Satire in Narrative: Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, & Pynchon 9781477301593

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Satire in Narrative

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Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, and Pynchon

SATIRE in I1RRRRTIUE FRANK PALMERI

University of Texas Press, Austin

Copyright © 1990 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition, 1990 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819.

© The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Palmeri, Frank. Satire in narrative : Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, and Pynchon / by Frank Palmeri. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-292-77631-4 (alk. paper) 1. Satire, American—History and criticism. 2. American fiction— History and criticism. 3. Satire, English—History and criticism. 4. Satire, Latin—History and criticism. 5. Petronius Arbiter. Satyricon. 6. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. PS430.P35 1990 809.7—dc20 90-34840 CIP

To my mother and father

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1. Satiric Parody of Classicism in the Satyricon

19

2. Satiric Materialism in A Tale of a Tub

39

3. Satire, Epic, and History in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

64

4. The Dialogue of Credit and Doubt in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

86

5. Parody and Paradigms in The Crying of Lot 49

109

Epilogue: Borges, Satire, and History

126

Notes

131

Bibliography

167

Index

179

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Acknowledgments

FIRST studied satire, read Bakhtin, and conceived of this study under the ironic intelligence of the late Bert Leefmans. The project later benefited from Michael Seidel's wide knowledge of satire. Helen Bacon suggested new connections to pursue, especially between ancient and modern satires. From Edward Tayler I learned the importance of seeing and thinking double. Stephen Donadio helped shape my ideas about satiric narratives before I ever conceived of the book. Anne Van Sant read and responded helpfully to the manuscript at a crucial stage. Gerald Chapman encouraged my project during the process of revision. Over the years, I formulated my ideas about Pynchon's satire through conversations with many friends: Steven Goldleaf, Eugene Man, Robert Silberman, who also read an earlier version of some chapters and made helpful recommendations, and my sister Gloria, whose essay on The Crying of Lot 49 helped shape my thoughts about Oedipa. Steven Mailloux read the two American chapters and made useful suggestions about the shape of the entire study. Melvyn New not only kindly encouraged my work on satire; he also helped me see more clearly the implications of my argument. I have learned much about Gibbon from Patricia Craddock, who generously suggested directions for my own work on Gibbon. Many colleagues and friends at the University of Miami have contributed suggestions and advice: Zack Bowen, Hermione de Almeida, John Fitzgerald, George Gilpin, Tassie Gwilliam, Patrick McCarthy, Frank Stringfellow, and Lindsey Tucker. I am grateful to Frankie Westbrook of the University of Texas Press, whose interest in this project encouraged me to bring it to completion.

I

x

Acknowledgments

Mihoko Suzuki contributed immeasurably to the shaping and reshaping of this project, as a generous collaborator and a satiric comrade. Portions of the chapter on A Tale of a Tub, which appeared earlier in Genre 18 (1985): 152-170, are reprinted by permission of the University of Oklahoma. The chapter on The Crying of Lot 49 is reprinted from ELH 54 (1987): 179-199, by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. Quotations from The Crying of Lot 49, copyright © 1965, 1966, by Thomas Pynchon, are used by permission of Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.

Satire in Narrative

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Introduction

Dialogical Parody

s

discover in the past an image of pristine integrity, in relation to which their contemporary situation signifies a falling off into ambiguity and doubleness. Yet it is precisely this fall that enables satire, for it provides satirists with their formal strategy of parodic reversals—the creative structural principle of narrative satire. Having considered a prevailing cultural code as a parody of the ideal, and its opposite alternative a constricting position worthy of parody too, satirists prefer to live in the interstices of this fallen world where all exists on a single level rather than in the hierarchy of values of any originary system or ideal. The ironic spaces between such structures attract the satiric parodist rather than any of the structures themselves. Narrative satires, therefore, record a process of decentering, a movement away from praise and affirmation, from the anchoring of meaning in an authority outside the doubly parodic text—in God, nature, society, or self. Narrative satire stands apart from other forms of satire and of narrative through its unresolved juxtaposition of conflicting frames of reference or systems of belief. Such satire adopts a continuing parodie stance toward other authoritative discourses; its parodies produce an open-ended dialogical form. Moreover, by insisting on the material bases of spiritual systems of value, narrative satire reduces social and philosophical hierarchies to the common level of the body, and in a corollary movement, reduces rhetorical hierarchies to the level of the literal. Instead of expressing its vision directly, like those forms whose purpose is to praise, satiric narrative works indirectly through parodie alteration of celebratory forms, established discourses, and dogmatic pronouncements. The languages, voices, and styles that thus intersect in satiric parodies do not constitute extrinsic experiments with language; ATIRISTS

2

Introduction

rather, their vocabularies, grammars, and intonations express different relations to the world and present alternate, even opposite, perspectives. Mikhail Bakhtin focuses his critical attention on narrative satire because this double-voicedness constitutes narrative satire as a dialogical genre, a site of the creative linguistic mixture that he calls heteroglossia.1 The linguistic worlds that influence each other in narrative satire may be distinct languages, as in Cabrera-Infante's prologue in Spanish and English to Three Trapped Tigers. But even more when they clash internally than when they exist as explicit bilingualism, the collision between languages in narrative satire expresses conflicts between the interests of different classes, professions, linguistic communities, and ethnic or religious groups. Joyce's parodies of British literary models, and his parodic distortions of English syntactical and grammatical forms in Ulysses, constitute from this point of view a satiric assault through language on the authority of the British empire and its occupation of Ireland.2 Such a case exemplifies the critical and creative force of the heteroglossia that claimed Bakhtin's attention. Whereas the hierarchical strata that Joyce juxtaposes consist of two peoples, Rabelais juxtaposes an official and an unofficial world within the hierarchy of French society. Against the grim, single-visioned authority of the Church, in his "Drunkards' Conversation" (the fifth chapter of Gargantua), he sets the irreverent parodies of a community of unnamed festive drinkers on Mardi Gras who proclaim, for example: "1 have the gospel word on my tongue: sitio, I thirst." Such joyful, blasphemous parody comes close to the heart of Bakhtin's conception of carnival and of menippean satire. With such an instance in mind, Bakhtin identifies a fundamental cleavage between ways of understanding and the genres that express them: between one-sided rationality, the pious truths of an officially sanctioned view, with its genres of praise on the one hand, and, on the other, the inverting ambiguity and ambivalence of carnival and parodic seriocomic forms such as narrative satire. In an important respect, however, Bakhtin's formulation of parody in satire needs to be qualified and extended. Viewing the anonymous common people as the natural repository of understanding that mocks ossified social forms and that always expresses a new and emerging cultural model, Bakhtin attributes an unambiguously Utopian value to the parodie forms of folk culture and carnival.3 In doing so, he dislodges officialdom by means of carnival, its inverting opposite, and replaces one absolute criterion of truth with another—more ambiguous and heterogeneous, but still unnecessarily constricting. Rather, the most complex and subversive narrative satires incorporate more than a single instance of parodie energy:

Dialogical Parody

3

after parodying a prevailing perspective, these satires go on to parody their own parodic inversion, without reverting to the original point of departure. Parodic satire in narrative then becomes not an isolated episode, but a continuing process of unsettling hierarchies of value and systems of thought. Through repeated parody and self-parody, such satire counterpoises multiple frames of understanding without assenting to the authority of any single perspective. It aims at reaching a "perspective of perspectives."4 As it puts clichés, outmoded forms, and one-sided views to the test, narrative satire takes shape as an unresolved dialogue between opposed and parodied philosophical alternatives. Voltaire's narrative of Candide's experiences satirically inverts and opposes a pervasive cosmic optimism in a narrative that provides all possible evidence for philosophical pessimism. Yet the dialogue between these two positions remains unresolved, concluding as it does with a formulation entirely different from thé other two: the need to cultivate our own garden. Candide achieves its open-ended dialogicality by parodically inverting widespread optimism, then parodying its converse, without authorizing either position. Such repeated inversions define narrative satire: inversions not only of the world outside the narrative, but internal reversals of value and implication. If we cannot share Gulliver's mindless patriotic parroting of the official view of his country and culture in the first three and one-half books of Gulliver's Travels, neither can we adopt the absolute misanthropy that succeeds his conversion to the Houyhnhmn's view that human civilization merely aggravates humanity's natural share of malice. Ultimately, Gulliver the satirist is satirized.5 Gulliver's language serves as an indicator of his mentality: the graphic but emotionally neutral descriptions of deaths in war signal the absence of ethical judgment in his first position; the highly wrought language of hatred and disgust alerts us to the limitation in his misanthropy. Parody of the language of patriotism or of misanthropy in Gulliver's Travels, like parody of the language of optimism or of pessimism in Candide, constitutes satire of the position that language expresses.6 Narrative satire presents a parodie antithesis to orthodoxy and then the negative of that antithesis; it describes a dialectic without a synthesis. Through most of Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert directs his satire against the two retired clerks whose projects, undertaken in the belief that progress will necessarily result from practical science and truth from the books of experts, always produce grotesque or disastrous consequences instead. In the last chapters of the unfinished work, Bouvard and Pécuchet move from embodying to opposing many of the pieties of nineteenthcentury French society (although the critical perspective they attain does

4

Introduction

not erase the carnivalesque effects of their bookish foolishness); it seems that Flaubert intended the satirized ultimately to become the satirists in this narrative. Through his parodic narrative encyclopedia, Flaubert implies the impossibility of any consistent, systematic understanding of the world.7 These and other narrative satires aim not to arrive at a truth that can be neatly formulated, but rather to use the process of parodic inversion in order to investigate philosophical attitudes toward the world; to this end, they invert both the officially accepted orthodoxy and its antagonistic inverted opposite. This parodic dialogicality produces satire's distinctive open-endedness, which resists both comic and tragic forms of resolution and closure. The marriage that closes comedies emblematically signifies reconciliation between opposing social groups and philosophies, but satire excludes compromises and middle grounds as it portrays extreme positions and their opposites.8 Narrative satires do not end with an achieved harmony; the struggle they embody between opposed views of the world reaches no satisfactory resolution or synthesis.9 Although many critics associate satire with comedy, satire in narrative more closely resembles tragedy in its unresolved ambivalence. The conflict in tragedy between the positions advocated by the mediocre collectivity of the chorus and the suffering individualism of the hero remains unresolved, just as do the conflicts between perspectives that animate narrative satires. The ambiguous relation in tragedy between the human and the divine—especially in the question of the hero's responsibility for his fate—corresponds to the ambiguous relationship between the human and social forms, which in satire replaces tragedy's divine machinery.10 Only the violent ending and the death of the hero bring a sense of irrevocability to tragedy that narrative satire withholds. Although the elements of recognition and reversal contribute significantly to the closure of tragic and comic plots, satiric plots in drama and narrative include reversals but not recognitions. Their parodic form necessarily introduces reversals of established conventions and expectations into satiric narrative, but their deluded protagonists evince little or no increased understanding of their identity, their kin, or their proper relations with others. Recognitions, like metaphors, depend on seeing resemblances between previously unrelated persons or objects; consistent with its omitting of significant recognitions, narrative satire also avoids metaphoric transferences, emphasizing literal meanings instead. Satire's depiction of reversals without recognitions helps determine its unresolved, problematic conclusions.11

Dialogical Parody

5

The open-endedness of satire partly accounts for the otherwise large number of satiric works that take the form of fragments and continuations. Breaking off the narrative without clear resolution can point to the conventional nature of literary forms, as it does in Swift's "Fragment" on the "Mechanical Operation of the Spirit"; it can suggest an unchanging vicious circle, as it does in Notes from Underground; or it can allow for continuations of the narrative's characters and concerns. Gargantua and Pantagruel and Don Quixote exemplify such narrative continuations and transformations, as do the compositional processes of Montaigne, Burton, and Joyce. At its end, Rabelais' narrative also illustrates the kind of openendedness in which an inconclusive ending takes the form of a joke that deflates expectations of resolution aroused by a long narrative. Thus "Drink!," like Sterne's story of "a COCK and a BULL," invites the reader to continue the process of reading and interpreting by declining to resolve the narrative's conflicts and ambiguities. The unsettling, inconclusive endings of Ulysses, or of Gogol's "The Nose" and "The Overcoat," produce similarly open-ended results, leaving meaning indefinite and suspending the reader uncomfortably between alternate and opposed interpretations of the work. Such satiric and ironic texts do not provide a single interpretive frame that would fix their meaning; instead they provide at least two such frames of reference. The genre's capacity for incorporating other genres constitutes another source of the open-endedness of narrative satire; through embedded forms such as letters, sermons, official documents, pastorals, accounts of travel, diaries, essays, poems, and songs, it juxtaposes languages and frames of reference to suggest the conventionality and limitation of any single frame of understanding.12 In this way, narrative satire establishes a dialogue among forms. The close link between utopia and satire illustrates the potential of such juxtapositions of forms. Thefirstpart of More's Utopia, to take the originary instance, consists of devastating satiric criticism of England's political and social institutions for perpetuating the country's deadly economic condition. The Utopian construction of the work's second half inverts England's perverse institutions to produce the imagined justice of Utopia. The Utopian child's laughter at the gold-laden ambassadors from the outside world illustrates the affinity between More's narrative and the laughing inversions of carnival. Utopia and satire throughout their history mirror each other in this, like negative and positive photographic prints, and the radically inconclusive ending of More's work indicates both a lack of formal resolution and the distinctive impossibility of compromise in the dialogue between them.

6

Introduction

If the Utopian vision implied by a satire looks backward toward a golden age in the past, and if it subjects to satiric parody a recently emerging, subversive position, then the satiric work defines its position as reactionary or conservative. On the other hand, if a satire's implied Utopian vision looks forward to necessary changes in the future, and if it parodies a long-standing, well-established institution, set of beliefs, or practice, then the work defines its perspective as subversive or progressive. Satire in verse almost always expresses a conservative view of the world in language that approaches a purely dogmatic, monological state.13 By contrast, narrative satire usually expresses a more subversive line of attack, making a more dialogical use of language. Many critics have asserted the fundamentally conservative nature of satire and the satirist.14 Indeed, verse satire does function conservatively to enforce an established cultural code by ridiculing deviations from it. However, narrative satire parodies both the official voice of established beliefs and the discourse of its opponents. In doing so, it interrogates any claims to a systematic understanding of the world. Narrative satire is therefore less tied to a conservative cultural project and potentially more subversive. An interchange between the satirist and an agreeable, pliant interlocutor provides the structure of most verse satires.15 But such a rudimentary division does not constitute a dialogical confrontation of differing views of the world; it merely provides a framework for the satirist's declamations, sermonizing, and invective. The verse satirist closely resembles the prototype of the satirist as lay preacher, acting as a moral authority to excoriate contemporary practices or individuals.16 Verse satire almost never parodies the satirist, the "I," the spokesman for the satire's values. Its authority is not bifurcated and dialogical but single and undivided. It restricts itself to one perspective and one language, exhibiting almost no desire or ability to incorporate other points of view, other voices, other genres. Even in identifying itself as the lowest of the classical genres, the least poetic and the most conversational, verse satire acknowledges the hierarchy of genres, and the validity of social and cultural distinctions between high and low, hierarchies which narrative satire contests.17 The misogynistic, xenophobic, and homophobic satires of Juvenal's first three books portray the verse satirist as a man of hatred, motivated by resentment, comforted by nostalgic sentiment, fearfully and eagerly predicting an apocalypse. Pope's Moral Essays and "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" assign a larger role than Juvenal's satires to attacks on personal enemies, but Pope's verse satires pursue the same project as Juvenal's: a rhetorically elaborate expression of scorn for women, defense of established ranks in society (even the tasteless rich are superior to the poor),

Dialogical Parody

7

and praise of a traditional culture. A comparable defense of a cultural tradition, by the early twentieth century conceived of as far in the past, combined with an anti-Semitism recalling Juvenal's hatred of Greeks and Egyptians, informs the Sweeney poems that T. S. Eliot delivers with the dourness of a lay preacher and at most a grain of irony. More ironic and more moderate than these verse satirists, Horace occasionally turns his satire against himself in his second book, but his satires explicitly embrace a quietist and thoroughly conservative political position, and his unease with the rhetoric of attack leads him to abandon satire and adopt other forms. Ironic verse satires like Horace's or Swift's "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" relinquish a heavy-handed Juvenalian assignment of undivided poetic and moral authority to the satirist or the satirist's surrogate; they broach the possibility of a more ironic and ambivalent form of verse satire. Still, instead of maintaining the traditional opposition between a Horatian or comic and a Juvenalian or tragic variety of satire, I suggest that in their sermonizing and conservatism these two kinds of verse satire resemble each other more than either resembles such narrative satires as Petronius's Satyricon or Apuleius's Golden Ass. When Horace and Swift in their poems satirize a satirist, they take a step toward the condition of narratives saturated with parody, but they do not thereby alter the consistent project of verse satire to attack what it sees as vices or follies in a poetic sermon, almost always defending a conservative perspective. Rather than leading to full-scale narrative parody, the trope of the satirist-satirized offers only a limited instance of the continuing process that subjects both sides of cultural and philosophical oppositions to parody. Such ongoing parody attains its distinctive predominance in narrative satire. In this form, a division of authority results from parody both of an original perspective and of an opposite position that received an implied sanction from the earlier parody.18 From these repeated parodies, narrative satire develops more potential than poetic satire for disruption and subversion of conventions. However, such subversion is not universal among narrative satires; they too can reinforce a prevailing perspective. Although Bakhtin does not acknowledge the possibility of reactionary uses of carnival and of carnivalesque forms such as menippean satire, parodic satire can be employed not only by critics of established institutions, but also by defenders who use such forms to attack those who differ from cultural norms, especially women, homosexuals, and foreigners. For Bakhtin, carnivals and other festive parodic forms play an unequivocally positive role as expressions of popular opposition to the grim official world. But at the conclusion of their mocking inversions of

8

Introduction

the established world, that world resumes its sway. Allowing a community to vent accumulated social pressures in a licensed transgression, a contained subversion, carnival generally helps preserve the status quo.19 Parodic literary forms, including narrative satire, similarly depend for their effect on the authority of institutions and forms which they subvert; but such containment need not completely coopt or debilitate their subversive energy. Carnival supposes only two worlds: one official, everyday, monological, and the opposite, unofficial, inverted, and ambivalent. However, parodic narrative satire is capable of challenging both an established authority and a less centralized, more dispersed configuration of authority. Sometimes it attacks only one of these objects: either the exceptions to a prevailing norm, or the prevailing norm itself, from an emerging, less established point of view. When it does so, such singly directed, monological strategies express a dogmatic purpose. The full possibility for subversion in narrative satire arises not from a single parodic inversion of an established or a challenging perspective, but from the ongoing dialogicality that inverts the original inversion, as a point of departure for conceiving further alternatives. Fully dialogical narrative satire divides the authority that informs the text, undercutting every singular perspective. The resulting multivoicedness, the unresolved clash of multiple alternatives, gives narrative satire the possibility of formulating distinctive and novel critical perspectives. In the middle ground between the two main varieties of satire, narrative satires in verse can exhibit affinities either with more backwardlooking verse satire, or with more subversive narrative satire: Pope's Dundad illustrates the first possibility, Byron's Don Juan the second. Pope's notes explain in serious self-justification that reaction and resentment motivated the writing of his poem; he does not distance himself from or undercut the authority of his satiric voice. Nor does Pope undermine the authority of the Aeneid, although he adapts many passages from it; rather, he reveres Virgil's epic as a model of both poetic and political values. This backward-looking poem well exemplifies narrative satires in verse that adopt a mock-epic strategy; they generally mock not epic, but the falling off from epic.20 The poem's apocalyptic conclusion asserts with regret and without irony the end of high culture. In sharp contrast with Pope's practice, Byron distances himself from his protagonist and qualifies the authority of his irreverent narrator, as he mocks both Romantic seriousness and classics of high culture. Exemplifying Romantic irony as it underlines its necessarily unfinished and open-ended nature, Don juan exemplifies as well the kind of narrative satire in verse that does not condemn the social

Dialogical Parody

9

and cultural forms of modernity. Byron rather adopts multiple perspectives in order to criticize the constraints of established social and literary forms. Narrative satires in prose similarly vary greatly in the extent to which they subvert established cultural forms and doctrines. Some refrain from using the dialogical potential of the form, and, like verse satires, enunciate a dogmatic and reactionary position. West's Miss Lonelyhearts and Vidal's Myra Breckenridge both use as the vehicle of their satire a protagonist who combines a female name with traditionally masculine behavior. But West's narrative, despite a proliferation of voices, maintains its interested concern in Miss Lonelyhearts, and its refusal to parody its male protagonist, to question its own satiric disposition, prevents the narrative from becoming fully dialogical. Like Miss Lonelyhearts himself, the narrative claims to be sympathetic toward innocent sufferers, women, abused children, and the physically handicapped, but it uses this pretense as a cover under which it expresses its hostility toward these sufferers and toward all who differ from the uncontested norm of the cynical white male. In Myra Breckenridge, the protagonist's transsexual operation parodically inverts the conventional view of what is feminine and masculine, as does her forcible humiliation of a representative macho man, but the narrative also ironically undercuts Myra's parodic satire when she reverts to a masculine appearance, adopts a male name, and assumes a husband's role in a parody of a happy ending. Myra Breckenridge comically and disturbingly challenges conventional understandings of masculine and feminine. Miss Lonelyhearts possesses most features of narrative satire, but it expresses and reinforces a violent resentment of relatively privileged men against those who are weaker than they, especially against women who attempt to fill conventionally masculine roles. Like other conservative or reactionary narrative satires, such as Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Waugh's Black Mischief, Miss Lonelyhearts never develops a doubly directed satiric parody. By pursuing their original satiric presuppositions, these works direct their undiluted satire against those who differ from the author or satirist, the "I" or protagonist. The single, backward-looking perspective of such satires scapegoats its objects as deserving attack, and presents the assaults themselves as healthful. Noting the similarity between such satiric violence and the practice of scapegoating, a number of critics have drawn parallels between the satirist and the scapegoat that reflect a primary focus on the nature and strategies of the satirist.21 An expanded focus that includes those who are satirized reveals rather the extent to which the marginal and weak often

10

Introduction

serve as scapegoats, as permissible objects of the satirist's verbal attacks, especially in verse satire and reactionary narrative satire. By contrast, the narrative satirist does sometimes occupy the position of the scapegoat.22 This book investigates the extent to which narrative satires may avoid scapegoating their objects by multiplying instances of parodic dialogicality to question, rather than enforce, cultural authority; it assesses as well the obstacles and limitations to such subversions.23 Material Leveling Narrative satire links parodic inversions with lowering strategies to produce its distinctive effects. The materializing, leveling energy of narrative satire contributes to satiric subversion by contesting authoritative distinctions between high and low among bodily functions, social groups, literary genres, and rhetorical operations. Satiric leveling and juxtaposing of genres carries the far-reaching implication of questioning entire systems of understanding and views of the world. The plot and the rhetoric of narrative satire cohere in accomplishing the same movement of lowering or leveling. Narrative satire reduces the spiritual and abstract to the same level as the physical and material, concentrating for this purpose on the natural functions of the body. As it depicts or alludes to the processes of ingestion, elimination, and sex, it stresses the active participation of the body in its material environment, the transformations that the body effects on the elements it incorporates into sweat, blood, saliva, urine, feces, gas, breath—even language, considered in its materiality. With this focus, narrative satire reduces all that might be heroic and noble to a common level of physical experience, which it openly acknowledges, if it does not always joyously celebrate. Epic and tragic decorum elide the processes of ingestion, elimination, and sexual activity. Of common bodily facts these high forms concern themselves only with suffering and death: epic with clinical depictions of dying, tragedy with the formal spectacle of suffering. Comedy disciplines and accommodates the wants of the body to the social form of marriage; its conclusions satisfy not individual appetites, but the needs of the community. More physically crude and less respectful toward social forms than comedy, unwilling like epic and tragedy to ascribe heroism to individuals' attempts to transcend the unavoidable constraints of the human frame, narrative satire pays unembarrassed attention to the double-edged physical phenomena that run like a submerged basso continuo under all professions of nobility. It returns high-minded, single-voiced seriousness to am-

Material Leveling

11

bivalent laughter that acknowledges birth as well as death and excrement as well as food, linking opposite poles as phases in a single ambiguous process.24 Satiric materiality thus brings claims of spirituality and assertions of philosophical abstraction down to earth, to a common denominator of understanding.25 The ludicrous, usually hypocritical pretense of cutting one's body off from the processes of the physical world and denying its products provides an inexhaustible series of objects for satire. The nymph in the "Circe" chapter of Ulysses cracks and emits the products that she tried to deny. Moreover, these bodily products have a fertilizing power that also figures in Ulysses, for instance, when Bloom's stay in the outhouse stimulates his literary imagination. Trying to live according to the conventions of chivalric romances, Don Quixote denies his need for physical nourishment and throws himself repeatedly against an unyielding and damaging reality. Sancho Panza's participation in the life of the body—eating, drinking, defecating, sleeping, also receiving beatings—criticizes the idealizing ascetic aspirations of the thin old knight. Cervantes joins satiric parody of an idealizing genre with the lowering movement of satiric materiality to produce his satiric effects in Part I. In addition, Cervantes uses the languages of the two protagonists to bring high and low close to a single level: the knight's composite of poetic and chivalric aristocratic language affects Sancho; more important, Sancho's vividly physical, proverb-laden language brings Don Quixote into contact with bodily processes, everyday life, and common wisdom:26 Narrative satire may emphasize the participation of the body in the world through a sexual as well as through a gustatory or an excremental vision. The eroticized world of Tristram Shandy reveals language to be an inexhaustible source of sexual double entendres: all abstractions and transferred meanings have their source or analogy in the processes of the lower half of the body. Narrative satire understandably experiences a renewal in a century in which Freud's model of mental and emotional processes finds general acceptance, though many twentieth-century satirists also mock Freud's system and its sway. As in Freud's understanding of the relation between psychic results and physical causes, narrative satire lowers spirituality to its physical sources, tracing spiritual excesses to physical deprivations, and, in Swift's words, deriving spiritual from carnal ecstasies.27 At the end of the "Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," Swift's narrator expresses in pointed and punning formulations the distinctive satiric reduction of the spiritual to the physical: "the Seed or Principle which has ever put Men upon Visions in Things invisible, is of a corporeal nature; . . . the Thorn in the Flesh serves for a Spur to the Spirit, . . . and [Zeal]

12

Introduction

from inflaming Brotherly Love, will proceed to raise That of a Gallant."28 The reduction of spiritual ideals to bodily facts calls into question not only the ascendancy of spirit but the very possibility of transcendance. Rendering the spiritual equivalent with the material, satire also levels high and low in social, philosophical, and literary hierarchies of value.29 In Byron's narrative satire in verse, the seasick retchings which punctuate Don Juan's protestations of eternal love debunk romantic ideals. As Byron multiplies similar instances mocking social values and institutions in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Russia, and England, it becomes clear that through his satiric materiality he means to level hierarchies and satirize the systems by which societies and their apologists attempt to contain the energies of life. Because such conventions include established literary genres as well as social and political institutions, Byron alters the tone and switches the form of his narrative frequently and jarringly to make it a composite of mock-epic, critical essay, memoir, philosophical reflection, social satire, epic, comedy, and tragedy.30 He employs a multiplicity of forms to point beyond them all to the inadequacy of forms and of any single pattern of understanding. Similarly, the second part of Don Quixote modifies the perspective implied by its original satiric parody without, however, returning to embrace chivalric romance. Cervantes shows in Part II that not only the deluded knight, but all of us construct our reality in accordance with our desires. By continuing to regard Quixote ironically, Cervantes makes the original object the catalyst, but not quite the agent, of his satire. The second part of Don Quixote thus produces its double ironies because its satiric reduction of claims to nobility expands into a questioning of all accepted systems of understanding, the prosaic system of everyday conventions as well as the poetic system of Don Quixote. As Don Quixote and Don Juan illustrate, narrative satires lead repeatedly to the conclusion that no system of explanation, whether religious, scientific, or economic, can provide a satisfactory account of the world, however absolute its claims. Juxtaposing two systems of value in Rameaus Nephew, Diderot undermines both the one, honoring respectability based on accommodation, and its opposite, which celebrates spontaneity and a cynical honesty about a rapacious society. Each order of values serves as a foil and criticism of its opposite. In Jacques the Fatalist, Diderot not only refrains from settling the argument between the servant's fatalism and the master's voluntarism, he also unsettles the hierarchy of social relations that places one above the other, and the hierarchy of literary relations that distinguishes between narrative and essay, fiction and metafictional essay. He converts vertical to horizontal polarities, employing and rupturing frames in order to explore matters whose terms they

Material Leveling

13

cannot frame. In this century, Borges, Nabokov, and others write parodic scholarly commentaries that include as well elements of the spy thriller, philosophical novel, and short story. Narrative satire has contributed significantly to the breaking down of rigidly systemized generic distinctions in the last hundred years. Because a genre can condense and imply a way of understanding the world, the parodic juxtaposition of genres by narrative satires implies their interrogation of models of understanding. In a few chapters, I use the term paradigm, with which Thomas Kuhn denotes alternate models of scientific understanding, in order to designate alternate models of cultural understanding. Despite criticisms of Kuhris theory, I find that it articulates both the explanatory power of philosophical and religious systems as well as their limitations and horizons. When applied to culture, a paradigm designates both a systematic view of the world and the forms of discourse which that view assumes and dictates. Thus, as I argue in Chapter 5, a literary genre such as tragedy, pastoral, or the detective novel can prove equivalent to a paradigm in expressing an understanding of the world.31 The reduction of spiritual to physical in satiric narrative corresponds to the rhetorical reduction of metaphors to literal meanings. Instead of using objects and characters as a means of representing abstract qualities, narrative satires return extended figurative usages to literal and material senses. At the extreme, such emphasis on the physicality of language leads the philosophers of Lagado to substitute things for words, and, in Rabelais' Fourth Book, words take on color, weight, and other physical properties. Satiric reduction of metaphorical to literal meaning often operates on idioms and clichés. When Panurge becomes obsessed with marriage, he exhibits a flea in his ear, not a figurative but a literal physical flea set in the earring he wears. The police inspector in Gogol's 'The Nose" declines to investigate the case because no respectable man would lose his nose; if having a nose tweaked constitutes an insult, then actually losing a nose must be so dishonorable as to place one beneath official attention. The displacement in such cases of figurative by literal meanings works to satirize hidebound characters such as the inspector who live within the confines of clichés and received ideas. The satiric results of rhetorical leveling thus parallel and reinforce the antisystematic implications of spiritual and physical leveling in the satiric narrative.32 Puns also serve the satiric aim of reducing abstract, figurative claims to the common denominator of the body. By repeatedly drawing attention to the double meanings of words, Sterne produces a displacement downward, so that almost any word that can signify a protuberance or an opening will carry some sexual connotation in Tristram Shandy. Ety-

14

Introduction

mological puns produce a similar reduction; tracing the meaning of a word back to its source almost always involves a return from abstract to material meanings.33 Metaphors typically use objects and phenomena as means of access to a higher, immaterial world, but puns metonymically juxtapose multiple meanings not in hierarchical relations, but on a single level. Instead of designating the abstract through the material, satiric puns level the two by reducing the first to the second. Thus, for Swift, Gibbon, and other satirists of religious enthusiasm, being inspired does not mean being possessed with the spirit, but means rather containing much air, wind, or gas.34 The opposition between metaphorical meaning and metonymical punning manifests itself, in terms of the larger narrative, in an opposition between allegory and irony. Quintilian and others argue that allegory constitutes a narrative elaboration of a metaphorical relation; by the same line of argument, an ironic passage functions as an extended metonymy or pun. A metaphor and an allegory establish a correspondence between two spheres of meaning, literal and figurative. As a mode of praise, allegory raises its subject from a lower rank to a higher one; as afigure,it implies a systematic, hierarchical, authoritarian, and cosmic order. When parody dissolves allegory, irony results. As extended metonymical figures, ironies disrupt correspondences between the literal and other worlds of meaning; they disrupt as well the systematic exposition of the cosmos that constitutes the project of most allegory. Paratactic narrative ironies instead effect a leveling movement of antiauthoritarian and antihierarchical dispraise.35 Because both thesefigurespoint to some meaning other than the literal, Quintilian could define irony as a species of allegory; for the same reason, because of their indirection, both allegory and irony have served as the instruments of satire. Since the late seventeenth century, satire has been associated with irony, but in the Middle Ages satire found its natural ally in allegory. The opposition between allegory and irony points through satire to a difference between forms of language and society in medieval, early modern, and modern periods. Whereas allegory served as the preeminent form of expression in the Middle Ages, irony has served as the predominant form of literary expression for the last three centuries.36 In the medieval world, social actions, including exchanges within markets, found their sanction in relation to a transcendam authority. A hierarchical and cosmic system of beliefs anchored in such an authority motivates allegory's movement from tangible action to incorporeal meaning, from character to idea, through figures such as personification. A national or international money market, however, dispenses with such transcendant authorization. Relations of exchange between agents in a

Material Leveling

15

monetarized market assume a calculated equivalence that reduces social relations from vertical hierarchies to horizontal associations.37 Among rhetorical forms, irony and metonymy correspond most closely to such economic forms. Rather than grounding allegorical meaning and hierarchical social relations in claims of access to a transcendant immaterial authority, irony, in which meaning passes metonymically among more nearly equivalent agents, suits those less vertical economic and social forms in which authority and belief follow from functional acceptance. Allegory and metaphor thus arise from a hierarchical society and assert a hierarchical cosmos, while irony exhibits a close affinity with a money economy that has weakened both the hierarchy of social ranks and the authority of cosmic sanctions.38 Since David Simpson maintains, and Marc Shell implies, the creative force of metaphor against the deadening effects of metonymy, perhaps 1 should explain why I view metaphor as a possible instrument of mystification and metonymy as potentially demystifying. I can see that metonymic reductions of persons to clothes and of organic to inorganic serve the interests of political, religious, and social hierarchy in celebratory contexts. However, in the context of satiric dispraising and parody, metonymy carries an opposite potential too. One could thus emphasize the extent to which monetary exchanges resemble metaphoric transferences, which effect relations between disparate things; in the commodity form, the figure takes on, or claims to have, the status of a natural form. In narrative satire, metonyms can answer and expose metaphor's claims of essential relation between commodity and labor process, or between commodities and natural forms, by reducing the figure back to its material origin, reducing metaphors to literal and concrete meanings, what seems natural and immutable to what is arbitrary and contingent. Against assertions of natural and social harmonies that may take the form of metaphors, metonymic reductions can reduce incorporeal to corporeal. Puns that yoke ideas based on contingent homophony can draw attention to similarly inessential relations between elements, such as labor and commodity, which are supposed to bear an essential, metaphoric relation to each other. Thus, metonyms and puns can serve asfiguresfor the movement from linguistic realism and philosophical essentialism to nominalism and materialism. Narrative ironies extend and elaborate these reductive metonymie strategies. Metonyms do not always function to demystify; depending on the context, either figure, metaphor or metonymy, can serve various interests and positions.39 Moreover, when metonyms expose mystified relations between humans and physical objects, through their reductions of intangible to tangible,figurativeto real, they repeat the reductive, materializing, and

16

Introduction

alienating effects of monetary forms. When metonymy works critically and satirically, it does so because the rhetorical figure constitutes a homeopathic, parodic form of the economic and social forms it discloses. In Chapter 4, I argue that this is the case in Melville's The Confidence-Man. Because they constitute interlinked forms of exchange in narratives, in markets, and in rhetoric, irony, money, and metonymy inform the structures of the realistic nineteenth-century novel from Austen to Zola. Friedrich Schlegel, Georg Lukacs, and Paul de Man have stressed the constituting element of irony in the novel, and many critics have observed and analyzed monetary, commercial, and middle-class forms as primary centers of attention in the novel. Perhaps because these commercial and rhetorical forms of exchange represent the established forms of social and figurative life from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, satire plays a submerged role in that period, and the novel incorporates many of the energies of satire, especially in the hands of Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Gogol, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Twain.40 In Bakhtin's account, narrative or menippean satire persisted as the major literary vehicle of carnivalesque parodic energies in literature until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a progressive impoverishment of carnival caused menippean satire to fade away; menippean satire served the teleological purpose of preparing the way for the novel, which in the nineteenth century realized its full potential and, in the polyphonic novel of Dostoevsky, its highest development.41 Bakhtin does not sketch or even acknowledge a history of the novel after Dostoevsky.42 However, the realistic social and psychological novel begins to give way between the wars to parodic satiric narrative as a form particularly well suited to expressing modern and contemporary cultural forms and contradictions. Works by Joyce, Zamyatin, Borges, Bulgakov, Beckett, Barth, Pynchon, and Calvino point to the strong effect satire has exerted on narrative in this century.43 From this perspective, the nineteenth century, with the novel its prevailing literary form, may represent not a period of extreme linguistic animation but a period of consolidation between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. In keeping with a primary focus on the analysis of a genre that can be recognized from ancient through modern times, I adopt for the most part a synchronic method in this study, concentrating principally on the common features linking five works of apparently wide diversity. In order to articulate a theory of narrative satire, I analyze texts that have not received very much attention as satires. To have discussed at length the Quixote, and Tristram Shandy would not have contributed very much to an

parodic

Material Leveling

17

understanding either of these texts or of satire as a genre. Conversely, it would serve little purpose to choose texts that are far removed from the acquaintance of most modern American readers—for example, the Satyre Menippée du Catholicon d'Espagne (1596) or Alfred Jarry's Faustroll.44 In addition to being moderately familiar, each of the texts I discuss has aroused sharp critical controversy concerning the genre to which it belongs. I hope that demonstrating their parodic and leveling strategies will illuminate the satiric nature of these narratives and that, in turn, recognizing them as satires will improve our ability to make sense of each. An adequate account of this genre must also involve a certain diachronic dimension, precisely because narrative satire does not claim access to a truth that transcends particular social and cultural conditions. Fully dialogical narrative satires parody an established, traditional perspective, and also the perspective implied by such an attack—a more recently articulated and emerging paradigm. Changes in the terms of the oppositions parodied in narrative satire therefore register changes in the prevailing forms of social and cultural opposition. Certain historical moments—periods of collision between one cultural paradigm and an alternative—seem to favor the writing of narrative satire. Civil war or turmoil constitute clear signs of cultural disintegration and new formation; but an increase in commercial activity and the use of new forms of exchange can also lead to the emergence of new social and cultural forms. Whether the determining cultural condition offers a sudden and dramatic stimulus or a more gradual development of alternatives, narrative satire provides a means of reflecting on the claims to understanding, as well as the limitations, of both the more firmly established and the more recently articulated form.45 After the civil wars that brought an end to the Roman republic, the first decades of the empire saw a surge in commercial activity whose social effects attracted the notice of many writers during the first century. Petronius's narrative satirizes the uneducated tastelessness of the newly rich, but it also interrogates the imperial assertion of classical values by parodying the high genres of epic, philosophical dialogue, declamation, and romance. Such parodies imply a leveling both of the hierarchy of genres and of the social hierarchy. In the two eighteenth-century texts in this study, Christianity replaces classicism as the dominant and totalizing system of explanation. Both A Tale of a Tub and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire recount satiric histories of Christianity that imply a crucial absence instead of a sacred authority at its center. To the inner spirituality of the Christian paradigm, Swift opposes a Hobbesian materialism and emphasis on exteriority. Gibbon offers a tolerant new paganism as the al-

18

Introduction

ternative to Christian fanaticism. But in addition to criticizing traditional Christianity by juxtaposing it to a more recent alternative, both Swift and Gibbon distance themselves from that newer alternative also. In the narratives of Melville and Pynchon, the American system of commerce and expansion replaces Christianity as the source of official value and understanding. Because The Confidence-Man depicts a society in which this incomplete transformation of the reigning perspective is barely accomplished, Melville first satirizes traditional Christians, showing that their self-interested attempts to reconcile spiritual and material gain lead them to material losses. But he also satirizes the transcendentalists who profit handsomely from recommending what it is unnecessary to encourage—a supreme regard for one's own material interest. His darkly comic conclusion anticipates the coming of the American civil war three years later. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon satirizes the deadening routines of late-industrial corporate America, offering the dramatic and mysterious Tristero as an alternative; however, he also distances himself from affirming either the existence or the desirability of this potentially subversive underground. Allfiveof these satirists attempt to stand outside established systems in order to achieve perspective on traditional and prevailing forms of understanding. The satiric narratives studied here parody both the orthodoxy that defines high cultural authority—in epic, romance, hymn, panegyric, or celebratory history—and the forms that contest such pieties. Parodic, dialogical satire embraces neither position, but its own procedures bear affinities with the energies that level and materialize hierarchies of cultural and social value. These narrative satirists discern a fall from a state in which falls are possible, from a condition organized as a vertical hierarchy, into a state in which all exists in paratactic juxtaposition. More reactionary satirists, often satirists in verse, seek to regain a world of purity, authority, and classical order. Subversive narrative satirists adjust their vision to this fragmented world, attempting to perceive and give expression to its grotesque, material, and nonsystematic life.

1. Satiric Parody of Classicism in the Satyricon

EAR the end of the dinner he hosts in the Satyricon, Trimalchio concludes his story about witches: "You can't get away from it— there are such things as women with special powers and midnight hags who can turn everything upside down."1 Like Trimalchio's witches, Petronius parodies the established genres of antiquity—the high genres of epic, oratory, and philosophical dialogue and the less exalted conventions of the Greek romances—and he insistently juxtaposes with these forms elements from such low forms as mime, Milesian tales (or fabliaux), and menippean satire. Petronius's mixing of genres subverts the traditional priority of the high over the low. By juxtaposing and inverting forms and conventions, he levels the classical hierarchy of genres. Similarly, Petronius reduces the functions of the body's upper parts to those of its lower parts, abstractions to material and physical concerns, and figurative language to literal meanings. Finally, reversing a principal concern of epic with transformations of nature into culture, the Satyricon delineates the opposite conversion—from cultural forms to natural ones. Petronius thus undermines the authority of high over low in literary genres, in physical and mental functions, in rhetoric, and in prevailing cultural institutions and social practices. Yet he does not merely replace high with low to produce a world turned upside-down, as Trimalchio's witches do; rather, he confounds hierarchical divisions themselves, aiming to convert high and low to a single level. Petronius accomplishes this leveling through his unrelenting and multivalent parodies.2 Parody here does not consist of simple ridicule of an author's idiosyncracies through applying his style to a ludicrous subject. Such a conception, prevalent throughout much of the last three centuries,

N

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Satyricon

unnecessarily restricts parody to a single-minded attack. Recently, however, Linda Hutcheon, Gary Saul Morson, and David Kiremidjian have advocated understanding parody as a constructive reworking of an original discourse that combines repetition and critical difference.3 All three argue that parody need not include humorous effect or ridicule; rather, its distinctive combination of critical judgment and creative force contributes to creating new forms and renewing old ones. For Mikhail Bakhtin, language in parodic discourse serves less as a transparent means of representation than as a represented material element. Taking an authorized discourse as its object of representation, parodic discourse opposes that parodied discourse to a newly emerging one, from the perspective of which the parody proceeds. Parodie dialogicality becomes most fruitful and intense when, with the multiplying of parodied discourses, the parodying discourse itself is reduced to the same level as all the other parodied discourses that express limited, interested perspectives on the world. Consequently, no discourse is authorized; all are parodied.4 Such fully parodic and dialogical discourse can reveal the limitation and incompleteness of languages and cultural forms; it provides a means of adjusting established forms to a changed world or to a changed view of the world. By refusing to confine itself to one-directional parody of a single author or form, by parodying a wide range of genres and authors, the Satyricon achieves a radical dialogicality that calls such forms and languages into question. After parodying a genre, an author, or a particular passage, Petronius parodies the position from which the parody issued, often revealing the motive behind the original parody. The Satyricon contains no direct authorial word; language in the narrative always comes refracted through parody and double parody. Parody functions not as a mere stylistic device here; it generates the form of the narrative in the Satyricon as surely as it does in Don Quixote and Ulysses.5

Parodying Genres, Leveling Hierarchies Petronius parodically reshapes and reevaluates four principal genres: Greek romance; Roman rhetorical declamation; epic, especially the Odyssey and Aeneid; and Platonic dialogue, especially the Symposium. Petronius's parodies lower these celebratory high genres to the same level as satire, comedy, and mime. Although parody of the romance may be more pervasive than parody of any other genre, demonstrating that parody also involves more difficulties, because none of the surviving romances can be

Parodying Genres, Leveling Hierarchies

21

proven to antedate the Satyricon.6 A number of factors mitigate this problem, however: we do have five complete Greek romances, dating from as early as the first century A.D. (Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe), and these works exhibit a family resemblance that allows characterizing the genre with some certainty. Moreover, fragments discovered in the last one hundred years (especially the Ninus romance) provide physical evidence that the romance dates back at least to the first century B.C. Many classical genres contributed to the formation of the romance in the Hellenistic period, including historical narratives (for short dramatic stories of historical individuals), rhetorical declamations (for informal trials and formal courtroom scenes), the Odyssey and travel narratives (for adventures in strange lands), lyric love poetry (with its idea of fated, all-conquering love), Euripidean tragedy (with its pathetic suffering and recognitions), and new comedy (with its stock character types). Since parody of romance necessarily involves parody of one or more of these genres, we might infer that parody in the Satyricon of combinations of these genres constitutes evidence of parody of romance, which makes use of these genres.7 The Satyricon and the romances are comparable in that neither constitutes a pure genre. Both take shape as hybrid genres: the romance an idealizing hybrid that uses elevated rhetoric; the Satyricon a satiric hybrid that parodically reduces elevated styles to bathos and common speech.8 The surviving Greek novels and epitomes, or plot summaries, revolve around the love and adventures of a young, idealized, nonmythological couple of unknown origins who, having been struck with love at first sight, then, from the opening to the conclusion of the narrative, endure separation and crises of travel (including storms, shipwrecks, capture by pirates, enslavement) as well as crises of love (including attempted seductions, resisted rapes, and seeming unfaithfulness through presumed marriages or prostitution). Most romances also include feigned suicides or sacrifices, presumed deaths, premature burial, and hairbreadth escapes. The narrative takes shape as a series of ordeals that each protagonist must endure while remaining faithful to the other. The protagonists express their grief, jealousy, or despair in highly rhetorical lamentations, and a climactic, rhetorically charged courtroom battle often establishes their virtue.9 The prevalence of contingent and random fortune, which moves the plot through chance meetings and close misses, misfortunes, and rescues, implies that identity in this world can be guaranteed only by surrender to the uncontrollable madness of love. In the classical period of the polis, a network of mythological, historical, political, and local meanings confers identity on the protagonists of epic, tragedy, and comedy. But in the more

22

Satyricon

cosmopolitan period of Hellenism and the empire, love that one would die to prove gives meaning to the lives of the hero and heroine of romance.10 Petronius parodically reverses many of the values implied in the early Greek romances by exaggerating or inverting their conventions. He encapsulates his lowering of the romances in his title. Satyricon takes the same genitive form as the titles of many romances, such as the Ephesiaka or Ephesian Tale, which announce a narrative of marvels and faithful love associated with a particular locale. But Satyrica, or Satyricon (with libri understood), Tales of Satyrs, announces instead a narrative of lascivious, roguish characters, in a plot similarly full of travels, coincidences, and (parodic) sentimental melodrama.11 Fortune still rules the world of his narrative, as appears from multiple chance encounters, coincidences, close brushes with disaster and drowning, the rise of slaves to wealth, and the sudden loss of riches by the wealthy. Despite such dizzying turns of fortune, Petronius's protagonists, like those of romance, remain unchanged, although Encolpius and Giton are vagabond drifters, and not the respectable hero and heroine of romance. Petronius replaces the heavenly eros of an extraordinarily chaste and beautiful high-bourgeois heterosexual couple with the earthly love of an ordinary pair of homosexual or bisexual characters, who nevertheless employ the language of high sentiment and love when they speak of their feelings. The parody satirizes these roguish, bookish, romantic, hypocritical, and deluded bohemians; but it also satirizes the heroes and heroines of the romances, since Petronius's narrative implies that all their professions of love and proofs of chastity probably issue from characters no different than his. Encolpius makes the same speeches as the idealized heroes, and Giton speaks the same language as a heroine of a sentimental romance. Petronius's satire of the conventional, excessively virtuous characters strikingly resembles Fielding's satire of comparable characters in the early idealizing novels of Richardson.12 Petronius repeatedly ridicules the melodramatic willingness of the protagonists of the romances to die as proof of the intensity of their love. In the course of a few chapters, Encolpius and Giton pretend five suicide attempts (80, 94, 108); both threaten to castrate themselves to eliminate the cause of their problems (108, 132); they twice request to be killed (79, 101); and Ascyltus proposes they cut Giton in half, as he and Encolpius have divided the rest of their belongings (79, 80). Petronius frequently provides props that emphasize the theatricality of the scene, for example, the blunted razor with which Giton pretends to cut his throat (94) and his genitals (108). The comic hollowness of such farcical lovers' play (fabula inter amantes luditur, 95.1) follows from its repeated lack of any consequences. Whether or not there existed a comic variety among the

