Infernal Repetition

Comic anticlimax in a work’s finale, as we have seen in chapter 8, assuredly undercuts the fiction and aggravates the reader’s expectations. As a matter of fact, authors of the satiric grotesque are just as apt to situate anticlimax everywhere in a plot, inserting a clutter of seemingly mindless repetitions in their narratives, arranging insidious circularities in their storylines. In fact, the most deplorable kind of plotting—frustrating for the reader, terrible for the characters—is the kind that engineers duplication, redundancy, reiteration. The same grooves, tracks, and scenarios inevitably recur, and the major character is inevitably stuck in it. This might seem comic and amusing at first, but at its worst it suggests a hellish eternal repetition.

One of the great ludicrous moments in literature occurs in Milton’s Paradise Lost, when Satan makes his furious, resolute attempt at flight, after the Fall, across the immense distance from hell to the newly created earth:

Flutt’ring his pennons vain plumb down he drops

Ten thousand fadom deep . . .

[until] by . . . chance

The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud

. . . hurried him

As many miles aloft: that fury stay’d

Quencht in a Boggy Syrtis, neither Sea,

Nor good dry Land, nigh founder’d on he fares,

Treading the crude consistence, half on foot,

Half flying; behoves him now both Oar and Sail.

So eagerly the fiend

O’er bog and deep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,

With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,

And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.¹

This hapless Satan is juggled and buffeted along what proves to be the greatest distance between two points. Furthermore, the increasing pauses and word lists and the breakdown of poetic rhythm toward the end imitate the dizzying, anfractuous, sea-sickening trip. Repetition and near-chaos amusingly spell disaster for the Evil One’s affected decorum, presumptuous seriousness, and smooth sailing.

Similarly, Chaucer masterfully portrays his characters’ ”bisinesse”: a kind of fevered and febrile flourish of activity that often gets such characters nowhere at all. One thinks of the marital manipulations and argumentative squabblings of the Wife of Bath, of the loud, avaricious, and boastful Pardoner, of the drunken Miller, a “stout carl” bagpiping away and fronting the procession, or of Chaucer himself, captive and hapless in an endless fit of rhyming about Sir Thopas. Perhaps the Canterbury pilgrimage in its entirety—set in constant motion in a meaningless direction—represents just such blustering activity. Certainly an excellent exemplar of such “bisinesse” is “handy Nicholas,” the confidential clerk of “The Miller’s Tale.” In order to bring off a mere assignation and swift sexual encounter with the more-than-willing Alison and to beguile her carpenter husband, he must obsessively invent a fantastic scenario of Rube Goldberg–like eventualities: Nicholas must take to his bed at great length in mock illness, prophesy the Second Flood, and set the husband building and provisioning no less than three skiffs before he will consent to come at sexual congress. One has to chuckle at such a representation of intellectual and professorial types, who are driven to scamper about and hoist miles of hypotheses and entire grids of conjectures merely to be able to pronounce their arrival at “structuralism” or—worse yet—move along to the business of deconstruction.

Another handsome case of hyperactivity is Richardson’s Lovelace, that monumental hellish rake who has to expend an infinitude of time and muster more ingenuity than the Creator merely to seduce the waspish, priggish little Clarissa. With incessant role-playing and frenetic vigor (not unlike Nabokov’s demented Humbert) he roars about London, calculating and inveigling furiously: “Here have I been [he tells us] at work, dig, dig, dig, like a cunning miner, at one time, and spreading my snares, like an artful fowler, at another, and exulting in my contrivances to get this . . . creature absolutely into my power.” Like a madman, he schemes to have prostitutes assume the guise of his sister, to have churlish hirelings dress as seamen, and he himself at one point hobbles about, posturing as a goutish old man. For indeed Lovelace is willing to convert all the world into melodramatic theater simply that he might stage his “production.” As he unwinds his perpetual plot, he boasts and tootles: “Stand by, varlets—Tantara-ra-ra! Veil your bonnets, and confess your master!” He is hunter and player and orchestra in the pit. Elsewhere, he is a Proteus, a chameleon, an emperor, a veritable god during the protracted undertaking, as well as a Bacchanalian maenad: “Io Triumphe! Io Clarissa, Sing!” All, as he says, these actors are “engaged . . . so many engines set at work, at an immense expense, with infinite contrivance” to perpetrate his pitifully brief and solitary sexual emission.² But what an enervated discharge that is: the abandoned roué and omnifornicator is reduced to performing a rape upon the inert body of a sedated and senseless maid who is pinioned by a brace of whores. Of course, he is comical, terrible, and pathetic.

