look at the opening remarks about the PC. We’re presently smack in the middle of the world’s biggest-ever renaissance: all times are now. Do you think Eliot’s little essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”214 has any relevance to this condition and our subject? Menippean satire has a huge future, because it is designed to counter the literary swoon, and because it is super-literary. Ideal conditions prevail today: there’s a big, sober-sided moral era on its 212

Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (Longmans Green, 1939; rpt. Penguin Books, 1967, 1986). 213 Janet Morris et al., Heroes in Hell (New York: Baen Publishing Enterprises, 1986; quite a few volumes have since joined the series). Here’s part of the opening blurb (the relation to various Menippean commonplaces is obvious): Alexander the Great teams up with Julius Caesar and Achilles to re-fight the Trojan War—with Machiavelli as their intelligence officer and Cleopatra in charge of R&R… Yuri Andropov learns to Love the Bomb with the aid of The Blond Bombshell (she is the Devil’s very private secretary)…Che Guevara Ups the revolution with the help of Isaac Newton, Hemingway, and Confucius… And no less a bard than Homer records their adventures for posterity… 214 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen & Co., 1920; much reprinted).

Cynic Satire and the Postliterate Crowd

203

way: the current crowd is comparatively humourless, and getting more so. As the arts become democratized, the old fine arts cease to exist as specialized activities and, except as providing aesthetic nostalgia for the few, will matter less and less to the culture at large. The need for revivifying sensibility, however, will enlarge at the same rate that Art becomes history. A clear field for Menippus and his mimes. Now let us see if we can concoct a surefire test for identifying Menippean satires from any age. The last two thousand years have seen too much variety for the classic description—“a mixture of verse and prose”—by itself to be of much use.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE LITMUS TEST: WHAT IS AND WHAT ISN’T CYNIC SATIRE

At the end of Men Without Art, Wyndham Lewis proposed a “Cab-driver’s test” for fiction. Here is Lewis: I believe that you should be able to request a taxi-cab driver to step into your house, and (just as you might ask him to cut a pack of cards) invite him to open a given work of fiction, which you had placed in readiness for this experiment upon your table; and that then at whatever page he happened to open it, it should be, in its texture, something more than, and something different from, the usual thing that such an operation would reveal. In fact, allowing for the difference of scale and of technical approach, a work of “fiction” should be as amenable to this test as would be a play by Molière or Racine, of any page taken at random in, say, the Collected Works of Donne or of Dryden.215

Why not, in the same spirit, invent a similar test for Cynic satire? Because our subject is polymorphous, description must inevitably fall short of the mark. How, then, to compose a test to detect Menippism at work? I invite you to figure it out. This chapter offers a few tools and other things you might wish to keep handy for the job. It ends with brief discussions of the Menippean satire problem and the seriousness of Menippean satire. An appendix to the chapter offers additional test cases, mostly from twentieth-century literature. (The Afterword to this book considers a final test case: Plato IN, Boethius OUT?)

215

Men Without Art. rpt. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), p. 295.

206

Chapter Fifteen

Thomas D’Urfey, An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World, 1704

The Litmus Test: What Is and Isn’t Cynic Satire

207

A Few Tests That Have Worked Korkowski’s Pedigree Test Surefire, as far as it goes. Here it is again. Menippean satires display what false (or true) learning is, and have startling features of both thematic and structural attractiveness, to keep the unlearned reader interested. The genre has two species, a negative (the earlier, sprung from Greek cynicism) and a positive (the later, sprung from Roman didascalism). The Greek involves “satire,” understood as ridicule or attack, upon the philosopher, theologian, or other learned individual; the Roman sometimes is not satirical, but follows (as does the Greek) the concept of a satura, a medley of diverse topoi and literary forms, usually a mixture of prose and verse. Menippean authors either admit they have followed Menippus or one of Menippus’ known imitators, or else borrow both manner and matter (structure and theme) that could only have come from a Menippean text to which they had certain access.

As Korkowski avers, Menippizing is a very appealing kind of controversial writing because it is “adaptable, with only very minor adjustments, to almost any dispute involving the authorities or gloriosi in learning and theology.” Somewhere in the satire you will find Menippus’ signature. But as a test it is limited, for—as discussed above—it makes insufficient provision for innovation in both form and medium (i.e., audience). But it IS a workable test.

The Piracy Test Surefire: Use a known Menippean satire as a second plot, or update (steal/rework) one. Lucian, for example, has been endlessly plundered and imitated and parodied. Clearly, there is some overlap between this test and the pedigree test: perhaps the difference is one of degree. It would also admit McLuhan and Watson, Du cliché a l’archétype,216 which uses Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues (from Bouvard et Pécuchet) as a second “plot,” i.e., in the chapter breaks. The chapters

216

H. M. McLuhan and W. Watson, Du cliché à l’archetype: La foire du sens (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1973 / Paris: Mame). This is a translation by D. de Kerckhove of From Cliché to Archetype (New York: Viking Press, 1970). The English original does not contain Flaubert’s material. The current reissue puts the original book in a frame that destroys its former Menippean efficacy.

208

Chapter Fifteen

themselves are arrayed in alphabetic order; so, for example, the Table of Contents appears under T, not at the start of the book.

The “Cynic Spirit” Test Absolutely surefire. There must be PLAY somehow, somewhere, in the satire, although not just for its own sake or just to be cute. It must attract the audience, engage it in the play, and thus coerce it to retune itself. Must be deliberate.

A Test That Used to Work: Verse/Prose NOT surefire nowadays as verse has ceased to matter, but works for satires of antiquity to early twentieth. The mix may have been adequate for antiquity, when they cared about such things and were sensitive to delicacies of decorum. Hoi barbaroi reign now. The technique would be largely lost on today’s audiences— unless, perhaps, rappers began to use it. But they as yet show little capacity for play, sophisticated or otherwise. PLUS: some Menippean satires don’t mix verse and prose: some are just prose; some, just verse. Vide Byron’s Don Juan, Pound’s Cantos. Vide also Boethius: his Consolatio is not Menippean, though it puts on the proper OUTWARD traits, i.e., it mixes verse and prose. (See below.) Also, even in antiquity, as Horace shows, a style could be found. Evidently, though, prosimetrum style retains its potency on the stage. T. S. Eliot, in Poetry and Drama, was first in our time to point out the effect of mixing verse and prose...for the stage. A mixture of prose and verse in the same play, he wrote, “is generally to be avoided: each transition makes the auditor aware, with a jolt, of the medium.”217 217 T. S. Eliot, Poetry and Drama (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 13–15. The whole passage deserves contemplation: ...We have all heard (too often!) of Molière’s character who expressed surprise when told that he spoke prose. But it was M. Jourdain who was right, and not his mentor or creator: he did not speak prose—he only talked. For I mean to draw a triple distinction: between prose, and verse, and our ordinary speech which is mostly below the level of either verse or prose. So if you look at it in this way, it will appear that prose, on the stage, is as artificial as verse: or alternatively, that verse can be as natural as prose. But while the sensitive member of the audience will appreciate, when he hears fine prose spoken in a play, that this is something better than ordinary conversation, he does not regard it as a wholly different language from that which he himself speaks, for

The Litmus Test: What Is and Isn’t Cynic Satire

209

Strong Possibility Department x Little Epics, Double-Plots, and Frame Tales. x Frames: Apuleius, Martianus, Canterbury Tales, 1001 Nights. x Double-Plots: Scientific Epics of the twelfth, thirteenth centuries, like Sylvestris’ Cosmographia. Later, More’s Utopia. In the twentieth century, Joyce’s Ulysses uses Homer, his Dubliners uses Ovid’s Metamorphoses, his Exiles uses Euripedes’ Medea.