Parodying Genres, Leveling Hierarchies

23

early romances, more physical and more ironic than the idealizing kind,13 Petronius clearly adopts a strategy of carrying to the extremes of parody the self-involved pathos of the idealizing romances. Petronius uses parodic farce to deflate not only the melodramatic posing of Encolpius and Giton, but also the rhetorical counterpart of such posing, the sentimental and self-regarding lamentations which figure largely in the romances. In situations that call for emotional responses, Encolpius produces stock literary responses, hackneyed representations of melodramatic emotion. When he denounces Ascyltus and Giton for abandoning him, for example, he echoes oratory and epic, and, by inference, the synthesis of these two in romance. Encolpius characterizes Giton as "a boy who went into skirts instead of trousers, . . . who played the part of a woman in a slaves' prison, who after going bankrupt, and changing the tune of his vices, has broken the ties of an old friendship, and shamelessly sold everything in a single night's work like a follow-me girl" (81.5). It is hard to see how Giton could have been bankrupt when still a boy, until we realize that Encolpius here adapts Cicero's Philippics to suit his own case. Cicero asks Mark Antony: "Do you remember that, while yet in your boyish gown, you were bankrupt? . . . You assumed a man's gown and at once turned it into a harlot's. At first you were a common prostitute, the fee for your infamies was fixed, and that not small; but Curio quickly turned up, who withdrew you from your meretricious trade, and, as if he had given you a matron's robe, established you in an enduring and stable wedlock."14 In addition to parodically equating Giton with Antony, the close parallel here calls into question the accuracy of everything Encolpius says about Giton, since it is borrowed from this established model of Roman oratory. In addition, rather than raising himself to the level of a Cicero by this means, Encolpius more effectively discredits himself, because, as he reveals earlier in the same monologue, his crimes exceed even those of Ascyltus and Giton, whom he has been addressing: "[Was it for this that] I fled from justice, I cheated the arena, I killed my host[?]" (81.3). This question parodically echoes Aeneas's similar question on the night of Troy's fall: "Was it for this, my gracious mother, that you saved me from the blade, the fire?"15 In such instances, Petronius compounds his parodies of individual works by mixing and contaminating different genres within a single extended parodic passage. Petronius extends this travestying parallel between a roguish gypsy scholar jealously searching for his former male companions at midday in a coastal Italian city with Aeneas trying desperately to defend his family during the night of his city's destruction. Encolpius describes rushing out of his inn to pursue Giton and Ascyltus in language that closely

24

Satyricon

echoes Aeneas's furious search for Greeks among the burning buildings of Troy: both Encolpius and Aeneas speak of strapping on their swords, rushing out of doors, sighting down porticos, thinking of nothing but slaughter (Aen. II, 315-317, 670-672, 761; Sat. 82.1-2). But Encolpius sits down to eat a full meal (to keep up his strength) before going out to pursue his furious revenge. With this interruption, Petronius satirically undercuts the claims of literary conventions by opposing them to the physical needs of the body. The search concludes abortively when a soldier or bully (miles, . . . sive nocturnus grassator, 82.2) challenges Encolpius, pointing out that soldiers don't wear white gym shoes (phaecasiati, 82.3), and tells him to hand over his sword; Encolpius, this second Aeneas, does so. Encolpius's melodramatic, literary posturing collapses anticlimactically. The entire episode takes shape as a multilayered parody of the Philippics and the Aeneid, of oratory and epic combined. In parodying specific passages from epic and oratory, Petronius may also be parodying a specific romance; at any rate, he was parodying two genres which, when combined as here, must have contributed largely to shaping the generic conventions of romance in the century and a half before his time. Moreover, this episode shows that Petronius's parodies do not leave the high genres untouched, even in parodic passages that may primarily satirize melodramatic romance. Petronius implies an equivalence between the liaisons of Mark Antony and Giton, which has some basis in the behavior of the two, and he exposes the conventionality of the ennobling epic narrative of the Aeneid. In this way, Petronius often fashions his own text through parodying multiple texts of different genres. For example, after the shipwreck in a storm, Encolpius on the beach sees a drowned man offshore, about whom he wonders gloomily, in lines that closely parallel those of Alcyone at the end of Book XI of Ovid's Metamorphoses: "Maybe there is a wife waiting cheerfully at home for this man in a far-off land, or a son or a father" (Sat. 115.9). But whereas Alcyone's melancholy reflection, aroused by a dream of her husband's drowning, gives way to her wrenching recognition that the body is in fact that of her husband, Encolpius's unmotivated rhetorical lamentation reaches a bathetic conclusion: "So much for man's mortal plans . . . Just look at how the man floats" (115.11). When Encolpius recognizes the drowned man as his former enemy and owner of the ship both were just sailing on, he does not reflect on his relations with the man or on the small margin by which he himself escaped drowning. Instead, interested only in the idea that the body floats, Encolpius launches into another declamation, which echoes many passages in Seneca on the absurdity of caring about what happens to our bodies after death.16 Encolpius's school exercise bears no emotional relation to the body on the beach. At

Parodying Genres, Leveling Hierarchies

25

the conclusion of his speech on the empty conventionality of disposing of corpses by burning them, Encolpius reports, without acknowledging any inconsistency, that he and the other survivors burned Lichas's body (115.20). Such discrepancies illustrate the inconsequentiality of Encolpius's declamations, their utter lack of relation with his experience and actions. In Ovid's poem, Alcyone grieves deeply because she recognizes the magnitude of her loss; in Petronius's parody, Encolpius has recourse to a declamation against the conventional disposition of corpses. He uses the conventional form of a declamation to distance and buffer himself from recognizing the material fact of death.17 Because heightened emotionalism characterizes rhetorical declamations as well as romances of love, parodic satire of those who mistake the conventions of romance for actuality dovetails into parodic satire of practitioners of declamation. Petronius parodies contemporary declamatory rhetoric in order to satirize imperial political and social forms. Romans of the first century knew that training in declamation constituted the cornerstone of their educational system, and many lamented a decline in the quality of oratory from that of the previous century. Almost no writers or speakers, however, openly designated as the cause of this decline the change in political form from republic to empire. Depriving public assemblies of the power to decide policies, the imperial system made public speaking unnecessary for the conduct of public affairs. But, paradoxically, the importance of rhetorical training in the educational system increased even as the empire eliminated the political uses of oratory. The difference between oratory and declamation registers this change. In my usage, oratory refers to public speaking in the late republic when speeches in assemblies and courts were able to shape political decisions. Declamation, on the other hand, refers to speeches delivered in schools, where their inconsequentiality reflects the irrelevance of public speaking to policy under the empire. While an energetic, relatively independent intellectual who was a good public orator could advance through political activity in the late republic, intellectuals under the empire often became professors of declamation and were generally much more dependent on a powerful or wealthy patron. Such dependence of intellectuals on patrons in the first century parallels the dependence of intellectuals in general on the good will of the emperor himself. Petronius satirizes the reduced standing of men of intellectual energy under the empire through the conversation with which the surviving portions of the Satyricon begin. As the text now opens, Encolpius is energetically attacking a professor of rhetoric, Agamemnon (a general in the art that under the empire has replaced the art of war), whom he ac-

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cuses of being responsible for the contemporary decline of eloquence. Because school performance of declamations on assigned, often sensational topics bears little or no relation to courtroom performance, Encolpius says, young graduates feel they have entered another world when they attempt to become advocates. To reverse this decline in eloquence, Encolpius would prescribe a severe diet of classical Greek writers in the high genres—epic, tragedy, ode, history—all of them dead at least four hundred years before his own time. Agamemnon interrupts Encolpius, but, rather surprisingly, only to agree with his harsh attack. Agamemnon maintains that teachers of rhetoric merely satisfy parents' demand for a superficial education; if he and the others were more demanding, they would lose their fees. When Agamemnon sketches an ideal course of preparation for a poet, he, like Encolpius, emphasizes the Greeks as models, although he also recommends Cicero and a few other unnamed Romans. Most critics have held that the extreme Atticist position expressed by Encolpius and Agamemnon approximates Petronius's own views; but some maintain that Petronius undercuts these views by putting them in the mouths of such unsavory characters.18 Agamemnon lends support to this possibility when, to justify his curriculum, he uses two striking similes. Professors of rhetoric, he says, are "like the parasites of comedy, cadging dinners out of their rich friends; they think first about what is calculated to please their audience. . . . A teacher of rhetoric is like a fisherman; he must put the bait on his hook that he knows the little fish will rise for" (3.3-4). In Agamemnon's cynical view, the art of rhetoric consists of saying what rich men want to hear in exchange for dinner invitations and pretending to teach their children in exchange for fees. He has presumably used his rhetorical ability to obtain invitations for himself and some friends to dinner at Trimalchio's house. Encolpius follows the same strategy here: he uses a clichéd attack on the decline of eloquence to impress Agamemnon and obtain invitations to dinner.19 As with Agamemnon, his appearance at Trimalchio's table marks his successful use of rhetoric. This discussion, which appears to be a heated debate about the decline of eloquence, thus proves to be neither a debate nor about the decline of eloquence, but rather a reciprocal confidence game in which assertions of decadence serve as strategic gambits that help one obtain the prize of a free dinner.20 Rather than diagnosing oratorical decadence, these speeches exemplify it, through their reduction of rhetoric to cynicism and flattery. The Satyricon repeatedly shows that those who rail most against decadence have the most to gain by such declamations. The narrative focuses on the results that forms of discourse obtain, not only on the apparent meaning of a discourse. Petronius frequently depicts occasions when

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the ends obtained by reforming discourse contradict its overt meaning; he shows that the discourse of rigorous reform occupies the same level as the discourse of flattery that it attacks. Thus, the discourses of Agamemnon and Encolpius are not discourses in which Petronius chooses to represent his own opinions but rather constitute the represented subject of Petronius's parodic discourse.21 Although contemporary Romans focused on education or, more commonly (like Eumolpus in par. 88), on luxury as the cause of the decline of oratory after Cicero's day, their very avoidance of the unmistakable change from republic to principate testifies to the close connection between the changed political conditions and the enervating separation of oratory from its political uses in the assemblies or in the courts. Seneca the Elder recounts that Titus Labienus, who retained the partisan passions and free speech of the republic into the principate of Augustus, committed suicide when his books were ordered burned by the Senate (Controversiae 9, pref. 4-7). Augustus prosecuted for treason Cassius Severus, another orator whose free asperity in his satiric speeches and writings linked him with the earlier age, and he died destitute in exile (Controversiae 3, pref. 12-18).22 Also as early as Augustus's time, the declaimer Cestius was emphasizing the manner in which a counselor should speak to a king: "in Alexander's presence one's opinions must be given in such a way that his feelings are soothed by lavish flattery, though some moderation must be preserved so as to give an impression not offlatterybut of due respect."23 One needs not only toflatterbut, more important, to conceal one's flattery. During dinner with Trimalchio, Encolpius and Agamemnon demonstrate their real lack of interest in the decline of learning and rhetoric when their host turns Homer, Greek mythology, and the classical genres on their heads, and neither of the scholars says a word; they may laugh under their breath, but they live by their sycophancy. The relation between these intellectuals and Trimalchio closely reiterates the contemporary relation between intellectuals and the emperor. In the Satyricon, and especially in the Cena, Petronius meditated on his relation to the political authority of Nero, as Thomas More meditated on his relation to Henry VIII in thefirstbook of Utopia. There, Hythlodeus ("speaker of nonsense") argues the impossibility of remaining uncorrupted as counselor to a monarch, yet More became a counselor to Henry. Petronius served honorably as governor of the province of Bithynia and suffect consul in Rome. When his successes brought him to Nero's court, he adopted a strategy of employing at times mock insults, at times ironically excessive flattery.24 Like More, Petronius speaks ironically and indirectly, through a fictional character from whom he distances himself by making him the dim-witted

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butt of the jokes at the dinner and throughout the narrative. In the relation between Encolpius or Agamemnon and Trimalchio, Petronius constructs an image of the relation between intellectuals and Nero; he portrays the intellectual as a social parasite who accepts the powerful and rich man's largesse and lauds him to his face, yet judges him behind his back as vulgar, untalented, and uneducated. However, for all the laughter or scorn directed against him, Trimalchio remains incomparably more powerful economically, just as Nero remains incomparably more powerful politically, than the scholars and artists at their tables. Significantly, both Trimalchio and Nero possess a distinctive artistic style: Nero favored short epic, hymn, and elegy,25 whereas Trimalchio's inversions of convention and mixing of genres resemble Petronius's own parodic strategies. Petronius's satire of declamations and declaimers exposes the institutionalizing of flattery under the empire. His parodic satire of epic, especially the Aeneid, the epic of the Roman empire, undermines the justification for the establishment of the empire itself. Petronius parodically revises the Odyssey not as the primary epic of his culture, but as the founding travel narrative. Poseidon's angry opposition causes Odysseus's long wanderings and his varied adventures and thus shapes the plot of the Odyssey. An angry divinity, usually Artemis or Aphrodite, figures also in the early romances of travel, and Juno, of course, plays this role in the Aeneid. The surviving portions of the Satyricon indicate that Priapus, rather than one of the majestic Olympians, opposes and frustrates Encolpius on his wanderings.26 Odysseus's name, derived from the verb meaning "to suffer pain and to cause it," expresses his role as giver and receiver of trouble in the Odyssey.27 Encolpius, whose name means "in the groin," encounters myriad opportunities for sexual enjoyment; but he is afflicted with impotence until the penultimate page of the surviving text.28 Petronius thus parodically juxtaposes the aimless, dim-witted, impotent Encolpius with the determined, cunning, and virile Odysseus. Odysseus achieves reunion with his wife and reclaims his kingdom; Encolpius regains merely the ability to become tumescent. In the episode Petronius parodies more frequently than any other from the Odyssey, Odysseus earns Poseidon's anger by blinding the god's son, Polyphemus. The complete Satyricon must have contained an account of the origin of Priapus's anger with Encolpius; in accordance with Petronius's methods, this scene probably bore a close parodic relation to Odysseus's blinding of the Cyclops. If the cultural authority of the Greek epic diminished under the Roman empire, the Aeneid, completed two generations before the Satyricon, had already attained its place as Rome's authoritative epic. Petronius's numerous parodies of the Aeneid, perhaps outnumbering those of

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any other work, thus carry a sharp challenge to his own society. Petronius concentrates his parody on some of the most solemn and tragic moments in the Aeneid as he contests its classic affirmation of Rome's imperial culture.29 In pursuing his satiric strategy, Petronius often associates the weak, pretty, and inconstant boy Giton with the young heroes Euryalus and Nisus and even, on occasion, with Dido. When Encolpius and Ascyltus are about to fight over him, Giton begs them to turn their sword on him (80.4), echoing the words with which Nisus urges the Rutulians to kill him rather than his companion (Aen. IX, 427-429). When Eumolpus compliments Giton on his fortune and parentage (94.1), he closely echoes Aeneas's compliment to Dido, "What glorious parents gave birth to so noble a child?" (Aen. I, 606), then with a leer adapts the epitaph for Nisus and Euryalus (IX, 446-450), in which Virgil asserts that the fame of the pair will survive in his poem as long as Romans live around the Tarpeian rock. In Petronius's work, Virgil's lines indeed survive, as he had prophesied, but not in their original context. Petronius mockingly lowers Virgil's stately praise to a pick-up line with which Eumolpus attempts to seduce Giton. Moreover, by extending the homosocial companionship of the two soldiers into the homosexuality of the affected bohemians, Petronius irreverently questions the value of the act that Virgil elegiacally celebrates: dying in combat for one's companion and for Rome. Petronius also profanes and parodies the solemnity of the Aeneid during Encolpius's later half-hearted attempt to castrate himself out of frustration at his impotence. When he tries three times to grasp his penis, which eludes him each time (132.8), the lines describing his efforts unmistakably echo those in which Virgil describes Aeneas's attempts to embrace the shade of his wife Creusa: Thrice there I strove to throw my arms about her neck; thrice the form, vainly clasped,fledfrom my hands. (Aen. II, 793) Thrice I seized in hand the dreaded axe, thrice, fainter than a little cabbage stalk, I shrunk from the steel. (Sat 132.8) Moreover, when Encolpius scolds his recalcitrant penis (132.11), he encounters the same reaction as Aeneas does when he meets Dido in the underworld and swears by all that is sacred that he did not abandon her willingly:

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she, turning away, kept her looks fixed on the ground and no more changes her countenance as he tries to speak than if she were set in hard flint or Marpesian rock. (Aen. VI, 469-470) it stayed there turned away with eyes fixed on the ground and at this unfinished speech its looks were no more stirred than pliant willows are or poppies on their weary necks. (Sat. 132.11) For his last line, instead of Virgil's simile for Dido's unforgiving silence, Petronius has substituted Virgil's simile of Euryalus's head drooping on his shoulder as he dies, "like poppies on their weary necks" (Aen. IX, 436). Through the grotesque conflation of Creusa and Dido with Encolpius's penis, Petronius implies that Aeneas's various wives exist not as independent characters for him, but as interchangeable narcissistic projections; he suggests also that both Virgil's protagonist and his own serve as their own wives. Moreover, the comparison of the deaths of Dido and Euryalus to Encolpius's attempted self-castration implies a significant difference: Encolpius's failure allows his penis a chance to recover life, a chance not available to Dido, Euryalus, or any of those who die for the sake of Aeneas's mission. Petronius's indecent parody implies that Aeneas, not Encolpius, has disabled himself from being fully human. As with his parody of Virgil's epitaph for Nisus and Euryalus, Petronius disputes and mocks the argument sanctioned by Virgil's epic that necessary sacrifices sanctify the founding of Rome and empire; he profanely subverts the established justifications for the imperial order. For the same reasons that Petronius parodies Aeneas's dutiful transcendence of his personal wants and satisfactions, he parodically subverts Plato's assertion that every thinking person has a duty to transcend the realm of physical desire, to rise to a love of abstract knowledge. When Trimalchio goes away to relieve himself in the middle of supper (41-47), the conversation among his guests parodically revises the after-dinner speeches in Plato's Symposium.30 Both works present five or six speeches related in theme, progressing from the shorter and more rudimentary to the longer and more elaborate, which rework earlier arguments to produce a cumulative effect. Such parallels bring into relief the divergences between the two texts. Plato's aristocratic diners include some of the most famous of all Athenians; Trimalchio's guests carry names that indicate their Near Eastern and servile origins—Dama, Seleucus, Habinnas. Plato's speakers use elaborate syntax, elevated language, and frequent allusions to epic in their eulogies of love; Petronius's speakers use short sentences, colloquial speech, clichés, and proverbs in their complaints and gossip about

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matters of the day. The first speaker strikes a characteristic note: "The day is nothing; you turn around, and it's night" (41.10). Seleucus follows with "I was at a funeral today. Poor old Chrysanthus. . . . We're just walking bladders of wind, . . . no more than bubbles" (42.3-4). Like these two, each of the succeeding speakers asserts the instability of fortune and the ephemerality of human life: Phileros, remarking on the dead man as Fortune's favorite, nevertheless observes that even if Chrysanthus was an old lecher, "all he could take with him were his pleasures" (43.8); Ganymedes complains about decadence, inflation, corruption, and drought. Echion looks forward to a promised "slaughterhouse" at the next gladiatorial games, which will earn their sponsor "an eternal name" (45.6); he hopes to live on through his children, whose practical training occupies his thoughts. Petronius's speakers express their concerns with social issues in concrete terms, Plato's with philosophical issues in abstract and idealizing terms. Nevertheless, the obsession of the freedmen in the Satyricon with the power of fortune, with the transience of human life, and with what remains of a person after death, illustrates the same point that Plato's Diotima makes: that the love which animates all humans, the desire for the perpetual possession of the good, logically involves a desire for immortality as well. Diotima exhorts her listeners to rise from the level of procreation, which approximates immortality in a physical form, through increasingly abstract satisfactions to an intellectual identification with the mystical, immaterial good. Petronius reduces all the higher steps in Diotima's ladder of love back to the original level of material concerns and physical desires. Some people seek only material and physical pleasures; some seek to survive through the procreation of children; some through their reputation for generosity, for example, by presenting gladiatorial contests; some through memories engraved in funeral monuments. Trimalchio, of course, plans an elaborate funeral monument. One could infer that his efforts in the gastronomic and theatrical arts of the dinner table also respond to the need to survive in reputation and compensate partially for his childlessness. The symposium in the Satyricon does not include or point toward a realm higher than the material. By omitting any allusion to intangible and eternal forms, by reducing Plato's Ideas to material concerns and physical desires, Petronius sharply parodies Plato's dialogue and his idealistic philosophy. Denying the possibility of transcending the material world, Petronius shows the continuity between the vulgar, material freedmen in Rome and the aristocratic philosophers in Athens: both desire to survive in some form after death. Petronius thus irreverently challenges the hierarchies of value embodied in romance, declamation, epic, and Platonic dialogue. Deeply suspicious of such classical traits as beauty, harmony, and order, Petronius

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fashions his text instead through parodic leveling of elevated forms.31 He satirically subverts the progression from earthly to heavenly love either in Platonic philosophy or in the Greek romances. He undermines the rhetorical hierarchy that subordinates colloquial speech to formal declamation or epic poetry.32 He disputes as well the imperial assertion of a hierarchy among nations with Rome at the apex. He thus converts systems of vertical oppositions to paratactic juxtapositions, implying a leveling and tolerance of heterogeneous languages and forms of understanding. Material Life, Literal Meanings The classical body preserves a decorous surface; a cool and finished object of formal beauty, it lacks openings and protuberances. The grotesque body of satiric narratives, on the other hand, represents not a static image, but rather the processes of interchange with other bodies and with organic materials through the orifices and lower parts: principally the processes of eating, drinking, eliminating, and sex. Satiric narrative lowers the area of concern from the upper half to the lower half of the body.33 The Symposium exemplifies the classical depiction of the body, slighting the contents of the meal and the physical functions of the diners to focus on their intellectual productions. The Satyricon lowers such an abstract symposium, or drinking together, by paying close attention during Trimalchio's feast to eating, drinking, and elimination, and elsewhere to the processes of sexual life.34 Satiric reduction from abstract to physical in the depiction of characters' behavior involves a corollary, punning reduction from abstract to physical meanings of language. Eumolpus consistently and insouciantly reduces philosophical ideals to sexual behavior, andfigurativeto literal meanings. In his story of the Pergamene boy, for example, he gains access to his young student by affecting the severe modesty of a real philosopher, incapable of tolerating indecent talk (85.2). After his pupil has first granted and then again refused Eumolpus's wishes, he whispers in the boy's ear words dictated by his libido distenta (87.2). Considering the abstract noun, the phrase could mean Eumolpus's "delayed longing"; but the concrete adjective designates in addition a physical meaning—an "enlarged or extended desiring," that is, his erection. The physicality underlying the languages of philosophy and poetry figures in many other sayings of Eumolpus. When he plays a shipwrecked rich and childless man in order to snare the legacy-hunters of Croton, and a matron named Philomela (who in myth kills her own chil-

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dren) commends her young children to his care and goodness (bonitas, 140.2), Eumolpus accepts the implicit invitation to teach them what he knows. But in order to preserve an appearance of debility, he asks the girl to sit on his highly recommended goodness (bonitas, 140.7), to learn, as some translators have it, from his "uprightness," while a slave imparts a rotary movement to the two of them from underneath the bed. Pretense to virtue serves as a convenient cloak for the physical transaction; the pun correspondingly reduces the abstract to the sexual level of meaning. Chrysis, the lady's maid in Croton, provides a further instance of. the process of abstract giving way to sexual meanings. In a common comic and satiric inversion, her lady, Circe, relishes only gladiators and ruffians while the maid is interested only in men of the upper class: "I never yet yielded to a slave. . . . I may be only a maid, but I never sit except in the knights' seats" ("nunquam tamen nisi in equestribus sedeo," 126.9, 10). As Chrysis uses it, succubui carries not only thefigurativemeaning, "yield to," but also its literal meaning, "lie under," with obvious sexual significance. Moreover, when Chrysis locates her desires in the first fifteen rows of the theater reserved for knights, she implies that she sits in the knights' laps as well as in their seats. The inversion of desires on the part of the mistress and maid also mixes and levels classes in the sexual partnerships that result. Similarly, the letter from her mistress Circe to Encolpius consists of a series of witty and cutting double entendres on Encolpius's impotence (129.4-10), as it parodies a romance convention of lovers exchanging letters even when they are living near each other. All these characters reduce chaste ideals and abstract language to sexual behavior and literal meanings. Trimalchio lowers abstract to physical meanings in matters of food and elimination. He characteristically strains politeness by visiting the latrine in the middle of dinner, and on his return advises his guests that they should not hold anything in, since "none of us was born solid" (47.4). His seemingly idiosyncratic sentiments echo those of the emperor Claudius, who in a well-known mark of his tolerance, did not object to flatulence at his table.35 Trimalchio often uses foods themselves as punning reductions of abstract to physical categories. In the zodiac dish (35), for example, each sign around the circumference of the plate carries an appropriate kind of food: over Virgo—a young sow's udder; over Pisces—two fish. In the apophoreta (56), which resemble our door prizes,36 each person receives a ticket with a riddling phrase on it that the gifts answer through strained puns with ordinary foods or worthless objects: "fly paper" (muscarium) leads to a present of Attic honey (mel Atticum); "headrest" (cervical) produces not a pillow but a neckpiece (offla collaris). Trimalchio's puns on foods in his zodiac dish and his apophoreta

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arouse and then deflate expectations of meaning. Suspending meaning in this way leaves his guests uncertain whether to laugh, groan, or remain impassive; it makes them the objects of the jokes. The silly but disquieting apophoreta amuse Trimalchio because they allow him to exercise his power as host; they held the same appeal for Augustus.37 Art, Death, and the Roman Empire Petronius's parodic leveling ultimately extends to parodies of fundamental institutions and social practices which call into question the precedence of culture over nature that epics celebrate. Trimalchio's dishes move in this direction when they make use of conceptual puns that conflate process and product, nature and culture, life and death. In the first roast (40.1-8), for example, the cooked pig appears to have given birth to suckling piglets, but these prove to be made of cake. Then, when the pig's belly is sliced open, live thrushes fly out; in an artificial confusion of species, the boar gives birth to birds, which are recaptured and redomesticated. Morever, the boar itself wears a freedman's cap because, although captured for culture when it was killed and cooked, it was dismissed by the previous day's diners, and thus returns a freedman. Through such staging of his dishes, Trimalchio confuses the boundaries between culture and nature, cooked and raw, servile and free.38 He aims to produce moments in which the first category in each of these oppositions wears the appearance of the second, to represent natural processes by artificial products, life by death.39 Of course, the boar is not pregnant with birds, nor does it give suck to pastry piglets, nor is it free, nor,finally,is it alive. For the second roast (47.8-13, 49.1-10), Daedalus, the cook, leaves with a live boar and returns quickly with a cooked one, which, when questioned, he confesses he has forgotten to gut. After all the diners (except a livid Encolpius) beg their host to be merciful and not to whip the cook, Trimalchio relents and orders the pig gutted at the table. Daedalus opens the boar's belly, and sausages and blood puddings pour out. Again, what the diners (and readers) expect to be cooked seems for a time to be raw, then proves to be cooked after all, but with a clever and grotesque resemblance to its natural state: the cooked sausages pun on live intestines. Trimalchio here and elsewhere lends cultural products an appearance of participating in natural processes, such as digestion or reproduction. Most of the guests play their part byflatteringtheir host's power and clemency, a trait Trimalchio is eager to display on many other occasions (41.7, 52.5, 54.5, 71.3). Tacitus reports that Nero also sought occa-

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sions on which to demonstrate his clemency, even allowing unfounded charges to be brought against someone in order to be able to pardon the accused and save him from being whipped.40 Trimalchio shows little interest in sex except as an unobjectionable way of pleasing his master and mistress on his way up from servitude (75.11). But his theatrical imitations of reproduction in his dishes apparently provide a surrogate and greater satisfaction than sex and reproduction, because through them he uses his position as a rich host to garner flattery and applause. They also provide him with a way of momentarily and imaginatively seeming to overcome death. Trimalchio is obsessed with death; he carries in mind the date of his own death as foreseen by a soothsayer, and he responds to the prospect of death with works of art—culinary, theatrical, verbal, or pictorial—which lend a new if unreal existence to creatures who are already dead. His dishes, riddles, puns, and stories consistently substitute cultural production for natural reproduction. This pattern underlies all the courses at his dinner, as well as the anecdote of the Sybil, the stories of witches, and even the encounters with the guard dog.41 But his elaborate dishes and riddling puns do not in fact offer any consolation for death, or accommodation between death and life; rather, after the trompe l'oeil effect wears off, Trimalchio's presentation unintentionally emphasizes that the dishes consist of dead animals even as it aestheticizes that fact. Trimalchio does not, of course, actually overcome death or elide the boundary between death and life; instead, he engages in an artistic confidence game that depends on his audience's willingness to play along for the ride and the food. Trimalchio's artistic efforts, however, do resemble those of Petronius: by means of his culinary simulations of reproduction, by giving dead cultural products the appearance of natural processes of life, he parodically levels the conventional vertical relation of culture over nature. Trimalchio's inversions resemble Petronius's, with the significant difference that they have no satiric object. Petronius, on the other hand, extends his satirical lowering of elevated forms and philosophies by connecting Trimalchio with four of the first five emperors: Nero, through his thirst for applause and his inconsistent and cruel acts of clemency; Claudius, through his reversal of taboos on excretory products and flatulence; Augustus, through his punning dinner prizes; and Tiberius, through the story Trimalchio tells (along with Pliny and Dio Cassius) of that emperor beheading a man who invented unbreakable glass (51). Through the composite figure of Trimalchio, Petronius satirically parodies the emperors themselves, reducing their idiosyncrasies to the same level as those of rich, eccentric imperial freedmen (such as Pacuvius, whose mock funerals were

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notorious).42 Petronius thus satirizes the defining institutional feature of the empire. Yet his parodic lowerings also resemble those of two of these emperors (Claudius and Augustus) as well as those of Trimalchio himself. Petronius incorporates a similarly radical ambivalence in Encolpius, through whom he parodically reverses the conventional portrayal and understanding of scapegoating. In his commentary on Virgil, in a passage included as Fragment I in most editions of the Satyricon, Servius writes that "whenever the people of Massilia were burdened with pestilence, one of the poor would volunteer to be fed for an entire year out of public funds on food of special purity. After this period he would be decked with sacred herbs and sacred robes, and would be led through the whole state while people cursed him, in order that the sufferings of the whole state might fall upon him; and so he was cast out. This account has been given in Petronius."43 Some translations have incorporated this fragment into the narrative of the Satyricon to give the surviving text greater closure.44 Such a conjectural extension of the text usually includes throwing one or both of the remaining protagonists (Encolpius and Eumolpus) over a cliff to die. However, the scapegoating in Marseilles came most probably not at the end of the novel, but near its beginning.45 In the lost episode to which Servius refers, Encolpius seems to have turned to his advantage a secular and cynical understanding of the mechanism of scapegoating. In Encolpius, Petronius may offer a combination of a scapegoat and a confidence man. When thrown out of Marseilles, Encolpius would be in better shape, not worse, as a result of a year's worth of excellent free meals, and he would melt back into the miscellaneous population to become an urban Everyman of Nero's empire. The Satyricon, then, shows that those whom the process of scapegoating asserts to be different and evil are in fact indistinguishable from those who scapegoat them. By focusing not on the history of the community that expels the scapegoat, but on the scapegoat's adventures after expulsion as the unifying thread of his narrative, Petronius levels the vertical opposition between persecutor and victim that scapegoating seeks to establish. As an actual scapegoat in the narrative, Encolpius serves as a vehicle for Petronius's satire of an invidious social practice that parallels his satire of the institutions of empire. However, as a remarkably foolish narrator who is often the object of his author's satiric parodies, Encolpius occupies a peripheral role even in his own narrative. Throughout the surviving text, Encolpius serves as fool and dupe in his relations with Ascyltus and Giton, Proselenus and Oenothea, and Circe and Chrysis. He is also the butt of the jokes at Trimalchio's feast; by contrast with Trimalchio, who stages illusions and performs in his own farcical plays, Encolpius repeatedly proves himself inca-

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pable of seeing through theatrical jokes, tricks, and trompe l'oeil effects. As in other narrative satires, the protagonist of the Satyricon experiences reversals of fortune and expectation without reaching any consequent recognitions. The narrative consistently reveals the narrator to be extraordinarily naive and slow-witted as well as impotent. As an unwitting vehicle of satiric revelations, like Quixote, Gulliver, or Candide, he provides the satirist with a useful buffer between himself and his satire of established powers.46 Cervantes, Swift, and Voltaire, like Petronius, can disclaim destructive satiric intentions by ascribing any apparently satiric effects produced by their works to the extreme foolishness of their protagonists, who. do not understand the imperatives of established institutions.47 Such irony serves to protect the author, but it also involves satire of the eternally naive and uncomprehending protagonist. Thus, Petronius questions the institution of scapegoating and mocks scapegoaters through Encolpius's tricking of them, but at the same time, he scapegoats Encolpius, deflecting his anxieties about the satire he writes onto the fictional character who bears the opprobrium in the satiric narrative. Through Trimalchio and Encolpius, then, Petronius satirizes the political and social order of his day, and he also refracts his own perspective in the narrative. Trimalchio's art of staging and his artistic leveling resemble Petronius's, but Petronius lacks Trimalchio's power, which resembles the emperors'. Being a parodic and satiric artist, Petronius does not share Encolpius's farcical dullness and naiveté, but his position in relation to political authority does resemble Encolpius's marginal status. Even so, Petronius is implicated in the policies and tone of the court of Nero and of the emperors he satirizes, though his role as arbiter of taste was limited to matters of entertainment and art.48 As a courtier, facing an extremely restricted range of choices if he wanted to preserve some independence of spirit, he produced ironic, inverted flattery. He also wrote his parodic Satyricon libri. Within that narrative, he satirizes both the position resembling that of the emperor, and the position of the powerless but educated guest which resembles his own. He authorizes one-sided satire neither of the tasteless powerful figure nor of the dependent hanger-on. Similarly, throughout the Satyricon, he repeatedly satirizes both wealthy students and dependent teachers. He implies criticism of the traditional cultural model as well as of the new social order. He does not offer a vision of a desirable alternative to these two, although his leveling tendencies make him more sympathetic to the more recently emerging mixed society than to the rigid and hypocritical old order. Trimalchio's staging of his own funeral effects afinalinversion in Petronius's satire of Roman institutions. Earlier, in his dishes, Trimalchio

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had constructed illusions of life in death; at the end of the night, in a comic and grotesque scene, he stages an illusory representation of death in life.49 With this inversion, Trimalchio's practice comes to coincide with Petronius's. Trimalchio's staging of his pretended death eerily anticipates Petronius's staging of his own suicide. Tacitus recounts that, under Nero's displeasure, perhaps less than a year after he had written Trimalchio's mock funeral, Petronius opened his veins, then had them bandaged again many times, ate a full meal, distributed punishments and rewards to his slaves, chatted with his friends and recited light verse with them, so that his last day appeared no different from any other. At the end, he dozed off "so that his death, even if compulsory, might look natural."50 The same technique of imaginative mastery through parodic leveling that characterizes Trimalchio's attempts to overcome death also characterizes Petronius's mocking, ironic acceptance of death: his death scene parodies and satirizes the conventions of Stoic and Socratic suicide practiced by philosophers and poets such as Seneca and Lucan.51 Petronius also parodied written forms to the last by sending the emperor not the conventional codicil including him in the victim's will, but instead the names of all the emperor's sexual acts and sexual partners. Petronius makes his enforced death appear the most unforced and natural of all Nero's victims as well as the most successfully contemptuous of Nero's power. In both the art of his Satyricon and in the acts of his life, Petronius determined his meanings through parodic leveling of elevated philosophies and forms.

2. Satiric Materialism in A Tale of a Tub

WIFT records that he read Petronius's Satyricon during 1697, the year he probably wrote most of A Tale of a Tub.1 I will not be arguing that Petronius exerted a determining influence on the Tale, though there are some specific convergences (both Swift and Petronius parody Plato's Symposium, for example). I will be arguing, however, that Swift's work, like Petronius's, reveals strong ambivalence toward his forebears and toward cultural orthodoxy, and that Swift, like Petronius, uses the double parody of narrative satire to convey his divided judgment. In 1697 Swift was also reading works by three other authors who helped shape the Tale: Lucretius, Hobbes, and his patron, Sir William Temple. According to his notes, he read Lucretius three times during the year, and he also read Hobbes's translation of Thucydides. Swift had been working with Temple for more than six years, helping him prepare his letters, memoirs, and essays for publication. In its relation to Lucretius, the Tale reveals what might be termed the return of the parodied: the evidence of strong kinship between the parodic and the parodied texts. In regard to Temple, the Tale reveals the obverse: intense parody of the man and author to whom Swift stood in the most nearly filial relation. Swift's allusions to Lucretius and Temple play an important role primarily in the "Digression on Madness," and I will return to consider them in connection with a central passage in that section. However, the foundation and strategy of Swift's satire in the Tale bear a strong relation to Hobbes's expression of his epistemology and political thought in Leviathan; I will therefore concentrate on the relation between Swift and Hobbes in the first section of this chapter.

S

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A Tale of a Tub

Swift, Hobbes, and Materialism Throughout the first seven sections of A Tale of a Tub, the author recounts with fundamental sympathy the exploits of Peter, a worshiper of spiritual interiors. In section 8, he recounts the exploits of Peter's opponent, Jack, a worshiper of material exteriors. In a famous passage in section 9, the author clearly indicates that his sympathies have shifted: "In the Proportion that Credulity is a more peaceful Possession of the Mind, than Curiosity, so far preferable is that Wisdom, which converses about the Surface, to that pretended Philosophy which enters into the Depths of Things, and then comes gravely back with Informations and Discoveries, that in the inside they are good for nothing" (173). Swift had parodied the author's earlier preference for interiors, and now, as I will argue, he continues to parody the author and his current preference for exteriors. Why Swift should execute such a dramatic reversal in direction at the crux of his satire remains a baffling and disturbing question. I suggest that Swift's reversal from satiric parody of interiority to satiric parody of exteriority can be explained by reference to the question of the proper relation between political authority and religious belief and behavior in late seventeenthcentury England. On this question, as well as on fundamental epistemological matters, Swift's thinking agrees in substance and in detail with Hobbes's. In particular, both satirize the superstitious interiority of the Catholics, implying an agreement with the opposite, material principle; but both also then turn to satirize the material exteriority of the Protestant enthusiasts, criticizing the position they implicitly endorsed earlier. Considering the meaning and function of interiority and exteriority in the thought of Swift and Hobbes will illuminate the crucial reversal of parodic direction in A Tale of a Tub. Noting the numerous allusions to Hobbes in the Tale, most commentators have regarded them as evidence of Swift's unalloyed hostility toward the philosopher. I will argue, however, that Swift the satirist agreed with Hobbes's fundamental point, the denial of the existence of spirit. Hobbes denies such a possibility because spirit is either wind or a phantom: if the first, it is body; if the second, nothing. For Hobbes, all is body, material;2 like other satirists, he reduces spirit to matter. Swift in his satires also insistently reduces spirituality to physicality; as a satirist, he is as thoroughgoing a materialist as Hobbes. However, in order to avoid the automatic condemnation that Hobbes's thought provoked, Swift masks his Hobbesian satire of spirituality throughout the Tale by an apparent parody of Hobbes. In addition, both Hobbes and Swift are nominalists, suspicious of metaphor and allegory, regarding the literal as the

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proper meaning of words. The philosopher and the satirist favor exteriors, materiality, and literal meanings over interiors, spirituality, and metaphoric meanings. For both writers, the relation of interior conscience and external behavior implies a response to the question of the individual's obedience to the state. For both, the sovereign cannot do anything against the law because what it decides is the law. Writing in response to the deist Toland, Swift closely echoes Hobbes's formulations of the sovereign's absolute power: "Every Body knoweth and allows [sic], that in all Government there is an absolute, unlimited, legislative Power, which is originally in the Body of the People"; this legislature, in Britain's case the Parliament, "may do any Thing within the Compass of human Power."3 For both Swift and Hobbes, the sovereign civil power possesses authority to designate an official church.4 Yet both maintain that outward conformity to state religion does not compromise one's conscience, which both define in the very narrow terms of knowing what one thinks: Swift calls it "that Knowledge which a Man hath within himself of his own Thoughts and Actions."5 Such a definition undercuts the power of appeals to conscience; if conscience, like any perception or judgment, can be mistaken, then individuals cannot claim liberty of conscience as a higher authority to justify civil disobedience.6 But such an understanding also grants conscience and individual judgment a peculiar inviolability. The magistrate may prohibit acts, but not the internal workings of conscience or judgment. For Hobbes, the sovereign can enforce external obedience, but he cannot affect the internal operations of faith either by promises or by threats (Lev., III, 42, 527). Swift agrees in nearly identical terms that, in effect, liberty of conscience cannot be violated: "To say a man is bound to believe, is neither truth nor sense . . . You may force men, by interest or punishment, to say or swear they believe, and to act as if they believed: You can go no further."7 In conflicts between conscience and the state, Hobbes and Swift prescribe complete conformity in externals, even acknowledging the necessity of hypocrisy. Swift proposes strict regulation of public morality, judging that its benefits outweigh the unavoidable increase in hypocrisy.8 Thus, as a consequence of their emphasis on external unity of worship and avoidance of civil dissension, both radically sever behavior and thought, external evidence of belief and the internal beliefs or doubts that remain inaccessible to one's sovereign or fellow citizens.9 Political authority may prescribe external behavior but not belief; the internal authority of conscience or judgment, on the other hand, may harbor questions about the authority of the sovereign and doubts about orthodoxy, but may not express them.10

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A Tale of a Tub

Consistent with their position that the civil sovereign must take precedence over church authorities, the religion of both writers is devoid of spirituality. To be saved, in Hobbes's view, requires only "faith in Christ, and obedience to laws" (Lev., III, 43, 425). In his nonsatiric writings, Swift characterizes the role of a churchman in terms of duty, not faith; refusing to discuss theological questions, he regards religion exclusively as a source of morality and social order.11 In place of immaterial spirit, Hobbes and Swift embrace a materiality that stresses surfaces and outsides. As Hobbes points out, it is a contradiction in terms to speak of incorporeal substances; nothing immaterial is hidden within matter. Traditional Christian spirituality offers access to some valuable attribute that the physical body contains like a vehicle or a barrel. By contrast, the conscience or judgment that Hobbes and Swift acknowledge consists not of spirit, but of the mental operations of bodily matter. Swift and Hobbes also express this movement from spiritual to material in their use of language, by reducing metaphors to literal or "proper" meanings. Hobbes, for example, argues that angels are corporeal because he takes the word in its "proper," literal signification, meaning merely "messenger" (Lev., III, 34, 435-440).12 With his extreme and consistent literalizing, his readings of biblical passages parody standard spiritual interpretations.13 Hobbes regards metaphor as an abuse of the proper meaning of words (Lev., I, 4, 102); he considers that the inherent deceptiveness of metaphor suits it perfectly for conveying the deluded notion of noncorporeal spirit—hence, the close alliance he observes between metaphorical language and spirituality, as well as between the proper, "literal" uses of words and skepticism about spirit. When metaphor is extended it becomes allegory.14 Consistent with his distrust of metaphor, Hobbes avoids allegorical interpretation throughout Leviathan.15 If allegory points beyond the material world, elevating and authorizing what is invisible and abstract over what is material, ironic passages block such ascents, insisting upon the literal meanings of words and a material account of the world. Allegory derives strength from the premise of philosophical realism that words possess an intrinsic relation to the things they signify. Irony, however, bears a close relation with nominalism, which denies this convergence of sign and signified. In their ironic and parodic subversions of allegory, Hobbes and Swift contribute to the shift from the scholastic paradigm, in which allegory and the spirit predominated, to the modern paradigm, in which irony and materiality take their place.16 Metaphor and allegory give access to interiority and the

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spirit; literal interpretations and uses of words remain tied to exteriority and the material world. The thinking of Swift and Hobbes exhibits sharp divisions between inner and outer in all areas. In epistemology and hermeneutics, their materialism and nominalism locate opposition to orthodoxy in the external and material. However, as we have seen, in their politics it is the internal conscience that can challenge the official word. This chiasmus in the significance of interior and exterior from one field to another reflects the dichotomy in the objects of their criticism. First, when they criticize the allegorizing spirituality of the Catholics, they use materialism and nominalism as weapons; but then they reverse direction to criticize the Protestant dissenters' extreme materiality, against which they offer their idea of the individual's internal judgment and the sovereign's external authority. At crucial moments in sections 8 and 9 of A Tale of a Tub, Swift reverses his parodic celebration of interiority to a parodic celebration of exteriority: the first kind of parody implies opposition to religious authority; the second, an opposition to political authority. In the "Digression on Madness," the reversal from an implied reliance on material externals to an implied recognition of a need for inner judgment and feeling supports an inference that Swift as satirist consistently opposed authority: against spiritual authority, his skepticism recommends explicit language and material surfaces, although that skepticism also sanctions internal reservations on political and ecclesiastical matters. Swift has the King of Brobdingnag observe that the law allows a man to keep poisons locked in his cupboard, but not to sell them as liqueurs.17 The passage suggests that Swift knew what it was to possess such poisons. So do other passages among Swift's writings, among them many of his "Thoughts on Religion": "I am not answerable to God for the doubts that arise in my own breast, since they are the consequence of that reason which he hath planted in me, if I take care to conceal those doubts from others, if I use my best endeavours to subdue them, and if they have no influence on the conduct of my life."18 The personal pronoun invites a personal application of this thought to Swift. Even if he felt them, Swift could not openly express these doubts precisely because he accepts the need for external submission to constituted authority. Strengthening the supposition of internal doubts, Swift explores the implications of individual interiority more thoroughly than does Hobbes; in his hands, the shifting alignment of interiority and exteriority, skepticism and authority, becomes more openly and urgently problematic.

