Notes

Introduction

1. Preface to the 1st ed. of Poems (1853), in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London, 1965), 591. Arnold is referring to fifth-century Athens, but these modern insecurities well describe Arnold’s own era.

2. In Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Tübingen, 1904-5), Max Weber perceives that the nineteenth century became an industrial iron age, filled with mechanic conformity; he rejected idealistic theories of progress. Quotation from Thomas R. McDaniel, “Thoughts on a Dissertation,” Humanities in the South 44 (Fall 1976): 8.

3. The quoted terms have been employed as titles in book-length studies by a number of critical observers: Ortega y Gasset, Julien Benda, Harold Lubin, Harry Levin, Wylie Sypher, Leslie Fiedler, Robert Martin Adams, Mark Hillegas, Ihab Hassan, and George Steiner.

4. See, for instance, George Knox, “Apocalypse and Sour Utopias,” Western Humanities Review 16 (Winter 1962): 11-22; Irving Howe, “The Fiction of Anti-Utopia,” in Decline of the New (New York, 1970), 66-74; and W.K. Thomas, “The Underside of Utopias,” College English 38 (1976): 356-72.

5. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1885), in The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1956), 10, 17.

6. Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel (New York, 1966), 334.

7. Tony Tanner, Saul Bellow (London, 1965), 115.

8. Louis I. Bredvold, “The Gloom of the Tory Satirists,” in Pope and His Contemporaries, ed. James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa (New York, 1949), 16. George Bernard Shaw’s Lucifer makes a similar point: “I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes.” Shaw, Man and Superman (Baltimore, 1952), 170.

9. Lionel Trilling, “The Fate of Pleasure: Wordsworth to Dostoevsky,” in Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York, 1963), 90.

10. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York, 1974), 37, 38.

11. Irving Deer and Harriet Deer, “The Power of Negative Thinking,” in Person to Person: Rhetoric, Reality, and Change, ed. Irving Deer, H.A. Deer, and J.A. Gould (New York, 1973), 243-62. See also Leslie Fiedler, No! in Thunder (Boston, 1960).

12. Terence, Heauton Timorumenos, 1. 77: “I’m a man: nothing human is alien to me.”

1. Deadly Laughter

1. I borrow the phrase from Saul Bellow’s novel concerning a listless, unstable man suspended between civilian life and the military; he awaits imminently being inducted into the army during World War II. See Bellow, Dangling Man (New York, 1944).

2. For almost two thousand years the Judaeo-Christian concept of a sacred, linear, unfolding history predominated, only to become secularized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See C.A. Patrides, The Grand Design of God: The Literary Form of the Christian View of History (London, 1972), a revised version of his 1964 volume, The Phoenix and the Ladder: The Rise and Decline of the Christian View of History. This constitutes, in effect, a major revolution in the realm of Western consciousness; see J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (New York, 1932), Charles Van Doren, The Idea of Progress (New York, 1967), and W.W. Wagar, ed., The Idea of Progress since the Renaissance (New York, 1969). Science and rationalism matured this secular concept of progress into a burning faith. But from the mid–nineteenth century onward, we have been witnessing a still more drastic intellectual revolution, which denies progress entirely. A coherent early attack was mounted by the near-anarchist Georges Sorel, in his Les Illusions du progrés (Paris, 1908), and most thinkers in our era substantiate the repudiation of earlier “faith”—not merely the faith in Christianity but in humanism as well. See, for instance, chap. 9, “Progress at Bay,” in Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York, 1980), 317-51.

3. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub to Which Is Added the Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A.C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1958), 129, 146.

4. Olga is speaking at the close of “The Three Sisters,” in Chekhov: The Major Plays, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York, 1964), 312.

5. I borrow the phrase performing self from an essay of that title that examines a number of twentieth-century authors who are “notorious self-advertisers.” Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New York, 1971), 86-111. And in using the term cult of the ego, I am thinking of a major study of destructive modern solipsism, Eugene Goodheart, The Cult of the Ego: The Self in Modern Literature (Chicago, 1968). The great romantic creator of a posturing self—as dashing, ardent, obsessive, accursed—was Byron; see Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis, 1962). A number of recent studies examine the emergence since the Renaissance of particularly self-conscious, role-playing individual “selves” in modern society; consult, for example, John O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century (Carbondale, Ill., 1978).

6. The best relevant studies are Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), and Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, rev. ed. (New York, 1968).

7. D.H. Lawrence, “Study of Thomas Hardy,” in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (London, 1961), 409.

8. “Pitié pour nous qui combattons toujours aux frontières / De l’illimité et de l’avenir.” “La Jolie Rousse,” 11. 28-29, from Calligrames (1918), in Guillaume Apollinaire, Oeuvres Poétique, ed. Marcel Adéma and Michel Décaudin (Paris, 1956), 314.

9. From Marinetti’s Foundation Manifesto, in Jane Rye, Futurism (New York, 1972), 9.

10. Jean Anouilh, “Antigone” (1944), adapted and trans. Lewis Galantière, in Contemporary Drama: Eleven Plays, ed. E.B. Watson and B. Pressey (New York, 1956), 131.

11. Wylie Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York, 1962). An acute study of the causes, both internal and external, of the fragmentation and “disintegration” of the individual in the twentieth century is Erich Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss: An Inquiry into the Transformation of the Individual (New York, 1957).

12. Earlier Christian ideas of apocalypse are offset by secular ideas of progress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia [Berkeley, 1949]), but pessimism was one significant vein of thought in the Renaissance. Consult Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone (Chicago, 1949), and Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). Despite romantic exuberance, there was a dark Byronic strain, and by the mid–nineteenth century, second-generation romantics in France openly espoused “decadence”; consult G.L. Van Roosbroeck, The Legend of the Decadents (New York, 1927), Noël Richard, Le Mouvement décadent: Dandys, esthètes et quintessents (Paris, 1968), and George Ross Ridge, The Hero in French Decadent Literature (Athens, Ga., 1961). Such ideas of cultural decay spread; see Jerome Hamilton Buckley, “The Idea of Decadence,” in The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 66-93, and Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington, 1977). By the 1890s an influential book in Europe was Max Nordau, Entartung, or Degeneration (Berlin, 1892-93; English trans., 1895), which stressed the artist’s mental deterioration and society’s degeneration owing to social ills. Such ideas were carried further by Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919; rpt. New York, 1958), by his younger brother’s work (Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay [New York, 1893]), and of course by Oswald Spengler.

13. “For a thousand years or so, roughly from the time of Charlemagne to 1914, the wars of Christendom . . . [had derived from] a single, continuous tradition. . . . within that tradition [it was] assumed without question that [most] battles . . . were not only justifiable but holy. . . . Full of internal contradictions . . . the Christian heroic tradition proved viable for centuries.” Suddenly in our century, with the world wars, that tradition of heroism died. “We inhabit for the first time a world in which men begin wars knowing that their avowed ends will not be accomplished.” Some leaders, to be sure, still do not know that “they were merely dupes of history.., unaware that history had rendered them comic” and absurd, but it is a dominant topic of our literature. Leslie Fiedler, Waiting for the End (New York, 1964), 28-29, 31. For the lasting and devastating impact of World War I, consult Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975).

Frederick J. Hoffman, in The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagination (Princeton, 1964), carefully studies the great increase in the incidence and impact of violence and violent death in modern literature and life. The decline of religions and their sanctions have ensured the proliferation of “naturalistic” death—in which society is deprived of “moral, confessional, and willed” explanations for dying. The great shock in this century was World War I in which the depersonalization, enormity, and unreality of death were encountered on a grand, unprecedented scale (13, 15). On modern warfare and its terrible ingenuities, see Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare (London, 1946).

14. George Santayana, “The Poetry of Barbarism,” in Essays in Literary Criticism, ed. Irving Singer (New York, 1956), 149.

15. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Louis S. Feuer (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), 320.

16. T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917), 11. 48-51, in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York, 1952).

17. Thomas Mann, “Conrad’s ‘Secret Agent,’ ” in Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Freeport, N.Y., 1968), 240-41.

18. Eugène Ionesco, “Experience of the Theatre,” in Notes and Counter Notes, trans. Donald Watson (New York, 1964), 26.

19. See Maurice Valency, The End of the World: An Introduction to Contemporary Drama (New York, 1980), esp. 419-37.

20. George Steiner, “After the Book?” in On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford, 1980), 186. This “disintegrative process,” Erich Kahler argues, concerning the arts, owes to increasing dominance in recent centuries of the irrational and the unconscious over consciousness; see Kahler, The Disintegration of Form in the Arts (New York, 1968), esp. 28.

21. I borrow the term employed by J.L. Styan to describe modern tragicomedy, particularly that kind of drama whose unpleasant setting and Brechtian “alienation-effects” in some sense contribute to the audience’s discomfort; see Styan, The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1968).

22. Flannery O’Connor, “The Displaced Person,” in The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor (New York, 1971), 200. O’Connor’s grotesquerie has attracted considerable critical attention. See, for example, Gilbert H. Muller, Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O’Connor and the Catholic Grotesque (Athens, Ga., 1972); Carol Shloss, “Extensions of the Grotesque,” in Flannery O’Connor’s Dark Comedies (Baton Rouge, 1980), 38-57; Marshall Bruce Gentry, Flannery O’Connor’s Religion of the Grotesque (Jackson, Miss., 1986); and Zhong Ming, “Designed Shock and Grotesquerie: The Form of Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction,” The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin 17 (1988): 51-61. O’Connor herself did see and appreciate peacocks; in fact, she raised them. See her own memoir, “The King of the Birds,” in Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York, 1969), 3-21.

23. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Boston, 1958), 4.4.1-4, p. 136.

24. King Lear 4.1.2-6. All quotations of Shakespeare’s plays are taken from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, with a preface by Christopher Morley (Garden City, N.Y., 1936).

2. Satiric Gothic, Satiric Grotesque

1. Maximillian E. Novak, “Gothic Fiction and the Grotesque,” Novel 13 (Fall 1979): 50n. Consult the trenchant analysis of the later eighteenth century’s mood and art in England by Northrop Frye, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” Journal of English Literary History 13 (June 1956): 144-52, frequently reprinted. Much recent American literature has been attracted to revitalizing the gothic and the horrible; see the works of such novelists as Flannery O’Connor, John Hawkes, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, James Purdy, and J.D. Salinger. Consult Irving Malin, New American Gothic (Carbondale, Ill., 1962).

2. See James William Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (Princeton, 1967), esp. chap. 2, “The Role of Historiography” (55-68), on the decline of history; see p. 61 on Temple, pp. 63ff. on Swift. Henry James, as in “The Pupil,” frequently perceived vulgar moderns and vulgar modern Americans as trooping through the once-sacred precincts of Europe like barbarian invaders: see his “Preface to ‘What Maisie Knew,’ ” in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, with an introduction by Richard P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), 152. And the imminent return of an invading barbarian horde was a central tenet in the satiric mythos of Evelyn Waugh; see Alvin B. Kernan, “The Wall and the Jungle: The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh,” Yale Review 53 (Dec. 1963): 199-220.

Richard Gilman, in Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York, 1979), has argued that the term decadence itself is essentially meaningless. I would suggest, however, that the term obtains force because a great many writers associate the internal moral decline of a society (archetypally Rome) with its assault and destruction from without. This is the case, as we have noted, with Swift, James, and Waugh; the reader might also consider disparate examples such as poems by Verlaine (“Langueur”), C.P. Cavafy (“Waiting for the Barbarians”), and Auden (“The Fall of Rome”)—all of which make this same assumption and utilize this general myth. Such a mythos is vitally alive in the twentieth century, a mythos that cultivates genres describing decline and general collapse—dystopias, negative science fictions, and apocalyptic tales of the end of the world.

3. Especially on the dark visions of Twain, Dickens, and Flaubert, see John R. Clark and William E. Morris, “Humor in the Nineteenth Century: Decline and Fuel,” Mosaic 9 (Summer 1976): 219-26. Concerning the blending of the gothic with the grotesque, Alan Spiegel in a curious article contends that in America modern southern writers tend to employ the grotesque (i.e., to create grotesque characters), whereas northern writers utilize the gothic. Consult Spiegel, “A Theory of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” Georgia Review 26 (1972): 426-37.

4. Seminal studies of the grotesque are Thomas Wright, A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (1865), rpt. with an introduction by Frances K. Barasch (New York, 1968); and Wolfgang Kayser, Das Groteske, Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (Oldenburg, 1957), and its English ed., The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington, 1963). The observations of John Ruskin, Stones of Venice 3.3, and Modern Painters 4.8, are still extremely relevant. For a full description, with excellent photographs of Nero’s palace, consult Michael Grant, “The Golden House: Art and Luxury,” in Nero: Emperor in Revolt (New York, 1970), 162-95. For my study of Seneca and the grotesque, consult Anna Lydia Motto and John R. Clark, “ ‘There’s Something Wrong with the Sun’: Seneca’s Oedipus and the Modern Grotesque,” Classical Bulletin 54 (Jan. 1978): 41-44. One recent critic examines the grotesque effect generated when ancient myth confronts modern realities; his study explores several nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts. Consult Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque (Princeton, 1982).

Of lesser importance, but still of some interest, are M.B. van Buren, “The Grotesque in Visual Art and Literature,” Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 12 (1982): 42-53, and Arthur Clayborough, The Grotesque in English Literature (Oxford, 1965).

