Epic V Minnipean Satire

The Poetics of Genre: Bakhtin, Menippus, Petronius
R. B RACHT B RANHAM
Emory University
“The Satyricon of Petronius is good proof that Menippean satire can ex-
pand into a huge picture, offering a realistic reflection of the socially var-
ied and heteroglot world of contemporary life.”
M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology
for a Study of the Novel,” trans. C. Emerson (1941)
My purpose in this essay is to explore why Bakhtin felt justified in making

the assertion (cited as my epigraph), an assertion which is arguably false, but
which nevertheless has a lot of truth in it. Bakhtin’s account of the emer-
gence of fiction in antiquity is developed under three principal rubrics: 1)
discourse in the novel; 2) the representation of space-time or chronotopes in
fiction; and 3) a history of minor genres related to the novel that focuses on
the catalyzing effects of Menippean satire. The first two categories frame
attempts to isolate aspects of form specific to ancient fiction, which will
allow us to distinguish its dominant types. The final rubric poses the riddle
of generic origins: what is the relationship of prose fiction to the complex of
genres from which it emerges? While Bakhtin’s conception of Menippean
satire is not as ahistorical as it sometimes seems when taken out of the con-
text of his three pronged account, it is sweeping and idiosyncratic. My in-
vestigation will begin by offering a critical overview of Bakhtin’s characteri-
zation of Menippean traditions (and the realm of the seriocomic) in the light
of contemporary accounts of the genre with the aim of specifying those fea-
tures that make it a crucial episode in the prehistory of novelistic discourse. I
will then ask what light Bakhtin’s account of Menippea and the emergence
of fiction (i.e., the novel) sheds on his model of literary history as a dialogue
of genres.1
—————
1
For the Bakhtinian conception of genre as utterance, see Branham in Branham 2002.
The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative, 3–31

4 R . B R AC H T B R A NH A M
Bakhtin on the Seriocomic
A literary genre, by its very nature, reflects the most stable, ‘eternal’ ten-
dencies in literature’s development. Always preserved in a genre are un-
dying elements of the archaic. True, these archaic elements are pre-
served in it only thanks to their constant renewal, which is to say, their
contemporization. A genre is always the same and yet not the same, al-
ways old and new simultaneously. Genre is reborn and renewed at every
new stage in the development of literature and in every individual work
of a given genre. This constitutes the life of the genre.
M. M. Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoyevsky’s Poetics,
trans C. Emerson (1963)
Menippean satire is the subset of a much wider category Bakhtin chose to

call the spoudogeloion2 or seriocomic. Historically this term refers specifi-
cally to Cynic practices and Menippus in particular and, while it is true that
the Cynics had no monopoly on the concept, Bakhtin’s expansion of it is a
bold reconception of the entire field of postclassical literature which gives
the seriocomic a dynamic role in the emergence of the last genres to appear
in antiquity — those of prose fiction. Just as it is necessary to historicize
Bakhtin’s generalizations about genre, it is no less useful to read Bakhtin
himself historically — that is, to understand how his thinking developed
over time and how particular theoretical constructs served his own projects.3
He was not writing an encyclopedia article.
—————
2
Much that is written on the spoudogeloion (or seriocomic) is misleading. The word oc-
curs only twice in the extant literature but the concept, probably Cynic in origin, is far
more important than its rarity as a word might imply. For the meaning of the word, see
Branham 1989, 26–7, 227n.31. For the concept as it applies to Lucian’s practice, see
Branham 1989, Chap. 1, “The Rhetoric of Laughter.” Bakhtin’s construction of the con-
cept as an overarching attribute of Socratic dialogue, Menippean satire and other genres
rooted in carnival is original. For Crates and Diogenes as seriocomic philosophers, see
Long 1996 and Branham 1996 in Branham and Goulet-Cazé 1996.
3
For an excellent example of how to read Bakhtin historically in both directions, i.e., to
historicize his own work as well as its claims, see A.T. Edward’s “Historicizing the
Popular Grotesque: Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World and Attic Old Comedy” in Bran-
ham 2001. As Edwards points out, Bakhtin’s treatment of carnival or the popular gro-
tesque varies somewhat in Problems in Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Rabelais and His World
and the discussion of Rabelais in the essay on chronotopes: “The notion of the grotesque
appears only informally in “Chronotope” and without reference to the social and political
ramifications of its anti-authoritarianism and popular roots except in the limited context
TH E P O ET IC S O F G EN R E : B AK H TI N , ME NI PP US , PE TR ON IUS 5
The epigraph at the beginning of this section is taken from the revised
version of the first book Bakhtin chose to publish under his own name,
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art (1929). Because the 1963 edition, Problems
of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, became in Caryl Emerson’s words, a study of
“Dostoyevky’s place in the history of novelness”,4 the chapter on genre was
rewritten to include a discussion of Menippean satire and related traditions.
Hence, while it represents Bakhtin’s mature thought on the subject — it is
the last time he wrote about it — the aim of bringing together his original
study of Dostoyevsky’s novels with his wide ranging work of the intervening
decades on “carnivalized literature” risks compression and over-simplifica-
tion. Nevertheless, he clearly thought the risk worth taking: “In our opinion
the problem of carnivalized literature is one of the very important problems
in historical poetics, and in particular of the poetics of genre” (107).
The first example of such literature in history is “the realm of the serio-
comical” (107).5 What defines the literature of this category for Bakhtin is
not, as we might expect, a particular aesthetic structure or function, or its
roots in Cynic parody, but that it was influenced — directly or indirectly —
“by one or another variant of carnivalistic folklore” (107). While Bakhtin
claimed a “huge role” for “folklore and popular comic sources for the
novel”6 in essays written in 1940–41, his roughly contemporary work on
Rabelais (defended as a dissertation in 1946) has clearly led him to attribute
greater importance than ever before to “carnival” as a persistent pattern of
culture expressed in a range of postclassical genres that prepare the ground
for the novel. At first glance, this claim seems obviously ahistorical since
many of the genres so categorized — mime, bucolic poetry, Socratic dia-
—————
of Rabelais’ own opposition to the medieval order. While the locus of the town square
and the theme of the carnival in its influence upon literature are central in Dostoyevsky,
the approach here is again quite different from Rabelais. The specific concept of the gro-
tesque is absent, as is the focus upon its political and social role. Yet all three books do
deal in detail with the same literary style or genre, even if from a different perspective in
each case.” (Edwards 2001, n.2).
4
Bakhtin 1984a: “The 1929 book was a monograph on Dostoyevsky’s novel: the 1963
book was more a study of Dostoyevky’s place in the history of novelness” (275).
5
For why Bakhtin marginalizes Aristophanes — by identifying carnivalized literature with
the seriocomic rather than Attic Old Comedy — see Edwards 2001.
6
Bakhtin 1981: “Epic and Novel” (35); cf. “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.”
In these essays Bakhtin treats laughter (e.g., popular comic traditions, parody and trav-
esty) and polyglossia as the agents of change leading from genres based on myth to
comic prose fiction. The Saturnalia is only mentioned in passing (58).
logue — cannot be shown to have any direct link to specific festive occa-
sions. Yet our only extant Menippean satire in Latin — Seneca’s Apocolo-
cyntosis — may well have been written for the first Saturnalia of Nero’s
reign (in 54 BC).7 Be that as it may, it is clear that the value of Bakhtin’s
synthesis is as much heuristic as it is historical.8 It illuminates broad patterns
and tendencies in order to provide a genealogy — not for the novel in gen-
eral — but for one particular type of novel, the carnivalesque line that alleg-
edly leads to Dostoyevsky. Bakhtin is offering only one of several ge-
nealogies that could be constructed for the novel as a genre as he makes
clear: “Speaking somewhat too simplistically and schematically, one could
say that the novelistic genre has three fundamental roots: the epic, the rhe-
torical, and the carnivalistic …. It is in the realm of the seriocomical that
one must seek the starting points of development for the diverse varieties of
the third, that is the carnivalistic, line of the novel …” (109).
Epic and Novel: A Digression
A basic antithesis structures all Bakhtin’s thinking about literary history and
that is the opposition between the classical and the non-classical.9 The for-
mer is exemplified by oral epic, the latter by the novel. Since his conception
of Menippean traditions, or of carnivalized literature more generally, is an
attempt to mediate between these two more fundamental categories and to
account for the literary and cultural practices that make possible the emer-
gence of the non-classical from the classical, we need to specify the several
senses in which Bakhtin conceived this fundamental dichotomy before we
can assess the function of Menippea in his thinking.
In fact, Bakhtin could be accused of maintaining two contradictory posi-
tions: 1) that epic is the generic opposite of the novel: and 2) that the novel is
a species of epic, which supplants it as the major form of narrative by gradu-
ally usurping its functions. The first position is forcefully advocated in his
classic essay, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for a Study of the
—————
7
See Eden 1984, 12.
8
Bakhtin 1984a acknowledges that carnival—one of his focal concepts—is “a peculiar
sort of heuristic principle” (166).
9
For a remarkable critique of Bakhtin’s use of the categories classical and non-classical,
see Nagy 2001.
Novel” (1941),10 where Bakhtin defines the novel as a genre by contrasting it