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A Tale oj a Tub

This problem contributes to shaping some of the bewildering reversals in the Tale. One of these occurs in a passage that has often been taken as a parody of the Introduction to Leviathan, where Hobbes first compares "Naturall Man" with an "Artificiall Man," asking: "What is the Heart but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings . . . ?" Hobbes then inverts the order of the comparison to assert that the body of the "Artificiall Man," the commonwealth, resembles that of the "Naturall Man": " Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength;. . . Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill war, Death."19 In describing the sect of tailor-worshipers in section 2 of the Tale, Swift's narrator compares natural elements with clothing, asking, "What is Man himself but a Micro-coat" (78). Swift, however, converts this stale celebratory conceit to ingenious satiric criticism, first by comparing moral terms to clothes, and then by literalizing the conceit and replacing human beings with clothes: To instance no more; Is not Religion a Cloak, Honesty a Pair oj Shoes, worn out in the Dirt, . . . and Conscience a Pair of Breeches, which, tho' a Cover for Lewdness as well as Nastiness, is easily slipt down for the Service of both[?] . . . [It follows that] Suits of Cloaths, are in Reality the most refined Species of Animals, or to proceed higher, that they are Rational Creatures, or Men. . . . If certain Ermins and Furs be placed in a certain Position, we stile them a Judge, and so, an apt Conjunction of Lawn and black Sattin, we intitle a Bishop. (78) Swift's passage echoes the syntax, rhythm, and progression of Hobbes's. Hobbes reduces the human body to a physical mechanism without a hint of spirit; Swift reduces human beings, their morality, and rationality to clothes. Both lower idealizing conceptions of human beings to material workings. Swift echoes Hobbes closely but not satirically; the extensive parallel rather indicates shared thoughts and techniques. The conclusion of this passage on sartorism, furthermore, exchanges common ideas of interiority and exteriority, echoing Leviathan and parodying the New Testament. The most refined sartorial "Professors" held "that Man was an Animal compounded of two Dresses, the Natural and the Celestial Suit, which were the Body and the Soul: That the Soul was the outward, and the Body the inward Cloathing. . . . This they proved by Scripture, because, in Them we Live, and Move, and have our Being: As likewise by Philosophy, because they are All in All, and All in every Part" (79-80). Swift ingeniously systemizes the importance of externals in human behavior. As he does so, he parodies Scripture, using the sartorists to

Swift, Hobbes, and Materialism

45

literalize Acts 17:28 and 1 Corinthians 15:28 (because in them, we live and move). The sartorists raise clothes to the status of their God, but Swift also reduces God to clothing (because it is in them that we live and have our being).20 Swift's systematic fashion worshipers consider an external attribute, clothing, as the soul, and thus view the body as an interior self. Making the body interior in effect eliminates spiritual interiority, demonstrating the satiric materialism that Swift shares with Hobbes. Swift's parodies of biblical passages in his account of sartorism and his reduction of spirit to body and of interiority to exteriority reiterate the strategies of Hobbes's own parodic biblical readings and his attack on spirit. Hobbes himself offers a way of accommodating internals and externals at the end of his Introduction; observation of others' external behavior can confirm the results of observing one's own thoughts and passions. In Swift, relations between inside and outside remain unresolved.21 While he agrees with Hobbes about epistemology, matter, and the dominant human passions, Swift's internal divisions prevent his believing either that his divided convictions can be brought into complete alignment with the structure of authority in the world, or that the world can be brought to conform to the structure of his own desires. The difference between interior and exterior fluctuates; the two terms can even be reversible. Perhaps some critics have taken Hobbes to be a major object of the satire in the Tale because the author announces in the Preface that he intends the Tale to render Hobbists and wits ineffectual "for an Interim of some Months," until a "large Academy" will be ready to contain them. At a meeting of a committee of defenders of the state, some of those present observed that sailors will throw an empty tub overboard to occupy a whale: This Parable was immediately mythologiz'd: The Whale was interpreted to be Hobs's Leviathan, which tosses and plays with all other Schemes of Religion and Government, whereof a great many are hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy, and wooden, and given to Rotation. . . . The Ship in danger, is easily understood to be its old Antitype the Commonwealth. . . . [As for the Tub], the literal Meaning was preserved: And it was decreed, that in order to prevent these Leviathans from tossing and sporting with the Commonwealth, (which of it self is too apt tofluctuate)they should be diverted from that Game by A Tale of a Tub. (40-41) The adjectives describing schemes of government and religion as tubs characterize Swift's own Tale both accurately and ironically, anticipat-

46

A Tale of a Tub

ing its deficiencies, especially its series of self-contradicting metaphors, allegories, types, and emblems. But if A Tale of a Tub should be understood literally as a tub, then Hobbes's Leviathan should be understood literally as a whale that threatens to shatter other political philosophies. However, there is no reason to accept this explanation of the Tale's purpose at face value. To do so would, among other things, confuse Swift with the narrator, whom he repeatedly characterizes as vapid and self-satisfied, proud of his clichéd choice of subject and his ridiculous treatment of it.22 The Tale thus exhibits substantial, even fundamental—albeit disguised—agreement with Hobbes. Swift and Hobbes agree in their views on conscience and sovereignty, as well as in their satiric materialism and nominalism. Frequent echoes and allusions demonstrate Swift's close acquaintance with Hobbes's writings. However, Swift cannot openly identify himself with the notorious atheist and cynic. The Tale's apparent attack on Hobbes instead deflects attention from the substantial affinities between Swift's thought and Hobbes's. Against the idea of suppressed affinities with Hobbes in A Tale of a Tub, some commentators might appeal to Swift's orthodox nonsatiric writings expressing his aggressive High Church positions and Tory politics. But Swift's prose writings fall into two distinct kinds. The first embraces in monological language a traditional social order and an authoritarian political structure. In these works, which do not use pseudonyms or parodied narrators, Swift embraces hierarchical doctrines, especially when he serves as a spokesman and conduit for the official views of the ministry from 1711 to 1714. For example, the "Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue," dedicated to minister Harley in Swift's name, advances a centralizing, monological attitude toward language and authority. Among these writings, I would also place tracts such as the "Project for the Advancement of Religion," "Sentiments of a Church of England Man," and the articles published in the Examiner. While such works make effective use of formal rhetoric, they lack the distinctive irony that Swift generates from parodically adopting the characteristic voice, thoughts, and perspective of another, unofficial, usually unnamed writer, as in the Tale. The anonymous and pseudonymous dialogical works, the second kind of prose writings, set official, parodied perspectives against the energy and insight of unauthorized, parodic voices. Many critics have taken the monological works to be the authoritative texts by which to determine the meaning even of such ironic, dialogical works as "An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity," "A Modest Proposal," and Gulliver's Travels. But there seems little justification for such a procedure. Indeed, one might logically work

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47

in the opposite direction, taking the dialogical works as the more ample and complete expressions of Swift's verbal art. The divisions that inform the dialogical works inform all of Swift's thinking. The most thorough study of his political thinking finds that he simultaneously embraced nearly contradictory beliefs throughout his career. On the one hand, his fundamental political positions remain conservative and authoritarian, focusing on order and stability; on the other, his political writings consistently oppose arbitrary, absolute power, expressing admiration for the ancient republics.23 Swift clearly held deep divisions within himself, and his parodic, dialogical works embody his divided allegiances more fully and accurately than do the monological works that reflect only the authoritative and hierarchical side of his thinking. Like Hobbes in Leviathan, Swift subverts traditional hierarchies of philosophy and rhetoric in A Tale of a Tub, reducing spirit to matter and figurative to literal. He satirically debunks claims of access through metaphor to hidden knowledge of valuable interiors. Although much of the Tale attacks such interiority, Swift mounts a complementary attack on the apparent alternative, a satisfaction with exteriority, mocking assertions in literal language of the primacy of material appearances.24 Hobbes attacked the notion of inspiration along similar lines; however, Hobbes's satire remains cool and contained, whereas Swift's satire of the enthusiasts more uncomfortably involves his readers and himself. Swift's double parody results partly from the self-contradictory nature of the objects of his satire.25 Swift ridicules the rhetoric of the Catholics through their practices, and he ridicules the practices of the Independents through their rhetoric. After parodying the rhetoric of interiority, he turns to parody a rhetoric of externality that closely approximates his own satiric materialism. As such an assault on his own positions indicates, Swift's parodic practices also result largely from his selfcontradictions: a high churchman, he considered most bishops venal; a defender of republican freedom, he considered modern republicans treasonous. In religion, politics, and epistemology, Swift's satiric attacks demonstrate that accepted and conventional authorities are empty of value, and yet he still discerns a functional use for these empty shells. "An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity" advances in parodie, dialogical form the same proposal for a hypocritical, nominal Christianity that the "Project for the Advancement of Religion" advances monologically, without irony. Swift the conservative recognizes the same void at the center of authority as Swift the subversive. In his orthodox works, Swift writes as if that emptiness could be concealed. But in his satiric works he expresses his reli-

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A Taleofa Tub

gious, political, and epistemological nominalism through parodying both the voices that contest and those that assert religious and political authority.

From Allegory to Irony The appearance of A Tale oj a Tub in 1704 marks a transition from a time when the predominant form of narrative was allegorical to a time when narrative becomes primarily ironic. The Tale also recapitulates this transition itself, as it moves from one kind of satire and satiric object to another: from allegorical satire of Catholic allegorists and medieval alchemists to ironic parody of Protestant literalists and modern scientists and critics. The "Battle of the Books" is the most allegorical, and probably the earliest, piece in the collection, and the "Mechanical Operation of the Spirit" and the "Digression on Madness" are the most ironic.26 Within the Tale itself, the same division distinguishes the narrative of the brothers, which is predominantly allegorical, from the digressions, which are more self-reflexive and ironic.27 The earlier form of satire directs its criticism against an external object. The more ironic kind of satire emerges internally from fissures in the writer's own voice and language; it gives evidence of internal divisions such as those I have just discussed in Swift. In the various pieces contained in the collection entitled A Tale oj a Tub, we can see Swift moving from a more monological kind of satire to a more dialogical and parodic satire. In the "Battle," his satire of the moderns implies defense of the ancients. In the Tale, however, by satirizing first Peter, then Peter's opposite, Jack, he implies no norm outside the satire, only a continuing process of satiric parody.28 In the Tale, Peter exhibits a Catholic imagination given to "refining what is literal into figure and Mystery"; Jack exhibits the opposite, Protestant determination of "Fixing Tropes and Allegories to the Letter" (189-190). Peter offers symbolic readings that find anything he wants in the words of their father's will. He determines that the brothers may wear silver fringe despite the will's explicit prohibition because "fringe" also means "broomstick." As for why the father would prohibit his sons from wearing silver broomsticks, he takes the phrase in an allegorical sense, still acknowledging it to be a "mystery" (88). Jack, on the other hand, returns to the letter of the will with zeal. He does not clean his trousers after soiling them because he understands in a literal sense the text "The filthy shall remain filthy" (Rev. 22:11). The purifying fanaticism with which, in reaction against Peter, he rips his coat to shreds in fact mirrors Peter's superstitious embroidering. As a result, opposites converge: "As it is the Nature

From Allegory to Irony

49

of Rags, to bear a mock Resemblance to Finery; there being a sort of fluttering Appearance in both, which is not to be distinguished at a Distance, . . . Jack and his Tatters . . . left so near a Similitude between [himself and Peter] as frequently deceived the very Disciples and Followers of both" (200). Swift considers the willful misinterpretations of Jack and Peter to be equivalent as well as opposite, and he satirizes with equal energy the fanatical literal interpreters of the divine will and its superstitious allegorizers, both Protestants and Catholics. Martin appears to offer the possibility of a middle ground between the spiritual misinterpretations of Jack and Peter, a moderate Protestant position on interpretation and belief. However, Martin plays almost no role in the Tale; he merely advises moderation and removes less fringe from his coat than Jack before he disappears entirely. In the "Apology," written six years after the Tale's first publication, Swift attempted to strengthen Martin's position by maintaining that the Tale "celebrates" the beliefs and practices of the Church of England. But, as F. P. Lock has pointed out, Swift never succeeded in celebrating anything with conviction.29 Swift's assertion of the positive purpose of the Talefindsvirtually no support in the Tale itself: the Tale does not celebrate Martin or the Church of England, nor does it imply any conception of spirit as normally understood. On the contrary, it profanely parodies many biblical passages (34-35, 79-80, 191). The absence of any spirituality in fact indicates how thoroughly satiric and parodic a narrative the Tale is. The conspicuous erasure of a middle ground collapses what originally appears to be the tripartite division of the Tale's allegory into a bipolar opposition.30 But, in addition, the Tale has depicted the convergence of two opposites, Jack and Peter, "like a strait Line drawn by its own Length into a Circle" (158). As it recounts the intersection of Peter and Jack, the plot of the allegory comes to resemble the hoop of an empty tub. The Tale depicts no norm of interpretation or religious doctrine; rather, the history of Christianity and of interpretation that it recounts consists only of self-deception in the service of willfulness and ambition. This self-deception assumes different forms in Peter, Jack, and the author of the Tale. In the Tale's early sections, the author shows affinities with Peter's mode of understanding, repeatedly asserting or implying that wisdom concerns itself with contents and interiors. So, when he enumerates the means by which some raise themselves above others, he includes the tub or barrel that serves the Independent preacher as a pulpit, and he sees two reasons why the wood of such barrels should be rotten: "Because it is the Quality of rotten Wood to give Light in the Dark: And secondly, Because its Cavities are full of Worms: which is a *Type with a

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Pair of Handles, having a Respect to the two principal Qualifications of the Orator, and the two different Fates attending upon his works." A footnote explains this typological riddle: "*The Two Principal Qualifications of a Phanatick Preacher are, his Inward Light, and his Head full of Maggots, and the Two different Fates of his Writings are, to be burnt or Worm eaten" (62). In the model of interpretation that considers language as a kind of container, metaphor and allegory or typology figure as the valuable contents of the literal and material meanings of words. But the explication here indicates that these contents consist solely of the products of decomposition. Throughout the first half of the Tale, interiors repeatedly prove to contain either nothing or only waste products. Because of the analogies between the Tale and its tubs, both the Tub that we read and the tubs it contains hold these unpleasant contents. In one of the clearest instances of this pattern, the author complains that modern readers do not go "beyond the Surface and the Rind of Things": whereas, Wisdom is a Fox, who after long hunting, will at last cost you the Pains to dig out: Tis a Cheese, which by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homelier, and the courser Coat; and whereof to a judicious Palate, the Maggots are the best. Tis a Sack-Posset, wherein the deeper you go, you will find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a Hen, whose Cackling we must value and consider, because it is attended with an Egg; But then, lastly, 'tis a Nut, which unless you chuse with Judgment, may cost you a Tooth, and pay you with nothing but a Worm. In consequence of these momentous Truths, the Grubaean Sages have always chosen to convey their Precepts and their Arts, shut up within the Vehicles of Types and Fables . . . [but readers have been able] neither to regard or consider, the Person or the Parts of the Owner within. A Misfortune we undergo with somewhat less Reluctancy, because it has been common to us with Pythagoras, Æsop, Socrates, and other of our Predecessors. (66) Each characterization of wisdom here constitutes an emblem, a miniature allegory. The series characterizes exteriors as bushes that hide wisdom, obstructions in the way of arriving at the heart and the meaning of things. But this conceit comically betrays its inadequacy as it is elaborated. Perhaps such a contrast between interior and exterior describes many cheeses, but the unwitting recognition that maggots do live inside some rinds contradicts the overriding idea of the passage. Sweet wine gets sweeter the further down one drinks, but excess sweetness is sickening. The egg suggests fertile creativity but also nullity.

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As the author attempts to distinguish absolutely between valuable interiors and worthless externals, the distinction collapses at every point. Common sense and everyday facts quietly undermine the author's conceit; his figures actually imply that interiors can be rotten or vacuous, although he appears oblivious to these subversive meanings. At the end of the paragraph, he names classic examples of wise men who bear out his original argument, though his argument and his figures have again diverged. Socrates and Aesop did possess exceptional wisdom within their ugly appearances. However, the modern writer and his fellow "Grubaean Sages" exhibit fine appearances (resembling Peter in both their rhetorical and physical ornamentations), while the "Person or Parts of the Owner within" remain unseen, diminutive, worthless, if not noxious. Despite himself, the author reveals that the showy typologies and metaphors of modern writers remain empty, whereas Socrates and the Silenus that he resembles carry treasures within their unattractive exteriors.31 When the "modern author" praises progress in scholarship, especially abstracts and indices, his figures, like the description of the dissenter's tub and the nut of wisdom, demonstrate something other than the argument they are called in to support: The most accomplisht Way of using Books at present, is . . . to get a thorough Insight into the Index, by which the whole Book is governed and turned, like Fishes by the Tail For, to enter the Palace of Learning at the great Gate, requires an Expence of Time and Forms; therefore Men of much Haste and little Ceremony, are content to get in by the Back-Door. For, the Arts are all in aflyingMarch, and therefore more easily subdued by attacking them in the Rear. Thus Physicians discover the State of the whole Body, by consulting only what comes from Behind. Thus Men catch Knowledge by throwing their Wit on the Posteriors of a book, as Boys do Sparrows with flinging Salt upon their Tails. Thus Human Life is best understood by the wise man's Rule of Regarding the End. Thus are the Sciences found like Hercules's Oxen, by tracing them Backwards. Thus are old Sciences unravelled like old Stockings, by beginning at the Foot. (144) The author sets out to show that one can obtain a central kernel of truth, or a truth depicted as hidden prey, through judicious use of indices and selected quotations. But his string of eight similes contains instead a pattern of anal double entendres: the similes "Tail," "Back-Door" "Rear," "Behind," "Posteriors" and "Tails" again. Hercules had to clean out the Augean stables, but otherwise resembles the many crazed "heroes" who figure in the Tale: Alexander, Jack of Leyden, and Louis XIV (who made wars be-

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cause of vapors until they became fixed in the form of hemorrhoids [166]). Seeking to demonstrate a shortcut from the periphery to the secret truth at the center, the modern author again points to waste products and bottoms. Although the incongruous literal meanings of seven of these similes contradict the writer's ostensible point, one of the eight does have a metaphorical resonance. "End" cannot be read literally here as "Tail" must be. The sobriety of Solon's advice to Croesus strikes a discordant note amid the outhouse humor and serves as a double negative, in which Swift reverses his ironic reversal of the conceit of the passage. We might judge a human life or a book by reference to its end, but not necessarily by reference to a posterior or an index. Like other narrative satirists, Swift deflates vacuous metaphors and allegorical figurations by literalizing and materializing them. In the first seven sections of the Tale, Swift satirizes through parodying the allegorizing, "converting imagination" of Peter, the Catholics, and the author. In these early sections, the author, like Peter, embraces allegorical interpretations and claims to possess knowledge of mysterious unseen worlds. Both consider exteriors worthless, remain oblivious to the literal senses of words, and espouse interiority in their rhetoric and their epistemology. To expose through parody the emptiness or corruption of such wisdom of the interior, Swift underlines the incongruous literal and material meanings of words that Peter or the narrator understands metaphorically. In opposing what he parodies, he affirms exteriors and materiality in rhetoric and epistemology.32

Spiritualists, Materialists, and the Excluded Middle In the first seven sections of the Tale, Swift parodically exposes the emptiness of Peter's allegorical celebration of interiors. In the eighth and ninth sections, he turns to satirize the opposite tendencies of Jack and his Protestant followers. Thus, sections 8 and 9 lack the elaborate, selfdestructive metaphorical and allegorical machinery that characterizes the earlier sections of the Tale. The sect of the Aeolists founded by Jack, and identified in Swift's note as "all Pretenders to Inspiration whatsoever" (150), takes literally the accounts of origins in Genesis, the pre-Socratic Anaximenes, and John: "The learned *Aiolists maintain the Original Cause of all things to be Wind" (150). Like the satirist in the earlier sections, the Aeolists reduce figurative, spiritual meaning to a literal, material sense. Most important, they understand spirit etymologically and literally to mean air in motion.

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From this fundamental belief arises the crucial importance of communicating winds among the bodies of the Aeolists, and the key role played by their inspired priestesses, "whose Organs were understood to be better disposed for the Admission of those Oracular Gusts" (157). The Aeolists recognize no distinction between sexual excitement and holy "extasies." The most general way of worshiping their god links hundreds of worshipers by their orifices "in a circular Chain, with every Man a Pair of Bellows applied to his Neighbour's Breech, by which they blew up each other to the Shape and Size of a Tun; and for that Reason, with great propriety of Speech, did usually call their Bodies, their Vessels" (153). This general practice of oral-anal intercourse follows logically from the Aeolists' material first principle. That the devotees form a ring and that their bodily vessels exchange gaseous waste fulfills the author's own early explanation of the Tale's title and purpose: the Tale here depicts a barrellike circle of bodies, which themselves resemble barrels ("tuns"), and which serve only as containers for the holy gas, the material spirit. As the allegories of Peter and his followers had done, so the activities of Jack's materialist followers leave an emptiness at the center of these circular containers, an absence of authorizing values. Still, Swift faces a satiric bind here. In the early sections, metaphors broke apart, revealing their literal, material underside. But Jack and the Aeolists now seize on literal and material meanings themselves and make them their own. To draw out the satire of this section, the reader must supply abstract orfigurativemeanings where Jack, his followers, and the narrator read literally and materially. Hobbes faces the same check to his materializing strategies when he considers the extreme Protestants' claims to inspiration. Rather than reducing metaphor and spirit to literal and material meanings, he asserts that if "spirit" is understood literally, as wind, then inspiration is merely "the blowing into a man some thin and subtle wind, in such manner as a man filleth a bladder with his breath" (Lev., III, 34, 440). But inspiration, if it means anything, must mean something other than this physical communication of the substance of God into human bodies; the word must be understood metaphorically. Being "full of the Holy Spirit," therefore, stands not for infusion of God's substance into a person, but for "accumulation of his gifts. For the proper [i.e., literal] use of the word infused, in speaking of the graces of God, is an abuse of it; for those graces are virtues, not bodies to be carried hither and thither, and to be poured into men as into barrels" (Lev., III, 34, 441). Reversing his nearly ubiquitous strategy of literalizing reduction and "proper" usage, Hobbes must understand "inspiration" in a metaphoric sense, because those who understand it literally reduce human

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beings to bladders or barrels, mere containers of air. He thus satirically characterizes inspired enthusiasts in the same terms, and using the same strategy, with which Swift attacks the inspired Aeolists in the Tale. However, Swift begins to extend his satire of inspirational Protestantism further than Hobbes's when he depicts the near equivalence of equally untenable opposite extremes, a close, mirroring relation between Jack and Peter, high ideals and low physicality, gods and devils, even interiors and exteriors: "The mind of man, when he gives the Spur and Bridle to his thoughts, doth never stop, but naturally sallies out into both Extreams of High and Low, of Good and Evil; . . . not well perceiving how near the Frontiers of Height and Depth border upon each other; With the same Course and Wing, he falls down plum into the lowest Bottom of Things; like one who travels the East into the West; or like a strait Line drawn by its own Length into a Circle" (157-158). Extreme opposites bear a close kinship with each other; language, based as it is on oppositions, cannot designate an absolute height or unqualified good. Noting that Latin alius means both "high" and "low," Freud theorized that in their origins all words signified both ends of an opposition, although in the course of their development languages suppressed and forgot such doubleness. Montaigne knew from experience the destructive folly of those who attempt to transcend such a qualified condition: "instead of changing into angels," he wrote in "Of Experience," such fanatical purists paradoxically "change into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves."33 The Aeolists demonstrate the accuracy of the observations of Montaigne and Freud: believing themselves to have risen above the human, to be filled with divinity, they reveal themselves to be worshipers of belches and farts.34 Montaigne and Freud attempt to reconcile opposites and to understand the ironies of experience. But Swift, as a narrative satirist, depicts attempts to flee ambivalence for certainty and delusions of unity. Through double parody, he opposes such retreats into a unified, single alternative; he deploys each extreme "as a foil to destroy and be destroyed by the opposite extreme."35 Sections 8 and 9 of A Tale of a Tub and Part IV of Gulliver's Travels survey a realm of excluded middles, in which opposite extremes become equivalent in their distance from an absent central area of ambiguity. At the end of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas confronts a string of unbearable either-or choices, knowing what Swift's reader must know or learn: "She knew all about excluded middles. They were bad shit."36 Not-A might be as valid as A; or they might both be equally inadequate and unavoidable. The Tale contains no kernel of reason to be authorized by the deviant peripheries. The abstract, allegorical interiors of

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Peter and the material, literal exteriors of Jack constitute the only paradigms for interpretation of the text and the world in A Tale of a Tub; they prove to be both unacceptable and inescapable. Swift satirized the metaphorical imagination by showing, through parody, that its claims of access to spiritual inferiority ignored intractable facts of the material world. However, it is much more difficult to satirize materialists than spiritualists because materialists have already appropriated the most effective strategy of satire. Swift the satirist and Hobbes the materialist philosopher do not acknowledge the existence of spirit in its accepted meaning, and thus a metaphorical, spiritual inferiority is unavailable to them as a means of satirizing the materializing interpretations of the Aeolists. Indeed, Hobbes criticizes materialist enthusiasts in only a few brief passages. Although the only alternative Swift can offer to the Aeolists' materialism, the interior conscience, is inaccessible and thus unavailable for representation, Swift goes further than Hobbes to fashion an extended satire of the extreme Protestant materialists. He pursues a distinctive satiric strategy of indirection that ultimately points to the necessity for the moral but nonspiritual faculty of conscience to counteract the callous amorality of extreme materialism. In section 9, the "Digression on Madness," Swift juxtaposes the most comprehensive pairs of opposite extremes, and he satirizes both sides of each pair.37 Sections 8 and 9 constitute a unit: the theory of vapors in section 9 offers a generalized version of the Aeolist system of winds in section 8; in addition to explaining inspirational religions, it accounts for new doctrines in politics and philosophy. It argues that all innovations result from madness induced by the presence of vapors in the brain.38 On the difficult point of explaining how very different effects follow from the one cause of vapors, the text itself becomes vaporous: "Hic multa desiderantur" (170). The hiatus, the void at the center of the argument, ironically both undercuts and exemplifies the theory of vapors. In such crucial textual lacunae, the Tale again represents an empty container and fulfills its name as a tub and a tale of a tub. In addition, the ambiguous interrelationship of rising and falling carries over from section 8 to the early pages of section 9, where vapors rise from the earth, an outhouse, or an altar to darken "the Face of Nature," then from clouds descend to water the soil and render it fruitful. In the internal, human parallel to this natural process, vapors rise from the lower parts to cloud the brain, there watering the imagination and rendering it inventive (163). The innovating mind thus functions as analogue both to the watered soil and to the watering rain, because the author conflates high and low, and describes the creative mists as rising instead of falling. He

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represents the internal as an image of an external phenomenon, only inverted. The Tale again shows that extensions of height and depth coincide; it also shows interiors and exteriors to be versions or, more precisely, inversions of each other. Most significantly, the author reverses his earlier advocacy of interiors in sections 8 and 9. In the Preface, he had explained his work as a diversionary maneuver in preparation for the establishment of a large "Academy" for the confinement of modern subversives, deviants, and wits (41-42). In the "Digression on Madness," however, he instead proposes releasing the present inmates of the "Academy of Modern Bedlam" desiring that they be no longer confined to "that Honorable Society [the madhouse], whereof I had some Time the Happiness to be an unworthy Member" (176). This reversal, from advocating confinement to advocating release, coincides with the author's reversal in sections 8 and 9 from faith in figurative language to reliance on material meanings. Curiously, though, the author himself does not remark upon either of his reversals. Refraining from criticizing either Jack's Aeolists or Peter's sartorists, the author remains consistently laudatory of his subject, although the subject of his history changes from one sect to its inimical opposite, and although his later sections accordingly invert the rhetorical form and epistemological allegiances of the earlier ones. This lack of recognition of inconsistencies points to a deficiency in the author's mental condition. Once the author has announced his tendencies toward madness by mentioning his former residence in Bedlam, it takes only a short step to specify his condition in modern terms as schizophrenia. The language of the author, the only means by which we can know him, exhibits schizophrenic inconsistencies and submersions of logic in aflowof words.39 The Tale's digressions show him repeatedly advancing one argument one moment and an unrelated or opposite point the next, never recognizing any discrepancies or inconsistencies with what he has written previously. In the earlier sections, resembling Peter, he appears as an abstract, allegorical, curious reasoner, confident of the value of interiors; in the later sections, resembling Jack, he becomes a literalist, a materialist, and a credulous adherant to exteriors. Just as between Peter and Jack, so between the two sides of the author, Swift provides no third alternative. As an apologist for allegorical depths, the author remained unperturbed by the material rottenness and literal meanings that betrayed him; when he embraces superficies, he exhibits an exclusive awareness of the physicality and literal meanings he had ignored before, but no increase in self-awareness. Like other narrative satires, the Tale reverses expectations, without characters or narrator coming to recognize anything significant about themselves or

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their relations with others. In the two central paragraphs of the "Digression on Madness" (171-174), the author most bewilderingly exchanges praise of interiors for praise of exteriors. This reversal of satiric direction, which substantially extends Hobbes's reversal of his usual materializing strategies in Leviathan, occupies a central position in the Tale that far exceeds its role in Hobbes's text; Swift makes this section the climax of his doubly directed satire. Having earlier defined wisdom as acquaintance with interiors, now, at the beginning of the first paragraph, he defines happiness as contentment with externals, more precisely, as "the perpetual Possession of being well Deceived" (171). The word "perpetual" and the phrasing of happiness as the "possession" of being deceived mark this definition as a close parody of the definition of love in the culminating speech of Plato's Symposium. There Socrates defines love as a desire for "the perpetual possession of the good,"40 an elevating drive that leads beyond desire for the physically beautiful to love of the intellectual beauty of abstractions. Plato figures this development as a progression from fascination with physical exteriors to recognition of the attractions of interior essences. In place of love of another or of knowledge, Swift's author substitutes the narcissistic gratifications of self-deception. He reduces the Platonic vision of higher forms of knowledge desired by higher forms of love to its first and lowest level: a contented acquaintance with the physical surfaces of things. Swift thus satirizes the parodic voice that confines itself exclusively to the physical and the deceptiveness of appearances. Yet through this parody, Swift also criticizes the vision of the Symposium. In the Satyricon, Petronius parodied the Symposium in order to satirize high-minded Platonic lovers as hypocrites or deluded fools. Swift's parody implies that the definition of happiness as delusion possesses as much validity as Plato's definition of love. For Swift, as for Petronius, the Platonic theory of love as an ascent toward knowledge claims to accomplish the impossible, to transcend the physical. It provides a basis for those who delude themselves into believing that their behavior has no physical motives. Claims of access to hidden, mystical wisdom, like those made by Socrates in Plato's dialogue, constitute precisely the objects of Swift's satiric parodies in the earlier sections of the Tale. That Swift parodies Plato's spiritualizing alongside his satire of innovating materialists demonstrates that his attack on the superficiality of the latter does not imply a return to endorse the transcendent interiors of the former. The last aphorism in the "Mechanical Operation of the Spirit" (which continues the satiric strategies of section 8) mocks "Platonick" lovers and philosophers whose idealizing contemplation of the stars in heaven or in their ladies' eyes leads their

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lower parts into a ditch (289). Such debunking of those who aspire to rise above physicality reiterates Montaigne's indictment of fanatical purists and reinforces the satire of Plato as the prototypical idealizing philosopher. Considering this definition of happiness further, however, may lead to an acknowledgment of its wide applicability. Not only did happiness in Eden depend on ignorance, but much shallow happiness does depend on blithe acceptance of delusions. The author, then, offers here a knowing defense of deliberate ignorance and a cynical argument for shallow, tenuous happiness. Arguing in favor of such happiness, he echoes the published sentiments of Sir William Temple, the patron whom Swift served as literary secretary at the time he was writing the Tale. In his essays, Temple, a retired and somewhat embittered diplomat, argued that the highest happiness consists of quiet repose and contentment of mind in an Epicurean withdrawal from the disturbances of public life. Swift slightly heightens Temple's praise of mental self-satisfaction into his author's defense of delusions; in doing so, he reveals his scorn for his narrator and for Temple. Swift mocks rather than celebrates the contentment that results from self-deception. This definition of happiness therefore proves to be doubly parodic, concerning Temple as well as Plato. Like Temple, it recognizes the near ubiquity of self-deception as an ingredient of happiness: "those Entertainments and Pleasures we most value in Life, are such as Dupe and play the Wag with the Senses" (171). On the other hand, Swift refuses to find such a state of continued delusion a high point of wisdom, as Temple virtually did.41 In the next stage of this ambivalent and complex double parody, Swift brings to a disturbing climax his satire of the search for truth in the interiors of objects and beings. The narrator here recognizes flaws in human beings, but locates them only in the material realm, in the physical imperfections of the species. Confining himself exclusively to material and literal meanings, he observes like a natural philosopher that in most Corporeal Beings, which have fallen under my Cognizance, the Outside hath been infinitely preferable to the In: Whereof I have been farther convinced from some late Experiments. Last Week I saw a Woman flay'd, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her Person for the worse. Yesterday I ordered the Carcass of a Beau to be stript in my Presence; when we were all amazed to find so many unsuspected Faults under one Suit of Cloathes: Then I laid open his Brain, his Heart, and his Spleen; But, I plainly perceived at every Operation, that the farther we proceeded, we found the Defects encrease upon us in Number and Bulk. (173)42

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Taking care to make only a physically and literally accurate observation, the author unwittingly provides a metaphor for human moral infirmities. He also offers an exemplary instance of such moral inadequacy himself, in acknowledging only a diminished physical attractiveness in the whipped prostitute, and not her suffering. The author here embraces the extreme position of valuing only exteriors—the skin of human beings, the surfaces of material objects. His insistence on material exteriors draws attention to its suppression of the moral dimension of human behavior. This depiction of the callous inadequacy of the extreme materialist constitutes Swift's distinctive strategy of satiric indirection; through the use of this strategy, Swift calls for recognition of the need for a countervailing interior faculty of moral judgment, the conscience, which is neither material nor spiritual. As the conclusion of his argument for the wisdom of satisfaction with exteriors, the narrator identifies the source both of happiness and wisdom as an untroubled Epicurean celebration of the senses: "He that can with Epicurus content his Ideas with the Films and Images that fly off upon his Senses from the Superficies of Things; Such a Man truly wise, creams off Nature, leaving the Sower and the Dregs, for Philosophy and Reason to lap up. This is the sublime and refined Point of Felicity, called, the Possession of being well deceived; the Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves" (174). Yet again, the Tale divides the world into two opposites with no third alternative. Swift does not endorse the pursuit of a truth hidden in interiors, either through Peter's mysticism and metaphors or through the anatomizing reason in the "Digression on Madness," which explores interiors like those of the beau's body only to expose their physical corruption. Neither, however, does he endorse a retreat to a purely passive reception of emissions from the exteriors of objects, the inactive bliss of a fool. The author's elaborate defense of such receptiveness again closely echoes Temple's essays. Swift followed some of Temple's passages so closely that William Wotton and others thought that Temple had written A Tale of a Tub. Swift's relation to Temple closely resembles Petronius's relation to Nero; the judgments that both writers had to suppress because of their subordinate position find expression in the two narratives as sharp but disguised satire of their patrons. We do not know how much of Nero's writing Petronius parodied in the Satyricon, but we know that Swift used his intimate acquaintance with Temple's writings to subject them to devastating parody. In Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, Temple applies to himself the proverb that a fool knows more in his own house than a wise man in another's, as he defends his expensive follies of building and planting in re-

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tirement. Moreover, Temple professed himself to be in agreement with the moral philosophy but critical of the natural philosophy of Epicurus; however, while attempting to refute Epicurus on sensation, Temple falls into arguing the Epicurean position that happiness depends on adjusting oneself for the proper reception of sensations.43 Swift's narrator repeats Temple's argument here, as he recommends that relishing the stimuli available to the senses, apart from any intellectual or moral activity, makes available a happiness that depends on oneself alone. In these two paragraphs, then, Swift seizes on Temple's muddled expositions of his thoughts on happiness, folly, and the senses to satirize the defense of delusion in Temple's writings, a defense whose advantages he illustrated in his inflated satisfaction with himself as a writer and thinker. Swift was able to achieve such stinging parody because of his close familiarity with Temple's writings; he was rereading the published essays in 1697 and recopying other writings which Temple had an eye to publishing eventually. But the conclusion of the paragraph also parodies another author with whose writings Swift was extremely familiar. The Epicureanism of "Films and Images that fly off upon the Senses" points to Temple but also closely paraphrases Lucretius on vision. The echo criticizes Lucretius in this case, by associating him with Epicurus and Temple. Yet Swift directly quotes Lucretius more often than any other author in the Tale, and in contexts that do not parodically satirize Lucretius but rather align him with Swift. For example, Swift quotes Lucretius earlier in section 9 for a materialist explanation of desire (diametrically opposed to Plato's vision in the Symposium) and for a commonsensical cure for lust (recourse to corpora quaeque, any bodies, i.e., those of prostitutes). Swift's materializing exposures of mystics such as Peter makes use of the same satiric strategies as does Lucretius's demystification of the ancient gods. Repeatedly, Lucretius's ingenious materialism seconds Swift's own materializing, lowering strategies. Lucretius even seems to have been one of Swift's favorite authors. The Tale's epigraph from Lucretius announces an ambition to pluck a garland that the Muses have never before awarded.44 This claim of originality mockingly expresses the project of the deluded author of the Tale, and the poetic project of Lucretius, who was reputed to have been half-mad himself. It also anticipates Swift's later characterization of his own distinctive and original uses of extended parodic irony: "Arbuthnot is no more my Friend,/ Who dares to Irony pretend;/Which I was born to introduce,/Refin'd it first, and shew'd its Use" ("Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," II. 55-58). As with Hobbes, Swift cannot openly declare agreement with the ancient atheist and materialist, but his parodies reveal his fascination and even kinship with Lucretius.

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After recommending "the Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves," the author begins his next paragraph with an extraordinarily ambiguous transition: "But to return to Madness . . ." (174). Having taken us through a passage rife with double ironies, Swift returns to the trope of single irony for most of the rest of the Tale. But the section introduced with the author's return to a more stable form of satiric madness concludes with the last significant hiatus in the text. At the end of his list of the occupations to be filled by those released from Bedlam (who might become lawyers, doctors, scientists, and courtiers), the author omits specifying the appropriate occupation for one inmate, a tailor "run mad with Pride." He whispers, "*Heark in your Ear . . . ," and the footnote merely says, "*I cannot tell what the Author means here, or how this chasm could be fill'd" (179). One subtext, however, indicates the significance of this final empty center in the text. When the half-mad Lear meets blind Gloucester on the beach at Dover, he refuses to acknowledge him: "What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?" (IV, vi, 148-152). Lear will recognize Gloucester soon, but here his assumed madness allows him to rail upon two concerns of primary importance in Swift's text: the relation between exteriors and interiors, and the emptiness implied by the interchangeability of judge and criminal, high and low. In his whispered rhetorical question, Lear acknowledges the lack of connection between exteriors and moral worth. Swift's ex-Bedlamite similarly implies that the highest judges of church and state are equivalent to tailors mad with pride, and that there would be no difference if the pompous tailor changed places with the powerful king. Unlike the fools of Erasmus and Shakespeare, however, Swift's fool remains deluded; he does not combine recognition of himself or any increase in wisdom with his folly or madness.45 At the most, by using the voice of near madness, Swift is able "to carry illusion to the point of truth,"46 but the foolish author does not become a truth-teller himself. Swift writes his entire text under the sign of parody. The author seizes on the certainty and unity of the moment, but in a world of multiple meanings and perspectives, such a stabilizing urge may constitute the most extreme disunity—a schizophrenic selfforgetfulness. In his pursuit of purity and unity, the modern disintegrates into textual and temporal fragments.47 The same author who proposes releasing the tailor to become king or judge at the end of the "Digression on Madness" depicted with approval the sartorists' worship of tailors in section 2. The same voice that recounted and imitated the interpretive pro-

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cedures of Peter has recounted and imitated the opposite interpretive procedures of Jack. Using such doubly directed "two-pronged"48 parody enables Swift to avoid the one-sided, programmatic satire that often results from taking up such topics as ancients versus moderns or Independents versus Catholics. By reversing the direction of his satire from the early sections to the "Digression of Madness," he produces instead a dialogical, open-ended narrative satire. In A Tale of a Tub, Swift elaborates a broad satire of metaphorical, analogical modes of thinking and writing consistent with Catholic doctrine and dominant in medieval times (but including holdovers such as typology, the Protestant form of analogical interpretation, and alchemy, an analogical form of scientific inquiry). He also subjects to intense satire the empirical and literal modes of interpreting and inquiry that characterize the scientific thought predominant in modern times (he associates such inquiry with the Protestant dissenters and with virtuosos such as the author of the "Mechanical Operation of the Spirit"). Each of these modes constitutes a paradigm for understanding the world. Swift knows that the scholastic paradigm has lost its authority, and he knows that despite his contemporaries' and his own attacks on Hobbes they have been shaped within a Hobbesian paradigm.49 According to Hobbes's model, the authority of the sovereign and of moral values do not descend from divine sanction but arise from contractual or consensual agreement. Moreover, according to Hobbes, Swift, and others, the threat of civil disorder in the early modern state requires that doubters not be allowed to express their views publicly. As Swift mocks both Catholic allegorists, then literalizing dissenters, his satire coincides with Hobbes's debunking philosophy in Leviathan. Yet, as a satirist, he cannot find a way to specify an authority beyond doubt or beyond satire. The official beliefs of the church offer such an anchor to the churchman, but Martin, the figure of the British church, obviously provides no resting place for the satirist's doubts. Having insisted on the importance of a single sovereign authority, Hobbes was able to reconcile himself to life both under a commonwealth having no ecclesiastical establishment and under a restored king and an established church. Swift could accommodate himself neither to the medieval paradigm nor to the more modern, Hobbesian one. In Swift's writings, political authority with its concern for exteriors offers the proper counterweight to Peter's high evaluation of interiors. But the religious authority that might serve as the counterweight to Jack's materiality exists only in the state, and Swift conceives of conscience as inaccessible interiority. A Tale of a Tub thus expresses Swift's unease with authority in

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both realms, exterior and interior. After Martin and Jack expose Peter's pretensions, Jack in turn becomes the object of the satire, Martin drops out, and it is difficult to see any alternative to the paradigm of materialism and literalism beside the model of spirituality and metaphor. But Swift does not endorse a reactionary acquiescence to an analogical view of the world. Nor does he reconcile himself to Jack and most of modern science. He refuses to celebrate either of these two paradigms or a nonexistent central point of compromise or origin. He points instead to unspecified spaces outside or between the models he parodies, to the silent areas of doubt in the satirist's conscience about all available paradigms of authority.

3. Satire, Epic, and History in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

IBBON'S narrative satire in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, like Swift's in A Tale of a Tub, concerns to a great extent the history of religion. Like Swift, Gibbon draws a parallel between superstition and allegory on the one hand, between materialism and irony on the other. Both affirm materiality against spirituality; yet both eventually distance themselves from extreme forms of materialism. Leaving one-directional satire behind in the Decline and Fall, Gibbon ultimately embraces an attitude of elegaic but detailed remembrance of the lost Roman world. 1 will discussfirsthis materializing, leveling strategies, then his parodic satire of Christianity, andfinallyhis ironic, melancholy juxtapositions of diverse religious and cultural systems. In his account of the Empress Theodora, wife of Justinian, Gibbon describes her former career as a prostitute: "The satirical historian [Procopius] has not blushed24 to describe the naked scenes which Theodora was not ashamed to exhibit in the theatre.25 After exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure,26 she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of Nature;27 but her murmurs, her pleasures, and her arts, must be veiled in the obscurity of a learned language."1 Gibbon reserves for his footnotes his references to Procopius's Secret History (IX, 16-20), from which he quotes two passages in Greek. The first quotation he brackets this way: "25After the mention of a narrow girdle (as none could appear stark naked in the theatre), Procopius thus proceeds: [three lines of Procopius's Greek]. I have heard that a learned prelate, now deceased, was fond of quoting this passage in conversation." The second Greek passage he quotes without preamble, then comments, "27. . . She wished for a fourth altar on which she might pour libations to the god of love." Rather

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than consigning the subject to a "decent obscurity," Gibbon's comments illuminate the indecent meaning of the quoted passages. His affectation of a learned modesty actually heightens their indecency. Without translating the passages, he nevertheless succeeds in conveying their meaning vividly to the imagination of readers with little or no Greek. As this passage shows, Gibbon is interested in much that does not fit into the standard view of him as an exemplar of rationality and classicism. He himself writes as a satiric historian, bringing down to the level of the body the pretenses of emperors and empresses as well as the claims to spirituality of religious leaders. Gibbon again emphasizes the bodily needs of the highly placed when he defends calling the emperor Vitellius "beastly": Vitellius consumed in mere eating at least six millions of our money in about seven months. It is not easy to express his vices with dignity, or even decency. Tacitus fairly calls him a hog; but it is by substituting to a coarse word a very fine image . . . "At Vitellius, umbraculis hortorum abditus, ut ignava animalia, quibus si cibum suggeras jacent torpentque, praeterita, instantia, futura, pari oblivione dimiserat." ["Vitellius secluded himself among the shadows of his garden like those miserable animals that are content to lie and doze so long as food is put in front of them."] Tacit. Hist, iii.36. (I, 87, n. 58) Describing Vitellius as "beastly," Gibbon maintains civility and decency in his narrative. But calling an emperor a "hog" does not violate the decorum of the footnote. In the note, moreover, Gibbon can discuss why such attributions are inappropriate in his and in Tacitus's text, and can quote Tacitus's circumlocution, which, as in the case of Theodora, captures Vitellius's character more vividly and hence more damningly than does the single adjective to which Gibbon resorts.2 Of the possible bodily parts and functions, Gibbon's vision concentrates not, like Swift's, on the excremental, but, like a synthesis of Sterne's and Rabelais', on the sexual and the gustatory. Both figure, for example, in the effort to stimulate the exhausted senses of Elagabalus by "the confused multitudes of women, of wines, and of dishes, and the studied variety of attitudes and sauces." Gibbon's parataxis captures the conflation of sexual and gustatory pleasures here, in what he ironically calls "the only [sciences] cultivated and patronized by the monarch 68 " (I, 159). Gibbon satirically depicts the empire under Elagabalus as a proverbial worldturned-upside-down, in which the emperor has displaced sense in favor of the senses.3

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At the opposite extreme, Gibbon diagnose the final effects of the asocial and beastly fanaticism of the Egyptian monks: They aspired to reduce themselves to the rude and miserable state in which the human brute is scarcely distinguished above his kindred animals; and a numerous sect of Anchorets derived their name from their humble practice of grazing in the fields of Mesopotamia with the common herd.69 69

Sozomen, 1. vi. c.33. The great St. Ephrem composed a panegyric on these boskoi, or grazing monks. (Tillemont, Mém. Eccles. torn. viii. p. 292). (IV, 78-79) The activities of these monks complement those of Elagabalus and Theodora, thus exemplifying the satiric law of the excluded middle: extreme opposites figure prominently, but moderate elements remain faint or invisible.4 The libertine and hoggish rulers of the empire bear a striking resemblance to their ascetic opposites, the bovine monks of the desert, who sleep in caves and live by grazing. Self-indulgence and self-abnegation mirror each other, demonstrating the ease with which the soul of a beast can live in the shape of a human. The satiric historian encounters very few characters who occupy a middle ground between such opposite but equally degraded extremes. Superstition and fanaticism mirror each other just as libertinism and asceticism do. In Gibbon's history, once Christianity triumphs, it falls into the same superstitiousness that it condemned among the pagans. Gibbon imagines the outrage with which a simple Christian of the second century would witness pilgrims of three hundred years later kissing the walls of a church, worshiping the blood and bones of a saint, giving evidence of "the strong intoxication of fanaticism, and, perhaps, of wine" (III, 226). The zeugma here that reduces spiritual to physical intoxication characterizes Gibbon's satiric analysis of religious enthusiasm.5 Earlier, Gibbon describes the zealous Christian worshipers in terms that even more closely echo Swift's portrayal of religious fanatics in section 8 of A Tale of a Tub and in the "Mechanical Operation of the Spirit": "When their devout minds were sufficiently prepared by a course of prayer, of fasting, and of vigils, to receive the extraordinary impulse, they were transported out of their senses, and delivered in extasy what was inspired, being mere organs of the Holy Spirit, just as a pipe or flute is of him who blows into it" (II, 30). Like Swift, Gibbon reduces the Holy Spirit to wind and implies a scene of worship similar to that produced by the Aeolists in section 8 of the Tale.

