Parody/Satire

Abstract

Satiric narratives have been crucial for the development of novelistic forms in the West; Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra'sDon Quixote(1605, 1615) provides the paradigmatic instance of this relation between satire and novel. Nevertheless, satire stands in a vexed relation to novelistic forms. They may be closely related, but there is a general consensus that satires such as Jonathan Swift'sGulliver's Travels(1726) differ from novels in their typical plot, treatment of character, and mode of representation: generally, the interior life of characters in satires is not available as it is in most novels; satires also tend to conclude inconclusively, without a change in the condition of the world that led to their composition (Kernan); finally, satires do not provide the same level of verisimilitude in the detailed depiction of objects (but may employ long and wildly heterogeneous lists instead). Although these distinctions may seem well established, they would not be accepted by Mikhailbakhtin, one of the foremost theorists of novelistic forms, whose extremely expansive understanding of novels encompasses almost any long fictional narrative (except epic), including ancient Greek romances, thousand‐page‐long seventeenth‐century French romances, and satires such as François Rabelais'sGargantuaandPantagruel(1532–52), as well as eighteenth‐, nineteenth‐, and twentieth‐century novels of contemporary life, bildungsromane, and historical novels. Bakhtin considers the romances and psychologically realistic narratives to belong to one line or tradition of the novel and parodie satires to be characteristic of a second line. Individual fictional narratives can be placed along a spectrum on which the two types approach each other: William Makepeace Thackeray'sVanity Fair(1848) is a novel with strong and sustained satiric implications, while Gustave Flaubert'sBouvard et Pécuchet(1881) is a satiric narrative with some novelistic features.