systematically with epic. Underlying a whole series of aesthetic and ideo-
logical oppositions are two fundamental points about the representation of
time and discourse in each genre: 1) the novelist represents events on the
same plane of time and value as that of his contemporaries, whereas the epic
singer privileges and elevates the past with reference to the present of his
audience;11 similarly, epic song cultivates a unity of style fostered by the
conventions of oral poetry, while the novelist, thanks to the technology of
writing, can engage many different universes of discourse in a single text.
Thus the novel, in contrast to epic, privileges the present and heteroglossia
(or marked intertextuality).
Yet in the passage just cited (from Problems in Dostoyevsky’s Poetics),
Bakhtin clearly says that epic, like rhetoric and the carnivalesque, is the root
rather than the generic opposite of at least one type of novel. Similarly, in an
essay on the Bildungsroman12 (written in 1936–8), he refers in passing to
“the large epic including the novel” and “the novel (and the large epic in
general)” implying that they belong to the same category.13 But that is be-
cause Bakhtin is singling out in this particular context an important attribute
shared by the two major forms of narrative, namely, that both aspire to “re-
flect the entire world and all of life” and do so not by summation of all its
parts but by “condensation” or substitution (43). Similarly, the acknowl-
edgement in (Problems in Doystoyevsky’s Poetics) that some types of novel
have their roots in epic, i.e., that they share important attributes with the
oldest form of narrative, does not actually contradict Bakhtin’s analysis in
“Epic and Novel” or other essays. For example, novels of “the first stylistic
line, which begins with Greek romance (analyzed in “Discourse in the
Novel” [1934–5]),14 share the tendency of epic to avoid heteroglossia in
favor of a unitary literary style, even though their temporal orientation —
“discourse of a contemporary about a contemporary addressed to contempo-
raries”15 — is as distinctly novelistic as it is alien to epic.16 In other words,
—————
10
Bakhtin 1981, 3–40.
11
For this formulation, see Nagy 2001.
12
“The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism: Toward a Historical
Typology of the Novel” in Bakhtin 1986b, 10–59.
13
Bakhtin 1986b, 43, 45.
14
Bakhtin 1981, 366–415.
15
This formulation from “Epic and Novel” (Bakhtin 1981, 13–14) is at the heart of the
matter for Bakhtin. This same formulation would apply to Plato’s dialogues, which
the contrast between epic and the novel (in “Epic and Novel”) is used to
highlight what is typical of each genre and is not absolute. As Bakhtin says
in “Discourse in the Novel”: “it goes without saying that we continually
advance as typical the extreme to which poetic genres aspire.”17
Similarly, Bakhtin’s three attempts to construct typologies of the novel18
acknowledge the fact that there are significantly different kinds of prose
fiction. Some kinds, such as Greek romance (e.g., Chariton or Heliodorus)
may resemble epic both in the avoidance of heteroglossia and the quasi he-
roic stature of the main characters, just as the relation of the genre to rhetoric
is evident in characters that speechify. In fact, the relevance of both epic and
rhetoric to ancient fiction is obvious. What is far from obvious — and pecu-
liar to Bakhtin — is the importance he attributes to such minor genres as
Menippean satire gathered under the heading of the carnivalesque (or serio-
comic).
—————
Bakhtin considers important forerunners of the novel; presumably Bakhtin does not take
historiography into account because it is nonfiction, even though Thycydides, for exam-
ple, exemplifies his idea of contemporaneity.
16
Chariton may appear to be an exception to this generalization as it applies to ancient
fiction but by tying his story to a famous event in Athenian history he makes it continu-
ous — in a way heroic myth is not — with his Greek audience’s present and, therefore,
unepic if not exactly contemporaneous. Longus is arguably the exception; the temporal
setting of Daphnis and Chloe is deliberately mystified to set its charmed world apart
making it like the mythical past of epic. Indeed, the narrator claims the status of myth for
his story (Longus 2.27). The setting of the other romances is generically contemporary
(i.e., not mythical) constructed from Greek cultural traditions however idealized: see
Scarcella 1996, 221–76.
17
Bakhtin 1981, 287 n.12.
18
Bakhtin analyzes the history of the genre using three distinct criteria: 1) the representa-
tion of discourse, “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–5); 2) the representation of time-space
(or chronotopes) “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937–8); 3) how
the image of the hero is constructed, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the His-
tory of Realism” (1936–8). As Todorov observes “The search for a system” seems to de-
crease over time and Bakhtin does not cross-reference his typologies, although they over-
lap both in outline and in details: “Bakhtin’s work does not consist in the establishment
of genres but … in their submission to analysis” — whether in terms of discourse, time,
or character. “Bakhtin’s practice thus confirms his attachment to ‘analytical history’ and
beyond, to his conception of literary studies as part of history” (1984, 92–3).
Bakhtin and Menippus
With these caveats in mind let us briefly consider Bakhtin’s claims about the
seriocomic. First, the seriocomic category as a whole is said to share three
“external generic features” as “a result of the transforming influence of a
carnival sense of the world” (108): 1) a new relationship to time — a con-
temporary point of view is foregrounded; 2) a new relationship to the classi-
cal genres based on myth (“the literary image is almost completely liberated
from legend” [108]); (3) a new relationship to the word as the material of
literature resulting in a complex, variegated text that accentuates heteroglos-
sia (or intertextuality). The first two points reflect Bakhtin’s theory of the
temporal model of the non-classical (vs. classical or myth based genres) and
the third his view of discourse in the novel (vs. epic). But why is the concept
of carnival needed to explain these differences — as opposed, for example,
to the effects of writing and the rise of literacy?19 Be that as it may, Bakhtin
singles out two genres as having “definitive significance” for understanding
“the development of the novel” (109) and “dialogic” prose: Socratic dialogue
and Menippean satire. We will focus our analysis on the latter.
Bakhtin’s very brief history of Menippean satire, offered as background
to his analysis, is largely conventional except for the fact that his conception
of the genre is more inclusive extending to kindred genres that he sees as
linked to the tradition of Socratic dialogue. While he predictably traces the
“definitive form” from Lucian (second century A.D.) through Seneca the
Younger (first century A.D.), and Varro (116–27 B.C.) back to Menippus20
the Cynic (third century B.C.) — who survives only in fragments — he
would also include earlier philosophical writers (e.g., Heraclides Ponticus
[fourth century B.C.] and Bion [ca. 335–245 B.C.]) as well as novelists of
the Roman empire, Petronius (first century A.D.) and Apuleius (ca. A.D.
125–170), and such late antique authors as Boethius — all of whom a nar-
rower conception of the genre might exclude. While this lumping together of
such varied texts under the sign of Menippus goes back to the Renaissance
—————
19
Bakhtin is clearly aware of the significance of writing for the emergence of the novel:
“Of all the major genres only the novel is younger than writing and the book: it alone is
organically receptive to new forms of mute perception, that is, to reading” (“Epic and
Novel”: Bakhtin 1981, 3).
20
The best history of the genre is Relihan 1993. For Menippus, see Relihan 1993, 39–48;
cf. Branham 1989, 14–28 on Lucian’s Menippus.
when the idea of the genre first coalesced, it risks blurring some important
distinctions, as we shall see.
It is important to remember that neither what we call fiction (i.e., ro-
mances or novels) such as the narratives of Apuleius or Petronius nor
Menippean satires such as those of Seneca or Lucian had an established no-
menclature or stable generic identity in antiquity. As Joel Relihan has ar-
gued, Menippean satire does not actually emerge as a generic term until
1581 in the works of Justus Lipsius.21 In antiquity it is used not to designate
a genre but as the title of a single collection — Varro’s Saturae Menippeae.
The Latin word for satire, satura (feminine of satur, “full”) is generally
thought to derive from the phrase lanx satura, a platter of many different
kinds of first-fruits offered to the gods in ancient times (Diomedes, GLK
1.485). The salient idea here is one of miscellaneous mixtures, although the
main tradition of Roman verse satire (that runs from Lucilius [ca. 167/8 –
102 B.C.] through Horace [65 – 8 B.C.] to Persius [A.D. 34 – 62] and Juv-
enal [ca. A.D. 67 – 127]) is consistently written in hexameters, the meter of
epic. Varro is clearly diverging from this tradition, taking the idea of the
genre in a new direction, mixing things Roman and Greek, high and low in
both verse and prose in the motley manner of Menippus.22 Varro’s title, in
which the indigenously Roman tradition of saturae is modified by the name
of a Greek philosopher famous for his seriocomic mockery, is surely meant
as a comic oxymoron. Seneca does not call his Apocolocyntosis — whose
comically complex title is reminiscent of Varro23 — a Menippean satire and
one manuscript tradition refers to it simply as a satura (Ludus de Morte
Claudii per saturam).
Lucian associates himself more closely with Menippus through imper-
sonation (in the Menippus and Icaromenippus) but also claims other literary
ancestors (e.g., in the Bis Accusatus) such as Old Comedy, Platonic dialogue
and Cynic literature more generally. His generic affiliations are complex and
always constructed with the ends of a particular work in mind. The generic
signals sent by Petronius are certainly no less complex but, despite his exten-
sive and inventive use of verse in a prose narrative, an ancient reader of the
Satyrica would most likely not have called his fiction a “Menippean satire”
—————
21
Relihan 1993, 12
22
Varro’s polymetry may also recall the medley of meters in the saturae of Ennius (239 –
169 B. C.), which survive only in fragments.
23
See Relihan 1993, 87–8 and Eden 1984, 3–4.
but simply a fabula (“story”), as does Macrobius (Comm. 1.2.8). While the
Latin word satura (“satire”) is unrelated to the Greek word “satyr” that ap-
pears in Petronius’ title, Satyrica (neuter plural of the adjective “satyric”),
the two were often conflated in antiquity (e.g., Diomedes ibid.) creating still
more possibilities for generic confusion. The point is that the classification
of prose fiction in antiquity — whether “satires,” “romances,” or “novels” —
was much looser than that of the older genres of verse. We cannot, therefore,
set Bakhtin’s construction of Menippean satire aside by citing ancient genre
theory or terminology. We have created the traditions of “Menippean satire”
and the “ancient novel” in retrospect.
Hence, it is not surprising that the question of whether the apparently
anomalous Satyrica should be assimilated to the tradition of Menippean sat-
ire has been a pre-occupation of classical scholarship at least since the Ren-
aissance and the important work of Pierre Pithou, editor of Petronius.24 In a
lucid and skeptical treatment of the question G. B. Conte begins by ac-
knowledging Bakhtin’s “immense authority”25 on the subject but then
strangely decides not to examine his account. But the interesting question
really isn’t one of generic identity — is it A or B? A cursory familiarity with
the texts in question is sufficient to show that there are fundamental generic
differences between a picaresque novel like the Satyrica26 and the extant
Menippean satires of Lucian or Seneca. The problem that the poetics of
genre should anatomize is rather the relation among genres — what charac-
teristics and functions do they share and why? How do they differ in means
and ends? In short, how does a systematic comparison of the rhetoric of gen-
res serve to define their dominant aesthetic and ideological tendencies? As
Tynjanov has taught us, “it is only in the context of changing generic para-
digms that a single genre’s function can be grasped.”27
An excellent place to focus such an analysis is the list of fourteen charac-
teristics that Bakhtin uses to itemize his inclusive conception of the genre.
—————
24
Like Bakhtin Pithou favored a capacious conception of the genre including Varro, Petro-
nius, Lucian, Apuleius and Rabelais: see Kirk 1980, 113–14.
25
Conte 1996, 144.
26
In “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937–8) Bakhtin argues that in
its representation of time “the Satyricon is closer [than Apuleius] to the European type of
picaresque novel”: Bakhtin 1981, 129. For discussion, see Branham, “A Truer Story of
the Novel?” in Branham 2001.
27
As paraphrased by Fowler 1982, 235; see Tynjanov 1978, 66–81: “On Literary Evoluti-
on”.
First, I will analyze the logic of the categories that underpins the list as a
whole before interrogating Bakhtin’s anatomy on an empirical level asking
how each characteristic does or does not apply to the relevant texts of
Lucian, Seneca and Petronius. Then (in a concluding section) I will briefly
sketch my own view of the relationship of Petronius to the major genres of
contemporary prose fiction — Menippean satire and Greek romance — that
constitute the changing generic paradigms of the first century A.D.
Bakhtin devotes a paragraph to examining each of the basic characteris-
tics of the genre as he conceives it.28 For brevity and ease of discussion, I
will note below only the central idea of each characteristic and his key ex-
amples.
1. The centrality of the comic (e.g., the carnivalesque).
2. Extraordinary freedom of plot and invention “not fettered by any de-
mands for an external verisimilitude to life.”
3. Extraordinary situations for testing ideas (e.g., the sale of Diogenes in
Lucian’s Philosophers for Sale!; Lucian’s On the Death of Peregrinus;
the adventures of Apuleius’ Lucius in The Golden Ass).
4. The organic combination of slum naturalism with the philosophic, sym-
bolic and fantastic: “slum naturalism could develop to its broadest and
fullest extent only in the Menippea of Petronius and Apuleius, Menippea
expanded into novels.”
5. “Everywhere one meets the stripped-down pro et contra of life’s ulti-
mate questions.” (e.g., Lucian’s Philosophers for Sale!; Menippus).
6. The three planed construction — earth, Olympus, underworld (e.g., Se-
neca’s Apocolocyntosis; Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead).
7. Experimental perspectives that produce “a radical change in the scale of
the observed phenomena of life.” (e.g., Lucian’s Icaromenippus 19,
where Menippus peers down from the moon and sees men as ants scam-
pering around their tiny polities.)
8. Moral-psychological experimentation incompatible with “the epic and
tragic wholeness of a person and his fate: the possibilities of another per-
son and another life are revealed in him, he loses his finalized quality
and ceases to mean only one thing; he ceases to coincide with himself”
(e.g., Varro’s Bimarcus).
9. The combination of scandalous and eccentric speech and behavior that
“destroy the epic and tragic wholeness of the world [and] make a breach
—————
28
Bakhtin 1984a, 114–19.
in the stable, normal (“seemly”) course of human affairs and events”