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Throughout his history, Gibbon maintains that physical stimuli—especially such deprivations as fasts, sexual frustration, and sleeplessness— cause spiritual ecstasies. He thus elaborates the same satiric argument that Cervantes, Swift, and Sterne advanced, that repression of physical energies gives rise to inflammations of the spirit.6 The rhetorical analogue of enthusiasm is allegory: both the enthusiast and the allegorizer attempt to read through the visible and tangible to the spiritual, to transcend the sensible phenomena of the world and the literal meanings of words. As in A Tale of a Tub, allegorical interpretation stands as the primary object of Gibbon's satiric attack. The historian relies on literal, materializing meanings in his own critical analyses and satiric levelings. Taking moderate literal usage as a norm, he criticizes allegorical practices wherever he encounters them in writing the Decline and Fall He also attacks some extreme literalizers, whose practices virtually satirize themselves. In Gibbon's history, allegory provides a means of concealing awkward discrepancies within a doctrine and its embarrassing connections with bodily parts and functions. According to Gibbon's account, the Gnostics first had recourse to allegorical readings in order to obviate the difficulties with a literal interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, such as "the speaking serpent, . . . the seraglio of Solomon, . . . the sanguinary list of murders, of executions, and of massacres" (II, 13). Shortly thereafter, orthodox Christian writers adopted the same strategy: "Acknowledging that the literal sense is repugnant to every principle of faith as well as reason, [the Church fathers] deem themselves secure and invulnerable behind the ample veil of allegory, which they carefully spread over every tender part of the Mosaic dispensation31" (I, 393). In the Decline and Fall, allegory veils and protects the tender private parts of a creed. Allegorical interpretation serves the same function as does clothing, registering changes in religious fashion. Swift makes the same connection when he links Peter's use of allegory with his foppishness in the second section of the Tale. After the Gnostics and the orthodox have made use of allegory as a protective mantling for their most dubious doctrines, the pagans adopt the same strategy for veiling their more objectionable beliefs. Gibbon considers pagan mythology to be a "thin texture" (I, 32) to which Neoplatonic philosophers add layers of allegory in their defense of paganism (II, 127). Gibbon satirizes pagan as well as Christian practitioners of allegory. Allegory and religious enthusiasm both seek to overcome the material world by refining physical phenomena into spiritual or moral lessons. The satiric historian lowers their spirituality to physicality as he reduces their metaphors to statements of literal fact. But extremely literal,

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superstitious worshipers also reduce moral or spiritual beliefs to physical phenomena. The demand for relics, for example, requires that the material of the true cross possess a miraculous power of regeneration so that however much of it is taken away, the original substance remains: "67 This multiplication is asserted by Paulinus (epist. xxxvi), who seems to have improved a rhetorical flourish of Cyril into a real fact. The same supernatural privilege must have been communicated to the Virgin's milk (Erasmi Opera, torn i. p. 778), saints' heads, etc., and other relics" (II, 481). Superstitious believers take as literal fact the metaphorical usages by which the bishop of Jerusalem accounts for the multiplication of "true" relics. As evidence of the same literal form of understanding, Gibbon observes that in most cases, the Christian bishop "extracted from his flock the same implicit obedience as if that favourite metaphor had been literally just" (II, 47). In addition, superstitious Christian millenarians "understood in their literal sense" Christ's prophecies of "the second and glorious coming of the Son of Man in the clouds, before that generation was totally extinguished" (II, 24). A common method of understanding links the superstitious who assert the material efficacy of relics, and the millenarians who subscribe to the literal interpretation of sacred texts.7 Like Swift, Gibbon satirizes allegorizers by stressing literal and material meanings; however, like Gibbon, Swift also seeks to distance himself from the gross simplifications of an exclusive literalism or materialism. In order to accomplish this distancing, Gibbon demonstrates the ironic convergences between allegory and extreme literalism, and between spirituality and extreme materialism. The late second-century Christian thinker Origen best illustrates both the damaging consequences of excessive literalizing and the point of contact between allegory and literalism in religious rhetoric and behavior. By Origen's time, Christian abhorrence of sexuality had allegorically sublimated physical union into spiritual intercourse: "the sensual connexion was refined into a resemblance of the mystic union of Christ with his church" (II, 39). Spurred by such doctrines, thousands of Christians took vows of celibacy.8 Some went further, and "a few of these, among whom we may reckon the learned Origen, judged it the most prudent to disarm the tempter.98" In the footnote Gibbon remarks wistfully and devastatingly: " 98 As it was his general practice to allegorize Scripture, it seems unfortunate that, in this instance only, he should have adopted the literal sense" (II, 39). The case of Origen illustrates a fundamental paradox: the metaphor of the marriage between Christ and his church moves Origen to act on a literal interpretation of the injunction to make oneself a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:12).9 As Gibbon sees it, Origen unwittingly satirizes himself; the note relishes the

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ironic neatness with which his self-mutilation exposes his spiritual presumption. Origen saves the historian the need to underscore because he so sharply presents the ascetic's self-reduction to a condition that is less than fully human. In the Decline and Fall, Gibbon thus reiterates Swift's doubleedged indictment of the converging extremes of allegory and extreme literalism in A Tale of a Tub. In Gibbon's argument, the pagans prove equivalent to the Christians when they develop their own allegories in order to obscure such objectionable narratives as that of Venus and Attis. "Instead of being scandalized or satisfied with the literal sense" of their myths, the pagans too produce "skillful masters of this allegorical science," who "could extract from any fable any sense which was adapted to their favourite system of religion and philosophy. The lascivious form of a naked Venus was tortured into the discovery of some moral precept, or some physical truth; and the castration of Atys explained the revolution of the sun between the tropics, or the separation of the human soul from vice and error" (II, 462). Under a veil of allegorical moral precepts and unrelated natural phenomena, Gibbon finds a naked goddess (being tortured by allegorizers), and another narrative of self-castration.10 He underscores the self-interested use of allegory throughout the ages to cover embarrassing doctrines and indecent narratives.11 He also implies that the generation of such meaning derives ultimately from denying or cutting off contact with prime physical facts of human life. With the narrative of Origen or of Attis constituting the literal level, allegory exists to cloak the self-mutilation that pure literalism enacts. Both allegory and extreme literalism thus testify to a separation from potency, from sense, and from the senses. Gibbon imagines the "sages of Greece and Rome" as dispassionate, knowledgeable observers who realized "that any popular mode of faith and worship which presumed to disclaim the assistance of the senses would, in proportion as it receded from superstition, find itself incapable of restraining the wanderings of the fancy and the visions of fanaticism" (II, 81-82). Such ironic philosophers provide models for Gibbon in their understanding of the process by which opposite but complementary extremes such as allegory and literal interpretation or enthusiasm and superstition metamorphose into each other. As an alternative to such disablement as Origen's, and as an inconspicuous norm of human behavior, Gibbon offers the younger Gordian, named to be co-emperor with his virtuous and productive father of eighty: "Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the one and the other were designed for use rather than osten-

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tation" (I, 191). The younger Gordian demonstrates the possibility of living a life that combines sense and the senses, intellectual activity and moral responsibility with moderate satisfaction of physical needs. While far from perfect, such a man's life is full and human—neither swinish nor bovine, neither mystical nor self-mutilating.12 But Gordian, whose reign lasted less than two months, provides an extremely rare instance of such moderation in Gibbon's history. Christian Epic and Satiric History Satirically lowering the claims of spiritual and secular authorities to the level of their bodily functions, Gibbon indicts both Christians and pagans. As he levels the complementary rhetorical strategies of allegory and extreme literalism, he again satirizes both, although he maintains that the pagans imitated the allegorical practices of the Christians. To fashion the Decline and Fall as parodic satire, however, Gibbon sets paganism and Christianity against each other as antagonistic opposites. Satirizing Christianity and implying a high regard for the pagan system of belief, he inverts long-established verdicts of Christian history. Constantine has been called "the Great" for establishing Christianity as the official religion of the empire, and his nephew Julian "the Apostate" for his efforts to revivify the pagan system. Gibbon satirically reverses both of these judgments: for example, he considers Constantine great only in the magnitude of his betrayal of classical culture. To drive home his satire of Christian values, Gibbon parodies the most recent and authoritative Christian epic, Paradise Lost. He inverts key elements of Milton's epic, identifying Julian with Milton's Satan, for example, but subversively portraying both Julian and Satan as heroes. Gibbon formulates his project in the first half of the Decline and Fall as a vindication of paganism through satiric revision of Christian history and epic.13 Gibbon's early critical writings on narrative forms provide a basis from which to analyze his parodic satire of Christian epic and history. In his first work, the Fssai sur l'Etude de la Littérature, Gibbon does not distinguish between epic and history ("littérature" designates history and philosophy as well asfictionand poetry).14 Rather, he discusses epic as a narrative form whose analysis can lead to accurate historical and psychological inferences. Although based on historical understanding, the epic need not be bound to the strict fidelity of a "froid annaliste." It can claim the "grand pouvoir de la fiction"15 to choose among or to diverge from established historical traditions in order to depict character most effec-

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tively. Epic poets should not radically alter well-established characters by depicting a cowardly Julius Caesar or a noble Cataline; however, "les poètes peuvent écrire leur histoire, moins comme elle a été, que comme elle eût du être."16 Although this might seem an extraordinary conflation of history and fiction, Gibbon's concept of historical narrative makes full use of the double meaning of the French "histoire" as both "history" and "narrative." History possesses a shape because the historian gives it one. Philosophical historians, like epic poets, construct a narrative that reflects their judgment of characters, events, causes, and their predecessors. In accordance with this view, in the Decline and Fall, Gibbon's shaping of narrative and depiction of character reflect his sympathy with the pagan empire as well as his judgment that Christianity undermined not only paganism but the empire itself. In these early essays, Gibbon articulated the method that shaped his own epic history's adaptations and inversions of previous histories and epics.17 In the early "Inquiry whether a Catalogue of the Armies . . . is an essential part of an Epic poem," Gibbon concludes it is not. As one might expect, then, although he reviews the organization of the Roman military in thefirstchapters of the Decline and Fall, he does not directly imitate epic catalogues by listing the contributions of the various provinces and allies to the military strength of the empire. However, he does unobtrusively translate the substance and effect of, for example, the catalogue of the ships in Book II of the Iliad when he surveys the provinces of the empire in the age of the Antonines from Spain to Syria, from Britain to Egypt (I, 20-30). The sweep and variety of the climates and cultures listed in this section announce the vast scale of his narrative. As Homer's catalogue names all the elements of the Greek and Trojan worlds focused on the war, Gibbon's survey of the provinces allows him to indicate the effective reach of the forces concentrated in the capital city administering an empire over three continents. Gibbon adapts numerous epic conventions in similarly quiet ways to suit the purposes of his history. As his history comes to focus on Christianity, his adaptations increasingly take the stronger form of critical inversions. The Decline and Fall begins in the middle of the history of Rome, literally in medias res, but it never reverts to an account of the republic or the early empire. After its preliminary review of the empire in the second century, the history stays close to chronological order through thefirsthalf of the work. However, Gibbon's title and his decision to begin his narrative with the death of Marcus Aurelius indicate that his history shares its subject with numerous epics that recount the fall of a city, a culture, and an empire, beginning with the Iliad. A decline, of course, can only follow a

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state of good fortune. Agreeing with numerous other historical thinkers, Gibbon locates this happy era between the reigns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius: "If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hestitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus" (I, 85-86). 1 8 A century of pax Romana under a succession of enlightened monarchs approximates paradise on earth more nearly than any other historical time. This period thus serves Gibbon as a point of reference from which to discern the empire's decline. The precarious good fortune that gave the empire an uninterrupted string of hard-working, intelligent, and upright rulers would turn into the bad fortune that placed a series of weaklings, imbeciles, and corrupt Praetorians on the throne. Gibbon notes that the reign of Marcus Aurelius's predecessor, Antoninus Pius, "is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind" (I, 69). There is no history in paradise.19 Gibbon's historical narrative accordingly begins when the brutal lunatic Commodus succeeds his father, the philosopher Marcus. The following twelve centuries furnish abundant materials for history. Gibbon points out that even in the second century, images of liberty, stability, and happiness cannot entirely obscure the developments that would lead to the empire's disintegration: the powerlessness of the senate, the rise of the Praetorian guard, the spread of civic apathy, the rule of one man. The first author of these causes is the author of the empire itself—Augustus. Gibbon repeatedly describes the first emperor as hypocritical and crafty, the "artful founder" of the flawed imperial system: The tender respect of Augustus for a free constitution which he had destroyed can only be explained by an attentive consideration of the character of that subtle tyrant. . . . He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government. . . . Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom. (I, 78) Deceiving the Romans with illusory images, Augustus induces them to accept a military monarchy and exchange their liberty for stability. As subtle as a serpent, he plays a role in Gibbon's Roman history comparable to that of the tempter in Genesis.

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The death of this serpent a century before the establishment of the paradisal age of the Antonines indicates that there are in fact two eras of nostalgic longing, two approximate golden ages, in Gibbon's conception of Roman history: most of the republic as well as the second century of the empire. If, as Gibbon writes, "the golden age of Trajan and the Antonines had been preceded by an age of iron," that age of iron had in turn been preceded by an earlier golden age when a citizen army, a narrower Roman rule, and a balance between the powers in a republican government contributed to making Rome both strong and virtuous (I, 71-72).20 Tacitus no doubt idealized the republic, but Gibbon adopts from Tacitus, his model of a philosophical historian, a deep respect for the institutions of republican Rome.21 The republic thus offers an alternate point of reference from which the rest of Roman history can be understood as a decline. Gibbon might have traced a decline with less ambiguity if he had begun his history with the establishment of the empire or the beginning of the Christian era.22 But Gibbon consistently reckons by some means other than the Christian system, and his dramatic starting point clearly reflects his conception of his narrative as one that beginning from a high point describes a downward movement, yet concludes with an upward one: his last chapters recount the rediscovery of ancient civilization during the Renaissance. As the story of a tremendous fall that ends with an ascent, the plot of the Decline and Fall thus strikingly reiterates the curve of plot of Paradise Lost.23 In fact, however, Gibbon's narrative satirically subverts some of the most significant features of Milton's Christian epic. Although Milton's standing among the Romantics has received much attention, only recently, in Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century, by Dustin Griffin, has his reception during the eighteenth century been studied. Griffin's book, however, does not analyze the relation between Gibbon's history and Milton's epic. Other critics have paired Gibbon and Milton in isolated or casual comments, and E. M. W. Tillyard has discussed Gibbon's history as an epic project, but the extended subversion of Milton's epic in Gibbon's history has never been analyzed.24 Gibbon's attitude toward Milton could be described as protoRomantic; his opposition to Christianity even leads him, like Blake and Shelley, to a sympathetic admiration of Milton's Satan. Gibbon often refers to Milton's "imagination forte"25 and his "strength of fancy" (II, 28), and he respects the extent of his learning. But Gibbon objects to Milton's uncompromising rejection of pagan values and embrace of Christian ones. In Paradise Lost, Milton regularly alludes to pagan epics in order to assert that pagan beliefs and forms of heroism have been surpassed by the coming of Christ. For example, he compares the fall of Satan to the long decline and fall of Mulciber:

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From heav'n, they fabl'd, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o'er the Crystal Battlements: from Morn To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve, A Summer's day; and with the setting Sun Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star, On Lemnos,Th'ÆgeanIsle: thus they relate, Erring; for he with this rebellious rout Fell long before. (1, 740-748) Milton's emphatic placement of "erring" links pagan epic poets with Mulciber, who is a type of Satan, and implies that they, like Mulciber and Satan, have been cast down for their errors. While Gibbon can acknowledge the beauty of such a passage, he judges the epics of Homer and Virgil to be more successful than Milton's because pagan polytheism more closely accords with the conventions of epic than does Christian monotheism. Milton judged the ancient epics to be inadequate from a Christian perspective, and sought both to incorporate and overcome them in his Christian epic. Gibbon in turn finds that Milton's poem presents an unsatisfactory grafting of Christian doctrine onto a recalcitrant poetic form. In his Essai Gibbon objects that the two-day war in heaven against an omnipotent divinity could never be imaginatively satisfying, and he faults Milton for the inconsistency between his revisionary concept of Christian heroism and his anachronistic use of epic conventions. As Gibbon sees it, Milton's religion imprisons his poetic genius.26 Perhaps Gibbon does not draw attention to the revision of Milton's poem in his history because he knows himself to be both closely akin to Milton and sharply competitive with him. Each man took a circuitous route to arrive at a subject of heroic amplitude; the search for a subject occupied their thoughts at the same stage of their lives, and their lists of possible topics include some of the same ideas.27 Such convergences as these, however, bring into sharp relief the opposition between the two men's thinking: Gibbon distrusted Milton's radical republicanism, his defense of tyrannicide, and his vision of the political rule of the elect.28 Most importantly, Milton overturned the values of the pagan epics, equating, for example, Satan with Mulciber and the epic poets. Gibbon in his turn reverses the values implied in Paradise Lost, and fashions the first half of his history as a parodic revision of Milton's Christian epic. Milton casts down pagan culture; Gibbon raises it up. In the rise of Christianity itself, Gibbon discerns the empire's decline and fall. Paradise Lost recounts a fall from grace, and concludes with a vision of the

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eventual possibility of salvation. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire depicts a fall from a golden age of pagan prosperity and peace, and concludes with the eventual reemergence of an era of enlightened paganism. In Milton's providential history, nothing equals the importance of Christ's death in the shaping of human history. In Gibbon's secular history, the execution of a son of a Galilean carpenter in an obscure corner of the empire does not warrant mention until the narrative reaches the point three centuries later when an artful emperor made belief in Christ's divinity the empire's official religion, although only about five percent of the empire was Christian at the time (II, 69). To Christianity and to Milton, the pagan world is the Satanic adversary; to paganism and to Gibbon, however, it is Christianity that plays the role of the adversary. Gibbon's satiric inversion of Milton's epic and of Christian history achieves its sharpest focus in his portrayal of the emperors Julian and Constantine. The former he takes from an object of Christian opprobrium and refashions as a hero; the latter he finds to be not a religious man of broad vision, but a fit object of satiric debunking. Although Christian tradition associates Julian with a serpent—Milton calls him "the subtlest enemy to our faith"29—Gibbon considers the metaphor to be more appropriate when applied to Constantine's character. In reevaluating Julian, Gibbon draws parallels between Julian and earlier heroic figures. For example, he repeatedly compares Julian's Persian campaign with the Greeks' embattled march through Persia seven hundred years earlier, as recorded in Xenophon's Anabasis (Decline and Fall, II, 520-550). When Gibbon condemns the treaty that Julian's successor, Jovian, concluded with the Persians after Julian's death in battle, he pointedly contrasts the weakness of the Roman Christians with Xenophon's heroic Greeks. Gibbon also notes parallels between Julian's Persian campaign and Mark Antony's: both armies suffered from supply shortages and from the same hit-and-run tactics of the enemy; both "were pursued by the same enemies and involved in the same distress" (II, 540). Gibbon underscores his reassessment of Julian not only by placing him in the company of heroes of pagan antiquity, but also by associating him with an energetic character from Christian lore—not a saint or prophet, but Satan. Gibbon describes in detail Julian's almost preternaturally rapid march from Germany through the Black Forest and down the Danube to Constantinople against his cousin, Constantius II, Constantine's son. Recounting how Julian "pursued his direct course" climbing over mountains, wading through morasses, swimming rivers, and marching across barbarian territories to claim the imperial purple, Gibbon observes that

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. . . A modern divine might apply to the progress of Julian the lines which were originally designed for another apostate:— So eagerly the fiend, O'er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way, And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies. (II, 434) "The fiend" to whom Milton refers here is, of course, Satan on his journey from hell to earth (Paradise Lost, IV, 947-950). Such lines describing Satan on his way to seduce human beings from their obedience to the Christian god also apply to Julian on his way to become emperor and attempt to divert the Roman empire from its official obedience to the Christian religion. Gibbon indeed accepts the equivalence between these two opponents of Christianity, but he does not affirm the Christian condemnation of them. Adopting the traditional view of pagan and Christian as polar opposites, Gibbon reverses their traditional valuation; he considers truly heroic the figure that Christian historians and poets have damned as the last threat to the earthly success of their religion. Gibbon's admiration for Julian thus gives him cause to admire Satan, who also opposed the god of Christianity. Moreover, Gibbon himself resembles both Julian and Satan as he "pursues his way" through the difficult and varied historical terrain of the later history of the empire—military, ecclesiastical, theological, economic, biographical—as part of his long narrative. As Satan rebelled against the Christian god, and Julian undermined the Christian religion, Gibbon undertakes his daunting narrative journey in order to oppose the orthodoxies of Christian history. Thus Gibbon aligns himself with these two arch-apostates as he parodically and precisely inverts many established Christian evaluations of crucial historical figures and events.30 Criticism on Paradise Lost has long held that Satan displays the heroism of antecedent epics, a heroism which Milton considers Christian heroism to have surpassed. Going further than Renaissance chivalric epic, which sought to synthesize classical and Christian virtues in such heroes as Orlando and the Red Cross Knight, Milton placed his own epic in a subversive, parodic relation to classical epic. Satan's desire for fame, his eloquence, and his capacity for action recall similar traits of numerous epic heroes. But Milton's judgment of such pursuit of honor exactly inverts that of earlier epic poets: where they see heroic action, Milton sees self-limiting pride. Gibbon acknowledges that Julian's paganism was not free of all superstition, "the general contagion of the times" (II, 456). However, he distinguishes between Julian and superstitious Christian monks because

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Julian was not an antisocial recluse, but a responsible ruler who framed "wise and salutary" laws for his realm, a civilized man who cultivated his critical abilities through the practice of philosophy and his creative talents through the writing of satiric dialogues.31 Gibbon's respect for Julian's energy and talents demonstrates his sympathetic reevaluation of pagan heroism by contrast with the more theological and contemplative virtues of Milton's Christ or Adam. Through his admiring portrait of Julian, and through his witty identification of himself with both Julian and Satan, Gibbon satirically overturns Milton's Christian redefinition of heroism and reasserts pagan over Christian values. If Gibbon rescues Julian from satiric attack by Christian historians, he makes scrupulous but shrewd use of the available evidence to construct a pointedly satiric portrait of Constantine, one of the heroes of Christian history.32 Gibbon first undercuts the tradition that Constantine saw in the sky on the eve of the battle of the Milvian bridge in 312 a large sign of the cross along with the words, "By this sign, you will conquer." Eusebius included this vision in his biography of Constantine, written after the emperor's death in 337, but said nothing about such a miracle earlier, although it would have been highly relevant to his Ecclesiastical History, completed in 323. Nor did any of the participants in the battle write anything about such a sign in the years between 312 and 337. Following Bayle's dictum that no supernatural explanation is needed if a natural one will do, Gibbon infers that the famous vision must have been conveniently fabricated decades after the battle and years after the establishment of Christianity. Gibbon further subverts the celebratory view of Constantine by fixing his conversion not, as was traditional, around 312, the time of the discredited vision, but around 325, when Constantine triumphed over his last rival. In Gibbon's view, Constantine's true character emerges only after he becomes absolute ruler in 325; in that year, he issues an edict of toleration, summons the first church council to Nice, and murders his wife and eldest son, Crispus. "At the time of the death of Crispus the emperor could no longer hestitate in the choice of a religion; . . . the church was possessed of an infallible remedy" (II, 329). Gibbon underscores the convenience of Constantine's accepting Christianity's promise that baptism brings "full and absolute expiation of sin." Constantine thus emerges from Gibbon's narrative as a calculating and superstitious man who rose to power by favoring Christians, cultivated the idea that heaven smiled on him, saw the advantages of allying the Church with the empire, and embraced baptism as absolution for mortal crimes. Gibbon caps his satiric portrait by emphasizing what Christian historians neglect—that in his

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final years Constantine became an increasingly capricious tyrant, adopting the use of dresses, cosmetics, and wigs, and exchanging his earlier behavior as a military leader for the manners of an hermaphroditic potentate. For Gibbon, then, Constantine's late conversion demonstrates the precisely inverse relation between the practices of Christianity and of civic virtue: "As [Constantine] gradually advanced in the knowledge of [Christian] truth, he proportionably declined in the practice of virtue" (II, 329). In Gibbon's satiric narrative, Constantine joins Augustus as an artful, subtle innovator. By favoring the new religion for the consolidation of his own power and that of his dynasty, Constantine defines himself as another serpent whose craftiness led not to the reinvigoration but to the further corruption of the Roman empire. Augustus and Constantine, the founders themselves, ironically emerge as the true serpents in Gibbon's revisionary satiric history of the Roman and Christian empires. Gibbon's one-directional satire here, however, leads to his problematic treatment of the persecutions of Christians. In concluding Chapter XVI, he calculates that perhaps only fifteen hundred Christians were killed throughout the empire in the ten years of Diocletian's notorious persecution—"an annual consumption of one hundred and fifty martyrs" (II, 147). With this coolly dismissive irony, Gibbon lapses from the compassion that informs the rest of the Decline and Fall; here Gibbon writes as an extreme partisan of paganism, and, as he himself observes of other extremists, he shows inhumanity in doing so. In answer to the overwhelming evidence of substantial persecutions in nearly contemporaneous documents, Gibbon charges that the Christian writers projected their own persecuting spirit onto the tolerant Romans. He inverts the accusation commonly leveled against the Romans in depicting the Christian martyrs as perverse fanatics determined to transform the empire through their own insistence on being victimized. Such convoluted and unsupported arguments reveal Gibbon's desire in this instance to blame the victims. Seeking to invert Christian history, Gibbon's historical method here paradoxically makes use of a Christian mode of interpretation. Just as Christian history interprets past events teleologically, from the point of view of their contribution to the eventual triumph of the Church, Gibbon in the first half of the Decline and Fall interprets the history of the empire from the point of view of the eventual struggle of pagan enlightenment against Christian superstition. Disputing the power and authority of the Church in his own day, Gibbon allows himself to forget in Chapter XVI that the early Christians themselves subversively disputed the paganism established by Roman imperial power. In the years following the original publication of Chapters XV and XVI in the first volume of his history (1776), Gibbon's attitude toward Christianity and toward other religions

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grew more complex and tolerant. In a letter to Sheffield written in 1790, he explains that he treated the early Church with such satiric "freedom" because he "was attached to the old Pagan establishment, and the Christians were the innovators."33 He implies that his account would be less hostile if written then because he has come to recognize and renounce his earlier embattled allegiance to the pagan cause. Even such fundamental conflicts should not obscure the significant points of convergence in the visions of Milton and Gibbon.34 Intensely anticlerical, both oppose monastic and ascetic ideals. Milton's conviction in Areopagitica that "reason is but choosing,"35 in the midst of temptations, deceits, and threats finds a strong echo in Gibbon's castigation of the plague of useless monks and praise for active civic administrators. For Milton as for Gibbon, paradise precludes history. Although a popular view holds that Milton's last two books exhibit a loss of energy and focus, they fittingly recount the consequence of "Man's first disobedience" as the fall into history. After witnessing the first murder, the tower of Babel, and the flood, Adam learns from Michael of Christ's death, the persecution of the apostles, and the triumph of the "grievous Wolves," corrupt priests who serve their own power and interest. Michael encapsulates centuries of human history in his bleak summary, "So shall the world go on, / To good malignant, to bad men benign" (XII, 537). At the conclusion of Milton's vision in Paradise Lost, this conception of history as a meaningless succession of exploitations, stupidities, and sorrows closely parallels Gibbon's characterization of history as "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind" (I, 84). Both Milton and Gibbon view history as a seemingly unending demonstration of the fallen condition of human nature. As a minor compensation, in Milton's view, each age, no matter how fallen, produces "one just man"36—such as Abdiel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and Christ. Gibbon's history, for all its concern to designate impersonal causes of the decline of empire, also finds a series of outstanding historical individuals in Cato, Tacitus, Julian, Boethius, and Petrarch. History as Monument The increasing focus on such individuals signals a major change in method and argument; after the midpoint of the Decline and Fall, Gibbon leaves behind his parodic reversals of Paradise Lost and his satire of Christianity. The idea of a decline and fall unifies his first three volumes; the last page of almost every chapter marks a stage in the fall of the empire. In the final three volumes, Gibbon abandons this means of organization,

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with its metaphors of corruption and of falling, and its attempt to ascertain the workings of impersonal historical forces.37 He concentrates instead on the force of historical contingencies and on figures such as Theodora, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, Rienzi, and Poggio, characters usually of humble origin who resist, overcome, or understand powerful historical circumstances. Gibbon deliberated and experimented on the best means of organizing his history of the years 476-1453: "It was not till after many designs and many tryals, that I preferred, as I still prefer, the method of grouping my picture by nations," he notes in the Autobiographies.38 Milton had overcome the limits of national epic by returning to the story of the original parents of all nations; Gibbon transcends the form in a different way. Rather than celebrating the origins and accomplishments of a single people, as Petrarch, Ariosto, Ronsard, Camoens, or Spenser had, he recounts the history of the Normans, the Saxons, the Persians, the Bulgarians, and the Turks each in a separate chapter. In the paratactic second half of the Decline and Fall,39 Gibbon grants no nation the status of a special or chosen people; all serve as equally worthy subjects for historical narrative. Gibbon thus shapes the second half of his history into a critical parody less of Milton than of classical and Christian national epics. He shares with these epics the project of recording the origins and noteworthy deeds of a culture, but he critiques their partisan celebration of single nations by recounting the acts of many peoples and nations. He also grounds his historical epic in scholarly research and skeptical inferences. Gibbon's method in the last volumes therefore demystifies epic, reducing its availability for legitimizing national authority. Although Gibbon's view of religion in the first half of the Decline and Fall remains bipolar, in the second half he multiplies the number of his perspectives on religion. Instead of opposing two religions in order to satirize one and celebrate the other, he juxtaposes his description and analysis of Islam with those of paganism and Christianity, studying religion as a comparative social phenomenon. In the second half of his history, Gibbon transforms his exclusive, parodic satire into a comprehensive, ironic vision. He moves beyond a national, a Christian, or even a European point of view to attempt a truly multicultural perspective. A partisan of no nation or religion, Gibbon adopts a method of historical interpretation based on juxtaposing the histories of different peoples, alternate beliefs, and multiple frames of reference. Gibbon's increasing relativity of vision leads him also to more tentative and ambiguous judgments of the character of historical figures. In his first volumes, Gibbon felt capable of accurately encapsulating such

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complex characters as Constantine—ambitious, artful, cruel, superstitious—and Julian—brave, rash, self-denying, enthusiastic. In a later volume, however, having noted that Justinian's shrewd, undefeated general Belisarius exhibits folly and cowardice in his domestic life, Gibbon accepts both sets of character traits as accurate if radically inconsistent. In his attempt to ascertain Mohammed's true character, Gibbon similarly adopts multiple perspectives, concluding that Mohammed's successive roles as visionary, soldier, and preacher do not coalesce to allow a single formulation; assessing such a character calls for multiple judgments and an ability to tolerate inconsistencies. Throughout the last three volumes, Gibbon depicts historicalfiguresas extremely ambiguous and stresses the inadequacy of relying on a single or even double angle of vision in evaluating character.40 In addition to juxtaposing the contradictory sides of complex characters and the histories of many nations and religions in the second half of the Decline and Fall Gibbon also draws meaning from the juxtaposition of different spots of time on the same geographical site. Emphasizing the persistence of space through change in time, he develops a strategy for historical understanding that depends on recognizing ironic parallels between events occurring centuries apart in the same place. Such juxtapositions across eras reveal most compactly the historical inversions that constitute Gibbon's primary concern in the later volumes of the Decline and Fall Gibbon notes, for example, that in the tenth century, the Norman Robert Guiscard defeated the Greek emperor Alexius on a plain outside Durazzo (ancient Epidamnus, or Dyrrachium), the site a thousand years earlier of the battle between Caesar and Pompey that preceded Pharsalus (VI, 207). However, the existence of such a close parallel throws into greater relief the dramatic contrast between the poverty, tyranny, and superstition plaguing southern Italy under Norman rule and the prosperity, freedom, and philosophy found in the regionfifteenhundred years earlier at the time of Pythagoras. Parallels between ancient and later times bring into focus the contrasts between those times, registering the "revolution of human affairs" usually as a loss, an occasion for melancholy or ironic reflections.41 Because the evidence of historical reversals will be most concentrated in cities, Gibbon repeatedly returns to Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome as focal points that give coherence to his narrative. He notes that after the Romans defeated the Jews in 71 A.D., they built a temple dedicated to Venus on the ruins of the Jewish holy places. Almost three hundred years later, the destruction of this temple on Constantine's orders revealed Christ's sepulchre hidden underneath it, and Constantine had a Christian church erected on the site. The succession of temples on a single

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site, dedicated in turn to Jehovah, Venus, and Christ, registers in stone the succession of religions in Jerusalem and the West. These reversals produce also the distinctive irony of a temple dedicated to the pagan goddess of love sitting for almost three centuries on the burial place of Christ. The continuity of geography allows Gibbon, like an ironic archaeologist, to excavate layers of meaning from the remains of successive, antagonistic cultural systems juxtaposed on the same location.42 Because of the rich significance of architectural remains, Gibbon twice juxtaposes and laments the most famous pillagings of Rome: for six days by Alaric's soldiers in 410, and even more destructively for seven months in 1527 by soldiers serving Charles V, ironically styled the Holy Roman Emperor (III, 339-348; VII, 308). Gibbon's reiteration of the destruction wrought in the sacks of Rome indicates that he is drawing near to the conclusion of his history, returning to Rome as the focal point of its concerns. In the second chapter, his survey of the Roman world in the age of the Antonines had concentrated on the capitol and celebrated such monuments as Trajan's column. In the final chapter, he revisits the remains of the architectural glories of the Antonines and closes his history with an examination of the ruins of Rome that survived into the fifteenth century and his own day.43 Since the architectural monuments function as a synecdoche for the empire itself, this meditation on ruins and their significance provides a fitting conclusion for the entire Decline and Fall. Characterizing his history as a project of coming to terms with the loss of ancient Rome, Gibbon implies a layering of possible reactions to such massive cultural loss. His own work ultimately exemplifies a late stage in the process of mourning—the melancholy working through in detail of memories of the lost object as a precondition to accepting the death of the earlier, generative culture as an unalterable fact.44 Gibbon devotes most of the first paragraph of this final chapter to a passage he quotes from Poggio Bracciolini's Historiae de varietate fortunae, on the vicissitudes of fortune. In this passage, Poggio has climbed the Capitoline hill with a friend to view the remains of ancient Rome, just as Gibbon in his last chapter invites his reader to join him in his survey of and meditation on the same ruins. A fifteenth-century historian, Poggio was one of the first to realize the differences between historical eras, especially classical and medieval cultures. He wrote dialogues satirizing religious enthusiasm and ecclesiastical corruption as well as indecent tales, his Facetiae. Sharing Gibbon's historical awareness and many of his interests and satiric attitudes, Poggio serves as Gibbon's double within the narrative, allowing him to bridge the three centuries between the end of the narrative of the Decline and Fall and his own time. Gibbon does not simply adopt

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and reiterate the passage he quotes from Poggio, however; he also makes it his own by translating it into his distinctive English, so that at the beginning of the seventy-first and culminating chapter of his history of Rome and its empire, he utters his own words in his own voice, as he synchronizes his voice and words with Poggio's across three centuries. Poggio first remembers Aeneas's visit to Evander in Aeneid VIII, where Virgil contrasts the thick underbrush of the Capitoline in Evander's days of rustic simplicity, poverty, and virtue with the polished columns and golden roofs of the Eorum in the imperial times of Augustus. Now, Poggio laments, history has come full circle, and the hill has returned to a semicivilized, pastoral state (in Gibbon's translation): "The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes. The public and private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant" (VII, 314). The juxtaposition of domestic animals with the scattered limbs of architectural giants demonstrates for Poggio the incommensurability between shrunken moderns and colossal ancients.45 Although Poggio invokes the wheel of fortune in this passage, his own time does not return to an exact duplication of Evander's, because the departure of greatness produces a sense of desolation and loss unknown to the original pastoral world. The third age of Rome, in which he lives, has reverted to semipastoral humility, but it lacks the virtue of the first age as well as the civilization of the second. Having to remind himself that "the hill of the Capitol, on which we sit, was formerly the head of the Roman empire, the citadel of the earth," Poggio exclaims, "This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! how changed! how defaced!" (VII, 313). With this series of exclamations, Gibbon through Poggio juxtaposes widely separated times and perspectives to produce a chorus of responses—including grief, celebration, and melancholy—to the fall and fragmentation of the Roman empire.46 Poggio's words allude first of all to the night of the fall of Troy and Aeneas's dream of Hector's disfigured shade. Aeneas laments the contrast between this spectacle and the sight of Hector in his glory: ei mihi, qualis erat! quantum mutatis ab illo Hectore, qui redit exuvias indutus Achilli Ah me, what an aspect he wore! How changed from that Hector who returns after donning the spoils of Achilles. (Aeneid, II, 274-275)47

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Hector, covered with gore and dirt, enjoins Aeneas to flee the burning city and save the Trojan gods. Poggio's exclamations also echo a passage that expresses exactly the opposite judgment on a fallen empire and its gods' defeat: "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!" (Isaiah 14:12). Prophesying the destruction of Babylon and its being "thrust down into the pit," Isaiah exults in the fall of the Assyrian empire and the triumph of its enemy, the god of Israel. Milton would allude to the same two passages in his own narrative of a contest between competing claimants to divinity and the disfiguring fall of one of them. Awaking after his fall into the lake of fire, Satan utters these first words to Beelzebub: If thou beest hee; But O how fall'n! how chang'd From him, who in the happy Realms of Light Cloth'd with transcendent brightness didst outshine Myriads though bright . . . . (Paradise Lost, I, 84-86) Both Isaiah's exclamation and this reiteration of it are addressed to devils; Milton's Lucifer describes his henchman in terms that apply equally to himself. Although he does not intend to, Satan here gives the same evidence as Isaiah of the power of the god that lays his adversaries low and sends them to the pit. Milton's additional allusion to Virgil draws a parallel between Aeneas's reaction to fallen Hector and Satan's reaction to fallen Beelzebub. Milton links Satan with earlier epic heroes because his judgment of the fall of empire coincides with Isaiah's; both insist that all empires of this world descend from Satan and are doomed like him to fall. Gibbon thus allusively introduces and juxtaposes possible responses to the destruction of empire. Isaiah and Milton celebrate the fall of Babylon and Rome, along with the complementary triumphant elevation of their god. Virgil mourns the horrific fall of Troy, the Trojans' deaths and disfigurements. Poggio's melancholy indignation, with its recognition of the differences between historical periods, places him with Petrarch and Rienzi, whose recognition of such loss Gibbon has quoted earlier: "Where are now these Romans? their virtue, their justice, their power? why was I not born in those happy times?" (VII, 270). Juxtaposing the epic poets of pagan Rome and Christian Britain with the Jewish prophet and the Renaissance Italians, Gibbon makes these alternatives available to the reader's imaginative intelligence. He does not scornfully condemn or dismiss Milton's celebration and Isaiah's exultation; nor does he simply embrace Vir-

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gil's grief and Petrarch's regret. He holds in suspension both responses to the empire's fall. His conclusion implies a tolerance of opposed points of view, a comprehensive rather than an exclusive vision, an ironic openness and elegiac melancholy. Almost alone among ancient monuments, Trajan's one-hundredfoot column still remains entire and upright, although since the time of Pope Sixtus V it has been capped, ironically, with a statue of St. Peter. The "scattered fragments" of the empire, the dismembered limbs of the Roman architectural giant, cannot be rejoined and restored; but they can be recollected, that is, vividly remembered. Gibbon's response to the ruins of the Forum, therefore, consists not only of melancholy, but of the creative work of remembering and retelling. From this perspective, Gibbon's entire history contributes to a project of reconstituting the authority and values of the felicitous time of Trajan and the Antonines. In the absence of architectural monuments in their original integrity, it is the historian's mind, ranging over the vast materials of history to organize a massive epic narrative, which provides a modern equivalent to the heroic accomplishments of ancient empire. Gibbon presents The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire itself as a fitting replacement for the architectural monuments that survive only in ruins. He intends his history to commemorate what has gone before by serving as a grave marker for the Roman empire.48 In the Autobiographies, Gibbon shows his awareness of the paradoxical possibilities for the survival of linguistic monuments when he anticipates that the Decline and Fall "may, perhaps, a hundred years hence, still continue to be abused." Observing further that an eighteenth-century work that is received well in London "is speedily read on the banks of the Delaware and the Ganges,"49 he extends his understanding of his future readership and fame to include the realm of space as well as time. The first volume of the Decline and Fall appeared in the year of the Declaration of Independence; the last three volumes were published in the year the U.S. Constitution was adopted. By citing America as an important source of his future readership, Gibbon implies his recognition that the British empire, like the Roman, will decline and pass away. But the sway of the English language will survive British imperial power, just as the preeminence of Latin long outlived the Roman empire. Virgil and Horace are read fifteen hundred years after the fall of Rome. Framing his history as a meditation on the ruins of that empire and as a more lasting memorial to its acts, Gibbon demonstrates an awareness that his work will survive the decline and fall of the British empire.50

4. The Dialogue of Credit and Doubt in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

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EVENTY years after the appearance of the final volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Herman Melville published a narrative that, like Gibbon's, satirically revises Christian history. Melville set The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) not on the banks of the Delaware (where Gibbon had envisioned his future readership), but on the Mississippi, which functions as the main artery of American commerce, the "cosmopolitan and confident tide"1 that connects East and West, North and South. In the course of the day recorded in the narrative, however, the novel traces a movement in only one direction. The route of the steamer Fidèle marks various descents: from dawn to darkness, from St. Louis to New Orleans, from free states to slave. In charting this trajectory, Melville diagnoses as the primary fact of American culture its conflation of Christian with commercial beliefs. Melville satirizes both Christian and commercial forms of social organization in The Confidence-Man, because he perceives commercial confidence to rest on an appropriation of Christian belief that renders faith and credit functionally equivalent.2 The newly dominant creed of commerce asserts the necessity of progress based on a confident belief in the goodness of God, nature, society, and the individual. As one of the confidence operators puts it: "Confidence is the indispensible basis of all sorts of business transactions. Without it, commerce between man and man, as between country and country, would, like a watch, run down and stop" (128). Confidence men take advantage of the increased need for trust in strangers amidst the growth of cities, of speculations in land, and of the purchasing power of money in an abstract, impersonal market. From the "sharp increase in confusion over social roles" in antebellum America,

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David Brion Davis has traced "a virtual obsession with hoaxes, imposters, frauds, confidence men, and double identities" and a sharpened anxiety about the staging and presentation of the self.3 In writing The ConfidenceMan, Melville almost certainly made use of reports in Albany and Pittsfield newspapers about the reappearance of the confidence man whose activities had led to the coining of the word six years earlier in New York City.4 His narrative satirizes such confidence operators not as threats to the society, but rather as emblems of the social, economic, and political system of the United States in the 1850s. In earlier, shorter works of the mid-1850s, Melville had already developed a means of satirizing through indirection and irony the impersonality of market conditions for labor (in "Bartleby the Scrivener")5 and of factory conditions in the textile mills (in "Paradise of Bachelors, Tartarus of Maids"), as well as the complicity of the North in the institution of slavery (in "Benito Cereno").6 In The Confidence-Man, he culminates this series of writings with an encyclopedic satire of social and psychological conditions in the United States in the 1850s that applies as well to the country in the Gilded Age and indeed in our own time. Melville diagnoses a game of confidence underlying all aspects of American life— the stock market, the labor market, the markets in literature, medicine, religion, philanthropy, and land—as well as the foundation of such markets in racial hatred. The Confidence-Man depicts society as a war of all against all; all are hunters aboard the Fidèle, even the hunted: "farmhunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters" (9).

From Moral Allegory to Irony of the Marketplace This predatory game of confidence appears to function allegorically in Melville's novel, as the game in its various rounds exhibits essentially the same patterns and is governed by the same rules. At the same time, however, the novel frustrates allegorical readings, often by inscribing contradictory meanings among characters who perform the same function in the game, notably the confidence men. Thus, the "lamb-like" mute in cream colors who appears in the first chapter of the novel recalls conventional representations of the lamb of God, an association strengthened when he chalks on his slate Paul's hymn to charity from his first letter to the Corinthians. Not only does the first sentence of the novel strikingly compare him to a Peruvian sun god, his designation as a "stranger" recalls a common Gnostic designation for a divine visitor. But the text also de-

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bunks such myth-making through insistent materializing puns: although the "fleecy nap" of the mute's hat strengthens his association with a lamb, it also suggests that he may be the agent, not the object of a fleecing. Being both "gentle and jaded" (6), the mute is both a type of Christ (and other divinities) and a prototypical confidence man.7 Although the crippled Black Guinea, who succeeds the mute, seems to signify his opposite, they play exactly the same role in the confidence game. Like the mute, Guinea resembles Christ in that he is harrassed without cause, and he is also lamblike in that his hair is described as "black fleece." Yet a cynical one-legged man accuses Guinea of being "some white operator, betwisted and painted up for a decoy" (14), and most critics, accepting this accusation, have taken Guinea to be a satanic figure.8 Such critics consider the mute as a Christ figure who fades away from the narrative and Guinea as the first in a series of shape-shifting confidence men. Yet both the white mute and the black cripple appeal to charity and provoke the distrust of cynics; their parallel cases illustrate that players exhibiting seemingly opposite traits can occupy the same position in the confidence game.9 The cynic's challenge leads Guinea to list those aboard the ship who can vouch for him: Oh yes, oh yes, dar is aboard here a werry nice, good ge'mman wid a weed, and a ge'mman in a gray coat and white tie, what knows all about me; and a ge'mman wid a big book, too; and a yarb-doctor; and a ge'mman wid a yaller west; and a ge'mman wid a brass plate; and a ge'mman as is a sodjer. . . . Oh, find'em, find'em, and let 'em come quick, and show you all, ge'mmen, dat dis poor ole darkie is werry well wordy of all you kind ge'mmen's kind confidence. (13) Guinea's roster of his friends in punning black dialect designates a core of confidence men who appeal to charity or confidence, and who vouch for each other. Guinea, whose own name can mean "counterfeit coin," uses the same descriptive tags that the narrator will later employ and which denote each con man's area of specialty in the confidence game: philanthropy, business, medicine, and so on. Yet none of these tags refers to essentials; all arise metonymically from accidentals such as attire. After Guinea, the progression includes John Ringman, the man with a mourning weed (who uses the ploy of the "original confidence man" in chapters 4 and 5); the wholesale philanthropist, the man in gray, who collects contributions for the Seminole Widow and Orphan Asylum (in chapters 6 through 8); Truman, the man with a traveling cap who carries a big ledger

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book (chapters 9-15); the unnamed herb doctor who wears a snuffcolored overcoat (chapters 16-21); and, finally, the servile philosophical employment agent (chapter 22). The fragmentary and accidental nature of these identifying designations underscores the novel's anti-allegorical mode of signifying. Melville also subverts allegorical signification through the problematic relation between the plurality of confidence men in the narrative and the title, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, which denotes a single emblematic protagonist. Inferring the existence of a single protagonist, and assuming this protagonist to be diabolical, most critics of the novel identify some set of characters as his opposite, usually Christian and good.10 But Melville never uncovers an all-encompassing masquerader behind the masks; the various confidence men remain characters of the surface. Like the multiform modern voice in A Tale of a Tub, Melville's confidence men exemplify a process of depersonification: they possess no inner nature or consistent metaphorical significance, but only an identifiable mode of performance.11 Fragments of exterior performance and appearance alone serve to identify most characters in satiric narratives, from Petronius's Encolpius to Swift's modern author and Melville's confidence man. Melville's nonallegorical construction of all characters, proceeding from an exclusive attention to surfaces and externals (including speech and gestures), scrupulously withholds any guarantees of depth or authenticity. This mode of representing character as a masklike performance can also be seen as a response to the fragmentation of social life produced by the development of commodity markets. Developing markets unmoored many from their places in household and farm economies, and led to increasingly calculating and impersonal exchanges between people. The Confidence-Man acknowledges that as social exchanges based on exchanges of commodities and money increased in abstraction, the identity of the participants increased in opaqueness and unknowability.12 In The Confidence-Man, a conception of character that distinguishes satiric narrative converges with a conception of character that derives from the growth of capital markets. Melville's representation of character as lacking depth and identifiable only on the basis of performance anticipates Georg Simmel's characterization of the shaping of personality within industrial national markets: "Here the individual, inasmuch as he produces, buys, and sells, and in general performs anything, approaches the ideal of absolute objectivity. . . . Individuals are merely engaged in an exchange of performance and counter-performance that takes place according to objective norms— and everything that does not belong to this pure objectivity has actually

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disappeared from it."13 The operations of Melville's confidence man enact this increasing alienation in relations between people. Although the operators relentlessly advocate confidence, each of their encounters ends with a reversal producing greater suspicion, not trust. After selling some of his Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator, the herb doctor warns against imitations put out by "certain contrivers," and advises: "Take the wrapper from any of my vials and hold it to the light, you will see water-marked in capitals the word 'confidence,' which is the countersign of the medicine, as I wish it was of the world" (83). One can inspect the wrappers only after one has purchased a bottle; confidence can prove ill-placed only after it has been placed. What's more, the word on the label actually signifies its opposite; it functions, in fact, as a "countersign." Similarly, once the merchant Roberts believes he knows the "unfortunate man" and gives him money, the operator resumes the air of a stranger and ends by causing Roberts to doubt his memory and his act of charity. The con men appeal to the need for hope, faith, or charity, profit from it, and finally betray it, leaving their victims with an increased sense of doubt, not trust. They both proclaim and undercut the need for optimism and belief in progress, like the monetary commercial system itself.14 Those who hold out against the confidence gambit also carry an identifying mark of their own: Pitch wears a raccoon-tail hat and bearskin coat (106), and the behavior of other cynics prompts comparison with lions (32) and hyenas (95). These characters who express confidence only in distrust seem to have rendered themselves less than civilized— wild and barely human. The text thus appears to have constructed two parallel strings of oppositions: between optimistic, philanthropic, and bullish operators, and pessimistic, misanthropic, and bearish cynics. Such a dialogue between confidence men and cynics, if it were consistently supported throughout the text, might resemble an animal fable with an allegorical plot. Again, however, the narrative does not distribute totemic associations in a consistent way that would support any such allegorical readings. The misanthropic skeptics are consistently associated with dogs, since the name for the philosophy of Diogenes and his followers comes from the Greek for "dog." But at least two of the operators also bear strong associations with dogs: Black Guinea, because his dependence on a crowd's capricious goodwill resembles a Newfoundland dog's, and the employment agent, because of his canine fawning and insinuating. Thus, if the skeptics are doglike in their cynicism, the operators are canine in their simpering approaches to their potential victims. The word "dog" carries a comparable range of meanings in Timon of Athens, according to William Empson, as a designation for fawning courtiers at one extreme and snarl-

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ing cynics at the other.15 Melville's text crosses literal andfigurativemeanings by distributing canine characteristics to both the cynics and their antagonists, the con men. Similarly, an equal number of characters with crippled legs can be found among the con men and the cynics. Yet one character moralizes as the one-legged cynic leaves the scene: "There he shambles off on his one lone leg, emblematic of his onesided view of humanity" (15). Many other characters, mostly confidence men, also assert an emblematic relation between external physical traits and abstract moral traits. The effectiveness of the confidence men's pitch depends on what the employment agent calls his "doctrine of analogies," which makes systematic such allegorical translations from the physical to the moral plane. The operators' "speculations" conflate religion and business, faith and credit, philanthropy and profit. They typically argue from the beauty or goodness of one part of creation to the beneficence of the creator, and from the creator's goodness back to the goodness and beauty of all creation. Thus the herb doctor professes his faith in the optimistic doctrine of the analogy between the visible and invisible worlds when he comforts a veteran who has been crippled by an unjust imprisonment. He acknowledges that "the world's law may yet, in some cases, have, to the eye of reason, an unequal operation, just as, in the same imperfect view, some inequalities may appear in the operations of heaven's law; nevertheless, to one who has a right confidence, final benignity is, in every instance, as sure with the one law as the other" (98). But Melville's text does not support an emblematic view of the world despite such eloquent allegorical translations of physical phenomena into evidence of moral benignity. The supposed doctor pushes the parallel between invisible justice and visible beauty to a rhapsodic conclusion: "though poor and friendless, . . . yet, how sweet to roam, day by day, through the groves, plucking the bright mosses and flowers, till forlornness itself becomes a hilarity, and, in your innocent independence, you skip for joy." The cripple responds, "Fine skipping with these 'ere horse-posts—ha ha!" (99). Only such countervailing experience can oppose the blandishments of confidence; yet within a few minutes even this cripple gives in and buys some of the doctor's questionable potion for his legs. But the vividness of his response indicates that resisting the confidence operators depends on disengaging the physical from the figurative meanings of words, and insisting on literal, material meaning rather than accepting the confidence men's metaphorical, spiritual rhetoric. Like the herb doctor, the operator with the account book moves from the physical to the metaphysical when he cites the "native hilarity" of African people in the course of arguing that crippled Black Guinea must be

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happier than most white people with sound legs, because he smiles more. The stock agent concludes, "it was improbable, therefore, that a negro, however reduced to his stumps by fortune, could be ever thrown off the legs of a laughing philosophy" (59). Although Roberts does not object to this mystification, the proper response would be to identify such a bogus form of arguing and others like it as attempts to suppress recognitions of injustice by rendering metaphoric the reality of suffering. An insistence on literal meaning can provide a basis for skeptical resistance to such mystifications. Indeed, underneath a surface of abstract dialogues through which operators advance their metaphorical mystifications, Melville insinuates in the form of submerged puns an ironic recognition of physicality and materiality. These puns subvert the rhetoric of confidence by insisting on the materiality of the world, the physicality of the body, and the literal meanings of language. Melville's anti-allegorical representation of the confidence game registers a lack of transcendental authority in a national market for commodities. His novel implies a general opposition between allegory with its implicit affirmation of hierarchical authority on the one hand, and irony with its literalizing, materializing subversion of institutional and cultural authority on the other. Institutions that ground belief and behavior characteristically employ allegory to assert their authority; the use of irony by narrative satire registers and encourages the undermining of such institutions. Allegory suits a hierarchical society and view of the world, while irony exhibits a close affinity with a money economy with weakened hierarchical sanctions, with a world in which social transactions are grounded in the calculating, provisional, and passing trust of strangers in each other, in the currency, and in the system of exchange.