5. See Bakhtin’s introduction, esp. 1-34, in Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Héléne Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). Consult also William R. Magretta and Joan Magretta, “Lina Wertmuller and the Tradition of Italian Carnivalesque Comedy,” Genre 12 (Spring 1979): 25-43. The broad use of the “comic grotesque”—in plays and in pamphlets—is also stressed in Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (Boston, 1980). Rhodes also notes that the grotesque traditionally calls for “two kinds of response which are mutually incompatible”; hence the audience is confronted with “frivolity and the macabre, or, more generally, [with] laughter and revulsion” (10).

6. Vitruvius Pollio De Architectura 7.5.3-4, in On Architecture, ed. and trans. Frank Granger (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 2: 105.

7. Horace Ars Poetica 1-8 (my translation). See Homer Odyssey 12.39-46; and Virgil Aeneid 5.864-65; 6.273-91, 574-607, for treatment of monsters. Seneca is notorious for presenting supernatural elements in his plays; consider Agamemnon 766-68, the host of omens in the Oedipus, and supernatural figures and phenomena in the Thyestes.

8. Consult G. Wilson Knight’s famous essay “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque” in The Wheel of Fire (New York, 1957), 160-76. Works that stress the “tension” of mirth and horror in the grotesque include Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague, 1971); Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London, 1972); and Michael Steig, “Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 29 (Winter 1970): 253-60. Satiric and demonic features and the grotesque’s relationship to the picaresque are stressed in Barbara C. Millard, “Thomas Nashe and the Functional Grotesque in Elizabethan Prose Fiction,” Studies in Short Fiction 15 (Winter 1978): 39-48.

David Hayman claims, in fact, that Mikhail Bakhtin has overstressed the grotesque’s playful side; Hayman notes that the romantics invested “pathos and dread” into the concept of the grotesque. Hayman, “Toward a Mechanics of Mode: Beyond Bakhtin,” Novel 16 (1983): 106-7. Similarly, Bernard McElroy argues that too many critics have taken the grotesque lightly, dealing with its relationship to play. Concurring with Ruskin, McElroy emphasizes the terrible and the fearful in the grotesque, especially considering features that suggest the primitive, the uncanny, the magical, and the irrational—features that focus upon “corporeal degradation.” See McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque (New York, 1989), esp. 1-29.

9. Although the other arts have “the workes of Nature” for their “principall object,” “Onely the Poet, disdayning to be tied to any such subiection, lifted vp with the vigor of his owne inuention, dooth growe in effect another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite a newe, formes such as neuer were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as hee goeth hand in hand with Nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her guifts, but freely ranging onely within the Zodiack of his own wit.” Sir Philip Sidney, Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie, ed. J. Churton Collins (Oxford, 1907), 7, 8.

10. See John O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century (Carbondale, Ill., 1978); Arnold Weinstein, Fictions of the Self: 1550-1800 (Princeton, 1981); and Stephen D. Cox, “The Stranger within Thee”: Concepts of the Self in Late Eighteenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh, 1981).

11. See Monroe C. Beardsley, “Dostoyevsky’s Metaphor of the ‘Underground,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (1942): 265-90; Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York, 1958); and Darlene Unrue, “Henry James and the Grotesque,” Arizona Quarterly 32 (1976): 293-300.

12. See Renate Matthaei, Luigi Pirandello, trans. Simon Young and Erika Young (New York, 1973), 21ff., and Roger W. Oliver, Dreams of Passion: The Theater of Luigi Pirandello (New York, 1979), 7. Brecht similarly jolts and perplexes his audience by sudden disruptions and reversals, his well-known Verfremdungseffekt.

13. Thomas Mann, “Conrad’s ‘Secret Agent,’ ” in Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Freeport, N.Y., 1968), 240-41. This passage is quoted in William Van O’Connor’s essay on recent grotesquerie in American fiction, “The Grotesque: An American Genre,” in The Grotesque: An American Genre and Other Essays (Carbondale, Ill., 1962), 5. Concerning the grotesque in twentieth-century art, Bernard McElroy verifies Mann’s prediction: “There seems to be an affinity which makes the grotesque not only typical of our art, but perhaps its most characteristic expression, indeed at times even its obsession” (Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, 16-17).

14. Tennessee Williams, “This Book,” introduction to Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye (New York, 1950), xii, xviii, xvi.

15. “Of Friendship,” in The Essayes of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (New York, n.d.), 1.27, p. 144.

16. Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose, with an introduction by William K. Wimsatt, Jr., 2d ed. (New York, 1972), 381. On the Dunciad, consult Tony Tanner, “Reason and the Grotesque: Pope’s Dunciad,” Critical Quarterly 7 (1965): 145-60.

17. Geoffrey Galt Harpham cites “The Metamorphosis” as a perfect example of a work that alienates the audience, suddenly shocking it and instilling what Kayser termed a “fear of life”—the awful growing suddenly out of the quotidian. Harpham goes further, noting that, although ideas of what is grotesque vary in each generation, he nonetheless hopes to “fix” some constants in audiences’ reactions: he suggests that the viewer must respond in a threefold way—with astonishment, with disgust or horror, and with laughter. Harpham, “The Grotesque: First Principles,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (Summer 1976): 461-68.

18. Consult Richard M. Cook, “Popeye, Flem, and Sutpen: The Faulknerian Villain as Grotesque,” Studies in American Fiction 3 (Spring 1975): 3-14.

19. W. Gordon Cunliffe, Günter Grass (New York, 1969), 66. See also Leslie A. Willson, “The Grotesque Everyman in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel,” Monatshefte 58 (1966): 131-38.

20. On mutilated figures as archetypal, see Peter L. Hays, The Limping Hero: Grotesques in Literature (New York, 1971). On wit and satiric strategies, see William York Tindall, Samuel Beckett (New York, 1964), 35f.

3. Degrading the Hero

1. In addition to Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), trans. Joan Rivière (Garden City, N.Y., 1958), and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1916), trans. James Strachey (New York, 1963), the reader should also consult Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1918), trans. A.A. Brill (New York, n.d.).

2. See esp. A.V. Judges, ed., The Elizabethan Underworld (London, 1930); Frank W. Chandler, The Literature of Roguery (Boston, 1907); and idem, Romances of Roguery (New York, 1899). Recent studies include Robert Alter, Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); Alexander A. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent (Edinburgh, 1967); and Richard Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (Madison, Wis., 1977).

3. See Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid–Nineteenth Century England (New York, 1975).

4. Lionel Trilling, “The Two Environments: Reflections on the Study of English,” in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York, 1965), 219.

5. Velma Bourgeois Richmond, “The Humanist Rejection of Romance,” South Atlantic Quarterly 77 (1978): 296. Richmond refers to McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride, which mentions a correspondence between the contemporary appeal of Superman in the popular culture and the similar appeal of angels in the Middle Ages.

6. Similarly, it can be suggested that, in Old Testament Hebrew society, the lonely rural prophets (such as Isaiah, Jeremiah) stand in sharp critical contrast with the organized religious bureaucracy of the city-dwellers, typified by the Sadducees.

7. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (London, 1932), 1: 32.

8. Quoted in Robert Douglas Mead, Hellas and Rome (New York, 1972), 59.

9. C.W. Mendell, “Satire as Popular Philosophy,” Classical Philology 15 (1920): 140-41. Mendell’s article cogently urges the continuity between the practical and popular diatribe traditions initiated by early Cynics—Diogenes, Menippus, Bion—and the later development of the genre of Roman verse satire.

10. On Antisthenes, see Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, trans. L.R. Palmer (London, 1955), 108; see also 109-12, 227-29, 272-74. All the Cynics in some sense emulated Diogenes’ waggery and doggishness. Lucian terms Menippus “the secret dog who bites as he laughs”; Bis Accusatus 33. That Diogenes was normally referred to as Dog was commonplace; see Aristotle Rhetoric 3.10.1411a24, who refers to Diogenes as “The Dog” without even mentioning his name. Consult the discussion in Farrand Sayre, Diogenes of Sinope: A Study of Greek Cynicism (Baltimore, 1938), esp. 87.

11. Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers 6.46; Donald R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism from Diogenes to the Sixth Century A.D. (London, 1937), 21, 28.

12. Dudley, History of Cynicism, 37. Needless to say, most of our information about Diogenes is legendary. The original man may well have been a conflation of several eccentrics, together with similarly named characters in later fictions and romances; see Farrand Sayre, The Greek Cynics (Baltimore, 1948), esp. 50. But this should not prevent us from questioning Sayre and positing a powerful influential Cynic founder, Diogenes, some part of whose life and teaching are indeed preserved in the works of Diogenes Laertius and later authors. See H. von Arnim, Leben und Werke des Dio von Prusa (Berlin, 1898), 37ff.

13. A.A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (New York, 1974), 111. Consult Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, vol. 2, ed. J. von Arnim (Stuttgart, 1964), 743-56. The early Stoics (much to the embarrassment of the later Stoa) even adopted some of these claims; see SVF 1: 249ff.

14. On “soapbox lectures,” see Lionel Casson, introduction to Selected Satires of Lucian, ed. Lionel Casson (Garden City, N.Y., 1962), xii. Eratosthenes compared Bion’s garish, motley style with the gaudy robes of the hetaera, or prostitute; Diogenes Laertius Lives 4.52. On the evolution of later prose, see André Oltramare, Les Origines de la diatribe romaine (Geneva, 1926), and Richard M. Gummere, “The English Essay and Some of Its Ancient Prototypes,” Classical Weekly 14 (April 4, 1921): 154-60. What Bjornson says of the picaresque writer applies equally well to Cynic authors: “By breaking down the traditional separation of styles and expanding the range of acceptable subject matter to include the morally serious treatment of non-aristocratic characters, they constituted one of the most important stages in the transition between earlier literary prose and the modern novel” (Picaresque Hero, 3).

15. Diogenes Laertius Lives 6.41, 6.43; Abraham J. Malherbe, ed. and trans., “The Epistles of Diogenes,” in The Cynic Epistles (Missoula, Mont., 1977), Epistle 16, p. 109. Such epistles are, of course, spurious, doubtlessly written during the Augustan era.

16. Diogenes Laertius Lives 6.63; Harold W. Attridge, ed. and trans., First-Century Cynicism in the Epistles of Heraclitus (Missoula, Mont., 1976), 3.

17. Many critics continue to be surprised to find Hercules a standard Cynic and Stoic hero; he appears too brazen and impulsive to them. Hence they frequently find Stoic treatment of this hero “ambiguous” or “ambivalent”; see, for instance, Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (New York, 1962), 30-38.

18. G. Karl Galinsky, “The Comic Hero,” in The Herakles Theme (Totowa, N.J., 1972), 81-100, 107. See Prodicus’s parable “The Choice of Hercules,” in Xenophon Memorabilia 2.1.21-34.

19. Diogenes Laertius Lives 6.71. To be sure, as best as we can reconstruct the Cynic view of Heracles, he represents a contrast with the fatalistic hero suffering his πόνοι as in the tragedies, or merely the muscular athlete of comedy and the satyr plays. Instead, he is simplistic and “natural” man, alien to the intellect and to civilization, and distinctly ethical, ascetic, and individualist. The topic of Hercules as the Cynic avatar is treated extensively in Ragnar Hoistad, Cynic Hero and Cynic King: Studies in the Cynic Conception of Man (Uppsala, 1948), esp. 22-73.

20. R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness (Chicago, 1960); idem, The Politics of Experience (New York, 1967); R.D. Laing and A. Esterson, Sanity, Madness and the Family (New York, 1971); Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston, 1955); Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York, 1966).

21. Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New York, 1971); see Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York, 1978).

22. See Yeats, “The Circus Animal’s Desertion” 1.40; Robert Martin Adams, Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side (Berkeley, 1977), 119-20. Renato Poggioli observes that since the 1870s, when avant-garde ideals became popular among cults and coteries, the “posture” of the avant-garde has always been antagonism—toward tradition and toward the popular audience. Paradoxically, its anarchistic individualism has always been based upon upper- as well as lower-class standards. As a member of a sect and caste, the militant milieu artiste repeatedly displays “two postures, now plebeian and now aristocratic, now ‘dandy’ and now ‘bohemian.’ ” Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 31.

23. Ronald W. Tobin, “A Hero for All Seasons: Hercules in French Classical Drama,” Comparative Drama 1 (Winter 1967-68): 288.

24. Michael Ayrton, The Maze Maker (New York, 1967), 242-44.

25. See, for instance, Sean O’Faolain, The Vanishing Hero: Studies of the Hero in the Modern Novel (Boston, 1957); Harold Lubin, ed., Heroes and Anti-Heroes (San Francisco, 1968); the special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination 9, no. 1 (Spring 1976), devoted to “The Anti-Hero: His Emergence and Transformations”; and David Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction: Updike, Styron, Bellow, Salinger, 2d ed. (Austin, Tex., 1981).

4. Debunking the Author

1. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub to Which Is Added the Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A.C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1958), 55.

2. Jonathan Swift, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.,” 11. 13-20, in Swift: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London, 1967), 496-97.

3. Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief (Baltimore, 1954), 7.

4. F.N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Boston, 1961), 239.

5. Aubrey Williams, ed., Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope (Boston, 1969), 43.

6. Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, 1962), 244.

7. Pope, “An Essay on Man,” in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, 407.

8. Robinson, ed., Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 242.

9. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, 1. 13.

10. Juvenal, Satire 7, in Juvenal: Satires, trans. Jerome Mazzaro (Ann Arbor, 1965), 89; Persius, Satire 1, 11. 41-43, in Juvenal and Persius with an English Translation, trans. G.G. Ramsay, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 321.

