Menippean satire

The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, usually in prose, that is characterized by attacking mental attitudes rather than specific individuals or entities. It has been broadly described as a mixture of allegory, picaresque narrative, and satirical commentary. Other features found in Menippean satire are different forms of parody and mythological burlesque, a critique of the myths inherited from traditional culture, a rhapsodic nature, a fragmented narrative, the combination of many different targets, and the rapid moving between styles and points of view.
The term is used by classical grammarians and by philologists mostly to refer to satires in prose (cf. the verse Satires of Juvenal and his imitators). Social types attacked and ridiculed by Menippean satires include "pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds," although they are addressed in terms of "their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior ... as mouthpieces of the idea they represent". Characterization in Menippean satire is more stylized than naturalistic, and presents people as an embodiment of the ideas they represent. The term Menippean satire distinguishes it from the earlier satire pioneered by Aristophanes, which was based on personal attacks.
The form is named after the third-century-BC Greek cynic parodist and polemicist Menippus. His works, now lost, influenced the works of Lucian (2nd century AD) and Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), the latter being the first to identify the genre by referring to his own satires as saturae menippeae; such satires are sometimes also termed Varronian satire. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the genre itself was in existence prior to Menippus, with authors such as Antisthenes (c. 446 – c. 366 BC), Heraclides Ponticus (c. 390 BC – c. 310 BC)) and Bion of Borysthenes (c. 325 – c. 250 BC).
Varro's own 150 books of Menippean satires survive only through quotations. The genre continued with Seneca the Younger, whose Apocolocyntosis, or "Pumpkinification", is the only near-complete classical Menippean satire to survive. It consisted in an irreverent parody of the deification of Emperor Claudius. The Menippean tradition is also evident in Petronius' Satyricon, especially in the banquet scene "Cena Trimalchionis", which combines epic form, tragedy, and philosophy with verse and prose. Both Satyricon and Apuleius' Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass), are Menippea "extended to the limits of the novel". The most complete picture of the genre in ancient times is to be found in the satires of Lucian. The influence of Menippean satire can be found in ancient Greek novels, in the Roman satires of Gaius Lucilius and Horace, and in early Christian literature, including the Gospels. Later examples include The Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius and The Caesars of Julian the apostate.
Bakhtin identifies a number of basic characteristics that distinguish Menippean satire from comparable genres in antiquity:
Despite the apparent heterogeneity of these characteristics, Bakhtin emphasizes the "organic unity" and the "internal integrity" of the genre. He argues that Menippean satire is the best expression and the truest reflection of the social-philosophical tendencies of the epoch in which it flowered. This was the epoch of the decline of national legend, the disintegration of associated ethical norms, and the concomitant explosion of new religious and philosophical schools vying with each other over "ultimate questions". The "epic and tragic wholeness of a man and his fate" lost its power as a social and literary ideal, and consequently social 'positions' became devalued, transformed into 'roles' played out in a theatre of the absurd. Bakhtin argues that the generic integrity of Menippean satire in its expression of a decentred reality is a quality that has enabled it to exercise an immense influence over the development of European novelistic prose.
According to Bakhtin, the cultural force that underpins the integrity and unity of Menippean satire as a genre, despite its extreme variability and the heterogeneity of its elements, is carnival. The genre epitomises the transposition of the "carnival sense of the world" into the language and forms of literature, a process Bakhtin refers to as Carnivalisation. Carnival as a social event is "syncretic pageantry of a ritualistic sort": its essential elements were common to a great diversity of times and places, and over time became deeply rooted in the individual and collective psyche. These elements revolved around the suspension of the laws, prohibitions and restrictions that governed the structure of ordinary life, and the acceptance and even celebration of everything that was hidden or repressed by that structure. The apparently heterogeneous characteristics of Menippean satire can, in essence, be traced back to the "concretely sensuous forms" worked out in the carnival tradition and the unified "carnival sense of the world" that grew out of them.
In a series of articles, Edward Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson, building upon Bakhtin's theory, have argued that Menippean is not a period-specific term, as many Classicists have claimed, but a term for discursive analysis that instructively applies to many kinds of writing from many historical periods including the modern. As a type of discourse, “Menippean” signifies a mixed, often discontinuous way of writing that draws upon distinct, multiple traditions. It is normally highly intellectual and typically embodies an idea, an ideology or a mind-set in the figure of a grotesque, even disgusting, comic character.
The form was revived during the Renaissance by Erasmus, Burton, and Laurence Sterne, while 19th-century examples include the John Buncle of Thomas Amory and The Doctor of Robert Southey. The 20th century saw renewed critical interest in the form, with Menippean satire significantly influencing postmodern literature. Among the works that contemporary scholars have identified as growing out of the Menippean tradition are:
According to P. Adams Sitney in "Visionary Film", Mennipea became the dominant new genre in avant-garde cinema at the turn of the century. Filmmakers he cited include Yvonne Rainer, Sidney Peterson, Michael Snow, and Hollis Frampton.
For Bakhtin, Menippean satire as a genre reached its summit in the modern era in the novels and short stories of Dostoevsky. He argues that all the characteristics of the ancient Menippea are present in Dostoevsky but in a highly developed and more complex form. This was not because Dostoevsky intentionally adopted and expanded it as a form: his writing was not in any sense a stylization of the ancient genre. Rather it was a creative renewal based in an instinctive recognition of its potential as a form through which to express the philosophical, spiritual and ideological ferment of his time. It could be said that "it was not Dostoevsky's subjective memory, but the objective memory of the very genre in which he worked, that preserved the peculiar features of the ancient menippea." The generic features of Menippean satire were the ground on which Dostoevsky was able to build a new literary genre, which Bakhtin calls Polyphony.
Critic Northrop Frye said that Menippean satire moves rapidly between styles and points of view. Such satires deal less with human characters than with the single-minded mental attitudes, or "humours", that they represent: the pedant, the braggart, the bigot, the miser, the quack, the seducer, etc. Frye observed,
He illustrated this distinction by positing Squire Western (from Tom Jones) as a character rooted in novelistic realism, but the tutors Thwackum and Square as figures of Menippean satire.
Frye found the term Menippean satire to be "cumbersome and in modern terms rather misleading", and proposed as replacement the term anatomy (taken from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy). In his theory of prose fiction it occupies the fourth place with the novel, romance and confession.