Some Test Cases Admission test: Agatha Christie wrote a set of twelve short stories featuring her hero Hercules Poirot, and named the set The Labours of Hercules.218 Each story in the book carries the name of one of the labours demanded of Hercules; each cleverly updates the original tale, retelling it

that would interpose a barrier between himself and the imaginary characters on the stage. Too many people, on the other hand, approach a play which they know to be in verse, with the consciousness of the difference. It is unfortunate when they are repelled by verse, but it can also be deplorable when they are attracted by verse—if that means that they are prepared to enjoy the play and the language of the play as two separate things. The chief effect and style and rhythm in dramatic speech, whether it be in prose or verse, should be unconscious. From this it follows that a mixture of prose and verse in the same play is generally to be avoided: each transition makes the auditor aware, with a jolt, of the medium. It is, we may say, justifiable when the author wishes to produce this jolt: when, that is, he wishes to transport the audience violently from one plane of reality to another. I suspect that this kind of transition was easily acceptable to an Elizabethan audience, to whose ears both prose and verse came naturally; who liked highfalutin and low comedy in the same play; and to whom it seemed perhaps proper that the more humble and rustic characters should speak in a homely language, and that those of more exalted rank should rant in verse. But even in the plays of Shakespeare some of the prose passages seem to be designed for an effect of contrast which, when achieved, is something that can never become old-fashioned... Today, however...we have to accustom our audiences to verse to the point at which they will cease to be conscious of it; and to introduce prose dialogue would only be to distract their attention from the play itself to the medium of its expression... 218 Agatha Christie, The Labours of Hercules (Melbourne, London, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1953 [first published, 1947; much reprinted]).

210

Chapter Fifteen

in modern dress. Is it Menippean satire? There’s only one way to test: go read the book, or enough of it to tell. Admission test: Woody Allen’s film Deconstructing Harry219 exhibits a number of Menippean touches. E.g., an actor in a movie-within-themovie cannot be brought into focus by the camera (-within-the-movie), and the cause is that he is out of focus and blurry even off-camera (within-the-movie), which puzzles the other characters (themselves sharply delineated). But is there enough to push the movie—and the audience—to the point of The Jolt? Admission test: Caroline Gordon wrote Old Red and Other Stories, a collection of twelve short stories,220 and patterned them after the twelve labours of Hercules, rather as Joyce worked Ulysses. Is this Menippean satire? Again, you’ll have to read the book before you can say finally. Admission tests: Two of John Barth’s books, Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera. By any descriptive accounting, both employ sufficient Menippean devices for a convincing case to be made. Chimera has the unreliable narrator, the reader as co-creator, digressions galore (both in narrative and in style), intrusions by the writer, and a host of the routine Menippean devices listed in our “Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés,” chapter nine, above. Lost in the Funhouse has more of the same, mixes verse and prose, plays with printing conventions, promises things never delivered, omits chapters, etc. Is either one Menippean satire? Only a reading will tell. Admission test: Both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) employ a narrative structure in which the main action is relayed at second hand through an enclosing frame story. Are these Menippean satires? Go read... Admission test: Milton’s “Lycidas” uses a frame narrative: all but a few lines, at beginning and end, are “in quotes.” Is it Menippean satire? Go... Admission tests: Dante’s La Vita Nuova mixes verse and prose...but is Dante Menippizing, is he on the attack? Don De Lillo’s White Noise221 works with cliché and language at an unusual pitch of tension and precision: Is it Menippean satire? Is John Fuller’s Flying to Nowhere222?

219

Woody Allen, writer and director, Deconstructing Harry (distributed by Fine Line Features, 1997). 220 Caroline Gordon, Old Red and Other Stories (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963). 221 DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1985 222 Fuller, John. Flying to Nowhere. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1984.

The Litmus Test: What Is and Isn’t Cynic Satire

211

Other Possible Tests The Weigh-Scale Perhaps we need a scale: x Outside the park (jes’ messin’ aroun’): light x On the fence (close, but no cigar): medium x Across home plate (cave canem!): heavy

Screens Some means to clearly fence out interlopers like Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. How about these as screens? x It’s not got the style; the decorum’s too smooth. x It’s not got the play, wit, fun. x No riot here: no high wit and low seriousness. x Too much emphasis on content. x It takes itself too seriously. x No Cynic barking, jab, or leer. x Korkowski’s mimesis/pedigree test.

content-heavy, or > >> tricks only (self-absorbed)

[as we move from L to R]

>>> emphasis on perception stylistic intensity increases

tomfoolery>>> >>> >>>serious art --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Spectrum

Chapter Fifteen

The reader is rejuvenated (more, or less) all across the spectrum, but only at the RH side does the reader effectively become a target. Most works occupy one or another point on, or an area of, the spectrum. Each of the greatest ones (Finnegans Wake, Gargantua & Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, etc.) covers the broadest area of the spectrum, including the right-hand side. They use ALL devices at once.

212

The Litmus Test: What Is and Isn’t Cynic Satire

213

The Menippean Satire Problem It’s no use describing and listing this or that group of properties or preoccupations or themes, for Menippean satires put those on or off as expediency (and current sensibility, susceptibility) dictates. (See “A Cornucopia of Menippean Clichés,” chapter nine, above.) Menippean satire is rather a range or group of styles…styles considered as routes to a range of effects. So it appears arcane during ages that don’t naturally include the audience or the user in their calculations. It is no less practised in those dark times, but is regarded much less seriously, less heeded by the sobersiders, the gloriosi. Menippean satire works as ground, not as figure. All our usual critical techniques convert the objects of their study into figure. Delightful: it falsifies Menippean satire from the outset: we’ll NEVER come to grips with it thataway. Clive Hart records the Menippean effectiveness of reading Finnegans Wake in his Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake. The word-play, he says, ...comes to be accepted, just as the ordinary reader of the ordinary book accepts the usual conventions of language. After a few hundred pages we are so saturated with puns that nothing surprises, nothing shocks; the mind’s ear takes part-writing for granted, the mind’s eye is fixed in a permanent state of multiple vision.223

That reader has been somewhat retuned, revivified. After a couple of sessions with the Wake, good writing has a sweeter savour, bad or inept literature registers as quite insipid, even irritating. And you’re irritatingly (to others) alive to all the resonances and double-entendres and puns that lurk in even the most innocent conversation or trivial prose. No amount of description will convey the effect: you had to’ve been there. But then, Finnegans Wake is unusually potent. We are told that Rabelais had that effect in his day; Flaubert, in his. Even Eliot found small doses of the Wake quite adequate (but perhaps he was atypical, already attuned). He wrote, with a grin, in his essay “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956), that “the only obvious common characteristic of The Road to Xanadu and Finnegans Wake is that we may say of each: one book like this is enough.”224 223

Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962), p. 34. 224 T. S. Eliot, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), p. 49. The entire passage is of interest, for in it

214

Chapter Fifteen

SERIOUSNESS of Menippean Satire Here be Thorns and Tygers, for the literati. No “good taste” approach is really possible. You need make no apologia here: low seriousness prevails, and there’s an end on’t. All depends on effect. I.e., on style. For it’s not the idea content but the style-as-ground that produces the effect. Style is, was, and ever will be the way of seeing. Flaubert was fond of saying that his ideal novel would be all style and have no content, no story. Joyce did it, with Finnegans Wake. Many satires “put the antic disposition on” but don’t thereby get the Menippean effect of retuning, the jolt that refreshes, for they’re only surface shenanigans (e.g., much of John Barth, G. M. Fraser). They’re not aimed AT the reader but are really just the writer having fun, aiming to amuse (himself?). In terms of rhetorical divisions, dispositio (organization, ideas, whimsicality), not elocutio (decorum, style), is in control of these works. They have no cutting edge, perform no dissection, no lancing of boils, no swift kicking of the knuckleheaded.

Eliot wrestles, honestly and publicly, with the Wake—a book that he clearly does not know how to comprehend. He decides that it belongs to poetry, but has no notion what it is for.

