Menippean Satire is a term employed broadly to refer to prose satires that are rhapsodic in nature, combining many different targets of ridicule into a fragmented satiric narrative, which we may attempt to call a "novel" with some sense of unease. The form is named after the Greek cynic Menippus, and from suppositions about the nature of his (lost) works, which are more directly available reflected in the Greek dialogues of Lucian and the works of Marcus Terentius Varro. Indeed, such satires are sometimes termed Varronian satire. Though Varro's own 150 books of Menippean satires survive only as quoted snippets, his tradition can be recognized in the prose fictions of Petronius's Satyricon and Apuleius' Golden Ass, works which also are sometimes called "novels".
The term has been used by classical grammarians and by philologists to refer to satires in prose; compare the verse satires of Juvenal and his imitators. Menippean satire moves rapidly between styles and points of view. Such satire deal less with human characters than with the single-minded mental attitudes, or "humours", that they represent: the pedant, the braggart, the bigot, the miser, the quack, the seducer. "The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect," Northrop Frye observed (1974, p. 309), and instanced Squire Western in Tom jones as a character rooted in the realism of the novel, but the tutors Thwackum and Square as figures of Menippean satire. Contemporary literary scholars such as Northrop Frye have attempted to classify Swift's A Tale of a Tub or Gulliver's Travels and Thomas Carlysle's Sartor Resartus as Menippean satires. Frye instances Alice in Wonderland and its sequel.
Frye, who recognized in Burton's discursive Anatomy of Melancholy the ironic digressions and encyclopedic intellectual nature of Menippean satire, would have liked us to substitute Anatomy in its sense of a "dissection' or analysis for the cumbersome phrase "Menippean satire.
Further reading
- Frye, Northrop, 1957. Anatomy of Criticism : Four essays (Princeton University Press), especially pp 309 – 312.
