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QUESTION:
Imagine that a curious friend asks just what this "Menippean satire" business is all about. Yougive a succinct answer in well-chosen words and precise critical language that is at once a masterpiece of comprehensiveness and a miracle of compression. If that is not quite possible in a mere forty or sominutes, at least this is your chance to show that you have grasped the conceptual basis of the Menippeantradition. You get extra credit if you can remember (or even invent) aspects not covered in Part Two of this exam as you concoct your answer in this essay.
ANSWER:
To begin at the beginning, because
everything 
has a beginning, although Menippean satire doesnot always have an ending (much like its explication), back in the fourth century BC there were the cyn-ics, most notably Menippus and Diogenes. The name cynic, which was first created as a derogatory termmeaning dog, entailed a jubilant stoic or a pessimist with a sense of humor. They rejected most human pretensions like homes and possessions in their effort to return to a natural, fundamental way of life, likean animal (specifically, like a dog).These cynics were commemorated and celebrated first by Marcus Terentius Varro in the first cen-tury BC, and then by Seneca, Patronius, Apuleius and Lucian in the first and second centuries AD. Workslike Lucian’s
Sale of Philosophies
mocked arrogant self-assured philosophies, and his
 Dialogues of the Dead 
satirize the weeping wealthy, who now in Hell, are no better off than a beggar. These early Menip- pean satires were dark, mostly pessimistic, but had a sense of humor that merited the “Menippean” quali-fier before the “satire.”What makes Menippean satires Menippean is precisely that mixture of foreboding and laughter,or “spoudogeloios.” The Menippean satire is characterized by a strange quality of joculoserious, or seri-ocomedy. Death, said the cynics, is inevitable and all-powerful. So they accepted this and moved on toenjoy life while they had it. There is certainly an amount of stoicism in the Menippean tradition, but it isalways balanced by the festivity of the carnival.The carnivalesque characteristic that pervades Menippean satire is an inversion of the natural or-der. In the spirit of the week-long Roman holiday of Saturnalia, the carnival of Menippean satire turns theworld upside-down, but only for an extended period of time. There is the apotheosis of the fool to start thecarnival in style, but at the end, after the parades and debauchery and cathartic satiety, the fool must bedeposed, beaten, and everything must return to normal. Yet, Menippean satire, as a written form, allowsthis carnival to happen whenever the book is read, without end.The Menippean satire, in its formal quality, often revolves around a carousel plot, with a begin-ning, a middle, and no end. It is full of episodes that may be moved around at will, cut out, replaced withnew ones, or simply skipped. This is like an anatomical analysis: the surgeon-reader can inspect the whole body, and then deeper into the organs, then into the cells, down to the molecules, indefinitely, thus linkingmacrocosm and microcosm. It is very flexible, but at least one go-round on the carousel is highly recom-mended.We see that Menippean satire does not always follow traditional linear form of plot, and neither does it conform to the rules of the world. It is often set in a fantastic world, sometimes without a care for even logic’s prize principle of non-contradiction. This fantastic setting, says Mikhail Bakhtin, is to make possible the treatment of “serious philosophical questions.” This aspect, by loosening the rules of narrat-ive and fact, provides a larger playing ground in setting up analogies and allegories, which often take theform of journeys.The Menippean form has often been said to derive partly from the picaresque tradition, and manyMenippean satires take the form of the Odyssey plot, wherein the adventurer laboriously travels toward adestination. Often, in the case of Menippean satire, this destination is unreachable, or the effort aban-doned, in cynical fashion, to show that the human condition is one of failure and distraction, or more op-timistically, to show that the destination is much less important than the journey.An important stylistic trait of Menippean satire is the author’s consciousness of the work and presence therein, often as one of the characters. With the advent of the printing press, the author became
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