11. Horace Epistle 2.1.269-70; Catullus, Carmina 95.8; Martial Epigrams 3.2.3-4. Martial’s favorite image is that of the fish-wrapper, as in 3.50.9, 4.86.8.

12. John Lyly, “Euphues. The Anatomy of Wit” (1578), in The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R.W. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1967), 1: 182.

13. Eccles. 1: 2-4, 10, 11.

14. T.S. Eliot, “Fragment of an Agon” (from Sweeney Agonistes), in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York, 1952), 80.

15. Alexander Pope, Dunciad (1743) 3.155 and the note to 1. 156, in The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, 3d ed., vol. 5 of The Poems of Alexander Pope (New Haven, 1963), 327.

16. Swift, Tale of a Tub, 34-35. Cf. 1 Macc. 12:53, Deut. 32:26.

17. Samuel Putnam, ed. and trans., The Portable Rabelais (New York, 1965), 9; Swift, Tale of a Tub, 71.

18. Putnam, ed. and trans., Portable Rabelais, 225.

19. Homer Wilbur [James Russell Lowell], The Biglow Papers (New York, 1969), 127; Pope, Dunciad 1.156, p. 282; Swift, Tale of a Tub, 36; Pope, Dunciad 1.229-30, p. 287.

20. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Ozell and Motteux, with an introduction by Herschel Brickell (New York, 1930), 51-54.

21. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey and Journal to Eliza, with an afterword by Monroe Engel (New York, 1964), 117. Mackenzie’s novel commences with chapter 11; the remainder is presented in an absurdly disjunct sequence, as follows: chaps. 12-14, 19-21, 25-29, a fragment, 33-36, a fragment, 40, a fragment, 45-46, a conclusion. The curate is presumably indiscriminate when extracting his “wadding.”

22. John Harold Wilson, ed., Six Restoration Plays (Boston, 1959), 342-43.

23. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals (London, 1968), 34, 39.

24. Horace, Book 1, Satire 4, trans. Hubert Wetmore Wells, in The Complete Works of Horace, ed. Casper J. Kraemer, Jr. (New York, 1936), 21-22.

25. Voltaire, Candide and Zadig, ed. Lester G. Crocker (New York, 1968), 82.

26. Francisco Gomez Quevedo, Quevedo: The Choice Humors and Satirical Works, ed. Charles Duff (New York, 1926), 53.

27. Catullus, Carmina 36.20; Pietro Aretino, Aretino’s Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1971), 3; Swift, Tale of a Tub, 36.

28. John Dryden, “MacFlecknoe,” ll. 100, 103, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. E.N. Hooker, et al. (Berkeley, 1972), 2: 56-57.

29. Pope, Dunciad 4.71, 81-82, 101-102, pp. 348, 349, 351.

30. Ibid., 4.135-36, 191-92, 653, 656, pp. 354, 360, 409.

31. Matthew Hodgart, Satire (London 1969), 115.

32. John M. Bullitt, Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 44ff.

33. Joseph Bentley, “Semantic Gravitation: An Essay on Satiric Reduction,” Modern Language Quarterly 30 (1969): 3-19.

34. George Orwell, 1984 (New York, 1949), 63; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Breakfast of Champions (New York, 1973), 131, 133.

35. George Orwell, Animal Farm (New York, 1946), 108.

36. Orwell, 1984, 51.

37. Günter Grass, The Meeting at Telgte, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1981), 120.

38. Horace Satires 2.7.

39. Mailer’s tale appears in Cannibals and Christians (New York, 1970), 380-97. This piece concludes the book. Such strategies are merely comical warnings, satirical ways of shocking—a dominant feature of satire, but not necessarily deliberate affirmations of pessimism or despair.

40. In Branko Mikasinovich, ed., Modern Yugoslav Satire (Merrick, N.Y., 1979), 68-69.

41. Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, trans. Michael Kandel and Christine Rose (New York, 1973), 2.

42. Examiner no. 18, Dec. 7, 1710, in The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1959), 3: 32. Swift observes in a letter (Jan. 6, 1708–9) to Archbishop King that “the World is divided into two Sects, those that hope the best, and those that fear the worst; your Grace is of the former, which is the wiser, the nobler, and most pious Principle; and although I endeavour to avoid being of the other, yet upon this Article I have sometimes strange Weaknesses. I compare the Religion to Learning and Civility which have ever been in the World, but very often shifted their Scenes; sometimes leaving whole Countries where they have long flourished.” Harold Williams, ed., The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift (Oxford, 1963–65), 1: 117.

43. “Ode to the Athenian Society,” ll. 296-300, in Davis, ed., Swift: Poetical Works, 17. The theme of the imminent invasion of barbarians is a popular one among satirists and is particularly well utilized by Evelyn Waugh; see Alvin B. Kernan, “The Wall and the Jungle: The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh,” Yale Review 53 (Dec. 1963): 199-220.

5. Dislocating the Language

1. Consult Philip Pinkus, “Satire and St. George,” Queen’s Quarterly 70 (1963): 30-49; John R. Clark and Anna Motto, eds., Satire: That Blasted Art (New York, 1973), esp. 19-22; and John R. Clark, “Anticlimax in Satire,” Seventeenth-Century News 33 (1975): 22-26. Alvin Kernan notes in The Plot of Satire (New Haven, 1965) that most satires unfold erratically: running downhill, wobbling up and down, or going around in circles.

2. Individual Horatian and Juvenalian satires take up so many topics that they almost madden subsequent critics who wish to sort out themes and perceive coherent form. In addition, overcrowding is regularly a topic and a practice of satire as well: see Alvin B. Kernan, “The Mob Tendency in Satire: The Day of the Locust,” Satire Newsletter 1 (1963): 11-20.

3. Consider Frederick J. Stopp’s observation: “Traditionally, satire has always borrowed its ground-plan, parasitically and by ironic inversion, from other forms of ordered exposition in art or in life; misericords bear parodies of the liturgy, ironical encomia are laudatory speeches in reverse.” Stopp, Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of an Artist (London, 1958), 201. The concept of satire as a genre deriving its shape from other genres, functioning as a parasite dependent upon numerous hosts, is developed at length in Leon Guilhamet, Satire and the Transformation of Genre (Philadelphia, 1987).

4. Most studies of satire treat it as essentially rhetorical; here I propose that satire is an art form and is essentially mimetic.

5. Robert C. Elliott rightly extols the “brilliant counterfeiting” of Swift that is “dangerously convincing,” for “Swift takes on the guise of the enemy in order to do a wrecking job from the inside.” Elliott, “Swift’s ‘I,’ ” Yale Review 62 (Spring 1973): 383.

6. Consult Harold Williams, ed., The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1958), 101-5.

7. Ian Watt argues that this sense of double audience—the refined and the ignorant—led to the proliferation of indirection and meiosis in Augustan literature: see Watt, “The Ironic Voice,” in The Augustan Age: Approaches to Its Literature, Life, and Thought, ed. Ian Watt (Greenwich, Conn., 1968), 101-14.

8. H.R. Swardson, “Sentimentality and the Academic Tradition,” College English 37 (April 1976): 747-66.

9. Edmund Wilson, “ ‘Never Apologize, Never Explain’: The Art of Evelyn Waugh,” in Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (New York, 1950), 140-46.

10. Relevant to this study, critic Robert Scholes perceives an increased interest of late in “fabulation” in artists (like Faulkner, Nabokov, Hawkes) who take a particular “delight in formal and verbal dexterity.” Scholes, The Fabulators (New York, 1967), 67. But we might assert that satirists have been attracted to such verbal playfulness. Nonetheless, there is now an “almost universal . . . acceptance of the element of playfulness in art,” one critic proposes; Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry (New York, 1966), 162. And game theory has played a considerable role in recent literary criticism; see particularly Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, trans. R.F.C. Hul (London, 1949); Jacques Ehrmann, ed., Game, Play, Literature (Boston, 1971); and Richard A. Lanham, “Tristram Shandy”: The Games of Pleasure (Berkeley, 1973).

11. C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York, 1961), 94.

12. Ben Jonson, “Timber, or Discoveries,” in Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1947), 8: 592-93.

13. Compare 11. 169-72 from “An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot”:

Pretty! in Amber to observe forms

Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms;

The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare,

But wonder how the Devil they got there?

John Butt, ed., The Poems of ALexander Pope (New Haven, 1963), 603.

14. Horace Walpole, “The Peach in Brandy: A Milesian Tale,” in Hieroglyphic Tales (London, 1926), 53-54. Much the same ambiguity clings to the expression “God forgive him!” Is the prelate in need of forgiveness because he dined upon a fetus, because he swallowed it at a single gulp, or because he neglected the saying of grace?

15. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (Baltimore, 1943), 67.

16. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York, 1974), 545.

17. Charles Neider, ed., The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 436

18. Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay (New York, n.d.), 230.

19. I take ecstasiated to be an ugly neologism; satirists, serving the cause of distortion, are particularly expert in creating new words. Thus, for example, Ejner J. Jensen remarks the vitality that Thomas Drant, the Elizabethan satirist, obtains by introducing such “free-wheeling” words as sparple, prools, nipfarthinge, dindle, chubbyshe, and wamblynge. Jensen, “The Wit of Renaissance Satire,” Philological Quarterly 51 (April 1972): 400.

20. See Hamlet 2.2.545ff. “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”

21. Petronius Satyricon 99, in The Satyricon, trans. William Arrowsmith (New York, 1963), 104.

22. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), 162, 34, 229-30, 233-34.

23. Frederick C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook (New York, 1963), 88.

24. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub to Which Is Added the Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A.C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1958), 170. And how, one may wish to know, does a thinker “unravel” a “point” that has somehow metamorphosed into a knitter’s “knot”?

25. John Dryden, “MacFlecknoe,” 1. 148, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. E.N. Hooker et al. (Berkeley, 1972), 2: 58; E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York, 1927), 111-12; Henry James, “Preface to ‘What Maisie Knew,’ ” in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, with an introduction by R.P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), 149.

26. Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Baltimore, 1967), 1: 36.

27. See, for instance, William P. Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire, 1572-1642 (New Haven, 1954); Walter Wagoner, ed., Bittersweet Grace: A Treasury of Twentieth-Century Religious Satire (Cleveland, 1967); Eugene Hollander, Die Karikatur und Satire in Der Medizin (Stuttgart, 1905); John A. Yunck, “The Venal Tongue: Lawyers and the Medieval Satirists,” American Bar Association Journal 46 (1960): 267-70; and C.S. Duncan, “The Scientist as a Comic Type,” Modern Philology 14 (1916): 281-91. Much of this proliferation of “jargon” is understood to apply to any maker of systems; see D.W. Jefferson, “Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit,” Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 225-48. For a further discussion together with numerous examples, consult “Parody of Learning,” in Clark and Motto, eds., Satire, 86-123.

28. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), trans. J. Gerald Markley (New York, 1954), 3.

29. “ ‘Tis of Aucassin and of Nicolette,” in Aucassin and Nicolette and Other Medieval Romances and Legends, trans. Eugene Mason (New York, 1958), 13-14. A number of critics still believe that this tale is “serious”; but see Robert Harden, “Aucassin et Nicolette as Parody,” Studies in Philology 63 (Jan. 1966): 1-9.

30. Mikhail Zoshchenko, “Much Ado About Nothing,” in Nervous People and Other Satires, trans. Maria Gordon and Hugh McLean (Bloomington, 1975), 233.

31. Hugh McLean, introduction to Zoshchenko, Nervous People, xi. Fostering a kind of paradox, Kenneth Burke once proposed that “we might even say that the conditions are ‘more favorable,’ to satire under censorship than under liberalism—for the most inventive satire arises when the artist is seeking simultaneously to take risks and escape punishment for this boldness, and is never quite certain himself whether he will be acclaimed or punished. In proportion as you remove these conditions of danger, by liberalization, satire becomes arbitrary and effete, attracting writers of far less spirit and scantier resources.” Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, rev. ed. (New York, 1957), 199. This is a beguiling hypothesis that probably will not hold up. A major artist is a major artist, regardless of conditions; nor will his work tend to become “effete” under certain circumstances.

32. Ezra Pound, Personae: Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (London, 1952), 73.

33. Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, December 6, 1886, in Percy Lubbock, ed., The Letters of Henry James (New York, 1920), 1: 124; Letter to Robert Louis Stevenson, July 31, 1888, Lubbock, ed., Letters of Henry James 1: 138.

34. Henry James, The Sacred Fount, with an introduction by Leon Edel (New York, 1953), 163-64. Much later, Mrs. Brissenden patiently explains to the narrator that Gilbert Long continues to be filled with “platitudes,” and thus he remains “a prize fool” (292).

35. Thomas R. Edwards, Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes (New York, 1971), 85. Because Edwards is dealing with the poet “speaking out” on public issues, he naturally tends to conceive of satire as being most ably represented by “formal verse satire,” rather than as a far broader and more inclusive fictional genre.

36. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York, 1966), 279-80.

6. Gaming with the Plot

1. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry (New York, 1966), 162.