Such portrayals of enormous effort to little effect are a common feature of satire; they induce a furor and a flurry, only to accomplish a resounding anticlimax of the sort Dryden attributes to his lumpish MacFlecknoe: a puffed-up creature eternally infected by “Pangs without birth, and fruitless Industry.” For satire recurrently dramatizes the action of a literary lame duck: enormous bustle, stir, and pother accompanied by minuscule and sterile achievement—what Horace nicely encapsulates in his phrase “Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus”: Mountains in labor, producing a piddling mouse.³

We observe in all the instances cited antitheses that are powerfully combined, stressing oxymoronic incongruity: violence, hunger, and locomotion juxtaposed with anticlimax, insipidity, inertia. Revolution is mated with ennui, furor with hebetude. Perhaps this mixture is the ultimate meaning of the preacher’s “vanity of vanities,” for in such a state, “all things are full of labor,” but “man cannot utter it.” All performance and endeavor are undercut, hailed as commonplace repetitions: “The thing that hath been it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”⁴

A tang of such ironic contradictions pervades all satiric busy idleness. It is the situation of ardent political souls like Manente degli Uberti, called Farinata, whom Dante encounters in the sixth circle of hell. Those who had been extreme activists in life are there fastened up to their waists or their chins in immovable sepulchres of fire. As a taunting temptation, because of their excessive earthly preoccupations, they are permitted dimly to perceive future worldly events, but nothing of the present. Yet it is precisely to the affairs of the present moment that they remain eternally devoted. In addition, the spirit of Farinata appears upright, aloof, gentlemanly—dignified and cool amid all that ludicrous heat—for he is still haughty, scornful, and factional, “as if he held for Hell a great disdain.”⁵ The audience response is intended to be a shudder, a touch of Schadenfreude, for what could be more powerfully absurd than a blind, flaming coffin-bound dignity in the underworld? Farinata is a wretchedly superfluous soul—so addicted to petty mortal affairs that he does not notice his eternal situation. Of course, we might say that this blindness is almost sublime; Farinata’s myopic, geocentric vision obliterates for him his supernatural world, and it is that vacuum of insight that constitutes his perdition. But there is no helping some people; they are too dumb to know what in hell is going on.

The same idiocy prevails with Milton’s hordes of fallen angels. While awaiting the return of their leader, confined in an unspeakable labyrinth of fire and ice, they can hardly help being assailed by boredom and “restless thoughts.” Hence, like a rout of exigent children at a tedious party, they undertake a series of reckless “games”: races, mock battles, song fests (“with notes Angelical”), and voyages of discovery (as if they were Columbuses, Balboas, Sir Francis Drakes).

In discourse more sweet

(For Eloquence [charms] the Soul . . . )

Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d,

In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high

Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate, Fixt

Fate, Free will, Foreknowledge absolute,

And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.⁶

It is a brilliantly laughable and shocking piece of news to learn that the eternally vigilant devils are reduced to fun and games, or that their “charming Souls” are merely lost in an obfuscating dither of discourse: “so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.”⁷

The underworld has a curious effect upon people; authors can hardly approach its precincts without turning ironic and satiric. Since the time of Aristophanes, Menippus, and Lucian, satirists have had a fondness for “dialogues of the dead.”⁸ The irony of these conversational set pieces can cut so many ways: the dead, given a fatal aesthetic distance, can tellingly reflect upon the futility of action among the living. Yet at the same time, the lively reader cannot but detect a certain irony in the fact that the dead appear to be so knowledgeable about living (and envious, too). In addition, there is revealed an eternal dichotomy betwixt vita activa and mors contemplativa, those who perform and those who interminably talk about it, activity and passivity.

