Satire in the WL

[Terence]

Thomas,  thanks for your comments. 

"Who are we working for?  M&D

In V., one question asked, is, will you sell out your people
or the human race? 

When we get to the plastic surgeon, we will read: 


"
They will sell out the human race." 

And  

 "the Westchester in the sky where all God's elect, soon or
late, ended up." 

This satire seems to have a target and it seems to suggest
reform, but does it? 

Have you read Steven Weisenburger's Fables of Subversion,
Satire and the American Novel? 

We might consider some of the questions raised by his work
as we read V. 

What is the Object of attack? The target? 

What does it seek to correct? Is it corrective? 

Satire? 

What is it? Is it a  literary work which belittles or
savagely attacks its subject?
Is satire  an  artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic,
in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or
shortcomings are  held up to censure by means of ridicule,
derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, sometimes with
an intent to bring about improvement? 

What is the distinction, sometimes made between direct and
indirect satire? 

What does it say in my handy Penguin Dictionary of Literary
Terms And Literary Theory. The Third Edition is the one I
have in front of me.  Samuel Johnson sits slouching on its
cover, his portly self, his pink, pig like fist over a page.
The entry for the term Satire is six pages. 

Johnson is quoted on the first page and Swift provides his
now famous definition:

"Satyr is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally
discover everybody's Face but their own."
		--Swift, preface to "Battle of the Books" 

See also, Caricature, Invective, Lampoon, Menippean Satire,
Utopia, 

Moreover, we could include other important terms, say
Personification and Pathetic Fallacy. 

If you have a Classical Literature Companion or Classical
Dictionary and you look up Satire you will find quite a
different entry. 

Here's something on Augustan Satire:  

The term preeminently associated with Augustan literature,
"satire" derives from the
Latin word satura, meaning a medley or mixture--a paella, a
mixed dish, which
Horace used for a genre of poetry he took up from others.
The term is not, in fact,
related to the Greek word satyr..
See Britannica for an excellent Introduction: 

Old  Irish literature is laced with accounts of the
extraordinary power of the poets, whose satires brought
disgrace and even death to their victims:

     . . . saith [King] Lugh to his poet, "what power can
you wield in battle?"

     "Not hard to say," quoth Carpre. . . ."I will satirize
them, so that through the spell of my art they  will not
resist warriors."

-- "The Second Battle of Moytura," trans. by W. Stokes,
Revue Celtique, XII [1891], 52-130.)

 According to saga, when the Irish poet uttered a satire
against his victim, three blisters would appear on the 
victim's cheek, and he would die of shame. One story will
serve as illustration: after Deirdriu of the Sorrows came 
to her unhappy end, King Conchobar fell in love again--this
time with the lovely Luaine. They were to be married;  but,
when the great poet Aithirne the Importunate and his two
sons (also poets) saw Luaine, they were overcome  with
desire for her. They went to Luaine and asked her to sleep
with them. She refused. The poets threatened to  satirize
her. And the story says:

     The damsel refused to lie with them. So then they made
three satires on her, which left three blotches on her
cheeks, to wit, Shame and Blemish and Disgrace . . . .
Thereafter the damsel died of shame. . . .

     ("The Wooing of Luaine . . . ," trans. by  W. Stokes,
Revue Celtique, XXIV [1903], 273-85.)

 An eminent 20th-century authority on these matters adduces
linguistic, thematic, and other evidence to show a 
functional relation between primitive "satire," such as that
of Carpre and Aithirne, and the "real" satire of more 
sophisticated times. Today, among various preliterate
peoples the power of personal satire and ridicule is 
appalling; among the Ashanti of West Africa, for example,
ridicule is (or was recently) feared more than almost  any
other humanly inflicted punishment, and suicide is
frequently resorted to as an escape from its terrors. 
Primitive satire such as that described above can hardly be
spoken of in literary terms; its affiliations are rather
with the magical incantation and the curse.

In all the works that Campbellkim notes, the satiric element
(he did not make the argument for genre classification) that
involves an Ironic interpenetration of the animate and
inanimate is a important feature. 

Frye is helpful, Weisenburger begins with Frye,  Mendelson
on GR and all those that replied to him. The most important
one I have mentioned and posted quotations from is the Eliot
Braha Dissertation, where he identifies the 15 plus elements
of MS in TRP's work. 

Posted a year back: 


"Thank you for calling Central Services. This has not been a
recording" [Repeat five times and hand up the phone].
--BraZil  

Here is something you may or may not find helpful: 

Here is a condensed list of  Hohmann's take on the "Modern
Menippean Satire" of GR. He combines, Frye, Mendelson,
Bakhtin, and Eliot
Braha (Braha's dissertation, "Menippean Form in GR and Other
Contemporary American Texts." Diss. Columbia Univ. 1979). 

