Page 52 →Chapter 2 Everett and Menippean Satire

Menippean satire is a mode of seriocomic satirical expression that dates back to and is named after the ancient Greek writer Menippus of Gadara, who is believed to have lived in the third century B.C.E. Despite there being no physical copies of any of the works attributed to Menippus, this literary mode bears his name because of the characteristics ascribed to those works while they—and their author’s reputation—still did exist. For example, the second-century C.E. Greek satirist Lucian wrote a work entitled Menippus, or the Descent into Hades, in which a fictionalized version of Menippus travels to the underworld to engage in a highly satirical philosophical debate with the mythic seer Teiresias. Athenaus of Naucratis mentioned Menippus among the Cynic philosophers in his third-century C.E. work Deipnosophistae (translated into English as The Learned Banqueters), and Athenaus’s contemporary Diogenes Laërtius included Menippus among the notable “Ionians” in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, naming and describing numerous works reputedly penned by him. Thomas Willard has written that Menippus “was known in antiquity as the earnest jester … because his satires lampooned ideas of rival schools. (He thus followed the advice of Gorgias, as reported by Aristotle: ‘kill your opponents’ earnestness with jesting and their jesting with earnestness’)…. Menippus was said to have combined verse and prose, and Lucian drew equally on … comedy and satire as well as verse and prose … [to create] a hybrid form that came to be known as Menippean satire” (778–79). In its classical form, Menippean satire was thus distinguished by its variety of literary forms and by directing its satirical attacks specifically at the ideas of other Page 54 →philosophers, rather than at instances of typical human “folly” or on the moral failings of particular individuals, as was generally the case in the renowned satires of Aristophanes, Horace, or Juvenal.

David Musgrave described how the term developed over the centuries between late antiquity and the Enlightenment, when it enjoyed a resurgence in the literatures of central and northern Europe: “Ancient Menippean satire tended to be a satire of [particular] philosophers … which gradually became a satire of philosophy in the middle ages and, later, a satire of religion and other powerful ideologies” (viii). Dustin Griffin expanded on this development by noting that “the Menippean family has several branches” that emerged after the classical period: “a tradition of fantastic narrative, from Lucian to Gulliver’s Travels and beyond; a parallel tradition of wild and parodic display of learning, from Erasmus through Robert Burton to A Tale of a Tub; and a tradition of dialogue and symposium from Plato and Lucian to [Bernard Le Bovier de] Fontenelle and [William] Blake” (33). W. Scott Blanchard further explained how Menippean satire was perceived during the late Renaissance and the Enlightenment: “Menippean satire is a genre for and about scholars; it is an immensely learned form that is at the same time paradoxically anti-intellectual. If its master of ceremonies is the humanist as wise fool, its audience is a learned community whose members need to be reminded … of the depravity of their overreaching intellects, of the limits of human understanding” (14). Blanchard also noted that Menippean satire is less inclined than the varieties descended from the Roman writers Juvenal and Horace to become a medium of moral instruction or correction: “[It] refuses to allow an ideal type to emerge from its chaotic sprawl, whereas Roman satire achieves its effect by contrasting the debased world of the present to models of human behavior that are acceptable” (18–19).

Even in these initial and intermediate contexts, one sees parallels emerging between the structures and intentions of this class of texts and Everett’s “earnestly jesting” methods as a writer, whether in terms of the multiplicity of genres and forms that make their way into his texts or the ways in which his works implicitly and explicitly reveal the “depravity” underlying various forms of accepted wisdom. While far from “anti-intellectual,” Everett is especially Menippean in his unwillingness to insist that his view of the world is the correct one—“I don’t approach fiction, or, more generally, writing with the notion that I know what’s true and right. I raise questions” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 221)—or that expressing his criticisms is going to change the world for the better: “I don’t operate under any illusions about the world—it’s a bad place…. Always has been always will be. Human beings aren’t particularly admirable…. Still, I’ll talk about the things that I think are vacuous and the things I think are evil, knowing that certainly not because of my pointing them out will Page 55 →they change” (Monaghan 73). Everett’s comments echo Dustin Griffin’s claim that satire’s “ultimate provocation—what Swift calls vexing the world—is to make readers look in the mirror and see that they are not and can never be what they claim to be. Satire cannot mend them; it can only hope to make them see” (62). Howard Weinbrot has attributed a similarly unpromising brand of persistence to Menippean satires specifically: “[These texts’] dominant thrust is to resist or protest events in a dangerous world, however much the protests may fail…. Menippean satire lives in a precarious universe of broken or fragile national, cultural, religious, political, or generally intellectual values” (7).

