Part II. Stratagems

Part II of this study explores prominent methods that the grotesque satirist employs to shock the reader by manipulating, undercutting, and even dismantling conventional literary form. Satirists have always sought to parody and to lampoon traditional literary and popular genres—romance, apologia, Bildungsroman, confession, detective mystery—and grotesquerie continues such practice. But grotesque satire seeks to go one step further, hoping to startle its readership by boldly shattering broadly accepted decorum and even elementary formal usage. Furthermore, it tends to wreak this havoc and perform this mayhem with some glee and a great deal of insidiousness.

Chapters 3-9 consider the chief ways that satirists distort, fracture, and subvert the plot and other standard apparatuses of fiction. The conventional hero-protagonist decays; the author is mocked or else intrudes upon his fiction, breaking down verisimilitude; normative language and diction are skewered; and the machinery of smooth and harmonious plotting is battered or expunged. By such means, the authors of the grotesque capture attention, keep the reader off balance, and call into question the basic clichés and assumed paraphernalia of writing and of fiction-making, thereby upsetting the habitual lassitiude and passivity of typical readers. Such satiric fiction, as Donne noted of the “new philosophy,” calls all in doubt.

Degrading the Hero

One point that has been driven home to audiences of modern literature and film is the death of the hero, even of heroism itself. Carlyle may have exalted heroes and hero-worship in the nineteenth century, but our era champions the antihero. Thackeray subtitled Vanity Fair “A Novel without a Hero” in 1848, and the modern era has increasingly contributed to the hero’s demise. In his place lurch his faulty replacements: criminals, bumblers, toadies, cowards, outsiders, and buffoons.

In fact, every society always contends with a radical protesting minority that seeks to question, alter, and replace the regnant society’s mythologies and idols. Such rebels of course have their own goals and agendas, but they tend primarily to emphasize revolt—accentuating the traditions and standards that they renounce and against which they rebel. Such opponents debunk the traditional heroes of conventional culture only to extol the newly proposed replacement—the “contrary” culture.

Hence, the term counterculture might appear to be new in the last decade or so, but the concept and what it stands for are as old as the hills, for a counter-society is a deliberate opposite, a negative mirror-image, in the sense that Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal grow in the rotting garden plot across from the bed of Christian lilies. A counterculture is contrapuntal, engaged in a music-making that plays off against the prevailing themes of dominant cults and mores in precisely the same way that the Greek παρωδία (parodia) suggests a countermusic that mimics and plays beside the traditional ode. Because such a deviant culture takes its definition and being from the accepted society but constitutes a wild divagation, it tends to flourish with a kind of deadly zeal and serves (often even unconsciously) as purgative saturnalia for the civilized soul.

In this sense the counterculture represents the reverse side of a civilization’s single coin and functions, like Freud’s “wit” and “humor,” as an aggressive creative attack upon that part of the society or self that is sublimated and projected. We must remember that Freud believed such an overleaf or underside absolutely necessary for a civilization (and its discontents) to survive.¹ Some lively underbellied countercultures of the past immediately come to mind: the Elizabethan preoccupation with the criminal “underworld,” for instance, and, related to it and spreading from Spain in the sixteenth century, the picaresque literature of roguery.² More recently, we have become increasingly aware of the Sade-like nether side of nineteenth-century priggishness and rectitude that cultivated pornography and perversion, the alter ego of a prim society.³

Lionel Trilling suggests that perhaps society always contains built-in “alienation,” a bipartite dissociation of sensibility of what may be named “the two environments.” In that sense, he reminds us, a significant “counter” in the seventeenth century to the gay courtier and suave cavalier existed that was just as “modish and faddish” as is our youth cult today:

It is necessary [that we] recognize the part a mode or a fad may play in the history of culture. The English middle classes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fell prey to a fad of Bible-reading and theological radicalism. It is hard for us to imagine how these Puritan predilections could once have impassioned many minds, but before they passed beyond our comprehension, they changed the social and cultural fabric of England and helped create the social and cultural fabric of America.⁴

