SOURCE: Sherbert, Garry. “Metaphysic Wit: The Charm and Riddle of D'Urfey's Menippean Satire. In Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, D'Urfey, and Sterne, pp. 76-117. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

[In the following essay, Sherbert discusses the riddles, puns, and other comic techniques Durfey used in his parody of John Norris's An Essay Towards the Theory of the Intelligible World.]

Wit's false mirror

—Alexander Pope, Essay on Man

Thomas D'Urfey's contribution to the eighteenth-century battle of wits is his “Satyrical Fable”, An Essay Towards the Theory of the Intelligible World (1707). Against what he calls the “Metaphysick Wit” (14) of John Norris, D'Urfey launches a parody that turns Platonic idealism into the playful nonsense of the senses. To effect his victim's narrative descent, the satirist calls up associations with the story of Echo and Narcissus. Corresponding with these two mythic figures, the satiric reduction of Norris's theory of the intelligible world to the sensible world takes two forms: it may address the ear through transgressive sexual songs and puns, or it may address the eye through visual conceits, lacunae, and riddles which play with the book's arrangement. In two “senses,” D'Urfey brings Norris's transcendental ideas crashing down on the printed page “Like Words congeal'd in Northern Air” (16). Most significant for this chapter, D'Urfey's literary practice relates to contemporary theories of wit because his reductio ad absurdum involves a large measure of regression to the subconscious psychological associations of the creative process itself.

Since D'Urfey chooses to break the spell of the intelligible world over idealists by casting Norris in the role of Narcissus, he seizes on the paradoxes specifically involved in the act of philosophical “speculation”, including the word's etymological sense of “seeing.”¹ In Freudian terms, D'Urfey's Narcissus is caught in the “mirror stage,” where, as we shall see in the first section of this chapter, both wits and philosophers endlessly seek to affirm their identities. The second section of the chapter takes a more historical perspective of D'Urfey's satire on metaphysical speculation. Thomas Sprat's remarks on philosophical style in the History of the Royal Society lead us into a discussion of the way D'Urfey turns Norris's philosophical metaphors against him. And, given his extraordinary popularity as a songwriter, D'Urfey ironically makes no extended use of the figure Echo from Ovid's narrative, replacing her with his own echoing song. However, the chapter's third section on “charm and riddle” will recover traces of Echo's feminine presence. Though Echo's absence is consistent with the misogyny that haunts psychoanalysis's representation of wit and its relation to the unconscious, the feminine principle she represents returns to theory and to practice. It returns as “mother wit,” a term that designates all the discourse named by the Augustan and Baroque theorists of wit as “false.”

In the seventeenth century, Locke and Descartes had established the mind as a “mirror of nature” (Rorty). Their philosophies confidently asserted that a self-conscious subject if properly empirical and rational could obtain truth. The success of Cartesian and Lockean models of self-consciousness encouraged idealist philosophers to pursue with greater urgency the Delphic oracle's call to self-knowledge. The satirists were quick to point to the myth of Narcissus to warn of the mirror's elusive images and the desires that bind philosophers to them. Yet John Norris's effort, An Essay Towards the Theory of the Intelligible World (1701-1704), which owes much to Nicolas Malebranche's De la recherche de la vérité (1674-75), goes much further than Locke, who says that we have an immediate consciousness of the mind's activities. Norris believes not only that the mind is immediately aware of its own states, though it has no clear ideas of its own nature; he also believes that the mind can have direct contact with the divine essence of God through certain “necessary” ideas.² These ideas are the intelligible aspect of God. As Norris puts it, “The ideas whereby we understand are necessary, eternal, and immutable; but there are no ideas so qualified but the divine; therefore the ideas whereby we understand are the divine ideas” (2: 426).³ The effect of Norris's syllogistic reasoning is, to quote Malebranche, “That we see all things in God” (230). While the conclusion may be desirable, the philosophical difficulties that arise, particularly with regard to seeing material things in God, do not, as we shall see, long escape the Menippean satirist's notice.

What makes Norris the “ideal” philosophus gloriosus for D'Urfey's parody is the quixotic conviction with which he argues, against common sense, for the reality of the Intelligible World. The title of Chapter Four, in Norris's first volume, for instance, indicates just how far he is prepared to go: “That the Existence of the Intelligible is more Certain than that of the Natural or Sensible World. With an Account of the Comparative Certainty of Faith and Reason” (184). Undaunted by the magnitude of his claim, Norris quickly leaves Lockean sensationalism behind in this volume and draws an intellectual map of the Ideal World. The weakness that D'Urfey easily preys on is the ironic difficulty Norris has in finding a place on the map for the material world. To heighten the reader's perception of this glaring absence, D'Urfey generously quotes five pages of Norris's text designed to persuade readers that the Intelligible World serves God as the Archetype, or model, for His creation of Nature, the Ectype.

D'Urfey allows Norris's reduction of the material world to a mere “Phantom or a Shadow” (D'Urfey 4; Norris 10) to be seen for the absurdity that it is. D'Urfey knows the reader will inevitably ask how God, a spiritual being, relates to matter, since we see all things in God. Struggling with the intractable problem, Norris himself states, “how an Idea purely Spiritual can represent Body, I must confess my self unable to explain the very precise manner of it. But that it should be thus there is evident Necessity, it being impossible God should create Body, unless he had the Idea of it” (1: 296; qtd. in McCracken 165-66). Norris's contradictory confession that he has no “idea” of what matter is, but that God must, amounts to an admission that he is, in at least one respect, blind—he does not see all things in God.