Philanthropist, Misanthropist, and the Excluded Middle In the second half of The Confidence-Man, one character occupies center stage. Frank Goodman seems to complete the series of operators that includes the wholesale philanthropist, the stockbroker, and the herb doctor. At the end of Guinea's list, a "ge'mman in a wiolet robe" follows a "ge'mman wid a brass plate": immediately after the departure of the employment agent (who carries a brass plate), Goodman appears, wearing maroon slippers and a purple smoking cap, as well as a "vesture barred with various hues, that of the cochineal predominating" (131). Besides being dressed in violet clothes, as predicted in Guinea's description, Goodman also professes a doctrine of confidence like the preceding operators.

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However, since Goodman, unlike previous confidence men, gains no money from his conversations, he can hardly be counted a confidence man at all. A number of critics have observed and described the way the second half of the narrative reverses in crucial respects patterns established by the first. In Edwin Fussell's view, Goodman's appearance causes "the one real change of direction" in the narrative. H. Bruce Franklin begins to characterize this change when he points out that Goodman's first words, "A penny for your thoughts," reverse the pattern among all the earlier operators of receiving money in exchange for words. This perception is consistent with Henry Sussman's argument that in the person of Goodman, the protagonist undergoes an inversion from being an operator to being a "straight-man." In fact, all these changes indicate a reversal in the direction of the satire, as the editors of the Northwestern-Newberry edition put it, from satire of those with too much faith in the first half to satire of those with too little in the second.16 Melville reverses the direction of his satire in the second half of The Confidence-Man by expanding the conception of confidence that is at issue. Rather than the earlier understandings of confidence as charity (Guinea through the philanthropist), or commercial faith and hope (the stock trader through the employment agent), in Goodman's discourse "confidence" signifies geniality and sociability. Those who lack confidence in the second half of the narrative do not lack faith in God or the economy; instead, they lack decency; they prove incapable of not conning other people. Goodman the Cosmopolitan generalizes the need for a guarded trust in strangers required by a national market in capital to a need for congenial trust in strangers in any social encounter. Predictably, his affable insistence that society rests on faith in people, even if most are disappointments, means that by the end he even becomes something of a victim. Goodman serves as an object of other operators rather than as an operator himself. Thus, it is not Goodman but his adversaries—Charlie Noble, the apologist for Indian-killing, Mark Winsome, the transcendentalist, and Egbert, his disciple—who figure as the direct successors of the operators in the first half of the novel. In the first half of the narrative, Melville uses the confidence operators largely to satirize the credulous passengers who part with a few dollars in pursuit of their delusive hopes. His strategy in this early part of the narrative resembles that of Ben Jonson in Volpone; through Volpone, Jonson satirizes the greed and stupidity of those who attempt to become his heirs. In the second half of the narrative, Melville changes direction to attack the confidence operators in the persons of their successors—Noble, Winsome, and Egbert. It is as though a new Volpone had appeared to test

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all the small-scale charlatans and smooth operators in the world and to satirize these knaves as they have just satirized the fools who believed them. The relation between Goodman and the earlier series of market operators also bears a close affinity to the relation between the Don Quixote of Part II of Cervantes' novel and the Don Quixote of Part I. In the first part, short episodes that repeat the same pattern unmistakably satirize the knight; in the second, Don Quixote becomes less an object of satire and more an occasion, a catalyst, on contact with whom other characters reveal themselves as objects of satire.17 The other characters who encounter Goodman, calculating their behavior to suit the market, disguise their selfinterest as the surest means of promoting it; but they remain tied to, and blinded by, this self-interest. Goodman has neither a monetary interest in the game he plays nor an interested self to blind him to others and their games. Thus, Goodman carries to an extreme the performer's detachment and flexibility, which he employs satirically against the operators when they unwittingly reveal the material interests shaping their behavior. As his satire changes direction to attack not those who have Christian or capitalist confidence but those who lack confidence—in the sense of sociability—Melville maintains and even intensifies his subversion of allegory. Through Goodman, Melville employs practical punning and a method of disguised characterization to disrupt allegorical correspondences between the material world and an immaterial world of authorizing values. Goodman himself defines practical punning, through the example of Phalaris, who beheaded a man on a "horse-block" for no other reason than that he had a "horse-laugh" (164). Neither as fatal nor as capricious as Phalaris's, Goodman's own puns prove to be practical because, in lowering language from abstract to physical meaning, they comment satirically on the scenes in which theyfigure.18In addition, Goodman's puns disrupt connections between metaphors and thus prevent the development of a network of metaphorical meaning that informs allegorical or symbolic narratives. When Charlie Noble reacts indignantly after Goodman touches him for a loan, Goodman restores him to congeniality by placing a circle of gold coins around him while pronouncing a simple spell. The performance brings Charlie around because, in displaying the fifty dollars, Goodman indicates that the request was only a joke or a test. In addition, a submerged pun informs this strange method of calming Charlie, since it proves that Goodman can be "very charming" (231), in both senses of the word. Charlie's "metamorphosis" from anger to calm demonstrates both Goodman's personal charm and his ability to cast spells using the mesmerizing power of money.19 This episode thus illustrates the material basis of such idealized notions as personal charm. Goodman's nonmetaphorical

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puns return words with abstract meanings to their etymological and material basis. In "Nature," Emerson observes, "Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance."20 Being more interested in moral abstractions than in physical facts, Emerson did not make much use of the material and etymological meanings of abstract words in his own writings. On the other hand, almost all of Melville's writings reverse metaphorical practice by satirically punning on the material basis of abstract terms. In The Confidence-Man, a principal object of such satiric lowerings from abstract to physical meanings proves, ironically, to be Emerson himself. Rather than ascending allegorically from action to abstraction, Goodman's meanings descend from abstractions to ironic actions. When Winsome, the Emersonian philosopher, asks Goodman whether he has never wanted to be a snake, "your whole beautiful body one irridescent scabbard of death" (190), Goodman disclaims ever having the desire, but he confesses his own "confidence in the latent benignity of that beautiful creature, the rattle-snake, whose lithe neck and burnished maze of tawny gold, as he sleekly curls aloft in the sun, who on the prairie can behold without wonder?" As he breathed these words, he seemed so to enter into their spirit... as unconsciously to wreathe his form and sidelong crest his head, till he all but seemed the creature described. (190) In the process of asserting that he has never wanted to be a rattlesnake, Goodman takes on an eerily serpentine appearance. His action comments ironically on his speech and on the perspicacity of Winsome, who fails to recognize Goodman's performance as a rattlesnake. Despite such implicit debunking of Winsome, the task of demystifying his oracular pronouncements involves real difficulties. Winsome embraces blatant inconsistencies—advocating first a doctrine of labels, according to which the beautiful appearance of an animal or a plant denotes its beneficent moral meaning, and, second, a doctrine of triangles, according to which appearances suffice no more for ascertaining character than does giving one side for determining a triangle—then he shrewdly passes Goodman off to his disciple, Egbert, for an exposition of the practical significance of the master's philosophy. Having agreed to play the role of another "Charlie," Goodman's hypothetical lifelong friend, Egbert explains why, like the first Charlie, he too refuses to lend Goodman any money. Egbert's absolute separation of

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friendship from money follows directly from Emerson's essay on friendship and accords with Polonius's advice that loans to friends often lose both loan and friend. Having failed to move Egbert, Goodman leaves him with this indictment of transcendentalist philosophy: "moonshiny as it in theory may be, yet a very practical philosophy it turns out in effect. . . . Here, take this shilling, and at the first wood-landing buy yourself a few chips to warm the natures of you and your philosopher by" (223). Despite its name and its metaphysical pretenses, the philosophy of Egbert and Winsome (and Emerson) does not transcend the market; instead, Goodman satirically demonstrates that the doctrine of self-reliance sanctions as it mystifies the calculations of self-interest that inform operations in capital markets. Thus, when Winsome cites "that significant passage in Scripture, 'Who will pity the charmer that is bitten with a serpent?'" Goodman has strong reasons for answering, "a little bluntly, perhaps . . . 'I would pity him'" (191). Goodman's response reveals an indirect self-portrayal: Goodman's geniality and charm converge here with his uncanny ability to play a snake to constitute the character of a man-charming snake who is bitten by men—transcendentalists and others—in the second half of The Confidence-Man. Composed of both actions and words, Goodman's practical puns comment ironically on another character's position, much as Diogenes' silent walking back and forth refuted Zeno's denial of motion. Goodman also seems to resemble Diogenes the Cynic in searching perhaps not for an honest but for a sociable man. Pitch even perceives Goodman to be a contemporary equivalent of Diogenes—"You are . . . Diogenes in disguise. I say—Diogenes masquerading as a cosmopolitan" (138). Although the comparison with Diogenes seems to hit close to the mark, Goodman himself disavows the identification. Such repudiation typifies Goodman's method of characterizing himself by means of unacknowledged self-portraits, in which he describes, and yet disapproves of, himself in the guise of another character. Through such disguising of the parallels between Goodman's actions and those of the characters he describes, the narrative provides alternate ways of understanding Goodman, rather than a single allegorical meaning to which all his actions would point. In creating his own selfportraits, Goodman resembles the author who created him, and he exhibits an awareness of himself and his significance that allegorical characters rarely possess. Other characters, occupied with their strategies for pursuing their own interests, ironically fail to recognize the resemblances between Goodman and the characters he describes for them. As one consequence of this ironic method of portraying characters, names do not denote their bearers' significance in The Confidence-Man.

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Charlie Noble is not noble, as he would be in an allegory, and Goodman is not clearly a good man either. In the encounter between these two, Noble tries to trick Goodman into lending him money by attacking Polonius's advice against borrowing and lending; he indirectly describes himself when he disapprovingly describes Polonius. But Goodman responds with his own milder attack on Autolycus, the type of the fast-talking Elizabethan peddler of baubles and songs, whom he in turn resembles in many ways.21 Goodman is far more adept than Noble at the game of disapproving self-portrayal. Thus, he puts the touch on Noble before Noble can put the touch on him. This scene, in which Noble and Goodman attack an increase in suspiciousness as each prepares to ask the other for a loan closely resembles the scene in the Satyricon in which Agamemnon and Encolpius attack the decline of rhetoric as each maneuvers to obtain a dinner invitation or a fee from the other. In each scene, both characters exemplify the development they find reprehensible: Agamemnon and Encolpius of the decline of rhetoric into flattery; Noble and Goodman of the decline of trust into suspicion as a result of the work of confidence men. Noble's single attempt to distance himself from a character whom he resembles leaves him dizzy and exposed, whereas Goodman easily produces a series of unacknowledged self-portraits. Like the fragmentation of character in the earlier confidence operators, Goodman's ability to distance himself from representations of himself responds to the need for performance in the national market. Goodman exemplifies the ultimate performer, able to separate each role from the others he has played and to possess his roles so thoroughly that he possesses no self. Goodman's genial detachment and his apparent lack of self-interest free him to expose the self-interest behind Charlie's phony geniality. The most far-reaching of Goodman's disguised self-portraits appears when, in a discussion about adulterated wines, Goodman tells Charlie of "a kind of man who, while convinced that on this continent most wines are shams, yet still drinks away at them; accounting wine so fine a thing, that even the sham article is better than none at all" (162). He then cites an eccentric friend of his as believing that this case illustrates "as in a parable, how that a man of disposition ungovernably good-natured might still familiarly associate with men, though, at the same time, he believed the greater part of men false-hearted—accounting society so sweet a thing that even the spurious sort was better than none at all" (162). Although he doubly distances himself from this ironic parable (through the anonymous drinker and the eccentric friend), Goodman himself seems to be a disillusioned cynic who yet participates in society, testing men as a

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connoisseur, merchant, or inspector tastes wines. Such a character might continue socializing with faithless men, even knowing that such a course of action would resemble drinking poisoned wine.22 In a corroborating self-characterization, Goodman prophesies the appearance of a new kind of man, a "genial misanthrope" who will turn up "in the process of eras"; "under an affable air, he will hide a misanthropical heart" (176). The assiduity with which Goodman evades acknowledging evil implies that he knows well what he is avoiding, that he possesses the disillusioning knowledge which makes other men misanthropes. He paradoxically combines extremes of disillusionment and good humor, cynicism and sociability. Goodman's practical puns and disguised self-portraits thus add up to a discernible portrait of a paradoxical and protean performer: a cosmopolitan Diogenes tasting human spirits which prove to be sour or adulterated, a snakelike man-charmer who, ironically, is himself bitten by most men he meets in mid-nineteenth-century America. But if these indirect self-portraits accurately describe Goodman, they still give no access to an inner self or hidden meaning. Rather, as a contemporary Diogenes, Goodman seems to be on a search for what remains in the absence of transcendental authority—if not friendship, then perhaps at least an acknowledgment that the need to associate with others forms the basis of society. Having primarily satirized, in the first half of the narrative, those who place their faith and trust in God or the market, using the confidence operators as his satiric vehicles, Melville turns in the second half to satirize those operators who show no ability to trust at all, using Goodman's disinterestedness as a foil. However, he has so effectively undermined those who preach trust that he cannot offer any innocent sociability as an alternative, but only a call for trust where no trust is justified. The need for trust between people as a precondition for society, although paradoxically there is no ground for such trust, thus comes to constitute an absent center of value in The Confidence-Man, comparable to the need for an interior moral judgment in A Tale of a Tub. Although Goodman finds the society poisonous and others' friendship a sham, he continues to play social roles because they are all that remain.23 By making acting an absolute principle, he holds a mirror up to the various role-playing operators in American society; he serves as a catalyst in whose presence other characters reveal their hollowness and heartlessness. Goodman's practical punning and indirect self-portraits expose the other players' interests in the roles they play and the philosophies they espouse; he breaks down the connections between their practices and their mystified assertions of abstract values. Melville's interpolated critical chapters also function to dissolve allegorical correspondences. Chapter 14,

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for example, setting out to explain inconsistencies of character after "the good merchant," Roberts, has a sudden attack of distrust, ends by asserting that such inconsistencies are in fact the norm, because consistency of character is extremely implausible if not impossible. Paradoxically, therefore, the constancy of human nature devolves from its undiminishing capacity for inconsistency. Chapter 33 sets out similarly to defend Charlie's return to good humor against the charge that it is unrealistic. Here the critical voice argues that abandoning verisimilitude can lead fiction to include "even more reality than real life can show . . . . It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie" (183). This critical chapter therefore offers a metaphorical tie between the visible and invisible worlds, but only as it simultaneously insists on the distant otherness of that world, because the fantastic paradoxically proves more realistic than the plausible. Both chapters 14 and 33 explain an initial lack of correspondence in the narrative by recourse to a similar lack of correspondence outside the narrative; each concludes by restoring a correspondence whose substance proves to be a lack of correspondence, a consistent inconsistency.24 Both of these critical chapters keep open a possibility for metaphorical correspondence, but only of a paradoxical, contradictory kind. In the formulation of Plinlimmoris pamphlet in Pierre, the connections between worlds consist only of ironic, contrary correspondences. Thus, The Confidence-Man breaks down the connections in commonly accepted myths, whether religious or artistic, between this world and a valued other. Through its practical punning, its disguised and fragmented characterizations, and its critical pronouncements, the narrative undercuts allegorical mystifications, reducing abstract discussions to physical actions, depicting character through displacement and denial, and undermining the connections between the physical and an abstract world. It dissolves official allegory into narrative irony and metaphor into metonymy. The interpolated tales framed in the course of the narrative—the stories of Goneril, of Charlemont, and of China Aster—also contribute to this pattern of ironic and subversive correspondence. Each of these tales at first appears as an exemplary story bearing a metaphorical relation to the narrative that contains it. However, each exists in extremely problematic relation to its context: all are told at second or third hand, generally in words other than the tellers say they themselves would choose; the tellers retract or disclaim all the tales, either before or after the telling; and all the tales actually imply meanings opposite to the ones they purportedly carry. The expectation of a metaphoric relation only heightens the eventual frustration of such relations between the tales and the containing narrative.

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Cast in the form of allegorical parables, the tales in fact become inverted, ironic parables.25 The story of Colonel Moredock and the so-called "metaphysics" that purports to explain his actions provide the most extended and important example of Melville's ironic strategy in the stories interpolated throughout The Confidence-Man. We hear of Moredock at third hand, through the mouth of Charlie Noble, whose account echoes that of Judge James Hall. Hall, a district judge in Illinois and a banker in Cincinnati, made his literary mark with his writings about the West. In each of a halfdozen books, he wrote sympathetically about Indian-hating. Melville adapts scores of passages from the famous chapter on Moredock's Indian-hating in Hall's Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West (1836). Supposedly having memorized Hall's version from having heard it repeated so often, Noble repeats Hall's story from this chapter almost verbatim, as a disciple would spread a leader's teachings. Melville distances himself from this apology for Indian-hating by placing it within two framing sets of quotation marks. Yet he also implies that Hall's narratives and his attitudes are generally accepted and widely shared. Noble, by uncritically repeating Hall, pronounces the prevailing rationalization for the extermination of Indians. Hall and Noble both indulge in fantasies of violence through a surrogate who may kill with impunity because his culture desires the extermination that he accomplishes.26 Using a common satiric technique, Melville exaggerates the ordinary justifications for removal and subjugation of the Indians, but only slightly, only enough to show that Hall's narratives celebrate and also repress their celebration of racial murder. In order to undercut it, Melville loudly proclaims the view that Indian-killing is spiritually heroic, a view that remains subdued in Hall's account. Hall sounds moderate when he treats the uncompromising killing of Indians by Moredock and other backwoodsmen as a fact, regrettable from a Christian and civilized point of view, but nonetheless understandable. Hall's muted prose explains everything to the honor of the Indian-haters; Melville subverts by extending the exculpatory arguments in Hall's narrative. Melville consistently adds details resonant of religious myth, which accurately capture and make explicit the judge's admiration of Moredock as a cultural hero. Where Hall describes the frontiersmen as a useful "barrier between savage and civilized men" (503), Melville compares such a "captain in the vanguard of conquering civilization" to Alexander the Great and Moses (145). Hall in the Sketches has Moredock's mother widowed by the tomahawk "several times"; Melville specifies "thrice." Her "large family" in Hall becomes "nine children" in Melville.27 Moredock pursues his revenge, leading a party

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"pledged to serve him for forty days"; it is Melville who specifies the duration, again supplying a mythical number. What Hall implies in vague and unexceptionable formulations, Melville makes into ringing and explicit affirmations: because it requires a renunciation of worldly ambition and glory, "Indian-hating, . . . whatever may be thought of it in other respects, may be regarded as not wholly without the efficacy of a devout sentiment" (155). As a result of Melville's alterations, Noble clearly represents the Indian-hater as a mythical religious hero. When the Indian-hater takes leave of his family, he does so with "the solemnity of the Spaniard turned monk" (149), a comparison that seems to denote an impressive ceremonial determination, but which also draws an ironic parallel between Moredock and Benito Cereno, the only Spaniard turned monk in the rest of Melville's fiction. Cereno becomes a monk after falling under the shadow of a slave revolt that he understands as a sign of bottomless human evil, never considering that the system of slavery, and his participation in it, might bear some responsibility for such revolts. Cereno's retreat thus signals not heroism but moral paralysis. In addition, by calling the first Indians Moredock pursues a "gang of Cains" (153) where Hall has merely "lawless renegades," Melville directs attention to the fact that the revenger too is a Cain. Despite such ironic allusions, Melville's heightening of Hall's account into explicit religious celebration has led critics such as John Shroeder and Hershel Parker to interpret Moredock's story as an allegorical parable in which Indians symbolize absolute evil and the Indian-hater par excellence is the only true Christian.28 However, the resemblances between Moredock and the Indians he kills work to undermine such a reading of Moredock as spiritually noble and the Indians as purely evil. The colonel's stoic impassiveness (in Melville's account) when he hears of the murder of his family is regularly associated with the race he seeks to exterminate. As a "moccasined gentleman" (154), Moredock is a composite of a mild-mannered Christian gentleman and a ferocious red man; his character lacks allegorical consistency, and instead evinces ironic contradictions.29 Evil cannot be clearly separated from good and objectified as absolutely and conveniently as Moredock believes and as Hall and Noble assume in their narratives.30 Not only does Melville add to Hall's narrative phrasings that resonate with inflated religious significance, he also inserts deflating details that insist on the physical actions recounted in the narrative. Where Hall has Moredock resolve never to "spare an Indian" (509), Melville writes that Moredock never missed a chance of "quenching an Indian" (154). Melville also expands and provides specifics seemingly in support of Hall's asser-

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tion that Moredock was "not unsocial, ferocious, or by nature cruel"; in Melville, he "sung a capital song, . . . could be very convivial; told a good story (though never of his more private exploits)" (154). Melville's parenthetical statement startlingly reintroduces the innumerable Indians Moredock has killed in the context of a sociable after-dinner entertainment. Whereas Hall wants both to assert and keep separate the Indianhaters' killings and their "apparently self-contradictory . . . loving hearts," Melville insists rather that the good-humored sociability of Moredock among whites does not contradict, but is based on, his ferocious hatred of reds. In Melville, Moredock is "by report, benevolent, as retributive, in secret" (154), because the two traits are complementary and interconnected: Moredock's public good will depends on his private, secret brutalities. The uncomfortable directness of these passages punctures Hall's studied, bland approval of what Melville calls in his chapter title Moredock's "dubious morality." Melville heightens but also subverts Hall's tributes to Indiankillers by making more vivid and less easily repressed their cold-blooded ferocity. He thereby intensifies the paradoxical constituents of Indianhating: unmitigated death-dealing to all reds and sociable goodwill toward all whites. In the world of absolutes in which Colonel John Moredock and Judge James Hall live, evil can be localized in another race, and good can be objectified in the dedicated exterminator of that race. But of the absolute Indian-hater, Melville writes, there can be no biography, "any more than of a sword-fish" (150); such souls "peep out but once an age," and what they do will "never become news" (150). Therefore, the only Indianhaters we can know of are relative or "diluted" haters. If, as Parker and Shroeder maintain, Indians represent evil, and if killing Indians signifies annihilating evil, then the "diluted" Indian-killer who returns to white society renounces his dedication to wiping out evil and compromises with an evil world. Unless he can be as inhuman and asociable as a swordfish, the dedicated Indian-hater necessarily proves an unfaithful reprobate to his vows.31 Presumably to show that Moredock approached the level of an absolute hater and was not one of those compromisers who renounced their Indian-hating vows, Hall reports that when Illinois became a state, Moredock declined to be candidate for governor. Hall provides no explanation for this refusal, but he implies strongly that Moredock would have made a good governor. Melville remedies Hall's silence, supplying as a plausible reason for Moredock's refusal not that he was no longer capable of pursuing the heroic path of killing evil Indians (as would fit the allegorical interpretations of Parker and Shroeder), but exactly the opposite, that "he felt there would be an impropriety in the Governor of Illinois

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stealing out now and then . . . for a few days' shooting at human beings" (155). Melville's jovial directness here again punctures the mystification of Indian-killing by bringing it to a level of common understanding. As Melville knew, a Moredock could certainly become governor if he wanted to. A history of having killed Indians, along with the thinnest of contradictory and self-interested rationalizations for it, constituted the best qualifications for election to high office in America, as the careers of Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and many others demonstrate. But in the spirit of his entire ironic adaptation and inversion of Hall, Melville implies not that Moredock cannot continue killing human beings, but that he cannot quit doing so once the territory becomes a state. He is as much an Indian-quencher by nature as he is a sociable gentleman; statehood merely domesticates Indian-killing, converting it from a mission into a sport. Melville demystifies Indians from a principle of evil, translating them back into human beings shot at and killed by other human beings. Although Indian savagery supposedly signifies evil to be destroyed, the case of Moredock demonstrates that American domesticity in fact is founded on, but also represses, the savagery of whites. Allegorical correspondence collapses into irony, with the equation of white savagery with the imputed savagery of the Indians. In the Indian-hating chapters, Melville makes use of Swift's favorite satiric strategy, as he ironically celebrates action that he deplores by exaggerating only slightly attitudes already present in its defenders. "A Modest Proposal" is not an allegory, because it extrapolates only slightly from the actual condition of Ireland at the time. The proposed cannibalism of the British does not signify metaphorically, because it comes metonymically so close to describing their unacknowledged behavior toward the Irish. Similarly, Moredock's spiritual devotion to a crusade of racial killing does not signify allegorically, because it extrapolates only slightly from the chronicles of actual if mystified behavior of Americans toward native peoples.32 Moredock is not a myth, because his killing of innocents duplicates a historical reality; but he is the subject of mystification by Hall and Noble. The celebratory allegorical "metaphysics" of Indian-hating provides a rationale for affirming racial hatred and racial extermination. Pitch points out that after killing Abel, Cain went on to build the first city (137; Gen. 4:17). Moredock is another Cain or Alexander, civilizers who may be regarded as heroes by their own kind, but who are almost always killers of their dissimilar human brothers. The mystification of such a figure allows his people to glory vicariously in his originary murders.33 The "exterminating hatred"34 of Indians proves particularly appropriate as a founding confidence game in Melville's novel, for that hatred authorized the appropriation of the land that constitutes the country and

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has been the primary source of its wealth. The public successes of the American economy have as their hidden basis the extermination of the Indians carried out in private by such haters as John Moredock. Both Hall's and Noble's accepted public accounts conveniently elide the violent and fraudulent dispossession of Indians from their lands by whites. Instead, the "metaphysics" of red-hating rationalizes this process of appropriation, the "primitive accumulation" of wealth in the United States.35 Andrew Jackson's policy of removing Indians not only brought millions of acres into the American nation and economy; sacrificing the Indians also helped temporarily to cement the political union between whites of the North and South.36 The Jacksonian settlement successfully forestalled discussion of compromise on slavery by focusing the country's energies on the West for more than twenty years until the conflicts that had been displaced there resurfaced in the violence of 1856, the year of "bleeding Kansas" and the year in which Melville wrote most of The Confidence-Man. Both Indian removal and slavery were officially beyond controversy for the sake of unity among whites.37 Through his ironic, subversive narratives, Melville indirectly points to the dispossession and silencing of red and black people in the United States.38 The American confidence game consists of a "metaphysics" that displaces inconvenient or unpleasant physical facts in order to assert the inevitable triumph of goodness and civilization. The mystifying of race hatred joins other instances of mystification in the novel—including the practical "mythiness" (189) of the transcendental operators with their justification of selfishness as self-reliance, and the activities of the pickpockets in chapter 1, who keep their eyes on the "capitals" in the wanted poster and their hands on the capital in the "myth" (4), or pocket, of other people. The transcendentalists, pickpockets, confidence men, and celebrators of Indian-killing mystify the fundamental activity they pursue— the accumulation of capital. Melville shows a continuity between these other games of confidence and the race extermination of the Indian-haters, locating this continuity in the metaphysics that mystify capital markets. His representation of American culture exposes its mystified categories of understanding, even if no others are available. If Moredock, the allegorist par excellence, objectifies evil in red people, Goodman, the consummate game player, recognizes the constitutive falsity offictionsand of human relations, and thus affirms the necessity of role-playing.39 However, faced with the story of Moredock's exterminating hatred, Goodman can only counter, "Sir, I don't believe it," (157), or observe ineffectually, "I admire Indians" (140). Goodman is powerless against Moredock, and his participation in this society without

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condemning its violent and fraudulent expansion makes him a complicitous beneficiary of Moredock's killing of Indians. The designation "genial misanthrope" applies to both the Cosmopolitan and the Indian-hater: to Goodman with the emphasis on geniality; to Moredock with the emphasis on misanthropy. Melville implicates himself in the operations of the society by making clear the parallel between himself and Frank Goodman. In many works written before and after The Confidence-Man, Melville echoes Goodman's assertions of the value of geniality, as exemplified in the sharing of a bottle of wine.40 The bottle of adulterated wine in Goodman's antifable in The Confidence-Man resembles the untrustworthy nature both of social relations and of the fictional work, especially one that communicates its meanings subversively through the adulterated strategies of indirection and irony. Goodman's function as the director of the action in the second half of the narrative, exposing manipulations and hypocrisies, commenting indirectly on his own theatrical artifices and those of others, underscores the analogies between his role and the author's: both simultaneously demystify and remain committed to the social forms of their time and place. Through these parallels with Goodman, Melville signals his awareness that his role as satirist does not provide him with an Archimedean point of critical leverage outside the American game of confidence in capital. As an alternative to the utter lack of trust exhibited by the Indian-hater and the transcendentalists, Goodman and Melville can offer only ironic appeals to an adulterated sociability. Participating in the social game through roles it has authorized (as author, landowner, son-in-law of the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court), Melville remains involved in the operations he satirically anatomizes. Scatological Apocalypse The penultimate chapter of The Confidence-Man, while questioning whether Goodman is an original character, "in the sense that Hamlet is, or Don Quixote, or Milton's Satan" (238), implicitly ranks him with such figures, and thus suggests that he is "quite an original" (238). Just as Hamlet, Quixote, and Satan possess an equivalent stature, yet are not identical, Goodman produces an effect comparable to suchfigures,yet diverges from them. Like Gibbon, and because of similar criticisms of Christianity, Melville sympathetically identifies his protagonist with Milton's Satan. Melville also ranks himself with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Milton. In a final covert portrait of Goodman, Melville compares the truly original fic-

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tional character with such "prodigies" as "a new law-giver, a revolutionizing philosopher, or the founder of a new religion" (239).41 Melville echoes Swift's list of innovators in the "Digression on Madness" so closely that the parallel is almost certainly intentional. Although Moredock more nearly resembles an advancing conqueror and law-giver, Goodman exhibits something of both a social philosopher and an apostle for cynical geniality. Goodman's originality consists of his simultaneously embodying and subverting the conditions of performance in the national market. Thus he fittingly presides in the final chapter of The Confidence-Man over the waning of the officially Christian era and the emergence from it of a predominantly commercial era. Just as Simeon lived long enough to see and recognize the newborn Messiah at the end of the pagan and Jewish eras (Luke 2:26-35), another, parodic Simeon now lives to see but fails to recognize the two harbingers of the new age, Goodman and a ragged young peddler. The young boy's appearance recalls myths of the Hindus, Greeks, Jews, Christians, and Aztecs, but he appropriately bears the strongest affinities with Hermes, the god of commerce, of trickery, of thievery, and of the passage between this world and the next.42 In the final scene, Simeon exhibits the familiar antinomy of confidence: he claims to trust in God and the Bible for his security, yet his purchasing of a lock and a money belt from the grimy boy indicates that his confidence is an insubstantial cover for cynicism, for lack of trust in both God and human beings.43 At the end of the narrative, as he leads the old man to his berth, Goodman, "for the good of all lungs" (251), extinguishes the one remaining lamp in the cabin. As they fade, the haloed figure and horned altar represented on the lampshade indicate that the darkening of this lamp in the novel's penultimate sentence signifies the extinguishing of biblical forms, with clear intimations of an apocalyptic end of time. But in these final pages Goodman also makes far more use of sexual and excremental puns than elsewhere in the narrative. In his visit to the barber, William Cream, just before the last scene, Goodman's puns on "lather," "line," and "barber's chair" indicate the sexual nature of the commercial operation called shaving, even as he acts out that operation in another practical pun: Cream shaves Goodman, but Goodman shaves Cream of the cost of the shave. In the final chapter, the matter of the punning becomes bodily waste: Goodman persuades Simeon to use a chamber pot as his life preserver, assuring him, "Any of these stools here will float you, sir" (251). Just before extinguishing the lamp, Goodman observes, "in Providence, as in man, you and I equally put trust. But, bless me, we are being left in the dark here. Pah! what a smell, too" (251). The foul smell emanates from the ship of society, which is a ship of fools, and also from the Providence in which the fools and their society have placed their trust.

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The open-ended, seriocomic conclusion of The Confidence-Man thus combines apocalyptic and apocryphal, tragic and satiric modes of meaning. It records the passing of a religious system and, in the year of bleeding Kansas, anticipates a violent sectional conflict. But Melville undercuts the grim monological allegory of apocalypse with a submerged excrementality that produces muffled laughter.44 The scatological puns mockingly place on the same level as the physical products of the body such otherwise elevated metaphysical matters as religious beliefs, social trust, and confidence in the health of the economic system; all raise in the satirical author the same mild disgust. Fulfilling the descent announced by the movement of the steamboat down the river, Melville's satiric levelings include both physical reductions, like those Bakhtin emphasizes in Rabelais, of spiritual operations to bodily facts, as well as rhetorical reductions of allegorical form to ironic narrative, of metaphor and metaphysics to metonymy and puns. Summing up these movements at its open-ended conclusion, The Confidence-Man ends with profanity in both senses of the word, rendering as equivalents apocalyptic salvation and chamber pot. Melville's narrative descents also parallel and reiterate contemporary transformations in the market for labor that leveled disparities between workers to produce the abstract equivalence of self-interested agents in a national market. Although Melville's satiric levelings register the strength of materializing and leveling forces in the market itself, they also satirize the celebratory myths and mystifications that cloak the operations of the market. Melville's distance from established ideological positions can be mapped through pairs of seeming opposites that prove to implicate and mirror each other. The Fidèle moves from North to South, from a growing market in labor and capital to a semifeudal slave economy, at the same time that the country is expanding from an industrializing East to an undeveloped West. The Northeast was intimately involved with the economic activities of the South and West: its accumulation of capital was dependent on large exports of cotton, harvested almost entirely by slaves. Even most of those who opposed slavery in the South or Indian removal in the West profited from both.45 Moreover, in works such as "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "Paradise of Bachelors, Tartarus of Maids," Melville had already analyzed the wage-labor prevalent in the Northeast as a form that treated people impersonally, as units of machines and of mechanical calculations. Departing from these regional terms, we can also translate the contradictions and tensions in The Confidence-Man using the semiotic rectangle that Fredric Jameson has proposed as a means of mapping the two pairs of oppositions that define an ideological position.46 In the course of The Confidence-Man, each of the terms in the primary opposition between

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Christian faith and confident capital markets generates its own underside and its diametrical negation. Misanthropic cynicism arises from the operations of the markets in capital and labor, expressing pure suspicion, without the pious mystifications of the confidence men. Such cynicism diametrically opposes the Christian message of faith, implying a pagan Timonism instead. The diametrical opposite to the confidence game in capital consists of economic forms without capital: the "primitive accumulation" of Indiankilling and semifeudal slavery. Such means of appropriation silently undergirded the official faith of mid-nineteenth-century America, figuring in the discourse of a Judge Hall as allegories of Christian virtue. Moredock combines these coordinate poles of Christian love and racial hatred, Goodman the opposite poles of market psychology and pagan cynicism. For a time, Pitch occupies the precarious position between extremes in The Confidence-Man comparable to that occupied briefly by Martin in A Tale of a Tub; but Pitch, like Martin, fades quickly from the mediating position between contradictory perspectives and practices. Hence, the ideal implied by this rectangle of oppositions can only be a paradoxical combination of cynicism and sociability like Goodman's. Yet, even so, Goodman and his author can only recommend a poisoned, complicitous participation in their selfish and expansionist society. Melville is thus more deeply implicated in and less firmly parodic of the opposites he depicts than are the authors of the other narrative satires in this study. If Melville's is the least successful of the works studied here in designating a space outside existing paradigms of meaning and value, perhaps that is because less distance separates opposite perspectives in this text. The lack of a sharp opposition between Christianity and capital, between confidence men and cynics, and between the Cosmopolitan and the Indian-hater makes it difficult for Melville to locate an alternative between competing paradigms. Melville levels the two terms in each of these pairs and demonstrates that each depends on its complementary opposite. Yet all positions appear as aspects of a comprehensive paradigm whose contours Melville can describe, but beyond which he finds it impossible to proceed. A century later Pynchon proceeds further to depict a free-floating paranoia as the product of the interest that international capital has in controlling the production and marketing of information, opinions, and goods and services. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon proves more capable of parodying and juxtaposing accepted narrative modes in order to find a space of understanding between or outside official systems of meaning. Pynchon's pursuit of this satiric strategy leads his narrative to a vision of an open-ended, seriocomic apocalypse that is less embittered and less isolated than Melville's.

5. Parody and Paradigms in The Crying of Lot 49

N The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published a year or two before Pynchon started writing The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Kuhn argued that the production of meaning can only take place on the basis of models. In Kuhns view, normal science operates within the framework of a paradigm—a set of partially grounded assumptions, definitions, conventions, questions, and procedures. The experimentation that the paradigm makes possible paradoxically produces anomalous data that as they accumulate call into question the validity of the model. Yet the dominant model will not be discarded until an alternative that accounts for these anomalies has been formulated. In the period of crisis, when normal science stands virtually paralyzed between paradigms, the emergence of the new model reveals the provisional and metaphorical nature of all models. The scientist working within the framework of a new model actually sees a different world, for observed data are shaped by the questions the paradigm formulates and the criteria it sets for acceptable answers.1 Myths and literary genres, like scientific paradigms, serve as conventional models of explanation. Just as normal science and periods of crisis alternate in the history of science, literary history consists of works that observe generic conventions and works that combine or invert them. Claude Lévi-Strauss has demonstrated that myths mediate contradictions within a culture. Moving this insight from the realm of myth into the realm of history and literature, Frank Kermode has sketched a cultural history that parallels Kuhn's history of science. He likens the mediations between myths that fictional narratives provide to the complementarities of scientific theory: by proposing that light is sometimes particle, sometimes wave, "[Niels] Bohr is really doing what the Stoic allegorists did to close the gap

I

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between their world and Homer's, or what St. Augustine did when he explained, against the evidence, the concord of the canonical scriptures. . . . Stoic physics, biblical typology, Copenhagen quantum theory, are complementarities."2 The development of a new genre or mode of interpretation testifies to a need for cultural accommodation. In works that reshape genres, parodic irony marks the reversal of generic conventions. Readers of such texts may at first perceive this irony as bewildering, offensive, or meaningless; upon recognition of the reversal, they see another world. Like Kuhn and Kermode, Pynchon is concerned with the extent to which scientific and literary paradigms determine what we perceive; he thus juxtaposes competing paradigms in search of possible alternatives. Pynchon's practice does not observe essential differences between science and literature, instrumental and emotive uses of language.3 His writing deliberately mixes allegory and history, tragedy and satire, metaphoric and literal in pursuit of the state that he ascribes to the fourth act of The Courier's Tragedy, his parody of Jacobean revenge tragedies: "Heretofore the naming of names has gone on either literally or as metaphor. But now, as the Duke gives his fatal command, a new mode of expression takes over. It can only be called a kind of ritual reluctance. Certain things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud; certain events will not be shown onstage; though it is difficult to imagine, given the excesses of the preceding acts, what these things could possibly be."4 To produce a text that signifies neither literally nor metaphorically, Pynchon establishes competing versions of the concept of entropy, the concept of Tristero, the myth of Narcissus, and the myth of Oedipus, to point in each case to another mode of meaning outside these shaping paradigms.5

Entropy to Complementarity Pynchon's narrative thinks about the concept of entropy rather than with it. A minor but significant character in The Crying of Lot 49, John Nefastis, has a black box in which he claims to have discovered and contained the refutation of entropy and a way to perpetual motion in the form of a demon named for the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell had only hypothetically proposed the existence of a small intelligence in order to express a paradox in the thermodynamic paradigm of one hundred and fifteen years ago. As Pynchon recapitulates, Maxwell supposed that a small creature might

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sit in a box among air molecules that were moving at all different random speeds and sort out the fast molecules from the slow ones. Fast molecules have more energy than slow ones. Concentrate enough of them in one place and you have a region of high temperature. You can then use the difference in temperature between this hot region of the box and any cooler region, to drive a heat engine. Since the Demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn't have put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing, causing perpetual motion. (62) Although Maxwell did not go on to refute his own supposition, the physicists Leo Szilard, Leon Brillouin, and Norbert Wiener did, by showing the complementarity between thermodynamics and the field of information theory, which was founded by Shannon's equations of 1948.6 The new paradigm of information theory was strengthened in the process of demonstrating why it is impossible to "get something for nothing" by exchanging information for heat energy without any gain in entropy. In 1931 Sir Arthur Eddington expressed the consensus of scientific opinion of the last one hundred years: "The law that entropy always increases—the second law of thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature."7 Supported by the mathematics of information theory, scientists today understand entropy in an even more general sense than he did. An engineering student at Cornell in the late fifties, Pynchon would have known what was happening: the equations of information theory were subsuming those of thermodynamics. Any electrical engineer who seriously believed in the existence of Maxwell's demon in August 1964 (when Oedipa visits Nefastis in Berkeley) would have to be a fraud. Nefastis makes an outdated idea of entropy his pick-up line: "The word bothered him as much as Trystero' bothered Oedipa. But it was too technical for her. . . . 'Entropy is a figure of speech, then,' sighed Nefastis, 'a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics with the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true'" (77). When Oedipa asks, "What if the Demon exists only because the two equations look alike? Because of the metaphor?" the engineering guru only smiles knowingly. In Nefastis's creed, the literal existence of the demon marries verbal grace with objective truth to produce certitudes of Edenic speech. Yet Pynchon undermines the engineer's presumption through the Latin meaning of his name: "unholy, unclean, abominable." Like the objects of

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Swift's satire in the "Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," Nefastis claims to possess the knowledge of a secret link between the machinery of the soul and of the body. He is an engineer of the spirit.8 An unmistakable science nerd, Nefastis "had a crewcut and the same underage look as Koteks, but wore a shirt on various Polynesian themes and dating from the Truman administration" (76). The dating is significant. Nefastis nostalgically projects himself back into thefifties,both in his dress and in his mental models. His understanding of entropy takes advantage of the conceptual murkiness that marked the introduction of mathematical information theory, a condition that Kuhn would consider predictable in a time of paradigmatic crisis. Nefastis explains the connection between thermodynamic and informational entropy this way: "The equation for one, back in the 30's, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence. The twofieldswere entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell's Demon. As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where" (77). The gist of Nefastis's explanation is that an increase in one quantity (information) "offsets" a decrease in another quantity (heat entropy). The papers of Shannon that founded information theory contain the same understanding of entropy that Nefastis exhibits here. In these papers, Shannon speaks of "entropy of information" as a measure of order and certainty. His willingness not to distinguish information and entropy invited others to equate the two concepts, as Nefastis does.9 By the latefifties,many scientists believed that Shannon's definition of informational entropy should be retained, but only with its sign reversed. His formula had exactly the right mathematical shape, but needed to be turned one hundred and eighty degrees to fit into the reigning paradigm of thermodynamics, transforming the paradigm and giving it an even more general applicability. This conceptual revolution was accomplished by Brillouin, who defined information and informational entropy to vary inversely, thus effectively distinguishing between them. Brillouin credits Shannon with developing the mathematical analysis of information, but objects that "he defined entropy with a sign just opposite to that of the standard thermodynamical definition. Hence what Shannon calls entropy of information actually represents negentropy [negative entropy] . . . . To obtain agreement with our conventions, reverse the sign."10 According to Brillouin's conventions, which have found wide acceptance, entropy of information always carries a negative sign; negentropy, the negative of entropy, then is equivalent to positive information.11 On this understanding, heat and information are correlates, and so are the two kinds of entropy,

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both being expressions of uncertainty and lack of information. In a closed system, an increase in information will equal but not "offset" a decrease in either kind of entropy, because information is the negative of entropy. Brillouin extends the second law of thermodynamics into the realm of information theory and shows that the connection between the two, the equation for entropy, is "objectively true" as well as "verbally graceful." In the process he exorcises Maxwell's demon, which was the ground of the metaphor for Nefastis.12 In Nefastis's explanation, Pynchon presents an understanding of entropy that suits this spiritualistic engineer. But in this section of The Crying of Lot 49, he also satirizes Nefastis's anachronisms and his use of the concept of entropy to pick up women. Pynchon thereby satirically suggests a backwardness in Nefastis's understanding of entropy also, and implies Brillouin's emendation of Shannon as an alternative. He thus satirically juxtaposes the explanatory models of Shannon and Brillouin to reach a double perspective. Deciding between the two available definitions of informational entropy may be less important than being aware of both and recognizing the complementarity between them.13 Oedipa investigates phenomena like a scientific observer throughout The Crying of Lot 49; the reader also seeks to understand narrative phenomena such as Tristero or "something called entropy" (77). The problematic nature of entropy or Tristero in Pynchon's novel is analogous to the nature of light in the theory of Heisenberg and Bohr: sometimes wave, sometimes particle, depending on the structure of the experiment undertaken. The complementary definitions of entropy similarly provide a metaphor for the limits of metaphoric activity.14 Another analogue to Pynchon's use of entropy in The Crying of Lot 49 is provided by Kafka's parable "Prometheus," in which the first version of the myth is the recognizable staple of Western literature, but succeeding versions return the myth in "the course of millenia" to what cannot be explained. By the time of the fourth myth, everyone involved . . . became tired of what had become pointless. The Gods became tired of it, the eagles as well, and the tired wound closed. The inexplicable mountains remained.—The myth attempts to explain what cannot be explained. Since its ground is one of truth it has to end up in what cannot be explained.15 The Prometheus myth provides the official account of the origin of science and technology, but Kafka's parable can be read as a revisionary interpretation of scientific progress. In Kuhn's history, later models emerge from the paradoxes of preceding paradigms; in Kafka's account, successive

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myths explain less and less of the world. Finding that the essential is inexplicable, Kafka rejects metaphor as inadequate because it can be used to explain. But his parable is far from meaningless. Although it deconstructs metaphor, it metaphorically points to the magnitude of what cannot be explained. As Beda Allemann puts it, "The inexplicable mountains of the fourth version derive their meaning from the preceding three versions. . . . The result is a peculiarity: . . . a text like [this] becomes a metaphor of itself."16 Pynchon's parable, like Kafka's, expresses a modern anxiety about the efficacy of metaphor. The Nefastis section works also as a "collapsed allegory" or "metaphor of itself" by suspending entropy between opposite poles of interpretation. But the amount of the quantity remains the same, no matter what its sign. The proper definition of entropy becomes a question of interpretation to be surpassed, like the earlier, more conventional, versions of the myth in "Prometheus." In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon employs potentially explanatory metaphors as tools that help in describing our condition, not as truths to be illustrated. He elaborates opposite meanings of Tristero, for example, in order to point beyond both to an undeniable but uncomfortable fact. Through his deliberate use of paradigmatic fictions, he would be a "liar in the service of truth."17 Tristero: Plot, Paranoia, Dispossession In Melville's Confidence-Man, Pitch accuses the philosophical intelligence operator of punning with ideas as others pun with words.18 Pynchon puns both with ideas and with words to elude the binary opposition of literal and metaphorical. The stamps in Pierce Inverarity's collection, featuring "allegorical faces that never were" (80), resemble the puns and narrative ironies that contribute to Pynchon's search for an alternative mode of meaning in The Crying of Lot 49. Allegory reconciles characters and actions with an unseen, abstract world. Ironies and puns also imply a world beyond what is said, but their significance in narratives remains ambiguous. Both modes use the double meanings of wordplay to imply an unsaid world of meaning; but irony attempts to elude accepted paradigms by reversing expectations of resolution. The Crying of Lot 49 raises expectations of meaning that it satisfies partially or not at all. Puns replace metaphors. The bewildering evidence of a historical plot suspiciously resembles the projections of paranoia. Signs proliferate, but not certainties. As Frank Kermode observes, Pynchon situates his novel, his heroine, and his reader "on the slash be-

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tween meaning and non-meaning."19 He uses puns, as he uses entropy, to think about the paradigms rather than within them and to signal our position between inaccessible fullness and profane emptiness of meaning. Pynchon's composite mode of naming, semi-allegorical and semiironic, produces names such as Thoth, Hilarius, Emory Bortz, Genghis Cohen, and Randolph Driblette: misfired mini-allegories. But in assigning the most important names in the novel—Saint Narcissus, Tristero, Oedipa —Pynchon eludes the constraints of allegorical coding through punning allusions to competing paradigms. On the subject of narcissism, for example, the text offers three models of interpretation: late classical, Christian, and Freudian. Each paradigm is inadequate by itself, or contradicts the other two. Yet an unsaid and ironic contemporary meaning emerges from the juxtaposition of all three. In Ovid's account (Metamorphoses III, 342-515), Narcissus represents a zero point where love short-circuits in self-love. Until Oedipa is named to execute Pierce's will, she has been confined in the tower of her self, solipsistically weaving the tapestry of her world out of herself (11). In San Narciso, she stays at the Echo Courts motel, whose swimming pool updates Ovid's pool, and whose thirty-foot sign depicts a nymph holding a whiteflower(perhaps Narcissus poetica): "the face of the nymph was much like Oedipa's" (14). The first pages of the novel allegorically associate Oedipa with Narcissus—misleadingly, as it turns out. Oedipa is less narcissistic than the men in her life: husband Mucho retreats to his own world; Dr. Hilarius goes insane; Metzger, her co-executor and occasional bedmate, runs off with a teenage groupie; Randolph Driblette, the gurulike director of The Courier's Tragedy, walks into the Pacific; the Innamorati Anonymous iterate in contemporary terms the Ovidian treatment of narcissism as a short-circuiting. Almost all the men Oedipa encounters abandon her and retreat into a self-contained state of fascination with themselves. In Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, however, the bearer of the same name, the thirtieth bishop of Jerusalem (died c. 218), carries an opposite valuation. Eusebius relates that Bishop Narcissus was hounded from Jerusalem by Jewish Christians who objected to the judgment of a council of bishops he convened that Easter be observed rather than Passover. His three accusers swore by fire, blindness, and disease; in succeeding years, one was burned, one blinded, and one plagued. Rehabilitated, Narcissus returned from the desert and served energetically for another decade, even though he was said to be one hundred andfifteenwhen recalled. Among his other miracles, he once turned water to oil to light an Easter celebration.20 The derelict sailor whom Oedipa comforts in San Francisco has a picture of this miracle in his otherwise bare single-room flat (94). The Courier's Tragedy begins by recounting that about ten years earlier, the

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pious Duke of Faggio died from kissing "the [poisoned] feet on an image of Saint Narcissus, Bishop of Jerusalem" (45).21 The parodic revenge play concludes, like St. Narcissus's career, with a miraculous conversion of lies into truths: Angelo's threatening message to Faggio (written in ink made from the burned bones of the Lost Guard of Faggio) metamorphoses into "a long confession by Angelo of all his crimes" (52). In the classical paradigm, Narcissus serves as an emblem of sterile self-love; in Eusebius's official Christian history, Narcissus embodies the potency of miracle. Eusebius intends his story of the magical power of words to buttress other miracles associated with Bishop Narcissus. But, as Robert M. Grant points out, the frame ironizes the narrative: Eusebius uses Narcissus's charismatic stature in the interest of the institutionalization of the Church. He bureaucratizes the demonically energetic bishop. "Fully folkloristic, the story [of Narcissus's turning water into oil] . . . depicts a miracle in the service of ecclesiastical authority and ritual."22 In a similar irony in The Crying of Lot 49, the miraculous conversion of a lying message into a true confession occurs in a context of grotesque torture and parody. Pynchon's awareness of Freud reinforces the classical and more pessimistic meaning of narcissism in the novel. In his essay "On Narcissism," Freud traces "the characteristic tendency of paranoiacs to form speculative systems" to the narcissistic overdevelopment of self-observation and self-criticism that arises (in men) from repressed homosexual libido.23 Paranoiacs project a plot onto the world outside themselves in order to justify their self-absorption and guilt. Freud's theory may fit Schreber's case, and might apply partially to the clientele of the Greek Way bar. But Freudian analysis does not explain any of Oedipa's problems very well, since she is female, not homosexual, not clearly paranoid, and less narcissistic than the men in the novel. Ovid was exiled from the Augustan establishment for writing playfully and seriously about love. Bishop Narcissus's charisma has been appropriated by the institutional codifier, Eusebius. Freud's analysis connects paranoid narcissism with male homosexuality (which doesn't help Oedipa) and with philosophical introspection (which implies that all abstract thinking contains a tincture of paranoia). Framing these three paradigms in his own parodic narrative, Pynchon indicates that we all project meaning out of our desires and fears, as shaped by the cultural forms we have inherited. Shared projections form the basis of institutions; unshared, of exile and madness. Oedipa stands out here for her growing awareness of the ubiquity and variety of the mechanisms of projection. While other characters imitate Narcissus, Oedipa resembles Ovid's Echo, who sees the self-absorption in love of Narcissus, but is unable to make him hear her.

