The Augustan Attack on the Pun

I want to explain my approach to this topic by sketching what I take to be three main ways in which the pun has been discussed and historicized in recent times. The first may be represented by Walter Redfern’s Puns, in which Redfern is interested in what puns tell us about innate features of human character and psychology, and in the kinds of universal human situations wherein they are typically used. ¹ Puns, he says, “are a latent resource of language, and certain temperaments simply will not resist trying to mine and exploit this rich ore, because (like Everest) it is there” (p. 9). These temperaments he associates with qualities such as antiauthoritarian dispositions, or creative (as opposed to scientific) mental outlooks, and he deems them especially susceptible to punning in situations of relaxation, illness, dreams, moments of poetic and scientific intuition, and contexts of playfulness or dissatisfaction. How does Redfern deal with punning as a historical phenomenon? Not very well, since his interest in innate qualities and universal conditions tends to reduce actual history to cliché. The Augustan period, for instance, is characterized in the usual negative way as gripped by “the classical straightjacket, the distaste for the mixture of genres, the obsession with high seriousness” (p. 51). And so Augustan punning becomes explicable as the reactions of individuals of a certain temperament against a fixed, authoritarian, scientific status quo, a reaction both playful and subversive; while attacks on the pun issue from a dominant power base riddled with distastes and obsessions.

A second approach is usefully represented by a group of essays edited by Jonathan Culler called On Puns. ² This collection is not interested in innate or universal human traits, but in the nature of the pun itself, and particularly in how the pun exposes the slippery and endlessly referring play of language as a whole. Like Culler, Derek Attridge sees the history of the pun since the seventeenth century as one of exclusion:

The pun remains an embarrassment to be marginalized or controlled by relegation to the realms of the infantile, the jocular, the literary. It survives, tenaciously, as freak or accident, hindering what is taken to be the function of language: the clean transmission of a pre-existing, self-sufficient, unequivocal meaning.

(On Puns, p. 140)

According to this view, a recurring myth of history is that language (and hence the structures of reality that we describe using language) is stable and transparent. The pun complicates this myth, forces it to be inspected. But note how agentless this perspective is; there are no people here, only “the pun” versus “what is taken to be the function of language.” The need to marginalize or control the pun is presumably what lies behind Augustan attacks on punning, according to Attridge; but that need is not easily associated with any particular social or political group. This is history at its most generalized and thinly populated level.

The third approach to the pun and history is that taken by more traditional literary critics, interested in the punning of individual authors in their literary, historical, and philosophical context. As an instance of this approach I have used an essay by David Nokes entitled ‘“Hack at Tom Poley’s’: Swift’s Use of Puns.” ³ Nokes investigates what puns do specifically in the works of his author, asking what their intellectual context and rhetorical point is, and demonstrating how they work to satirize or to win arguments. Criticism is concerned with specific literary functions, as the active verbs of the following typical sentences show:

Pun performs the Scriblerian trick of revealing the interdependence of the bathos and the sublime.

Puns dam up the easy flow of the currencies of finance and language by insisting that they bear the full freight of objects for which they circulate as ciphers.

The homophonic puns are functional, travestying classical and heroic dignity by a sexual or scatological reduction. Other examples...travesty polysyllabic or technical terms.... ⁴

Throughout, puns are handled as one rhetorical tool in the writer’s repertoire. What this approach does not take account of, however, is the fact that...