 
1) Carnival
2) quest-motif serves to test philosophical truths
3) the trilevelled construction of "earth," a "nether world"
and an "olympus" 
4) dissolution or merging of identities, in particular, the
motif of the double.
5) extraordinary freedom of philosophical invention within
the plot
6) combination of free fantasy, symbolism and --on
occasion--the mystical religious element with the crude
naturalism of low life
7) the concern with ultimate philosophical positions
8) the experimental fantasticality in the handling of
perspective which can imperceptibly shift from ant's to
bird's view
9) eccentric or scandalous behaviour--spectacular
stomach-turning passages
10) utopian--or, to be more accurate, dystopian--elements of
the quest motif
11) the juxtaposition of items normally distant, often in
oxymoronic combinations
12) the parody of various genres and the mixture of prose
and verse diction
13) the variety of styles
15) topicality and publicistic quality--WWII novel that
illustrates ideological issues of the 1960s

Now this may be of no use to you at all or it may be a bunch
of lit-crit terms. I'll provide an example of any of these
from GR and or several other books if you are interested and
I will explain any term you ask me to define. 

Do you need to know any of this to read GR? NO! Will it
help? It might. Will it hurt? It might, and this is one of
the reasons some teachers of literature advise against
reading lit-crit. 

I would be interested in a discussion of satire in V. that
includes Weisenburger's  Fables of Subversion.   Chapter
Five, "Encyclopedic Satires" opens with a reply to Mendelson
et al. Also, while I'm thinking of it, Mendelson's
Collection of Critical Essays, 1978, the one that has Pig
Bodine pulling the drunk "what's his  name" up to the fire
escape by the pants, has an essay by Michael Seidel, "The
Satiric Plots of Gravity's Rainbow." 

 I don't insist on Genre, really. However, I think it is
simply too helpful to ignore. It has been for me anyway. But
I know that we have an eclectic bunch here, and some will
disapprove, and they will be right to, if I start putting
Aristotelian boxes in my posts and forcing Pynchon's novels
into them. I would not do this, in fact I don't think anyone
can, but there are huge benefits to the type of approach I
have followed from the books of Weisenburger, Mendelson,
Kharpertian, and so on. 

I think if we put The Waste Land on the table we will run
into trouble. It's a big poem as you well know and we could
get way away from V.
Anyway, I think we agree that satire is an element of the
poem, that the inanimate/animate interpenetration is
present. 

HoD may not be an ideal text for this discussion either. The
Secret Agent might be better, but I would prefer to stick to
Pynchon here. 

Nänny, Max. "The Waste Land: A Menippean Satire?" English
Studies 66.6
(1985): 526-535. 

However, I thank you for providing some terms and
definitions for framing and focusing the discussion here. 

On Platonic Virtue: 

The world of Platonic ideas, if it is one thing more
than another, is a world of values. Shining in implacable
eternal beauty, it constitutes a metaphysician's dream of
order amid the harassing and perplexing confusions of the
world of experience. For though Socrates in the Parmenides
is made to admit that in strict logic there must be Ideas,
also, of mud and hair and dust and dirt, as well as of
Beauty,
Goodness, and Truth, he makes the admission reluctantly.
"What," as Professor Dewey suggests, "is the realm of
ideas in Plato, but the realm of things with all their im-
perfections removed." It is a universe constituted out of
the purified essences of the heart's desire. It is a realm
of
changelessness for a heart saddened by the spectacle of in-
evitable change. It is order for a mind perturbed by a
night-
mare of endless chaos. It is the cosmos of reason of which
one may have a glimpse in any thing of beauty, in any
item of clarity. in the turbulent regions here below the
moon.
It is the pattern which the mind of man may come to know,
and the life of man and of society within limits exemplify
and follow.
For in addition to being a metaphysician and a poet,
Plato was also, perhaps above all, a moralist. He was not
a moralizer. He was a moralist in the grand architectonic
sense of believing that it was possible to educate men, at
least a small group of philosophic spirits, to a disciplined
knowledge of reality, as contrasted with veering opinions
about appearance; in the light and by the guidance of
that steady vision of the truth, they could bring to being
on earth something like a realization, at least a decent ap-
proximation of the divine pattern of the   good. Plato's
whole
enterprise, taken in the total context of the dialogues,
might
be said to be that of indicating how the Good Life might
be lived. The whole body of the Platonic writings aims
to define the Good Life, to define it, not in a formula, but
in a series of suggestions, converging around the ideas of
unity, consistency and validity in the individual soul, and
in that co-operation of souls which is Society or the State.
The Early Socratic dialogues indicate the insistence of
Plato, here closely fo11owing his master, on the identity of
virtue and knowledge.

Gnosticism has Dualism. Jewish Mysticism does not, but both
have an Elect. What about Catholic mysticism? What about the
Anabaptists? 

>From V. and Ulysses
 
"They believe, I believe, that whatever your father is, as
long as your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish too because we
all come from our mother's womb. A long unbroken chain of
Jewish mothers going all the way back to Eve."









"One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life.
Creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth
with ta trailing navel cord, hushed in rooty wool. The cords
of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That
is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your
omphalos. Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph,
alpha; nought, nought, one."