2. Kenneth Burke in the 1930s and 1940s was already postulating that literature and life were simultaneously engaged in drama, gesture, and “symbolic action.” The interested reader might consult Stephen Potter, The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship (New York, 1948); Roger Callois, Les Jeux et les hommes: Le Masque et le vertige (Paris, 1958); Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y., 1959); Eric Berne, Games People Play (New York, 1964); Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New York, 1971); Jacques Ehrmann, ed., Game, Play, Literature (Boston, 1971); Richard A. Lanham, “Tristram Shandy”: The Games of Pleasure (Berkeley, 1973); and Harriet Deer and Irving Deer, “Satire as Rhetorical Play,” Boundary 2 5 (Spring 1977): 711-21. Many a critic, of course, is sceptical, believing that a serious falling-off has occurred since the great age of the modernist innovators: “It is perhaps the high seriousness of [the modernists’] devotion to art which finally distinguishes [them] from their successors, who set more store by jokes and language-games.” Peter Faulkner, Modernism (London, 1977), 75.

3. Virginia Woolf, “American Fiction,” in The Moment and Other Essays (New York, 1948), 123.

4. Despite critics’ elevated taste and their treatment of melodrama with haughty and often scornful disapprobation, literary traditions utilizing melodrama continue to thrive; it is a popular mode that recurrently thrives and prevails. Consult John R. Clark and Anna Lydia Motto, “Gasps, Guffaws, and Tears: A Modest Defense of Sentimentality, Bathos, and Melodrama,” Thalia 1 (1978): 61-70.

5. For the modern preoccupation with dystopias, consult Roger Elwood, ed., Dystopian Visions (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1975), and Harold Berger, Science Fiction and the New Dark Age (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1976). For H.G. Wells’s influence on the dystopian genre, see Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (Carbondale, Ill., 1967).

6. See Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” Sewanee Review 53 (1945): 221-40, 433-56, 643-53; Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley, 1954); Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel (New York, 1959); and Sharon Spencer, Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel (New York, 1971). Notably relevant, concerning the influence of twentieth-century scientific thought upon literature, is Irving Deer, “Science, Literature, and the New Consciousness,” ADE Bulletin, no. 34 (Sept. 1972): 37-45; reprinted in Harry Finestone and Michael F. Shugrue, eds., Prospects for the 70’s: English Departments and Multidisciplinary Study (New York, 1973), 125-33.

7. J. P. Hodin, “The Spirit of Modern Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 1 (June 1961): 183, cited in Stephen Spender, “The Modern as Vision of a Whole Situation,” Partisan Review 29 (Summer 1962): 361. This interesting essay also appears in Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley, 1963), 79-97.

8. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (London, 1962), 11-12.

9. Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley, 1955), 110-11.

10. Leslie Fiedler suggests that American writers “have to be sure, profited by their exposure to the avant-garde, just as they have by their awareness of the classical past—but their relationship to both has been essentially that of mockery, their chief connection the utterly ambivalent one of parody.” Fiedler, “The Dream of the New,” in American Dreams, American Nightmares, ed. David Madden (Carbondale, Ill., 1970), 24. Yet we might add that not merely the Americans are so inclined; the whole of the twentieth-century world has participated in an enormous resurgence in the employment of parody. See the particularly revealing study by Thomas R. Frosch, “Parody and the Contemporary Imagination,” Soundings 56 (Winter 1973): 371-92, and also Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Meta-Fiction (London, 1979).

11. “Formal realism’s” authenticity is inductive, and “the novel’s mode of imitating reality may therefore be equally well summarized in terms of the procedures of another group of specialists in epistemology, the jury in a court of law.” Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley, 1964), 31.

12. Consult Sir Edmund Strachey, “Nonsense as a Fine Art,” Quarterly Review 167 (1888): 335-65, on Edward Lear and his antecedents, and consider the recent interest in earlier writers of “nonsense”: Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense (London, 1952), on Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll; Kathleen Blake, Play, Games, and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974); Leonard Forster, Poetry of Significant Nonsense ((Cambridge, Eng., 1962), on Christian Morgenstern, Hugo Ball, and the Zurich group of dadaists and founders of the Cabaret Voltaire. See also James Rother, “Modernism and the Nonsense Style,” Contemporary Literature 15 (Spring 1974): 187-202.

Several critics believe that the twentieth century has witnessed the rise and proliferation of fantasy in literature as a special genre (C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and science fiction): see Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975); Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, 1976); and W.R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana, Ill., 1976).

13. In mentioning antistories, I am thinking of such collections as Philip Stevick, ed., Anti-Story: An Anthology of Experimental Fiction (New York, 1971); Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Breakthrough Fictioneers: An Anthology (Baiton, Vt., 1973); and Joe David Bellamy, ed., The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers (Urbana, Ill., 1974). See Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley, 1975), and Jerome Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (Urbana, Ill., 1975).

14. A similar transformation is suggested in André Gide’s L’Immoraliste (Paris, 1902), in which, well-nursed by his wife, Michel recovers from illness in North Africa and becomes increasingly sensuous. As he grows in strength and travels northward, his wife Marceline acquires his disease (tuberculosis); they return again southward, where she lingers and dies. Again, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (New York, 1934), as the mentally ill Nicole recovers from her illness, her psychiatrist husband, Dick Diver, declines and degenerates into alcoholism and professional ruin. With her cure, he is dismissed, a broken man.

15. Paranoia is, of course, a key theme in much of modern literature—and especially in Pynchon; see Robert Murray Davis, “Parody, Paranoia, and the Dead End of Language in The Crying of Lot 49,” Genre 5 (1972): 367-77. See also the general comments on paranoia in modern American literature in Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970 (London, 1971), esp. 15-17. On the other hand, much of the paranoia is clearly justified, for there has been a regular increase of violence—in literature and in life. See, for example, James B. Twitchell, Preposterous Violence: Fables of Aggression in Modern Culture (New York, 1989).

16. Martin Amis, Einstein’s Monsters (New York, 1987), 73-74.

17. André Gide, The Counterfeiters with Journal of “The Counterfeiters,” novel trans. Dorothy Bussy, journal trans. Justin O’Brien (New York, 1951). In France, the journal was published separate from the novel by Librairie Gallimard in 1927.

7. Further Intrusion and Obstruction

1. Many speak of “postmodern” innovations and creations; consider a pair of essays by John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Atlantic Monthly 220, (Aug. 1967): 29-34, and “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly 245 (Jan. 1980): 65-71. See also Philip Stevick, “Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots, Goes on Talking; the King, Puzzled, Listens: An Essay on New Fiction,” TriQuarterly 26 (1973): 332-62. There are, of course, some who understandably doubt whether there is a “postmodern” era at all: see Gerald Graff, “The Myth of the Post-modernist Breakthrough,” TriQuarterly 26 (1973): 383-417.

2. Jerome Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (Urbana, Ill., 1975).

3. Brecht’s term, Verfremdungseffekt, usefully describes strategies utilized to jolt the audience, to keep them on their toes, to prevent passivity and a dull crowd’s “identifying with” one’s literary characters. Regulated disorder may be found in antiquity and the Middle Ages, perhaps, but its incidence markedly increases as we approach the modern era. A related study of importance is Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity (New York, 1981). This collection includes particularly relevant studies of fragmentation in the modern period by John Tytell, Roger Shattuck, and Serge Doubrovsky.

4. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York, 1962), 17-35, 151-57, 45-55; Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares, Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York, 1976).

5. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York, 1971), esp. 267-71.

6. Donald Barthelme, Snow White (New York, 1967), 82-83.

7. See Ronald Sukenick, Up (New York, 1968); idem, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (New York, 1969); idem, Out (Chicago, 1973); Raymond Federman, Take It or Leave It (New York, 1976); Jonathan Baumbach, Reruns (New York, 1974); and idem, Babble (New York, 1976). A number of relevant critical studies have sought to examine the rising tendency to utilize self-conscious and self-reflective characters in much recent literature, as well as the author’s own penchant for breaking down the fictional illusion. Consult Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London, 1984), and June Schlueter, Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama (New York, 1979).

8. Sukenick, Up, 325.

9. William H. Gass, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (New York, 1971), [55].

10. Preface to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Between Time and Timbuktu (New York, 1972), xv.

11. Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions, ix, 2. For an extended (and unfavorable) review of this volume, consult George Levine, “Literary Good, Literary Evil,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 26, 1976, p. 20.

12. Eccles. 1: 9-10.

13. This is quite a common disruptive practice in the plays of Aristophanes, even outside of the parabasis; in Clouds, for example, consult ll. 326, 890, and 1094-1100. Similarly, at the close of Petronius’s Satyricon 132, Encolpius the narrator (or could it be the author himself for a moment?) suddenly interrupts the absurd melodramatic scene concerned with self-castration and launches into a pious tirade against “prudes” and followers of Cato who condemn “simple” and “fresh” works that speak of the natural—of activities in which all men engage. This speech is firmly undercut at its close when the narrator announces baldly that the “declamation” is over, whereupon the narrative calmly resumes. Catherine Belsey, in Critical Practice (London, 1980), 92, employs the term interrogative text to describe fictive creations that, unlike works of “classic realism,” avoid resolution and “disclosure.” In short, such works shun “closure,” and whereas other writings normally create a fictive world with the illusion of being real, such a text tends “to employ devices to undermine the illusion, [and] to draw attention to its own textuality.” We might add that texts that deliberately use such strategies and seek to engage readers (as they usually do) by shocking and disorienting them might well be termed disjunctive or disruptive texts. On the interfering speaker in literature, consult Wayne C. Booth, “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy,” PMLA 67 (1952): 163-85.

14. In Voltaire’s Candide, chap. 22, the innocent Candide visits the Parisian playhouse and attends a performance of Voltaire’s own tragedy, the Mahomet. Similarly, the priest Pero Pérez in Don Quixote, while collecting books of romances to be burned, discovers the Galatea by Miguel de Cervantes and elects to save it from the flames (1.6). In the midst of Molly Bloom’s last breathless soliloquy, she suddenly addresses her maker: “O Jamesy let me up out of this,” for a moment bursting the fictional context. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1934), 754. See “The Tragedy of a Character” (1911), in Luigi Pirandello, Short Stories, ed. and trans. Frederick May (London, 1965), 94-102, from which Pirandello subsequently developed his renowned play, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921).

15. The best work on Menippean satire and its long tradition and influence is Eugene P. Kirk, Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York, 1980). For an extensive review article of this work, consult John R. Clark and Anna Lydia Motto, “Menippeans and Their Satire: Concerning Monstrous Learned Old Dogs and Hippocentaurs,” Scholia Satyrica 6, nos. 3-4 (1980): 35-46.

16. See Erich Kahler, The Inward Turn of Narrative, trans. R. Winston and C. Winston (Princeton, 1973), and J.H. Matthews, Surrealism and the Novel (Ann Arbor, 1966).

17. The revolt against realism is the topic, largely, of Robert Alter’s insightful study, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley, 1975).

But see also Paul Regnier, “The Convention of ‘Realism’ in the Novel,” Genre 10 (1977): 103-13.

8. Discordant Endings

1. This phrase refers to and plays upon Frank Kermode’s title, The Sense of an Ending (New York, 1967). The book studies man’s perennial apocalyptic imagination and the creation of endings in fictions. My point is that a significant number of fictions refuse to utilize or patently oppose satisfactory or satisfying conclusions. Dustin Griffin, “Satiric Closure,” Genre 18 (1985): 173-89, considers that satirists have encountered problems in finding and creating satisfactory narrative endings. The article does not explore the idea that satirists particularly seek to generate disruptive, unsuitable finales.

2. For an analysis of this drama, see Anna Lydia Motto and John R. Clark, “Violenta Fata: The Tenor of Seneca’s Oedipus,” Classical Bulletin 50 (1974): 81-87.

3. Seneca’s Oedipus, adapted by Ted Hughes (Garden City, N.Y., 1972), 90.

4. Tom Prideaux, “Stage, Screen and Opera: Director Peter Brook Is Master of the Daring and Bizarre,” People, June 16, 1980, pp. 109-10. For reviews of the play when performed in London, see New York Times, April 2, 1968, p. 54, and July 26, 1968, p. 29.

5. Consult Anna Lydia Motto and John R. Clark, “ ‘There’s Something Wrong with the Sun’: Seneca’s Oedipus and the Modern Grotesque,” Classical Bulletin 54 (Jan. 1978): 41-44. See also Rainer Sell, “The Comedy of Hyperbolic Horror: Seneca, Lucan and 20th Century Grotesque,” Neohelicon 11 (1984): 227-300.

6. Critics frequently assume, however, that classicism avoids the indecorous and the disruptive. Speaking of the “grotesque,” E. E. Kellett asserts: “That taste which finds pleasure in incongruity—in violation of the recognized conventions of art—is one of the few tastes of which, so far as I know, little or no trace is to be found among the ancients.” Kellett, Fashion in Literature (London, 1931), 215. On the contrary, the Cynics and the satirists of antiquity were masters of a chaotic form, which zestfully fostered violent changes of topic, tone, and scene. This is especially true of Menippean satire, and such stratagems were passed along in the essay as well, particularly as it was developed by Montaigne. On the Menippean traditions, consult Eugene P. Kirk, Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York, 1980).

7. On Euripidean plays, see Bernard Knox, “Euripidean Comedy,” in Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore, 1979), 250-74. Consider the ending of Aristophanes’ Clouds, in which Strepsiades sets fire to Socrates’ think-factory, or of the conclusion to the Ecclesiazusae, in which two old lascivious hags, in the new female republic, each drag and pull at the limbs of the young protagonist Epigenes, taking him as captive for their lusts and beds. Similarly, Birds concludes with the successful demagogue Pisthetaerus celebrating his new autocracy in the aviary by preparing an elaborate “feast” of roasted bird—his citizenry.