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Facing her husband Mucho, who has found contentment on Hilarius's LSD, hearing a million voices intone "rich chocolaty goodness," Oedipa can only watch and echo: "So much of him had already dissipated" (108). Throughout The Crying of Lot 49, Freudian theories about narcissism, paranoia, or Oedipus express only partial truths. But Freud's method for converting oppositions to complementarities in analyzing the language of dreams provides Pynchon with a prototype of a language that would not be bound by the law of excluded middles. Lacking the negative, dream words and images produce antithetical meanings like those of key words in ancient languages: for example, the Latin alius ("high" and "deep") and sacer ("holy" and "polluted"), and the Greek pharmakon/os ("poison" and "antidote," "scapegoat" and "king").24 In a crucial passage, Oedipa recognizes that the dreamer, the saint, and the paranoid exist in a special relation to language because "[their] puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth" (95). As Swift asserted that extremes of high and low meet in the human mind, Pynchon implies that a single name may designate opposite historical phenomena. Like the idea of St. Narcissus and like many ancient words, the narrative evidence of Tristero carries antithetical meanings. The word itself connotes both a plot containing sinister adventure ("trysts") and one that elicits melancholic regret ("tristia"). As a kind of narrative pun, "Tristero" does not have a determinate meaning "either literally or as a metaphor," but it does, like "St. Narcissus," point to certain meanings. Puns clear out linguistic space in which to express unauthorized, repressed meanings. In the space between dominant modes of naming, Tristero also reveals a subversive mode, although the implications of the subversive system prove to be radically ambiguous. As models in which to frame an understanding of Tristero, the text offers suggestive histories of politics, religion, and economics; in each realm, Tristero carries opposite meanings. In political history, Tristero displays the two faces of extreme right and extreme left. At its birth in the 1580s, Tristero is dispossessed by the Spanish establishment as well as by the Protestants. But at the time of the Puritan revolution sixty years later, the underground presumably serves royalist and conservative interests. "Tristero enjoyed counter-revolution . . . the king about to lose his head. A set-up" (118). Bortz's historical adventure imagines the continental Tristero split between militants advocating takeover of a weakened opponent and a conservative faction which "would care only to continue in opposition" (123), with the latter winning out. A century and a half later, however, Tristero again reveals its revolutionary side: "It is even suggested that Tristero has staged the entire French Revolution, just for an excuse to issue the Proclamation of 9th Frimaire,

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An III, ratifying the end of the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly in France" (124). But the withdrawal of the aristocratic branch of the system, which "saw the Revolution as a temporary madness" (129), reduces Tristero to handling anarchist correspondence. After the abortive revolutions of 1848, most Tristero operatives immigrate to America, where, in the supposed words of (the nonfictional) J.-B. Moens in 1865, "they are no doubt at present rendering their services to those who seek to extinguish the flame of Revolution" (130). On the contrary, the false Indians dressed in obligatory black continue feeding that flame in America, "their entire emphasis now toward silence, impersonation, opposition masquerading as allegiance" (130). Over its long history, then, Tristero oscillates frequently and suddenly between complementary political extremes of left and right. Considered in religious terms, Tristero similarly encompasses extremes of high and low, sacred and cursed. Pynchon often associates Tristero with the realm of the sacred: in the course of the novel, Oedipa becomes sensitive to "all manner of revelations" (9). Her first sight of San Narciso produces an "odd, religious instant" when she realizes that "the ordered swirl of house and streets" resembles the "hieratic geometry" of a transistorized circuit (13). Miraculous coincidences and a "promise of hierophany" attend her throughout the novel.25 The word "God" appears frequently, and the number 49 can signify the eve of the Pentecost. But the revelations quivering on the horizon continue to do just that. The proliferation of clues signifies precisely the absence of the complete truth, "the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night" (87). Pynchon diagnoses our lot as a double one, with promise and threat as succeeding links in the same chain. In one paragraph Oedipa runs across a boy about to fly to Miami, "who planned to slip at night into aquariums and open negotiations with the dolphins, who would succeed man" (90-91). The boy will send his letters through Tristero's WASTE system. But in the preceding paragraph, the same system serves as a channel of communication for the AC-DC, "standing for the Alameda County Death Cult," which once a month chooses a victim "from among the innocent, the virtuous, the socially integrated and well-adjusted, using him sexually, then sacrificing him" (90). Such antithetical meanings attend Tristero as a manifestation of the sacred and taboo, which encompass "both the most desirable (holy) and repulsive (dreadful) thing the mind can conceive."26 Besides the opposite meanings that sacred and the profane carry, the sacred itself is double, and sacer a prime example of an antithetical word. Kenneth Burke observes, "Sacer might... be more accurately translated as 'untouchable,' since the extremely good, the extremely bad, and the extremely powerful

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are equally 'untouchable'. . . . The ambivalent notion of sacer will be more fruitful for leads here than a less dialectical essentializing that reduces the whole matter of the ambivalence in the forbidden to either a 'good' or 'bad' alone."27 "Tristero," like "sacred," designates "another realm of meaning behind the obvious" (137), where holy and dreadful combine as ambiguously as in ritual taboos.28 The evidence of Tristero in the economic sphere, both sinister and melancholy, crystallizes around a narrative kernel: "bones of lost battalion in lake, fished up, turned into charcoal" (43). The earliest plots of relevance to this pattern occur in seventeenth-century texts. In The Courier's Tragedy, the Lost Guard of Faggio are massacred on the shore of the Lago di Pietà, in a scene appropriated from thefictivePeregrinations of DiocletianBlobb,an Elizabethan traveler who saw all the rest of the passengers of a Thurn and Taxis mail coach dispatched near the Lake of Pity by assassins whose "cloaks cracked in the cold like black sails" (118) (although Blobb's account provides no information about the later history of the travelers' bones). The third "lost battalion" is a Wells Fargo detachment wiped out by marauders in "mysterious black uniforms" (64) in 1853 on the edge of California desert that would become one hundred and ten years later Fangosa Lagoons, or Lake Inverarity. The fourth instance of the pattern takes place in 1943 on the shores of the Lago di Pietà, where "about a company" of G.I.'s were penned in and killed by Germans who deposited the bodies in the lake. A corporal in the Italian army "harvested" the bones and sold them eventually to an American company having tangled connections with Pierce Inverarity. Some of them were processed in research on charcoal cigarette filters. With the development of San Narciso, the unused bones are strewn around the bottom of Lake Inverarity for the diversion of scuba divers (41-43). For his research on charcoal filters, Inverarity also used bones "harvested" from a cemetery displaced by the East San Narciso Freeway. Thus, in the last occurrence of the pattern, Fangosa Lagoons, or Lake Inverarity, becomes the American Lake of Pity, containing the bones of Wells Fargo men, of American G.I.'s, and of the general number of the California dead. Allfiveinstances of the narrative kernel relate sinister metamorphoses: the bones of the dead are transformed into charcoal, boneblack, or ink, and eventually decorate the bottom of an ersatz lake. But the displaced cemetery also produced dandelions, and Genghis Cohen's dandelion wine miraculously transmutes sinister commercialism into melancholy nostalgia. In spring, his wine becomes clearer, "as if the [dandelions] remembered" the dead (72). The evidence from the seventeenth century also contains a miraculous transformation as well as mys-

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terious threats, when the ink shapes itself into an account of Angelo's crimes. The history of Tristero's involvement with human bones in The Crying of Lot 49 reveals alternately sinister adventure and melancholic regret, reiterating in narrative terms the pun in the word itself.29 In political history, Tristero encompasses the revolutionary and the reactionary; in the religious realm, it signifies both the miraculous and the demonic; in economic history, it appears sinister and saddening. With the clues about Tristero, as with the concept of entropy, Pynchon points out that our paradigms are tools to think with. In the gaps between them, however, he registers a historical truth that the paradigms themselves either discount or ignore. There may be no conclusive evidence of the historical existence of Tristero, but there is still all the widely dispersed evidence of historical disinheritance that Oedipa and the reader can gather under the heading of Tristero. The name itself may not carry a clear and consistent significance, but it does point to this important truth. A little more than halfway through the novel, Oedipa relinquishes active pursuit of more clues (65) and decides to spend one night in San Francisco, "to drift . . . at random, and watch nothing happen" (80). But the idea of absolute meaninglessness triggers an avalanche of muted post horns and underground shadow states: a circle of dreaming children playing "Tristoe," a gang of delinquents, an "exhausted busful of Negroes," the AC-DC, and the adolescent ambassador to the dolphins: "Decorating each alienation, each species of withdrawal, as cufflink, decal, aimless doodling, there was somehow always the post horn. She grew so to expect it that perhaps she did not see it quite as often as she later was to remember seeing it. A couple-three times would really have been enough. Or too much" (91). The insistence of the Tristero post horn does not confirm the historical existence of a Tristero plot. But the scarred, exiled preterite whom Oedipa sees do exist both in the narrative and outside it. Although it appears that "every access route to the Tristero could be traced also back to the Inverarity estate" (127), once outside the dreamlike and narcotic estate of San Narciso, Oedipa sees in San Francisco the dispossessed whom we readers too could see there or in "a hundred lightlyconcealed entranceways" (135) across the land, if we would. Tristero has not heretofore possessed a consistent, single metaphorical meaning; but now the vision of these outsiders identifies Tristero strongly with the idea of dispossession. As such a signifier, Tristero generalizes the plight of its founder, who always emphasized "one constant theme, disinheritance" (120). Pynchon has emptied out conventional metaphors of praise in The Crying of Lot 49, and here, like Swift in sections 8 and 9 of A Tale of a Tub, he reverses direction to point to an unconventional content—the dark side of America, the dispossession of its people.

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Pynchon suggestively inverts fictional and documentary modes to formulate his satire of the American dream. Fictional San Narciso is the source of seemingly objective clues about Tristero, such as Wharfinger's play and Inverarity's stamps. On the other hand, San Francisco, which refers to the world outside the text, produces a hallucinatory sequence of misfits, invisible people, and parodies. The seeming hallucination, however, paradoxically opens Oedipa's eyes to convincing evidence of objective, anonymous dispossession.30 As the underside of Tupperware plastics and Yoyodyne missiles, Oedipa's urban night of the soul conveys a truth at least as much as such conventional elements of America, perhaps more. At dawn, Oedipa meets and comforts a tattooed sailor. Back in his single-room flat, she envisions his "Viking's death" on a mattress ignited by his own cigarette. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT's. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind's plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending on where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was. . . . "dt," God help this tattooed old man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, . . . where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. . . . She knew the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns. (95-96) As Oedipa thinks that a metaphor is a "thrust at truth and a lie," the pun in the passage bears her out. The connection between delirium tremens and delta time is strained at best. But the fortuitous linguistic fit prompts an attempt at exposition—a mere thrust at truth, still perhaps the best we can manage in our preterite state. The passage both illustrates and defends the way Pynchon combines conventional metaphorical connections and seemingly random connections in his puns. Onto the binary opposition of lie and truth, Pynchon, or Oedipa, superimposes another pair of opposites: "inside, safe, or outside, lost." The derelict is clearly connected to Tristero: he knows about the WASTE containers, his letter bears a parodic stamp, and he has the post horn tat-

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tooed on his left hand. If we take Tristero as a pointer to various species of loss, from psychological abandonment to physical harm, then, being outside, lost, at least enables one to make an attempt at telling the truth, whereas the safety of the inside produces lies, approved genres, and the authorized mail system with its "recitations of routine [and] arid betrayals of spiritual poverty" (128). In A Tale of a Tub, Swift satirized metaphoric assertions of spiritual interiors by means of materializing puns; he also distanced himself from an exclusive attention to exterior surfaces, and implied a need for somefigurativelanguage and moral understanding. In this passage of The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon also distances himself from either extreme of interior or exterior. He designates the pious celebrations of secular myths as lies and endorses the position of those who remain outside, excluded from the comfortable and safe interior of American society. But he does not abandon the search for meaning through metaphor entirely; in fact, only those who are outside can attempt to understand metaphorically, by making a thrust at comprehending a security they do not possess. Pynchon lies in the service of a truth here. Tristero may not be a historical plot, but its legacy of disinheritance is nevertheless a historical truth. The textual Tristero, whether it exists or not, succeeds as a metaphor for the underside of the American dream. Pointing to the often repressed fact that the legacy of America has to do with disinheritance, silencing, and subjection, as well as with birthrights, toleration, and liberty, Pynchon's narrative also takes account of the paradoxical importance of outsiders in our history. Through Tristero, Pynchon points to the other side of the mythical legacy of America— hoboes, paranoid fringe groups, unmoneyed squatters, Nazi store owners, and corrupt founding fathers.31 All the otherwise unrelated underground parts of this countersystem share an alienation from the reigning order of the visible and sanctioned establishment: they are the wastes of the system ("We Await Silent Tristero's Empire" [127]) and its parodic shadow. The muted post horn, emblem of dispossession, renounces authorized channels of communication. Tristero fittingly communicates only through alteration of licensed signals: through parody or strategic silences. Such indirect forms of communication, poised on the slash between nonmeaning and meaning, both reflect and aggravate a generally paranoid state. By raising and leaving open the possibility of a plot uniting the abnormal and subversive in an underground system, Pynchon captures a distinctive cultural moment: the mid-sixties and the beginnings of postmodern America.32 Any coincidence might be intentional, a revolution a counterrevolution, even an adenoidal stamp collector a plant. Of Pierce Inverarity the proper question to ask is not "What did he own?" but "What

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the hell didn't he own?" (24). For Americans since the sixties, faced with novel barrages of information and disinformation, moulded by propaganda and advertising in new media, and surrounded by scores of plausible conspiracy theories, our greatest common factor has been "a shared sense of paranoia."33 Parody as Paradigm A tragedy or comedy makes sense of human experience through reversals of fortune accompanied by recognitions concerning identity. Satire and parody also signify through reversals, although typically without an accompanying recognition, either by protagonists or, often, by readers. Inverting, displacing, and juxtaposing genres, the parodic genre of narrative satire expresses in formal terms the skepticism about models that pervades The Crying of Lot 49.34 In the course of his narrative, Pynchon parodies Jacobean and Sophoclean tragedies, detective and Freudian case histories. Oedipa's name alludes to Freud and Sophocles. But Freud's theory about Oedipus proves to be even more of a red herring in this text than his theory of narcissism, relevant only in that Pierce and Oedipa's father would be of the same generation. Oedipa's complex results not from familial pressures but from pressures of her time and place. The parallels run deep between her case and that of Sophocles' Theban detective, yet here, too, Pynchon introduces a contemporary reversal. Oedipus, like Oedipa, tries to solve a mystery about a dead founding father, starting "as an almost detached observer, only to discover how deeply implicated he is in what hefinds."35In the last third of the novel, Oedipa comes to see herself among those who are "outside, lost" (95): both she and Oedipus discover that they are more closely related than they had thought to those around them, but this discovery paradoxically places them outside the secure enclosure of their societies. Oedipus's successful and ruinous pursuit of his truth yokes extremes of knowledge and suffering. Oedipa recognizes her kinship with others—a kinship not of blood but of nonassimilation and relative paranoia. But Oedipa withdraws from the role of detective who uncovers what has been hidden. Unlike Oedipus who sees the riddle of his own identity hidden under his answer to the Sphinx's riddle, Oedipa remains unenlightened. She knows only that she does not know the answer to the riddles posed by Pierce's will, Tristero, or America. As she waits "for the symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew" (65, 136), she instead sees them congeal into binary opposites: either Tristero exists, or she is

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paranoid; either Pierce's will encodes a secret underground, or again she is paranoid (128). The only alternative to American "exitlessness" (129) is the relative paranoia of nonassimilation as a self-pronounced exile. Reversing well-established conventions of tragedy and the detective novel through the strategic hesitancy of his heroine, Pynchon situates his narrative apart from alternate genres and modes, between tragedy and satire, irony and allegory. Given her time and place, the computer is the most fitting final version of the Sphinx for Oedipa to face.36 Her last ambiguous revelation places her "among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above . . . ahead, thick, maybe endless" (136).37 Caught between the possibility of a conspiracy and the inconclusiveness of the evidence, Oedipa refuses to give credence either to Tristero or to the only apparent alternative, that she must be paranoid. She can follow the lie of Tristero to the submerged truth of dispossession. But she declines the either-or choice which her time presses upon her. "She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided" (136). Oedipa's growing realization both of the dispossessed and of her own plight indicates that Pynchon allows more scope for recognition than most narrative satirists. Oedipa progresses from her self-containment in the first chapter through her various "sensitizing" experiences, especially the night in San Francisco, to her awareness of the unacceptably constraining alternatives that confront her at the end. In this respect, The Crying of Lot 49 resembles Gibbon's Decline and Fall more than other satiric narratives. The narrator of Gibbon's history also gives evidence of a growth in his thinking—from a bilateral, adversarial attitude to a more multilateral, ironic, and tolerant view of alternate cultural forms. Such realizations as the historian's or Oedipa's take the distinctive satiric form not of a recognition of a positive law, but rather of resistance against the limitations of either-or choices. Oedipa's stance at the end of the novel also resembles that of postmodern science, as Jean-François Lyotard characterizes it: in search of instabilities, asymmetries, and indeterminacies, constructing narratives of explanation more metaphorical than quantifiable.38 The Aristotelian law of excluded middles, which posits the impossibility of both A and not-A, as the computer circuit demands a choice between one and zero, founds identity on the exclusion of simultaneous opposites. Its necessary complement, more favored by satiric narratives, is the Freudian law of the identity of opposites, exemplified by the antithetical meanings of primal words, dream words, myths, and puns.

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At the end of The Crying of Lot 49, the binary choices facing Oedipa and the reader reflect the constraining conditions of scientific models and literary genres, which conspire with the paranoid temper of postmodern times to keep her and us suspended far short of certainty. The auctioning, as lot 49, of Pierce's stamps—uncancelled tokens of communication that never occurred, of indeterminate, though more than face, value—offers a synecdoche for the paradoxes of the present paradigm, in which meanings and bits of information emerge as parts of an elaborate hoax. Oedipa remains deliberately irresolute and continues her quest by holding back. Out of range of the voice of God, "the cry that would abolish the night" (87), she awaits yet another inconclusive epiphany and braces against the forces of history and psychology that would make pure paranoia the shape of true conviction. In plotting the course of Oedipa's paranoid sanity, her refusal to be bound by comforting myths and paradigms, Pynchon cries our lot too.

Epilogue: Borges, Satire, and History

HE intolerable extremes that confront Oedipa serve as a figure not only for the binary technology of digital computers, but also for the ideology of the cold war. An absolute, global division, such as that between East and West, works to deny legitimacy to any position between or outside the extreme antagonists and makes assent to either hostile extreme self-limiting. To the extent that Oedipa realizes her plight, she is exceptional, both in her time and among characters in narrative satire. Most satiric characters exhibit a far more limited selfawareness as they embrace one of the sets of cultural beliefs satirized in the narrative, or retreat from the tensions and contradictions in their historical present. Borges' satiric tales illustrate and criticize representative modern retreats from history and enable us to define the function of narrative satire in our century. In "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," Borges posits a French symbolist who has deliberately written a few pages that coincide verbatim with pages of Cervantes' novel. Through this conceit, Borges undermines the idea of a national literary classic and the romantic glorification of creative originality: to be merely original requires less effort than fully reimagining a text written three centuries earlier. But Borges also satirizes his precious and petty narrator and Menard, who recomposes passages solely from Part I of Cervantes' novel. Menard exhibits a naive neglect of Part II of Don Quixote, Cervantes' own ironic reflections ten years after the publication of Part I. Menard's project results from an ahistorical view of the imagination as a nearly supernatural creative force that he shares with his friend, Paul Valéry; like Valéry's Monsieur Teste, Menard attempts to construct a nonexistent world in his head. History in fact does not play a significant

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role in Menard's project, except insofar as it has created a very different world from that in which Cervantes lived. History makes Menard's project possible, but his project attempts to defeat history. Menard's "creative anachronism," his attempt to elide three hundred years of history, is, of course, quixotically antihistorical. Like Don Quixote, Pierre Menard betrays a dissatisfaction with the conditions of his own time, which he seeks to remedy by resuscitating an earlier object of longing: Don Quixote longs for the age of knight errantry, Menard for the art of Cervantes. Rather than exploring the complex particulars that separate his historical condition from Cervantes', Menard embraces an ahistorical formalism here that appears in his other supposed works, such as his proposal for a vocabulary of "ideal objects" to be used in poetry but nowhere else. In "Pierre Menard," Borges depicts uncritical imitation as unintentional self-parody. Although Menard assumes the pose of an avantgardiste and attempts mechanically to write as a modern, he paradoxically returns to a mode of writing that resembles that of medieval scribes and copyists. In thus demonstrating the emptiness of uncritical imitation, Borges also reflects along lines similar to those that Walter Benjamin pursues in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": that advanced forms of mechanical reproduction lead to works that are less original than those that make use of creative translation, dialogical parody, or other critical imitations of previous forms. For Borges, modern writing must fashion what is new through parodic revision of what has gone before. His tale establishes that parody is the condition for modern writing because we recognize parody in its very absence—in Menard's earnest attempt to recompose Don Quixote. Menard's project might thus be termed negative parody or self-parody by way of uncritical, mechanical imitation. Borges repeatedly satirizes the attempts of the creative imagination to escape history or of philosophical idealism to alter actuality. He makes such criticism most explicit, in terms that bear directly on the concerns of this study, in "Tlön, Uqbar: Orbis Tertius." In that tale, the efforts of a small band of thinkers and projectors to imagine a nonexistent world in encyclopedic detail over the course of three centuries, passing along the secret project from one generation to another, finally begin to bring that world into existence in the 1930s. Philosophical idealism entirely governs the operations as well as the origins of Tlön: there nonexistent objects come into being because people imagine them in detail and search for them, just as Tlön itself comes into existence on the same principle. For most of the tale, the narrator describes with fascination and sympathy this alternate world whose fabulous objects, rules, and grammars revise the unsatisfactory actuality of ordinary experience, knowledge, and language.

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But Borges adds a long Postscript, dated 1947, to the tale, which he dates 1940. Since the tale and the postscript were originally published in 1941, the postscript produces an effect like that of science fiction set in the near future, as it recounts the threatening materialization of Tlön. Though originally conceived by such seventeenth-century Utopian thinkers as Johannes Andreae, Hon owes its existence, the narrator can now report, to its financing by a wealthy but paranoid nineteenth-century American atheist who wanted to prove that humans unaided by gods could create a world; Borges implies that Utopian visions often come to partial or warped realization through such compromising and ironic means. The narrator confirms this insight and extends it when he reports how, in the few years since Tlon's first appearances, the world has been giving way to Tlõn. Attributing Tlön's success to a fascination with system and a need to believe, he finds Tlön entirely analogous to the most successful alternate systems of belief of his time: fascism and communism. In its remaking of the world, Tlõn revises or obliterates sciences, languages, history—all previous forms of human knowledge. The postscript thus reports the sweeping transformation of the world into Tlõn and the corollary transformation of Tlõn from Utopian fantasy into nightmarish actuality. The postscript also includes an inversion of philosophical idealism that corresponds to this inversion of Utopian idealism: as Tlõn displaces the old world, objects of Tlönian worship appear that possess an uncanny heaviness, a concentration of materiality, which produces nausea in those who handle them. In this tale, Borges explores the double nature—including the inevitable underside—of philosophical and political idealism: the nauseatingly heavy sacred metal cones from Tlõn call to mind the dystopian results to which totalizing systems of the left and right, mostly Utopian in origin, have led in our century. The title of the tale, designating Tlõn as "orbis tertius" or "of the third world," promises that this newly discovered world will constitute an alternative to both the first world of the West and its totalizing antagonists. But Borges depicts a dramatic gulf between Tlön's Utopian promise and dystopian failure. Tlõn, therefore, does not offer a third alternative to the dominant culture of the West and its dystopian alternatives, but rather the ultimate instance of a utopia become dystopic. After originally depicting Tlõn as an enchanting alternative to actuality, the narrator retreats in the face of Tlön's cancerous materialization. Seeing that the old world is being superseded and effaced in all its details by Tlõn (which functions as afigurefor fascism or communism), he envelops himself in the past, translating into baroque Spanish Sir Thomas Browne's seventeenth-century English treatise on ancient British burial customs. But this withdrawal into literary archaeology constitutes as inade-

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quate a response to the material apparition of Tlõn as does the acceptance of Tlön by those whose forgetting destroys the works, ideas, and experiences of all previous history. At the conclusion of the tale, Borges declines to sanction the narrator's reactionary retreat from a Utopian alternative that has become dystopian into a sealed world consisting only of languages of the past. Both Tlön and Tristero emerge as promising but sinister underground plots that have spanned centuries, and now offer an alternative to the routine disinheritance of its people by the established order. However, like Pynchon and other narrative satirists, Borges excludes a middle ground, leaving his reader suspended between unacceptable choices: a fabulous but threatening future or an artfully embalmed past. Borges satirizes the narrator of "Tlön Uqbar" for retreating into the same century of the past as did Pierre Menard; both the narrator and Menard presume that the changes of the last three centuries might be reversed through their deliberate anachronism or antiquarianism. Thus, "Tlön Uqbar" and "Pierre Menard" share with Swift's Tale of a Tub the strategy of making their narrators the principal objects of their satire. In addition, the relationship in Borges' two tales between the writer and a literary authority—between Menard and Cervantes, and between the narrator of "Tlõn, Uqbar" and Sir Thomas Browne—recalls the relationship between Gibbon and Poggio Bracciolini, which also spans three centuries. However, unlike Borges' writers, Gibbon does not simply reiterate the words of the past; rather, he appropriates them in order to fashion his own complex meditation on the ironies of history. Like Gibbon, Petronius uses Virgil's words not in unthinking imitation, but in order to contest his epic's attitude toward Rome and its empire. These works by Petronius, Gibbon, and Borges thus demonstrate that the revisionary, critical use of past authorities offers a crucial means by which satiric narratives interrogate and contest established perspectives. Because such imaginative retrojections as those of Menard or the narrator of "Tlõn" cannot halt history, Borges and Pynchon satirize those who remove themselves from the nightmarish choices of history. But the satirists themselves still resist embracing either of the unsatisfactory systems of belief—the prevailing traditional one or the ambiguous Utopian alternatives—that they find in their times or depict in their narratives. If their suspension between opposite alternatives holds a particular interest for us, and the reinvigoration of narrative satire in our century indicates it does, the reason probably derives from the correspondence between modern conditions of social and mental life and the structure of their satire. For most of this century, many people have faced a version of an intolerable choice between communism and fascism, or socialism and capitalism, or,

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for forty-five years after World War II, East and West. The double parody of narrative satire expresses the unavailability of a principled position between or apart from these and similar pairs of unacceptable and opposite systems of belief. Narrative satire offers a suitable imaginative structure for such times, in which a cultural form that has been predominant faces the challenge of a more recent, alternate model of understanding, belief, and action; these narratives express in imaginative form the satirist's ambivalence toward both paradigms. Rather than thinking within either a fading or an emerging cultural model, a dominant or a subversive one, the narrative satirist persists in viewing all available paradigms of belief from the outside—from a skeptical and parodic distance.

Notes

Introduction 1. Mikhail Bakhtin stresses satiric dialogicality in his analysis of menippean satire in Problems of Dostoevshy's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson, chap. 4; he focuses on heteroglossia in satire and parody in "Discourse in the Novel" and "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," both in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, pp. 259-422 and 51-82. 2. Fredric Jameson implies a related view of Joyce's language as an attack on the language of official British culture, with its various branches in the military, the Church, the arts, and the professions. "Ulysses in History," in James Joyce and Modern Criticism, ed. W.J. McCormack and Alistair Stead, pp. 133-139. Patrick Parrinder argues that Joyce uses grotesque realism and carnival inversions, as Bakhtin argued Rabelais did, to contest the forms of official culture, in James Joyce, pp. 9 - 1 1 . Joyce uses creative linguistic parody as other narrative satirists have done throughout European history. Tinianov and Shklovsky argued that parody constitutes a laboratory from which new literary forms emerge, as Gary Saul Morson points out in The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevshy's "Diary of a Writer" and the Traditions of Literary Utopia, p. 112. 3. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White build on the insights about carnival inversions of Bakhtin (and others), but they avoid Bakhtin's one-sided Utopian populism by formulating their arguments not in terms of a static opposition between official and unofficial culture, but in terms of the changing contours of what is considered transgressive, in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, esp. pp. 9-19, 27-39. Richard Berrong argues that Bakhtin exaggerates the extent to which popular and learned culture were mutually exclusive when Rabelais' first two books were published (Bakhtin and Rabelais, pp. 52-78). 4. Kenneth Burke thus characterizes the complex perspective that results from juxtaposing "positions (or 'voices')" (which can include agents carrying ideas in narrative such as Pangloss, as well as grand historical characters such as "liberalism"), so that each point of view criticizes the others and becomes neither true nor false, but "contributory" to the ironic "perspective of perspectives" that, neither true nor false itself, subsumes all these "sub-certainties" (A Grammar of Motives, pp. 512-513). In this formulation, Burke specifies the dialogical workings of narrative satire, which

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Notes to Pages 3-6

builds an ironic perspective through parodic juxtaposition of two or more opposed and parodied perspectives. 5. Robert C. Elliott elaborates his argument for the importance of the figure of the satirist-satirized in The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art, pp. 130-222. Elliott confines his conception of the satirist to the hurler of curses and verbal abuse. I find that the undercutting of other kinds of satiric characters and narratives is much more widespread than Elliott's focus on the railing satirist acknowledges. 6. The consistent focus on language as constitutive of thought in complex narrative satire qualifies the applicability of the distinction drawn between parody (with language as its target) and satire (with things as its targets). Linda Hutcheon allows more flexibility for the overlapping of the two in elaborating the distinction between them in A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, pp. 62-64, as does Morson in The Boundaries of Genre, p. 114. 7. Borges also works in the ironic form of the parodic encyclopedia, especially in "Tlön, Uqbar: Orbis Tertius," which 1 discuss in the Epilogue. Morson notes the opposition to systemization in parodic texts in The Boundaries of Genre, p. 123. 8. In satires we can infer positive norms only with difficulty—occasionally with the unobtrusive help of figures such as Don Pedro or the Brobdingnagian king in Gulliver's Travels. 9. For related discussions of open-endedness in literature, see Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox; and Umberto Eco, The Open Work. 10. Satiric depictions of death and physical pain take the form either of comic inconsequentiality, as in Candide and West's A Cool Million, or the more nearly tragic form of cannibalism, in the Satyricon, "A Modest Proposal," and Don juan, as in Montaigne's "Of Cannibals," cannibalism serves to indict the barbarity of contemporary civilization. 11. Alvin Kernan formulates the point this way: "The rhythm of satire . . . lacks the crucial act of perception which permits development and forward movement. . . . Constant movement without change forms the basis of satire, and while we may be only half aware of the pattern as we read, it, more than any other element, creates the tone of pessimism inherent in the genre." The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance, pp. 32-33. 12. Bakhtin discusses the frequency and importance of inserted genres in the parodic "second stylistic line" of the novel in "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 320-323. He makes equivalent assertions about menippean narrative satire in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 118. 13. Although most critics have considered that Bakhtin's polemical assertions of a fundamental bifurcation between poetic and prose genres cannot be universally sustained, i find confirmation of such a distinction in this divergence between the two principal genres of satire. 14. For some qualified assertions of satire's tendency toward conservatism, see: Maynard Mack, "The Muse of Satire," in Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Ronald Paulson, p. 194; Elliott, The Power of Satire, pp. 273-275; Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, p. 223; Peter Green, Introduction to The Sixteen Satires, by Juvenal, pp. 23-29, 33, 3 9 - 4 1 ; and Harry Levin, "The Wages of Satire," in Literature and Society: Selected Essays from the English Institute, ed. Edward W. Said, p. 5.

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15. On the implicit or explicit presence of a friendly interlocutor in most verse satires, see Mary Claire Randolph, "The Structural Design of Formal Verse Satire," in Satire, ed. Paulson, pp. 171-189. 16. A number of critics have shown that the ancient sermon and diatribe, including the Cynics' preaching in the marketplace, helped shape both verse and narrative satire. See G. L. Hendrickson, "Satura Tota Nostra Est," in Satire, ed. Paulson, p. 42; C. W. Mendell, "Satire as Practical Philosophy," Classical Philology 15 (1920): 138-157; and Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoey shy's Poetics, pp. 119-120, and "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, p. 371. 17. Joseph A. Dane, in Parody: Critical Concepts versus Literary Practices, Aristophanes to Sterne, pp. 134, 145-147, points out that both the critical concept of parody and the poetic practice of parody have often contributed to a conservative cultural agenda. 18. Bakhtin asserts the need for a shift of critical attention from poetry and metaphor to prose and irony: "If the central problem in poetic theory is the problem of the poetic symbol, then the central problem in prose theory is the problem of the double-voiced, internally dialogized word" ("Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, p. 330). 19. On carnival as "licensed complicity," see Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, pp. 13-19; on parody as authorized transgression, see Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, pp. 74-76. Recognizing the compromised, ambiguous significance of structures of inversion enables Stallybrass and White to move beyond the question whether carnival inversions are fundamentally conservative or revolutionary, and enables Hutcheon to work with the understanding that parodic inversion can be "normative and conservative, or it can be provocative and revolutionary" (p. 76). 20. Dane also argues that mock-epic and even travesty, despite their names, do not degrade their epic originals {Parody, p. 132). 21. Alvin Kernan observes satire's ambiguous, potentially sanative, but potentially malignant effects (The Plot of Satire, pp. 10-11); and Ronald Paulson notes that satire's double function "returns fertility to the wasteland but leaves the satirist himself suspect" as both a savior and a scapegoat (The Fictions of Satire, pp. 75-76). Michael Seidel reflects that the satirist may become an object of the community's hostility through being contaminated by the dirt and corruption he sets out to clean up: "the moral intent of the cleanser is confounded by the contamination of the satiric action" (Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne, p. 15). Elliott conceives of the railing satirist as a possible equivalent to a scapegoat: "the railer who drives away evil may at the same time be made to take upon himself the accumulated evil of his people. He may be ceremonially beaten and exiled, if not slain" (The Power of Satire, p. 135). 22. Some evidence suggests that the originary satirists were not indiscriminate railers against unspecified evil, but rather attacked specific social injustices, and that they were killed in reprisal for their criticisms of the social hierarchy. Thersites articulated the concerns of the common soldiers against the aristocrats within the Greek expedition, and his killing by Achilles or by Achilles' men bears the marks of a reprisal; Homer, of course, retains Thersites and gives voice to his criticisms of the heroic world in the epic itself. See Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, pp. 259-262, 279-288. Similarly, The Life of Aesop indicates that through his fables Aesop criticized the unequal distribution of sacrificial

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meats by the Delphians, who killed him but then commemorated him as a scapegoat who initiated reforms in the system of religious rituals. See Anton Wiechers, Aesop in Delphi, pp. 31-42. 23. Craig Howes investigates the possibility for radically subversive satire, concluding that Bakhtin's theory of menippean satire holds out but ultimately frustrates this possibility. See "Rhetorics of Attack: Bakhtin and the Aesthetics of Satire," Genre 18 (1986): 238-241. Howes argues that the possibility still remains implicit in Bakhtin's early essay "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art," included as Appendix 1 in Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, trans. I. R. Titunik, ed. Neal Bruss, pp. 93-116. 24. Bakhtin investigates the carnivalesque and folk emphasis on what he calls the "material bodily lower stratum" primarily in Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, esp. chaps. 2, 5, and 6. His later analysis of the carnivalesque coheres with the more extensive account in the book on Rabelais. So, for example, "the carnival image . . . strives to encompass and unite within itself both poles of becoming or both members of an antithesis: birth-death, youth-old age, top-bottom, face-backside, praiseabuse, affirmation-repudiation, tragic-comic, and so forth, while the upper pole of a two-in-one image is reflected in the lower" (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 176). 25. Northrop Frye refers to satire's leveling of spirituality to a "bodily democracy" in Anatomy of Criticism, p. 235. 26. Bakhtin discusses the effect of Sancho's language on Don Quixote's ("Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 384-386). 27. Alvin Kernan diagnoses satiric reduction of the "vital to the mechanical and the spiritual to the vulgarly material" in The Plot of Satire, pp. 52-53, 90, 102. 28. A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and David Nichol Smith, p. 287. 29. Hutcheon notes the antihierarchical tendencies of parodic form in A Theory of Parody, pp. 81, 94. 30. Alvin Kernan makes the incorporation of multiple genres the focus of his analysis of Donjuán in The Plot of Satire, pp. 182-220. 31. Kuhn's original formulation of how in a scientific revolution one paradigm overcomes and replaces the previously established paradigm resembles Bakhtin's Utopian formulations of the power of carnival to subvert and replace an officially established world view. Many philosophers of science objected that Kuhn's conception of a paradigm was too monolithic and his conception of scientific revolutions too dramatic: at any moment, only one scientific model dominated, and it could only be entirely supplanted, never partially revised. In the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn responded to his critics by modifying this formulation, arguing instead that a field of scientific thought and activity need not be dominated by a single authoritative paradigm, but that multiple paradigms may jostle and compete for authority at a given time. As a corollary, he writes that the shift from one paradigm to another need not be absolute and revolutionary; the newer model that comes to predominate may exhibit continuities with the previous one. This revised position of Kuhn parallels the formulations of Bakhtin that stress dialogical parody (in, for example, "Discourse in the Novel") rather than those that emphasize carnival subversion (in, for example, Rabelais and His World). In dialogical parody, multiple worlds of discourse come into contact and conflict, interpenetrating and shaping each other. The paradigms of cultural understanding and discourse that, according to the latter formula-

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tion, claim absolute authority, according to the former possess only a relative authority that may be interrogated and criticized by alternate, competing perspectives and discourses. For criticisms, revisions, and extensions of Kuhris ideas, see two collections of essays: Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge; and Gary Gutting, ed., Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of Thomas Kuhris Philosophy of Science. Three collections of essays offer interpretations and evaluations of Bakhtin's theories: Gary Saul Morson, ed., Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Works; Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin; and Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd, eds., Bakhtin and Cultural Theory. 32. As Michael Seidel observes, "part of the satirist's strategy is to debase metaphors of false conveyance" (Satiric Inheritance, p. 23). Seidel also develops this line of analysis in relation specifically to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in "The Satiric Plots of Gravity's Rainbow," in Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Edward Mendelson, pp. 197, 207. 33. Morson remarks that "parodists may . . . exploit the double meaning of a pun to double-voice a text" (The Boundaries of Genre, p. 112). 34. Kenneth Burke analyzes metonymy as the trope of reduction, which moves from intangible to tangible, from incorporeal, metaphoric meaning to corporeal, literal meanings (A Grammar of Motives, p. 506). 35. Quintilian, The Institutes of Oratory, trans. H. E. Butler, Bk. VIII, sec. vi, 44-49, pp. 327-329. While Angus Fletcher notes that conceiving of allegory simply as a continued metaphor can be misleading and reductive, he uses this description of the figure as a starting point in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, pp. 71-83. 1 have drawn on Fletcher's account for support in considering allegory and irony as complementary narrative figures: see, on allegory, pp.82, 98, 118-136; and, on irony, pp. 84, 140-144. Edwin Honig notes that irony usually serves as an instrument of satire, but that when it becomes extended, it functions very much as allegory does in its longer forms. See Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory, p. 130. Like Honig, Maureen Quilligan analyzes Melville, Hawthorne, and Spenser as allegorists in The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre. Unlike Honig, she maintains that allegorical narratives develop from puns as from kernels of condensed meanings, and her analyses of the crucial puns in Melville's and Pynchon's novels illuminate their works. Since these puns suggest but withhold confirmation of a consistent system of cosmic meanings, they seem to me to serve narrative irony rather than narrative allegory. Paulson observes the transition from irony as a strictly rhetorical device to continued narrative irony in The Fictions of Satire, pp. 97-98. 36. Jorge Luis Borges points to the replacement of allegory as the preeminent rhetorical and narrative form in the medieval period with irony in the modern period. See "From Allegories to Novels," in Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952, pp. 154-158. 37. Bakhtin conceives the transition from the scholastic view to that of Rabelais as a movement from a vertical, hierarchical organization of knowledge and classes to a more nearly horizontal one (Rabelais and His World, pp. 363-364). 38. A number of studies have helped me to formulate my understanding of the relation between forms of economic and social exchange and forms of rhetorical exchange. Bakhtin emphasizes the materiality of language and of the body in his analyses of the language of the medieval marketplace and square, its coarse puns, billingsgate, and parodic free familiarity in Rabelais and His World. Stallybrass and White

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demonstrate that shifts in the mapping of high and low in the sphere of the body, of social classes, or of language produce corresponding shifts in the other spheres as well in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Jean-Christophe Agnew analyzes the ways that cultural forms, such as the theater, may serve as meditations on, and figures for, anxieties arising from changes in market relations and relations between people in Worlds Apart: The Theatre and the Market in Anglo-American Thought, 1500-1750. Walter Benn Michaels addresses cases in which the overt concerns of the cultural work and its form both respond to the paradoxes produced by changing social and economic circumstances in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Marc Shell argues along similar lines that Heraclitus's fragment 90, which describes exchanges of gold for all things, corresponds in its metaphorical form to the form of coined money, which had just appeared in the Greek world, in The Economics of Literature, esp. pp. 50-62. Finally, David Simpson asserts the relation of metonymy to the money form, especially because metonymy can serve as a figure for the alienation of product from process, and for the replacement of human reciprocity by ornament or dress, in Fetishism and Imagination, pp. 22-24, 33-36. 39. Simpson points out the availability of these rhetorical forms for either conservative or subversive projects (Fetishism and Imagination, p. 66). 40. Bakhtin notes that the two stylistic lines of the novel—the romancesentimental and the parodic-satiric—converge near the beginning of the nineteenth century ("Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, p. 414). 41. Howes demonstrates that Bakhtin assigns menippean satire the status of a John the Baptist among genres that prepares the way for the polyphonic novel, in this way finalizing its history and closing off its radical potentialities ("The Rhetoric of Attack," p. 141). 42. It would have been difficult and dangerous after the late twenties in the Soviet Union to try to incorporate parodic modernist narratives into a twentiethcentury history and theory of the novel. 43. The primary importance of parody in the forms of art in the twentieth century shapes Hutcheon's A Theory of Parody, David Kiremidjian's A Study of Modern Parody, as well as the analyses and remarks of numerous artists and critics. 44. The Satyre Menippée appears to have helped shape Swift's satire of Catholic Peter in A Tale of a Tub. Peter's pickles and powders in section 4, for example, closely resemble the charlatan's catholicon in the Satyre Menippée. Swift had annotated the copy of the Satyre he possessed; see Herbert Davis, The Library of Jonathan Swift, p. 50, item 111. 45. Bakhtin writes that the conditions most propitious for the flowering of heteroglossia and dialogical novelistic prose occur when centralized verbal-ideological systems disintegrate and the diversity of forms of speech increases ("Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 370-371).

1. Satiric Parody of Classicism in the Satyricon 1. Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, trans. Michael Heseltine, rev. E. H. Warmington, 63.9. Subsequent citations from this edition appear parenthetically in the text

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and refer to paragraph and sentence numbers. 1 have occasionally modified the translation. 2. On parody of old forms and institutions as a principle of literary and cultural renewal, see Mikhail Bakhtin, "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 63-85. David Kiremidjian, "The Aesthetics of Parody," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (1970): 231-242, elaborates a theory of parody for modern art which stresses the function of parody as renewal. For a placement of Petronius's parodies in connection with the tradition of parody in menippean satire, see E. Courtney, "Parody and Literary Allusion in Menippean Satire," Philologus 106 (1962): 86-100. Courtney draws evidence from Varro, Seneca, Petronius, and others to show that "parody is at the very root of the [menippean] genre" (p. 87). 3. Morson emphasizes that changes of context produce changes of meaning when he defines parody as a reiteration of a symbolic act in an altered context (The Boundaries of Genre, pp. 107-121). In A Theory of Parody, pp. 30-68, Hutcheon stresses the combination of close imitation "with a critical difference" and explores the range of attitudes of the parodic toward the parodied discourse, from respect and nostalgia to mockery and scorn. Kiremidjian conceives of parody as a repetition of form combined with an alteration in content (A Study of Modern Parody, pp. 16-36). These works by contemporary critics reclaim a broad understanding of parody that prevailed in the ancient world; see Fred Householder, "Paroidia," Classical Philology 39 (1944): 1-9; and F.J. Lelièvre, "The Basis of Ancient Parody," Greece and Rome 1 (1954): 66-81. Householder and Lelièvre point out that ancient parody involves singing the same song with a slight but significant change, without humor being a necessary element. 4. Bakhtin develops his ideas on parody most fully in "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic imagination, pp. 264, 312, 336, 342-344. He most clearly links parody and dialogicality in "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," in ibid., p. 76. 5. Had the whole work survived, we might see the Satyricon as the Ulysses of the ancient world: both works use parody as the shaping principle of their narrative; both combine erudite allusions, elements of popular culture, accurate transcriptions of common speech, and a frank depiction of bodily processes. Averil Cameron, "Myth and Meaning in Petronius: Some Modern Comparisons," Latomus 29 (1970): 397-425, surveys many of the mythical themes common to Petronius and Joyce. H. D. Rankin concentrates on similarities of attitude and personality, and comments in passing on the use of parody by both as a means of shaping new forms in Petronius the Artist: Essays on the "Satyricon" and its Author, pp. 73-80. 6. The dating of the Satyricon to the last decade of Nero's reign is firmly established. See K. F. C. Rose, "The Petronian Inquisition: An Auto-da-fé," Arion 5 (1966): 289; and J. P. Sullivan, The "Satyricon" of Petronius: A Literary Study, p. 32. 7. The earliest statement of the view that the Satyricon is shaped by parody of the sentimental Greek romance was R. Heinze's, "Petron und der griechische Roman," Hermes 34 (1899): 494-519. Heinze postulated the existence of Greek novels antedating Petronius just before the fragments of the Ninus romance first came to light; these date probably from about 100 B.C. Since then, Heinze's view has won general acceptance.