Everett’s Menippean qualities come into sharpest focus, though, when one considers the work of Northrop Frye, one of the two scholars—Mikhail Bakhtin being the other—most responsible for defining Menippean satire for the twentieth century and beyond. Wholly familiar with but also departing notably from Menippean satire’s long pedigree, Frye has contributed a major innovation that becomes extremely relevant to applying the concept to Everett’s work. Frye differs from scholars such as Willard and Blanchard, both of whom considered Menippean satire as a genre of literature—that is, an identifiable form of writing with a particular set of conventions and expectations. A genre-based definition was appropriate for the classical version of Menippean satire, but it proves inadequate in the face of the intentional confusion and deformation of genres that developed in the wake of such innovative novels as Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), or Laurence Sterne’s The Lives and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). Frye instead discussed contemporary Menippean satire as a mode that can appear in and affect the meaning of a work from just about any genre, a perspective that Weinbrot has summarized: “It often attaches itself to other kinds of works within other dominant genres, and peers in as occasion requires. It is perhaps less a clearly defined genre than a set of variable but compatible devices whose traits support an authorial theme” (4). If one accepts this assertion, then Everett’s claims about the interrelated nature of all his books expand the possibility of interpreting his entire catalog, not just individual works therein, as Menippean satire: “I see all [my] works as fitting together, as an overall project. I’m writing one big novel…. These books are in a dialogue with each other. It’s a conversation that I’m having with myself, and the work is having with itself, and I’m having with the work. It’s my way of understanding the world” (Stewart, “Uncategorizable” 295–96).

Although taking any passage from Percival Everett by Virgil Russell directly at face value is perhaps to stumble into a trap of the author’s making, that novel’s multitudinous narrator makes a comment that both echoes Everett’s real-life sentiments from the previous quote and positions art generally as a Page 56 →Menippean project of pushing back against “powerful ideologies.” The narrator appears to be speaking in the voice of the “father” when he states, “Thus, if I or you, son, can be relied upon, we are at this moment in time in a most grave condition, besieged and beset by that ceaseless host of negative thinkers and would-be controllers and, yes, disbelievers, threatening to undress us publicly.” The father then appears to quote his son’s amplification of this dire situation:

The world, says you, as it proceeds, is under an operation of devastation and misapplication and abuse, which, whether by creeping and insidious and assiduous corrosion, or open, hastier combustion, as things might be, will efficaciously enough destroy completely past forms and replace them with, well, whatever….

Forms of what?

I don’t know. Society? Art?

Although the precise meaning of these observations remains somewhat opaque, Everett allows for both literal (read: political) and figurative (read: aesthetic) interpretations. Whether it is “society” or “art” that is under duress, the scenario being described is one in which “the world” is under threat from “negative thinkers” and “corrosion.” The father’s voice posits a strategy for resistance that is itself Menippean and justifies considering Everett’s body of work as a larger whole: “For the time being, it is thought that when all our artistic and spiritual interests are at once dispossessed, the uncountable shapes to stories must be burned, but the better stories should be pasted together into one huge poem or graffiti for the defense of language only” (58).

If one defines satire predominantly as a genre with a collection of necessary structural/rhetorical elements—or “formal” and “functional” ones, as Kharpertian did in his incomplete move away from genre-based interpretation (33)—then determining what is or what is not satire is essentially reduced to a checklist or a set of rules. As Frye defined it, though, Menippean satire is a method of literary expression that is innately concerned with violating rigid rules, making it unlikely to be usefully defined by the very type of thing it routinely undermines. Everett’s insistence that he does not “believe in genres” diminishes the value of analyzing his satirical impulses from a standpoint that insists on genre-based interpretation. However, his corollary assertion that “stories of stories and literary art transcend any notion of genre” (Cruden) leaves room for and perhaps even invites a modal definition.