(e.g., the comic assemblies of the gods in Lucian’s Zeus the Tragic Actor
or Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis; the scenes in the town square, the inn, and
the bath in Petronius).
10. Sharp contrasts, oxymoronic combinations, misalliances of all sorts (e.g.,
the emperor who becomes a slave in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis).
11. Social utopia (e. g., journey to an unknown land).
12. Inserted genres of all kinds (e.g., the mixing of prose and parodic verse).
13. Multi-styled and multi-toned, a new relationship to the word.
14. Topicality — overt and hidden polemics (e.g., “the satires of Lucian,
taken as a group, are an entire encyclopedia of his times”; parodies in
Petronius; Varro).
First, Bakhtin’s decision to refer to his list as characteristics of Menippea
rather than of Menippean satire per se seems to acknowledge a shift in his
focus, namely, that he is characterizing a complex generic grouping — a
subset of what he calls the seriocomic, which has absorbed such kindred
genres as the symposium, diatribe and soliloquy (119) — not a single genre.
What they all share, he says, is “the external and internal dialogicality of
their approach to human life and thought” (120). But, at first glance, his cata-
logue of ingredients looks like a laundry list of topoi, themes and structures
found in a variety of texts and traditions. What, then, is the logic at work?
The one thing that all the characteristics share is a relation — not to
Menippus — but to carnival, Bakhtin’s theory of the origin and nature of the
comic, which I will discuss last. Moreover, all the attributes fall under one of
the three “external generic features” of the seriocomic that we have already
noted (108) and are meant to specify how they appear concretely in Menip-
pea. Thus points 1–11 and 14 illustrate i) the new temporal positioning of
the author in relation to his characters and audience resulting in ii) the sub-
stitution of experience and free invention for myth, which can be treated
freely and Cynically; points 12 and 13 illustrate the third generic feature: a
new relationship to the word as the material of literature making possible a
heterogeneous, distinctly non-classical style. In other words, all fourteen
attributes result from “the intersection of two categories, present intertextu-
ality and temporal continuity”29 of author, character and audience — Bakh-
tin’s conception of the non-classical.
—————
29
Todorov 1984, 90.
Todorov’s criticism of Bakhtin’s tendency to substitute general proper-

