(In order to revive my long-dormant blogs, I’m adding new posts as often as I can—even if one of them turns out to be not very funny and actually sort of boring, like this one.)
Are you familiar with those mathematical puzzles which give you a series of numbers and you have to figure out what the next number is? There’s always some trick involved.
While reading a piece in the London Review of Books recently I came across a list of nine novels.
The first eight are:
Don Quixote
Tristram Shandy
Moby-Dick
Alice in Wonderland
Sartor Resartus
Huckleberry Finn
The Way of All Flesh
Ulysses
What is the ninth novel in the series?
What do they have in common? Hmmm, let’s see....
Don Quixote
Definitely deserves its fame as a trail brazing and crazy book. On the other hand, it’s not that much fun to read. (Maybe it still hasn’t found its ideal English translator.)
Tristram Shandy
Charmingly lunatic. The favorite book (like other couples have favorite songs) of Thomas and Martha Jefferson, who could quote passages to each other.
Moby-Dick
A good sea yarn caught in an obsessive maelstrom of details. You have to let it suck you in.
Alice in Wonderland
A dotty metaphysical textbook for children.
Sartor Resartus
Wow! Deliberately exhibitionist intellectual acting-out. Slow-motion fireworks to blow the mind of the patient reader.
Huckleberry Finn
Afloat on a raft down a river through a mad mad world. (Marred by its Grade-B finale.)
The Way of All Flesh
?
(I’ve ordered a copy from Alibris.)
Ulysses
Exquisite unwinding of a day-long thread of a prosaic neurosis. (Unfortunately interrupted by a lengthy, lame, reductive effort at Jarry-inspired Dada.)
So? The ninth novel in the list?
When I tell you what the trick is
--although the first eight books are all by different authors, that’s not true for the ninth book--
you should be able to work it out.
Finnegans Wake.
The free association of a barmy polymath.
The list of nine books appeared in a review of three novels by an author I’d never heard of, Percival Everett. According to the reviewer, Leo Robson, these nine novels were among Everett’s favorite books and all are examples of “Menippean satire, a mixture of sermon, colloquy, catalogue, games, dreams, digressions.”
Menippean satire? I’d never heard of that either.
According to the staid Britannica, Menippean satire is:
A seriocomic genre, chiefly in ancient Greek literature and Latin literature, in which contemporary institutions, conventions, and ideas were criticized in a mocking satiric style that mingled prose and verse. The form often employed a variety of striking and unusual settings, such as the descent into Hades. Developed by the Greek satirist Menippus of Gadara in the early 3rd century BCE, Menippean satire was introduced to Rome in the 1st century BCE by the scholar Varro in Saturae Menippeae.
Wikipedia, where the data keeps up with the latest theories of the academics who edit the site, brings Menippean satire up to date:
The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, usually in prose, that is characterized by attacking mental attitudes rather than specific individuals or entities. It has been broadly described as a mixture of allegory, picaresque narrative, and satirical commentary. Other features found in Menippean satire are different forms of parody and mythological burlesque, a critique of the myths inherited from traditional culture, a rhapsodic nature, a fragmented narrative, the combination of many different targets, and the rapid moving between styles and points of view.
Well, you learn something new every day.
A couple of the books on Robson’s list are dubious as Menippean satire, even within Robson’s and Wikipedia’s sweeping definitions.
Huckleberry Finn? That’s a stretch.
And Finnegans Wake? Its shape-shifting cumuli of wordicules drift in a rarefied atmosphere that is way beyond the reach of literary taxonomy.
I’m looking forward to The Way of All Flesh. It’s a title I’ve come across from time to time ever since I began reading about the English novel, although lately it has been eclipsed by Butler’s Erewhon now that science fiction—pardon me—speculative fiction has become not only respectable, but fashionable.
Are you familiar with those mathematical puzzles which give you a series of numbers and you have to figure out what the next number is? There’s always some trick involved.
While reading a piece in the London Review of Books recently I came across a list of nine novels.
The first eight are:
Don Quixote
Tristram Shandy
Moby-Dick
Alice in Wonderland
Sartor Resartus
Huckleberry Finn
The Way of All Flesh
Ulysses
What is the ninth novel in the series?
What do they have in common? Hmmm, let’s see....
Don Quixote
Definitely deserves its fame as a trail brazing and crazy book. On the other hand, it’s not that much fun to read. (Maybe it still hasn’t found its ideal English translator.)
Tristram Shandy
Charmingly lunatic. The favorite book (like other couples have favorite songs) of Thomas and Martha Jefferson, who could quote passages to each other.
Moby-Dick
A good sea yarn caught in an obsessive maelstrom of details. You have to let it suck you in.
Alice in Wonderland
A dotty metaphysical textbook for children.
Sartor Resartus
Wow! Deliberately exhibitionist intellectual acting-out. Slow-motion fireworks to blow the mind of the patient reader.
Huckleberry Finn
Afloat on a raft down a river through a mad mad world. (Marred by its Grade-B finale.)
The Way of All Flesh
?
(I’ve ordered a copy from Alibris.)
Ulysses
Exquisite unwinding of a day-long thread of a prosaic neurosis. (Unfortunately interrupted by a lengthy, lame, reductive effort at Jarry-inspired Dada.)
So? The ninth novel in the list?
When I tell you what the trick is
--although the first eight books are all by different authors, that’s not true for the ninth book--
you should be able to work it out.
Finnegans Wake.
The free association of a barmy polymath.
The list of nine books appeared in a review of three novels by an author I’d never heard of, Percival Everett. According to the reviewer, Leo Robson, these nine novels were among Everett’s favorite books and all are examples of “Menippean satire, a mixture of sermon, colloquy, catalogue, games, dreams, digressions.”
Menippean satire? I’d never heard of that either.
According to the staid Britannica, Menippean satire is:
A seriocomic genre, chiefly in ancient Greek literature and Latin literature, in which contemporary institutions, conventions, and ideas were criticized in a mocking satiric style that mingled prose and verse. The form often employed a variety of striking and unusual settings, such as the descent into Hades. Developed by the Greek satirist Menippus of Gadara in the early 3rd century BCE, Menippean satire was introduced to Rome in the 1st century BCE by the scholar Varro in Saturae Menippeae.
Wikipedia, where the data keeps up with the latest theories of the academics who edit the site, brings Menippean satire up to date:
The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, usually in prose, that is characterized by attacking mental attitudes rather than specific individuals or entities. It has been broadly described as a mixture of allegory, picaresque narrative, and satirical commentary. Other features found in Menippean satire are different forms of parody and mythological burlesque, a critique of the myths inherited from traditional culture, a rhapsodic nature, a fragmented narrative, the combination of many different targets, and the rapid moving between styles and points of view.
Well, you learn something new every day.
A couple of the books on Robson’s list are dubious as Menippean satire, even within Robson’s and Wikipedia’s sweeping definitions.
Huckleberry Finn? That’s a stretch.
And Finnegans Wake? Its shape-shifting cumuli of wordicules drift in a rarefied atmosphere that is way beyond the reach of literary taxonomy.
I’m looking forward to The Way of All Flesh. It’s a title I’ve come across from time to time ever since I began reading about the English novel, although lately it has been eclipsed by Butler’s Erewhon now that science fiction—pardon me—speculative fiction has become not only respectable, but fashionable.
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