8. Consult Leonard P. Kurtz, The Dance of Death and the Macabre Spirit in European Literature (New York, 1934); Northrop Frye, “Yorick: The Romantic Macabre,” in A Study of English Romanticism (New York, 1968), 51-85; and Mario Praz’s classic investigation The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London, 1933).

9. Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café, in The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers (Boston, 1951), 65-66.

10. Tennessee Williams, The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, 3 vols. (New York, 1971), 3: 339; Gabriel García Márquez, No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, trans. J. S. Bernstein (New York, 1968), 153-70; Donald Barthelme, City Life (New York, 1971), 1-17.

11. Slawomir Mrozek, Tango, trans. Ralph Manheim and Teresa Dzieduscycka (New York, 1968), esp. 107. Both satiric films have been highly praised by reviewers: on S.O.B., see Time, July 13, 1981, p. 58; and on Being There, see the cover story, Time, March 3, 1980, pp. 64-68, 71, 73. Significantly, at the close of Being There during the credits, the director presents reruns of cut scenes in which Sellers breaks down on the set with helpless laughter.

12. Robert Martin Adams, Strains of Discord: Studies in Literary Openness (Ithaca, N.Y., 1958), 13; Thomas Mann, “Conrad’s ‘Secret Agent,’ ” in Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Freeport, N.Y., 1933), 240-41. Frances K. Barasch agrees: “In fiction and drama, in the theater and in art, the grotesque has appeared as the single most characteristic expression of our times.” Barasch, introduction to the facsimile reprint of Thomas Wright, A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (New York, 1968), viii.

13. On the demise of tragedy in our time, see Joseph Wood Krutch, “The Tragic Fallacy,” in The Modern Temper (New York, 1929); idem, “Modernism” in Modern Drama (Ithaca, N. Y., 1953); and George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York, 1961). The best study of the prevalence of parody as a dominant literary mode in our century is Thomas R. Frosch, “Parody and the Contemporary Imagination,” Soundings 56 (Winter 1973): 371-92.

14. William Styron, The Long March (New York, 1968), 119-20.

15. Ibid., 126-27.

16. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary C. Richards (New York, 1958), 84-85; Eugène Ionesco, “Experience of the Theatre,” in Notes and Counter Notes, trans. Donald Watson (New York, 1964), 26.

17. The topic was introduced in a seminar at the 1975 Modern Language Association Convention. The 1976 seminar’s position papers have been published as Kenneth S. White, ed., Savage Comedy: Structures of Humor (Amsterdam, 1978).

18. Consult Richard Pearce, Stages of the Clown: Perspectives on Modern Fiction from Dostoyevsky to Beckett (Carbondale, Ill., 1970).

9. Infernal Repetition

1. John Milton, Paradise Lost 2.932-42, 947-50, in Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York, 1957), 254.

2. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, ed. and abridged by George Sherburn (Boston, 1962), 191, 202, 172, 146-47, 279, 302.

3. Horace Ars Poetica 139.

4. Eccles. 1:9.

5. Dante Inferno 10.36.

6. Milton, Paradise Lost 2.555-61. For an excellent treatment of the incessant touches of farce, comedy, irony, and absurdity in the portrayal of Satan and the fallen angels, see C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York, 1961), chaps. 13, 14.

7. T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” 1.62-63, in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York, 1952).

8. See especially Benjamin Boyce, “News from Hell,” PMLA 58 (June 1943): 402-37, and Frederick M. Keener, English Dialogues of the Dead: A Critical History, an Anthology and a Check List (New York, 1973).

9. John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel,” 11. 152-58, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. E.N. Hooker, et al. (Berkeley, 1972), 2: 10.

10. William Faulkner, The Hamlet (New York, 1957), 371-73.

11. Woody Allen, “Selections from the Allen Notebooks,” in Without Feathers (New York, 1976), 10.

12. Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. D.J. Enright (New York, 1976), chaps. 21, 22.

13. Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales, trans. Walter F. Cobb (New York, 1964), 37.

14. Ibid., 41-42.

15. Ibid.

16. Bruce F. Kawin, Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972), 30; “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), 320. Consult Jean Maloney, “Flyting: Some Aspects of Poetic Invective Debate,” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State Univ., 1964. A grand cursing contest or débat betwixt an English woman and a French woman is nicely managed in John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (New York, 1970), 446-72.

17. See, for instance, Mary Tom Osborne, Advice-to-a-Painter Poems, 1633–1856: An Annotated Finding List (Austin, Tex., 1949).

18. Alvin B. Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven, 1965), esp. 30, 77, 160. The chapter on Waugh is explicitly designated “Running in Circles.”

19. William Wordsworth, “Mutability,” 11. 1-3, in Poetical Works, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (New York, 1950).

20. Gabriel García Márquez, “Big Mama’s Funeral” (1962), in No One Writes to the Colonel And Other Stories, trans. J.S. Bernstein (New York, 1968), 209.

21. Ibid., 198, 217.

22. Henry James, “Ivan Turgénieff,” in French Poets and Novelists (1878; Freeport, N.Y., 1972), 318-19.

23. Arthur Bloch, Murphy’s Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go ! (Los Angeles, 1977). The latest among the popular “rule” and “law” books include Paul Dickson, The Official Rules (New York, 1978), and John Peers, comp., 1,001 Logical Laws, Accurate Axioms, Profound Principles, Trusty Truisms, Homey Homilies, Colorful Corollaries, Quotable Quotes and Rambunctious Ruminations for All Walks of Life (Garden City, N.Y., 1979).

24. Donald Barthelme, Snow White (New York, 1967), 96, 97. An “everted sphere,” by the way, is one that has been turned inside out. Critics of satire continue to have trouble with such perverse revolutionary form. Neil Schmitz, for instance, praises Barthelme’s scathing representations of a decadent literature and a decadent society, yet he believes that Barthelme, although “exploding” folly, fails to be constructive, fails to “reconstitute another more ample universe.” Schmitz, “Donald Barthelme and the Emergence of Modern Satire,” Minnesota Review 11 (Fall 1971): 116. Like many others, this critic finds himself dissatisfied with “the negativity of [Barthelme’s] satire” (117). Such a critic does not want satire, he wants construction crews, moral uplift, utopia, affirmative action. He isn’t going to get them.

10. Ennui

1. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854), with an introduction by William W. Watt (New York, 1958), 115, 119.

2. Seneca’s De Tranquillitate Animi, written at the apex of Roman imperial civilization, is entirely devoted to instructing Serenus in the arts of serenity; it seems that he suffers in a civilized, bureaucratic society from a crippling fatigue and restlessness. (See also Seneca’s Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium 28.) Later, the letters of Pliny the Younger frequently deal with the topic of taedium.

Monastic solitude exacerbated the devout Christian’s suffering “the dark night of the soul,” a mental crisis that alternated states of lassitude, hallucination, and despair. One of the striking figures in Dante’s Purgatorio is Belacqua (4.97-139), too supine and listless to have worked out his soul’s salvation.

3. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934; New York, 1963), 271.

4. Seneca Ep. 28.1-2; see also 104.7, 20-21. Compare the saying of Crates that Seneca cites in Ep. 10.1.

5. In Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, this is the title of poem 86 in “Spleen et Idéal.” It was originally the Greek title of Terence’s Latin play (163 B.C.).

6. See Estelle R. Ramey, “Boredom: The Most Prevalent American Disease,” Harper’s, Nov. 1974, pp. 12-14, 18-20, 22; and John R. Clark, “The Restless Turbulence of Wit: Boredom in the Seventeenth Century,” Seventeenth-Century News 36 (1978): 7-8. James Sloan Allen argues that nineteenth-century fascination (among romantics, realists, naturalists) with the middle-class values of the commonplace, the trivial, and the banal eventually in our century becomes a despairing and impotent fear and acceptance of the quotidian and the nugatory, contributing to the picayune an aura of terror and menace as it overwhelms our lives. Allen, “Modernity and the Evil of Banality,” The Centennial Review 23 (1979): 20-39.

7. Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley, 1955), 114. See all of chap. 3, pp. 85-119, for an acute analysis of fragmented, instantaneous time as it impinges upon all things in twentieth-century thinking.

8. Rambler, no. 6, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 3, The Rambler, ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven, 1969), 35. See also no. 80, on humanity’s seeming addiction to “that insatiable demand of new gratifications.” Needless to say, Johnson argues, one’s anticipated happiness is always shattered by the event (Idler, no. 58). All of Rasselas is cast within the frame story of men placed in an earthly paradise and infinitely bored. One should also remark in Rasselas the gem of a story about the man who renounced the world and retired into the wilderness; after a time, tedium induces him to renege on his vow, and he returns to the world. Observers conjecture that, like Sisyphus, Tantalus, and other hell-bound creatures, he may be expected to bounce indecisively back and forth between hermitage and metropolis as long as he lives (chaps. 21, 22). Jacques Barzun observes that Faust’s magic, like nineteenth-century science, equally promised elixirs only to disappoint: they lead man, through “trial and error” to “a round of desire, disillusion, disgust, and despair.” Barzun, “Faust and the Birth of Time,” in The Energies of Art (New York, 1956), 36.

9. Sonnet 79, 11. 2-7, 12. Lionel Trilling remarks upon Keats’s extreme ambivalence about pleasure as if it were strictly a nineteenth-century development: “aching Pleasure . . . Turning to poison as the bee-mouth sips” (“Ode on Melancholy,” 11. 23-24). But such ambivalence, such “divided states of feeling,” an uneven balancing of joy and sadness, content and discontent, are precisely a feature of the emerging modern self over the last four centuries; see Trilling, “The Fate of Pleasure,” in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York, 1965), esp. 64-69. The classic study of romantic eros somehow helplessly turned to imaginings of grotesquerie, violence, and sadomasochism is Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London, 1933).

10. Curiously, Western man in the latest decades of this century has been singled out as particularly narcissistic, although he might have been considered so over a number of recent centuries. See Christopher Lasch, “The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time,” Partisan Review 44 (1977): 9-19.

11. John O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century (Carbondale, Ill., 1978), esp. 7, 8. I borrow the useful concept of the performing self from Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New York, 1971). The melodramatic posturer has been especially notable since the era of the Byronic hero. Yet in the modern era the romantic hero—poseur, egoist, guilty rebel, frequent Satanist—has essentially fallen out of fashion. Modern anxiety and intellect deny the isolated self, reject most heroism, and scrutinize the world with a sneering irony and even mockery; see Raney Stanford, “The Romantic Hero and That Fatal Selfhood,” The Centennial Review 12 (1968): 430-54. A noteworthy study of that romantic tradition is Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis, 1962); Thorslev duly notes in chapter 12 the demise of such “heroism” in the modern era, as do Eric Bentley, A Century of Hero-Worship (Philadelphia, 1944), Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, trans. Angus Davidson (New York, 1956), and Sean O’Faolain, The Vanishing Hero: Studies of the Hero in the Modern Novel (Boston, 1957).

12. Montaigne is a good example of this self-conscious type, as is Sir Thomas Browne (on the latter, see the interesting comments concerning his quirky selfhood in Virginia Woolf, “The Elizabethan Lumber Room,” in The Common Reader: First Series [New York, 1953], 40-48). It might even be proposed that the rise to popularity in the theater of the Jonsonian “humor character” commences, however grotesquely, to delineate such individuals. Blaise Pascal in his Pensées (1670) precisely exemplifies the individual reflecting in solitude. He concludes that nothing renders man more weary, unhappy, and wretched than reflection in solitude upon the self’s condition. Hence, he argues, men will go to any lengths to generate bustle and stir, to play, make love, go to war. See Pascal, Pensées: The Provincial Letters, trans. W.F. Trotter (New York, 1941), pp. 46, 47, 48-52, nos. 127, 130, 131, 139.

13. I am thinking, of course, of Coleridge’s “Dejection Ode,” and of Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” in particular. Often the romantic sensibility is even destroyed when it does achieve its heart’s desire, as in Keats’s enigmatic “La Belle Dame sans merci.”

14. William Wordsworth, Prelude 3.196-97, in Poetical Works, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (New York, 1950).

15. George Steiner, “The Great Ennui,” in In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven, 1971), 1-25. I suspect that no great deed itself undermines a century—for there have been more than a few monstrous deeds—but rather the contemporary populace’s imagination of great deeds performed by themselves that causes the letdown, for reality can never live up to fantasy, imaginings, and expectations. Thomas De Quincey remarked in 1823 in his essay “On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” that the facts of the particularly brutal conduct of the murderer John Williams in 1812 served as a high-water mark that later aspiring criminals could only survey with envy and disappointment: “There has been absolutely nothing doing since his time, or nothing that’s worth speaking of,” an amateur criminal tells the author. This is merely an insight into the frustrated mind of a competitive but peculiar observer. Many doubtless looked to the French Revolution or to Napoleon in much the same way.

16. Barzun, “Byron and the Byronic in History,” in Energies of Art, 52-53.

17. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axel, Oeuvres complètes, (Paris, 1923), 4:261. Verlaine wrote, “I am far from sure that the philosophy of Villiers will not one day become the formula of our century”; cited in Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London, 1899), 45n.

18. Paul Verlaine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Y.G. Le Dantec and Jacques Borel (Paris, 1962), 371, 371n, 307.

19. As for the great fashion of artists and intellectuals baiting the bourgeoisie, see the excellent study by César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1964).