Similarly, Velma Richmond proposes that such a “characteristic cleavage” always exists within a culture and follows McLuhan in noting “correspondences between popular medieval and contemporary thought,” such as “a view of hippies and Cathars [or Albigensians] as similar counter-cultures in their rejection of conventional civilization.”⁵ In a certain sense, of course, the entire monastic and mendicant movements of the Middle Ages constituted islands and fortresses of radicals withdrawn from the dominant barbarian and feudal social norm.⁶ Later, to be sure, the earthy Provençal singers and the lusty heretical Church fathers themselves seceded from the sacred font and created the vulgar secular lyric hymns of the Goliards and the Carmina Burana.

One of the most pressing causes for the development of a counterculture (and one with which we, in our century, are surely familiar) occurs in reaction to the creation of massive international and metropolitan civilization. Hundreds of cities, in such an expansive society, cultivate stability and sameness. There is significant population growth and the breakdown of inbred coherencies, local ties, and rural roots. Oswald Spengler describes this eventuality as the advent of the “World-city”: “In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful.”⁷ Just such an engrossing culture evolved in the Hellenistic era, that witnessed the breakdown of the πόλις (polis) and the sudden spread of Greek culture, after Alexander, throughout the Mediterranean world. Isolation was the lot of Hellenistic men, who had become the lonely crowd, as Timon of Phlius (fl. 250 B.C.) wistfully remarked: “As the individual walked through the streets of the great cities, he was lost in the crowd, become a simple number in the midst of an infinity of human beings like himself, who knew nothing about him, of whom he knew nothing, a man who stood alone in bearing the weight of life without friends, without reason for living.”⁸

The Cynics constituted the most notable group of intellectual “dropouts” from that Hellenistic society. All philosophical schools, in some sense, derive from Socrates, his humble demeanor, and his devotion to ethics or to the individual’s moral conduct. The πόλις (polis) was already threatened by the Peloponnesian War; increased international trade fostered cosmopolitanism; and tribes, sects, and local religious practices were already commencing to disintegrate. Hence it is not simply that “Socrates first brought philosophy into the field of ethics . . . [but that] all philosophy was becoming practical,” that is, concerned with the newly emergent and disestablished individual.⁹

Balding, disheveled, uncouth, simple in his habits, Socrates appeared never to work, spending his time instead incessantly (and naggingly) questioning others and debating. Humbly he sought clear ideas and often discovered a lack of clarity in others. Socrates left behind no writings, no systematic philosophy, only the legacy of ceaseless interrogations and conversations; he saw himself as the “midwife” of philosophy—forever bringing forth ideas out of others. The silent majority perceived such a casual flouter of metropolitan conventions as the nagging “gadfly” of Athens. Yet he was strikingly successful with the youth, for he attracted about himself an ardent band of young disciples—aristocrats and conservatives, agnostics and atheists, socialists and anarchists. And from him a dozen philosophical schools evolved.

The most theatrical and revolutionary of the youthful enthusiasts were the Cynics, or Dog-Philosophers, so called after their gathering-place at the Cynosarges, or “white dog”, a gymnasium outside the walls of Athens. But they were also associated with dogs because of their overt shamelessness and audacity. The first of the Cynics was Antisthenes, a pupil of Socrates’ who intensely extolled virtue by emphasizing the cultivation of freedom from wants, cares, and desires. Indeed, Antisthenes initiated the famous Cynic habit of dress—the doubled cloak (for all weather), the large and simple wallet, and the humble staff. And particularly did that cloak, the τρίβων (tribon)—tattered and worn—become the emblem and symbol of Cynic shabbiness. Antisthenes’ follower, in turn, Diogenes of Sinope, went farther still and mocked, excoriated, and fulminated against the conventions and appurtenances of civilization itself. Calling himself the Dog, he stood upon street corners and barked, snarled, and snapped obloquy at startled bourgeois passers-by.¹⁰