Indeed, once one is permanently settled underground, philosophizing and chatter become superfluous, permanently called into question. And to be sure, such a lasting volubility combined with utter debilitation proves exactly that ironic mixture of flourish and fixity that we have been considering. Just such an uneasy combination is perfectly captured by those classic figures of myth in the underworld: Sisyphus perennially rolling his stone to nowhere, Ixion revolving upon his wheel of fire, Tantalus forever striving to obtain food and drink and yet forever famished and parched. These are the principle archetypes of the repetitious nonachiever.

The infernal principle need not, of course, always be present in satire, but it is an extreme boundary and a potent locale for dramatizing almost superhuman restlessness and eternal recurrence. Dryden’s Achitophel is such a character, one who is, although alive, driven, warped, and stunted, as if by internal demons:

For close Designs, and crooked Counsells fit;

Sagacious, Bold, and Turbulent of wit:

Restless, unfixt in Principles and Place;

In Power unpleas’d, impatient of Disgrace:

A fiery Soul, which working out its way,

Fretted the Pigmy Body to decay:

And o’r inform’d the Tenement of Clay.⁹

Sometimes the demonic realizes itself in a representative group. Thus, Jack and the choir boys in Golding’s Lord of the Flies metamorphose into fiends of bloodlust, as the children’s tentative civilization on the idyllic island regresses into barbarism. The devil or Beelzebub figure they worship on the mountain or perched atop a totem stick is in reality a demon within themselves that strives to emulate the atomic holocaust that the boys’ elders have engendered in the outside world. Their vigor simply spreads strife and, like the fire that comes to rage on the island, is self-consuming.

Sometimes the demonic is symbolic and incriminatingly inclusive, representative. Hence Oskar Matzerath in Grass’s The Tin Drum retains a dwarfed and stunted childish maturity that directly reflects the twisted, tormented, and chaotic political world of warfare in Nazi Germany. His guilt for his parents’ deaths represents all Europe’s guilt, and his final incarceration in an insane asylum suggests the insanity of an entire generation. Like the Mr. Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, Oskar is crippled as well as a crippler, a devilish avatar of a cursed and damned society. Oskar’s multitude of picaresque misadventures, like his freakish sexual forays, merely dramatizes the fecundity of a proliferating and virtually all-pervasive evil.

John Hawkes’s The Cannibal simply extends, if that were possible, Grass’s evil vision to include three generations in Germany and three devastating bouts of warfare (in 1870, 1914, and 1939); the text’s surrealistic density only intensifies the nightmarish reality of war’s destructiveness. With ruthless irony, the novel concludes with the insane being once again “well tended” as the nation joyously prepares for a fourth consummation of world warfare. Again and again, the novel presents total war as a dark fruit devoutly nurtured only to produce an all-devouring fruitlessness, a species of self-consuming cannibalism.

Sometimes the demonic rears it head in a hauntingly, uncontrollably repetitious manner, almost becoming continuous. In D.M. Thomas’s book The White Hotel, Frau Elisabeth Erdman was in her childhood disturbed by the sexual capers of her father with her aunt and distraught by the revolutionary violence of Russian strikers. These incidents help shape her subsequent hysteria, and her crippling fantasies about sex, violence, and catastrophes mysteriously and magically conjoined in an Alpine resort—of the sort that Freud himself can barely grasp or treat—persist. She cannot rid herself of her psychic disorders. Then, events come full circle once again: in Kiev in 1941 she is rounded up with thousands of other Jews for slaughter in a ravine. Two Ukrainian mercenaries, collaborators with the Nazis, murder Frau Erdman by raping her with a fixed bayonet. The reader is helplessly left to ponder the question Which is the more disabling, social reality or private neurosis? Who is truly sexually unbalanced in our world? Who is actually hysterical? Freud has often spoken of “projection,” when a person projects internal psychic images and desires outward, into the physical world. But here we encounter a terrifying “injection,” in which an international frenzy for sexual battery and the lust for violence infect and invade the individual conscience. Uneasily, the reader wonders Which comes first—man’s general public malevolence or the individual’s mental maladjustment? In any case, both seem to be segments of one cruel, demonic machine, each part fueling the other and generating a continuous and inevitable cycle of murder, rapine, and malaise.