20. André Gide, Le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs (Paris, 1926), 70-71; my translation.

21. The latter two characters appear, respectively, in Sainte-Beuve, Vie, poésies, et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829), and Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale (1869). François-René de Chateaubriand’s hero appears in René (1802) and in Les Natchez (1826). On characters like René and Obermann, see the discussion by George Ross Ridge, “Hypersensitivity and the Pathological Hero,” in The Hero in French Romantic Literature (Athens, Ga., 1959), 53-74.

22. Charles Baudelaire, “Pierre Dupont,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Y.G. Le Dantec and Claude Pinchois, rev. ed. (Paris, 1961), 613.

23. Self-contradiction is one of the key features romantic man detects when he peers inward and studies the self; he confirms the paradox of Heraclitus that into the same river (of time? of life?) a man never steps twice, since the river and the man himself are so rapidly careening and changing. Pascal observes this rapid alteration of the self in Pensées, no. 122, and we recollect the almost Jekyll-and-Hyde aspects of Boswell the gentleman and also the rakehell in the London Journals (1762-63). Much the same is the essence of Sainte-Beuve’s Joseph Delorme: “Defunct Reason was prowling around him like a phantom and accompanied him to the abyss, which it illuminated with a sepulchral glimmer. With frightful vigor, this is what he called ‘the headlight for drowning himself.’ In a word, Joseph’s soul now no longer offers us more than inconceivable chaos where monstrous imaginations, fresh reminiscences, criminal fantasies, huge aborted thoughts, sage premonitions followed by mad actions, pious transports after blasphemies, all caper and quake confusedly on a bed of despair.” Charles Augustine Sainte-Beuve, Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829), ed. Gérald Antoine (Paris, 1956), 17; my translation. Here the much-touted “alienated” and “divided self” has fully arrived. See also Baudelaire’s similar catalog of his own reversals, alterations, and divagations between his intentions and his acts that reminds us of Delorme; in “A Une Heure du matin,” among the Petits Poèms en Prose, “Le Spleen de Paris” (1869), in Oeuvres complètes, 240-41.

24. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1843-1860), vol. 3, part 4, chap. 16, in Works, 26 vols. (Boston, 1897), 26: 319.

25. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), 1: 19-20. The entire section “Diapsalmata” is relevant for its treatment of dilemma and exhaustion, as in “The Rotation Method.”

26. Two salient studies here are Renato Poggioli, “On Goncharov and His Oblomov,” in The Phoenix and the Spider (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 33-48; and Geoffrey Clive, “Goncharov and the Spectrum of Boredom,” in The Broken Icon: Intuitive Existentialism in Classical Russian Fiction (New York, 1972), 63-85.

27. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (New York, 1954), 266-67. Reprinted with the permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company.

28. Ibid., 283, 289.

29. Antonio Machado, Poesías (Buenos Aires, 1969), p. 151, ll. 31, 33-36; my translation.

30. Frederick Karl, review of R.M. Adams, After Joyce (1977), English Language Notes 17 (1979): 75-77. Amid all the slaughter in our era, man’s paranoia, his sensing that “someone is out to get him,” might not so much be an obsession as a reasonable assessment of the situation: see the interesting remarks in Hendrik Hertzberg and David C.K. McClelland, “Paranoia,” Harper’s 248 (June 1974): 51-54, 59-60. As for preoccupation with degeneration and decay, Richard Gilman has cogently argued that the term “decadence” has no ascertainable meaning and should therefore be put away; Gilman, “Reflections on Decadence,” Partisan Review 46 (1979): 175-87, and idem, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York, 1979). But man recurrently (and at no time more than in these last two centuries) is convinced that his society is debauched and in decline, and there is no reason for taking his images, paradigms, and metaphors away from him; consult Lance Morrow, “The Fascination of Decadence,” Time, Sept. 10, 1979, pp. 85-86.

31. William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, N.Y., 1962), 241.

32. Refer to George Woodcock, “Utopias in Negative,” Sewanee Review 64 (1956): 81-97; George Knox, “Apocalypse and Sour Utopias,” Western Humanities Review 16 (Winter 1962): 11-22; Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (Carbondale, Ill., 1967); Irving Howe, “The Fiction of Anti-Utopia,” in Decline of the New (New York, 1970), 66-74; Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Chicago, 1970), esp. chaps. 5 and 7; and W.K. Thomas, “The Underside of Utopias,” College English 38 (1976): 356-72.

33. Most dystopias can be considered a species of science fiction, but much science fiction does not deal with an almost ideal society in collapse, but just with any extraterrestrial society in collapse. See, for instance, Roger Elwood, ed., Dystopian Visions (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1975); Harold Berger, Science Fiction and the New Dark Age (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1976); and Gregory Fitzgerald and John Dillon, eds., The Late Great Future (Greenwich, Conn., 1976). The most potent among the recent satiric authors of the science fiction of disaster or exhaustion is Stanislaw Lem.

34. Ideas of the heat-death of the universe have been growing ever more popular since the concept was postulated as an extension of the second law of thermodynamics in 1850 and 1852.

35. William Barrett, Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1972), 6. The onset of such inertia and self-doubt is well represented by the listlessness of the unrehabilitated former fighting man from World War I in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home”; he has taken to his bed and cannot and will not be reintegrated into society. He cannot function. In 1953 Paddy Chayefsky’s television drama Marty handsomely presented the whole of youthful society as drenched in boredom, “drugstore cowboys” hanging listlessly around with nothing to do. Recently, Saul Bellow’s Charles Citrine has long been collecting data for a projected essay on boredom that, significantly, he is unable to write. For Citrine too leads a life of a dangling man, in suspension—indecisive, nonproductive, uncertain. Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (New York, 1975), esp. 108-9, 198-203.

36. E.M. Cioran, Précis de décomposition (Paris, 1949), 22, 25; my translation.

37. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, trans. Patrick Bowles and Samuel Beckett (1955; New York, 1970), 53.

38. Donald Barthelme, “Games Are the Enemies of Beauty, Truth, and Sleep, Amanda Said,” in Guilty Pleasures (New York, 1976), 127, 133, 134.

39. See Charles Baudelaire, “Au lecteur,” in Les Fleurs du mal, ed. Ernest Raynaud, (Paris, 1952), 6. An advertising blurb for Kuhn’s Demon of Noontide by Princeton Univ. Press reads: “Baudelaire predicted that the ‘delicate monster’ of boredom would one day swallow up the whole world in an immense yawn”; PMLA 91 (1977): 319.

11. Scatology

1. Aldous Huxley, The Genius and the Goddess (New York, 1955), 52-53.

2. Alice Hamilton and Kenneth Hamilton, Elements of John Updike (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1970), 35; Francis Bacon, “Of Discourse,” in Essays, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis and Other Pieces, ed. R.F. Jones (New York, 1937), 96.

3. See Philip Pinkus, “Satire and St. George,” Queen’s Quarterly 70 (1963): 30-49.

4. Adrian Stokes, “Strong Smells and Polite Society,” Encounter 17 (July-Dec. 1961) 50-56; Captain John G. Bourke, Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (Washington, D.C., 1891), 134. Consult Thomas E. Maresca, “Language and Body in Augustan Poetic,” Journal of English Literary History 37 (1970): 374-88; and Philip Stevick, “The Augustan Nose,” University of Toronto Quarterly 34 (1965): 110-17.

5. “The Excremental Vision” is the title of chapter 28 of John Middleton Murry, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Biography (New York, 1955). See also Milton Voigt, “Swift and Psychoanalytic Criticism,” Western Humanities Review 16 (Autumn 1962): 361-67. Occasionally, however, a psychoanalytic critic will take compeers to task, as Norman O. Brown does (concerning attitudes toward Swift) in chapter 13 of Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn., 1959). Brown himself considers that “we are nothing but body” and aptly compares the amassing of “filthy lucre” with anal and excremental concerns (292-304). Consult William Makepeace Thackeray’s essay “Swift,” in The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853); and Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will (Garden City, N.Y., 1929), 99-112.

6. Jeremy Sandford and Roger Law, Synthetic Fun (Baltimore, 1967), 125. Nor are our ideas of hygienic washing, bathing, and treating food altogether sound; contemporary practices are often as much “ritual,” expressing “symbolic systems,” as many of the rites and proceedings of primitive tribes. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), esp. 34-35. For a fine satiric treatment of American cleanliness as aboriginal ritual, see Horace Miner, “Body Ritual among the Nacirema,” American Anthropologist 58 (1956): 503-7.

7. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York, 1955), 84; Alexander Pope, “Postscript to the Translation of the Odyssey” (1726), in Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge, 2 vols. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1961), 1: 295.

8. Little work has been done in the field of literary scatology; one might consult what proves to be a slender and hardly thorough study, Jae Num Lee, Swift and Scatological Satire (Albuquerque, 1971). Catullus, Carmina 36.1.20.

9. Petronius Satyricon 27, 47; Martial Epigrams 12.61. Elsewhere Bassus is condemned for manuring in a gold chamber pot but drinking only from glass: “Therefore, you shit at a greater cost” than you live (Epigrams 1.37).

10. Franceso Berni, “Capitolo dell’orinale,” in Rime, ed. Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti (Torino, 1969), 31-33. Concerning the tradition of the paradoxical encomium, consult Henry Knight Miller, “The Paradoxical Encomium, with Special Reference to Its Vogue in England, 1600-1800,” Modern Philology 53 (1956): 145-78.

11. John Dryden, “MacFlecknoe,” 11. 98-103, in Hooker, Works of John Dryden, 2:56-57. For studies of the scatological in this poem, see Michael Wilding, “Allusion and Innuendo in MacFlecknoe,” Etudes Celtiques 19 (1968): 355-70; Robert F. Willson, Jr., “The Fecal Vision in MacFlecknoe,” Satire Newsletter 8 (1970): 1-4; and John R. Clark, “Dryden’s ‘MackFlecknoe,’ 46-50,” Explicator (April 1971): item 56.

12. François Rabelais, The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J.M. Cohen (Baltimore, 1955), 1.13, 17.

13. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, ed. Louis A. Landa (Boston, 1960), 1.1; 2.1, 101, 157-90.

14. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. André Parreaux (Boston, 1968), 18, 19.

15. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1934), 67-69; Oliver St. John Gogarty, As I Was Going down Sackville Street (New York, 1937), 294-95.

16. For predictions of the decline of satire and comedy-and-satire respectively, see Herman Scheffauer, “The Death of Satire,” Fortnightly Review 99 (1913): 1188-99, and Jesse Bier, The Rise and Fall of American Humor (New York, 1968). Despite the many virtues of Matthew Hodgart, Satire (London, 1969), Hodgart nevertheless feels that satire is “archaic” and inadequate for treating many topics (77-78, 155). As a matter of fact, what Northrop Frye terms the “low mimetic” mode in literature comes close to describing much modern literature and is quite similar to satire. Consult Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), esp. 38-42, and Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (New York, 1966).

17. “Kingsley Amis, “Laughter’s to Be Taken Seriously,” New York Times Book Review, July 7, 1957, p. 1.

18. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (Baltimore, 1943), 39-40; Eugène Ionesco, Four Plays, trans. Donald M. Allen (New York, 1958), 15.

19. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York, 1966), 122.

20. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York, 1954), 23-24. Even in his earliest fiction, Beckett was fond of these fecal tricks. In Murphy, for instance, the protagonist leaves elaborate instructions in his will that his ashes should be somberly flushed down the toilet at the Abbey Theatre—noisily, and during a performance. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York, 1970), 269.

21. William Golding, Lord of the Flies (New York, 1959), 14, 100.

22. George R. Stewart, Doctor’s Oral (New York, 1939), 185.

23. Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (Chicago, 1965), 192.

24. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York, 1968), 22.

25. Ibid., 23, 30-31, 114-15.

26. J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (New York, 1959), 45.

27. John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (New York, 1970), 186, 390-93. From the outset of Barth’s career, to be sure, his work contained a distinct savor of the Rabelaisian and the excremental. The legal battle for the vast fortune of the deceased Mack Harrison turns upon his “jibbering idiocy” in his last years, and his penchant for allowing “nothing of his creation—including hair- and nail-clippings, urine, feces, and wills—to be thrown away.” Indeed, in addition to his monies, Harrison also bequeathed “several hundred pickle jars” of excrement. Characteristically, much of the remainder of the novel is invested in, and made to “float” upon, these commodious “shares.” John Barth, The Floating Opera (New York, 1972), 85, 89.

28. Barth, Sot-Weed Factor, 390-93.

29. John Hawkes, The Cannibal (1949; New York, 1962), 54.

30. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (New York, 1988), 141-42, 284-86.

31. Consult Lucius R. Shero, “The Cena in Roman Satire,” Classical Philology 18 (1923): 126-43.

32. Alan Sillitoe, A Start in Life (New York, 1971), 219-20.

33. Nathanael West, “Miss Lonely hearts,” in Miss Lonelyhearts and the Day of the Locust (Norfolk, Conn., 1962), 189-91.

34. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 17-18.

35. Ibid., 19-20.

36. Ibid., 133-34.

37. John Updike, Couples (Greenwich, Conn., 1968), 327-28.

38. Ibid.

39. Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Candy (New York, 1964), 160-61. Southern, indeed, never travels far from these toilet encounters. Guy Grand, the multimillionaire of The Magic Christian, loves to corrupt humanity by tempting and tormenting it (in the tradition of Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” and Dürrenmatt’s The Visit) with the possibility of “earning” vast sums of money. One of his capers, “making it hot for people,” consisted of placing, in summertime in Chicago’s crowded Loop, a great heated vat of blood, urine, and cowshit, into which Grand gleefully stirs ten thousand one-hundred-dollar bills. Then he labels a public sign, “FREE $ HERE,” and retreats, waiting patiently to observe the panic and commotion. Terry Southern, The Magic Christian (New York, 1964), 16-23.