The Litmus Test: What Is and Isn’t Cynic Satire

215

Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae (4th C., title page from 1539)

The Litmus Test: What Is and Isn’t Cynic Satire

217

Appendix to Chapter Fifteen Additional Test Cases (mostly from the twentieth century) The Bible [Old Testament and New Testament together] Aristophanes, The Clouds Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveller . . . John Fuller, Flying to Nowhere John Barth, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor; Giles Goat-Boy Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth Laurence Sterne, The Sermons of Yorick [all of them stolen] Christoph Ransmayr, The Last World Luis d’Antin van Rooten, Mots d’heures: Gousses, Rames. The d’Antin Manuscript. Discovered, Edited and Annotated by Luis d’Antin van Rooten H. M. McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting H. M. McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business Movies: The Last Action Hero Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Forrest Gump Boccaccio, Decameron Marguerite of Navarre, Heptameron Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia Thomas Amory, The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq. (Two vols.: 1756, 1766) Anonymous, Mystery. Complete with Everything: Detective, Telephone, Mysterious Woman, Corpses, Money, Rain [“A NoFrills Book” exactly 60 pages long] Anonymous, Science Fiction. Complete with Everything: Aliens, Giant Ants, Space Cadets, Robots, One Plucky Girl [“A No-Frills Book” exactly 60 pages long] Anonymous, Romance. Complete with Everything… and Western: Complete with Everything . . . The last in the series of four, each one “A No-Frills Book” exactly 60 pages long. Suspected publisher: Jove. Richard Harris Barham, Ingoldsby Legends Christine Brooke-Rose, Textermination Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [etc. All four volumes of the trilogy] Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency James V. Schall, Another Sort of Learning: Selected Essays on How

218

Chapter Fifteen

Finally to Acquire an Education While Still in College or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated Advice about How to Employ Your Leisure Time When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to Be Found E. Todd Williams, The First Men’s Guide to Ironing: How You Can Survive the Decline and Virtual Dismemberment of Everything You Used to Depend Upon Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One and Part Two Denis Diderot, the Neveu de Rameau, and the Rêve d’Alembert Voltaire, Candide The Arabian Nights (The Thousand Nights and a Night) The Noctes Ambrosianae Aulus Gellius, The Attic Nights Umberto Eco, Misreadings [not all of it, but the (fake) readers’ reports, “Regretfully, We Are Returning Your . . .,” two of “Three Eccentric Reviews,” the do-it-yourself Movie Kit, the transcript of the live CNN-like coverage of Columbus’ arrival on American shores in 1492, the essay on “Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society”] Anthony Burgess, The End of the World News: An Entertainment Michael Ende, The Neverending Story [not the film, the book—that is, the original printing with the type in red ink and green ink, not the cheap monochrome version they offer in its place. Accept No Substitutes]

The Litmus Test: What Is and Isn’t Cynic Satire

219

Note Pablo Neruda, by general consent Walt Whitman’s truest heir, said that the appeal of Whitman to the Spanish poets was that “he taught how to see and name what had not been seen or named before”: Poetry in South America is a different matter altogether. You see there are in our countries rivers which have no names, trees which nobody knows, and birds which nobody has described. It is easier for us to be surrealistic because everything we know is new. Our duty, then, as we understand it, is to express what is unheard of. Everything has been painted in Europe, everything has been sung in Europe. But not in America. In that sense, Whitman was a great teacher. Because what is Whitman? He was not only intensely conscious, but he was open-eyed! He had tremendous eyes to see everything—he taught us to see things. He was our poet. (From Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages [New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994], p. 47)

220

Afterword: Boethius OUT, Plato IN? A Final Test Case

John Dunton, The New Quevedo, II, 1702

AFTERWORD BOETHIUS OUT, PLATO IN? A FINAL TEST CASE

Plato a Menippist? “Hardly,” is one’s first reaction. But weigh Paul Shorey’s concluding words of introduction to The Republic: Provided that the meaning is plain and the emphasis right, [Plato] allows himself unlimited freedom in anacoluthons, short cuts, sharp corners, ellipses and generally in what I have elsewhere called illogical idiom. Anyone who does not like that style should give his days and nights to the study of Isocrates and Lysias. According to his mood and the context Plato’s style ranges from Attic simplicity to metaphysical abstraction, from high-flown poetical prose to plain colloquial diction. And his colloquialism, though usually kept within the bounds of Attic urbanity, is not lacking in Aristophanic touches which, if rightly rendered, shock the taste of critics who approach him with a stronger sense of the dignity of philosophy than they have of Greek idiom. In deference to friendly criticism I have generally suppressed or transferred to footnotes my attempts to reproduce this feature of Plato’s style. But I am not convinced. As Taine aptly says (Life and Letters, p. 53), “M. Cousin’s elegant Plato is not at all like the easy ... but always natural Plato of reality. He would shock us if we saw him as he is.”225

He would “shock the taste of critics”; “He would shock us ...” Here is the looked-for effect, the Cynic touch—though Plato was not a card-carrying Cynic. How ought we to respond to such information? With a modicum of suspended judgment, I expect. Lacking the same familiar ease in Plato’s Greek that we enjoy in literary and colloquial English, we readers are at the mercy of the translators. Shorey has been exceptionally candid in these remarks, but we need to know more before we can judge. Now he has given us enough to suspect Plato of Menippism, at least part of the time. Did Plato set out to shock? That is the crux of the matter. 225 Plato, The Republic, trans., Paul Shorey, in two vols. Vol II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: Loeb Classical Library, l935, 1942), p. lxxiii.

222

Afterword: Boethius OUT, Plato IN? A Final Test Case

Plato-in-translation has been tidied up out of all recognition by wellmeaning translators and editors: the rough-and-ready nature of his prose could never be detected in their renderings. Now, normally, the last thing a Dialectician wants to do is divert attention from the argument to the style, let alone create a self-conscious reader. Yet these effects are precisely what a Menippist aims to achieve. It is axiomatic among philosophers that the style should be transparent and not an object of attention. As Richard Lanham remarked, “Stylistic self-consciousness, then, parallels behavioral self-consciousness, and we resist both for the same reasons. They are intellectual reasons when they assume the Platonic guise but they also run deep into our evolutionary past. Stylistic behavior is enormously expressive.”226 So what in blazes is Plato up to here (and who knows where else), deliberately wrenching the decorum, jolting and shocking the reader? And all the while, in the content, playing the good and loyal Dialectician? Is it a double game (yet another kind of double-plot)? Don’t you sniff the familiar scent of Cynic technique? It is easy to lose sight of the fact that Plato did not write philosophy textbooks (however, Aristotle, for one, did). Plato wrote dialogues, that is, playscripts for actors to perform. He was a dramatist, not an essayist; a man of the stage, not of the classroom. When he arrived in Athens, he did so as a member of a mime troupe.227 He was into street theatre. Well, whether Plato Menippizes or not, Boethius clearly fails the test, even though he does mingle verse and prose. For his smooth and even style is directed to another end entirely than that of the Cynic jolt, leer, grin, slap, and tickle. He aims to heal through consolatio, through soothing rather than roughhousing or carousing with the reader. Here is not a roughand-tumble Rabelais or Swift but an urbane and genteel upper-class family physician with very proper bedside manner. No street-corner barker, he. His writing is entirely too feline. Put, for example, the Confessio Amantis at one end of a scale, and The Canterbury Tales at the other, and there’s no question at which end you would find the Consolatio. Boethius is palliative, not, as Horace or Juvenal, sanative or purgative or laxative. 226

Analyzing Prose (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), pp. 218–19. Diogenes Laertius: “That Plato acted as choregus at Athens, the cost being defrayed by Dion, is stated by Athenodorus in the eighth book of a work entitled Walks” (Lives of Eminent Philosophers [Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Book III, 3-4], vol. I., p. 279). A little later, he reports that “Plato, it seems, was the first to bring to Athens the mimes of Sophron which had been neglected, and to draw characters in the style of that writer; a copy of the mimes, they say, was actually found under his pillow” (ibid., p. 293).