Total warfare and incessant illness are infernal enough and are fitting topics in our bellicose century, as in Heller’s Catch-22, Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or the conclusion of Waugh’s Vile Bodies. And many a satirist pushes further, toward Armageddon and apocalypse for the human race, as in Pope’s Dunciad, in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, in Čapek’s R.U.R., in Wells’s Time Machine. Such blasted imaginings are surely related to the medieval and later preoccupations with the Last Judgment, the Dance of Death, and the torments of hell that we encounter in the paintings of Bosch, Brueghel, Hogarth, and Goya.

Frequently, modern works merely suggest the infernal at the personal level, as fictions end with some form of total defeat for the central characters—suicide, assassination, lobotomizing and brainwashing—as in Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. For satire need not plunge all the way into the infernal pit; near approaches will serve satisfactorily enough. It is sufficient for characters to be driven, for example, into a towering insanity. One thinks of the grim portrait of Henry Armstid at the conclusion of Faulkner’s The Hamlet, crippled, avaricious, perpetually digging and lusting for gold:

They had been watching him for two weeks . . . watching Armstid as he spaded the earth steadily down the slope of the old garden. . . . when . . . one . . . approached . . . Armstid climbed out of his pit and ran at him, dragging the stiffened leg, the shovel raised . . . and drove the man away. . . . he appeared to be not even aware of them where they stood along the fence, watching him spading himself steadily back and forth across the slope with . . . spent and unflagging fury . . . spading himself into the waxing twilight with the regularity of a mechanical toy and with something monstrous in his unflagging effort, as if the toy were too light for what it had been set to do, or too tightly wound. . . . the gaunt unshaven face . . . was now completely that of a madman.¹⁰

Similar incessant, repetitious, ambiguously “spent” yet “unflagging” lunacy (that is, concerning the monstrous regularity of the moon’s changefulness) overcomes Gulliver, Woyzeck, Humbert Humbert, and The Day of the Locust’s Tod Hackett. Others are beset by immobility, inertia, and near paralysis, as if entropy had triumphed in their lives: Dante’s Belacqua in the Purgatorio, Grimmelshausen’s would-be hermit Simplicissimus, Goncharov’s willfully bed-ridden Oblomov, Dostoyevsky’s interred Underground Man, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and certainly Murphy and some dozen others of Beckett’s enervated personae. A classic case is James’s John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle,” a man whose destiny it is to have no destiny, a waiter and watcher who has nothing to do. As a modern exemplar of vacuous expectancy, he is akin to Musil’s Ulrich, the man without qualities, swallowed alive in interminably irresolute committees.

More amusing is the character who is simply impotent, who lets everything all hang out and fall down, and who cannot get it up. The soul of all Sterne’s zany “bisinesse” in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey is founded upon impotence or coitus interruptus pure and simple. The same persistent evil fate besets Encolpius in the Satyricon, and the same crippling modern disease plagues Prufrock. It is, surely, a debilitating effeminacy that unmans Gustave von Aschenbach, preparing him properly for the plague and for death in Venice.

Most often, such impotence, paralysis, and catatonia are only metaphoric, and many of satire’s creatures are mere comic bumblers: characters like Lazarillo and Candide, Waugh’s Paul Pennyfeather, Thurber’s oppressed males, and Kotzwinkle’s Fan Man. If disaster did not exist, then these fools and naïfs would invent it; even with no roof over their heads, they would still bring the house down. Precisely like the horror-bound, their light comic brethren skip and bounce from mistake to mistake, anticlimax to anticlimax, pratfall to pratfall with patient placidity and sustained ignorance. They are going down—one, two, three times—but do not know the difference. Woody Allen’s persona cannot even progress the length of a paragraph without several inevitable tumbles: “How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? I am plagued by doubts. What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.”¹¹

Allen’s persona is exactly related to the erstwhile hermit in Rasselas, whose career orientation throughout his lifetime appears subject to cruel bouleversements and tergiversations; the poor, virtuous eremite has lived in solitude and retreat for years, attempting to secure himself from vice. He suddenly resolves, however, “to return into the world tomorrow” “with rapture”: “In [an] assembly Rasselas [related] his interview with the hermit, and the wonder with which he heard him censure a course of life which he had so deliberately chosen, and so laudably followed. . . . One . . . thought it likely, that the hermit would, in a few years, go back to his retreat, and, perhaps, if shame did not restrain, or death intercept him, return once more from his retreat into the world.”¹² At such a rate, the religious recluse will be converted into a bouncing ball forever.