Without a “clear and distinct idea” of matter, Norris fails as a Malebranchean, and therefore as a Cartesian. The passage just quoted above testifies to Norris's failure to sustain the opposition between spirit and body, the intelligible and the sensory, despite his reliance on Malebranche's theory of “intelligible extension” (1: 251). D'Urfey makes no specific mention of intelligible extension. His satire, nevertheless, ruthlessly ridicules the difficulty idealists face in trying to get the unextended spirit to communicate with, yet remain distinct from, material bodies extended in space. Norris follows Descartes' argument that if I can conceive of A without B, then A and B are different (2: 27-31). Norris, for instance, refutes Locke's argument that “matter can think” by saying that not only can he separate “a Thinking Being from an Extended Being, or Matter, but that [he] can conceive a Thinking Being to be, even tho' [he] should suppose Matter not to be” (2: 28). However, one critic, Charles McCracken, detects a flaw in the idealist's reasoning, when Norris asserts that, while we have a clear idea of the nature of the body, we have no clear idea of mind (McCracken 170-71).⁴ As an idealist whose ideas do not appear clearly and distinctly, Norris opens the way to D'Urfey's portrait of a purblind pedant who has brought the problems of personal identity (to say nothing of logical identity) into deeper obscurity.

Satiric play with the obscurities of personal identity turns on Norris's inability to keep the intelligible world in a higher rank than its sensible counterpart. Norris struggles to keep the self-conscious Cartesian subject fixed in a superior position over its own activities, its ideal object. The revelation of the self to itself, however, always involves a certain concealment:

For tho' the Soul turns her dark side, as I may say, to her self, as having no clear view of her own Essence, that dear Self, whereof she is so blindly fond, yet she can reflect upon her own Actings, and upon her own Sensations, and need not go out of her self, for the Perception of any of these, because they are in her self.

(Norris 2: 279)

The metaphor of the soul turning its dark side to itself strongly suggests to twentieth-century minds the concept of the unconscious mind. That we are “so blindly fond” of this dark essence further suggests analogies with the Freudian narcissistic ego, especially as they are elaborated by Lacan's theory of the mirror stage (Ecrits 1-7). These Freudian analogies will unfold in our analysis of Norris as a metaphysical wit, but here we need only note that the visual metaphors and their relation to identity are central to D'Urfey's attempts to unsettle the priority that the intelligible enjoys over the sensible in Norris's self-sufficient subject.

Although the ideal self that Norris intends to secure exists outside the activity of thought and sensation, through the power of reflection, it need not go outside itself. D'Urfey undermines this autonomous, self-conscious subject by representing it more as a result of confusion than mastery. Taking the image of the self reflected in his metaphysical abstractions as the “true” self, Norris creates a specular other, subject to speculations he cannot control. To show just how “blindly fond” he is of this specular other, D'Urfey takes Norris's metaphors of speculation “literally.” D'Urfey's fictional idealist, Gabriel John, sees all things, including himself, in God. Gabriel lives, moves, and has his being in the Intelligible World. If readers identify, or, more to the satiric purpose, confuse the intelligible world with the imaginary, fictional world, they experience the mental error of the philosophus gloriosus by duplicating it. Readers, however, cannot avoid this mental error simply by siding with the author in recognizing and condemning Gabriel's philosophy as narcissism. The text also brings further confusion by encouraging us to read Gabriel John as a figure for D'Urfey as well as for Norris. For readers “so blindly fond” of the author that they assume his guiding presence unifies Gabriel's chaotic text, D'Urfey not only divides Gabriel's identity, but he also makes the enigma of authorial attribution part of the parody by publishing the text anonymously. As in so many other Menippean satires, questions concerning the status of fictional discourse in D'Urfey's Essay mingle with those of authorial identity, leading inevitably, in their turn, to the question of authorial control.

D'Urfey signals his play with authorial identity as early as his table of contents:

XXI

A Section treating of my self, one of the best of Subjects; and such a one as both I and HER MAJESTY have Reason to be peculiarly Fond of. A Discovery what sort of a Person I am, together with something concerning my Mistress, and the same contradicted again. My own just Commendations, especially that of my Great Modesty. Compleat Annals of the First 55 years of my Life. A Prediction of my much Lamented Death. All humbly dedicated to the Manes of Mr. De Montagne, St. Evremont and Sir W—T—e.”

(sig: A2^v)

Dating D'Urfey's birth from 1653 to the publication of the Essay, presumed to be 1708, readers arrive at the author's attributed age of 55.⁵ Confidence in this chronological evidence wavers when “Gabriel John, alias Timothy,” directs his beloved amanuensis “Ezekiel Philodash,” on April Fool's Day, 1701, to “fix up an Index” which never appears (193). Despite his membership in the group of illustrious writers who write about themselves (especially William Temple, whom D'Urfey quotes extensively), Gabriel's writing exhibits little self-possession.

Evidence of a deluded Gabriel mounts as he “plays” with his dispersed identity. At one point, Gabriel, alias Timothy, confers imaginary honours upon European monarchs and appoints “one of the most considerable Islands in New-Eutopia to go by the Name of TIMLAND” (188-89). Utopian schemes usually mark Menippean influence, but D'Urfey may also have in mind Norris's statement that “the Existence of the Intelligible World, (as much an Eutopia as it may be fancied by some) is more certain than that of the Natural” (1: 214). In any case, the outpouring of Gabriel's identity toward the island symbolizes the outpouring of his pen in that both tend toward an ideal imaginary place that exists nowhere. Gabriel, for example, often loses his place in the narrative. Even though the readers may be weary and “flattering themselves” that late in the text there would be “no more to come” (194), Gabriel surprisingly says that he can give them “no manner of Encouragement; nor do I any more know what is immediately to follow this Sentence, than L———can tell what shall be his next Throw at the Groom-Porters, than P———can predict to what Point the Wind will change, or than S———can prognosticate what shall be his next No-Religion” (195). The loose, associative style of Gabriel's writing mirrors his restless mind, accounting, in part, for the bewildering title of this short section: “The Best Section in the Book, concerning Seven Hundred Pounds a Year” (194). The fact that the narrator at no time in this section refers to money makes this title one of the many riddles of referentiality in D'Urfey's satire.