In fact, Diogenes did more than antagonize and harangue the crowd. Once, at a banquet, when the genteel guests playfully threw their bones to him, Diogenes commenced playing the dog in earnest, romping and cavorting, until he finally lifted a leg and did on them a dog’s business. For Diogenes advocated an anarchic “absolute freedom in speech, absolute fearlessness in deed”; he contended that “a great deal of theory may be upset by a small amount of brute fact.” In the most flagrant sense, this is what he meant when he spoke of living “life in accordance with nature.”¹¹

Indeed, Diogenes cultivated a life-style of conspicuous abstinence and exigent eccentricity. He insisted upon leading a mendicant’s life, always appearing barefooted, always extravagantly unshaven and un-bathed. And paradoxically, together with an immoderate poverty, he advocated extreme individualism; he recognized no distinctions of birth or class, no restrictions of place, person, or ceremony.¹² Thus, he considered marriage supererogatory and extolled random free love, maintaining that one may engage in intercourse—with anyone of either sex—at any time, in any place. To add to such shocking opinions, he frequently put theory into practice. Diogenes even advocated “that incest and cannibalism may be justifiable in certain circumstances.”¹³ Such early Cynics took to giving “soapbox lectures” and created free street-corner “happenings,” as if they were conducting “open universities” and classrooms-without-walls. They mixed paradox and insult with an everyday colloquial and conversational manner; they were wits and anecdotists as well as masters of the tirade hurled to the four winds of heaven. Later Cynics, such as Menippus and Bion, perfected the diatribe, the satire, and what was later to become the informal “essay.”¹⁴

Diogenes, always the crackerjack outrager of social norms and ace performer, is remembered for marching along the streets with a lighted lantern in broad day, proclaiming that he was searching for an honest man. He even renounced a simple dwelling place in Athens and, to everyone’s astonishment, took up residence in a large public earthenware tub or enormous wine jar (πίθος, pithos) in the Metroum of the Ceramicus, or market district. He observed, Diogenes claimed, how the snail lived, carrying about with it its own house—and he would aspire to no more.¹⁵ Moreover, he early asserted that he was a κοσμοπολίτης (cosmopolites)—a citizen or patriot of no single nation or state, but a free inhabitant of everywhere. Thus was Cynicism assuredly an “unconventional philosophy” and, as one critic observes, a distinctive counterculture “involving a rigorous, practical critique of social traditions.”¹⁶

One of the more surprising moves of these early Cynics was their pronouncing Heracles (or Hercules) as their hero, patron, and archetype.¹⁷ Heracles, doubtless the most famous of the strongmen, had been an early Doric deity and long accepted throughout Greece as a national hero. Already in the fifth century he had been adopted for every sort of role—in religion, in epic, in tragedy. He even was made to serve in comedy as a figure of farce. Such a national Hercules was already being transformed into an ethical ideal among the intelligentsia. But this was hardly the case with the “unabashedly anti-intellectual” Cynics, who brazenly and shockingly celebrated merely his “labors” and physical strength.¹⁸ For them, Hercules was the ideal of coarse and pristine brawn, and they particularly lauded his primitive and savage garb—the lion skin and the enormous Neanderthal club. Once again, the Cynics, with a masterful flare for the actor’s pose and the melodramatic gesture, succeeded in undermining traditional culture and religion with their own avatar. For Cynics sought to agitate, scandalize, and appall common public opinion—and they succeeded well enough. Diogenes baldly insisted that in his tub he lived exactly like Heracles, preferring liberty over all things.¹⁹

