Mock-Epic Poetry: Pope to Heine by Ritchie Robertson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mock-Epic Poetry: Pope to Heine by Ritchie Robertson Blanford Parker Ritchie Robertson . Mock-Epic Poetry: Pope to Heine. New York : Oxford , 2009 . Pp. xvi + 441 . $110 . I have never been completely satisfied by schema that attempt to clarify the various modes of mockery—parody, travesty, mock-heroic, and the others. We know how satire works, though we may labor to explain its species. Mr. Robertson’s argument hinges on the idea that there is a constant if uneven development in satire that begins with mock-heroic and develops a greater and greater amorphous realism, which leads in the end to a blurring of [End Page 179] genre. The first great break in the progress of satire in the eighteenth century came with the extended mock-epic poem, and The Dunciad is the great exemplar. Pope moved from the elegant contrast between epic conventions and the quotidian world of Belinda in The Rape of the Lock to the heteroglossic tangle of The Dunciad. Mock-heroic here constitutes “a frigidly correct neoclassical poem,” while The Dunciad is an explosion of new imaginative energy. Pope’s battle with his enemies becomes an all-encompassing and obsessive project. It unconsciously elevates the lower register of satire—tradesmen, book-dealers, editors, astrologers, projectors, and the whole carnival of Grub Street. The line between high and low is obscured. Sometimes (we are told) the mock-epic grows up beside the older epic and sometimes it challenges its authority. I have one disagreement with this treatment of mock-heroic. As I have claimed elsewhere, The Rape of the Lock includes within it the romance novel of a later generation. First, there is a girl at court indulging in the leisure of the professional class. Second, there is the imposing figure of the rake. Third, there is the small event that causes a rupture in the seduction narrative. Belinda’s reaction to her loss of hair is psychological, not epical. She is the direct forebear of Burney’s heroines. For this reason I cannot accept a substantial break between the logic of mock-heroic poetry and the mock-epic which Mr. Robertson describes. He has some of the same problems all taxonomists of satire face. Because satire is an acidic genre (especially in the violent transition of the Enlightenment), it tended to flatten or defang the older humanist genres—particularly in the case of epic and pastoral. To be successful, the epic and the pastoral depend on a certain ethical attitude. In the case of epic it is the attitude of the classical fatalism of a military cult; in the case of pastoral it is the attitude of a first world—a world before the changes that constitute normal historical experience. For this reason, Mr. Robertson’s book is a helpful map. It shows us defections of classical genre brought on by satire and other forces with which it was allied. It shows us the whole complex of new literary types made possible by the supercessive character of Enlightened and Romantic discourse. In this sense, we may say that Voltaire’s La Pucelle, a text which Mr. Robertson reads with great dexterity, is an answer not only to the canons of neoclassical taste, but, and more forcefully, to the hagiographical narratives of the counter-Reformation. Perhaps it does not celebrate “a whole range of warm and sympathetic emotions,” but its attempt to replace the discourse of Christian asceticism with that of sexual passion is an adventure. The most telling of Mr. Robertson’s readings is his chapter on Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea. If we were to draw a line of development of the uses of mock epic from The Dunciad to the present (and Mr. Robertson goes so far as Kafka and Joyce), Goethe’s might be the most problematic text. It seems to be devoid not only of mock-epic parallelism, but of any satire at all. Mr. Robertson tells us that readers are divided as to what kind or degree of irony may be found in the text. I hold with those who see only a largely unintentional irony of Homeric prosody and imagery used to describe a modern sentimental situation. Mr...