Gabriel praises the loss of meaning in his narrative as the “Best section in the Book” to display his knowledge of the mystical traditions associated with philosophical idealism. Since words can only tell us what God is not, idealists who say nothing about God, paradoxically, say what needs saying. This doctrine of negative theology embedded in Norris's Neoplatonic idealism furnishes D'Urfey with the most fundamental “joke” of the satire. If words cannot express the attributes of God, and, as idealists argue, if we see all things in God, words and things are frozen in two separate worlds. The “paradoxical deadlock” of this separation is, in Northrop Frye's words, “precisely the essence of the riddle” (“Charms” 145). In D'Urfey's hands, idealism drives such a wedge between words and things that Gabriel's language necessarily becomes unintelligible and meaningless. Gabriel, like Norris, speaks in riddles. Without the power to refer to things in the material world, the philosophus gloriosus empties his mind of meaning whenever he communicates in words. And yet in Menippean satire the philosopher's obsession to impose his theories on reality leads to a verbal and intellectual exuberance unmatched in any other form of discourse. The paradoxical excesses of the philosophus gloriosus recall Georges Bataille's exploration of what he calls the “general economy” of life in the universe, an economy exemplified by the sun, which gives without any return. Bataille recognizes that the greatest productive exuberance corresponds to the greatest loss (1: 28).

The paradox of Gabriel's riddles is, of course, that they have no answer. Gabriel empties words of their meaning and leaves the reader of his work lost in a labyrinth of allusions. D'Urfey's satiric point pierces through the web of allusions, the veil of Neoplatonic mysticism, to show it hiding nothing at all. Gabriel most strongly makes the case for the mysteries of idealism in his chapter on the Jewish Cabala, Section twenty-eight: “The next Section does really contain such sad Truths that I would not advise you to understand it, nor so much as read it, if it can possibly be avoided” (65). Overwhelmed with a profusion of highly specialized language, the apprehensive reader enters the secrets of the Cabala to learn about the nature of the spiritual world, Gabriel's Intelligible World. After being given a mere mention of the “Doctrine of the four Worlds Aziluthical,” or four worlds Emanating, and the “Doctrine of Sephiroth,” or Ideas (65), Gabriel gives a list of twenty-five words and phrases that serve as some kind of commentary. He promises volumes on the subject where he will expatiate upon the “Quiseity of Amen, as likewise upon the Ensophicality of Aziluth” (66). Studying “whatness of Amen,” not a traditional topic in the Cabala, and the “endlessness of God's Emanation,” leads us, ideally, to an understanding of He who is not, God whose being is beyond being. In Gabriel's discourse, it leads us into an understanding which,

rightly prepar'd, will doubtless become like the Odour of the Voice of the Beauty of Sublimated Intelligence. Two-legged Truth shall be caught with Saline Essence upon her Caudality; She shall edify and nidificate in the Petticoats of his Pia Mater, or the supercilious Eaves of his Pericranium.

(66)

The abusive metaphors, or catachreses, by which the understanding becomes the odour of beauty's voice, and truth nests in the petticoats of our brain, represents an abuse not only of conventional language, but also of poetic language. Gabriel's mock learned discourse transgresses sense into the mystery of meaningless nonsense and in so doing alerts the reader to the catachretical “violence that we do to things” (Foucault, “Discourse” 229) when we give them meaning.⁶

Ironically, however, to say that D'Urfey deliberately misleads the reader through Gabriel's cabalistic mysteries of nonsense is to miss the point—at least from a psychoanalytic perspective. In a fundamental way, D'Urfey's identity as a witty author depends on a process that no amount of deliberation can master. This does not mean that D'Urfey does not consciously seek to dominate fully his discourse, as Norris does. The following quotation, quite to the contrary, signifies a desire in the narrator that coincides with D'Urfey's. The quotation heads a chapter that explains “Why the Author is so Desirous of being thought a Wit, now in his Old Age. An Humble Request that the Reader would Humour him therein” (215). The significance of a request that the reader humour, or indulge, the wit goes beyond an appeal to our sympathy for his “Old Age.” The wit depends on readers to have his identity as wit affirmed by a response not even in the full control of readers themselves, the response of laughter. D'Urfey, in other words, shares Gabriel's impossible, narcissistic desire to control exterior reality to affirm his identity. Gabriel, as Norris, tries to explain the meaning of reality through the speculations of “metaphysick wit.” Gabriel, as D'Urfey, tries to use the expectation of meaning to bait the reader into laughter through his pointless riddles of satiric wit. The strange concurrence of two interpretations of meaning joined at cross-purposes in a single figure, Gabriel, provides no safe enclosure for readerly subjects striving narcissistically to enclose themselves within a meaningful, self-contained textual object.

THE AUFSITZER: WIT'S SPECULAR OTHER

Samuel Weber's compelling analysis of the “uncanny” similarities between wit and theoretical speculation in The Legend of Freud goes far in detailing the crisis of the self-conscious subject in narcissistic narratives like D'Urfey's. Drawing upon the theory of wit in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (1905), Weber deconstructs Freud's definition of the joke by showing that a marginal, supplementary example is actually the constitutive condition for the joke as such. The supplementary case, though it derives from the class of “nonsense jokes,” contradicts its class, since it resists Freud's theoretical desire to find the “sense in nonsense.” These meaningless jokes highlight the Menippean technique of misdirection in D'Urfey's text, for they raise the expectation of meaning only to frustrate it. They frustrate, that is, the expectation of meaning in the listener of the joke, and in the theorist of the joke, who needs to produce a totally unified explanation of reality to confirm the wholeness of his own identity. D'Urfey's unanswerable riddles introduce an irreducible alterity within the metaphysician and the wit of “metaphysick wit.”