ties of discourse for the definition of genres that can be historically located
may apply to the underlying logic of the catalogue. It could also be objected
that, while the fourteen characteristics are themselves sufficiently specific,
Bakhtin has cast his net so wide that no text actually has all these elements
and their collocation produces a spurious unity for his category. But
Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis comes very close to embodying the whole list and
its explicit treatment of carnival themes (i.e., the new king replacing the old
lord of misrule [Saturnalicius princeps] makes it the best example of Bakh-
tin’s conception.30 Yet it is hard to find moral or psychological experimenta-
tion (point 8) in a caricature like Claudius. Lucian’s Menippus pieces also
exhibit most of these characteristics, but the idea of a social utopia (point
11), the use of slum naturalism (point 4) — not to mention moral-
psychological experimentation (point 8) — are missing. Of course even in
the case of historically circumscribed genres like Athenian tragedy no single
example of the genre has to exhibit all its defining attributes for the genre to
cohere.
Instead of seeing the catalogue as the specification of an ancient genre or
generic grouping, it may be more useful to consider it as Bakhtin’s attempt
to itemize the ancient ingredients of the carnivalesque tradition of prose,
which crisscrosses traditional generic boundaries. Indeed, “carnivalization
constantly assisted in the destruction of all barriers between genres, between
self-enclosed systems of thought, between various styles” (134) making it an
anti-genre31 or generic solvent rather than a genre in the conventional sense.
Certainly, not the least of Bakhtin’s accomplishments was to call attention to
the underestimated significance of such marginal genres as Menippean satire
for the genesis of the novel. Yet it is Petronius — arguably the best example
of carnivalesque fiction in antiquity — not Lucian or Seneca who most
clearly resists fitting into Bakhtin’s scheme and actually contradicts it on
some important points: his realism, for example, while only one of his styles,
shows an acute concern with verisimilitude extending to the representation
of class and regional dialects as such (i.e., the speech of the freedmen at
—————
30
Nauta 1987 misses this crucial point: see Bakhtin 1984a, 124–5.
31
For this concept, see Fowler 1982, 174–75: “…much is gained by extending the idea of
counter-statement beyond the limits of a single genre. We may think of certain new gen-
res or ‘antigenres’ as antitheses to existing genres. Their repertoires are in contrast
throughout… From this point of view, early picaresque [e.g., Petronius] is itself an anti-
genre to romance [e.g., Greek romance].”
Trimalchio’s party) for the first time in European literature (contradicting

point 2). Ultimate questions do seem to lurk in the text concerning, e.g., the
teachings of Epicurus and the validity of magic, but they do not resemble the
impossible questions of Menippea that are more reminiscent of the fantastic
quests of Aristophanic heroes32 (cf. point 5). There is no social utopia in
Petronius comparable to Seneca’s ideal of the virtuous emperor (cf. point
11). The three planed construction taken over from myth is certainly a basic
feature of the classic examples of Menippea but it is at most echoed meta-
phorically in Petronius (e.g., in the implicit comparison of Trimalchio’s villa
to the underworld). The remaining characteristics — inserted genres (point
12), the heterogeneous style (point 13), oxymoronic combinations (point 10),
scandalous speech and behavior (point 9), moral-psychological experimenta-
tion (point 8), experimental perspectives (point 7), extraordinary situations
for testing ideas (point 3) — do point to significant features of Petronius but
his use of these elements often seems idiosyncratic rather than representative
of Menippea.
This is perhaps clearest in the case of the one element all Menippea share
— a distinctive comic style. Yet the variety and complexity of Petronius’
humor, although often carnivalesque in precisely Bakhtin’s sense — that is,
uniting existential opposites such as feasting and funerals (e.g., Trimalchio)
or redemptive love and crucifixion (e.g., the widow of Ephesus) — seems
categorically different from the mythological burlesque and abstract play
with literary frames and conventions characteristic of Menippea, again pre-
cisely because of the novelist’s quasi realistic presentation. Bakhtin sees all
these texts as animated by a certain sense of humor that he calls “serio-
comic” — “a realm whose very name already sounds ambivalent” (132) —
but not only are there many kinds of ambivalent humor or seriocomic texts
— consider, for example, Diderot, Sterne, Rabelais, Lucian, Petronius — but
the classic Menippea are also tendentiously witty, e.g., the satire on Claudius
in the Apocolocyntosis and the satire on the wisdom of philosophers in
Lucian’s Menippus. In short, the attempt to assimilate Petronius to Menippea
— even when it is as broadly conceived as it is by Bakhtin — calls our at-
tention to what distinguishes him from the category as effectively as it does
to constitutive similarities — the most notable being the extensive use of
parodic verse in a prose narrative (point 13). But here again the narratives of
Menippea — for example, those of Lucian or Seneca — are, unlike Petro-
—————
32
See Branham 1989, 14–22.
Petronius, not realistic but ludic fantasies based on myth. Hence the effect of
having characters erupt into verse is not the same. But as Mary Douglas ar-
gues paraphrasing Quine “sameness is not a quality that can be recognized in
things themselves — it is conferred upon elements within a coherent
scheme.”33
What lends coherence to Bakhtin’s scheme is its focal concept: the idea
of carnival itself. Bakhtin’s understanding of the social origins and cognitive
nature of carnival laughter is profound and is at the very center of his work
and what makes it valuable.34 The motive of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival
laughter is nothing less than to explain how it originates — it emerges, he
argues, from ancient pre-Christian rituals and festive occasions35 and persists
in analogous forms until modernity — and what it expresses. Carnival for
Bakhtin is our paradigmatic experience of the comic: it is a means of percep-
tion made possible by the suspension of some social hierarchies and the in-
version of others;36 most significantly, those of master and slave and the
correlative concepts of work and play, the serious and the non-serious.37 But
—————
33
Douglas 1986, 59, where she cites Quine 1961 and Goodman 1972 to support her case.
See also her “Rightness of Categories” in Douglas 1999, 284–309.
34
For bibliography on carnival in antiquity, see Döpp 1993; Versnel 1993, chaps. 2–3;
Edwards 2001.
35
Cf. Burkert, “Kronia-Feste und ihr altorientalischer Hintergrund”, Döpp 1993, 11–31;
Lesky 1963, 234: “Our researches have now led us to the Greek carnival — a word
which can justly be used if we trace all these customs back to their original source” (cited
by Edwards 2001, n.1). This is precisely the sense in which Bakhtin uses the word. (Cf.
also Reckford 1987, 441–61.)
36
“The laws, prohibitions and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordi-
nary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival: what is suspended first of all
is hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety and etiquette con-
nected with it — that is everything resulting from socio-historical inequality or any other
form of inequality among people (including age)”: Bakhtin 1984a, 122–3. During the Sa-
turnalia, “schools were closed, physical exercises were suspended … courts did not con-
vene … there was an iustitium … it was forbidden to declare war. Roman citizens put off
their togas and covered their — normally bare — heads with the pilleus, the felt cap of
the freedman. There were exuberant gorgings and even more excessive drinking bouts
…. Anarchy was pushed so far as to allow gambling and dice playing, which was pro-
hibited in everyday life …. The intellectual elite used to spend the holiday in learned im-
provisations and table talk, as exemplified in Macrobius’ Saturnalia …. The most re-
markable and characteristic trait of the Saturnalia was the temporary suspension of the
social distinctions between master and servant” (Versnel 1993, 147–9 supplies the refer-
ences).
37
Temporary kings, festive abundance and the inversion of the hierarchies associated with
wealth and poverty, work and play, freedom and slavery are central to Lucian’s comic pres-
such inversions and suspensions are themselves made possible only by the
temporary abundance of the festive occasion. As Douglas and Bakhtin have
taught us, altering the social controls of cognition changes what can be
known and expressed, at least temporarily — and thereby changes the nature
of the word38 releasing the comic potential that ordinary social logic and the
constraints of official culture occlude.
A good way to understand the concept of carnival, therefore, is by anal-
ogy with the function of joking in traditional societies. The violation of the
countless rules both tacit and explicit that govern our behavior, beginning
with our use of language, is basic to any form of humor. That is why Doug-
las argues that the form of the joke “rarely lies in the utterance alone” and
can, therefore, only be understood with reference to “the total social situa-
tion.”39 In her classic study of jokes and joking, “The Social Control of Cog-
nition: Some Factors in Joke Perception”, she argues that “the peculiar ex-
pressive character of the joke stands in contrast to ritual as such.40 For if we
consider the joke “as a symbol of social, physical or mental experience”, we
are already treating it as a kind of rite. But what kind? As a spontaneous
symbol, she says, a joke “expresses something that is happening but that is
—————
entation of the customs of the Kronia in his Saturnalia. Of the Attic Kronia and Roman
Saturnalia Versnel writes: “two aspects are combined here, on the one hand, the reversal of
roles, and on the other, elation caused by the collective abundance of food and drink sum-
marized by Macrobius Saturnalia 1.7.26: tota servis licentia permittitur”: Versnel 1993,
115. While Bakhtin’s account acknowledges the importance of both these aspects, the de-
fining image of carnival for him is emblematic of time’s passing: the crowning and subse-
quent dethroning of the carnival king. Cf. Versnel 1993, n.234, p.206: “It is not by chance
that Saturnalian festivals generally require a king, prince or princess …. He/she embodies
the playful arbitrariness and is the personification of happiness.”
38
Bakhtin notes in particular “the outspoken carnivalistic word”, “carnivalistic blasphe-
mies”, “carnivalistic obscenities”, “carnivalistic parodies” of sacred texts and other forms
of profanation. He also writes of “the latent sides of human nature” revealing and ex-
pressing themselves in the “free and familiar” atmosphere of carnival: Bakhtin 1984a,
123. The literary significance of the Saturnalia in the Roman cultural calendar has been
underestimated: see V. d’Agostino 1969; Citroni 1989.
39
M. Douglas “The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception” Man
3.3 (1968) 363. (Reprinted as “Jokes” in Douglas 1999. For a critique of her theory, see
Mulkay 1988). Douglas’ work is important precisely because she focuses on how and
why jokes work, i.e., what makes them funny. In Douglas 1999 she re-affirms her analy-
sis: “By the main argument I take my stand: a joke is not funny unless the context per-
mits it to be recognized, and the funniest jokes project the situation of the laughers. The
funniness consists in the license to comment irreverently on the current situation” (194).
40
Douglas 1968, 368–9.
all.” It stands in contrast, therefore, to the standardized rite or ritual which

