MenSat II

[DudiousMax at aol.com]

Continuing on p. 309

                The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with 
mental attitudes.  Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, 
rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms 
of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social 
behavior.  The Menippean satire thus resembles the confession in its ability 
to handle abstract ideas and theories, rather than naturalistic, and presents 
people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent.  Here again no sharp 
boundary lines can or should be drawn, but if we compare a character in Jane 
Austen with a similar character in Peacock we can immediately feel the 
difference between the two forms.  Squire Western belongs to the novel, but 
Thwackum and Square have Menippean blood in them.  A constant theme in the 
tradition is the ridicule of the _philosophus gloriosus_, already discussed.  
The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean 
satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect, as a kind of maddened 
pedantry which the _philosophus gloriosus_ at once symbolizes and defines.
                Petronius, Apuleius, Rabelais, Swift, and Voltaire all use a 
loose-jointed narrative form often confused with the romance.  It differs 
from the romance, however (though there is a strong admixture of romance in 
Rabelais), as it is not primarily concerned with the exploits of heroes, but 
relies on the free play of intellectual fancy and the kind of humorous 
observation that produces caricature.  It differs also from the picaresque 
form, which has the novel's interest in the actual structure of society.  At 
its most concentrated the Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the 
world in terms of a single intellectual pattern.  The intellectual structure 
built up from the story makes for violent dislocations in the customary logic 
of narrative, though the appearance of carelessness that results reflects 
only the carelessness of the reader or his tendency to judge by a 
novel-centered conception of fiction.
                The word "satire," in Roman and Renaissance times, meant 
either of two specific literary forms of that name, one (this one) prose and 
the other verse.  Now it means a structural principle or attitude, what we 
have called a _Mythos_.  In the Menippean satires we have been discussing, 
the name of the form also applies to the combination of fantasy and morality. 
 But as the name of a form, the term satire, though confined to literature 
(for as a _mythos_ it may appear in any art, a cartoon, for example), is more 
flexible, and can be either entirely fantastic or entirely moral.  The 
Menippean adventure story may thus be pure fantasy, as it is in the literary 
fairy tale.  The Alice books are perfect Menippean satires, and so is _The 
Water-Babies_, which has been influenced by Rabelais.  The purely moral type 
is a serious vision of society as a single intellectual pattern, in other 
words a Utopia.