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8. Bakhtin notes that the romances combine many genres while maintaining a single elevated style ("From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," in The Dialogic Imagination, p. 65). 9. I have drawn for this account of the grammar and the syntax of the ancient romances on Ben E. Perry, The Ancient Romances: A Literary-Historical Account of their Origins, pp. 124-137; Arthur Heiserman, The Novel before the Novel, pp. 4 - 6 , 42-56, 75-93; and Mikhail Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 65, 86—110. See also B. P. Reardon, ed., Erotika Antiqua: Acta of the International Conference on the Ancient Novel; Thomas Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity, pp. 5-32; and Graham Anderson, Ancient Fiction: The Novel in the GraecoRoman World, pp. 25-43. The Greek romances and fragments are now available in B. P. Reardon, ed., Collected Ancient Greek Novels. 10. As Bakhtin points out, public affairs do not impinge on private matters in the romance, but rather the reverse: public matters such as wars and diplomatic missions are undertaken to suit the purely private needs of the protagonists in the plot ("Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 108110). Hägg also stresses the almost exclusively private focus of the romances' concerns (The Novel in Antiquity, pp. 82-108), as does Perry (The Ancient Romances, pp. 54-62). 11. The title puns as well on the Roman genre of satura, or satire, to imply critical portrayals of contemporary follies and vices. On the title of the Satyricon and its lack of relation to formal verse satire, see Michael Coffey, Roman Satire, pp. 181-201. 12. Perry notes Petronius's resemblance to Fielding and the similarity of the romances to Richardson's novels, although without remarking the full parallel between the two pairs of parodies (The Ancient Romances, pp. 115-116). Bakhtin implies this parallel in the section on the "second stylistic line" of the novel in "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 366-396. 13. Those who have inferred the existence of a comic variety among the early romances include C. W. Mendell, "Petronius and the Greek Romance," Classical Philology 12 (1917): 158-172; and Ben Perry, "Petronius and Comic Romance," Classical Philology 20 (1925): 39-49. Perry subsequently renounced this view in The Ancient Romances. 14. Cicero, Philippics, trans. Walter C. A. Ker, ii, 44, pp. 108-109. 15. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, II, 261-263. Subsequent citations from this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 16. J. P. Sullivan finds a multiplicity of allusions to Senecan passages woven into this speech of Encolpius (esp. Ep. 92.34-35; Rem. Fort. 5.2, 4.5; Cons Marc. 11.3-5). On the basis of such close and complex echoes he disputes Collignon's view in Etude Sur Pétrone that parody of Seneca in the Satyricon is relatively unimportant (The "Satyricon" of Petronius, pp. 196-212). 17. Like those of Encolpius, the speeches and actions of Giton convey a peculiar immaturity and an absurdly clichéd quality, which Peter George captures in his analysis: "Giton not only talks like a declamation, he behaves like one. The spurious emotions and false drama demanded of the declaimer in the rhetorical schools have in him become indistinguishable from genuine emotions and real drama." See "Style and Character in the Satyricon," Arion 5 (1966): 336-358. 18. Evan T. Sage argues that Petronius espouses a traditional stylistic At-

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ticism in "Atticism in Petronius," Transactions of the American Philological Association 46 (1915): 47-57. Others see Petronius's placement of these opinions in the mouths of Agamemnon, Encolpius, and later Eumolpus as at least "semi-satiric." See, for example, Sullivan, The "Satyricon" of Petronius, pp. 161-165; and George Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, p. 462. In a later article, Kennedy argues that Petronius satirically portrays Encolpius and Agamemnon as confidence men using the clichéd criticism of declamation as bait to catch dinner invitations. See "Encolpius and Agamemnon in Petronius," American Journal of Philology 99 (1978): 171-178. My argument about the discussion at the beginning of the Satyricon draws on Kennedy's article. The question of Petronius's views arises again in the context of Eumolpus's later linking of decline in the arts with a general cultural decadence whose symptoms are luxury, laziness, and avarice. Peter Walsh, in The Roman Novel, pp. 81, 84-85, 97, stresses the extent to which Petronius separates himself from the conservative jeremiads of such dubious spokesmen as Encolpius and Eumolpus, by noting how often and how ironically Petronius presents "the theory of the coincidence of a healthy culture with a healthy morality, and the nostalgia for the days when the Romans were religiosissumi mortales." 19. For the wide currency in the first century of the conservative views expressed by Encolpius and Agamemnon, see Stanley F. Bonner, Roman Declamation in the Late Republic and Early Empire, p. 73. 20. As a depiction of the workings of a reciprocal confidence game, the scene between Encolpius and Agamemnon bears close comparison with the encounter of the two operators, Frank Goodman and Charlie Noble, in Melville's The ConfidenceMan; see chapter 4 of this study. 21. The ironic relation between Petronius and the speeches of Encolpius, Agamemnon, and, later, Eumolpus (88) closely parallels the ironic relation between Joyce and the "noble words" in the speeches of John F. Taylor, Seymour Bushe, and Robert Emmet in Ulysses, pp. 139-145, 290-291. 22. Kennedy discusses the later careers of Labienus and Cassius as examples of the "frustration and helplessness" to which the new political circumstances brought independent-minded orators (The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, pp. 3 0 8 312). On the basis of the elder Seneca's Controversiae and Suasoriae, Lewis A. Sussman argues that he considered the political change from late republic to early empire as a significant cause of the decline of oratory. See "The Elder Seneca's Discussion of the Decline of Roman Eloquence," California Studies in Classical Antiquity 5 (1972): 195-210. 23. Seneca the Elder, Declamations, trans. M. Winterbottom, II, 493. 24. Peter Sloterdijk maintains that Petronius makes use of a strategy of scathing ironic flattery in Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 234. Plutarch describes Petronius's mock-insults in "On the Distinction between Flattery and Friendship," Mor. 60d-e. 25. For a discussion of Nero's preferences among forms and styles, see J. P. Sullivan, Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero, pp. 89-92. 26. This mock-epic parallel was first suggested as the skeletal structure underlying the otherwise episodic narrative of the Satyricon by Eilimar Klebs, "Zur Composition von Petronius Satirae," Philologus 47 (1889): 623-635. Since then, the thesis has aroused controversy, but the critical consensus today holds that the wrath of Pria-

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pus comically haunts Encolpius through most of the remaining parts of the text and probably through much of what is lost (the parallel between events in the Odyssey and the Satyricon being loose and suggestive, and not a one-to-one correspondence). See Sullivan, The "Satyricon" of Petronius, pp. 93-96; Walsh, The Roman Novel, pp. 76-77; and Rankin, Petronius the Artist, pp. 55-57. 27. George E. Dimock, "The Name of Odysseus," Hudson Review 9 (1956): 52-70. 28. Some speculate that Encolpius impersonated a Priapus watching over a garden in Marseilles so that he might take advantage of the women who made nocturnal visits to enjoy the "sacred stump" of the statue ("sacri stipitis," frag. IV). The first proponent of this view was Cichorius, Römische Studien, p. 438. Others think it more likely that Encolpius offered himself as a scapegoat at Marseilles, but fled before he was thrown to his death at the end of his year of free meals (according to the description in frag. I); among these are Sullivan, The "Satyricon" of Petronius, pp. 41-42. The end of the present chapter presents another view of the meaning Petronius gives to Encolpius's scapegoating. 29. In "What Is a Classic?" T. S. Eliot argues that only one work in the Western tradition satisfies the requirements for a classic: the Aeneid. See Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, pp. 115-131. In The Classic, pp. 15-28, Kermode analyzes the close relation between the classic and the imperial in Eliot's argument. 30. Scholars have analyzed many instances of parody of the Symposium in the Satyricon. Averil Cameron concentrates on Habinnas's entrance as a parody of Alcibíades' and observes that the relationship between Eumolpus and the Pergamene boy travesties that between Alcibiades and Socrates. See "Petronius and Plato," Classical Quarterly, n.s. 19 (1969): 367-370. Cameron also notes in passing that the freedmen's monologues parody the philosophical speeches in the Symposium. Mario Citrioni focuses on the echo of Aristophanes' remarks in Niceros's introduction to his story of witches in "Due note marginali a Petronio," Maia 27 (1975): 301-305. Sullivan notes the parallel between the Symposium and the Satyricon in The "Satyricon" of Petronius, p. 59. John Patrick Lynch observes that the language and style of each speaker in this series of speeches becomes increasingly more elaborate, and he draws the parallel to the speeches in the Symposium, with Echion's culminating speech being analogous to Socrates'. See "The Language and Character of Echion the Ragpicker, Satyricon 45-46," Helios 9 (1982): 41. 31. W. R. Johnson characterizes a countercultural sensibility that stresses the futile arrogance of human attempts at order and that ironically uses classical forms "to mock, sometimes poignantly, sometimes bitterly, the failure of classicism and its artificial revivals." See "The Counter-classical Sensibility and Its Critics," California Studies in Classical Antiquity 3 (1970): 143. Much of what Johnson observes in the Metamorphoses, one of his primary examples of a counterclassical poem, also applies to the Satyricon: Ovid's parodic overturning of the topos of the golden age (143), for example, and his ironic association of the emperor Augustus with a pompous and inconsistent Jupiter (147). In the Metamorphoses, Johnson writes, "skepticism about the received ideas of society and culture, about the uses of power, and about the possibility of order and lucidity in human existence, which the classical tradition fosters, is united with a deep awareness of and deep compassion for man in his failure" (147). Lynch also main-

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tains that Petronius contests classical canons of style and form through his heterogeneous mixing of different stylistic levels ("Echion the Ragpicker," pp. 41-42). Eugene Cizek, on the other hand, defining the classical as a coincidence of form and content, argues that Petronius's styles remain classical because they suit his heterogeneous content. See L'Age de Néron et ses controverses idéologiques, pp. 406-408. 32. Erich Auerbach discusses the separation of high, middle, and low styles in antiquity and conceives of the expression of tragedy through the middle style as a distinctive accomplishment of Christian discourse ("Fortunata," in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, pp. 40-47.) Bakhtin analyzes the ancient doctrine of stylistic purity ("From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 65-68). Both Auerbach and Bakhtin conclude that the Satyricon takes the mixing of styles further than any other ancient work. 33. Bakhtin analyzes the processes of the lower body as the defining characteristic of grotesque as opposed to classical art in Rabelais and His World, esp. chaps. 2, 5, and 6. Stallybrass and White develop this distinction between grotesque and classical representations of the body and its processes in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. 34. In "The Cena in Roman Satire," Classical Philology 18 (1923): 126143, L. R. Shero points out that Roman satire translates the symposium from the philosophical dialogue, but lowers its concerns to matters of everyday life and includes explicit recognition of bodily functions. 35. Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, p. 201. 36. On the custom of giving apophoreta and on the meanings of the puns in Trimalchio's apophoreta, see H. D. Rankin, "Saturnalian Wordplay and Apophoreta in Satyricon 56," Classica et mediaevalia 23 (1962): 134-142; K. F. C. Rose and J. P. Sullivan, "Trimalchio's Zodiac Dish," Classical Quarterly 18 (1968): 180-184; and B. L. Ullman, "Apophoreta in Petronius and Martial," Classical Philology 36 (1941): 346-355. 37. Augustus enjoyed giving punning apophoreta, which were sometimes valuable, sometimes worthless (Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, pp. 92-93). 38. A. D. Leeman also asserts that appearance and truth are inextricably mixed in the Satyricon in "Morte e scambio nel romanzo picaresco di Petronio," Giornale italiano di filologia, 20 (1967): 147-157. Kaye Warren investigates the various kinds of illusions and the different purposes they serve for Encolpius, Eumolpus, and Trimalchio in "Illusion and Reality in the Satyricon" (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1976). 39. G. Rosati, "Trimalchio in schena," Maia 35 (1983): 217-218, argues that theatricality at Roman dinners often aimed specifically at producing an effect of dizzying stupefaction. 40. When the Senate refused to convict Antistius Sosianus on the charge of slandering the princeps, Nero wrote the Senate in a pique, declaring that the accused deserved to be convicted, although he would have pardoned him. See Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, 14.48, trans. Michael Grant, p. 335. Although Nero seems to have learned the meaning of clemency very imperfectly, it provided a key theme in Nero's principate; Seneca sounded the theme in Nero's accession speech as well as in his own work De Clementia. See also Miriam Griffin, Nero: The End of a Dynasty, pp. 48-49, 64-66.

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41. Encolpius had been fooled and frightened as he entered Trimalchio's house by a guard dog painted on the wall; when he and his friends try to escape the feast, a real guard dog appears at the same spot, and Encolpius falls backward into a fishpond. The porter sends the unwilling guests back to dinner, with the riddling statement that they must leave by another door than that by which they entered. Just so, Aeneas had to enter and leave the underworld by different ways (Aen. VI, 125, 898). In another interpretation of the porter's riddle, we all enter life through one passageway, but we leave by many different routes. Trimalchio's home could thus represent both the house of Hades and the abode of life. 42. We know about Pacuvius's mock funerals from Seneca's description of them (Ep. 12.8). Sullivan argues that Petronius uses Seneca's depiction of Pacuvius, Calvisius Sabinus (Ep. 27.5-8), and Maecenas (Ep. 114.6) as models for his depiction of Trimalchio (The "Satyricon" of Petronius, pp. 129-131). Martin Smith, in his edition of the Cena Trimalchionis, sets out arguments for a much more skeptical view of Petronius's use of Seneca in the formation of Trimalchio (pp. 165, 211, 217-19). Smith draws parallels between actions of Trimalchio and Agamemnon and those of certain Theophrastian characters (pp. 141, 179-180). 43. Petronius provides one of the handful of instances of the word pharmacus in Latin in Sat. 107.15. 44. Such proceedings make Eumolpus, rather than Encolpius, the scapegoat. The translations attributed to Addison and Wilde conclude with the Crotonians throwing Eumolpus over a cliff to punish him for having deceived them with his role as a captator for so long. Both these versions transpose the site from Marseilles to Croton to fit the last of the surviving episodes, and alter the situation so that it is no longer a case of scapegoating a victim but rather of punishing a man for acts of which he is guilty. See The WorksofPetronius Arbiter, trans. Joseph Addison; The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, trans, attributed to Oscar Wilde. Walter Burkert makes it clear that ritual scapegoating often led only to expulsion, as in Servius's brief account, and usually did not involve killing the victim. See Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing, pp. 35-48. Burkert mentions one ritual whose combination of scapegoating and phallicism has affinities with what appears to have happened to Encolpius: a temporary "king," after a ritual meal, was paraded through a village accompanied by a large wooden phallus; in the evening, the "king" was pushed out into a body of water (p. 71). However, Burkert locates this ritual in Thessaly, not Marseilles. 45. Almost all reconstructions of Encolpius's wanderings fix Marseilles as his starting point. See, for example, Sullivan, The "Satyricon" of Petronius, pp. 40-42; and André Daviault, "La destination d'Encolpe et la structure du Satiricon: conjectures," Cahiers des Etudes Anciennes 15 (1983): 30. In an attempt to restore Encolpius's virility, which also recapitulates an important element of the scapegoating ritual, Oenothea strikes Encolpius's penis with green nettles (138.1-2); it remains characteristically limp. 46. Perry argues that Petronius's choice of form was determined by a desire to avoid the attention and jealousy of Nero (The Ancient Romances, pp. 204-206). 47. Bakhtin considers the importance of the uncomprehending fool for the narrative exposure of official lies (in "Discourse in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination, p. 390). Smith stresses the extent to which Encolpius is satirized for his slowness during the Cena (Cena Trimalchionis, pp. 59, 79, 96, 133, 181, and 193).

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48. On Petronius as "Arbiter of Taste," see Tacitus, Annals, 16.18, p. 390. 49. It may well be that Petronius wrote the Cena within a year after the great fire of Rome in July 64, when Nero may have recited apposite poetic passages of his own composition—"such as his own verses on the capture of Troy, which may have been the conclusion of his Troica" See Sullivan, Literature and Politics in the Age of Nero, p. 159. For the date and description of the fire of Rome, see Tacitus, Annals, 15.38-40, pp. 362-364. Nero apparently turned the actual fire into a stage set and theatrically but unreflectively linked burning Rome and falling Troy; Trimalchio's staged funeral sounds a fire alarm that seems unwarranted because his house is not actually on fire. But Petronius implies, according to this interpretation, that Nero's Rome is still in the midst of a slow burn: that the undertaker's trumpet blows, as the ominous cock had crowed, for everyone at Trimalchio's feast and for Roman society. It is impossible to determine whether Petronius wrote the end of the Cena after the great fire or whether in this instance, as in Trimalchio's staged death scene, his art anticipated events in his life and in the history of Rome. Since the Civil War recited by Eumolpus in chaps. 119-124 parallels Books I-111 of Lucan's Civil War, and Petronius seems to be aware also of the later parts of Lucan's unfinished epic, chaps. 83-141 of the Satyricon containing Eumolpus would probably have been composed "no long time before or after the death of Lucan on 30 April, A.D. 65" (Sullivan, The "Satyricon" of Petronius, p. 32). If this dating is accepted, then the preceding Book 15 of the Satyricon, the greater part of which is devoted to Trimalchio's feast, would have been written probably in early 65 or late 64. Walsh, The Roman Novel, p. 130, and Barry Baldwin, "Petronius and the Fire of Rome," Maia 28 (1976): 35-36, have noticed the possible allusion to the Roman fire of 64 in the report of a fire on Trimalchio's estates at Sat 53, but they do not observe the relevance of the great fire to the end of the feast in Sat. 78. 50. Tacitus, Annals, 16.18, p. 390. 51. On Petronius's parody of Stoic conventions of suicide in his own, see Rankin, Petronius the Artist, pp. 2, 39, 45-46.

2. Satiric Materialism in A Tale of a Tub 1. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Boohs, and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and David Nichol Smith, p. Ivii. Subsequent citations from this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 2. "The Word Body, in the most generall acceptation, signifieth that which filleth, or occupyeth, some certain room, or imagined place; and dependeth not on the imagination, but is a reall part of that we call the Universe. For the Universe, being the Aggregate of all Bodies, there is no reall part thereof that is not also Body." See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson, III, 34, p. 428. See also pp. 429-434. Subsequent citations from this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 3. "Remarks upon a book intitled The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted, etc." (1708), The Prose Works ofJonathan Swift, vol. II, Bickerstaf Papers and Pamphlets on the Church, ed. Herbert Davis, p. 74. Hobbes casts his argument in the following terms: "Sovereign power ought in all commonwealths to be absolute. . . . [W]hether placed in One Man, as in Monarchy, or in one Assembly of men, as in Popular, and

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Aristocraticall Common-wealths, [it] is as great, as possibly men can be imagined to make it" (Leviathan, 11, 20, p. 260). 4. For example, Swift asserts that the "supreme legislature . . . whenever it pleases, may abolish Christianity, and set up the Jewish, Mahometan, and heathen religion" ("Remarks upon a book . . . ," Prose Works, vol. II, p. 74). 5. "On the Testimony of Conscience," Prose Works, vol. IX, Irish Tracts and Sermons, p. 150. For Hobbes, "a man's Conscience, and his Judgment is the same thing, and as the Judgment, so also the Conscience may be erroneous" (Lev., II, 29, p. 366). 6. David French refers to or cites most of the passages from Hobbes and Swift on conscience and conformity that I discuss in this paragraph and the following. See "Swift and Hobbes: A Neglected Parallel," Boston University Studies in English 3 (1957): 243-255. French infers that Hobbes exerted a significant influence on Swift's thinking, but that Swift remained hostile to Hobbes's most distinctive positions on politics and religion. I maintain that the agreement between Swift's and Hobbes's views of conscience and conformity when combined with the materialism and nominalism they both practice point to a nearly complete convergence in their thinking. Swift's apparent parodies of Hobbes divert attention from that convergence. French recommends that the parallels between Swift's thought and Hobbes's be taken into account in succeeding evaluations of Swift. By suggesting that Swift's frequent echoes of Leviathan in A Tale of a Tub constitute evidence of general agreement between Swift and Hobbes, I offer such a reevaluation. 7. "Thoughts on Religion," Prose Works, vol. IX, p. 261. 8. "A Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners," Prose Works, vol. II, pp. 41-63. Hobbes sanctions hypocritical avowals of religious beliefs by citing Elisha's approval of Naaman in 2 Kings 5:17 (Lev., III, 42, p. 528; III, 43, p. 625). 9. In his analysis of Hobbes's attitude toward toleration, Alan Ryan finds that "he was extremely anxious to secure uniformity of profession in matters of religion"; Ryan argues that Hobbes was somewhat more liberal than the common view of his position suggests. See "Hobbes, Toleration, and the Inner Life," in The Nature of Political Theory, ed. David Miller and Larry Siedentop, pp. 197-218. 10. A comparable split between external phenomena and internal perceptions informs Hobbes's epistemology as well as his political thinking. Against prevailing theories of his time, Hobbes maintained that color was not an attribute inherent in objects, but instead a mental "phantasm" or idea. He reasoned that sometimes we see images where there is no object (in a mirror, for example). Hobbes traced a material connection between the "object of sense" and the "internal organ," and he denied that the individual perception was an attribute of the object. See De Corpore, in Metaphysical Writings, pp. 115-129. Richard Tuck writes that Hobbes "treated moral terms in exactly the same way as he had treated colour terms: though common language and common sense might lead us to think that something is really and objectively good, in the same way as we might think something is really and objectively red, in fact such ideas are illusions or fantasies, features of the inside of our heads only" (Hobbes, p. 53). 11. See, for example, Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Energy and Order from Dryden to Blake, pp. 180-183; and John Traugott, "A Tale of a Tub," in Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Leopold Damrosch, p. 41.

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12. Hobbes translates literally the Latin of the scholastics into English in order to demonstrate the absurdity of arguing with nonsensical terms: "What is the meaning of these words. The first cause does not necessarily inflow any thing into the second, by force of the Essentiall subordination of the second causes?" (Lev., I, 8, p. 146). 13. Everett Zimmerman also observes the parodic effect of Hobbes's materialistic, literalizing biblical interpretations in Swift's Narrative Satires: Author and Authority, p. 46. 14. Quintilian defines allegory as extended metaphor in Institutes of Oratory, trans. H. E. Butler, Bk. VIII, sec. vi, 44-49. 15. Leviathan, III, 41, pp. 518-520. See J. G. A. Pocock, "Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes," in Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, p. 173. Pocock argues that Hobbes used materialist and nominalist arguments against both the Catholics and the enthusiastic Protestants, with the result that he destroyed the concept of spirit altogether (p. 193). A Tale of a Tub uses the same strategy, satirizing both Peter (Catholics) and Jack (enthusiastic Protestants), and also implies that spirit does not exist. For an account of the development and significance of typology, the predominant variety of allegorical interpretation allowed by Protestantism, see Erich Auerbach, "Figura," in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, pp. 11-76; Earl Miner, ed., Literary Uses of Typology; and Paul Korshin, Typologies in England, 1650-1820, esp. chap. 5, "The Development of Abstracted Typology," pp. 101-132. 16. Borges discusses this shift from metaphor to irony as part of the movement from medieval to modern ("From Allegories to Novels," in Other Inquisitions, p. 157). 17. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings, ed. Ricardo Quintana, II, 6, p. 100. 18. "Thoughts on Religion," Prose Works, vol. IX, p. 262. Swift reflected repeatedly on the necessity and permissibility of concealing religious doubts: "The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome. . . . Every man, as a member of the commonwealth, ought to be content with the possession of his own opinion in private, without perplexing his neighbour or disturbing the public" (vol. IX, p. 261). Swift clearly feels that long-standing and firm doubts about religious doctrines in private do not constitute an obstacle to a churchman's performance of his public duties. Significantly, he devotes more of his thoughts on religion to religious doubt than to any other subject. 19. Leviathan, Introduction, p. 81. Philip Harth first noted the similarities between the description of tailor-worship in the Tale and the introduction to Leviathan in Swift and Anglican Rationalism, pp. 83-85. He juxtaposes the two passages, but does not discuss how the former constitutes a parodic attack on the latter. 20. Joseph Bentley analyzes the lowering effect of satiric juxtapositions. See "Satiric Gravitation," in Die Englische Satire, ed. Wolfgang Weiss, pp. 3 3 - 5 1 . 21. Accurate deductions concerning others cannot be made merely by observing their behavior, because their thoughts and desires remain inaccessible. But, according to Hobbes, one can compare one's own passions with those of others to arrive at a degree of certainty in interpretation, "for this kind of doctrine admitteth no other demonstration" (Lev., Introduction, p. 83).

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22. 1 distinguish the author of A Tale of a Tub from Swift, although criticism on Swift remains divided about the status, the number, and even the existence of a persona. Ronald Paulson argues for a well-defined Grub Street persona of Gnostic predilections, whom he calls the "Hack," in Theme and Structure in Swift's "Tale of a Tub" Ricardo Quintana identifies six personae in "Situational Satire: A Commentary on the Method of Swift," University of Toronto Quarterly 17 (1948): 130-136. Gardner Stout argues against the need to see any persona at all in "Speaker and Satiric Vision in Swift's A Tale of a Tub" Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969): 175-200. Irvin Ehrenpreis argues more generally against overuse of the concept in "Personae," in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Carroll Camden, pp. 28-38. John Clark, in Eorm and Frenzy in "A Tale of a Tub" identifies a single anonymous persona whose modernity he considers to be distinctive. 1findthis position persuasive. The author of the Tale clearly identifies himself as a voice if not a character distinct from Swift: he writes in a garret under a regimen of hunger and light-headedness; he has written for dozens of factions and on both sides of all questions, and he professes himself to be "a most devoted Servant of all Modern Forms" (p. 45). Difficulties in defining this authorial voice arise from its anonymity, as well as from Swift's frequent use of what William Empson calls "double irony"; at such moments, instead of serving through Swift's parody as the object of satire of modern writers, the authorial voice, seemingly unwittingly, delivers a satiric jab itself (Some Versions of Pastoral, p. 60). Compounding these obstacles to coherent characterization, the author's language reveals illogicalities and catachreses symptomatic of schizophrenia. The fragmented nature of the characterization reveals, finally, a generic emphasis on discontinuities in behavior, and externality in general. 23. F. P. Lock, Swift's Tory Politics, pp. 116, 136, 169. 24. That the recoinage debate of the mid-1690s turned on the question of intrinsic versus extrinsic value illustrates the wide applicability of the terms with which Swift was working in A Tale of a Tub. Locke asserted the intrinsic value of silver against his opponents' unanswerable evidence that functional value had guaranteed the acceptance of clipped coins for decades before the crisis of the 1690s. Locke won the pamphlet war; the coinage was reminted at the same value as before, and despite the severe deflation, the intrinsic value of gold and silver remained a tenet of liberalism for two centuries. Locke's position on the absolute value of the metal in money contradicted his anti-absolutist position that political authority derives from the consent of the governed. However, he managed by means of his persuasiveness on the coinage to appropriate from the old monarchical system and use as an anchor of his liberalism a standard of absolute, unalterable, and natural metallic value. As Joyce Appleby points out, Locke's reasoning was ideological, not supported by evidence or logical argument. See Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 212-241; and "Locke, Liberalism, and the Natural Law of Money," Past and Present 71 (1976): 43-69. The question of intrinsic versus extrinsic value, which was in the air because of questions of monetary policy, may have helped shape Swift's reflections on the question of the values of exteriors and interiors in language and philosophy throughout the Tale, which was written in the later part of a decade that saw intense agitation over economic issues, as well as the emergence of several distinctively modern institutions, such as the national bank and the national debt.

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25. The rhetoric of the Catholics claims access to spiritual essences, but their doctrines point for confirmation to material evidence such as the transformation of bread into flesh or the miraculous properties of saints' bones. In their rhetoric, the Independents understand only the most literal and explicit meanings in the sacred text, yet to such materiality they join the doctrine of the spiritual inner light of each individual. 26. James L. Calderwood, "Structural Parody in Swift's 'Fragment,'" Modern Language Quarterly 23 (1962): 243-253, analyzes the "Mechanical Operation of the Spirit" as satire of religious enthusiasts through parody of a letter-writing Hobbesian virtuoso. 27. The historical allegory begins in the even-numbered sections and the digressions in the odd-numbered, but in the later sections this numbering becomes inverted. Miriam Starkman analyzes the relation between the sections of the allegory and the digression following each in Swift's Satire on Learning in "A Tale of a Tub." 28. Gay Clifford, Transformations of Allegory, pp. 49, 110-111, considers Swift a "crucial figure" in the history of allegory's transformation into more ironic forms in modern literature. I agree with Clifford's argument that, when he writes as a satirist, Swift does not write allegorically, because his satires do not imply a shared system of values. 29. Lock, Swift's Tory Politics, p. 50. 30. Jay Arnold Levine draws attention to the Tale's pattern of suppressed middle terms in "The Design of A Tale of a Tub," ELH 33 (1966): 198-227. He does not go on to discuss the convergence of the remaining two terms throughout the narrative. 31. Throughout the Tale's exploration of the values of interiors and exteriors, Swift makes implicit reference to the ancient figure of the Silenus, which is ugly on the outside but contains within a precious figure of a god. In the Symposium, Alcibiades compares Socrates to a Silenus, because his ugly and ridiculous exterior holds within such virtues as temperance, sobriety, and. disdain for riches and pleasure (Symposium, 215a-217a). In his adage on the Sileni Alcibiadis, Erasmus compares Christ's parables to a Silenus because from their surface appearance, one would think they came from "a simple ignorant man. And yet, if you crack the nut, you find inside that profound wisdom, truly divine." See Erasmus on His Times: A Shortened Version of the Adages of Erasmus, trans. Margaret Phillips, p. 82. In addition, Erasmus attacks contemporary churchmen as inverted Sileni: their delight in ornamentation and pomp conceals a corrupt interior under a splendid exterior. Swift's satire parallels Erasmus's criticism of external ornament, especially clothing. For Erasmus, contemporary practices reverse the proper relation between exteriors and interiors, both in speech and action: "the mask is preferred to the truth, . . . the fleeting to the substantial, the momentary to the eternal. The reversing of values brings about a reversed use of words. What is sublime they call humble; what is bitter they call sweet; the precious is called vile, and life, death" (pp. 84-85). Swift incorporates these reversals in the satiric structure and language of his Tale. However, whereas Erasmus's adage accepts a clear distinction between exterior and interior and advocates greater attention to the latter, Swift's satire undermines the fixity of the distinction and, in its first half, implies that all claims to inner spirituality are empty.

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32. Maurice Quinlan discusses Swift's literalizing as a satiric strategy throughout his works in "Swift's Use of Literalization as a Rhetorical Device," PMLA 82 (1967): 516-521. 33. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. Donald Frame, p. 856. 34. Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, ed. Joan Riviere, vol. IV, p. 189. 35. Edwin Honig, "Notes on Satire in Swift and Jonson," New Mexico Quarterly Review 18 (1948): 155-163. 36. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, p. 136. 37. Commentaries on the "Digression on Madness" are numerous. Clark, Form and Frenzy, pp. 3-37 and 181-231, discusses section 9 as an instance of the "Icarian" movement that also informs other sections of the Tale. However, section 9 reverses the direction of this movement, satirizing not those who rise in order to fall, but those who descend into materiality and contentedly stay there. In a detailed analysis of the central paragraphs of the "Digression on Madness," Ricardo Quintana concludes that Swift steps forward in this passage to pronounce his verdict in favor of reason and against madness. See "Two Paragraphs in A Tale of a Tub," Modern Philology (1975): 15-32. Quintana's conclusion is shared in different ways by Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism, pp. 123-153; Paulson, Theme and Structure, pp. 177-187; Edward Rosenheim, Swift and the Satirist's Art, pp. 189-206; and Starkman, Swift's Satire on Learning, pp. 24-44. Such a reading, however, views reason and madness as bipolar opposites, and identifies Swift's position with one pole of the various oppositions that have accumulated throughout the Tale—with reason and against madness. But both of the opposing sides in the Tale can claim "Reason" as theirs, and Swift satirizes both materialists and mystics, Hobbesians and Cartesians, literalists and allegorists, advocates of extrinsic and of intrinsic value. Zimmerman thus distinguishes between the reasonableness of Swift's position in the Tale and the rationalism that it satirizes: "Swift repudiates the separation of body and spirit, however incomprehensible their connection is. Matter and spirit are necessary counterbalances to each other. They limit the sphere of the human understanding, but their uneasy relationship also increases human awareness of the limitation" (Swift's Narrative Satires, p. 109). Zimmerman maintains that Swift satirizes both Hobbes and Descartes as rationalists who unjustifiably separate spirit from body. I would concur that Swift satirizes Descartes, whose selfcontained rationalism exemplifies the mad systemizers of section 9, but not Hobbes. Unlike Descartes, who divides bodily exterior from spiritual interior, Hobbes and Swift regard both exterior and interior as material. I therefore find Swift to be satirizing Descartes' rationalism but agreeing with Hobbes's materialism in the "Digression on Madness" as throughout the Tale. 38. Trimalchio propounds a theory of vapors that anticipates and clarifies the Tale's. He advises his guests not to be shy about using the conveniences he offers: "Believe me, the vapors (anathymiasis) go to your brain and upset your whole body. I know many people who have died this way, from not being honest with themselves" (Satyricon 47.6). Trimalchio's assertion that the vapors most strongly affect those who do not recognize their source receives further elaboration in the "Digression on Madness," where ascending vapors lead Louis XIV to make war on his neighbors, while their descent to the fixed form of a hemorrhoid brings peace to his part of the world (165-166).

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39. Harold D. Kelling, "Reason and Madness: A Tale of a Tub" PMLA 69 (1954), 198-222, diagnoses the narrative voice as schizophrenic, proposing that on the one side it reveals an inveterate projector of abstractions who "finds everything good," and on the other one who "uses particulars which reveal rottenness everywhere," and is thus a vitriolic but unacknowledged satirist. I divide the narrator's traits into opposing groups somewhat differently. Frederik Smith provides clinical examples as he argues that the narrator's language closely resembles the language of schizophrenics. See Language and Reality in Swift's "A Tale of a Tub" pp. 104 ff. 40. Plato, Symposium, 206a. This definition of love could also be translated as the desire "to have the good for one's own forever." Helen Bacon pointed out to me the close echo of the Symposium in this passage. 41. A. C. Elias, Jr., Swift at Moor Park: Problems in Biography and Criticism, pp. 157-183, analyzes extensively the parodies of Temple's writings in the "Digression on Madness." Temple praises repose of mind independent of any moral or rational standards in Upon the Gardens of Epicurus. Elias summarizes Swift's parodic satire of Temple through his definition of happiness as delusion: "Temple's argument claims wisdom in happiness achieved through Epicurean tranquillity—the peace of a mind answerable only to itself—and opposes such tranquillity to the dismal life of rational and moral control. Swift maintains the same basic philosophy, only in clear and heightened terms which advance the argument one step further and which carry it into the realm of satire. In doing so he repeats each basic element in Temple's argument" (p. 163). 42. In The Crying of Lot 49, pp. 95-96, Pynchon extends Swift's and Hobbes's satire of spiritual interiority by associating interiors with security and falseness, and exteriors with being lost but seeing clearly. However, Pynchon links metaphorical activity with being in a peripheral position, outside a secure center; his definition of metaphor as "a thrust at truth and a lie" also implies that interiors may contain truths. See chapter 5 below. 43. Elias, Swift at Moor Park, pp. 165, 170. 44. The epigraph reads: "I love to pluck new flowers, and to seek an illustrious chaplet for my head from fields whence before this the Muses have crowned the brows of none." See Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Smith, I, 928-930, p. 77. 45. For analyses of the relations between Erasmus's Folly and Swift's narrator, see Paulson, Theme and Structure, pp. 79-82, 249-253; Traugott, "A Tale of a Tub," pp. 22-23; and Eugene Hammond, "In Praise of Wisdom and the Will of God: Erasmus' Praise of Folly and Swift's Tale of a Tub," Studies in Philology 80 (1983): 2 5 3 276. Hammond also notes that Swift's narrator resembles both Erasmus's Folly and Erixymachus in the Symposium in praising a subject that he claims has not yet received its due—modern writing. 46. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 34. Foucault's later summation also speaks to Swift's concerns in the "Digression on Madness": "The madman, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is not so much the victim of an illusion, of a hallucination of his senses, or of a movement of his mind. He is not abused; he deceives himself" (p. 104). 47. Zimmerman associates this fragmentary character of the author with Hobbes's psychology (Swift's Narrative Satires, pp. 57-60). Empson says of the "Me-

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chanical Operation of the Spirit" and section 8 of the Tale: "Everything spiritual has a gross and revolting parody very similar to it. . . . Only unremitting judgment can distinguish between them" (Some Versions of Pastoral, p. 60). 1 share Empson's emphasis on the primacy of parody in the Tale, but I see its effect extending further: the Tale does not acknowledge the existence of spirit; it implies that the physical and nonphysical occupy a single level rather than standing in a hierarchical relation that subordinates the physical. 48. Honig uses this word to describe Swift's satire ("Satire in Swift and Jonson," p. 161). 49. Alan Fisher, "An End to the Renaissance: Erasmus, Hobbes, and A Tale of a Tub," Huntington Library Quarterly 38 (1974): 1-20, discusses Swift's attitude as an uneasy acknowledgment that he lived within a Hobbesian cultural paradigm. Hammond views the Tale as Swift's "zany yet rueful joke" at his plight. I see Swift's agreements with Hobbes as evidence of a more strained and more nearly tragic division within himself.

3. Satire, Epic, and History in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 1. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, vol. IV, pp. 227-228. Subsequent citations from this edition appear parenthetically in the text and refer to volume and page numbers. 2. Footnotes offer an inviting site for the satire and irony of both Gibbon and Swift. Their location at the bottom of the page makes it appropriate there to emphasize the lower parts of the body and their functions, as well as the underside of high cultural authorities. In "The Satiric Footnotes of Swift and Gibbon," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32 (1991), forthcoming, I analyze the contesting of established hierarchies of value by satiric footnotes, as well as the implication such footnotes often carry of a self-parodic undermining of the satiric narrative itself. 3. In a note, Gibbon observes the comical consequences of the exceptional importance of sauces to this emperor: "68The invention of a new sauce was liberally rewarded: but if it was not relished, the inventor was confined to eat of nothing else, till he had discovered another more agreeable to the Imperial palate. Hist. August, p. 111" (I, 159). 4. Gibbon writes of the passage among early Christians from superstition to fanaticism: "The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul; and it is well known that, while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes" (II, 35). 5. J. G. A. Pocock, "Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon's History of Religion," Eighteenth-Century Life 8 (1982): 83-94, analyzes the complementarity of these terms in the work of eighteenth-century thinkers, as does J. W. Burrow, Gibbon, pp. 52-56. Important eighteenth-century analyses of the relation between these phenomena include Hume's essay "Superstition and Enthusiasm," in Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, ed. John W. Lenz, pp. 146-150, and the sermons of Swift and Sterne on enthusiasm.

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6. W. B. Camochan compares Gibbon as a satirist with some earlier eighteenth-century satirists and concludes that the third book of Pope's Dunciad provides the closest analogue among "Augustan" satires to Gibbon's "Antonine" satire. See Gibbon's Solitude: The Inward World of the Historian, pp. 83-85. 7. Superstitious belief in the miraculous efficacy of relics or of words figures in late paganism as well as in early Christianity: "The Platonists believed in the mysterious virtue of words; and Julian's dislike for the name of Christ might proceed from superstition as well as from contempt" (II, 486). 8. In the same paragraph, Gibbon contrasts the ambition of the Christians with the dubious record of the pagans: "it was with the utmost difficulty that ancient Rome could support the institution of six vestals." 9. Gibbon repeatedly associates Origen with mutilation. In a note two pages after recounting Origen's self-mutilation, Gibbon refers to the fragmentary survival of the text of the pagan philosopher, Celsus, through Origen's attack on it: "104 As well as we can judge from the mutilated representation of Origen (1. viii, p. 423), his adversary, Celsus, had urged his objection with great force and candour" (II, 41). Origen mutilates Celsus's text as well as severing the generative part from his own body; such unnatural or violent severings distinguish one of the earliest Christian apologists. 10. Gibbon's conception of truth as a beautiful naked woman whose perfect form has been tortured and distorted strikingly parallels Milton's rhetorical portrayal of truth in Areopagitica: "Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on." But after Christ's death came a "wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Tryphon, with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds." Not until the second coming shall Christ "bring together every joint and member, and shall mold them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection." See John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes, pp. 741-742. 11. Lionel Gossman maintains that as a thinker Gibbon perceives and depicts the absent center of authority in political, religious, and domestic affairs throughout the Decline and Fall, yet out of respect for the stabilizing effect of tradition, he veils or envelops this central lack in irony and ambiguity (The Empire Unpossess'd: An Essay on Gibbon's "Decline and Fall"). 12. Gibbon occasionally presents himself on the model of this Gordian— for example, when he recounts in his Autobiographies how, after finishing the Decline and Fall, he returned to his large library: "My Seraglio was ample, my choice was free, my appetite was keen." See Edward Gibbon, The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Murray, p. 340. Gibbon's rhetorical transformation of himself from a scholar into an oriental potentate paradoxically underscores how much he remains a man of letters resembling a monk more than a man of affairs or a man of many mistresses. But the self-awareness indicated by his self-deprecating irony distinguishes him from the onesided ascetic as well as from the one-sided rake or one-sided man of affairs. 13. In characterizing Gibbon's work and Enlightenment historiography generally, R. G. Collingwood writes: "Perhaps the best short way of describing the historiography of the Enlightenment is to say that it took over the conception of historical research which had been devised by the Church historians of the late seventeenth cen-

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tury, and turned it against its authors, using it in a deliberately anti-clerical spirit instead of a deliberately clerical one" (The Idea of History, p. 81). 14. The virtual equivalence of history and epic figures also in Gibbon's remarks on Hurd's edition of Horace's Ars Poetica. See Edward Gibbon, The English Essays of Edward Gibbon, ed. Patricia Craddock, pp. 34-35. 15. On the importance of this idea in Gibbon's history, see Leo Braudy, "Edward Gibbon and The Privilege of Fiction,'" Prose Studies 3 (1980): 138-151. 16. Edward Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works, ed. John, Lord Sheffield, vol. IV, p. 449. 17. E. M. W. Tillyard cites the discussions in the Essai and in the observations on Hurd and Horace as evidence of Gibbon's "predilection for the epic," of his habitual association of epic and history, and of the epic qualities of the Decline and Eall (The English Epic and Its Background, pp. 511-513). Tillyard finds in the Decline and Eall most of the characteristics he considers distinctive of epic: a high seriousness, the author's willful control over his material, and the encyclopedic expression of the beliefs and understandings of a culture. 18. David Jordan mentions the concurring opinions of Machiavelli and Bacon, and aptly cites the long note to the chapter on the gypsies in Tom Jones in which Fielding mentions the time from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius as the "only Golden Age that ever had any real existence" (Edward Gibbon and His Roman Empire, p. 216). In a letter congratulating Gibbon on his accomplishment in the first volume, which ends with the controversial chapters XV and XVI, Horace Walpole expressed the same judgment, referring to "that, alas! wonderful period, in which the world saw five good monarchs succeed each other. I have often thought of treating that Elysian aera. Happily it has fallen into better hands!" (Miscellaneous Works, vol. II, pp. 155-156). Gibbon seems deliberately not to date this period from the birth of Christ, but reckons instead according to the emperors' reigns. He avoids using dates in anno domini throughout the Decline and Eall. In a note at the end of chapter XL, he praises the system of reckoning years forward from the supposed creation of the world 7,296 years earlier: "I regret this chronology, so far preferable to our double and perplexed method of counting backwards and forwards the years before and after the Christian aera" (IV, 287). 19. Hegel similarly observes that "history is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it." See G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman, p. 33. 20. On the importance and definition of republican civic virtue in the Decline and Fall, see J. G. A. Pocock, "Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian," in Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Eall of the Roman Empire, ed. G. W. Bowersock, John Clive, and Stephen Braubard, pp. 103-120. 21. On Gibbon's early admiration for Tacitus, see the Essai, chap. 48, Miscellaneous Works, vol. IV, pp. 66-67. 22. In a handwritten note in the margin of the first pages of the first volume, Gibbon asks, "Should I not have given the history of that fortunate period which was interposed between two iron ages? Should I not have deduced the decline of the Empire from the Civil Wars that ensued after the Fall of Nero, or even from the tyranny

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which succeeded the reign of Augustus? Alas! I should: but of what avail is this tardy knowledge? Where error is irreparable, repentance is useless." See Patricia B. Craddock, "Gibbon's Revision of the Decline and Fall" Studies in Bibliography 21 (1968): 200. 23. Burrow notes the parallel also between the plot of the Decline and Fall and that of the Aeneid, which is "the story of the fall of a city, Troy, and its rebirth as Rome" (Gibbon, p. 84). 24. In Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century, Dustin Griffin examines Milton's influence on various genres in the eighteenth century, as well as the relation between Milton and Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Johnson, and Cowper. In "Gibbon's Paradise Lost," Lewis P. Curtis refers only once to Milton's epic; he argues that Gibbon hoped in the Decline and Fall to "bequeath a book of wisdom for the guidance of statesmen and philosophers." See The Age ofJohnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker,ed.F. W. Hilles, pp. 73-90. Tillyard's discussion appears as the last chapter in The English Epic; he does not link Gibbon with Milton. 25. Miscellaneous Works, vol. IV, p. 48. 26. Ibid., p. 26. In the Essai, Gibbon writes, "Le beau génie de Milton lutte contre le système de sa réligion, et ne paroît jamais si grande que lorsqu'il est un peu affranchi." 27. Gibbon's consideration of possible subjects for a history bears a remarkable resemblance to Milton's projection of possible subjects for an epic. When he was twenty-four and serving with the militia in 1761, Gibbon began working on Charles VIII and Italy. After four months and a short introductory essay, he dropped the subject as being "too remote from us, and rather an introduction to great events than great and important in itself" (Autobiographies, p. 194). He next considered a variety of English biographical subjects, some in pairs modeled on Plutarch, such as the life of Henry V and the emperor Titus. After he settled on Sir Walter Raleigh, he studied the man and the age for almost a year before he abandoned the project, concluding that it had already been treated adequately if drily, and that it was too fraught with material for partisan quarrels. The last two topics he considered in his journal were the liberty of the Swiss and Florence under the Medici—"the one a poor, warlike, virtuous Republic which emerges into glory and freedom; the other a Commonwealth, soft, opulent, and corrupt, which, by just degrees, is precipitated from the abuse to the loss of her liberty" (ibid., p. 197). These last two subjects demonstrate Gibbon's strong interest in the rise and fall of states and their public morality. The Decline and Fall allows him a large scope in which to explore these concerns. After years of preparation for the vocation of poet-prophet, Milton explored two dozen possible topics for an epic drawn from British history, including Arthur, Alfred, and Richard I, ideas to which he alludes in Manso, 11. 78-84, and Epitaphium Damonis, 11. 161-171 (Complete Poems and Major Prose, pp. 130, 137). With the aim of equaling or surpassing "what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old did for their country, 1 in my proportion, with this over and above of being a Christian, might do for mine," he announced a number of times in his prose writings of the 1640s his intention to write a British epic that would be "doctrinal and exemplary to a nation" (Reason of Church Government, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, pp. 668-669). His assured pronouncement, "1 might perhaps

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leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die" (ibid., p. 668), rings with the same confidence as Gibbon's "I know, by experience, that from my early youth 1 aspired to the character of an historian" (Autobiographies, p. 193). Both men considered numerous topics for their epic possibilities; both lists include Arthur and Richard I. Both wanted to find a subject that would redound to the moral benefit and cultural distinction of their country. The similarity between the two extends even to their habits of composition: before setting pen to paper, both shaped and polished a substantial section of their work in their heads (a day's dictation in Milton's case, a long paragraph in Gibbon's), and made few or no revisions thereafter (ibid., p. 316). 28. He disapproved enough to favor the suppression of Milton's prose works, as Griffin points out (Regaining Paradise, p. 18). 29. Areopagitica, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, p. 726. 30. Gibbon sympathizes with Julian partly because both rebelled in adolescence against the religion of their upbringing. Julian was raised as a Christian by his uncle, Constantine, but worked his own way to pagan belief. Gibbon's early rejection of the Church of England by converting to Catholicism at sixteen led his father to send him to Switzerland for five years. There, under the tutelage of M. Pavillard, he convinced himself of the error of Catholicism and went on to develop his own deep skepticism, combined with an external acceptance of the Church of England. In the Autobiographies, he points out that Bayle, like Julian and Gibbon himself, followed the same path "from superstition to scepticism" (p. 89). Gibbon also identifies himself with the Apostate when he notes in the Autobiographies that one of the attacks on his history of Christianity was entitled Thoughts on the Causes of the Grand Apostacy; he reveals some pride in the accusation. 31. Julian's effort remains impressive even if a longer reign would not have enabled him to prevent or postpone significantly the triumph of Christianity throughout the empire. E. R. Dodds argues, for example, that "it is hard to believe that Julian's attempt to resuscitate [paganism] by a mixture of occultism and sermonising could have had any lasting success even if he had lived to enforce his programme." See Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, p. 132. 32. In what follows, I make use of David Jordan's analysis of Gibbon's account of Constantine in Edward Gibbon and His Roman Empire, pp. 191-212. 33. Letter to Sheffield, 1790, included in Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, p. 249. 34. Although Gibbon may sympathize with Satan and Julian, he does not glorify the use of force, as his complex reflection on Trajan's conquests makes clear: "as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters" (I, 6). Compare Milton's indictment of the desire "to be styl'd great Conquerors, / Patrons of Mankind, Gods, and Sons of Gods, / Destroyers rightlier call'd and Plagues of Men" (Paradise Lost, XI, 695-697). 35. Complete Poetry and Major Prose, p. 733. 36. See Paradise Lost, XI, 681, 808, 820, 876, and 890. 37. Leo Braudy makes this difference one of the central points of his analysis of the Decline and Fall in Narrative Form in Fiction and History, pp. 225-268. Braudy

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argues that the metaphors of decline and fall prove too simple and reductive to serve Gibbon's antisystematic understanding of historical causation in the second half of his history. Jordan sees a similar development in Gibbon's view of history in the Decline and Fall (Edward Gibbon and His Roman Empire, pp. 121-122 and 213-230). 38. Autobiographies, p. 332. 39. Gibbon's paratactic leaps in the second half of the Decline and Fall from one kind of material to another, and among widely separate times and places, again resemble the progress of Julian's march and Satan's journey. 40. As Braudy points out, Gibbon makes use of a "rhetoric of relative judgment" in the second half of the Decline and Fall (Narrative Form, p. 247). 41. Gibbon's use of "revolution" bridges the newer and the older meanings of the word. In line with older usage, "revolution" signifies an exchange of positions, like that of an object which in the course of its orbit passes through points on opposite sides of a center. Anticipating more recent usage, "revolution" in Gibbon can also signify the noncyclical overturning of a social order. However, in Gibbon's history, such inversions occur gradually, over the course of centuries, not suddenly and violently like modern revolutions. Melvin J. Lasky traces the change in the meaning of "revolution" from the cyclical, scientific sense to its linear, social sense in Utopia and Revolution. The older meaning was still the more common one when Gibbon was writing his history. 42. Patricia B. Craddock argues that Gibbon's use of "ruins" always implies a double meaning, "a poignant combination of loss and achievement in the transfer of power." See "Edward Gibbon and the 'Ruins of the Capitol,'" in Roman Images: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Annabel Patterson, p. 68. 43. According to the final sentence of the Decline and Fall, the work was conceived as Gibbon sat meditating among the ruins of the Capitol twenty years earlier. (For the full account, see the Autobiographies, p. 302.) Gibbon's meditation in this final chapter on the decline of Rome from its glorious past into a domesticated present translates into words a genre of painting and drawings extremely popular in the eighteenth century: the capricci by Guardi, Piranesi, Canaletto, and others, which juxtapose massive classical ruins—fallen columns, half-submerged arches overgrown with shrubs —with a diminutive humanity oblivious among its everyday activities to the colossal fragmentary remains of ancient times. I analyze the relation between the layering of reactions to the fall of empire in Gibbon, and the layering of attitudes toward the ancient past in the capricci, in "History as Monument: Gibbon's Decline and Fall," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989): 225-245. Craddock underscores the metaphoricity of "ruins" when she points out that, despite Gibbon's seeming particularity in this last chapter and in his account of the conception of the Decline and Fall in the Autobiographies, there were no ruins on the Capitoline hill in his day ("Edward Gibbon and the 'Ruins of the Capitol,'" pp. 63-82). "Ruins" function primarily as rhetorical figures in Gibbon and elsewhere. 44. Freud analyzes the process of mourning as a painful recollection and working through of strong emotional attachments preparatory to accepting the loss of the person or object that had been their focus. See "Mourning and Melancholia" in Collected Papers, vol. IV, pp. 152-170. 45. Poggio's personification of ancient Rome as a prostrate giant and of its architectural ruins as its stripped and dismembered limbs strikingly anticipates the fig-

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ures that Gibbon adapts from Milton of earthly truth as the dismembered Osiris, and of truth in its purity and wholeness as a naked Venus. 46. W. B. Camochan first noted the conflation of texts in Gibbon's quotation from Poggio. See "Gibbon's Silences," in Johnson and His Age, ed. James Engell, p. 384. He sees these texts all contributing to the silence produced by contemplation of the fall of Rome; he does not observe or elaborate on the contradictory attitudes embraced by the different texts to which Gibbon alludes. See also his Gibbon's Solitude, pp. 71-73. 47. 1 have modified the Fairclough translation slightly. 48. Gibbon thus joins many poets who have asserted that linguistic monuments may outlive both political empires and the monuments they erect in stone and metal: Virgil establishes his own epic as an appropriate memorial for Nisus and Euryalus in the Aeneid (IX, 446-449); Horace calls his poetry his "monument, destined to outlast bronze and to tower above pyramids" (Odes 111, 30); in Metamorphoses XV, Ovid asserts that his poem will outlast the anger of Jupiter and the star of Augustus Caesar. In Sonnet 55, Shakespeare also asserts the power of poetry to outlast the language of public praise engraved in stone: "Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes / Shall outlive this pow'rful rime." 49. Autobiographies, pp. 338-339. 50. When he was working on the middle volumes of his history, near the end of the war between Britain and the American colonies, Gibbon wrote to his friend Georges Deyverdun that "the Decline of the Two Empires, the Roman and the British, advances with equal steps. 1 have contributed, however, much more effectively to the former." Quoted in J. W. Johnson, "Gibbon's Architectural Metaphor," Journal of British Studies 13 (1973): 60.