The Renaissance scholar Paul Alpers has provided a useful definition of literary modes in his book What Is Pastoral? (1997): “Mode is the literary manifestation, in a given work, not of its attitudes in a loose sense, but of its assumptions about man’s nature and situation. This definition in turn provides Page 57 →a critical question we implicitly put to any work we interpret: what notions of human strength, possibilities, pleasures, dilemmas, etc. are manifested in the represented realities and in the emphases, devices, organization, effects, etc. of this work?” (50). In The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye described Menippean satire in modal terms, thus perceiving it, as Alpers has suggested, more as a philosophical relationship between the author and his/her text than as a series of explicit formal structures and conventions: “Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behaviors…. The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect, as a kind of maddened pedantry…. [Menippean satire] is not primarily concerned with the exploits of heroes, but relies on the free play of the intellectual fancy and the kind of humorous observation that produces caricature” (309–10). Frye’s comments about the “free play of the intellectual fancy” coincide closely with Everett’s insistence that “it’s important to watch how ideas work and how they can be manipulated” as well as his preference for “stuff that challenges me and makes me think differently, that introduces me to things I didn’t know before” (Shavers, “Percival” 48). Furthermore, Frye’s remark that Menippean satire often “produces caricature” squares well with Marguerite Déon’s observation that Everett consciously uses clichés in many of his works as he “disrupt[s] stereotypes or fixed ideas … [and] teases the reader by interfering with her reassuring reading habits” (1). Déon even explicitly identified Everett’s recurrent use of characters who “go from one idea to another without the least coherence and apparently without the least care for their listeners” as “a form of Menippean satire, aimed at mocking … vacuity going by the name of knowledge” (4).

Frye later stated that the “Menippean satirist, dealing with intellectual themes and attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon” (311). This is practically a word-for-word description of Glyph, applies just as directly to Erasure and A History of the African-American People, and applies more indirectly—and in less comic ways—to The Water Cure and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. For example, Glyph contains a seven-page “appendix within the text” entitled “(Ralph’s Theory of Fictive Space)” and consisting of seventy-eight hierarchically categorized and theory-heavy aphorisms seemingly intended to answer the question “Are Meanings in the Head?” (194), which is posed by the section-heading immediately preceding this gargantuan list. The list is bookended by a pair of fairly reductive statements: “A) What is is what is and all Page 58 →that is is all there is” (194) and “C) Nothing is a story but a story” (200); but the overwhelming effect of digesting the entire list is precisely that which Frye mentions above.

Similarly, an early passage in Erasure features “Monk” Ellison at a conference of the “Nouveau Roman Society” reading a paper that is a complex parody/adaptation of ideas taken from Roland Barthes. Two years before its inclusion in Erasure, Everett published in Callaloo a free-standing version of the piece that Monk reads; in its original context, Everett calls it a “piece of fiction, though it might easily be classified as a parody” (“F/V” 18), whereas within the novel its ontological status is still more ambiguous. Monk dismisses his audience as snobbish pseudointellectuals and claims that they have only a “semblance of credibility in the so-called real world” (Erasure 11) because they never leave the closed rhetorical confines of their own company. He is smugly convinced that they understand little of his presentation, but he seemingly ignores the concurrent facts that he barely cares about his own ideas and that the paper is, in many ways, intentionally written to be beyond understanding. Monk similarly intends his novel My Pafology to mock through parody what he considers to be pervasive and simplistic assumptions about authentic blackness among mainstream readers and publishers. That intention becomes hazy, though, once the book unexpectedly catapults Monk (pseudonymously) to fame and fortune, and his own thought process gradually becomes subject to Everett’s satire as the text progresses, rather than serving as the seeming mouthpiece through which it is transmitted.

Some of Everett’s earlier satires too contain such reflexive and intertextual Menippean satirical moments, even if the “jargon” being redirected and repurposed is less obscure than the literary theory parodied in Glyph and to a lesser extent in Erasure. For example, Curt Marder notes early in God’s Country that he had “read what I could of the dime novels about the frontier, thinking it my duty as a citizen of it to make sure the truth be told, and generally the little books gave a fair account” (10). Everett later incorporates and repurposes wildly skewed versions of precisely the kinds of tropes and conventions one would expect to find in those same “dime novels.” Marder’s direct announcement of the manner in which these literary elements serve him as an intellectual foundation allows the reader to understand that their usage by Everett is meant as satirical refutation, rather than simple parodic simulation, of the “fair account” they represent in Marder’s willfully ignorant, bigoted worldview. Marder and John Livesey from Cutting Lisa are both presented as characters whose “maddened pedantry” justifies their appalling actions. Each character outlines his ethical perspective at length and in detail, while the Page 59 →underlying structures of the narratives satirically undercut their convictions, although God’s Country does so in a much more comic fashion than Cutting Lisa does.

The desire to “disrupt” and “shake up” ideas without substituting a new truth for the disrupted one departs from the better-known Horatian or Juvenalian conception of satire as a means of moral or ethical instruction. Dustin Griffin asserted that Menippean satire involves a pair of simultaneous rhetorics that are intended to destabilize existing notions of truth: “If the rhetoric of inquiry is ‘positive,’ an exploratory attempt to arrive at truth, the rhetoric of provocation is ‘negative,’ a critique of false understanding. In each case, the satirist raises questions; in provocation, the question is designed to expose or demolish a foolish certainty” (52). As Frye defined it, Menippean satire requires neither prescription nor solution for the ills it depicts; in any case, Everett would likely insist that “diseases of the intellect,” such as those from which Monk Ellison, Curt Marder, and John Livesey suffer, are cured by new and more productive uses of one’s intellect, rather than simply by following a different set of imposed rules.