40. Günter Grass, Cat and Mouse, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1964), 98-99.

41. T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York, 1952), 36.

42. Slawomir Mrozek, “From the Darkness,” in The Elephant, trans. Konrad Syrop (New York, 1963), 7, 8, 10.

12. Cannibals

1. Robert J. Lifton and Eric Olson, Living and Dying (New York, 1974), 3, 19; Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History (New York, 1965), 5; Frederic Wertham, The Show of Violence (Garden City, N.Y., 1949), 87.

2. For a reproduction of several etchings and paintings, together with a discussion of the meaning of Saturn to Goya in his old age, see Folke Nordtröm, Goya, Saturn and Melancholy (Stockholm, 1962), 192-201.

3. See, for instance, J. Robert Constantine, “The Ignoble Savage: An Eighteenth Century Literary Stereotype,” Phylon 27 (1966): 171-79.

4. Richard Rhodes, The Ungodly: A Novel of the Donner Party (New York, 1973); Piers Paul Read, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (New York, 1974).

5. See the discussions of Dionysian and similar bacchantic sacrifices and celebrations in Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York, 1951), 453ff., 339-40, 576ff. For a study of cannibalism and subsequent sublimations, see Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (New York, 1974). Even though cannibalism is rare in warm-blooded species, especially among mammals, human beings have so indulged. As Konrad Lorenz reports, the earliest traces of human use of fire also uncover the charred bones of roasted people. Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. M.K. Wilson (New York, 1967), 115, 251-52, 231.

6. Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore, 1967), 9.

7. A.A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (New York, 1974), 111; Juvenal Satire 15.11-13, 27-83; Petronius Satyricon 141; Montaigne, “Des Cannibales,” in Essais 1.31. Montaigne in fact argues that savages are closer to nature than we are, more direct and affectionate. Indeed, European society is more cruel, torturing fellows to death, whereas cannibals merely dine upon dead enemies. George Bernard Shaw tends to agree: “The human fact remains that the burning of Joan of Arc was a horror. . . . The final criticism of its physical side is implied in the refusal of the Marquesas islanders to be persuaded that the English did not eat Joan. Why, they ask, should anyone take the trouble to roast a human being except with that object? They cannot conceive its being a pleasure. As we have no answer for them that is not shameful to us, let us blush for our more complicated and pretentious savagery.” Shaw, “Preface to Saint Joan,” in Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, Major Barbara, Androcles and the Lion (New York, 1956), 34.

8. Mark Twain, “Cannibalism in the Cars,” in The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 9-16; Ambrose Bierce, “Did We Eat One Another?” in The Sardonic Humor of Ambrose Bierce, ed. George Barkin (New York, 1963), 193-94; Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett), “Two Bottles of Relish,” in 21 Great Stories, ed. A.H. Lass and N.L. Tasman (New York, 1969), 41-55; Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief (Baltimore, 1954), 213-14; T.S. Eliot, “Fragment of an Agon,” in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York, 1952), 79-80; Stanley M. Garn and Walter D. Block, “The Limited Nutritional Value of Cannibalism,” American Anthropologist 72 (Feb. 1970): 106; Norman Mailer, “The Metaphysics of the Belly,” in Cannibals and Christians (New York, 1970), 269-70. An implicit theme throughout Ovid’s Metamorphoses is “Terras Astraea reliquit” (1.150): In the face of so much crime and evil, Astraea (or pristine justice) has fled our debauched planet entirely and taken up residence in the skies. In like manner, the haunting chagrin and suspense behind much of Herman Melville’s Typee (1846) is generated by the protagonist’s slowly discovering that the happy tribe that holds him captive in the Marquesas Islands is in fact a society of man-eaters. It is patent in such stories that the innocent observer can hardly guess at the depths of depravity lurking within the human heart. With a sardonic twist, Joseph Conrad also explores this cannibalistic theme, but he suggests that love and selfishness can learn to tolerate cannibalism. Conrad, “Falk: A Reminiscence,” in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ Typhoon, and Other Stories (Baltimore, 1963), 258-332.

9. See, for instance, Laurence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1975); Robert J. Lifton, Boundaries: Psychological Man in Revolution (New York, 1969); and idem, History and Human Survival (New York, 1970). But not merely post–World War II traumas have bemused us; Paul Fussell argues that the terrors of World War I’s battlefields have permanently cast dark shadows over the entire century’s grim and gloomy art. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975).

10. “I don’t think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away.” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five (New York, 1969), 15, 214, 116.

11. G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (New York, 1960), 31.

12. Consult Slawomir Mrozek, Six Plays, trans. Nicholas Bethell (New York, 1967), 81-103.

13. Karel Čapek, War with the Newts, trans. M. Weatherall and R. Weatherall (New York, 1967), 137. For a general admiring appraisal of this novel, together with discussion of the ways man is incriminated in it, see John R. Clark and Anna Lydia Motto, “At War with Our Roots: Karel Čapek Revisited,” Studies in Contemporary Satire 14 (1987): 1-15.

14. John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy (Greenwich, Conn., 1968), 129, 299, 414. Men exposed to the computer’s rays are destroyed, or their offspring become idiots or maniacs for generations. “That’s what it means to be EATen, Billy! The goats, now: they’ll eat almost anything you feed them; but only us humans is smart enough to EAT one another!” (90).

15. Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed (1964; New York, 1976), 172.

16. J.P. Donleavy, “Cannibalism,” in The Un-Expurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners (New York, 1976), 70-73; Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (New York, 1975).

17. George P. Elliott, “The NRACP,” in Among the Dangs (New York, 1966), 109-42; Fernando Arrabal, Plays, vol. 3, trans. Jean Benedetti and John Calder (London, 1970), 87-93.

18. Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York, 1977), 119.

19. By an ironic inversion, it is precisely when a new leader is about to commence another destructive war in this novel that the mad lunatics return to the “order” of the insane asylum and spring is in the air. Warfare, in other words, is the only “order” such a society can know; organized madness, its only modus operandi.

20. John Hawkes, The Cannibal (1949; New York, 1962), 180-81.

21. John Gardner, Grendel (New York, 1972), 138.

13. Dystopias and Machines

1. James Thurber, “Sex Ex Machina,” in The Thurber Carnival (New York, 1945), 59.

2. See George Knox, “Apocalypse and Sour Utopias,” Western Humanities Review 16 (Winter 1962): 11-22, and Irving Howe, “The Fiction of Anti-Utopia,” in Decline of the New (New York, 1970), 66-74. On dystopias as “upside-down or topsy-turvy societies,” see J. Max Patrick, introduction to sec. 9, “Utopias and Dystopias, 1500-1750,” in St. Thomas More: A Preliminary Bibliography of His Works and of Moreana to the Year 1750, comp. Reginald W. Gibson (New Haven, 1961), 294. See also Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Chicago, 1970), esp. chaps. 5 and 7, and Glenn Negley and J. Max Patrick, eds., The Quest for Utopia: An Anthology of Imaginary Societies (Garden City, N.Y., 1962), 5-6.

3. Stainslaw Lem, “Robots in Science Fiction,” trans. Franz Rottensteiner, in SF, The Other Side of Realism: Essays on Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1971), 317.

4. Arthur Asa Berger, “The Age of Confusion: The Third Generation of Comics,” in The Comic-Stripped American (New York, 1973), 203.

5. See Denis Gifford, Science Fiction Film (New York, 1971), 8-19, 149-51; and John Baxter, Science Fiction in the Cinema (New York, 1970), 142-53, 153-66.

6. Baxter, Science Fiction in the Cinema, 92, 136.

7. Ado Kyrou, “Science and Fiction,” in Focus on the Science Fiction Film, ed. William Johnson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972), 94.

8. Matthew Arnold, “Preface to First Edition of Poems (1853),” in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R.H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor, 1960), 1: 1; Wylie Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York, 1962), 9-14; Lionel Trilling, “Commitment to the Modern,” Teachers College Record 64 (1963): 407.

9. Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley, 1955), 103.

10. Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970 (London, 1971), 16. Other critics have found a strain of the gothic, the nightmarish, and the apocalyptic running throughout much of American literature; see, for instance, Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York, 1958), and Martha Banta, “American Apocalypses: Excrement and Ennui,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 7 (Spring 1974): 1-30.

11. William Barrett, Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1972), 6.

12. Consult Howard Schultz, Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York, 1955), and R. Joly, “Curiositas,” L’Antiquité Classique 30 (1961): 33-44.

13. Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928; Boston, 1949), 159.

14. E.B. White, The Second Tree from the Corner (New York, 1954), 46-51; James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” in Thurber Carnival, 47-51. On Thurber’s continual war with machines and “our machine civilization,” see Louis Hasley, “James Thurber: Artist in Humor,” South Atlantic Quarterly 73 (Autumn 1974): esp. 509. Donald Barthelme, “The Balloon,” in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (New York, 1968), 91-93. This may be taken to be the “early” Barthelme. For a later, darker view, wherein the world is “sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, staling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance,” the reader should consult “Down the Line with the Annual,” in Guilty Pleasures (New York, 1976), 3-8. In that story, overwhelmed by defective American products and the positivism of the Consumer Bulletin, the protagonist wishes to flee to Australia.

15. Harold Pinter, A Night Out, Night School, Revue Sketches: Early Plays (New York, 1968), 91-93; Robert Coover, Pricksongs and Descants (New York, 1969), 125-37. Concerning postmodern “playfulness” and a game-oriented “performance” in literature, see, for example, Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New York, 1971); Jacques Ehrmann, ed., Game, Play, Literature (Boston, 1971); and the recent new text expanding the concepts of “fiction-making,” Alvin B. Kernan, P. Brooks, and J.M. Holquist, eds., Man and His Fictions: An Introduction to Fiction-Making, Its Forms and Uses (New York, 1973). Speaking of recent alienated writers, Ihab Hassan suggests that they have turned even against themselves: “From this reflexive energy, this introversion of the alienated will, emerge the arts of silence, of the void, and of death, emerge also the languages of omission, ambiguity, games, and numbers.” Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (New York, 1971), 12.

16. Recently David Ketterer defined the apocalyptic as both destructive and regenerative (as it might be if one refers to the totality of the book of Revelation). See Ketterer, New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (Garden City, N. Y., 1974), 3-14. Nevertheless, apocalypse has been too often used to suggest debacle, havoc, and doom for us to recast its meaning. In addition to works previously cited on apocalypse, see also R.W.B. Lewis, “Days of Wrath and Laughter,” in Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition (New Haven, 1965), 184-234. A real cataclysm may well be virtually at hand for the inhabitants of earth; see Robert L. Heilbroner, “Ecological Armageddon,” in Peaceable Kingdoms: An Anthology of Utopian Writings, ed. Robert L. Chianese (New York, 1971), 242-53.

17. The heralding of the twentieth century’s unique “alienation” has been encountered often enough; it is caused, as one of the more recent writers phrases it, by “the explosion of the world’s technology and populations.” Robert Martin Adams, The Roman Stamp: Frame and Façade in Some Forms of Neo-Classicism (Berkeley, 1974), 232. Such a literature’s themes are entropy and apocalypse; see Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley, 1975), chap. 4. Its mode is a frenetic self-consciousness. Among innumerable titles, I will cite but a few: Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York, 1967); Jonathan Baumbach, The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (New York, 1965); John Vernon, The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture (Urbana, Ill., 1973); and Jerome Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (Urbana, Ill., 1975).

18. Barrett, Time of Need, 364. Wylie Sypher perceptively argues that there has been in fact a correspondence between aesthete and technician since the turn of the century, and he stresses the relationship of both to methodology. Nonetheless, Sypher still perceives technology as Protestant and partially alien—since it stresses parsimony, exactitude, and absolute control. See Sypher, Literature and Technology: The Alien Vision (New York, 1968), xv-xxi.

19. Norman Mailer, “The Last Night: A Story,” in Cannibals and Christians (New York, 1970), 396-97.

14. Entropy and Armageddon

1. C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1959), 16; Tony Tanner, “The American Novelist as Entropologist,” London Magazine, n.s., 10 (Oct. 1970): 5. Tanner’s entire article on the recent literary uses of entropy (5-18) is important; it is incorporated, with changes, into Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970 (London, 1971), as chapter 6, “Everything Running Down,” 141-52.

2. Stephen G. Brush, “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century: Thermodynamics and History,” The Graduate Journal 7, no. 2 (1967): 493-95; this article, together with its bibliography (477-565), is especially important concerning the origins and proliferation of scientific ideas of entropy and the subsequent impact upon the public, thinkers, and historians. See also Max Jammer, “Entropy,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, 5 vols. (New York, 1973), 2: 112-20.

3. See Ludwig Boltzmann, “Weitere Studien über das Wärmegleichgewicht unter Gasmolekülen,” Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wein 66 (1872): 275-370; J.W. Gibbs, “Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius,” Proceedings of the American Academy 16 (1889): 458-65; Max Planck, Eight Lectures on Theoretical Physics, trans. A.P. Wills (New York, 1915); Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge, Eng., 1928); and Sir James Jeans, The Universe around Us (Cambridge, Eng., 1930).

4. In his influential book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Garden City, N.Y., 1954), Norbert Wiener conjectures that in controlled “enclaves” (especially those involving computers) entropy could be resisted and progress made possible, but scepticism concerning progress in the twentieth century largely persists and prevails.

