ESC: English Studies in Canada

difficult it is to be a woman. Perhaps my own shortcoming is that I am ul­ timately appealing to some sense of intentionality when I doubt that either this designer or these playwrights really mean to demonstrate how hard it is to be a woman. These clothes or these plays may instead affirm a patri­ archal order that can be interpreted as subversive with only varying degrees of persuasiveness. Ba r b a r a d a r b y / Dalhousie University Garry Sherbert, Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of SelfConsciousness in Dunton, D’Urfey, and Sterne. (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). xvii, 225. $49.95 (U.S.) cloth. There are few generic-stylistic categories as slippery as “Menippean,” even with the focus narrowed to “Menippean satire.” And there are few harder concepts to pin down than “wit,” especially when it at once (or alterna­ tively) means not only a quality in literature (“wit-written”) but an aspect ofboth self-consciousness (related to imagination, and often opposed to rea­ son) and all mental activity, creative or ratiocinative. This being the case, there is an admirable courageousness in Garry Sherbert’s attempt to deal with both in a brief study. It is all the more courageous because he con­ tinually works to position his analysis and defense of the witty, scholarly (and scholarship-mocking) exuberance of the Menippean satire of Dunton, D’Urfey, and Sterne within a complex nexus of positions on witty excess taken by Hobbes, Locke, Dryden, Addison, Blackmore (!) and Johnson, and relevant arguments offered by modern theorists as disparate as Frye and Foucault, Freud and Derrida, and Bakhtin and Bataille. Not surprisingly, this attempt has weaknesses, as well as considerable at­ tractions, in its theoretical contextualizing of the Menippean phenomenon and its analyses ofexemplary texts. Reading and re-reading the 39-page “In­ troduction” (I did so three times before I felt I was following it adequately) can be a confusing experience, although its prose is never unclear. It elab­ orately balances one idea about “wit” against another, one signification of “Menippean” against others, one modern theorist’s clarifications (or is it obfuscations?) against another’s and then another’s. As a result, when I had taken it all in, insofar as I did so, I was not sure that I was more certain than I had been about the truest significance of “Menippean” or the nature of the “wit,” the “self-consciousness,” and the “satire” that Sherbert treats as central to the genre. And yet, to turn the matter around, reading it was very stimulating, each of the three times around, even when I was offered a chunk of gobbledegook by Derrida as an elucidation or left wondering why 35i (conservation and expenditure of energy being always equal and effectively inseparable) so much was being made of the creative “exhaustion” theory of Georges Bataille. To put the matter “positively,” Garry Sherbert’s own suggestions often seem more interesting than the theoretical dicta he quotes and criticizes, and I would extend this back-handed compliment by saying that his discussion as a whole has something like the brilliant opacity of Frye’s dealings with his roughly “Menippean” category: the “anatomy.” Four chapters form the main body of the study, followed by a brief sur­ vey of Menippean writing and responses to it after the eighteenth century that takes a stab at relating the Menippean to—what else is new?—the post-modern. Of these chapters, the first is the weakest. It analyzes the Menippean characteristics of John Dunton’s A Voyage Round the World in relation to “baroque poetics,” the patterns of which are never very clearly defined. Dunton’s wit-choked ramble has always seemed to me a bore, and I do not think this chapter will convince many that it is not. The next chap­ ter, concerned with the aesthetic and satiric points of Thomas D’Urfey’s An Essay Towards the Theory of the Intelligible World, is far better, as it intelligently probes D’Urfey’s essay as a parody of John Norris’s An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World, and in the process nicely defines the...