We can say much the same for the saintly Félicité (hardly the happy one) in Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart.” Whenever she exerts extreme effort, she is bound to be a loser. In fact, she steams along on the road like characters in Kerouac, expending incredible effort yet getting nowhere at all. She longs, for instance, to travel to the seaport to bid a last goodbye to her beloved nephew, Victor, about to sail away forever.

She put on her clogs and traveled the long twelve miles between Pont-l’Eveque and Honfleur.

When she arrived at the Calvary instead of turning left, she went right, got lost in the shipyards, and had to retrace her steps. Some people whom she approached advised her to hurry along. She went all around the ship-filled harbor, stumbling over the moorings.¹³

When she at last discovered Victor standing upon his ship, “she darted toward him, but at that moment the gangplank was raised” and the ship sailed away. Later, when her mistress’s beloved daughter Virginie is dying of consumption and pneumonia in a distant monastery, Félicité strives mightily to make one last visit. The mother and doctor leave at once.

Virginie had pneumonia. Perhaps her case was already hopeless.

“Not yet!” said the doctor and both got into his carriage. . . .

Félicité rushed into church to light a candle. Then she ran after the carriage which she overtook an hour later. She had jumped nimbly on behind, and was holding on to the straps, when she suddenly thought: “The courtyard isn’t locked! Suppose thieves break in!” And she jumped off.

At dawn of the following day, she went to the doctor’s house. He had returned, but had left again for the country. Then she stayed at the inn, thinking some stranger would bring a letter. Finally, at dusk, she took the Lisieux stagecoach.

The convent was at the bottom of a steep lane.¹⁴

Félicité knocks impatiently, and slowly the door opens: “The good sister, with a compassionate air, said that Virginie ‘had just passed away.’ At the moment, the tolling at Saint-Léonard’s became louder.”¹⁵ And so, as Vonnegut would say, it goes. Everything Félicité undertakes is a near miss. Whether the satire is tragic or comic, the characters regularly—again and again—go bumpety-bump in their journey downhill.

The more frequently and grandiosely the action is repeated, the more discomforting yet amusing, the more curiously satisfying such deformed action in satire tends to become. As Bruce Kawin in Telling It Again and Again observes of “destructive repetition”: “Say one word to yourself thirty times. . . . It loses its definition, becomes abstract and absurd.” No matter how painful events might be in themselves, their multiplication renders them ludicrous, as one knows who has ever observed a laughing modern audience’s response to grisly Jacobean tragedies. Knowingly, then, the satiric muse comes to us dressed in the accountrements of a predictable superfluity: the measured rhythmic imprecations of the formal curse; the powder of expletives flying in flyting; the exuberantly excessive vocabulary and word lists in Rabelais; the parody of logic, treatise, and learning in humanistic attacks upon scholasticism; the crush of footnotes in the Dunciad and of all authorial superficies (apologies, dedications, prefaces, marginal commentaries) in A Tale of a Tub; the parade of courses and platters in the cena; the pageant of clothes, manners, and “polite conversation” in Restoration theater or at country house weekend parties in Peacock, James, Huxley, or McCarthy; and the crass itemization of materialistic possessions in satire of the bourgeoisie, as in Petronius, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis.¹⁶

Moreover, such repetitions usually appear locally, at the simplest level, in sentences and paragraphs, often giving satire the texture of staccato fragmentation. For satire thrives upon incremental form—the stichomythia of repartee and punch lines, the acerbity of noxious double entendres, the piling up of metaphors and other figures of speech, the production of numerous proverbs, sentences, aphorisms, and witty maxims. Many a satire even appears to be a temerarious compilation of bits and pieces: simulated recipes, mock laws, dictionaries of demented definitions, handbooks of misguided directions, how-to manuals, pseudocollections of tips, keys, and instructions. Among these, one thinks of La Rochefoucauld’s and Nietzsche’s Zarathustran maxims; the aphorisms of Lichtenberg and Stanislaw Lec; dictionaries like those of Flaubert and Ambrose Bierce; the seventeenth-century genre of “advice-to-a-painter” poems; manuals like Dedekind’s guide to slovenliness, Grobianus (1605), and Swift’s Directions to Servants (1745); anthologies like that of bad verse compiled by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee; and laws and principles propounded by the likes of Parkinson, Murphy, and Peter.¹⁷