Freud's typology of the joke distinguishes the meaningless wordplay of the innocent jest from the meaningful, tendentious joke. Although Freud locates the “psychogenesis” of the joke in the child's play of the jest, the joke emerges, when the subject matures, as a jest with a meaning. This meaning, however, functions to meet the demands of the mature critical intellect only long enough to allow the childish pleasure of verbal play to be expressed. The meaning of the joke, then, is placed in the service of play to distract the conscious mind and lift the inhibitions. The listener of the joke saves energy normally expended in maintaining inhibitions. Furthermore, the witty verbal reduction of what would normally be a complex train of thought also saves energy in the listener. Thanks to the economy of the joke, the listener of a joke involuntarily releases this saved energy in the form of laughter. Because his energy is bound up with the narration of the joke, the teller laughs only “par ricochet” (Freud, Jokes 156), after the listener has been moved to laugh.

Weber's innovative reading of Freud focuses on the third person, the listener, to reinscribe the joke-telling subject within the joke, undermining his or her mastery of the joking situation. Weber reinscribes the speculative theorist of Witz, too, despite Freud's appeal to empiricism. But, since the structure of the joke and theory involve a dependence on the elusive mirror-image of the other, we will concentrate on the joke itself. It should be said at the outset that what theory shares with the joke is the desire to know, which Weber, quoting Freud, explicitly links with the “‘urge to see’” (Freud 7: 194; qtd. in Weber 111). Weber reminds us of the etymological relation of the words “speculation,” “theory,” and, significantly, “wit” with vision (Weber 111; n. 22). To demonstrate the visual, scopic drive in the desire to know, Weber chooses the “Smutty” joke from Freud's typology of tendentious, aggressive jokes, a typology which includes, among others, the blasphemous, cynical, sceptical, and nonsensical joke. The lure of the obscene joke needs little comment. The structure, nevertheless, of a joke-teller making a joke at another's, usually a woman's, expense, to a third party advances Weber's point. Freud's model of the joke-teller involves a male whose failed seduction of a woman provokes the aggressive joke. The third person, initially looked upon as a prohibitive presence, becomes transformed into a sympathetic ear for the frustrated male's need to release sexual tension. The joke, once accepted, allows the two, typically male, figures to transgress social taboos, and compensate for the joke-teller's frustration over the lost object of desire.

Freud's theory of the joke runs into trouble when he tries to explain the nonsense joke. Jokes, smutty or otherwise, differ from innocent jests, because they possess a meaning. In order to sustain this opposition, Freud must find a “sense in nonsense” (6: 138). He argues that nonsense jokes embody only the external play with thought, as opposed to the jest's play with words, the core of the joke suppressed by the critical intelligence. The opposition collapses, however, when the Hülle, or envelope of the joke, its conceptual play, proves as meaningless as its Kern or nucleus of verbal play. Freud's great struggle to explain an “extreme example” of nonsense jokes occurs, significantly, in a supplement to a footnote. Freud betrays his difficulty with nonsense when he describes the following examples as merely “resembling jokes”: “‘Life is a suspension bridge,’ said one man.—’ Why is that?’ asked the other.—’How should I know?’ was the reply.’” (6: 139). Weber's translation of Freud's analysis of this joke gives an important clue to the role nonsense plays in the joke-teller's endeavour to consolidate his ambivalent identity:

These extreme examples have an effect because they rouse the expectation of a joke, so that one tries to find a meaning [Sinn] concealed behind the nonsense [Unsinn]. But one finds none, they really are nonsense. Under the influence of that play of mirrors [Unter jener Vorspiegelung] it has become possible, one moment long, to liberate the pleasure in nonsense.

(6: 139; qtd. in Weber 113)

Translating Vorspiegelung as the “play of mirrors,” rather than as “pretence,” as Strachey has translated it, Weber enables us to see the relation of the nonsense joke and the joke-teller's identity. Applying the “play of mirrors” to highly self-conscious Menippean satires places works like D'Urfey's in a much more useful psychological context.

Although Freud's extreme example of nonsense dupes the listener into the “expectation of a joke,” Weber astutely observes that such examples present the listener “with a mirror of his desire ‘to find a meaning behind the nonsense’” (113; Freud 5: 506). Given that the expectation of a joke “consists in the desire to make sense of the enigmatic assertion with which the joke begins,” thwarting that desire cannot, Weber contends, be described as “pure and simple nonsense” (113-14). A nonsense joke, or what Freud calls an Aufsitzer (translated by Strachey as “take-in,” and by Weber as “shaggy dog story”), plays with the desire of the listener to find an intelligible context, the desire at the heart of “secondary elaboration.” Weber refers to the mental processes which rearrange dream material into an intelligible pattern (112). Placed in a position similar to the speculating theorist, the individual hearing an Aufsitzer experiences a desire which “involves nothing less than the narcissistic striving of the ego to unify, bind, and synthesize, and thereby construct that meaningful, self-contained object against which it can situate itself as an equally meaningful, self-contained subject, a self-consciousness” (Weber 114). The listener mirrors the joke-teller's equally narcissistic ego, striving to become a “first-person” narrator. The “play of mirrors” that Weber finds in Freud's theory of Witz turns out to be a repetition of Lacan's history of the ego's emergence in the “mirror stage.” Because the dialectic of Self and Other in Lacan, and in the Aufsitzer, never resolves itself, the play of mirrors contributes a valuable resource for understanding the fragmented philosophus gloriosus.

Unable to settle on a determinate object to ground his identity, D'Urfey's learned wit, Gabriel, traps himself and the reader in the metafictional mirrors of his text. Gabriel, for instance, goes on an ideal voyage to find his ideal self, guided by his teacher, Father Nicolas Malebranche. Gabriel, ironically, states, “I must needs give my self up entirely to his Guidance, and also submit to be hoodwink'd” (115). His voyage reflects the readers' need to give themselves over to Gabriel's guidance and submit to be “hoodwink'd” by his narrative nonsense. But, paradoxically, while D'Urfey lures his readers, through Gabriel, into unreadable riddles to uncover their “desire to know,” D'Urfey himself is lured, through Gabriel, by that same reader into uncovering his desire to know his own identity. Unlike his alter-ego, Gabriel, the reader represents a measure of alterity which D'Urfey “can never either appropriate or flatly reject” (Weber 108). D'Urfey seeks the reader's laughter to affirm his skill as the “first-person” narrator of nonsense. Freud, however, in Weber's translation characterizes laughter as a form of non-knowledge, “‘so that with jokes we almost never know what we are laughing about’” (Weber 110; Freud 6: 154). Weber argues that for the joke-teller the third person's function in the joke is analogous to a “persona, a mask, through which it (id) laughs” (109). We might say that Weber has uncovered the Menippean satirist's literary unconscious.