expresses what ought to happen and thus, unlike spontaneous joking, is “not
morally neutral”. Douglas spells out the opposition between joking and ritual
as follows:
A joke has in common with a rite that both connect widely differing con-
cepts. But the kind of connection of pattern A with pattern B in a rite is
such that A and B support each other in a unified system. The rite im-
poses order and harmony, while the joke disorganizes. From the physical
to the personal, to the social, to the cosmic, great rituals create unity in
experience. They assert hierarchy and order. In doing so, they affirm the
value of the symbolic patterning of the universe. Each level of patterning
is validated and enriched by association with the rest. But jokes have the
opposite effect. They connect widely differing fields, but the connection
destroys hierarchy and order. They do not affirm the dominant values,
but denigrate and devalue. Essentially a joke is an anti-rite …. The mes-
sage of a standard rite is that the ordained patterns of social life are ines-
capable. The message of a joke is that they are escapable … for a joke
implies that anything is possible.41
As joking is to ritual, so is carnival to society as it normally functions and

“carnivalized literature” (e.g., Menippean satire) to the older classical genres
grounded in myth and sanctioned by tradition. What is not possible, or even
conceivable, in classical texts such as Vergil’s Aeneid or Lucan’s Civil War
— e.g., the mocking and degradation of dead emperors, the comic disconti-
nuities of verse and prose styles — become possible in carnivalized litera-
ture. The inescapable patterns inherited from the classical past — both aes-
thetic and ideological — become escapable in the non-classical (or carni-
valesque) present. The category of Mennipea can mediate between the clas-
sical and the non-classical precisely because it has one foot in each camp: its
manifest dependence on the inherited structures of myth link it to the classi-
cal, while its temporal model, i.e., its contemporaneity, that enables the car-
nivalesque use of these structures makes it a prototypical expression of the
non-classical.
One problem with carnival as an explanatory concept is that it seems to
break down the crucial distinction between art and experience, literature and
—————
41
Douglas 1968, 369–70, 373.
life, the representation and the represented. But that may be precisely what is
so attractive about Bakhtin’s theorizing.42 Because he understands that the
social basis of cognition is rooted in the nature of language itself,43 he sees
literature as a form of collective representation rather than private expression
and thereby restores literature to the center of human experience. That has
led many to see carnival as at bottom a political idea but that over-simplifies
Bakhtin’s thinking.44 The value he attaches to “carnival” and its literary evo-
cations is primarily cognitive and aesthetic. It is a way of seeing the world,
one available only under certain circumstances, but one of those cir-
cumstances is literature, at least, carnivalesque literature and above all, the
—————
42
It is important to remember that unlike many exegetes of carnival Bakhtin stresses that its
language is one of “concrete sensuous” acts and gestures that cannot be successfully ab-
stracted from the event or translated into “a language of abstract concepts.” It is only be-
cause the “language of artistic images” has something in common with the “concretely
sensuous nature” of carnival that some of its characteristic features can be transposed
“into the language of literature” (Bakhtin 1983a, 122). Despite Bakhtin’s distinctions,
many studies of “carnival” attempt to abstract a stable meaning from the event and iden-
tify its political ideology as rebellious or conservative. After surveying the abundant lit-
erature Versnel attempts to combine the prevailing views in a single interpretation: “As a
matter of fact, both aspects, the ‘rebellious’ and the ‘cohesive’, are often found side by
side in different expressions of one ritual feast. The dissociative [i.e., rebellious] one is
acted out in the theatrical conflict of role-reversal, the integrating and status quo pre-
serving one is manifest … in the collective and egalitarian experience of the festival as
an image of abundance: Versnel 1993, 117. While he also notes the view that “we have
something to learn through being disorderly” (117), he underplays the cognitive and ex-
perimental dimensions of the festival that are magnified when transposed to literature.
Versnel suggests that “ritual is more direct than literary representation” (127), but is that
true when the rituals are reconstructed from fragmentary ancient literary evidence? For
Bakhtin, in any event, the ritual roots of the carnivalesque are less important than the lit-
erature it produced, see inf.
43
See Voloshinov 1973. Part II.
44
As a potent if unstable cultural force the “popular grotesque” or carnivalesque traditions
can of course be appropriated for political purposes, as Seneca does in his savage sati-
rizing of Claudius in the Apoc. and as Aristophanes does in his comedies (See Edwards
2001). I agree with Edwards’ formulation of the political dimension of carnival: “The
popular grotesque is inherently political but implicitly so. The unrepressed laughter of the
grotesque, its mocking and ridicule, undermine the seriousness and authority of the offi-
cial world. This tradition, however, is purely negative. While it can infect the high and
serious with meanness and vulgarity, it cannot mount a sustained critique or propose an
alternative.” Cf. “… while the grotesque as the expression of popular laughter is in Bakh-
tin’s view profoundly political, it is incapable, due to its very reliance upon laughter, of
articulating a positive and specific political view. The grotesque’s attack upon the power-
ful is generic; beyond that it does not choose sides. The negative voice of laughter can
espouse a position of its own only at the risk of becoming its opposite — seriousness.”
novels it produces. Reading is a form of experience and, for Bakhtin, an