227

Cynic Satire

223

Boethius is aiming for a more sober solace; he is also trying to adapt the prose/verse mix to produce the consolatio effect. By a stroke of good taste and homogeneous style, he pulls it off, but his effort was not followed up by anyone else.

APPENDIX OUTLINE OF THE MENIPPEAN TRADITION

The Ancients and Medievals Homer (800 BC?–1100 BC?), Margites Gorgias (fifth century BC), Praise of Helen Isocrates (436–338 BC), Busiris Diogenes the Cynic (404–323 BC) Timon of Phlius (c. 320 BC–c. 230 BC), Silloi Menippus of Gadara (fl. c. 250 BC) Varro (116–27 BC), wrote more than six hundred Menippean satires Seneca (4 BC–AD 65), Apokolocyntosis/Ludus de morte Claudii / The Pumpkinification of Claudius Petronius Arbiter (d. AD 66), Satyricon Plutarch (c. AD 46–120), Gryllus Lucian of Samosata (c. AD 120–180), various works Apuleius of Madaura (c. AD 125–?), Metamorphoses / The Golden Ass Athenaeus of Naucratis (early third C.), Deipnosophists / The Deipnosophists Macrobius (AD 339–422), Saturnalia Synesius of Cyrene (c. AD 360–415), Phalakras egkomion/Calvitii encomium / In Praise of Baldness Martianus Capella (late fourth/early fifth century?), De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii / The Marriage of Mercury and Philology Bernardus Sylvestris of Tours (fl. c. 1136), Cosmographia Alan of Lille (c. 1128–1202), De planctu naturae / Nature’s Complaint Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–c. 1321), La vita nuova (1292–1294) Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387)

Sixteenth Century Alexander Barclay (1475–c. 1552), The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde (1509)

226

Appendix: Outline of the Menippean Tradition

Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536), Moriae encomium / The Praise of Folly Thomas More (1478–1535), Utopia Andreas Guarnas of Salerno (c. 1435–?), Bellum Grammaticale: A Discourse of Great War and dissention betwene the two worthy Princes, the Noune and the Verb (1576) Johann Jaeger and Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523), Epistolae obscurorum virorum / Letters of Obscure Men (1515–1519) Ulrich von Hutten (alone), various items Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettlesheim (1486–1535), De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium / On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences (1530) Bonaventure Des Périers / Desperiers (c. 1500–1544), Cymbalum mundi / The Cymbal of the World (1537) François Rabelais (c. 1495–1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), Ragionamenti (1534–1539); Dialoghi (1545– 1549) Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), Barberici encomium / In Praise of the Barbarians Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), Encomium anseris / In Praise of the Goose Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), Don Quixote (1605, 1615) Giordano Bruno (Nolanus) (1546–1600), various texts James Sanford (fl. 1567–1582), The Mirrour of Madnes, or a Paradox maintayning Madnes to be most excellent (1576) Phillip Stubbes (1555–1610), The Anatomy of Abuses: contayning a discoverie, or briefe summarie of such notable vices and imperfections, as now raigne in many Christian countreyes of the worlde: but (especiallie) in a verie famous ilande called Ailgna: together, with most fearfull examples of Gods judgments, executed upon the wicked for the same, as well in Ailgna of late, as in other places, elsewhere . . . (1583); The second Part of the Anatomy of Abuses: conteining The Display of Corruptions with a perfect description of such imperfections, blemishes and abuses, as now reigning in every degree, require reformation for Feare of Gods vengeance to be powered upon the people and countrie, without speedie repentance and conversion unto God: made dialogwise by Phillip Stubbes (1583) Etienne Taburot (1549–1590), Les Bigarrures et touches du seigneurs des accords. Dernière ed. (1585) Robert Greene (1558–1592), Planetomachia (1585) and other texts

Cynic Satire

227

Thomas Nashe (1567–1601), many texts (In Praise of the Red Herring; The Unfortunate Traveller, etc.) Johann Fischart (under the name, Artwisus von Fischmentweiler, c. 1545– 1591), Catalogus catalogorum perpetuo durabilis / Das ist: Ein Ewigwerende, Gordianischer, Pergamischer Tirraninoscher Bibliotecken gleichwichtige und Richtige Verzeichnuss und Registratur (1590) Sir John Harington (1561–1612), A New Discourse of a Stale Subject Called The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1595) Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Somnium, sive astronomia lunaris / A Dream, or the Astronomy of the Moon; Dissertatio cum nuncio siderio nuper ad mortales misso a Galilaeo Galilaeo / A Discourse with the Sidereal Messenger Lately Sent to Mortals by Galileo Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), Satyra Menippea, Somnium. Lusus in nostri aevi criticos / The Menippean Satire: A Dream. A Skit on Today’s Critics Anonymous (various hands), La Satyre Menippée (1594)

Seventeenth Century John Barclay (1582–1621), Euphormionis lusini satyricon / Euphormio’s Satyricon (1605) Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich (1574–1656), Mundus alter et idem (1605) Thomas Dekker (1572–1632), Newes from Hell; brought by the Divells Carrier (1606); The Bel-man of London (1608); The Guls HorneBooke; many other texts John Donne (1573–1631), Conclave Ignatii / Ignatius His Conclave (1610, 1611) Guillaume Bouchet (1513–1593), Les Serées / The Evening-Sequences (1583–1614) François Beroalde de Verville (1556–c. 1612), Le Moyen de parvenir. Oeuvre contenant la raison de tout ce qui este, est, et sera /How to Succeed (c. 1610) “Deslauriers” or “Bruscambille” (1575–1634), Les Fantasies de Bruscambille. Contenant plusieurs discours, paradoxes, harangues & prologues facecieux (1615) Gaspar Ens (c. 1570–1656), Epidorpidum librii II, in quibus nonulla sapienter, acute, lepide, ridicule, denique dicta et facta, continentur uberiori conviviali praemissi / The Epidorpid in Two Books, in which All Manner of Sayings and Doings, Wise, Pungent, Jovial, and Finally

228

Appendix: Outline of the Menippean Tradition

Ridiculous, Are Contained and Set Forth as a Fruitful Banquet (1612, with later additions) Thomas Dekker (1572–1632), The Owle’s Almanacke: Prognosticating Many Strange Accidents which Shall Happen to this Kingdome of Great Britaine this Yeare, 1618. Calculated as Well for the Meridian Mirth of London as Any Other Part of Great Britaine. Found in an Iuybush Written in Old Characters, and Now Published in English by the Painefull Labours of Mr. Iocundary Merrie-braines. E[dward] G[riffin], 1618. Ed. Don Cameron Allen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943. John Taylor, the “water poet” (1580–1653), many texts Dornavius / Caspar Dornau (1577–1632), many texts, esp. Amphitheatrum sapientiae Socraticae joco-seriae, hoc est encomia et commentaria autorum, quia recentiorum propre omnium: Quibus res, aut pro vilibus vulgo ad amoenitatem, sapientiam, virtutem, publice privatimque utilissimum / The Amphitheatre of Joco-Serious Socratic Wisdom. That Is, Encomia and Commentaries of Nearly All Authors up to the Present Time, Who Found Virtue, Wisdom, or Utility in Vile and Vulgar Things (1619) Ben Jonson (1573?–1637), News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (played 1620) Bishop Francis Godwin (1562–1633), The Man in the Moon or a Discourse of a Voyage thither by Domingo Gonsales (1633) Robert Burton (1577–1640), The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–1638) Quevedo (Gomez Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas: 1580–1641), Los Sueños / The Visions (1627 and later) Edmond Rostand (1619–1655), Cyrano de Bergerac (1640–1655) Samuel Butler (1612–1680), “The Elephant in the Moon”; “Mercuriis Menippeus, or The Loyal Satirist in Prose” (1649–1650); Hudibras (1663, 1664, 1678) Izaak Walton (1593–1683), The Compleat Angler (1653) Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655), Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune et du soleil / Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657, 1662) John Dunton (1659–1733), A Voyage Round the World, or, A PocketLibrary, divided into several Volumes, the First of Which contains the Rare Adventures of Don Kainophilus, From his Cradle to his fifteenth Year. The like Discoveries in such a Method never made by any Rambler before. The whole Work intermixed with Essays, Historical, Moral and Divine; and all other kinds of Learning. Done into English