Indeed, many other satires at the level of plot clearly reflect this rotating superabundance, as can be seen in cycles of quests and travels in Don Quixote, Don Juan, Gulliver’s Travels or Céline’s novels. Satire suits itself agreeably to the episodic series and to the refrain; a sturdy subgenre is surely the picaresque, as is the Menippean, that recurrently hobbles back and forth between verse and prose, between the author’s own style and allusions and quotations that usurp the styles of others. Satiric characters, as well, do not surprise us when they appear and reappear, popping up in fictions like toast. Such include Eumolpus the reciting poet in the Satyricon, Falstaff, Pangloss, Waugh’s Captain Grimes and Basil Seal, G.M. Fraser’s Flashman. Parody is probably satire’s strongest calling card; those familiar with the works and themes being imitated are constantly assailed by sensations of déjà vu, as the satire bobs back and forth, echoing and reechoing portions of the original.

Yet the pervasive, multifarious repetition so common in satire, that is tediously, frighteningly disturbing and funny, is not quite what Alvin Kernan calls going around in circles. Satire, as I have argued, tends to run us downhill; it’s the pits. The repetitions and repeat performances merely deepen our sense of entrapment; the multiplication of cases of a single disease does not suggest fixity, but rather the eruption of an epidemic. Kernan, in postulating the “plots” of satire, metaphorically follows the extreme rhetorical figures proposed by Martinus Scriblerus in Pope’s Peri Bathous: the “Magnifying,” “Diminishing,” and “Variagating” figures. “Variagation” Kernan associates with fixity, with overcrowding or “the mob tendency,” and with circularity; in that sense, he perceives the fluctuating Day of the Locust as having “no plot” and Waugh’s characters in Vile Bodies as traveling “in endless circles.”¹⁸

But we had best be wary of Scriblerian discriminations, for despite the discernment of three motions—the rising, the falling, and the vibrating or jiggling—we must observe that Scriblerus’s own volume is subtitled The Art of Sinking in Poetry. Despite his endless lists of different motions, the bad poetry he celebrates travels in no other direction but downward, into the bathetic, into the abstruse. Indeed, we might well perceive that the central irony of Pope’s satire involves Scriblerus himself, who, although he lays on labels and distinctions like the gas, is himself the victim of a single fragmenting and falling action. Certainly, the most amusing redundancy of his “bisinesse” and crazy scholarship is his presumption to teach moderns the art of bad poetry, when all his cartload of terrible instances comes precisely from these moderns. Anticlimactically, they are the last people in creation to need such instruction; they have already mastered that art to hideous perfection. What could better constitute febrile ineptitude than the fervent teaching of a subject that the student already fully comprehends? Hence the Peri Bathous is a prince among the fallen angels of satire.

From low to high doth dissolution climb,

And sink from high to low, along a scale

Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail.¹⁹

Wordsworth’s lines are all very well, so long as we note that his solitary “concord” is universal dissolution itself.

Whether it appears to elevate, submerge, or keep us afloat, satire always manages to send us to the bottom. For satire immerses us in oceans of terror and tepidity, stimulating its audience by a depressant. A piquant example is Gabriel García Márquez’s story “Big Mama’s Funeral,” a paradoxical celebration of a holiday and a ninety-two-year-old oppressor’s demise. With mounting mock-epic grandeur, the humble narrator treats us with religious zeal to everything in and about the village of Macondo. The camera in fact broadens upon an enormous panorama of petty politics, absolute corruption, and the populace’s incredible squalor, gullibility, and superstition. The “carnival” simultaneously worships this perverse Virgin Mother’s sanctity even as it regales the people’s release from her barren and tainted domination. The narrative, a jumble of descriptions, lists, inventories, and name-droppings, progresses into the realm of sheer fantasy—and everything in its epic catalogs is thrown in, including the proverbial kitchen sink. Only consider Big Mama’s own deathbed tabulation of the possessions of her visible and invisible estate:

