MenSat IV

[DudiousMax at aol.com]

Continuing p. 311

                 This creative treatment of exhaustive erudition is the 
organizing principle of the greatest Menippean satire in English before 
Swift, Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_.  Here human society is studied in 
terms of the intellectual pattern provided by the conception of melancholy, a 
symposium of books replaces dialogue, and the result is the most 
comprehensive survey of human life in one book that English literature had 
seen since Chaucer, one of Burton's favorite authors.  We may note in passing 
the Utopia in his introduction and his "digressions," which when examined 
turn out to be scholarly distillations of Menippean forms: the digression of 
air, of the marvelous journey; the digression of spirits, of the ironic use 
of erudition; the digression of the miseries of scholars, of the satire on 
the _philosophus gloriosus_.  The word "anatomy" in Burton's title means a 
dissection or analysis, and expresses very accurately the intellectualized 
approach of his form.  We may as well adopt it as a convenient name to 
replace the cumbersome and in modern times rather misleading "Menippean 
satire."
                The anatomy, or course, eventually begins to merge with the 
novel, producing various hybrids including the _roman a these_ and novels in 
which the characters are symbols of social or other ideas, like the 
proletarian novels of the thirties in this century.  It was Sterne, however, 
the disciple of Burton and Rabelais, who combined them with greatest success. 
 _Tristram Shandy_ may be, as was said at the beginning, a novel, but the 
digressing narrative, the catalogues, the stylizing of character along 
"humor" lines, the marvellous journey of the great nose, the symposium 
discussions, and the constant ridicule of philosophers and pedantic critics 
are all features that belong to the anatomy.
                A clearer understanding of the form and traditions of the 
anatomy would make a good many elements in the history of literature come 
into focus.  Boethius' _Consolation of Philosophy_, with its dialogue form, 
its verse interludes and its pervading tone of contemplative irony, is a pure 
anatomy, a fact of considerable importance for the understanding of its vast 
influence.  _The Compleat Angler_ is an anatomy because of its mixture of 
prose and verse, its rural _cena_ setting, its dialogue form, its 
deipnosophistical interest in food, and its gentle Menippean raillery of a 
society which considers everything more important than fishing and yet has 
discovered very few better things to do.  In nearly every period of 
literature there are many romances, confessions, and anatomies that are 
neglected only because the categories to which they belong are 
unrecognized....    
                                             Max