Satirical Subgenres: Formal Verse, Menippean, and Scriblerian Practices

Written at December 30, 2023 on English with a size of 3.31 KB.

Satirical subgeneres:

Formal verse satire (dialogue with “adversarius”, or restrainer, like Arbuthnot) [problem of unity and method]. Traditional form from Greece and Rome with a polish attack on a vice. The interlocutor is an instrument for balancing the attitude of the satirist. However, it is very limited; these are just short poems on different human vices.

Menippean

(mixed) [Anatomy (Frye): ideas] [other genre problems: mode, genre or borrower of forms / humour- comic / comedy / parody / mock-heroic]. It is a more fashionable kind of genre without definite form. You adapt to any other existing genre or to non-genre in particular. It can be found anywhere: poem, novel, epic… It uses a double attack: against vices and against conventions of that particular genre (JS: novel).

Scriblerian practices

[more ambitious]. Pope, Gay, Swift and Arbuthnot, brilliant satirists, usually met themselves and they decided to write a common work depicting a typical modern author, such as Daniel Defoe, “The Memories of Martinus Scriblerus”.

System satires: they were a critic to ambition, happiness and optimism of modern world. They were more sceptical about how good the Modern World was.
Contamination of spheres: politics (whigs) – religion (puritans) – aesthetic principles (modern commercial genres) – class loyalties (middle classes)
Use of genres to subvert them: comic epic poems, opera (John Gay)

ROBINSON CRUSOE & LEMUEL GULLIVER

Adventurers with similar (modern) personalities. Both are modern, middle class, progressive, business-like sailors.

Difference 1: Style & taste of inner life. We can usually predict and know the characters as if he were our friend in novels.

LG’s prose is flat and solid. He is never very happy or very sad. Gulliver is just an instrument for satire for Swift. His personal evolution is just for the cohesion of the narrative, not for a psychological intention. He did not believe in that. GT is a work about political satire, not about an individual’s adventures.
RC’s prose is exploratory / authentic processes of discovery and reactions.

Difference 2: Spiritual dimension as central theme

LG: Fortune to be thanked (or not, but Lemuel is not affected). Things do not have a particular meaning for him.
RC: relationship with God (including vengeance, or punishment) is the topic. He narrates his life in order to produce a topic, his personal transformation into a good Christian.

Robinson Crusoe

First Original Sin: Disobedience: he disobeys his father when his father advices RC to be a lawyer and he decides to be a sailor. His punishment is his ship taking by pirates and him living as a slave in Morocco. Subsequent events interpreted as punishment.

Second Original Sin: Excessive ambition / unlimited desire to accumulate. Subsequent events interpreted as punishment. Several neighbours and colleagues agree to have slaves to make more money. In order to save money, they decide to go by themselves to Africa by hiring a ship, take the slaves and go back to Brazil. As Crusoe is a sailor, he becomes their captain.

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