Especially in his works published since the late 1990s, Everett’s use of Menippean satire exemplifies a related quality that Steven Weisenburger named both “subversive” and “degenerative” in his Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980 (1995). Weisenburger argued that the “purpose” of this predominantly postmodern variety of satire “is delegitimizing” and that it accomplishes this purpose by eschewing the usual “normative” role in order to “reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own” (Fables 3). Much of Everett’s recent fiction includes characters who share his name, such as “some guy named Percival Everett” in I Am Not Sidney Poitier, who teaches a course at Morehouse on the “Philosophy of Nonsense” and decorates his office with pictures of Terry McMillan, James Joyce, and “the first Bozo the Clown” (87–88). This technique literalizes the innate “suspicion” that the real-life Everett has directed toward his putative authority to “make meaning” throughout his career: “Making fun of what I think and myself is often a way of creating a distance between my own concerns and petty grievances with the world, or desires in it, with the world I’m trying to create” (Champion 173). An exchange between the “father” and the “son” from Percival Everett by Virgil Russell that initially resembles a John Barth–like postmodernist joke takes on a more subversive philosophical intonation when considered in the light of Weisenburger’s ideas:

Page 60 →Do you have a point here?

It’s just a story.

But it’s clearly not true.

And? (35)

That no answer to this question—like so many of the others posed in the novel—is forthcoming should not be surprising, given Everett’s thorough refusal to suggest what is “true” to his readers.

The traits that Weisenburger ascribes to degenerative satire are consistent with the skeptical impulse Musgrave has identified in claiming that “it is in the fractured form of Menippean satire that the impossibility of a single world view, or the impossibility of an explain-all dogma is realized” (11). Weisenburger’s analysis of the salient traits of “degenerative” satire further echoes Everett’s claim not to “believe in any rules when it comes to fiction” (Champion 170) and his desire to go beyond “building straw men simply to knock them over” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 221): “The common thread [is] the contemporary suspicion of all structures, including structures of perceiving, representing, and transforming. Narratives, especially, are among the most problematic of such structures, and satire becomes a mode for interrogating and counterterrorizing them. Yet postmodern satire is stuck with the very simulacra of the knowledge it so distrusts—stories. This is why the satirist often turns metafictionist and parodist, seeking out ‘intramural’ and self-referring ways of striking at the aesthetic rules hemming us in” (Weisenburger, Fables 5). Although Weisenburger did not specify any subversive intentions on Everett’s part in his 1985 review of Walk Me to the Distance, he hinted at such an approach in his description of how that novel questions the conventional form that he refers to as “the Westwarding Story”: “In its essentials that story always removes a man from the fractures of his Eastern biological family for him to discover—drop-forged between great skies and flat Western plains—a new nuclear family founded on honor, duty, and love…. This is a novel which wonders, paradoxically, if a [man] can be morally instructed by [such] a dead mythology. And if he can, what is it in the carcass that still nourishes? … [I]t’s a remarkable question to ask” (“Out West” 489–90).

While responding to an interviewer’s question about whether his books represent a correction of history, Everett expressed the reflexive suspicion of didacticism that Weisenburger has attributed to subversive satire generally: “I’m not correcting anything. That would mean I know enough to correct. I’m just a dumb writer” (Shavers, “Percival” 49). Moreover, when asked in a different interview whether he considers “artistic creation [to be] a form of gleeful self-sabotage,” he replied in a manner consistent with the aims of both Page 61 →Menippean and subversive satire: “Certainly if you consider disrupting all that you know about the world a kind of sabotage, yes. And I suppose in some ways that can be. If you’re walking through life and you think you understand something, and you purposely take that away, then you feel sort of shaken up—your world view. And for some people that can be a sort of sabotage. For me, I consider that a necessary component of living” (Champion 171). The snake of his authorial intentions eats its own tail to such an extent that Everett even has suggested that he is “making fun of satire as well as satirizing social policies.” His sheepish confession “I shouldn’t even say this, but I write about satire…. I’m exploiting the form” (Shavers, “Percival” 50) communicates the self-aware perspective that Weisenburger insisted is a prerequisite for subversive satire.