opportunity for dialogic contact.45
As Bakhtin argues in “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”
(1940): “what is important here is not the ritual roots of this laughter, but
rather the literature it produced … The literary and artistic consciousness of
the Romans could not imagine a serious form without its comic equivalent.
The serious straightforward form was perceived as only a fragment, only half
of a whole; the fullness of the whole was achieved only upon adding the
comic contre-partie of this form. Everything serious had to have and, in-
deed, did have its comic double. As in the Saturnalia the clown was the dou-
ble of the ruler and the slave the double of the master, so such comic doubles
were created in all forms of culture and literature.”46 Seneca’s Apocolocynto-
sis exemplifies this formulation; it is the “comic double” of Claudius’ deifi-
cation parodying both his funeral and the laudatio funebris that Seneca wrote
for Nero to read (Apocolocyntosis 12).47 The source of the ambivalent humor
that Bakhtin sees as so characteristic of Menippea is this parodic contesta-
tion, or comic doubling, of the genres of high seriousness in both verse and
prose whether political, religious, philosophical or heroic. Indeed, Petronius
can be usefully read as the comic double of the high culture dominant at the
court of Nero48 and the whole classical tradition as it was then received and
practiced.49 The result of such literary and cultural practices is the serio-
comic word whose purpose, Bakhtin argues, is “to provide the corrective of
laughter and criticism to all existing straightforward genres, languages,
styles, voices; to force men to experience beneath these categories a different
and contradictory reality that is otherwise not captured in them. Such laugh-
ter paved the way for the impiety of novelistic form.”50
In short, it is the seriocomic ambivalence of the dialogic word, originat-
ing in carnival and first finding expression in Menippea,51 that makes the
—————
45
See Bakhtin’s remarks on the “catharsis that finalizes Dostoyevsky’s novels” and “the
purifying sense of ambivalent laughter” (Bakhtin 1984a, 166).
46
Bakhtin 1981, 58.
47
Cf. Weinreich: “Eine Komödie hat er nicht geschrieben, die Apocolocyntosis aber ist
gleichsam ein Satyrspiel nach einer Praetexta”. Cited by Relihan 1993, 247.
48
Most conspicuously, the heroic verse of Seneca and Lucan, the philosophical prose of
Seneca, and the “Trojan follies” of Nero.
49
Cf. Connors 1998: “Petronius takes on the ambitiously circular task of rejecting every-
thing that is not what he is producing …” (148).
50
From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”: Bakhtin 1981, 59.
51
See note 2.
impious truth-telling of the novel possible by freeing it from the constraints

of the classical genres and giving it a medium suited to the representation of
its intrinsically comic, contradictory subject — characters who do not coin-
cide with themselves: writing of the novelistic hero Bakhtin argues: “An
individual cannot be completely incarnated into the flesh of existing socio-
historical categories … there is no form in which he could exhaust himself
down to the last word, like the tragic or epic hero …. There always remains
an unrealized surplus of humanness …. All existing clothes are always too
tight, and thus comical, on a man.”52 If this description calls any character in
classical literature to mind, it is Trimalchio — comically straining against
the sociohistorical category of the freedman, a status as inescapable as
death.53 Yet like any “universal-symbol system”,54 as Bakhtin calls carnival
(and its seriocomic expressions), in less skillful hands it always risks flatten-
ing out the differences between texts reducing them all to a single pattern,
however heterogeneous, contradictory and revealing.
So far I have been trying to make sense of Bakhtin’s account of Menippean

satire and the novel in the light of the extant texts and scholarship. Now I
would like to critique and supplement his account. One problem with Bakh-
tin’s story is that it attempts to derive like from like: where does the carni-
valesque novel come from? From older carnivalesque traditions and, ulti-
mately, from carnival, which is, so to speak, the thing itself. But this way of
describing the history of the novel does not do justice to how unexpected
—————
52
“Epic and Novel”: Bakhtin 1981, 37.
53
Bodel 1999, 44–7.
54
My focus here is the structure and function of “carnival” in Bakhtin’s thinking — not its
potential meaning in any time or place from antiquity to early modern Europe (see notes
42 and 44). Bakhtin is fully aware that even though carnival, as he himself conceives it,
is a “universal-symbol system” (Bakhtin 1984a, 129), its inflection in particular texts and
contexts will vary greatly; e.g., the results of his analyses of Dostoyevsky and Rabelais
are remarkably different, yet both make extensive use of the ideas of carnival and the
carnivalesque. The significance of Bakhtin’s characterization of his concept of carnival
as a “heuristic principle” — not a reified transhistorical meaning — has not been fully
appreciated (Bakhtin 1984a, 166). When Stallybrass and White in their influential adap-
tation of Bakhtin underscore “the banal —but often ignored truth that the politics of car-
nival cannot be resolved outside of a close historical examination” (16), they are simply
following Bakhtin’s lead: “As a form [of syncretic pageantry of a ritual sort, carnival] is
very complex and varied giving rise, on a general carnivalistic base, to diverse variants
and nuances depending upon the epoch, the people, the individual festivity” (Bakhtin
1984a, 122).
Petronius is and how significantly he differs from the Menippean satires and
prose fiction that are the usual comparanda. Yet if we did not have the Sa-
tyrica, we would not believe it was possible. For Bakhtin the answer to the
question “what conditions made a text like the Satyrica possible?” is the
existence of carnival and carnivalized literature. As we have seen, despite its
evident circularity, this genealogy has considerable explanatory power. But
why then does Petronius seem so surprising and so unlike any other work
from classical antiquity?
The problem with Bakhtin’s account is not that it is dialogical but that it
is not dialogical enough. In attempting to account for the anomalous cate-
gory of the novel — a genre that finds no place in traditional poetics going
back to Aristotle — he creates another anomalous category — the carniva-
lesque — which shares certain salient features with the explanandum, the
novel. But this attempt to derive like from like obscures the way the novel
comes into its own, above all, by engaging in dialogue what is different from
itself, by parodying such popular forms as heroic romance or the pre-emi-
nently canonical genre of epic — the dominant forms of narrative in antiq-
uity (other than historiography). By contrast Bakhtin can bring the most in-
fluential form of ancient prose fiction, Greek romance, into his account only
by finding something carnivalesque in it,55 thereby minimizing the very dif-
ferences which are in fact most striking and relevant. For it is these defining
aesthetic differences — not the incidental similarities — that create the pos-
sibility of dialogic tension between Petronius’ discourse and the forms of
narrative that constituted the changing generic paradigms of his day.
With this in mind let us revisit the problem of the novel’s genre. It may seem
odd that virtually the only type of literature widely read today — prose fic-
tion — should pose a problem of genre in a classical context. What could be
easier to place generically or more accessible to contemporary readers than a
work of prose fiction? What, is the problem?
First, any reader of the Satyrica will notice that it is unlike most contem-
porary fiction in containing many passages of verse in various meters, some
of them going on for pages. For while genres persist over very long periods
—————
55
“Thus elements of the Menippea can be detected in the Greek novels. Certain images and
episodes from the Ephesian Tales of Xenophon of Ephesus, for example, have the dis-
tinct scent of Menippea about them. The dregs of society are represented in the spirit of
slum naturalism: prisons, slaves, thieves, fishermen and so forth” (Bakhtin 1984a, 121).
of time, indeed for centuries, they are also subject to a continual process of
changes, as is the cultural context of their production and reception. Any
given example of a genre is formally determined by a wide range of cultur-
ally specific engagements as well as by its ruling generic design. The prac-
tice of Athenian tragedy, for example, differs significantly from that of
Elizabethan or modern forms of tragedy, but they have enough features in
common for us to feel justified in grouping them together generically as
‘tragedy’. Knowledge of the cultural context in which particular examples of
a genre developed allows us to decipher conventions peculiar to them, and
thus learn how to read them. Every genre of literature is in this sense also a
form of experience for readers — “a specific form of thinking, a way of
visualizing the world” not otherwise available.56 To locate any work within a
given genre as it existed in a specific cultural context creates certain expec-
tations and, hence, frames for interpreting what we read.
The problem posed by the genre of the Satyrica is complicated by the
fact that it is the earliest extant work of prose fiction in Latin: we cannot
compare Petronius’ practice with that of his Roman predecessors to see how
he shaped the genre for his own aesthetic purposes. Further, most ancient
genres had long traditions behind them that served to define their constituent
elements — their matter, manner, means, and specific effects. While writers
were, or course, always free to innovate, the traditional conception of the
genres determined the parameters within which experimentation could be
recognized as such. None of this applies to prose fiction (as it does to classi-
cal verse genres), since, as we have seen, it lacked an authoritative canon or
acknowledged set of aesthetic norms — except for those implicit in popular
but uncanonical examples of the genre. As the last major literary tradition to
emerge in antiquity, prose fiction never received the critical attention or cul-
tural prestige of the older classical kinds such as epic, lyric and drama.
Indeed, the singularity of the Satyrica may seem to be at odds with the
very idea of genre as a set of repeatable rules and convention; but, in fact,
genre yields the only means of grasping that singularity and specifying its
distinguishing features within the context of ancient literary culture. While
Petronius may have written the first full scale novel in Latin, there would of
course have been many kinds of narrative already familiar to him and his
audience: the mythological narratives found in classical epic, lyric and dra-
matic poetry in both Greek and Latin; popular prose genres in written form
—————
56
Morson and Emerson 1990, 306.
such as Greek romance, romanticized history and travel literature; popular