The non-knowledge that results from the intellectual exuberance of D'Urfey's self-conscious style may, in fact, have its source in this literary unconscious of the reader's alterity. The nonsense of the Menippean writer repeats, as it were, the infant's narcissistic formation of the ego that Lacan outlines in his theory of the mirror stage. According to Weber's apt summary, the ego in Lacan's mirror stage “can only establish its identity by engaging in the Sisyphean task of taking the place of another that, qua image, appears to possess the unity that the subject itself lacks” (96). The Menippist's self-conscious style, similarly, marks the writer's dependence upon a readerly other he can never master. Nonsense accentuates the satirist's dependence on the other, since it represents an even stronger imposition of the writer's self on the reader. In speaking of the paradoxical “play of mirrors” between the first and third person, Weber refers to the nonsense joke. His comments apply, nonetheless, to D'Urfey's metafictional mirrors: “The resolution of this ‘paradox,’ or rather its articulation, is the possibility and impossibility of being a ‘first person,’ an ‘ego,’ that compose that ‘being’ as one of imposability (if not of imposture)” (Weber 109). Along with laughter, the nonsense of the self-conscious Menippean satirist represents a form of non-knowledge akin to the mystic's increase of consciousness in the contemplation of nothing. The subject's increasing self-consciousness, as Bataille might put it, resolves into expenditure, “a consciousness which has nothing as its object” (Bataille 1: 190). But what of the reader in the metafictional play of mirrors?

Laughter discovers a divided consciousness in the readerly subject, what Weber calls “a certain divarication of mind” (110). The conscious mind must be distracted from the object that produces laughter by the meaning expected in a joke to release suppressed unused energy from the unconscious. The nonsense joke, however, may not elicit laughter. The Aufsitzer, by “misleading and annoying,” reveals the aggressive tendency that, in this context, satirists feel in regard to their readers (Freud 6: 139). Freud's conclusion that the dupe of the Aufsitzer may mute his annoyance by resolving to become a “story-teller” himself (Weber 110; Freud 6: 139) supplies a valuable insight into a reader's reaction to D'Urfey's self-conscious satire. The satirist's refusal to “make sense” incites readers to construct themselves as subjects, even if their labour is interminable. Perhaps the pleasure of narcissistic narratives, especially those of the nonsensical variety, attracts readers who enjoy being imposed upon by their authors.

NARCISSUS ALTER: SPECULATIONS OF PHILOSOPHICAL METAPHOR

Beyond the many local blind spots in his metaphysical system, Norris's basic problem, as D'Urfey sees it, stems from the philosopher's narcissistic demand for unity. Norris's metaphysical “speculations” “see” only resemblances, disregarding or reducing to sameness any differences that challenge the unity of his theory. The philosopher, however, does not stand alone against the charge of a narcissistic neglect of the facts. D'Urfey borrows from Samuel Butler's attack on philosophers in Hudibras, in order to label Norris a “metaphysick Wit.” The allusion implies that the ideological overtones carried by the word “wit” survive for forty years after the civil war.

Wit “jumps”—that is, Butler's attack on scholastic theology and religious enthusiasm agrees with D'Urfey's attack on Norris's scholastic idealism and its association with the Quaker's belief in the ‘inner light’ of an independent conscience (D'Urfey 13). In both historical situations, the “Ignes Fatui” (D'Urfey 120) prove to be fanciful wits. And, while it is more to our immediate purpose to illustrate the close relationship that speculative theorizing, the defining quality of the philosophus gloriosus, has with wit, the opportunity to trace the political implications should also not be missed.

Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667) will help underline the ideology of wit inherited by D'Urfey and the seriousness with which that ideology is taken. Although addressing men of science, Sprat appeals to the literary community of wits for support in his proposal for an academy of letters. The History is best known to us in the twentieth century because it advocates “Mathematical plainness” (113) in matters of style as a corrective for the excesses of natural philosophers, who must now

reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars.

(113)

That this admonition to “reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style” should be directed at “Wits, or Scholars” comes as no surprise to Menippean satirists who, like D'Urfey, adopt these stylistic excesses to mock learned wit. And, lest readers leap to the hasty conclusion that adopting this parodically exuberant style implies the satirist's approval of Sprat's equation of words and things, the project to shorten discourse in Swift's Gulliver's Travels should discourage them. In his attack on the royal society, Swift has one of the professors recommend that, since words are merely names of things, it would be more convenient to carry those things necessary for discourse. Applying the norm of an economic plain style to Menippean writing will ultimately prevent the critic from grasping its irony.

With the recent memory of civil war and the commonwealth, Sprat and Butler feel that the consequence of indulging great wits, who are to madness near allied, is social anarchy.⁷ The civil war demonstrated the need to reform the language of the “fantastical terms, which were introduced by … Religious Sects” (42), to avoid stimulating the passions of war. Sprat believes rhetorical eloquence would be banned from civil society, were it not its own best defense. An eloquent wit makes the “Fancy, disgust the best things, if they come found, and unadorned,” appealing not to reason, but “its Slaves, the Passions” (112). “Warm'd with … just anger” (112), Sprat complains that, unlike scientific knowledge, nothing is “sooner obtain'd” by a ready wit “than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphor, the volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World” (112). And who will acquire this eloquence sooner than men of learning, who are most vulnerable to being affected by “the pleasant musings of their own thoughts” (335) and who withdraw from the world of the senses and experimental science?

