Transgressive Fiction

The New Satiric Tradition

R. Mookerjee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137341082
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

Often dismissed as sensationalist, transgressive fiction is a sophisticated movement with roots in Menippean satire and the Rabelaisian carnal folk sensibility praised by Bakhtin. This study, the first of its kind, provides a thorough literary background and analysis of key transgressive authors such as Acker, Amis, Carter, Ellis, and Palahniuk.

1

Enemies of the State: The Atavistic Mock Epic

“Transgressive” as a label applied to literature or other media is a comment on the content’s reception which is very much a function of the atmosphere of the time. It is therefore implausible that contemporary transgressive novels have much in common, as I contend in this chapter, with classical mock epic such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the claim that they belong to a single “genre” is equally dubious. If I were Northrop Frye I would be implying not only a family resemblance but a case of literal propinquity, as if fictional stories centuries apart reflected a deeply embedded but universal human persuasion.

I make no such claim. While the transgression that is the primary subject of this book is a contemporary (post-1975) phenomenon, the emphasis in this chapter is on a longstanding literary gesture. Metamorphoses, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Roth’s The Breast, the 1960s film The Watermelon Man, and Will Self’s Cock and Bull all dramatize dramatic, inexplicable transformations and their aftermath. This only means that the tale of transformation (physical and psychological) is a common story type, just as the epic tale of the election of an unlikely hero for a mission, a resultant journey, an educative process, encounter with monsters and wise old men is common and remains popular. This latter story type, every time it resurfaces, is to some extent a retelling, while the satiric vision takes any prescriptive or proscriptive belief system as its starting place, and presents a story as we would tell it if that belief were not dominant, revealing an unlovely vision of common humanity. There is more consistency to this antediluvian vision than to the changing propositional morality of the epic or establishment tradition. That is where we begin.

When seen from a long-term perspective, literature is valued less for formal complexity or other aesthetic virtues than the extent to which it is seen to mirror or social or cultural progress. And this contribution to “progress” may be recognized in two ways: through a work’s illustration of social, behavioral, or psychological norms beneficial to the group (and therefore likely to characterize the group); or by the extent to which a work is consistent with a theory that describes the mechanism or process that purports to shed light on the future. Foundational texts predict the ascendancy of the Hebrews in Palestine, the destiny of Rome as the world’s central city, or the progress from late-stage capitalism to socialism. Anti-epic or anti-foundational texts lack these socially redeeming qualities, and are viewed with amusement or curiosity, appealing to a popular audience and acknowledged in retrospect to have had enormous influence.¹ The recent resurgence of the satiric tradition, little needed at the height of nineteenth-century realism, revives this hostility to treasured moralities and the verbal habits that maintain them. In so doing, it is both apophatic, asserting its innocence of prescribed beliefs, and, in an elemental way, mimetic.

In Critical Synoptics: Menippean Satire and the Analysis of Intellectual Mythology, Carter Kaplan helps draw a connection between the satirist’s roles as anatomist and philologist. He does this by noting a philosophical kinship between the satirist and the logical positivist Wittgenstein. For Kaplan, Menippean satire embodies the core ideas from the Tractatus: that the world is divided into facts that may or may not be the case; that states of affairs are essentially independent from each other and unrelated by cause; that we cannot know future events by inference from events in the present, etc. (23) As a key to understanding satire, this is significant in two ways. Firstly, it implies that satire eschews the Aristotelian mechanics of fiction. Secondly, it suggests that satire proposes a sort of “negative theology,” a philosophy that defines itself through its absence of and hostility to theories and propositions. This is not a paradox: Menippean and transgressive fiction may be seen as regressive, but its authors view it as revelatory of a truth that emerges in the absence of frameworks, theories, ideologies, and formulaic beliefs.

“Transgressive” and “progressive” are difficult terms, rich in unexplained assumptions. Since transgression literally means to cross lines or boundaries, it may be understood differently depending on one’s sense of the social norms violated. “Progressive” relies similarly on speculation that a given idea occupies a place in a timeline of ideas and will lead to the next development in a philosophical sequence due to its practical or moral advantages.² For instance, the concern with hygiene, burial practices, and codes of politeness in oral tradition epic was progressive; explications of the nature of sin in its relationship with repentance in Dante’s Commedia were also putatively progressive. Satire, of course, questions beliefs that have achieved some level of currency as established beliefs, not those that are marginal or heterodox. A particular irony associated with satire being labeled “transgressive” in America and the UK is that in pluralistic societies it is difficult to know which beliefs are normative. Chris Jenks comments on this fluxious state of affairs in his book Transgression: “This present state of uncertainty and flux within our culture raises fundamental questions concerning the categories of the normal and the pathological when applied to action or social institutions. Such periods of instability, as we are now experiencing, tend to test and force issues of authority and tradition – truth and surety are up for question” (5).

