Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature by Henry Power (review)

Henry Power’s Epic into Novel presents a subtle and energetic account of Henry Fielding’s three best-known fictions. The first half tells an interesting story about Augustan mock-heroic, with lively discussions of Swift, Gay, and Pope, but does not, in my view, quite come up to the ambitious scope of its title. The story is also both larger and smaller than its somewhat overburdened subtitle suggests. Larger, because Fielding does not altogether bear the weight of the historical process of which he is presented as the culminating figure. Smaller, because the book’s boundaries are probably best understood as narrower, and perhaps somewhat other, than the sweeping critique of consumerism implied in the phrase “Consumption of Classical Literature,” punningly pursued throughout the book in the service of a narrative of the past in a language of more recent cultural preoccupations. The neon-lit blinking of the buzzword “consumption” often occludes more interesting aspects of a work under discussion. It is also the flipside of the subtitle’s unfashionable mention of “Scriblerian Satire,” paraded in the face of a current orthodoxy that holds there was no such thing.

Power offers a well-documented demonstration that there was indeed such a thing, of sufficient importance and mass to legitimize the topic, and adds a compelling account of Fielding’s live relation to it. But Power is periodically stopped in his tracks by a nonexistent need to apologize for the term, whose appearance in the subtitle betrays a nervous defiance of trendiness that offsets the aplomb of the trendy “consumption.” The book explores the tension, in the authors discussed, between traditional classical allegiances and a modern world of commercialized print culture and decadent luxury. The nostalgia for classical order and simplicity, supposedly embodied in their highest form in Homeric epic, coexisted uneasily but productively with a dislike of this modern culture, which the Augustan satirists deplored while being variously caught up in the phenomena they repudiated. Cookery, eating, and overeating form a central theme, from the simple repasts of Homeric heroes to the erotic feasting and narrative bills of fare of Fielding’s novels.

The loss of epic as a genuine form of expression in a non-heroic age is a more or less overt concern of all Power’s authors. This concern underlies the flowering of a mock-heroic tradition that aspires to mimic the old genre under cover of an irony that does not undermine it. Some would argue that Alexander Pope came closest to achieving this in the Dunciad (1728), whose parody of high epic is constantly striving for a gravitas that matches the primary originals, and whose modern culmination is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), where the protective cover of a mockery, which Pope did not feel able to jettison, is finally abandoned. This was not Fielding’s way, but it is in Fielding’s novels that Power sees a different kind of epic realization in a modern world.

An instructive example of the transition Power explores in earlier satirists occurs in John Gay’s Trivia (1716). This retells Virgil’s story of Orpheus in Georgics IV, described by Power as “the single most celebrated and imitated account of poetic creation in the Western canon” (85). The severed head of Virgil’s Orpheus floats on the river, uttering three times the name of Eurydice. In Gay’s poem, an apple-seller called Doll goes on “crying” her Pippins in a triad, after she too loses her head, falling through the ice of the frozen Thames, where tradesmen have set their stalls, “the ultimate triumph of commerce over nature”: “And Pip-Pip-Pip along the Ice resounds.” Power argues that Orpheus, “the archetypal poet,” is reincarnated as Gay’s street-seller, entranced by her own vending cries, which, unlike the words of Virgil’s poet, are uttered...