The solitary imaginations of Speculative Men are of all other the most easy: there a man meets with little stubborness of matter: he may choose his subject where he likes; he may fashion and turn it as he pleases: whereas when he comes abroad into the world, he must endure more contradiction: more difficulties are to be overcome; and he cannot always follow his own Genius: so that it is not to be wonder'd that so many great Wits have despis'd the labor of a practical cours; and have rather chosen to shut themselves up from the nois and preferments of the World, to convers in the shadow with the pleasant productions of their own fancies.

(335-36)

An advocate of Baconian experimental science, Sprat urges these solipsistic wits to ground their eloquence not in their own thoughts but in nature and the discoveries of science, in order to avoid charges of idle impracticality made by “men of business” (331), the growing merchant middle class.

Sprat's recourse to stylistic reform works well in his unstable political context, yet his scientific apology conceals a myth—the myth of a plain style (Vickers 42-46). The virtues of “Mathematical plainness” succeed in establishing his rhetorical ethos as the humble, reasonable critic of the learned wits and the court wits (his patron, The Duke of Buckingham, numbering among them) (251: xxiv). Science helps the middle class appropriate the moral norm and renders the ethos of the educated gentleman corrupt and effete (cf. Vickers 44). Nevertheless, Brian Vickers in his admirable reassessment of the issues concerning English prose style convincingly concludes that, rather than objectively pursuing a plain style in campaigns like Sprat's, as R. F. Jones and others have done, one could more safely assume a plurality of plain styles. Writers of the period seldom give neutral or accurately descriptive accounts of the issue. As Vickers states, these accounts are more often the “result of animus, or controversy, or party politics, or religious dispute” (23). A point that Vickers does not explicitly make, however, is that the plain style, were it achieved, would, by necessity, resort to metaphors of its own, even as it claims to do away with them.

The metaphors of “clarity” and “vision” cherished by the proponents of empirical reason are, in fact, the very metaphors seized upon by the speculative wits. Having argued that the cooler light of empiricism has reformed science by prevailing over the heated disputations of Aristotelian scholasticism, Sprat would be alarmed to learn that Norris has profited from combining the plain style and scholasticism, the things Sprat had laboured to keep separate. Norris writes, in the preface to the second volume of his Theory, “I have thought it convenient to use great plainness and chasteness of Style, and to express myself not only Scholastically, but even sometimes Syllogistically, as being not out of conceit with Syllogism” (2: A8^v). Traces of Descartes, the philosopher of “clear and distinct ideas,” also manifest themselves everywhere in Norris's book, doubtless due to Malebranche's influence. But when Norris speculates that our “Union with the Sensible” weakens our union with the Intelligible World because it “estranges us from the Divine Light” (1: 5), the idealized metaphor of light diametrically opposes Cartesian sensationalism.

Sensitized to the question of style and its political implications by this digression on Sprat, we are better prepared to focus more intensely on the philosophical implications and apply these findings to D'Urfey's satire of Norris. In a self-consciously written text like the History, contradictions, or blindspots, buried under sophisticated argument, often escape detection. Ironically, the sensorial eye and its metaphors of light, which constitute the foundation of Sprat's argument, also constitute its weakness. In the now well-known passage on “Mathematical plainness,” he calls for “clear senses” to achieve a “primitive purity” in speech (113). For men of science, who work in the “world” and experiment with nature, “It is matter, a visible and sensible matter, which is the object of their labors” (339). By contrast, the idle, speculative wit busies himself with his private thoughts, and, Sprat adds, is “Like that Rhetorician, who having bin us'd to declaim in the shade of a School, when he came to plead a true cause in the open Air, desir'd the Judges to remove their Seat under some roof, because the light offended him” (339). Natural philosophy's attempts to clean away the “obscure” abstractions of scholastic speculation and return to the “primitive purity” of speech through the “enlightened” study of nature form part of what Derrida refers to as “White mythology,” or the history of logocentric metaphysics. But, as Derrida in “White Mythology” reminds us, the appeal to clarity and obscurity in philosophy is equally dependent on metaphors to purge philosophy of metaphor (“White Mythology” 252). Although Sprat is not misguided because he trusts the senses more than the speculative imagination, he can neither dispense with metaphors nor dominate them in his discourse.

If we avoid taking D'Urfey's attack on Norris's idealism as an implicit wholesale endorsement of the kind of empirical values displayed by Sprat, the flexibility of the satirist's irony will frustrate interpretation less. D'Urfey's irony will show that the metaphors in Norris's idealism are too far out of control to be trusted without suggesting that the satirist's views are, on the other hand, a simple inversion of idealism. The parody of England's most notorious empiricist, Thomas Hobbes, late in the Essay, precludes any such reduction of D'Urfey's text. D'Urfey manages to transform Hobbes into an idealist by revealing his approach to human nature as a grand deduction, albeit a cynical one. The ingenuity of the transformation lies in using Hobbes's theory of the compound imagination in Leviathan to bring about the parody. Fusing the image of a horse and man, the fictional figure of the centaur illustrates Hobbes's theory. D'Urfey plays on the centaur's classical associations with lechery and war (and of course satire) to attack Hobbes's cynical assumptions about human nature. The ease with which Hobbes, whom D'Urfey calls “Sir Satanides Goatham” (175), fits into the ideal world reveals an embarrassing contradiction in Norris's system of ideas.

Much of the humour in this satiric fable of Narcissus stems from the paradox that the vanity of philosophical reflection increases to the extent that D'Urfey grants Norris his ecstatic vision. In other words, the more intense the internal vision of the ideal world is for the metaphysical wit, the less real his external vision in the sensible, material world becomes. A fictional disciple, Gabriel John, stands in for Norris in the Essay, and, after lovingly quoting his master, singing his praises, and attacking his enemies, begins half-way through the book to narrate his adventures on his voyage to the Ideal World. We will discuss the manner of travel below, but, for the moment, the end of his ideal voyage better establishes D'Urfey's parody of metaphysical ecstasy as unbridled narcissism.

