Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (review)

Coming almost half a century after Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) renewed scholarly interest in Menippean satire, this book purports to supply a theoretical correction to the current understanding of the term. But the title is misleading. In fact, in a remarkable instance of practical criticism, Weinbrot applies a 'strategic hypothesis' about Menippean satire to a number of generically complex seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works of prose and verse. His primary focus is eighteenth-century English literature (notably Swift, Pope, and Richardson) but the book draws upon classical and French sources for intertextual purposes. Weinbrot begins by subjecting selected ancient Menippean works to analysis, both to test the hypothesis and to contribute fuller nuance to his treatment of later works. The practice is unusual, and it makes for some heavy sleddingin the opening chapters, where we are meant to take the hypothesison faith, and in which we are eager to doubt either Weinbrot's method or his self-assured tone. Midway through, we begin to experience a conversion, dazzled by the book's organization, the author's erudition, his detailed consideration of complex and subtle matters, and his good instincts.

Weinbrot's strategic hypothesis is that 'Menippean satire uses at least two other genres, languages, historical or cultural periods, or changes of voice to oppose a threatening false orthodoxy.' In his opinion, it is not Menippean satire if it does not seek to combat a dangerous or false orthodoxy. On the face of it, this provides for a much simpler understanding of the satire than Bakhtin's, to which Weinbrot gives particular attention. The simplicity, however, may be the illusory product of the author's craft. For example, what constitutes false orthodoxy is debatable. Weinbrot applies the term to political, religious, and literary fields of dispute. He seems indifferent to the philosophical terrain of Menippean satire – in particular its longstanding identification with Cynicism. One of the more thought-provoking treatments of the subject in the last decade was Branham and Goulet-Cazé's The Cynics: The Cynic Movement and its Legacy (1996), a book not mentioned here. Weinbrot discusses the reception of Menippus, whose works are lost, but there is no reference to Diogenes the Cynic, who was an especially popular fictionalized expression of Menippeanism throughout the Renaissance, and whose famous tub had widespread implications. Weinbrot does not draw a conclusion as to whether philosophies may be considered false orthodoxies simply for being positivist. The matter is important, for what are we to make of satires questioning human capacity to know anything for certain? On the answer to such a question will rest our conclusions as to whether Erasmus' Praise of Folly or Montaigne's 'Apologie pour Raymond Sebond' are Menippean satires. The former may be easily admitted, perhaps, as a work of fiction. And, of course, Erasmus wrote in a cultural context of disputed religious orthodoxies that played a major role in the conception of the work. Montaigne's essays are more difficult to pin down.

Weinbrot properly stresses the mixedness of Menippean satire. In so doing, he half-skirts the question of genre or mode. His hypothesis allows for it to be a genre inasmuch as it is self-consciously 'generic'; it allows for it to be a mode inasmuch as it reflects critical dispositions. He identifies two 'tones' that serve to define its dynamic range: the severe and the muted. He is untroubled by the mixture of prose and verse found in most of the ancient Menippean texts, and this is reflected in the mixed bag of works he discusses. The mixedness, rather, may derive from historical or cultural alienation supplied by the satire's use of distorted foreign subjects for the context at hand – what Weinbrot sees as the uneasy relationship between text and subtext. Another way of putting it is that the satire is fundamentally mimetic (a point repeatedly made about Cynicism in The Cynics); it is perspective art, whose points of reference...