Satire flourishes in transitional times such as the reign of Augustus Caesar, those when fairly new ideas make an aggressive claim to legitimacy and older notions about behavioral norms, social hierarchies, or values are believed to be in abeyance. Menippean satire promotes a “regressive” worldview as a response to positions or paradigms presented by cultural or political establishments as “progress.” Transgression, however, is an aggressive form that arises in times perceived as permanently unstable: the post-Restoration era of Rochester and Swift; the French Renaissance of Montaigne and Rabelais; mid-nineteenth-century France, from Sade to Baudelaire; and the postmodern era beginning in the 1970s–1980s. The quintessential symbol of instability is the plasticity of the human body depicted in Ovid. Transformative incidents, whether they occur in ancient, modern, or contemporary literature, are generally associated with the return to a primordial state of human affairs. They reflect an anti-evolutionary vision of culture.³

Depending on one’s perspective, this makes Menippean satire either more dangerous or more relevant than heretofore thought since it undermines the paradigm-setting function of literature. The epic tradition contains beliefs that are foundational far past the time in which they are widely held to be true, since they give way to new beliefs through a process of imitation, criticism, repudiation, and revival.⁴ Its works, if they follow Horatian aesthetics, are sententious, decorous, serious in subject matter, formal and consistent in design. Works in the epic tradition are likely to be consistent with the beliefs of the culture in which they were produced and patronized. They are usually understood to be more serious and important than their satiric counterparts: Virgil is more serious than Ovid; Lucan than Petronius; Dante than Boccaccio; Dr. Johnson than Swift; Coleridge than Byron. Along with Milton, Spenser and others, these poets are the backbone of the corpus exhumed in “Western Civilization” courses. In the romance tradition of the novel, the pattern largely holds. Fielding’s work transcends that of Richardson, but Pamela is seen as inaugural to the English novel and the celebrated realist school dominant from the nineteenth century to the present day. No one ever said that Don Quixote was inferior to its main source, the Castilian knight-errant story Amadis de Gaulle, but its reputation, has followed an Ovidian path. It was viewed as an entertainment until the extent of its influence became obvious when it surfaced in works like Butler’s Hudibras.

If Menippean satire is mock epic, it may be seen as more independent than garden-variety satire; it is more than a response to a person, text, or issue. Simple satire, by contrast, is intertextual and as a result somewhat epiphenomenal; traditionally it was seen either (negatively) as literature written primarily to attack someone or some thing or (positively) as literature that criticizes for a moral purpose.⁵ Menippean satire, voiced from a generally elusive author and imitating or mocking a range of beliefs, character types, social norms, institutions, and modes of speech, does not fit a formulaic description of its purpose. Nonetheless, it uses the techniques common to satire,⁶ and seems to implicitly justify its excesses in the same way as simple satire – by its claim of truthfulness. It strips away public perception to expose an underlying reality, recognizable and gratifying to the reader. For instance, Aristophanes in The Clouds reveals Socrates (in Plato a reticent Cynic), as an institutionalized philosopher, in charge of the Thinkery and at work on bizarre new uses for common tools. The audience finds the characterization funny to the extent that it is descriptive of an aspect of the truth even if it is not actually true.

This is not to say that Menippean satire does not rest on previous texts. While the satirist often takes a single literary form as the basis for a work, it ultimately serves as a platform for more inclusive mockery. Simple satire never rises above commentary on its subject. Satirists in the tradition of Ovid and Petronius use their literary and cultural victims to comment on their own work, emphasize the virtues of its insincerity, artificiality, and its other privileges as art. Its “positive” content is partly contained in its self-consciousness and partly in its absence of an earnestly advanced ethos. While oral tradition myth and secondary epic are composed as an assurance of safety and consistency in the face of a hostile, unpredictable natural world,⁷ satire skeptically takes on art and language. It therefore has a double consciousness, to borrow the Emersonian concept, and one which joins the thematic and the formal.⁸ It proposes a Kantian (or proto-Kantian) insistence on the freedom of aesthetic play and employs this freedom to represent the chaos tamed by establishment literature. In this mixture of complexity and provocation lies the satirist’s power to transgress. Depictions of taboo acts, events, or viewpoints can never be taken as entirely propositional. It is forever enclosed in inverted commas.⁹