Cynic Satire

229

by a Lover of Travels, Recommended by the Wits of both Universities (1691)

Eighteenth Century Sir Thomas Burnett (1694–1753) and George Duckett (1684 –1732), A Second Tale of a Tub: or, the History of Robert Powel the PuppetShow-Man (1715) John Dunton (1659–1733), The Second Part of the New Quevedo. Or, a Further Vision of Charon’s Passengers (1702); Athenian Sport: or, Two Thousand Paradoxes Merrily Argued, To Amuse and Divert the Age (1707) Thomas D’Urfey (1653–1723), An Essay Towards the Theory of the Intelligible World. Intuitively Considered. Designed for Forty-nine Parts. Part III. Consisting of a Preface, a Post-Script, and a Little Something Between. By Gabriel John. Enriched with a Faithful Account of his Ideal Voyage and Illustrated with Poems by Several Hands, or Likewise wiyth other strange things not insufferably Clever, nor Furiously to the Purpose. The Archetypically second Edition…Printed in the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred *&c. (about 1708) Alexander Pope (1688–1744), John Gay (1685–1732), John Arbuthnot (1667– 1735), The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus. [Working title: The Works of the Unlearned.] Written in Collaboration by the Members of the Scriblerus Club: John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Peri Bathous / The Art of Sinking in Poetry (ex Scriblerus) Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Gulliver’s Travels (ex Scriblerus); A Tale of a Tub Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Horne Tooke (1736–1812), Epei Pteroenta, or The Diversions of Purley (1786–1805) Denis Diderot (1713–1784), Jacques le fataliste et son maître / Jacques the Fatalist

Nineteenth Century Mark Twain (1835–1910), Huckleberry Finn (1884)

230

Appendix: Outline of the Menippean Tradition

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), Alice in Wonderland (1865); Through the Looking- Glass (1872) Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Sartor Resartus George Gordon / Lord Byron (1788–1824), Don Juan Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), The Water Babies Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), Le Tentation de St. Antoine / The Temptation of St. Anthony; Bouvard et Pécuchet / Bouvard and Pecuchet; Salammbô / Salammbo Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage Landor. First Series: Classical Dialogues, Greek and Roman. Second Series: Dialogues of Sovereigns and Statesmen. Third Series: Dialogues of Literary Men. Fourth Series. Dialogues of Literary Men (continued), Dialogues of Famous Women, and Miscellaneous Dialogues. Fifth Series: Miscellaneous Dialogues (concluded) (published together in 1883)

Twentieth Century James Joyce (1882–1941), Ulysses; Finnegans Wake; Exiles; Dubliners Ezra Pound (1885–1972), The Cantos T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), “The Waste Land” Leon Rooke (1934– ), Shakespeare’s Dog (1983) Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), The Four Men: A Farrago (1910) H. M. McLuhan (1911–1980) and W. Watson (1911–1998), Du cliché à l’archétype: la foire du sens, accompagné du Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues de Gustave Flaubert / From Cliché to Archetype (1973, published in English without the Flaubert materials) Woody Allen (1935– ), Mighty Aphrodite; Shadows and Fog; The Purple Rose of Cairo; Zelig Orson Welles (1915–1985), radio-broadcast version of “The War of the Worlds” (1938) Concrete Poetry (1950s–1960s) Janet Morris (1946– ), C. J. Cherryh (1942– ), and others, Heroes from Hell series (1980s–1990s) John Fowles (1926–2005), Mantissa; A Maggot; The French Lieutenant’s Woman (book and film) John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922), A Houseboat on the Styx John Barth (1930– ), Chimera Don DeLillo (1936– ), White Noise Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), Ada Flann O’Brien (1911–1966), At Swim-Two-Birds

Cynic Satire

231

Charles G. Finney (1905–1984), The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) Agatha Christie (1890–1976), The Labours of Hercules Caroline Gordon (1895–1981), Old Red and Other Stories *** Many writers on Menippean satire include lists of the satires at the ends of their books. Eugene Korkowski, for example, expanded his list into a book-length catalogue (writing as Eugene P. Kirk): Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York: Garland Publishing, 1980). Howard Weinbrot, in Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005; pp. 305-306, n. 1) cites some lists that bridge the gap between Korkowski’s massive catalogue and the present: See, for example, Garry Sherbert, Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, D’Urfey, and Sterne (New York: Peter Lang, 1996): “Theodore Kharpertian’s 1990 book identifies Thomas Pynchon…as a Menippean satiist. Roberta Tovey’s1984 thesis calls James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov Menippeans as well. Other theses label John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut as Menippists. (p. 23); “Thomas Love Peacock has received some recognition as a Menippean satirist from Marilyn Butler and James Mulvihill” (p. 193). See comparable remarks in M. Keith Booker, Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995): O’Brien’s role in “the tradition of Menippean satire” places him in the company of “modern successors like Salman Rushdie, Günter Grass, Thomas Pynchon, and Carlos Fuentes.” A note sends us to a critical study by Frank Palmeri showing “the continuity of Menippean satire from Petronius through Swift, Gibbon, and Melville on to Pynchon and Borges” (pp. 121, 121, n.1). Booker includes an appendix to demonstrate that O’Brien uses all fourteen points of Menippean satire that Bakhtin describes (pp. 143-50).

My list, above, attempts simply to give a bare outline of the main works, not all of which are known outside the study of Menippean satire. It does not (and does not try to) include everyone and everything: I have omitted, for example, lots of the French authors, the Russian authors (e.g., Dostoyevsky: Bakhtin has made too strong a case to ignore him, but his influence on English writing is questionable), and many others. I did not aim to include everyone discussed in the book—or to discuss in the book everyone on the list. You will note gaps, especially between

232

Appendix: Outline of the Menippean Tradition

Chaucer and the sixteenth century, and thin areas (such as the nineteenth century). Sic transit.

Burnett and Duckett, A Second Tale of a Tub, 1715

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED

Agrippa, Henry Cornelius. De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium (or On the Vanity and Uncertainty of Arts and Sciences). 1530. In Agrippa Opera. Ed. Richard F. Popkin. 2 vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970. Also James Sanford, ed. Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences.1569. Rpt., ed. Catherine M. Dunn. Northridge: California State University Press, 1974. Alan of Lille. Anticlaudianus de Antirufino or The Good and Perfect Man. Trans. and commentary, James J. Sheridan, C.S.B. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973. —. De planctu naturae. Plaint of Nature—Alan of Lille. Trans. James J. Sheridan, C.S.B. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980. Alighieri, Dante. Dante’s Vita nuova. New Edition. A Translation and an Essay by Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Allen, Woody. Writer and director. Deconstructing Harry. Distributed by Fine Line Features, 1997. —. Writer and director. Mighty Aphrodite. Distributed by Miramax Films, 1995. —. Writer and director. The Purple Rose of Cairo. Distributed by Orion Pictures and Warner Brothers, 1985. —. Writer and director. Shadows and Fog. Distributed by Orion Pictures, 1991. —. Co-screenwriter, actor. What’s Up, Tiger Lily? Distributed by American International Pictures, 1966. —. Writer and director. Zelig. Distributed by Orion Pictures and Warner Brothers, 1985. Anonymous. La Satyre Menippée (Or A Satire Menippized). La Satyre Menippée, ou la vertu du Catholicon. Selon l’édition princeps de 1594. Ed. M. C. Read. Paris: E. Flammarion, 1926. Apuleius of Madaura. Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass). Lucius Apuleius Opera Omnia. Ed. G. F. Hildebrand. 2 vols. 1842. Rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968. Also The Transformations of Lucius; Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass. Trans. Robert Graves. New York: Farrar, 1951. Also The Metamorphoses. Ed. S. Caselee, trans.