Such strategies should be familiar to us today, for we have witnessed the era of the beatnik, of Britain’s angry young men, and of the hippie. We have beheld the Berkeley Free Speech movement and rather impatiently abided the snarlings of the Panthers, the ablutions of the Jesus Freaks, and the public’s adoration of the already apotheosized Beatles and the Rolling Stones. We have also remarked the recent fashion of converting the tenement and the broken-down homestead and hovel into the commune. Ours, too, has become a period subject to outrageous paradox and vociferous rhetoric: R.D. Laing praises the sanity of the schizophrenic, Herbert Marcuse celebrates revolution; and Norman O. Brown fragmentedly adores love’s body.²⁰ Now we are growing accustomed to the concept of the “performing self” and to the shameless, flowery, and whorish language of Tom Wolfe and the New Journalism. Even our punk rock groups, discomaniacs, cinema and comic book heroes are becoming overtly “freakish” and downright ugly.²¹ One need merely reflect upon the popularity of Miss Piggy, Telly Savalas, the Hulk, and the Thing.

Beyond all such ugliness, tatters, and noise persists a serene and cynical regard for stylishness and attention-getting mannerism. The τρίβων (tribon) or threadbare cloak ultimately symbolizes, for the modern as for the ancient Cynic, what Yeats called “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” As one critic observes, “Within our own time, rags have had a widespread vogue among the young, partly as protest against straight society, partly from a sense that being grubby is a way to be natural and therefore perhaps next thing to holy. . . . Living in a different world, sensual, imaginary, and presumably better, the [protester, the dropout, and] the addict advertise by costume or behavior [their] contempt for this common and commonplace globe.” Given such an intense preoccupation with faded denim and tattered dungarees, with rags and filth, the modern almost becomes kin thereby to ancient religious hermits. “In thus acting out a disdain for middle-class decorums, rags may express an aloofness almost dandy in its sense of extreme style.”²²

Such styles and fashions in history definitely recur. Indeed, in the late 1960s, perhaps it was no accident that a so-called children’s television cartoon series regularly celebrated the Herculoids. It was a program full of ugly little monsters, “in which the abominable creatures who are the title characters are nonetheless the saviors and protectors of humanity.”²³

Above all, one important fact should be patently clear: in our era conventional heroes have been brought among the lowest of the low. In his novel The Maze-Maker, Michael Ayrton reduces the classical hero Theseus to the level of thug. Daedalus describes him with acid precision:

[Theseus is] a relative of mine. He has become very celebrated and is much admired for his treachery to Ariadne, . . . for slaying the Minotaur, with her help, . . . [and] for his accidental—if it was accidental—destruction of his own father by negligence in the matter of the color of the sail, and other heroic acts. Perhaps the most famous of all his exploits is the victory he achieved over a group of women, a large number of whom were killed in battle with him. Altogether, my kinsman Theseus . . . was a murderous hero, which is the common kind. . . . This must be accepted, for killing, like so many destructive activities, is unavoidable to the uncreative. It is their principal demonstration of power.²⁴

Meantime, Eliot’s Sweeney, Waugh’s Paul Pennyfeather, Chaplin’s tramp, Kafka’s neurotic nonentities in jeopardy or on trial, as well as James Thurber’s and Woody Allen’s schlemiels all undermine normative herohood. John Barth’s febrile protagonist in Giles Goat-Boy (1966) can hardly manage to stumble along the heroic track, a track that has, by the way, been reduced to a muddy community college mall. More appositely, who does not remember Ford Maddox Ford’s “good soldier” or Jaroslav Hasek’s “good soldier Schweik”? Who can forget Faulkner’s violent sharecroppers, Grass’s warrior freaks, or García Márquez’s surrealistic crazies? Indeed, there has been, if anything, over the ages, some species of degeneration; for whereas the Cynics could resuscitate a Hercules, we have nothing to show for our pains other than Dirty Harry, Rambo, Underdog, Mighty Mouse, and mutant turtles. Surely, much has already been written about the antihero in the twentieth century as tactic and as dominant theme.²⁵ It is enough here to remark that the antiheroic remains the quintessential ingredient of satire’s caustic grin and grimace. Our debunking literature is full of him.