dramatic genres such as New Comedy and the Mime in both Greek and
Latin; and oral genres of many kinds including fables, jokes, ghost stories,
apothegms and the other ingredients of folklore. And then there are works
and traditions that seem to straddle or confound the dichotomy of oral versus
written genres57 such as The Life of Aesop, a collection of jokes and comic
vignettes about the legendary dwarfish, ugly, and mute but clever slave, Ae-
sop; or the Milesian tales, a tradition of bawdy tales like the French fabliaux
(referred to by Apuleius in the prologue to The Golden Ass) that do not sur-
vive outside of their appearance in the Roman novel. What distinguishes the
Satyrica is not just that it responds to such a remarkable range of narrative
forms (including even non-narrative genres of lyric poetry) but that it re-
shapes and combines them as only a novel can — by bringing them into a
dialogue mediated by a narrating consciousness. What results is something
without attested classical precedent.58
Latin literature as a whole can usefully be considered as an extended
response to the literary culture of Greece, which dominated classical civili-
zation from beginning to end. While it is obviously beyond the scope of this
essay to delineate the relationship of Petronius to all varieties of Greek and
Latin literature to which he responds, his approach to two genres in particu-
lar can serve to exemplify his working methods. At this point many accounts
of Petronius will, like Bakhtin, confidently assert his defining relationship to
one of two genres, both Greek in origin, namely, Menippean satire and ro-
mance. While both traditions are of central importance to Petronius, to sug-
gest that his work somehow bears the same relationship to these genres as,
for example, Senecan tragedy does to Hellenistic or Republican tragedy, or
the satires of Persius do to those of Horace, is to misconstrue the nature of
the novel as a genre. Yet, strangely, given his understanding of the dialogic
nature of the word, Bakhtin’s Menippean genealogy is open to the same
criticism.
Like Menippean satire romance is not an ancient generic term but both
genres are ancient and well documented. Moreover, Menippean satire is
often identified simply as a form that mixes verse and prose — as if this
—————
57
For this fundamental distinction, see Ong 1982.
58
For an interesting attempt to locate the origins of classical fiction in the pre-classical
narrative forms of Egypt and the Near East, see Anderson 1984. It is the genre of the
novel, not the individual plot motifs, that is without classical precedent.
feature alone could define a genre or could not be found in some form in
other genres as different as Platonic dialogue or Greek romance! But the idea
of mixtures and misalliances of all kinds is generically significant, as Bakh-
tin’s analysis emphasizes, and the impropriety by classical standards of em-
bedding characters who speak verse in a prose narrative exemplifies this
tendency.59 As we have seen, the earliest extant example of Menippean satire
is the Apocolocyntosis, an exuberant parody of the deification of the emperor
Claudius attributed to Petronius’ contemporary Seneca. A glance at this
work reveals the central ingredients of the genre: a fantastic journey from
this world to that to myth that progresses by multiple forms of parody and
mythological burlesque as told by a ridiculous narrator intent on answering
some question that defies mortal knowledge. In Seneca the question is: ‘what
happened in heaven when the emperor Claudius, deified after death, arrived
hoping to join the ranks of the immortals?’ (Everyone knows what happened
on earth, comments the narrator, since no one forgets his own good luck!
[Apoc. 5]) The Apocolocyntosis therefore resembles not a novel, but the ex-
tant Greek examples of Menippean satire, the Menippus narratives of Lucian
(second century A.D.), in which the quest of the Cynic hero, Menippus,
makes mythological parody a vehicle for satirizing humanity in general, and
philosophers in particular, in the course of attempting to answer a single
urgent but overwhelming question — ‘What is the best kind of life for hu-
man beings?’
If all this sounds distinctly odd, then we have managed to convey an
accurate idea of this genre. As a current historian of the Menippean tradition
has argued: ‘Menippean satire is abnormal in all of its aspects. It is an anti-
genre; insofar as it is a satire it is ultimately a satire on literature itself and all
its pretensions to meaning.’60 This sounds, in turn, suspiciously postmodern,
and that may explain why Menippean satire has received so much attention
in recent decades after being all but forgotten for generations.
It is highly significant that apart from Menippean satire, the most impor-
tant literary tradition for Petronius, namely, romance, comes from the oppo-
site end of the literary spectrum. It is precisely this opposition that Bakhtin’s
—————
59
While the use of verse is probably the most demonstrably ‘Menippean’ feature of the
Satyrica, it is important to note that the extent and originality of the verse in Petronius
transcends its more limited use — as comic quotation and parody — in Menippean satire.
We should think of Petronius as ‘novelizing’ the more circumscribed genre of Menip-
pean satire rather than as working within its generic constraints. See also note 49.
60
Relihan 1993, 28.
genealogy fails to take into account.61 Menippean satire is a self-consciously

