Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century by Howard D. Weinbrot

Abstract

113 of those writings and to say why at least some of Defoe’s early works should continue to be read by nonspecialists,’’ which is the void that his book fills. On the vexed question of attributions of anonymous works to Defoe, Mr. Richetti employs the evenhanded strategy of accepting as Defoe’s those titles that Furbank and Owens regard as ‘‘probable’’ and that Novak considers as certainly by Defoe. He assumes, with Novak, that Defoe took a hand in Applebee’s Weekly Journal, but is cautious in his use of that connection. He is even gently witty at the expense of his subject, remarking of one of Defoe’s pamphlets that the effect of reading it is ‘‘rather like Ravel’s ‘Bolero,’ intense, relentless, and at length annoying.’’ This is an urbane, wellinformed , and interesting account, not only of Defoe but of the entire Defoe enterprise . Geoffrey Sill Rutgers University-Camden HOWARD D. WEINBROT. Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2005. Pp. xvi ⫹ 375. $60. Since Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and the translation of the work of M. M. Bakhtin into English in the 1980s, ‘‘Menippean satire’’ has become the genre of genres to literary studies. The variety, inclusivity, and mimicry of Menippean satire has made this a most convenient label for works that refuse to fit easily into any other generic category. Mr. Weinbrot feels that we have reached a point at which the question of what isn’t a Menippean satire has rendered the term less than useful. He considers the origins of Menippean satire in Greek and Latin antiquity, its continuation in the Renaissance (represented by the French Satyre Ménippée and its English translation) and the reception of this tradition in eighteenth-century Britain. After laying this groundwork briefly, the bulk of this study essentially considers four major English works published between 1704 and 1748 (the exception being a chapter on Boileau’s 1674 Art Poëtique and its English reception): Swift’s complete A Tale of a Tub volume, Pope’s An Essay on Criticism and The Dunciad, and Richardson ’s Clarissa. While these chapters are substantial and draw on many lesser works of the period, including responses to the major works, this is an extremely narrow canon by which to define a genre—especially one as sprawling as Mr. Weinbrot ’s own major exemplars suggest it to be. Nevertheless, Mr. Weinbrot explicitly narrows the Menippean canon by both formal and moral measures: Menippean satire is ‘‘a kind of satire that uses at least two different languages, genres, tones, or cultural or historical periods to combat a false and threatening orthodoxy.’’ Thus, formally, Mr. Weinbrot posits two ‘‘tones,’’ or degrees , of Menippean satire—‘‘severe’’ and ‘‘muted’’—and four modes: Menippean satire by addition, by genre, by annotation, and, in a special case that recognizes the presence of Menippean satire within a work of a recognizably different genre, Menippean satire by incursion. The eighteenth-century texts that constitute the bulk of the book’s subject matter are mapped out according to this grid. This formal definition is quite capacious—subject to hybrid combinations of different varieties and tones, and, in its last variety, as open to symbiotic (or parasitic) relationships to 114 ‘‘host’’ genres as Bakhtin could ever wish. In moralizing his song, Mr. Weinbrot imposes significant limitations upon the genre: ‘‘It is a genre for serious people who see serious trouble and want to do something about it.’’ Some of the customary exemplars of the tradition are thus ‘‘banished’’ as ‘‘non-Menippean pleasures.’’ Apuleius and Sterne are dismissed in four pages for ‘‘having too much fun to be gloomy,’’ but also absent are Rabelais and Cervantes, and even the fantastic narratives of Lucian (whose Dialogues of the Dead are admitted). It is in its denial of pleasure that this definition of Menippean satire is most radical. Mr. Weinbrot has spent a long and learned career articulating a vision of formal verse satire in the eighteenth century. He finds in Horace, Juvenal, and Persius the exemplary pattern of blame and praise and the positive norm by which the satirist judges society and recommends change. Menippean satire...