Stimulating his readers’ intellect by first dismantling their operative assumptions is Everett’s implicit task even when he is not writing satirically; however, the degree to which this intention moves powerfully to the forefront when he does produce satire imparts a distinctly Menippean and subversive/degenerative quality to the “one big novel” of his “overall project.” Although his definition of the word may differ somewhat from Weisenburger’s, Everett has stated that “all of my novels are subversive and militant, but none is social protest” (Mills, Julien, and Tissut 223). He also has made it clear that his personal politics are not meant to be imparted to his readers, even in The Water Cure, which he has explicitly identified “as a protest novel”—and, lest he seem to contradict himself, Everett wrote The Water Cure after he made the previous comment. The modal and Menippean nature of his satire is attested to by his claims that “every work of art is necessarily political. Even if you try not to put politics in the work that’s a political statement. Because it addresses one’s relationship to the world.” His comments about the emotional underpinnings of his satire indicate its concurrent degenerative nature: “Anger is … not the same as outrage. You can experience outrage and see injustice, but as soon as you are swallowed by your anger, you stop thinking” (Bauer, “Percival Everett” 8). William Ramsey asserted that Everett’s “personal anger finds mature outlet in the form of artistic sublimation” and, correspondingly, that his “trademark comedy—a grotesque humor, satire, surrealism, irrational character motivation, and the flouting of narrative conventions—is the creative sublimation of his rebellious impulses into a socially productive activity” (131). Rather than producing raging philippics or jeremiads that require readers to accept or to reject their “fixed norms or corrective goals” (Weisenburger, Fables 14), Everett wants to use his outrage as a general spur to thoughtful consideration of the realities he puts before his readers.

The manner in which other critics have used Menippean satire to analyze the work of writers similar to Everett serves as a framework for this study. In Page 62 →analyzing the work of the mid-twentieth-century Irish novelist Flann O’Brien—one of the pen names of Brian O’Nolan—M. Keith Booker noted, “Within the dialogic doubleness of Menippean satire, one can read O’Brien’s work both as a consistent evocation of the theme of futility and as a parody of such evocations. This doubleness informs all of O’Brien’s major works…. In particular, all of O’Brien’s work is centrally concerned with explorations of the uses and social implications of language. O’Brien’s comedy is not silly or gratuitous, but participates in important ways with important social, political, and cultural issues in his contemporary Ireland” (7). Though transposed from mid-century Ireland to (mostly) the contemporary United States, Everett’s work parallels O’Brien’s in using comedy for serious ends, whether artistic, linguistic, or sociopolitical: “Comedy in Everett’s novels is grounded in seriousness and love of intellectual knowledge. In Erasure, he addresses issues such as the dumbing down of America, the fracturing of nuclear families, violence, racism, Nazism, and Alzheimer’s. And always he plays with words, names, and fates” (Winther 185–86). Stewart has even linked O’Brien and Everett directly, claiming that both write “novels that teach literary-theoretical precepts and literary-theoretical texts that feature characters” (“Setting One’s” 223).

Theodore Kharpertian similarly framed the work of Thomas Pynchon—a writer whose work Everett has frequently singled out for praise—in Menippean terms, writing that “Menippean satire is, by its contradictory and paradoxical nature, an open and flexible genre, one particularly congenial to Pynchon’s radical brand of fictional experimentation, and if contradiction and paradox do indeed in some sense form the absent center of Pynchon’s discourse as well, then the Bakhtinian dialogism of the Menippean form provides a productive field for Pynchon to, in one of his own characters’ formulations, ‘keep it bouncing’” (21).

Kharpertian’s reference to Bakhtin, the other major theorist of contemporary Menippean satire, highlights the interrelated “dialogic” and “carnivalesque” aspects of that mode, which Booker summarized: “Menippean satire contains by its very nature a diverse collection of competing styles and voices … that is centrally informed by the energies that Bakhtin refers to as ‘carnivalesque.’ … The first and most fundamental characteristic of the carnival (and therefore of Menippean satire) is its ambivalence—different points of view, different worlds, may be mutually and simultaneously present without any privileging of one over the other, so that the different worlds can comment on each other in a dialogic way” (2). Julia Kristeva further clarified the way in which carnivalesque satire is intended to stimulate responses that transcend simple expectations: “The laughter of the carnival is not simply parodic; it is no more comic than tragic; it is both at once, one might say that it is serious. This is Page 63 →the only way that it can avoid becoming either the scene of law or the scene of its parody, in order to become the scene of its other” (50). Her words strongly echo Everett’s contention that he, like Menippus, is “fairly earnest about” his satire: “there’s a lot of irony in the fact that I take the things I’m talking about seriously” (Bolonik 98). Let us move on, then, to see what comes into clearer focus when one applies the critical lens laid out above to Everett’s idiosyncratic brand of earnest jesting.