written form, the product of a learned, chirographic culture, and as such it is
a literary composite completely alien to the older oral traditions of mythical
narrative that it appropriates for parody and satire. It is accordingly radically
mixed in form, critical in intent, and satirically estranging in its effects. Its
means and ends are thus deeply expressive of the literate, writerly culture
that gave rise to it. This fact is most obvious when we consider the demands
it makes on its audience’s knowledge of previous literature and philosophy,
without which much of its humor and, hence, its raison d’être is lost. Its
sophisticated and irreverent play with inherited literary forms contrasts
sharply with the conservative stance toward the classical canon assumed by
romance, just as its recherché subject matter contrasts with the more popular
themes of romance.
Greek romance emerges in the works of Chariton of Aphrodisias (first
century B.C./A.D.?) and Xenophon of Ephesus (second century B.C.?) as an
idealizing and sentimental form of narrative that recounts in excited tones
the love, separation and reunion of two beautiful young heterosexual Greeks,
who embody much of what their culture admired. The separation — effected
by pirates, storms, gods and rivals — delays the predictable dénouement,
thereby creating much of the narrative’s appeal, its suspense (what will hap-
pen?) and its mystery (why did it happen?).62 The delay puts the heroine and
the hero under stress and thus generates the “sentiment’, that is, ‘the repre-
sentations of feeling, anxieties and moral choices’ that provide the real
source of interest and value in ‘sentimental romance’.63 Thus, as David
Lodge observes, structurally the love story consists of the delayed fulfillment
of desire — of the heroine’s desire for the man she wants and of the reader’s
—————
61
In two earlier essays, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937–8) and
“Discourse in the Novel” (1934–5) Bakhtin acknowledges and analyzes categorical (or
generic) differences between Greek and Roman fiction —in their representation of time
and of speech — that are ignored in Chapter 4 of the book on Dostoyevsky, revised in the
early 60’s (i.e., 1984a). Here his emphasis is on the novelistic force of Menippean satire
and related minor genres in both Greek and Latin rather than on stages of development
(from Greek to Latin examples).
62
See Lodge 1990, Chapter 8.
63
See Lodge, 117.
desire for the answers to the questions raised by narrative suspense and mys-
tery.64
The general shape of the plot, its use of a unified literary language, its
quasi heroic characters and its wish-fulfilling ending that affirms society’s
future through marriage all align Greek romance with the Odyssean narrative
paradigm,65 which it translates into the contemporary prosaic world of its
Hellenistic and Roman audiences. While Menippean satire appeals to our
intellect and aims to demystify the great traditions of myth and philosophy
while exposing the world’s hocus pocus — such as deification of emperors
among other idols of the tribe — the ends of romance are just the opposite:
to engage our imaginative sympathies as fully as possible in the improbably
romantic adventures of star-crossed lovers — the perennial ingredients of
popular fiction from Chariton to the Harlequin romances. In other words, if
Menippean satire is a seriocomic critique of the inherited myths of classical
culture, ancient romance is its generic antitype — a new myth, that of eros in
the cosmopolitan Greek world that surrounded the ancient Mediterranean in
the wake of Alexander’s conquests and the Greek diaspora.66 The radically
differing aesthetics of the two genres may imply corresponding differences
in the audiences addressed by each, although such distinctions cannot be
easily made within the elite world of classical literary culture.67
While it has often been noted that Petronius is funnier than the other
ancient writers of prose fiction, it is not often recognized how central the
—————
64
See Lodge, 118. While Lodge’s characterization of eighteenth-century fiction forcefully
recalls classical romance, a recent study of Greek romance (Konstan 1994) reveals basic
generic differences in the representation of love and desire.
65
For important differences from the Odyssean paradigm, see Konstan 1994, 70–5.
66
Konstan argues persuasively that Greek romance is distinguished ‘as a genre from all
other amatory literature in the classical world’ and from the emerging modern novel by
‘a pattern of symmetrical or reciprocal love, in which the attraction is both mutual and
between social equals’ (7), which provides the underlying structure and raison d’être of
the genre. This is the new myth of eros invented in its literary form by the authors of
Greek romance. As Konstan shows, it differs fundamentally from the prevailing concep-
tions of eros as represented in other genres or as seen in social practice. For the idea of
ancient Greek romance as a form of post-classical myth, see Reardon 1971, 309–405.
67
See Harris 1989, Chapter 7. Harris argues plausibly that no ancient genre sought a mass
audience; yet some genres were undoubtedly more ‘popular’ — more accessible, more
widely read — than others: ‘We should rather see the romances as the light reading of a
limited public possessing a real degree of education’ (228). What makes them ‘light read-
ing’ is exactly what makes them ‘popular’ and hence ‘likely to attract a readership among
the educated bourgeoisie’, as Bowie puts it (1994, 440). Cf. Stephens’ discussion (1994).
humor is to his novelistic aesthetic.68 The sophisticated humor and ironic

tone of Petronius’ narrative have their origin in his novelistic fusion of two
genres that differ radically in form, tone, style, characteristic effects and,
perhaps, even in the audiences addressed. Out of this hybridization, cross-
breeding, or fusion of genres emerged what can fairly be called the first
novel.69 These metaphors for literary invention are not meant to suggest a
homogenous blending, of simple combination of known ingredients — like a
vinaigrette salad dressing — but something so paradoxical and strange as to
be suspect — like ‘cold fusion’. Menippean satire is of crucial importance
precisely because it is formally disruptive and intrusive, a satiric solvent that
acts as a catalyst for generic mixture and mutation but in this case within a
fictional narrative framework that originates in romance. Inside this frame-
work the Menippean mode of writing permits movement up and down the
literary scales (high and low, oral and literary, verse and prose) and between
genres and forms of speech that would either not appear in literary discourse
at all (e.g., the freedmen’s speeches [37 ff.] or the report on Trimalchio’s
holdings [53]70) or not in contiguity with one another (e.g., Eumolpus’ epic
recital follows a scene of scatological comedy [117–18]).
Of course Petronius draws on a great variety of discourses, including
works we no longer have, and he responds to different genres in fundamen-
tally different ways depending on their place in (and outside of) the canon
and their function in his narrative.71 The traditions of Menippean satire and
Greek romance should be conceived as important sub-texts, as two of a se-
ries of shifting generic frames of reference, not as ‘sources’ for the Satyrica.
It is of course what Petronius does with them that makes his work so obvi-
ously different from either. If romance remains his most conspicuous model
it is because it is the only kind of prose fiction — as opposed to traditional
storytelling — that he would have known. While recent papyrological dis-
coveries suggest that Greek fiction may have been more varied than was
—————
68
Notable exceptions are Plaza 2000 and 2001.
69
Compare the characterization of Don Quixote (by M. Bell, ‘How Primordial is Narra-
tive’, Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Story-telling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and
Literature, ed. C. Nash [London]) as uniting ‘two powerful, internally coherent, and yet
incommensurable traditions: the exemplary idealism of chivalric romances and the in-
cipient realism of the picaresque’ (180); (cited by Konstan 1994, 73).
70
References to the text of Petronius are to chapters.
71
Slater 1990.
once thought,72 the tradition that runs from Chariton to Heliodorus (third to
fourth century A.D.) makes it clear that the dominant strain was idealizing
and sentimental and is in general much closer to what is suggested by the
generic term ‘romance’ than by the more modern English term ‘novel’. This
distinction is a complicated one that does not hinge only on subject matter —
such as the heroine-centered plot of romance — but also on the parodic
manner in which the novel reflects the values, premises, and conventions of
romance. The relationship of Fielding to Richardson, or of Cervantes to chi-
valric romance, provides a useful model for understanding Petronius’ rela-
tionship to Greek romance. Just as reading Richardson will enhance our ap-
preciation of the comedy of Joseph Andrews, so Petronius’ many forms of
parody will be far more accessible to those who have also read Chariton and
the Greek romances.73
This account of the genre of the Satyrica might be taken to suggest that
the novel is a strictly literary phenomenon that bears little relation to the
historical context of its origins. But this, once again, would be to miscon-
strue the dialogic nature of the novel as a form of discourse and, hence, its
relationship to the institution of literature — the inherited modes of writing,
speaking, and thinking. But that is another story.74
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Epic V Minnipean Satire

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The Poetics of Genre: Bakhtin, Menippus, Petronius

My purpose in this essay is to explore why Bakhtin felt justified in making

The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative, 3–31

Bakhtin on the Seriocomic

Menippean satire is the subset of a much wider category Bakhtin chose to

Epic and Novel: A Digression

Novel” (1941),10 where Bakhtin defines the novel as a genre by contrasting it

Bakhtin and Menippus

in the stable, normal (“seemly”) course of human affairs and events”

Todorov’s criticism of Bakhtin’s tendency to substitute general proper-

Trimalchio’s party) for the first time in European literature (contradicting

all.” It stands in contrast, therefore, to the standardized rite or ritual which

As joking is to ritual, so is carnival to society as it normally functions and

novels it produces. Reading is a form of experience and, for Bakhtin, an

impious truth-telling of the novel possible by freeing it from the constraints

So far I have been trying to make sense of Bakhtin’s account of Menippean

such as Greek romance, romanticized history and travel literature; popular

genealogy fails to take into account.61 Menippean satire is a self-consciously

humor is to his novelistic aesthetic.68 The sophisticated humor and ironic

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