An impoverished wit living in a London garret, Gabriel turns his “internal Opticks,” or his mind's eye, toward his “Ideal Garret” when his ideal self appears at the window “sitting solitary as a Hermit, but in a violent Fit of Mirth.” The ideal Gabriel appears under the influence of some “pleasant Conceit” which the narrator adds “is a thing very familiar to me in my Retirements.” Already reminiscent of the speculative wits in Sprat's History in his solipsism, Gabriel reflects upon himself:

And as 'tis sung of the former Narcissus, that his Idea in the Water, as cruel as he found it, never refused to smile, when it saw that he smiled in Return; I on the other side, Narcissus alter, could not chuse but rejoyce to see my Idea so joyful.

(D'Urfey 198)

Seized with a “rash Curiosity,” Gabriel stares so hard at his Idea of himself that his “Eyes burst open” (he wakes up) and he relapses into the sensible world. Instead of “knowing himself” within the enclosed intimacy of a self-conscious identity, Gabriel knows only vanity, nothing.

Hardly affected by the empty vision that is his garret in the material world, Gabriel's self-interest moves quickly from within his narrative to without. Since he has just arrived back at his Grub Street garret, he takes the opportunity to offer his reader a “Paper-diet … furnished at reasonable Rates with all sorts of Ballads, Madrigals, Anagrams, Acrosticks, and Heroick Poems, either by whole Sale or by Retail: the Excellency of which I give him leave to judge by the following Samples” (199). Such coarse economic materialism greatly contradicts the narrator's professed idealism. Gabriel's metaphysical misadventures do, however, allegorize the readers'. His inability to sustain his vision of himself corresponds with his inability to sustain narrative verisimilitude. D'Urfey converts the reader into another Narcissus alter by breaking the internal, imagined vision of Gabriel down to its external material support printed on the page. Readers experience D'Urfey's “anatomy of vision” (Hoyles 89), if I may borrow a phrase, at a level beyond the content. D'Urfey satirizes, on the one hand, Norris's reduction of sensory vision and natural light and, on the other, his elevation of speculative vision aided by diving light. In addition, D'Urfey's performative text makes the readers mindful of their own inclination to reduce the printed object of their ocular activity of reading and elevate the imaginative object.

D'Urfey's anatomy of Norris's visionary metaphysics takes no part in any philosophical or theological movement of iconoclasm. Just the same, Menippean satire does specialize in breaking up things that limit our freedom, and Norris is a philosophus gloriosus spellbound by his own system of ideas. Having endowed his theory with divine significance, Norris has become, as Frye, quoting Blake, puts it, “idolatrous to his own shadow” (Blake 654; qtd. in Frye, Well-Tempered Critic 142, Secular Scripture 108). No Neoplatonic philosopher, for example, has relied more on the etymological sense of theory (Greek theoria, or “looking at”) than Norris. Perilously close to reasoning away the material world altogether, he privileges vision over the other senses to rescue his theory from a fatal contradiction. The problem he must solve is how to represent particular objects of matter transmitted to the mind from the senses, if Ideas, which operate independently of the senses, are purely spiritual and therefore general, or universal. His answer makes vision, in one critic's words, a “form of thought” (Acworth 143):

Vision has this peculiar in it, … that it includes Idea as well as Sentiment, that is, that there is in it an outward Perception, or Perception of something without us, as well as an inward feeling. Our other Senses have only the latter. There is nothing in them but only Sensation, some inward feeling or manner of being as to Pleasure or Pain that we are conscious of to our selves, and accordingly they may properly be said to be pure senses. Whereas in Vision, besides that Feeling or Sensation which it has in common with the rest, there is also a true Ideal Perception which the others have not, for which reason it is not a pure Sense, but has something intellectual as well as sensible in it.

(Norris 2: 193-94; qtd. in Acworth 143)

Norris's oculocentrism accomplishes two important tasks: it reifies ideas by making them visible to the physical eye, and it weakens the traditional association that our sense of sight has with the epistemologically untrustworthy imagination.

Idealist philosophical theories of the idea do not begin or end with Norris, as Plato and Hegel attest, nor have they been without their critics, such as Aristotle and Marx. Nevertheless, what has come to “light” recently in Derrida's analysis of philosophy is a better appreciation of the impossibility of controlling metaphor in philosophy's attempt to define it. Philosophical efforts to give an idea of metaphor fall prey to the metaphor of idea (which comes from the Greek idein, to see).⁸ Philosophers may consciously resurrect the loss of a word's metaphorical meaning in a dead metaphor in the hope that they will not be tricked by its effect. Norris, for example, does just that with the Lockean word “reflexion” (2: 117-19). “White Mythology” charts the deluded efforts of writers who recover a metaphor's original “sensible” meaning from its abstracted “metaphysical” meaning in the present. But there is no end to the search for words which escape the impropriety of metaphor, no proper, literal meaning with which to delimit metaphor that is not “always already” a metaphor. The philosopher's attempt to profit from metaphor by limiting the meaning of words to the restricted economy of propriety and plainness inevitably suffers a loss of meaning in the general economy of metaphor's retreat into itself.⁹

The retreat of metaphor into itself at the moment when philosophers try to define it suggests that when they make themselves “clear” or when they “ground” their meaning, they are abusing metaphor. They are taking the metaphors literally. Derrida's deconstructive strategies prompt philosophers not to forget the dead metaphor in the literal. Philosophers who will not give up the quest for the “literal” truth abusively fix themselves on one of the many properties exhibited by a thing at the expense of other properties. The phrase “the fairer sex” reveals this abuse by defining women solely by the physical attributes rather than by their intellect or personality. Norris seizes on the light of the sun rather than on its heat. Since rhetoric names abusive metaphors “catachresis,” Derrida applies the term to all the metaphor-laden concepts philosophy uses to found the values of propriety, or truth, concepts like theoria, eidos, logos (Gasché 309). Now D'Urfey's satire lacks the closely argued logic of Derrida's deconstructive technique, but nevertheless D'Urfey exposes the abusive metaphorical impositions on reality made by Norris's theory of the Ideal World. Gabriel, for example, praises his good fortune for having received the “subtile Philosophy of F. Malebranch,” and “the seraphic Speculations of Mr. Norris” in the “Shape of visionary Imaginations, double-minded Sophisms, Shadows of Eccho, and Sick-men's Dreams” (208-9). The synaesthesia in the phrase “Shadows of Eccho” signifies not only Gabriel's confusion, but also his habitual use of catachreses to privilege the visual sense over sound. And, while neither the word echo, nor the mythical figure appears again as theme in the text, the preponderance of echoing associations of sound in Gabriel's discourse defeat his catachretical efforts to govern his thoughts and finally subdue the sensible world.