234

Bibliography of Works Cited

William Aldington. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1915– 1965. Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Translated by S. H. Butcher, with an Introductory Essay by Francis Fergusson. New York: Hill and Wang (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 1961. Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. With an English Translation by Charles Burton Gulick. 7 vols. 1927. Rpt. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1961. Atkins, John William Hay. Literary Criticism in Antiquity, a Sketch of Its Development. 2 vols. Cambridge: The University Press, 1934. Attridge, Derek. Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. R. W. Rostel. N.p.: Ardis [USA], 1973. —. Rabelais and His World. Trans. H. Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1968. Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944. Bangs, John Kendrick. A House-Boat on the Styx, Being Some Account of the Divers Doings of the Associated Shades. London and New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1914. Barth, John. Chimera. New York: Random House, 1972. Rpt. Ballantine Books (Random House), 1988; 15th printing, 1992. —. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown and Company, 1991. —. Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Rpt. Bantam, 1969, and oft thereafter. Belloc, Hilaire. A Conversation with an Angel. London: Jonathan Cape, 1928, 1931. —. The Four Men: A Farrago. New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1911. Rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Bergerac, Cyrano de. Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune et du soleil. Ed. P. L. Jacob. Paris: Editions Galic, 1962. Voyages to the Moon and the Sun. Trans. Richard Aldington. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1923. Beroalde, see Verville. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Cynic Satire

235

Bouchet, Guillaume. Les Serées (or The Evening-Sequences, 1583–1614). Les Serées de Guillaume Bouchet, Sieur de Brocourt. Eds. Charles Royer and Ernest Courbet. 6 vols. Paris: A. Lemerre, 1873–1882. Bronson, Bertrand H. In Search of Chaucer. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1960. Brooke-Rose, Christine. Textermination. New York: New Directions, 1992. Burnet, Sir Thomas, and George Duckett. A Second Tale of a Tub: or, the History of Robert Powel the Puppet-Show-Man. London: 1715. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy, Intro. by H. Jackson. 3 vols. London: J. M. Dent & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1932: Everyman’s Library, No. 886. Butler, Samuel. Mercuriis Menippeus, or The Loyal Satirist in Prose (written 1649–1650; first pub. as The Loyal Satirist, or Hudibras in Prose.) London: Joseph Hindmarsh, 1882. —. Satires and Miscellaneous Poetry and Prose. Ed. René Lamar. Cambridge: The University Press, 1928. —. Hudibras. Pt. 1, 1663. Pt. 2, 1664. Pt. 3, 1678. Facsimile rpt. Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1970. Cage, John. Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. Capella, Martianus. De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (or The Wedding of Mercury and Philology). Ed. Adolfus Dick, 1925. Rpt. Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1969. Trans. William Harris Stahl, Richard Johnson, E. L. Burge. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970–. 2 vols. Vol. 2, The Wedding of Philology and Mercury, 1977. Casaubon, Isaac. De satyrica Graecorum poesi, & Romanorum satira libri duo. 2 vols. Paris, 1605. Rpt. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1973. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote: Ozell’s Revision of the Translation of Peter Motteux. New York: Airmont Publishing, 1967. Chesterton, G. K. Saint Thomas Aquinas—“The Dumb Ox.” With an Appreciation by Anton C. Pegis. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1933. Rpt. New York: Image Books, Doubleday & Company, 1955/1966. Christie, Agatha. The Labours of Hercules. Melbourne, London, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1953 (first published, 1947; much reprinted). Cicero. Brutus & Orator. Trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1939, 1971. —. De inventione. Trans. H. M. Hubbel. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1968.

236

Bibliography of Works Cited

—. De natura deorum; Academica. Ed. and trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1933, 1967. —. De officiis. Trans. W. Miller. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1913, 1951. —. De oratore. Trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1942, 1967–1968. Clayman, Dee L. Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonism into Poetry. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. Clement of Alexandria. The Miscellanies; or, Stromata. 8 books. In The Writings of Clement of Alexandria. Trans. Rev. William Wilson. 2 vols. Vols. 4 (1867) and 12 (1869) of The Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A. D. 325. 24 vols. Eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1866–1872. Also Stromata, Lib. 1-3. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991. Cleve, F. M. The Giants of Pre-Sophistic Greek Philosophy. 2 vols. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965. Coffey, Michael J. Roman Satire. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976. Coleman, Dorothy. Rabelais—A Critical Study in Prose Fiction. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1971. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria: or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. 1817. Ed. James J. Engell and W. J. Bate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963. Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Ed. Chris Baldick. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Craig, Hardin. The Enchanted Glass. New York: Oxford University Press, 1916. Crump, Marjorie. The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931. D’Urfey, Thomas. An Essay Towards the Theory of the Intelligible World. London, 1700. Dekker, Thomas. The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. Ed. A. B. Grosart. 4 vols. 1884–1885. Rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. De Lillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books/Penguin Books (Viking Penguin), 1985, 1986. Des Périers, Bonaventure. Cymbalum mundi. Trans. Bettina L. Knapp. New York: Bookman Associates, 1965. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Ed. William Smith, 3 vols. New York, 1967.

Cynic Satire

237

Diogenes Laertius. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Ed. and trans. R. D. Hicks. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1925, l959. Diomedes. Ars grammatica. In Grammatici Latini. Ed. Heinrich Keil. 8 vols. 1857–1880. Rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961. Dodds, E. R. Ed. See Plato, Gorgias. Donatus, Aelius. Ars Donati quam Paulus Diaconus exposuit: nunc primum ex Cod. Vaticano-Palatino 1746 monachi archicoenobii Monti Casini in lucem proferunt. Ed. A. M. Amelli. Montis Casini: Ex Typ. Archic., 1899. Donne, John. “An Anatomie of the World.” 1611. In The Anniversaries. Ed. Frank Manley. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963. —. Ignatius His Conclave. Ed. T. S. Healy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. [Omits Donne’s important title page, which is given in Sir Geoffrey Keynes’ A Bibliography of John Donne. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958.] Donno, Elizabeth S. Elizabethan Minor Epics. Ed. with intro. by Elizabeth Story Donno. New York: Columbia University Press / London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. Dornavius, Caspar. Sermo quodlibetus de podagrae laudibus in amphitheatrum sapientiae Socraticae joco-seriae, hoc est, encomia et commentaria autorum, qua recentiorum propre omnium: Quibus res, aut pro vilibus vulgo ad amoenitatem, sapientiam, virtutem, publice privatimque utilissimum. 2 vols. in 1. Hanover: Wechel, 1619. Dryden, John. “A Discourse Concerning the Originall and Progress of Satire.” In Essays of John Dryden. Sel. and ed. W. P. Ker, M.A. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900. Dudley, Donald R. A History of Cynicism. London: Methuen and Company, 1937. Duff, J. Wright. The Literary History of Rome, from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age. 3rd. ed. Ed. A. M. Duff, 1953. Rpt. London: Benn, 1960. —. The Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age. Ed. A. M. Duff. 3rd edition. New York, 1964. —. Roman Satire: Its Outlook on Social Life. 1936. Rpt. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1964. Dunton, John. The Second Part of the New Quevedo. Or, a Further Vision of Charon’s Passengers. London, 1702. See L’Estrange, below. Edelstein, Emma J. and Ludwig. Asclepius. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945. Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber, 1944.

