MenSat

[DudiousMax at aol.com]

Frye, Northrop:  Anatomy of Criticism, p308 & ff.

               We remarked earlier that most people would call _Gulliver's 
Travels_ fiction but not a novel.  It must then be another form of fiction, 
as it certainly has a form, and we feel that we are turning from the novel to 
this form, whatever it is, when we turn from Rousseau's _Emile_ to Voltaire's 
_Candide_, or from Butler's _The Way Of All Flesh_ to the Erewhon books, or 
from Huxley's _Point Counterpoint_ to _Brave New World.  The form has its own 
traditions, and, as the examples of Butler and Huxley show, has preserved 
some integrity even under the ascendency of the novel.  Its existence is easy 
enough to demonstrate, and no one will challenge the statement that the 
literary ancestry of -Gulliver's Travels_ and _Candide_ runs through Rabelais 
and Erasmus to Lucian.  But while much has been said about the style and 
thought of Rabelais, Swift, and Voltaire, very little has been made of them 
as craftsmen working in a specific medium, a point no one dealing with a 
novelist would ignore.  Another great writer in this tradition, Huxley's 
master Peacock, has fared even worse, for his form not being understood, a 
general impression has grown up that his stuatus in the development of prose 
fiction is that of a slapdash eccentric.  Actually he is as exquisite and 
precise an artist in his medium as Jane Austen is in hers.
                The form used by these authors is the Menippean satire, also 
more rarely called the Varronian saitre, allegedly invented by a Greek cynic 
named Menippus.  His works are lost, but he had two great disciples, the 
Greek Lucian and the Roman Varro, and the tradition of Varro, who has not 
survived either except in fragments, appears to have developed out of verse 
satire through the practice of adding prose interludes, but we know it only 
as a prose form though one of its recurrent features (seen in Peacock) is the 
use of incidental verse.