4. The Dialogue of Credit and Doubt in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade 1. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, p. 9. Subsequent citations from this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. 2. Max Weber provides the classic analysis of connections between the characteristic psychology of Protestant Christianity and the development of modern capital markets in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 3. David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style, pp. 24-31. Richard D. Brown, "Modernization and the Modern Personality in Early America, 1600-1865: A Sketch of a Synthesis," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1972): 201-228, traces a secular, conformist, cosmopolitan "modern personality" to factors including urbanization and the increase in contacts between strangers. 4. On "the original confidence man," known as William Thompson, see The Confidence-Man, pp. 277-278, 293, a discussion which relies largely on Johannes Dietrich Bergmann, "The Original Confidence Man," American Quarterly 21 (1969): 560-577.

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5. See Michael Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace, pp. 132-145. 6. See Carolyn Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America, pp. 120-143. 7. Like the "mind of Man" in section 8 of Swift's Tale of a Tub, whose undisciplined pursuit of its desires moves from high to low and from "East to West," the mute seems to arrive from opposite directions simultaneously: he mirrors the imposter "recently arrived from the East" and also seems to have arrived from some far West "beyond the prairies." 8. In her analysis of the role of Black Guinea, Karcher argues that judgments of Guinea by standards different from those applied to the white operators and cynics reveal racist assumptions on the part of characters within the narrative and readers outside it (Shadow over the Promised Land, pp. 195-206). Elizabeth Foster draws the commonly accepted distinction between the mute and Black Guinea in her Introduction to The Confidence-Man, pp. i-iii. 9. In Pierre, Melville has Plinlimmon's pamphlet assert of "man's truth" and "God's truth" that "by their very contradictions they are made to correspond" (p. 212). 10. Some readings argue that Melville sympathizes with the devil, some that he demonstrates the impracticability of Christianity in this world. Foster, Introduction to The Confidence-Man, pp. xlvii-lvii, interprets the confidence men as successive embodiments of Satan. According to this view, which remains the most common reading of the novel, those who resist the blandishments of the confidence men oppose the appeal of evil in this world. Others who read the confidence man as evil and satanic, and his opponents as good Christians, include John W. Shroeder, "Sources and Symbols for Melville's Confidence-Man;' PMLA 66 (1951): 363-380; Hershel Parker, "The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 18 (1963): 165-173; Daniel Hoffman, 'The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade" in Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard Chase, p. 134; and Joel Porte, The Romance in America, pp. 155169. On the other end of the spectrum, but sharing the view that the confidence man of the title is a single character in the text, a few critics have identified that character as God in disguise. See Leslie Fiedler, "Out of the Whale," The Nation 169 (1949): 494; H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology, pp. 183-187; and Merlin Bowen, "Tactics of Indirection in Melville's The Confidence-Man" Studies in the Novel 1 (1969): 401-420. Peter J. Bellis argues that the text does not support identification of the confidence man with either Satan or Christ. See "Melville's Confidence-Man: An Uncharitable Interpretation," American Literature 59 (1987): 548-569. 11. Michael Paul Rogin finds "no self under the confidence-man's guises." See Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville, p. 224. For similar views, see Edgar Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth, p. 183; and John Blair, The Confidence Man in Modern Fiction: A Rogue's Gallery with Six Portraits, p. 24. Wai-chee Dimock considers the characters in this narrative as disembodied voices in Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism, p. 208. Edward Mitchell argues that the characters in this narrative "are only distinguishable in terms of their function." See "From Action to Essence: Some Notes on the Structure of Melville's The Confidence-Man," American Literature 40 (1968): 30.

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12. In Worlds Apart Agnew argues that increased emphasis on economic rationality and calculation produced opaque, indecipherable actors in a market whose transactions depended not on a particular location and time, but rather on the presence of mobile capital and contracting agents. Agnew investigates the extent to which criteria of performance rule the behavior of actors in these "placeless" markets. 13. Georg Simmel, "What Is Society?" in Georg Simmel 1858-1918: A Collection of Essays with Translations and a Bibliography, ed. Kurt Wolff, p. 347. Simmel writes figuratively of performance virtually ingesting all nonsocial aspects of personality; Frank Goodman, Melville's celebrator of purely social performance, tastes the adulterated performances of other characters in the second half of The Confidence-Man. 14. Joseph Flibbert, Melville and the Art of Burlesque, p. 150, notes this doubleness of the confidence men, whose actions undercut the hope they preach. 15. William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words, pp. 177-179. "Dog" and "cynic" function in the texts of Shakespeare and Melville as primal words with antithetical meanings of the kind that interested Freud. On Melville's allusions to Timon in The Confidence-Man, see Charles N. Watson, "Melville and the Theme of unionism: From Pierre to The Confidence-Man," American Literature 44 (1972): 398-413. 16. Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the American West, p. 317; The Confidence-Man, ed. H. Bruce Franklin, p. 183 (one of many points where I am indebted to Franklin's rich and helpful annotations); Sussman, "The Deconstructor as Politician," Glyph 4 (1978): 46; Watson Branch, Harrison Hayford, and Hershel Parker, "Historical Note," in The Confidence-Man, ed. Hayford, Parker, and Tanselle, p. 295. Leon Howard perceives an alteration in the second half of the narrative from bitter satire to comic tolerance, and ascribes it to biographical causes in Herman Melville: A Biography, pp.228-229. 17. The length of the episodes also increases in the second half of The Confidence-Man. A manuscript fragment indicates that Melville conceived of his novel as consisting of a Part I and, presumably, a Part II; see ibid., pp. 295, 300, and 483-484. 18. John Blair points out that the nature of the puns changes from the first to the second half of the novel: "they no longer play between word and word, but between word and action." See "Puns and Equivocations in Melville's Confidence-Man," American Transcendental Quarterly 12 (1974): 94. Milton anticipates Goodman's practical punning in Paradise Lost (X, 511-520), where Satan's announcement of his triumph over Adam and Eve meets with a loud hissing rather than a shout of acclamation, as he and his companions fall on their stomachs and assume the form of snakes. The fallen angels do not allegorically represent snakes, nor do snakes represent the abstract qualities that the angels possess; rather, the snake is the form to which the angels have reduced themselves through their own actions in the poem. 19. This display of gold points to the source and significance of much magic and mesmerism in nineteenth-century American fiction: the mysterious power of the magician or mesmerist serves as a figure for the mysterious power of capital, especially of gold, to act at a distance, and with an impersonal force greater than that of people with little money. Gold serves as a metallic equivalent of allegory, giving access to a world of magical spells and invisible values. The charm would have been less magical and less successful if Goodman had encircled Charlie with paper bills instead of golden eagles.

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20. Ralph Emerson, Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, p. 197. 21. Goodman even hints that he is related to Autolycus because both are fictional characters: "a living creature he is, though only a poet was his maker" (p. 172). This awareness again echoes the phenomenon of Don Quixote's figuring in Part II as the protagonist of a novel that has already been published and widely read. In Herman Melville, p. 227, Howard observes that Melville bought a copy of Don Quixote in September 1855, a month or two before he began writing The Confidence-Man. 22. Elizabeth Keyser also infers that Goodman conforms to his own descriptions of the genial misanthrope and drinker of adulterated wines, as well as to Pitch's characterization of him as a contemporary Diogenes. See '"Quite an Original': The Cosmopolitan in The Confidence-Man" Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15 (1973): 286, 289-290. 23. Goodman's indirect announcement of the necessity of playing roles illustrates one of Georg Simmel's preconditions for social existence: the conditions that make social knowledge imperfect and others' characters untrustworthy are precisely those that render society possible and others knowable at all: "It seems as if only the apprehension of this [a man's real, unconditionally individual nature] could furnish the basis for an entirely correct relation to him. But the very alterations and new formations which preclude this ideal knowledge of him are, actually, the conditions which make possible the sort of relations we call social. The phenomenon recalls Kant's conception of the categories: they form immediate data into new objects, but they alone make the given world into a knowable world" ("What Is Society?" in Georg Simmel 1858-1918, p. 345). Through Goodman, Melville implies an awareness of the inadequacy of our knowledge of others, stressing particularly the multiplying occasions for suspicion and the chances of being taken in an early industrial national market. Honig, Dark Conceit, p. 161, similarly connects narrative irony with a recognition of social relations as indispensable but tainted, as does Blair, The Confidence Man in Modern Fiction, p. 24. 24. Thomas Joswick examines chapters 14 and 33 for their endorsement of metaphor and metonymy, and discerns a "criss-crossing" of the two, "an internal economy, . . . whereby metaphors are exchanged for metonyms and metonyms for metaphors." See "Figuring the Beginning: Melville's The Confidence-Man," Genre 11 (1978): 408. Charles Olsen formulates a position that I believe is closer to mine when he asserts that Melville was "incapable of either allegory or symbol" because "mirror and model are not congruent [i.e., do not correspond]. They require a discontinuous jump" (Selected Writings, p. 51). The digressive chapters in The Confidence-Man, like the digressive sections in A Tale of a Tub, are both ironic and illustrative; the digressions in both works repeat and intensify the narrative contradictions they are called on to dispel. Allen Hayman first analyzed the three critical chapters to elicit from them Melville's theory of fiction in his later works. See "The Real and the Original: Herman Melville's Theory of Prose Fiction," Modern Fiction Studies 8 (1962), 211-232. 25. A. Robert Lee suggestively characterizes most of the stories told in the novel as "anti-parables" in "Voices Off, On and Without: Ventriloquy in The ConfidenceMan," in Herman Melville: Reassessments, ed. A. Robert Lee, p. 168. He sees "the Goneril story as a false allegory, the opposite of its appearance and actually a parody of cere-

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monial grief and mourning used to win the cash (and sympathy) of the unwary listener; . . . Charlemont's story as an inverse Prodigal Son parable,... the Indian-hating as a frontier chronicle adapted to indict all forms of chronic Absolutism, whether Indians as Devils or other moral and theological systems of Heaven and Hell. . . . [The tales] 'say' what they don't mean, and hide what they most purport to reveal" (pp. 172-173). 26. In the spirit of Hall's account, Noble proposes a smoke to Moredock's memory during a pause in his story. The setting for Moredock's story, at twilight on board a slowly moving ship, closely resembles the setting for Conrad's Heart of Darkness on board a ship where, after a while, only the glowing cigars indicate the presence of the men who listen to Marlow tell the story of Kurtz—another white man whose mission of civilizing a darker race through conquest consists at base of a desire to "exterminate the brutes." Melville, like Conrad, stresses the comfort in which the listeners and readers learn of the white man's murders of those with darker skin in order to bring profit to his people's empire. Both Conrad and Melville establish an ironic relation between the narrative and its framing scene: although Conrad's frame appears to distance the narrative of Kurtz from the boat riding at anchor on the Thames, Mariow's narrative breaks down the separation between London and the Congo, as Melville's breaks down the artificial separation between Indian extermination and American pieties. H. Bruce Franklin observes a similar parallel between the frame of Heart of Darkness and the opening of Billy Budd. See "From Empire to Empire: Billy Budd: Sailor," in Herman Melville: Reassessments, p. 210. 27. Roy Harvey Pearce points out these changes in "Melville's Indian-hater: A Note on a Meaning of The Confidence-Man" PMLA 67 (1952): 945, 948. 28. For expressions of this view, see Shroeder, "Sources and Symbols," pp. 363-380; Parker, "The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating," pp. 165-173; and Bowen, "Tactics of Indirection," pp. 413-416. William Sedgwick, Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind, pp. 190-193, formulates a related interpretation of the Indian-hating episode, as does Foster, Introduction to The Confidence-Man, pp. lxv-lxviii. Most critics implicitly interpret the Indian-hater as a devil-hater, since they identify confidence men with the devil, and both of these with Indians and snakes. 29. Rogin observes that many of the most dedicated exterminators and removers of Indians, such as Andrew Jackson, mirrored Indian traits themselves (Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian, p. 119, 133, 161). Dimock analyzes the congruence between the "promising self" of the reformers and the "promising Indian" of the Indian-haters, and, underlying the congruence, the sinister difference between the way the two are regarded and treated (Empire for Liberty, pp. 198-201). 30. Fussell (Frontier, p. 308) suggests that Melville's ironic use of Indianhating may owe something to the passage from the "Mechanical Operation of the Spirit" in which Swift observes that "the fundamental Difference in Point of Religion, between the wild Indians and Us, lies in this: that We worship God and they worship the Devil . . . What I applaud them for, is their Discretion, in limiting their Devotions and their Deities to their several Districts, nor ever suffering the Liturgy of the white God, to cross or interfere with that of the Black. Not so with Us, who pretending by the Lines and Measures of our Reason, to extend the Dominion of one invisible Power, and contract that of the other, have discovered a gross Ignorance in the Natures of Good and Evil, and most horribly confounded the Frontiers of both" (A Tale of a Tub, p. 274).

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Swift exposes the futility of attempts to expand the frontiers of good by destroying supposed objectifications of evil. Melville could apply Swift's point to his own people, who assumed the right to extend their frontiers to the West, by asserting that red people embodied evil or uncivilized nature; destroying or pushing the red people before them, therefore, could supposedly reduce or eliminate such evil. In extending the frontiers of their sway, Americans confounded the frontiers of good and evil. 31. Stephen Holden makes the point in these terms: "Moredock under the terms of the allegory fails to be a good Christian—a good devil-hater—when he is not killing Indians but is showing love for his family and friends." See "Melville's Imagery of Ambiguity," in Explorations of Literature,ed.Rima Reck, pp. 81-99. Fussell emphasizes Melville's parodic inversions of clichéd writing about the West throughout The Confidence-Man, and characterizes the Indian-hating chapters in particular as examples of such inversion of conventional pieties to produce "pure and corrosive farce" (Frontier, p. 322). When Fussell considers why Melville would "make Hall [the representative writer of the West] appear so ridiculous and so inhumane," he concludes it can only be because "behind the protestations of morality and piety, Melville detected the fundamental barbarism of his eminently respectable views" (p. 323). Edgar Dryden notes the curiously self-discrediting metaphors in Noble and Hall's version of the story (Melville's Thematics of Form, p. 179). 32. Joyce Adler also compares Melville's irony in the Indian-hating chapters with Swift's in "A Modest Proposal." See "Melville on the White Man's War against the American Indian," Science and Society 36 (1971): 424. 33. Adler, ibid., p. 429, states: "The Indian-killer is openly what the civilization is in disguise" She reviews Melville's consistent and explicit criticism, in works from Typee and Mardi through Clarei and John Marr, of white expansion, murder, and trickery in the name of Christian civilization (pp. 435-436). Richard Drinnon discusses the Indian-hater as a cultural myth that ultimately equates American expansionism with the spread of civilization, from British colonial times, through the westward expansion of Manifest Destiny, to overseas expansion during the Spanish-American War, and, since then, in the wars in Vietnam and Central America (Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building). Drinnon focuses on Judge Hall on pp. 202-215. 34. Melville's phrase for racial hatred between whites and blacks from the Supplement to The Battle Pieces of Herman Melville, ed. Hennig Cohen, p. 200. 35. Rogin analyzes the appropriation of Indian lands as a process of "primitive accumulation" (Fathers and Children, pp. 165-205, 251-255). 36. On the use of the West as a means of converting sectional antagonism into a harmony of interests in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, see Fussell, Frontier, p. 302; Rogin, Fathers and Children, pp. 169, 297; and Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics, pp. 317-325. 37. On the scapegoating of Indians, see Adler, "Melville on the White Man's War," p. 432; and Rogin, Fathers and Children, pp. 296-297. Congress gagged itself for many sessions in the decades before the Civil War to avoid hearing arguments about slavery and ordered postmasters not to allow antislavery mail into the South, but rather, in a presumably inadvertent practical pun, to burn all such "incendiary" material. See, for example, Glyndon Van Deusen, The Age of Jackson, pp. 108-134. 38. Hall, for instance, questioned "whether, on this or any other point, the

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Indians should be permitted to testify for themselves" (p. 147); the Supreme Court agreed they should not. For analysis of "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby the Scrivener" as evidence of Melville's desire in the mid-1850s to signal the official silencing of those dispossessed in the America of his time, even though he could not give them voice himself, see Brook Thomas, "The Legal Fictions of Herman Melville and Lemuel Shaw," Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 29, 32-33, 48-49. 39. Gary Lindberg contrasts Moredock and Goodman in these terms in The Confidence-Man in American Literature, p. 27. 40. On the instances of this pattern throughout Melville's career, see Merton Sealts, "Melville's Geniality," in Pursuing Melville, 1960-1980, pp. 156-170. 41. Melville's list exactly parallels the forms of innovating madness in A Tale of a Tub: "the Establishment of New Empires by Conquest; the Advance and Propagating of New Schemes in Philosophy; and the contriving, as well as the propagating of New Religions" (p. 162). In Swift's view, originality connotes madness in diverging from accepted norms. In the view of Melville's kin and compatriots, his own perspective manifested his lunacy. Melville's portrait of the original character accordingly suggests more nearly overt admiration than does Swift's. The widespread use of puns in commercial advertising tends to confirm Melville's indirect affirmation of Goodman's originality as the presiding spirit of American commerce. 42. H. Bruce Franklin and Edgar Dryden have demonstrated extensive and substantial connections between the boy peddler and Hermes. See Franklin, The Wake of the Gods, pp. 182-186; Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form, pp. 192-195. HermesMercury, the god of trade and sharp dealing, is Trimalchio's patron also. 43. Simeon also uses a Counterfeit Detector that the boy gives him as a bonus. William Dilliston shows that the proliferation of such newsletters in the 1840s and 1850s gave rise to other circulars to detect counterfeit detectors. See Bank Note Reporters and Counterfeit Detectors, 1826-1866, p. 44. The market conditions that give rise to such well-founded but unresolvable suspicions anticipate those which give rise to the more generalized paranoia of Thomas Pynchon's narratives a century later. 44. Bakhtin traces a lessening in the intensity of ritual festive laughter from the Renaissance, when carnival forms and forms of high literature were most intimately interconnected, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which saw the progressive disengagement of high literature from popular cultural forms. The process results in the nineteenth century in the phenomenon Bakhtin calls "reduced laughter" (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 135-137). 45. Such terms inform Edwin Fussell's vivid map of Melville's moral geography in the late fifties: "His frontiers are realistically enough both East-West and North-South, as if he had in mind a metaphorical model of what Faraday called diamagnetism where the official frontier was split into two lines, lying at right angles to each other, self-neutralizing" (Frontier, p. 302). 46. See The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, pp. 167, 256. 5. Parody and Paradigms in The Crying of Lot 49 1. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 43-135. 2. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction,

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p. 68. For an analysis of myths as mediators between cultural oppositions as well as between categories of nature and culture, see Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, pp. 319-342. 3. For the formulation of a paradigm that rests on the separation of scientific and poetic language, see 1. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism. 4. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, p. 50. Subsequent citations from this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 5. Roger Mexico, perhaps the most sympathetic character in Gravity's Rainbow, believes that science "must look for a less narrow, a less . . . sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk causeand-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle" (p. 89). 6. Claude Shannon's papers on mathematical communication theory were first published in Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423, 623-656; and Bell System Technical Journal 30 (1951): 50-64. They are most conveniently available in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Leo Szilard's paper, originally published in German in 1929, is available as "On the Decrease of Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings," Behavioral Science 9 (1964): 301-310. The nub of Leon Brillouin's argument appears in "Maxwell's Demon Cannot Operate: Information and Entropy, I and II," Journal of Applied Physics 22 (1951): 334-343. But his full elaboration of the consonance between physical and informational entropy will be found in his Science and Information Theory. For a collection of Norbert Wiener's views, which parallel those of Szilard and Brillouin on the question of Maxwell's demon, see "Cybernetics and Society," in The Human Use of Human Beings, pp. 28-31. Michel Serres pursues the implications of Brillouin's argument in "The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, and Thermodynamics," in Hermes, pp. 79-83. 7. Eddington's remark is quoted in Silviu Guiasu, Information Theory with Applications, p. vi. The current expanded sense of informational entropy is also supported by successful applications in fields as diverse as communication theory, transport theory, and molecular biology. See Myron Tribus and Raphael Levine, eds., The Maximum Entropy Formalism, p. 9. 8. Edwin T. Jaynes has called attention to a conceptual vagueness "that made Shannon's writings, like those of Niels Bohr, so eminently suited to become the Scriptures of a new Religion." See "Where Do We Stand on Maximum Entropy?" in Maximum Entropy Formalism, p. 38. James Nohrnberg has remarked on the parallel between Nefastis and Swift's enthusiasts. See "Pynchon's Paraclete," in Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Edward Mendelson, p. 156. 9. Thomas Hill Schaub first pointed out the oddities in Nefastis's understanding of entropy in his "Open Letter in Response to Edward Mendelson's The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49','" boundary 2 5 (1976): 94. For Mendelson's essay, see "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49," in Pynchon, pp. 112— 146. The confused state of the paradigm in the fifties emerges clearly from two articles by Anatol Rapoport: "What Is Information?" (1953) and "The Promise and Pitfalls of Information Theory" (1956), collected in Introduction to Information Science, ed. Tefko Saracevic, pp. 5-17. In the earlier essay, Rapoport equates "amount of information" with "amount of disorder" (p. 12), following Shannon by not distinguishing information from informational entropy. In the later essay, he reverses his position after review-

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ing the works of Szilard and Brillouin, which disprove the possibility of Maxwell's Demon (p. 16). 10. Brillouin, Science and Information Theory, p. 161. 11. As evidence of the wide acceptance of Brillouin's inversion of Shannon's definition, see, among others, Jaynes, who states that informational entropy "measures, not the information of the sender, but the ignorance of the receiver, that is removed by receipt of the message" ("Where Do We Stand on Maximum Entropy?" pp. 37-38, my emphasis). A recent college textbook on information theory similarly defines fundamental concepts: "In [Shannon's] conception the amount of information is strongly connected to the amount of uncertainty. In fact, the information is equal to the removed uncertainty" (my emphasis). See Guiasu, Information Theory with Applications, p. 3. Jagjit Singh provides a nontechnical exposition of the current model in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics, pp. 76-77: "Entropy is a measure of our ignorance of ultramicroscopic structure. In other words, entropy is information in reverse gear" (emphasis in original). 12. Anne Mangel, "Maxwell's Demon, Entropy, Information: The Crying of Lot 49," Triquarterly 20 (1971): 194-208; and Peter Abernethy, "Entropy in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49," Critique 14 (1972): 18-33, summarize the basic arguments of Brillouin and Szilard, without, however, noting that Nefastis's explanation does not coincide with them. 13. N. Katherine Hayles reports that use of Shannon's definition of entropy is standard in electrical engineering textbooks, and she asserts that Shannon's convention is more productive than Brillouin's in chaos theory. See "Self-Reflexive Metaphors in Maxwell's Demon and Shannon's Choices: Finding the Passages," in Literature and Society: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund, pp. 229-230. On the other hand, I have noted the usefulness of Brillouin's convention in areas of information theory outside electrical engineering (see note 11 above). In addition, my conversations with physicists and chemists reveal that they generally accept and work with Brillouin's understanding of the relation between entropy and information. The fact that Shannon's and Brillouin's formulations continue to be accepted and to produce results in different fields—Shannon's in electrical engineering and chaos theory; Brillouin's in information theory, physics, and chemistry—testifies to the important and enduring complementary relation between them. 14. In his account of the relations between Pynchon's novels and the history of the concept of entropy, Peter L. Cooper points out that Pynchon's "use of entropy parallels to some extent the course of scientific understanding: early Pynchon and early thermodynamics are relatively unsophisticated and pessimistic in that they view entropy as an irreversible and irresistible constant force" However, in the world of Heisenberg and Bohr, as "'force' fades to 'relation,' so determinism fades to probability. This radical alteration in world view is at the heart of Pynchon's fiction, especially the later work." See Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World, pp. 112, 122. I find the first sign of the altered, more contemporary view in Pynchon's use of entropy in The Crying of Lot 49. 15. Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, p. 83. 16. Beda Allemann, "Metaphor and Antimetaphor," in Interpretation: The Poetry of Meaning, ed. Stanley R. Hopper and David L. Miller, pp. 113-114. Discussing

Notes to Pages 114-121

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the same parable, Fletcher suggests that narrative ironies are "collapsed" allegories (Allegory, p. 230). 17. Allemann uses this phrase in his discussion of Nietzsche's attacks on metaphor ("Metaphor and Antimetaphor," p. 107). 18. Melville, The Confidence-Man, p. 124. 19. Frank Kermode, The Art of Telling, p. 85. 20. Robert M. Grant, Eusebius as Church Historian, p. 151. 21. Pynchon distinguishes this saint from at least two other Saints Narcissus; see S. Baring-Gould, Lives of the Saints, vol. XII, pt. 2, p. 702. 22. Grant, Eusebius as Church Historian, p. 151. 23. Freud, Collected Papers, vol. IV, pp. 53-54. 24. Freud, "The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words" (1910), ibid., pp. 184191, cites the work of Karl Abel on antithetical words in ancient Egyptian in support of his own thesis on the "archaic character of thought-expression in dreams" (p. 191). Fletcher refers to Freud and the example of altus in discussing the ambivalence that he finds at the root of both compulsive behavior and allegory (Allegory, p. 298). Maureen Quilligan sees wordplay as the basis of allegory, and analyzes examples of punning allegory from Dante, Spenser, Hawthorne, and Pynchon (The Language of Allegory, pp. 42-46). In her view, Pynchon is an allegorical rather than, as I read him, a satiric punster. Honig shows how oppositions between literal and metaphorical meanings accomplish satiric ends through ironic means (Dark Conceit, pp. 117-131). Jacques Derrida has discussed the wide implications of the antithetical pair, pharmakos and pharmakon, in "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, pp. 63-171. These writers share Pynchon's marked interest in the coincidence of opposite meanings in a single word. "The 'bad' pun . . . is the kind most amenable to study," Kenneth Burke observes, then wonders, "but should we not look for 'benignities' that correspond to such 'malignities'? Should there not be 'good' puns?" See The Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 56. 25. On the basis of such language, Mendelson argues that "the religious meaning is itself the central issue of the plot" ("The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49," p. 120). 26. Fletcher, Allegory, p. 298. 27. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, pp. 51, 55. 28. N. Katherine Hayles argues that the alterations in the meaning of the Tristero—between abstract, metaphoric expansion and concrete, literal contraction— make the text's workings analogous to a two-cycle engine. See '"A metaphor of God knew how many parts': The Engine That Drives The Crying of Lot 49," in New Essays on "The Crying of Lot 49," ed. Patrick O'Donnell. 29. A fourth paradigm for understanding Tristero is the history of communications technology in terms of black boxes. In The Courier's Tragedy, Dominic is tortured with his head stuck in a black box. Nefastis says Maxwell's demon lives in a black box. Television is the contemporary black box which gives access to sexuality and violence: both Nefastis and Metzger use the television as part of "an elaborate, seduction, plot" (p. 18), and the founder of the Innamorati Anonymous renounces love just before imitating the self-immolating Buddhist monks he sees on television. 30. Mendelson points out the contrast between the dry historical evidence

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Notes to Pages 122-124

and the invigorating contemporary evidence of Tristero ("The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49" pp. 132-133). 31. David Cowart similarly concludes that Oedipa "discovers America's disinherited. . . . Oedipa is led to know that the American syllogism is somehow fallacious; its middle—those poor, huddled masses supposedly succored by opportunity and freedom—is undistributed" (Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion, p. 29). 32. Leo Braudy has argued that "the most original novelistic style of the 1960's was the style of paranoid surrealism. . . . [which] drew equally on the facts of national life and the clichés of popular fiction to create a world where technology, politics, and history had run wild and the only possible humanism was gallows humor" (New York Times Book Review, March 26, 1977, p. 5). Braudy cites Heller, Burroughs, Mailer, Kesey, and Pynchon as practitioners of the paranoid novel. The images of history gone wild and conspiratorial in V. or in Tristero find analogues in the evidence of technology on the loose in Vietnam (250,000 American troops were in the country when The Crying of Lot 49 was published), and the shaking of national political faith following the Kennedy assassination. Pynchon has Oedipa walk through a demonstration by the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley on her way to visit Nefastis. I am grateful to Robert Silberman for pointing out the relevance of Braudy's review. In "Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel," ELH 48 (1981): 619-637, Braudy derives the importance of paranoia in Pynchon's novels, especially Gravity's Rainbow, from the decreasing assurance of providence from the eighteenth century to the post-World War 11 period. 33. Stephen Donadio, reviewing The Crying of Lot 49 in "America, America," Partisan Review 33 (Summer 1966): 450. 34. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 106-137, and The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 51-82, 366-388. The second and third phases of satire in Northrop Frye's characterization of the mode of satire use inversions of conventions to express skepticism about the justice of social arrangements and the possibilities of human understanding (Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 229-236, 307-316). 35. Mendelson, "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49," p. 118. 36. Douglas A. Mackey also sees Tristero as a contemporary version of the Sphinx. See The Rainbow Quest of Thomas Pynchon, p. 33. 37. Ones and zeroes characterize the "satiric realm of the excluded middle," as Seidel has pointed out. Oedipa is like Slothrop and Mexico, who "struggle to get out of the world of satiric opposites and into the world of the gradual curve, the world of included middles." See "The Satiric Plots of Gravity's Rainbow," in Pynchon, pp. 195196, 207. Nohrnberg identifies the persistence of intolerable opposites as a feature of narrative satire ("Pynchon's Paraclete," pp. 147-161). John O. Stark also discusses Pynchon's works as satires in Pynchon's Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information, pp. 24-26. 38. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, pp. 53-60.

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Index

Adler, Joyce, 161 Aeolists, 52-54 Aesop, 133 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 136, 158 Allegory, 48, 50, 90, 114, 158; and enthusiasm, 49, 52, 67-69; and hierarchy, 15, 92; and irony, 14, 42, 99, 103, 135, 165; subversion of, 91, 94, 97. See also Irony; Metaphor Allemann, Beda, 114, 165 Apocalypse, 8, 106-107, 108 Apophoreta, 33-34 Appleby, Joyce, 146 Apuleius, 7 Ascyltus, 22-23 Auerbach, Erich, 141, 145 Augustus, 72, 78, 141 Authority, 7, 8, 58; political, 30, 35, 41, 46, 48, 103, 108; religious, 43, 47, 53, 62, 77, 92 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 2, 107, 133, 135, 138, 141, 142, 162, 166; on carnival, 7, 16, 134; on dialogical parody, 20, 131, 136, 137; on menippean satire, 132 Benjamin, Walter, 127 Bentley, Joseph, 145 Blair, John, 157,158, 159 Body, 10-12, 24, 25, 44, 51, 53, 58-59, 64-66, 69, 106-107. See also Materialism; Satiric leveling

Borges, Jorge Luis, 13, 126-130, 132, 135,145 Bracciolini, Poggio, 8 2 - 8 3 Braudy, Leo, 152, 154, 155, 166 Brillouin, Leon, 111-113,163, 164 Burke, Kenneth, 118, 131, 135, 165 Burkert, Walter, 142 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 8, 12 Cameron, Averil, 137, 140 Capital markets, 15, 86, 87, 89, 92, 93, 107-108, 136, 156. See also Fragmentation; Metonymy Capricci, 155 Carlyle, Thomas, 9 Carnival, 2, 5, 7, 133, 134. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail Camochan, W. B., 151, 156 Catholicism, 43, 48, 49, 154. See also Interiority Cervantes, Miguel de, 5, 11, 12, 94, 105, 126-127,159 Christianity, 67, 77-78, 80 Cicero, 23 Clark, John, 146, 148 Classicism, 19, 31-32, 140,141 Collignon, E., 138 Collingwood, R. G., 151 Comedy, 4, 10, 21, 23 Confidence, 86-87, 93, 105 Confidence games: in The Confidence-

180

Index

Man, 88-92, 97, 103, 104, 139; in Satyricon, 26, 35, 36 Confidence men, 26, 36, 87, 90, 91, 156 Conrad, Joseph, 160 Conservative satire, 6, 9, 18, 63, 129, 132 Constantine, 70, 77-78 Courtney, E., 137 Craddock, Patricia B., 153, 155 Davis, David Brion, 87, 156 Declamation, 25, 26. See also Rhetoric Dialogical discourse, 2, 5, 6, 8, 47, 48 Dialogue, Platonic, 31, 57 Diderot, Denis, 12 Dido, 30 Dimock, Wai-chee, 157, 160 Donadio, Stephen, 166 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 5 Dryden, Edgar, 157, 161, 162 Eddington, Sir Arthur, 111 Egbert, 93, 95, 96 Elagabalus, 65 Elias, A. C , Jr., 149 Eliot, T. S., 7, 140 Elliott, Robert C., 132,133 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 95, 96, 159 Empson, William, 146, 149, 158 Encolpius, 22-26, 28, 30, 34, 36 Encyclopedias, 4, 127-128 Enthusiasm, 14, 66-69, 150 Entropy, 110-114,164 Epic, 8, 10, 70, 85, 153; Christian, 74, 76, 80, 84; classical, 21, 23-24, 28-30, 71, 73, 83 Epicurean philosophy, 59-60 Erasmus, Desiderius, 147 Eusebius, 77,115-116 Exteriority, 43-44, 50-51, 58-60, 121, 144,146, 147, 149. See also Literalism; Protestantism Flaubert, Gustave, 3 - 4 Fletcher, Angus, 135, 165 Fortune, 22, 31

Foster, Elizabeth, 157, 160 Foucault, Michel, 149 Fragmentation, 5, 61, 85, 89, 97, 146, 149,151 Franklin, H. Bruce, 93, 157, 158, 160, 162 French, David, 144 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 54, 115-117, 123, 124, 155, 165 Frye, Northrop, 132, 134, 166 Fussell, Edwin, 93, 158, 160, 161, 162 Genre, 10, 13, 19, 20, 23, 31, 70-71, 109, 123, 132. See also Comedy; Epic; Greek romance; Tragedy George, Peter, 138 Gibbon, Edward: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 17, 64-85, 124, 129; Essai sur l'Etude de la Littérature, 70-71, 153; "Inquiry whether a Catalogue of the Armies . . . is an essential part of an Epic poem," 71; Autobiographies, 80, 85, 153, 154, 155,156 Giton, 22, 23 Gogol, Nikolai, 5, 13 Goodman, Frank, 92-98, 104-106, 108 Gordian, 69-70, 151 Gossman, Lionel, 151 Grant, Robert M., 116 Greek romance, 20-23, 137, 138 Griffin, Dustin, 153, 154 Griffin, Miriam, 141 Hall, Judge James, 100-102 Hayles, N. Katherine, 164, 165 Hegel, G. W. F., 152 Heinze, R., 137 Hendrickson, G. L., 133 Hermes, 106 Heteroglossia, 2, 8, 31 Hierarchies, 1, 6, 12, 14, 15, 19, 92, 133, 135 History, 16-17, 81-85, 111, 113, 126-130, 155; of America, 87, 92, 103-104,107-108,112,119-120,

181

Index

122, 124; of religion, 43, 47, 52-53, 66-69, 77-78; of Rome, 27, 35, 37-38, 70-73 Hobbes, Thomas, 39, 40-47, 53, 55, 62, 143-145, 148, 150. See also Materialism Honig, Edwin, 135, 148, 150, 159, 165 Horace, 7 Howes, Craig, 134, 136 Hutcheon, Linda, 20, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137 Iliad, 71

Indian-hating, 93, 100-105, 108. See also Race Interiority, 42, 50-51, 121, 144, 146, 147, 149. See also Allegory; Catholicism Irony, 8, 12, 27, 48, 61, 82; and allegory, 14, 42, 103, 135, 165; and puns, 15, 16, 99; and skepticism, 42-43, 80, 92. See also Metonymy Isaiah, 84 Jack (in A Tale of a Tub), 40, 49, 52-53. See also Exteriority; Protestantism Jameson, Fredric, 107, 131 Jaynes, Edwin T., 163, 164 Johnson, J. W., 156 Johnson, W. R., 140 Jonson, Ben, 93-94 Jordan, David, 152, 154, 155 Joyce, James, 2, 11, 137, 139 Julian, 70, 75-77, 154, 155 Juvenal, 6 Kafka, Franz, 113-114 Karcher, Carolyn, 157 Kelling, Harold D., 149 Kennedy, George, 139 Kermode, Frank, 109, 110, 114, 140 Kernan, Alvin, 132, 133, 134 Keyser, Elizabeth, 159 Kiremidjian, David, 20, 136, 137 Klebs, Eilimar, 139 Kuhn, Thomas, 13, 109, 110, 112, 134

Lee, A. Robert, 159 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 109 Literalism, 4, 48, 58, 67-69, 91-92, 110 Lock, F. P., 49, 146, 147 Locke, John, 146 Lucan, 143 Lucretius, 39, 60, 149 Lynch, John Patrick, 140 Lyotard, Jean-François, 124, 166 Mack, Maynard, 132 Marcus Aurelius, 71-72 Martin (in A Tale of a Tub), 49, 63 Materialism, 10-12, 40, 45-46, 53, 58-60, 68, 91-92, 95 Maxwell, James Clerk, 110 Maxwell's demon, 111-113, 163 Melville, Herman: "Bartleby the Scrivener," 87, 107; "Benito Cereno," 87, 101; The Confidence-Man, 18,

86-108, 114, 139; "Paradise of Bachelors, Tartarus of Maids," 87, 107; Pierre, 99, 157

Menard, Pierre, 126-127 Mendell,CW., 133, 138 Mendelson, Edward, 163, 165, 166 Menippean satire, 2, 7, 16, 132 Metaphor, 14-15, 32-33, 42, 91, 99, 110, 114, 165. See also Allegory Metonymy, 14-15, 88, 99, 136. See also Puns Michaels, Walter Benn, 136 Milton, John, 70, 73-77, 79, 84, 151, 153,154 Misanthropy, 90, 98, 105, 108 Monological discourse, 6, 8, 47, 78. See also Dialogical discourse Montaigne, Michel de, 54 Monuments, 85. See also Ruins More, Thomas, 5, 27 Moredock, j o h n , 100-104, 108 Morson, Gary Saul, 20, 131, 132, 135, 137 Narcissism, 115-116 Nefastis, 111-112,113,164

182

Index

Nero, 27, 28, 35, 38, 59, 141 Noble, Charlie, 93, 94, 97, 100 Nohrnberg, James, 163, 166 Nominalism, 42 Odyssey, 21, 28

Oedipa, 111, 113,115,120-121, 123-124 Open-endedness, 4 - 5 , 123-125 Oppositions, 17, 36, 37, 107, 123-124, 129-130; convergence of, 48-49, 54, 66, 69,101, 117,118-120,121 Oratory, 23. See also Rhetoric Origen, 68-69, 151 Ovid, 24-25, 115-116 Paganism, 67, 74-75, 79 Paradigms: cultural, 13, 17, 42, 62, 108, 114-116,120,125,130; scientific, 109-110,111-113,134 Paranoia, 117,122-125, 128,162,166 Parker, Hershel, 101, 102, 157 Parody, 19-32, 108, 123-124, 127, 132, 133, 137; dialogical, or double, 7-10, 18, 20, 47, 54, 62, 70, 115-116, 130. See also Satiric parody Paulson, Ronald, 132, 133, 135, 146, 148, 149 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 160 Perry, Ben E., 138, 142 Peter (in A Tale of a Tub), 40, 49, 52, 67. See also Catholicism; Interiority Petronius Arbiter: Satyricon, 17, 19-38, 57, 59, 89, 97, 129 Plato, 30-31, 57, 58, 147 Pocock, J . G.A., 145,150, 152 Poetic satire, 6 - 8 , 18 Pope, Alexander, 6, 8 Procopius, 64 Progressive satire, 6, 8, 18, 35-36, 37, 57, 74-75, 103-105, 108, 120, 122, 130 Protestantism, 49, 53, 154. See also Exteriority Puns, 11, 13-14, 33, 34-35, 52, 92, 114, 117, 121, 124, 141, 158; materializing, 51, 88, 106-107, 128; practical,

94-95, 96, 99. See also Metonymy; Satiric leveling Pynchon, Thomas, 108, 129, 148, 162; The Crying of Lot 49, 18, 54, 109-125, 149; Gravity's Rainbow, 166 Quilligan, Maureen, 135, 165 Quinlan, Maurice, 148 Quintana, Ricardo, 148 Quintilian, 14, 135 Rabelais, François, 2, 5, 13 Race, 88, 100-104, 108,157, 160, 161, 162. See also Indian-hating Randolph, Mary Claire, 133 Rankin, H.D., 137, 140, 141, 143 Recognitions, 4, 37, 56, 61, 123-124, 132 Reversals, 81; of convention, 7 - 8 , 70, 74-76; of expectation, 4, 37, 123; of satiric direction, 40, 43-44, 56, 62, 93-94, 98, 120, 128 Rhetoric, 21, 25-26, 28, 97, 139 Rogin, Michael Paul, 157, 160, 161 Romance. See Greek romance Rome, 17, 25, 27, 28-30, 35, 38, 71-73,78,82,85 Rose, K. F. C, 137, 141 Ruins, 82, 85, 155. See also Monuments; Rome Sage, Evan T., 138 Saint Paul, 87 Satan: in The Confidence-Man, 105, 157; in Decline and Fall of the Roman Em-

pire, 75-77, 154, 155; in Paradise Lost, 73-74, 84, 158 Satire in narrative. See Bakhtin, Mikhail; Dialogical discourse; Menippean satire; Parody; Progressive satire; Satiric leveling; Satiric parody Satire in verse, 6 - 8 , 18 Satiric leveling, 19, 35, 99, 104; of metaphoric and literal, 13-14, 32-33, 42, 50-52, 67-68, 91-92, 110, 117, 121; of spiritual and physical, 10-13, 19,

Index

183

Abolishing Christianity," 47; "Battle 31, 52-53, 57, 66-67, 70, 94, of the Books," 48; "Digression on 106-107,128 Madness," 55-61, 106; Gulliver's Satiric parody, 46; of Aeneid, 23-24, Travels, 3; "Mechanical Operation of 29-30; of Bible, 42, 44-45, 49; of the Spirit," 11, 48, 112, 160-161; "A Catholic interpreters, 48-52; of decModest Proposal," 103; "Project for lamations, 25; of Don Quixote, 127; of the Advancement of Religion," 47; Greek romances, 22-23; of Metamor"Proposal for Correcting the English phoses, 24-25, 115; of Odyssey, 28; of Tongue," 46; A Tale of a Tub, 17, Oedipus the King, 123-124; of Para39-63, 66, 89, 98, 108, 120, 122, dise Lost, 74-77; of Protestant inter129, 159, 162; "Verses on the Death preters, 53-56; of Sketches of. . . the of Dr. Swift," 7, 60 West, 100-104; of Symposium, 30-31, 57. See also Parody System, 6, 12-13, 14, 31, 44, 128 Szilard, Leo, 111, 163, 164 Satirist satirized, 3, 7, 132 Satyre Menippée du Catholicon d'Espagne, 17, 136 Tacitus, 38, 65, 73, 141, 143 Scapegoating, 9-10, 36-37, 133, 140, Temple, Sir William, 39, 58-60, 149 142 Theatricality, 22, 34, 37, 89, 95, 98, 105,158 Schaub, Thomas Hill, 163 Theodora, 64-65 Schizophrenia, 56, 61, 146 Thersites, 133 Seidel, Michael, 133, 135, 166 Tillyard, E. M. W., 73, 152, 153 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 138, 141, 142 Tlon,Uqbar, 127-129, 132 Seneca the Elder, 27, 139 Tragedy, 4, 10,21,123-124 Sermons, 6, 133 Trajan, 72, 73, 85, 154 Shakespeare, William, 61, 97, 105 Transcendentalism, 93, 96, 104 Shannon, Claude, 111-113, 163, 164 Traugott, j o h n , 144, 149 Shell, Marc, 15, 136 Trimalchio, 19, 28, 34-38, 148 Shroeder, John W., 101, 102, 157 Tristero, 18, 114,115,117-122, 124, 129 Silenus, 51, 147 Simeon, 106 Simmel, Georg, 89, 158, 159 Utopia, 5, 128-129 Simpson, David, 15, 136 Smith, Martin, 142 Vidal, Gore, 9 Virgil, 23-24, 29-30, 83-84, 142, 156 Smith, Frederik, 149 Vitellius, 65 Sociability, 93, 98, 105, 158, 159 Voltaire, 3 Sophocles, 123 Sphinx, 123-124 Spirituality, 40, 42, 43, 52-55, 68, 91, Walsh, Peter, 139, 140, 143 Waugh, Evelyn, 9 112 West, Nathanael, 9 Stallybrass, Peter, 131, 133, 135 White, Allon, 131, 133, 135 Starkman, Miriam, 147, 148 Wiener, Norbert, 111, 163 Sterne, Laurence, 5, 11, 13 Winsome, Mark, 93, 95, 96 Sullivan, J. P., 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143 Xenophon, 75 Superstition, 49, 66, 68, 150, 151 Sussman, Henry, 93 Zimmerman, Everett, 145, 148, 149 Swift, Jonathan: "An Argument Against