238

Bibliography of Works Cited

—. “The Frontiers of Criticism.” In On Poetry and Poets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957. —. “Johnson as Critic and Poet.” In On Poetry and Poets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957. —. On Poetry and Poets. New York: The Noonday Press (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy), 1943, rpt., 1957. —. Poetry and Drama. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951. —. Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber. Rpt. 1972. —. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen & Co., 1920. Also in Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1932. 3rd ed., 1951, 1972. Much reprinted. —. “The Waste Land.” In The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1934. Often reprinted. —. “The Waste Land”: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Ed. and introduced by Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1971, 1974. Elkin, P. K. The Augustan Defence of Satire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Elliott, R. C. The Power of Satire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960. Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. New York: New Directions, 1974. —. The Structure of Complex Words. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969. The Encyclopedia Britannica. 11th edition. 32 vols. New York, 1909– 1924. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Paul Edwards. 8 vols. New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1967. Epictetus. On the Calling of a Cynic. In Arrian’s Discourses of Epictetus. Ed. and trans. W. A. Oldfather. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1928, 1959. Erasmus, Desiderius. Moriae encomium (or Stultitia laus, or The Praise of Folly. 1509). The Praise of Folly. Trans. John Wilson. 1668. Rpt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958. L’Estrange, Sir Roger. Los Sueños. Trans. Roger L’Estrange. Ed. J. M. Cohen. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963. A translation, with drastic alterations (first issued in 1667 and in eleven editions by 1715), of Los Sueños (or The Visions, 1627 and later) by Gomez Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. Best modern translation: William Elliot’s The Visions of Quevedo. Philadelphia: H. H. Porter, 1832.

Cynic Satire

239

Fénelon. Oeuvres choisies: Dialogues sur l’éloquence. Paris: Librairie Garnier Frères, 1856. Oft reprinted. Finney, C. G. The Circus of Dr. Lao. With additional Interpretations by Boris Artzybasheff. New York: Viking Press, 1935. Rpt. New York: Equinox (Avon Books), 1976. Fischart, Johann. Catalogus catalogorum perpetuo durabilis. Das ist: Ein Ewigwerende, Giordanischer, Pergamischer und Tirraninoschar Bibliotecken gleichwichtige und richtige Verzeichnuss und Registratur. (1590) Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1969. Rpt. Signet, 1970. —. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Juniper Films, 1981. —. A Maggot. Toronto: Toronto: Collins Publishers, 1985. —. Mantissa. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1982. Fronto, Marcus Cornelius. The Correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto. With an English Translation by C. R. Haines. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1962. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Rpt. 1971. Fuller, John. Flying to Nowhere. Scotland: The Salamander Press, 1983. Rpt. USA: George Brazillier, 1984; Penguin Books, 1985. Fussell, Paul. The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke. London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, l965, l969. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. Edited with Introduction, Notes, and Appendices by J. B. Bury. 7 vols. London: Methuen & Co., 1909. Godwin, Bishop Francis. The Man in the Moon or a Discourse of a voyage thither by Domingo Gonsales. 1638. STC 11943, AA Reel 958. Gordon, Caroline. Old Red and Other Stories. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963. The Greek Anthology. Ed. and trans. W. R. Paton. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1917, 1960. Greene, Robert. Arbasto, The Anatomy of Fortune (1584). In The Life and Works of Robert Greene. Ed. A. B. Grosart. 15 vols. 1881–1886. Rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. Grube, G. M. A. The Greek and Roman Critics. London, 1965.

240

Bibliography of Works Cited

Guarnas, Andreas. Bellum Grammaticale: A Discourse of Great War and dissention betwene the two worthy Princes, the Noune and the Verb. (Or The Grammatical War. 1512.) London: n.p., 1576. STC 12420, AA Reel 736. Hall, Joseph, Bishop of Norwich. Mundus alter et idem. 1605. Engl. trans. John Healey (1609) used as The Discovery of a New World. Ed. Huntington Brown. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937. Harington, Sir John. Anatomie of the Metamorphosed Ajax, also called The Metamorphosis of Ajax. In Sir John Harington’s A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax. Ed. Elizabeth S. Donno. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. The Harleian Miscellany. (1744). Eds. William Oldys and Thomas Park. 10 vols. New York, 1965. Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities. Ed. Harry Thurstone Peck. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1965. Hart, Clive. Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962. Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, The Belknap Press, 1963. Hendrikson, G. L. “The Dramatic Satura and the Old Comedy at Rome.” American Journal of Philology, XV, 1894. —. Satura—The Genesis of a Literary Form.” Classical Philology, VI, 1911, pp. 129–43. Highet, Gilbert. The Anatomy of Satire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. Hirzel, Rudolf. Der Dialog: Ein Literarhistorischer Versuch. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1895. Rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1963. Horace. The Ars Poetica of Horace. Ed. with notes of Augustus S. Wilkins. London: Macmillan, 1939. Rpt. 1964. Jack, Ian. Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 1660– 1750. London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. Rpt. 1970. Jaeger, Johann and Ulrich von Hutten. Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum: The Latin Text with an English Rendering, Notes, and Historical Introduction by Francis Griffin Stokes. London: Chatto & Windus, 1925. Jordan-Smith, Paul. Bibliographia Burtoniana. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1931. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Robert Scholes in consultation with Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1967.

Cynic Satire

241

—. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber & Faber; New York: Viking Press, 1939. All editions observe identical pagination. —. Ulysses. New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1934. Julian the Apostate. Epistles, “To the Uneducated Cynics” and “To the Cynic Heracleios.” In Julian. Works: With an English Translation by Wilmer Cave Wright. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1949. Kahn, Charles H. Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960. Kernan, Alvin B. The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959, 1962. Kirk, E. P. Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1980. Kirk, G. S. Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Knapp, C. “The Skeptical Assault on the Roman Tradition Concerning the Dramatic Satura.” American Journal of Philology, XXXIII, 1912, pp. 125–48. Knoche, Ulrich. Roman Satire. Trans. Edwin S. Ramage. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1975. Korkowski, Eugene Paul. “Menippus and His Imitators: A Conspectus, up to Sterne, for a Misunderstood Genre.” Diss. 2 vols. University of California, San Diego, 1973. Kristeva, Julia. “La Ménippée: le texte comme activité sociale.” In 6(0(,27,.( (Sèméiôtikè). Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969, pp. 106– 107. Lain-Entralgo, Pedro. The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity. Ed. and trans. L. J. Rather and John M. Sharp. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970. Landor, Walter Savage. Classical (Imaginary) Conversations: Greek, Roman, Modern. With special intro. by G. Mercer Adams. Washington, DC: M. W. Dunne, 1901. Lanham, Richard A. Analyzing Prose. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983. —. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993. —. Literacy and the Survival of Humanism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983. —. The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976.