5. Hamlet 5.2.352; T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” sec. 5, ll. 28-31; Robert Martin Adams, Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1966), 6. Compare William Barrett: “Contrary to the confidence in our powers of technology and information, the prevailing image of man we find in modern art is one of impotence, uncertainty, and self-doubt”; Barrett, Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1972), 6. Further, John Bayley argues that all truly major artists naturally possess an “unconscious grasp” of forces that disturb the surface of their literary works—regularly providing “tension,” “puzzlement,” and “contradiction”; Bayley, The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature (New York, 1976).

6. Monre C. Beardsley, “Order and Disorder in Art,” in The Concept of Order, ed. Paul G. Kuntz (Seattle, 1968), 196. This theme is carefully analyzed in Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order (Berkeley, 1971). Consult Jose Ortega y Gasset, La Rebelión de las Mases (Madrid, 1929).

7. R.P. Blackmur, Anni Mirabiles, 1921-1925: Reason in the Madness of Letters (Washington, D.C., 1956), 6. This theme in the arts is more thoroughly explored in Wylie Sypher, “Existence and Entropy,” in Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York, 1962), 58-86.

8. Tanner, “American Novelist as Entropologist,” 5. It is particularly noteworthy that Pynchon’s first published story was entitled “Entropy”; consult Joseph W. Slade’s discussion of this story in Thomas Pynchon (New York, 1974), 32-40.

9. George P. Elliott, David Knudsen (New York, 1962), 38, 88.

10. Susan Sontag, Death Kit (New York, 1967), 167, 2-3.

11. William Burroughs, Nova Express, (New York, 1965), 17; idem, Naked Lunch (New York, 1962), 133-34, 224. Consult also Alvin Greenberg’s study of entropy in fiction: “The Novel of Disintegration: Paradoxical Impossibility in Contemporary Fiction,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 7 (1966): 103-24. He refers to, among others, the works of Céline, Henry Miller, Burroughs, Heller, Nelson Algren, and Beckett.

12. Wyndham Lewis, The Demon of Progress in the Arts (Chicago, 1955), 96, 97.

13. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, trans. Patrick Bowles and Samuel Beckett (1955; New York, 1970), 53; Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts and the Day of the Locust (Norfolk, Conn., 1962), 182, 209.

14. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, trans. John H.P. Marks (Norfolk, Conn., 1960), 192. Céline’s imagery is rife with portents of coming destruction and chaos; see Erika Ostrovsky, “The Horseman of the Apocalypse,” in Céline and His Vision (New York, 1967), 157-82. Consult the twenty-eighth entry, “Entropy and Energy,” in Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York, 1972), 140-47. See also Zamyatin’s essay “On Literature, Revolution and Entropy (1924)” Partisan Review 28 (1961): 372-78. Zamyatin’s pathetic plea for incessant revolutions in Russia to prevent loss of energy, vitality, and the encrustations of dogma was as impossible of realization as Ezra Pound’s plea that we incessantly “make it new” (1935).

15. Consult G.L. Van Roosbroeck, The Legend of the Decadents (New York, 1927); Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1958); Alfred E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature, 1830-1900 (Toronto, 1958); George Ross Ridge, The Hero in French Decadent Literature (Athens, Ga., 1961); and Jerome Hamilton Buckley, “The Idea of Decadence,” in The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (Cambridge, Mass, 1966), 66-93. See also Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington, 1977), esp. 151-221. Despite Richard Gilman’s recent argument in Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York, 1979), that the term is without precise meaning, we conventionally continue to be attracted by what we take to be a modern “decadence” compared with an earlier, more elevated, and healthy norm; see Lance Morrow, “The Fascination of Decadence,” Time, Sept. 10, 1979, pp. 85-86.

16. The Complete Works of Gustave Flaubert, with an introduction by Ferdinand Brunetiére, 10 vols. (London, 1926), 10: 96.

17. Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye (Norfolk, Conn., 1939), 107-34; George P. Elliott, Conversions: Literature and the Modernist Deviation (New York, 1971), 12-13; Saul Bellow, “Literature,” in The Great Ideas Today: 1963, no. 3 (Chicago, 1963), 170-71, 155; Leslie Fiedler, No! in Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature (Boston, 1960), 4-5.

18. Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1965), 6. An undercurrent motif in Auerbach’s Mimesis is precisely this “moral crisis” and “impending catastrophe” prior to World War I in Europe and reflected in increasing techniques in literature for presenting interiority and multiple points of view, which suggest to him “a symptom of confusion and helplessness “ of European culture as well as being “a mirror of the decline of our world.” Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 463, 487.

19. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (Boston, 1973), 429, 431, 451. Compare Yeats’s apocalyptic vision of the violent onset of a new two-thousand-year cycle of history in “The Second Coming” (1921), 11. 3-8:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

20. Adams, Education, 496.

21. Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, with an introduction by Brooks Adams (New York, 1958), 138, 182-83.

22. Donald Barthelme, Snow White (New York, 1967), 96, 97. For a further image of trash—the “figures” of consumer’s reports on millions of products of products and their vast dangers, ill effects, and capacity to malfunction—see Barthelme’s “Down the Line with the Annual”: “We are adrift in a tense and joyless world that is falling apart at an accelerated rate. No way to arrest the disintegration that menaces from every side” (in Guilty Pleasures [New York, 1976], 4). William H. Gass even argues that virtually all Barthelme produces as a writer—with its fads, multistyles, clichés thrown together—constitutes the imitation of modern trashiness, trashiness recycled; see Gass, “The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon,” in Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York, 1970), 97-103. That contemporary society does indeed survive (and thrive) in communications by trash and fakery is handily argued in Arthur Herzog, The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America (New York, 1974).

23. See Colin Wilson, The Outsider (London, 1956), and Melvin Rader, “The Artist as Outsider,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 16 (March 1958): 306-18. Archibald Geikie, “On Modern Denudation,” Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow 3 (1871): 153-90.

24. Hesiod, Lucretius, and others speak of a decline from a golden age through ages of silver, bronze, heroes, and iron; consult Arthur O. Lovejoy, Gilbert Chinard, George Boas, and Ronald S. Crane, eds., A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas (Baltimore, 1935), vol. 1. For Christian views of a coming decline and chaos prior to Judgment Day, consult Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone (Chicago, 1949); Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (Berkeley, 1949); and Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York, 1967).

25. Consult, for instance, Benedict Augustin Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (New York, 1857); Cesare Lombroso, L’Uomo delinguente, 4th ed., (Torino, 1889); idem, Le Crime, causes et remèdes (Paris, 1899); and especially Max Nordau, Entartung, or Degeneration (Berlin, 1892-1893; English trans., 1895). Nordau’s work attributes most contemporary social ills to the degeneration of the species and particularly singles out artists as decadent in their intellects; Nordau suggests “the intensity of concern.” “I believe that no other European book of any kind published during the entire decade aroused so much comment in the American press,” one critic observes; John Higham, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890’s” in The Origins of Modern Consciousness, ed. John Weiss (Detroit, 1965), 38.

26. See Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London, 1933), and Charles I. Glicksberg, The Literature of Nihilism (Lewisburg, Pa., 1975). Since the romantic period, an increasing number of writers have been driven toward silence (Rimbaud, Arnold, Valéry, Forster, Salinger), madness (Collins, Cowper, Smart, Artaud, Hölderlin, Lowell), or even suicide (Lautréamont, von Kleist, Nerval, Hart Crane, Hemingway, Plath, Berryman, Sexton). On suicide, see Charles I. Glicksberg, “To Be or Not to Be: The Literature of Suicide,” Queen’s Quarterly, 67 (Autumn 1960): 384-95, and A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (London, 1971). On the tendency toward silence, see Jacques Barzun, “Romanticism Today,” Encounter 17 (Sept. 1961): 26-32; George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York, 1967); Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York, 1967); and Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetic of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York, 1969), 3-34.

27. It has long been known that the most obvious “shapes” of history for interpreters would be ones discerning ascent, undulation, or decline; see Lovejoy, Chinard, Boas, and Crane, eds., Documentary History of Primitivism 1: 2-3. Recent historians of ideas have become particularly sensitive to the “shaping” impetus on the part of writers of history; consult, for example, Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses (Berkeley, 1961), and Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973).

28. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York, 1958), 222.

29. Alvin B. Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven, 1965), 97; Arthur Bloch, Murphy’s Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go ! (Los Angeles, 1977).

30. Juvenal Satires 1.147: “omne in praecipiti vitium stetit.” This is a complex line: literally, “All vice stands above precipice,” that is, highly elevated. Needless to say, the words are deliberately ambivalent; vice is exalted, but set above a pit, surely evoking ideas of poor footing and insecurity. Alexander Pope, “Epilogue to the Satires,” Dialogue 1.170; Senaca Agamemnon, 1. 758. Consider also Seneca’s comment “prosperum ac felix scelus virtus vocatur; sontibus parent boni ius est in armis, opprimit leges timor”: Properous and happy crime is called virtue; the good obey the guilty, right consists in arms, fear besets the law. Seneca, Hercules Furens, 11. 251-53. For relevant studies of satire’s plotting that runs downhill, consult Philip Pinkus, “Satire and St. George,” Queen’s Quarterly 70 (1963): 30-49, and John R. Clark and Anna Motto, eds., Satire: That Blasted Art (New York, 1973), esp. 19-22.

31. Matthew Hodgart, Satire (London, 1969), 155; see also 77-78. Robert C. Elliott, in The Power of Satire (Princeton, 1960), remarks that “one could hardly call the twentieth century an age of great satire” (223). And Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, in Satire’s Persuasive Voice (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), comment with self-contradiction that “satire by no means withers into moribundity, but we cannot deny that its vital growth now lies well in the past” (27).

32. Evelyn Waugh, “Fan-Fare,” Life, April 8, 1946, p. 60.

15. The Death of the Humanities

1. Anthony Burgess, “No Health Anywhere,” review of Don DeLillo’s Running Dog, Saturday Review, Sept. 16, 1978, p. 38; Peter H. Wagschal, “Illiterates with Doctorates: The Future of Education in an Electronic Age,” The Futurist 12 (Aug. 1978): 243-44.

2. See, for instance, Joseph Wood Krutch, “The Tragic Fallacy,” in The Modern Temper (New York, 1929); idem, “Modernism” in Modern Drama (Ithaca, N.Y. 1953); George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York, 1961); Herman Scheffauer, “The Death of Satire,” Fortnightly Review 99 (1913): 1188-99; Gilbert Seldes, “Satire, Death of,” New Republic, Jan. 5, 1927, p. 193; Matthew Hodgart, Satire (London, 1969), 155; J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (Boston, 1970); and Jesse Bier, The Rise and Fall of American Humor (New York, 1968).

3. John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Atlantic Monthly, 220, (Aug. 1967): 29-34. After exhaustion comes absolute quietus. For nineteenth-century backgrounds of such a tendency, see Robert Martin Adams, Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1966).

4. See Robert Martin Adams, Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side (Berkeley, 1977); Duncan Williams, Trousered Apes: Sick Literature in a Sick Society (London, 1971); George P. Elliott, Conversions: Literature and the Modernist Deviation (New York, 1971). Similar charges are made about the dirt and foul language currently encountered in the popular arts; see Richard Corliss, “Dirty Words: America’s Foul-Mouthed Pop Culture,” Time, May 7, 1990, pp. 92-95, 97-98, 99-100.

5. John Gardner, On Moral Fiction (New York, 1978).

6. Significantly, this view of history as cyclical and inevitable, leading to decline, was popular since the time of Polybius and revitalized in the late Renaissance; consult Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950), 424-53, 525ff. Jonathan Swift regularly anticipated a civilization’s unexpected decline into barbarism. He was most struck, to be sure, by the sudden fall of Rome to savage invaders, and he frequently looked about him in contemporary times for omens of decay and incursions of what he termed “the Gothick Strain”; Herbert Davis, ed., The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, 14 vols. (Oxford, 1939-68), 2: 175. “Some new Invasion of Goths and Vandals to destroy Law, Property and Religion, alter the very Face of Nature; and turn the World upside down” (9: 50). See James William Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (Princeton, 1967), 63-68. Such a viewpoint is reiterated by Henry James (“Preface to ‘What Maisie Knew,’ “ in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, with an introduction by R.P. Blackmur [New York, 1934], 152) and by Evelyn Waugh (see Alvin B. Kernan, “The Wall and the Jungle: The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh,” Yale Review 53 [Dec. 1963]: 199-220). Edward Diller claims that artists regularly utilize paradox and grotesquerie as a direct response to a world that has lost unity and coherence, a world that has fallen into chaos and muddle. See Diller “Aesthetics and the Grotesque: Friedrich Dürrenmatt,” Contemporary Literature 7 (1966): 328-35.

7. Consult Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, 1973).

8. Lional Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 83-84.

9. Arthur Bloch, Murphy’s Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go ! (Los Angeles, 1977), 11.

10. Plautus Heauton Timorumenos 77.

11. Plumb, Death of the Past, 108, 140. For a similar summation of the contemporary world’s hostility toward history and a similar defense, see Frank E. Manuel, Freedom from History and Other Untimely Essays (New York, 1971).

12. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 1. 463, in Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. Sculley Bradley (New York, 1955), 42; W.R. Benét and H.H. Pearson, eds. The Oxford Anthology of American Literature, 2 vols. (New York, 1960), 2: 1313.

13. “Though I sang in my chains like the sea,” 1. 78 of “Fern Hill,” in The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1934-1952 (New York, 1971), 180.

14. Hamlet 2.2.300-305.