L. E. Pinsky. Why God is asleep

Pinsky, L. (2019). Why God is asleep. Ed. by A. Kozintsev. St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriya. (In Russ.)The book is titled after the opening Menippean satire, sent by its author L. Pinsky to G. Kozintzev in order to entertain. Their correspondence (1968– 1973) follows to represent their current work. At that moment Pinsky was making desperate attempts to bring to completion his book Shakespeare. The Essential Elements of Drama [Shekspir. Osnovnye nachala dramaturgii]. Kozintsev in his turn was filming King Lear and enjoyed the worldwide success in 1971. Pinsky was among those who were disappointed with the work done by his friend. According to him both the sense of the heroic and a comic attitude towards heroism were lost in the film. The book is remarkable for the dignity of conversation on both sides and exchange of comprehension that does not rule our disagreement but, on the contrary, invites to the polemics as a form of ‘thinking together’ (Kozintsev).

"Llegado el caso": Valente convocado en Palais de Justice

Resumen: Este artículo busca revelar la estructura discursiva interna de la narración en prosa, en ocasiones marcadamente poética, que Valente comenzó a redactar, a modo de notas, a mediados de los ochenta y que fue puliendo hasta su muerte en 2000. La narración ensambla, de manera eficaz, tres horizontes discursivos diversos. En primer lugar, una sátira menipea sobre la descomposición de la ciudad y, por ende, de la vida civil: en las ruinas de una urbe imperial (que es tanto París como Atenas y Roma), una pareja de amantes sitúa su erotismo desbordante en abierto desafío a los rituales públicos corruptos y crecientemente desacralizados. En este registro Valente se inspira en Petronio y el modernismo (de Eliot y Sartre a Cortázar). En segundo lugar, un informe o relato en el que se consigna, de manera distanciada e irónica, el proceso de divorcio de Valente y su primera mujer, que tuvo lugar en Ginebra a mediados de los ochenta. Este relato está dominado por el distanciamiento kafkiano y la crítica a las instituciones del poder. Aquí influyen Kafka, Camus y Böll. En tercer lugar, una mórbida fantasmagoría autobiográfica sobre la infancia y la primera adolescencia, posiblemente influida por Bataille y por la literatura de la posguerra (Matute, Goytisolo, Umbral). Palais de Justice emerge, en esta confluencia, como un relato hiriente sobre la constitución de una identidad inicialmente imposible, informe, insumisa, adolescente, mediante la convocación del sujeto a un ritual jurídico-psiquiátrico en el que obtiene su determinación, su culpa y su castigo. Es también un testimonio impactante sobre la imposibilidad de la inocencia. Palabras clave: José Ángel Valente; Palais de Justice; identidad; adolescencia; inocencia; erotismo; sátira. Abstract: This article seeks to unveil the internal discursive structure of Valente’s narrative prose Palais de Justice, which he began writing, in the form of notes, in the mid-eighties and completed in 2000. The narrative successfully juxtaposes three different discursive horizons. First, a Menippean satire of the decaying city and, by extension, of degraded civil life: in the ruins of an imperial metropolis—that is simultaneously Paris, Athens and Rome—a pair of lovers set their exuberant eroticism against the corrupt and increasingly desacralized public rituals. Here Valente seeks inspiration in Petronius and the modernists (Eliot, Sartre, Cortázar). Second, a report that records, with ironic distance, the divorce trial that sanctioned the legal separation between Valente and his first wife in Geneva in the mid-1980s. This report is characterized by Kafkaesque distance and the critique of power institutions. We feel here the influence of Kafka, Camus and Böll. Third, a morbid autobiographical phantasmagoria focused on childhood and adolescence, possibly influenced by Bataille, Lezama Lima, and Spanish post-war literature (Matute, Goytisolo, Umbral). Palais de Justice thus emerges as a harrowing tale about the constitution of an identity—which proves initially impossible because formless, uncompliant, adolescent—through the summoning of the subject to a judicial-cum-psychiatric ritual by means of which he obtains his determination, guilt and punishment. It is also a formidable testimony to the impossibility of innocence. Key words: José Ángel Valente; Palais de Justice; identity; adolescence; innocence; eroticism; satire.