242

Bibliography of Works Cited

Lemprière, John, and Charles Anthon. Bibliotheca Classica: or, A Classical Dictionary. 2 vols. New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill–H. C. Sleight, 1833. Lesky, Albin. A History of Greek Literature. Trans. James Willis and Cornelius de Heer. New York: Crowell, 1966. Lewis, P. Wyndham. The Apes of God. London: Arco Publishers Limited, 1955. —. “The Dithyrambic Spectator, an Essay on the Origins and Survivals of Art.” In The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator. London: Chatto & Windus, 1931. Rpt. Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913–1956. Ed. and intro. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox. London: Thames & Hudson, 1969. —. “The Greatest Satire Is Non-Moral.” In Men Without Art. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. —. “One-Way Song.” In One-Way Song. London: Faber and Faber, 1933. —. Satire and Fiction by Wyndham Lewis Preceded by the History of a Rejected Review by Roy Campbell. London: The Arthur Press, n.d. —. Time and Western Man. London: Chatto and Windus, 1927. Rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Liddell and Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1848. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 2 vols. London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1961. Lodge, Thomas. The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge. Ed. A. B. Grosart. 4 vols. 1883. Rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. Lucian. Lucian. Ed. and trans. A. M. Harmon, K. Kilburn, and M. D. Macleod. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1913-1961. Lyly, John. Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit and The Owle’s Almanacke. In The Complete Works of John Lyly: Now for the First Time Collected and Edited from the Earliest Quartos, with Life, Bibliography, Essays, Notes, and Index, by R. Warwick Bond. 3 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902. Macrobius. Saturnalia. Commentarii in somnium Scipionis. Ed. Jacob Willis. 2 vols. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1963. Macrobius: The Saturnalia. Trans. Percival Vaughan Davies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. McLuhan, Eric. The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. McLuhan, H. M. “Pound, Eliot and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land.” New Literary History, 10 (1978–1979), pp. 557–80.

Cynic Satire

243

—. McLuhan, H. M. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. McLuhan, Marshall, Kathryn Hutchon, and Eric McLuhan. City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. Toronto: Book Society of Canada, 1977. McLuhan, H. M. and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. McLuhan, H. M. and Wilfrid Watson. Du Cliché à l’archétype: La Foire du sens. Trans. D. de Kerckhove. Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1973. (Paris: Mame.) Translation of From Cliché to Archetype. New York: Viking Press, 1970. Flaubert’s “Dictionnaire” appears only in the French version. Mercier, Vivian. The Irish Comic Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Milton, John. An Apology &c. In Works. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–1940. Morris, Janet, et al. Heroes in Hell. New York: Baen Publishing Enterprises, 1986. (Quite a few volumes have since joined the series.) Nashe, Thomas. Anatomy of Absurdity (1589). In The Works of Thomas Nashe. Ed. R. B. McKerrow. 5 vols. 1910. Rpt. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958. Nettleship, Henry. “The Original Form of the Roman Satura.” Rpt. in his Lectures and Essays. 2nd series. Oxford, 1895. The New Century Classical Handbook. Ed. Catherine B. Avery. New York, 1962. Newman, J. K. Augustus and the New Poetry. Bruxelles-Berchem: Latomus, 1967. O’Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two-Birds. Copyright Brian Nolan 1951, 1966. Longmans Green, 1939. Rpt. Penguin Books, 1967, 1986. Rpt. New York: Plume Books (Penguin), 1976. Obscure Epistolers. See Von Hutten, Epistolae obscurorum virorum. Ong, Walter, S.J. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. New York: Octagon Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rpt. 1974. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Eds. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scuddard. Oxford, 1970. Payne, F. Anne. Chaucer and Menippean Satire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981. Petronius Arbiter. The Satyricon. Trans. W. Arrowsmith. New York: New American Library, Mentor Books, 1959. Plato. Gorgias. A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary. Ed. E. R. Dodds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

244

Bibliography of Works Cited

—. The Republic. Trans. Paul Shorey. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: Loeb Classical Library, 1935, 1942. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1934. Oft reprinted. —. Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970. —. “The Serious Artist.” In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1968. Quintilian. Institutio oratoriae. Ed. and trans. H. E. Butler. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1922, 1961. Rabelais, François. Rabelais: Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Pierre Jourda. 2 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1962. The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais. Trans. J. M. Cohen. 1955. Rpt. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1970. Raby, F. J. E. A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. Ramage, E. S., D. L. Sigsbee, S. C. Fredericks. Roman Satirists and Their Satire. Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Press, 1974. Randolph, Marie Claire “The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory.” Studies in Philology, XXXVIII, April 1941, pp. 125– 57. Rpt. in Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Ronald Paulson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971. —. “Thomas Drant’s Definition of Satire, 1566.” Notes and Queries, 180, 1941. Riese, A. Saturarum Menippearum reliquiae. Leipzig, 1865. Rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1971. The only complete translation thus far is “Varro’s Menippean Satires.” Trans. Charles Marston Lee. Diss. University of Pittsburgh, 1937. Rooke, Leon. Shakespeare’s Dog. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; Don Mills, ON: Stoddart/General Publishing, 1981. Rpt. 1983. Sailer, Susan Shaw. On the Void of to Be: Incoherence and Trope in Finnegans Wake. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Sanford, James. The mirrour of madnes, or a paradox maintayning madnes to be most excellent. London: T. Marsh, 1576. STC 17980, AA Carton 479. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis with an English Translation by W. H. D. Rouse. In Petronius with an English Translation by Michael Heseltine. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1930. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Ed. and intro. R. G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1933, 1961.

Cynic Satire

245

Seyffert, Oskar. A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Rev. by Henry Nettleship and J. E. Sandys. London: William Glaisher, 1899. Shelley, P. B. “A Defence of Poetry.” 1821. A Defence of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley /The Four Ages of Poetry by Thomas Love Peacock. Ed. with intro. and notes by John E. Jordan. Indianapolis, IN: BobbsMerrill, 1965. Smith, William. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. 3 vols. London, 1844. Rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1967. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed., A. C. Hamilton. New York: Routledge, 2013. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of TRISTRAM SHANDY, Gentleman. Ed. Graham Petrie, Intro. Gilbert Phelps; Woodengravings by John Lawrence. London: The Folio Society, 1970. —. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. James Aiken Work. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1940. Strabo. Geography. Ed. and trans. Horace L. Jones. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1930, 1961. Sullivan, J. P. Ed. Petronius—The Satyricon and the Fragments. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1965, 1972. Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of a Tub with The Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. 1704. 5th ed. London: Benjamin Tooke, 1710. Facsimile Rpt. Scolar Press. n.d. Best modern edition is Eds. A. C. Guthkelch and David Nichol Smith. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1920. Rev. ed. 1958. Synesius of Cyrene. Phalakras egkomion or Calvitii encomium (The Praise of Baldness). In The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene. 2 vols. Tr. Augustine Fitzgerald. London: Oxford University Press, 1930. Taburot, Etienne. Les Bigarrures et touches des seigneur des accords. Dernière ed. Rouen, 1616. Taylor, John. The Works of John Taylor the Water-Poet Comprised in the Folio Edition of 1630. Most of his dozens of Menippean pieces are collected in the volumes of Reprints of the Spencer Society, 1868–78, printed at Manchester. Tuve, Rosemond. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947. Ullman, B. L. “Satura and Satire.” Classical Philology, VIII, 1913. pp. 172–94. —. “The Present Status of the Satura Question.” Studies in Philology, XVII, 1920. pp. 379–401.

246

Bibliography of Works Cited

Van Rooy, C. A. Studies in Classical Satire and Related Literary Theory. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1965. Verville, François Beroalde de. Le Moyen de parvenir. The Way to Succeed. Trans. Oliver Stoner. 2 vols. London: Hesperides Press, 1930. Vickers, Brian. In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Vivian, John. The Media of Mass Communication. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991. Von Hutten, Ulrich, and Johann Jaeger. Epistolae obscurorum virorum (or The Letters of Obscure Men). 1516-7. Epistolae obscurorum virorum. The Latin text with an English Rendering, Notes, and Historical Introduction by Francis Griffin Stokes. London: Chatto & Windus, 1925. Welles, Orson. “The War of the Worlds.” Radio broadcast on the primetime show Mercury Theatre on the Air, October 30, 1938 (CBS). Wheeler, A. L. “Satura as a Generic Term.” Classical Philology, VII, 1912. pp. 457–77. Williams, Juanita. “Towards a Definition of Menippean Satire.” Diss. Vanderbilt University, 1966. Yeats, W. B. “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” In The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Eds. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957. Young, Edward. “Conjectures on Original Composition,” (1759). In Hazard Adams, Ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1971, pp. 338–47.