There are no quotation marks in oral tradition texts or in Ancient Hebrew or Greek manuscripts. Genesis, echoed in the creation story that begins Metamorphoses, is the exemplary oral tradition text, conceived as a literary charm to ensure the survival of a specific Hebrew family. Like forthcoming epics, it also defines this people, gives them a special relationship with the deity, and, on the basis of this relationship, prescribes some behavioral norms. In large part, these norms have to do with sexual behavior: the descendants of Abraham reproduce with legitimate partners, or those chosen by Yahweh. Therefore, it is essential that Isaac conceive a son with Sarah and not merely with Hagar, her slave. Although Jacob is the younger son so conceived, it is essential that he – and not the animalistic (hairy and gluttonous) – Esau carry on the family name. Jacob must sire children with his niece Rachel in addition to those he has fathered with his uncle’s eldest daughter Leah, and so on. Judicious use of one’s reproductive powers is essential for the formation and survival of the social group, defined in this case as a family. In the Homeric epics, the social group is defined more broadly, and the ethics of war, death, and burial differentiate civilization from savagery. However, as in Genesis, hospitality and manners are essential for progressive humans. Like Joseph in Genesis and Odysseus, Aeneas, early hero of post-literate epic, is vexed to keep his mind on his mission. The distractions, for all three heroes, are sexual in nature; and the goal in each case is the formation or maintenance of the social entity.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE)

It is God or the gods, furthermore, who ensure the successful completion of the hero’s enterprise, making success somewhat of a foregone conclusion. While even the Hebrews may not have been monotheistic at the time of Genesis, all three epics have something approaching a monotheistic worldview, because, however mercurial or petty the deities seem, the preeminent god’s decisions are irrevocable. One might say of Menippean satire, beginning with Ovid, that it takes place in a world without the ordering power of a figure capable of making such decisions – unless that figure is the author. Values like sexual prudence, the cleverness of Jacob and Odysseus, and dedication to family, kingdom or state are missing in Metamorphoses – or present by virtue of their absence. Two hundred and fifty mythic stories in Ovid linked by the theme of change depict sexual chaos following closely on the creation story, as if indefinitely extending the period in Genesis between the exile from Eden and the flood punishing human misbehavior. The series of linked stories begins with Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne (who escapes him by turning into a tree) and Jupiter’s rape of a nymph, whom Juno turns into a cow. The bovine nymph’s frustration at her inability to speak (a common motif in Metamorphoses) mocks the central epic conceit of a human group that has transcended bestiality as shown by its behavioral and attitudinal norms. Ovid’s gods are players in folk literature, similar to trickster figures like the Native American Coyote, whose misconceived plans lead to surprising results; rather than imposing order on nature, they reflect its inherent unpredictability.

Ovid’s folktales were familiar to his audience and are retold in a crowd-pleasing manner to a presumably plebeian audience. Their momentum and unexpected twists make them engaging in spite of the work’s lack of a complex structure like that of The Odyssey.¹⁰ This style, based on immediate appeal rather than large-scale cohesion, is essentially performative, as is most subsequent satire. Ovid adapts his performative style to the retelling of episodes from The Aeneid, as one would use a showy description to evoke a well-known painting. Patricia Johnson writes that Ovid’s ekphrastic passages in Metamorphoses are intended not to “reanimate” pictures to glorify author and character but to draw attention to the fact that the current work is art – and is artificial. “True to his reputation in Quintilian and elsewhere,” she writes, “Ovid is unhampered by the appearance of arrogance or any anxiety of influence” (35). By contrast, Virgil appropriates the foundational quality of Homer, as well as the content of The Odyssey and The Iliad, to lend Rome a prophetic past and future. There is nothing playful about Aeneas’ journey, much of which guides the reluctant hero to an acceptance of his destiny. The Aeneid has a Bible-like quality, not only as a record of an (imagined) history, but as a model of the pietas to which every Roman should aspire.

Contrarily, the ludic quality of Metamorphoses, with its complex (not merely didactic) relationship to its audience, defines the Menippean style. In Book 12 Ajax and Ulysses argue about which of them deserves the arms of Pyrrhus. Ajax makes his case:

But I am not at ease with speech, and he

is not the one for deeds; if one has need

to battle savagely along the field,

I am the man to call, even as he –

if it is talk you want – is quite supreme.

But I don’t think that you, my fellow Greeks,

need be reminded now of all my feat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Criminal Rehabilitation
• 1 Enemies of the State: The Atavistic Mock Epic
• 2 Liminal Intent: Nabokov and Burroughs
• 3 A History of Violence: From Satire to Transgression
• 4 Sex Offenders: Stranger than Fiction
• 5 False Pretenses: The Antisocial Hero
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index