The wealth of the subsoil, the territorial waters, the colors of the flag, national sovereignty, the traditional parties, the rights of man, civil rights, the nation’s leadership, the right of appeal, Congressional hearings, letters of recommendation, historical records, free elections, beauty queens, transcendental speeches, huge demonstrations, distinguished young ladies, proper gentlemen, punctilious military men, His Illustrious Eminence, the Supreme Court, goods whose importation was forbidden, liberal ladies, the meat problem, the purity of the language, setting a good example, the free but responsible press, the Athens of South America, public opinion, the lessons of democracy, Christian morality, the shortage of foreign exchange, the right of asylum, the Communist menace, the ship of state, the high cost of living, republican traditions, the underprivileged classes, statements of political support.

She didn’t manage to finish.²⁰

Instead, she expires—with a belch.

Furthermore, all the world comes to her funeral, from Scotland, from Asia, from the dunghill, from history: “the bagpipers of San Jacinto,” “the rice planter of Sinu,” “the shysters from Monpox,” “the salt miners from Manaure,” “the President of the Republic and his Ministers,” the duke of Marlborough, and the pope—who concludes the grand ceremonies by himself flying bodily up to heaven!²¹ Through it all, the plentiful corpse of Big Mama, kept above ground for weeks and months of preparations and negotiations in 104° heat, is sublimely bubbling and rotting.

Yet we are hardly permitted, at the conclusion of these tumultuous and all-inclusive festivities, to feel that we have come full circle. True, the squalor remains, the low pedestrian garbage, detritus, and filth, the enslaved constricted inhabitants, remain. There is no new freedom or true release for anyone, since Big Mama’s heirs will continue her corrosive reign, her perverse predominance in Macondo. But there will no longer be any obese, omnivorous, sanctified central figure of the likes of Mama, as before. The oppression will continue, but the populace will now have been robbed even of the tawdry grandeur of Big Mama’s swollen, impotent, virginal presence, deprived of the distorted imaginary holiness and deluded pomp. The situation, if possible, is worse: there remains only the dull ache of a deeper misery and impoverishment.

Most frequently, satire is just such a saturnalia as was Mama’s burial rite, a festival and a crazy panegyric—not the representation of disorder, but a parody of order itself. It celebrates the mockery of established order and constitutes a period of reversal and release. Its chaos is nonetheless orderly, making us, with all its details and repetitions and compilations, more aware of the vice and folly of the everyday world, a world to which, at the satire’s close, we must return. That quotidian world of ours even Henry James—himself not averse to the satiric excursion—perceived all too clearly; “Life is, in fact, a battle. . . . Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever.”²² We may vacation from what we sense as our ironclad subservience to scientific laws, political malfeasance, the arms race, and a cruel fate. Consider the popularity of antiutopias, A Clockwork Orange, Vonnegut’s fictions, and Murphy’s Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go !²³ Nevertheless we still must return to these selfsame inescapable tyrannies that we, at the outset, had fled; we must return to an increasingly circumscribing technology, to political ineptitudes, to threats of war, and to our own darkening fate.

One of the lunatic seven dwarfs in Donald Barthelme’s mod retelling of Snow White, a character named Dan, explains that he and his brethren are busy, busy, busy manufacturing “plastic buffalo humps.” There is no market for such useless and trifling dross just now, he acknowledges, but you never can tell. Society is, after all, addicted to the “sludge” and “stuffing” of modern mass production, and tastes are bound to change. Dan explains “that the per-capita production of trash in this country is up from 2.75 pounds per day in 1920 to 4.5 pounds per day in 1965. . . . I hazard that we may very well soon reach a point where it’s a 100 percent.” At that stage, we will have to learn “to appreciate its qualities.” That’s why Dan and his friends are producing buffalo humps: “It’s that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the future.”²⁴ Dan wants—and Barthelme wants—”to be on the leading edge of the trash phenomenon.” Virtually every satirist would agree; as trivia, refuse, and wretchedness relentlessly continue to burgeon and multiply, the satirist vigorously lends a helping hand, continually building, amassing, and compiling the rubble, the dregs, and the sewage—for he is a visionary, ever aspiring to reach that ineffable 100 percent.