V2nd - chapter 11 - more examples - Bastardized?

[alice wellintown]

Although I disagree, ever so slightly with Frye's characterization of
Romance here and I would, of course, argue that American Romance as
practiced by Pynchon and Melville ...is not of the same tradition that
Frye describes, not European, but he describes V..

We can dicker with the terms abit here, but this is an excellent
description of Stencil and V..
The detective, the quest, the confession, the tragic episodes with the
devine comedy...so on...not a detective story or a drama...not oedipus
or slade.

We have, of course, and Moby-Dick is the best example, a tragic play
within the comic romance, but the tragedy of Ahab doesn't make
Moby-Dick a tragicomedy or a drama at all.


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, and differs from
the novel in its characterization, which is stylized 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
[309] 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.