Unity and Parody, or how to read a Menippean Satire: On Martianus’ De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii

The present paper aims to propose the study of Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii from a literary perspective, combining Theory of Genres and Functionalist Discourse Analysis. In order to disarticulate previous opinions on the work—which reduce menippean molds to a minimum, considering De nuptiis a didactic text—we state two main categories that work as axes in our interpretation: the unity of the work, and the presence of parody as the dominant register and unifying bond. In this framework, De nuptiis is no longer a failed encyclopedia, but a perfect Menippean satire.

The Poetics of Genre

This chapter explores why Bakhtin asserted the Satyrica was proof that “Menippean satire can expand into a … realistic reflection of the socially varied and heteroglot world of contemporary life”—an arguably false assertion containing much truth. For Bakhtin, ancient fiction emerged chiefly under three rubrics: novelistic discourse, space-time (chronotopes) in fiction, and minor novelistic history envisioning Menippea as catalyst. The first two isolate forms specific to ancient fiction, distinguishing dominant types; the final rubric investigates how prose fiction relates to the genres it arises from. Although Bakhtin’s conception of Menippea is not so ahistorical as it sometimes seems when removed from his three-dimensional approach, it is sweeping, idiosyncratic. This chapter begins with Bakhtin’s characterization of Menippea amid accounts specifying what makes it crucial for novelistic discourse; it then asks how Bakhtin sheds light on literary history as a dialogue of genres.

Inventing the Novel

Bakhtin as a philosopher and a student of the novel is intent upon the novel’s role in the history of consciousness. His project fails if he is wrong about the dialogic nature of consciousness or the cultural centrality of the novel as the only discourse that can model human consciousness and its intersubjective character. Inventing the Novel is an argument in four stages: the Introduction surveys Bakhtin’s life and his theoretical work in the 1920s, which grounded his work on the novel, as investigated in following chapters. Chapter 1 sketches Bakhtin’s view of literary history as an agonistic dialogue of genres, concluding with his claim that the novel originates as a new way of evaluating time. Chapter 2 explores Bakhtin’s theory of chronotopes: how do forms of time and space in ancient fiction delimit the possible representation of the human? Chapter 3 assesses Bakhtin’s poetics of genre in his account of Menippean satire as crucial in the history of the novel. Chapter 4 uses Petronius to address the prosaics of the novel, exploring Bakhtin’s account of how novelists of “the second stylistic line” orchestrate the babble of voices expressive of an era into “a microcosm of heteroglossia,” focusing it through the consciousness of characters “on the boundary” between I and thou. Insofar as this analysis succeeds, it evinces the truth of Bakhtin’s claim that the role of Petronius’s Satyrica in the history of the novel is “immense.”

Satire

Although scholars generally agree that satire cannot be defined in a categorical or exhaustive way, there is a consensus regarding its major features: satire is a mode, rather than a genre; it attacks historically specific targets, who are real; it is an intentional and purposeful literary form; its targets deserve ridicule on the basis of their behavior; and satire is both humorous and critical by its nature. The specificity and negativity of satire are what separates it from comedy, which tends to ridicule general types of people in ways that are ultimately redemptive. Satire is also rhetorically complex, and its critiques have a convoluted or indirect relation to the views of the author. Satire’s long history, which is not straightforwardly linear, means that it is impossible to catalogue all of the views on it from antiquity through to modernity. Modern criticism on satire, however, is easier to summarize and has often made use of ancient satirical traditions for its own purposes—especially because many early modern theorists of satire were also satirists. In particular, modern satire has generated an internal dichotomy between a rhetorical tradition of satire associated with Juvenal, and an ethical tradition associated with Horace. Most criticism of satire from the 20th century onward repeats and re-inscribes this binary in various ways. The Yale school of critics applied key insights from the New Critics to offer a rhetorical approach to satire. The Chicago school focused on the historical nature of satirical references but still presented a broadly formalist account of satire. Early 21st century criticism has moved between a rhetorical approach inflected by poststructural theory and a historicism grounded in archival research, empiricism, and period studies. Both of these approaches, however, have continued to internally reproduce a division between satire’s aesthetic qualities and its ethical or instrumental qualities. Finally, there is also a tradition of Menippean satire that differs markedly in character from traditional satire studies. While criticism of Menippean satire tends to foreground the aesthetic potential of satire over and above ethics, it also often focuses on many works that are arguably not really satirical in nature.