Insofar as he follows the accepted meaning of words, Norris, along with everyone else, is caught in metaphor's movement from a proper sensory meaning to a proper spiritual or intelligible meaning. This movement of metaphorization, Derrida claims, is “nothing other than a movement of idealization” (“White Mythology” 226): an idealization and also a reappropriation. Since metaphor must deviate from normal usage and yet remain mimetic, it will ultimately return to the norm as a dead metaphor, a literal meaning. The paradigm of this movement is the sun—hence Derrida's play on the rhetoric of philosophy as “heliotrope” (“White Mythology” 250). Heliotropic metaphors constitute the flowers of philosophic rhetoric par excellence for many reasons, but the philosopher's “appeal to the criteria of clarity and obscurity” (250) already may begin my account. To summarize briefly, metaphor always implies a sensory kernel or “aisthéton” which “can always not present itself” (“White Mythology” 250). The sun, Derrida declares, is the “paradigm of the sensory and of metaphor: it regularly turns (itself) and hides (itself)” (“White Mythology” 250). The sensory sun can therefore be the most natural, properly named, referent. On the other hand, when used as a metaphor, the sun possesses properties that are no longer available; for instance, in Aristotle's discussion of it in the Poetics, it ceases to be completely natural and it becomes an artificial construction (see “White Mythology” 242-45). The sun in Norris's theory of the Ideal World hides its sensory properties. D'Urfey translates Norris's ideal sun as lacking the sensory property of light, a satiric translation which leaves Norris as Narcissus sitting in the dark. He plays on the absence of the sensory sun in Norris's Ideal World by talking ironically about the darkness entailed in the hermetic obscurity of such abstruse, metaphysical truth.

Norris exemplifies the profit and the loss of wit's metaphysical speculations by investing his entire philosophical system in heliotropic metaphors he cannot control. D'Urfey can turn an apparent philosophical gain to loss if he can show that the artificial sun Norris uses to illumine the Incarnation of Christ hides itself (and the truth) behind Neoplatonic rhetoric:

Philosophers may talk of their Verbum Mentis, the Word of the Mind; but there is no Word of the Mind that I know of, but the Word of the Eternal Mind. For sure that Word which is the Wisdom of God, is fittest to be also the Light of Men. Even that Divine Word, which was incarnate, that was first with God, and afterwards with us, that became sensible, because we were not wholly intellectual, and that put on a Cloud of Flesh, because we could not so well endure to behold his naked Glory full of Grace and Truth. For then it was that the great Intelligible Sun suffer'd an Abatement of his Splendour to accommodate his Light to the infirmities of our Eyes and (to allude to an Expression of St. Austin) became, as it were, a Moon to comfort and refresh our Night.

(Norris 2: 466-67)¹⁰

D'Urfey will make much of this abatement of the intelligible Sun's light which betrays a metaphorical play of light and darkness, presence and absence, within the orbit of the Being of beings. The analogy of the word with Christ suggests, furthermore, the logocentric reduction of the signifier's sensory status to a simple reflector of light assures the mastery of the signified, Intelligible Sun as source. D'Urfey, for humorous rather than theological effect, will give the signifiers, the words, much greater freedom than that of a subordinate reflector of meaning.

The first and most profound abatement of the intelligible sun's light occurs when Neoplatonic adepts learn that the closer they get to the light, the more it blinds them. God's being so exceeds our finite being that none of his characteristics can be stated in positive assertions, or even known in any real sense. Believing that none of God's attributes reveals his true nature, Neoplatonists seek a via negativa and develop a negative theology. D'Urfey exposes some of the absurdity in negative theology by presenting its paradoxes as the false wit of an outrageous oxymoron, the phrase “Illuminating Blindness” in the quotation below providing a good sample. Defending his speculations against his critics, Norris states, “I see things in a better Light than they do, though not with better Eyes” (l: v). D'Urfey insists, Hoyles says, on the literal, “common-sense proposition that vision is a matter of sensory perception” (Hoyles 89):

I have been long Conversant in this kind of Studies, and therefore may see things in a better Light than they do, though not with better eyes. Nay, so many thoughtful and solitary Hours, so many nightly Lamps and Lucubrations, have these Studies cost me, that indeed my poor eyes, what with Age, and what with assiduous Poring, have the one departed this World, and the other almost worn it self with incessant Grief for the Loss of its Fellow. By this I am accidentally reduced very near to that State of Illuminating Blindness, which F. Malebranche had at first commended to me.

(211)

To ensure that his parody hits the mark, D'Urfey has Gabriel John proudly cite his authority in the margin: “See Preface to the First Volume of Mr. Norris's Theory” (211).

For delving even deeper obscurities of Norris's Ideal World, the popular Menippean convention of the fantastic voyage serves D'Urfey's satiric mixture well. These imaginary voyages usually visit the moon, and D'Urfey's follows suit.¹¹ To survey the “Intellectual Labyrinth” (122) of Norris's system, while sustaining the ironic strain between the system and the sensible world, a Cartesian vortex conveys Gabriel on an “Ideal Voyage” (122). The labyrinth, what Frye calls the image of lost direction (Anatomy 158), hints that Gabriel is already lost. But another hint of Gabriel's bewilderment lies in Descartes' theory that God sets all matter into a vortical motion—a theory ridiculed as romantic in Swift's Tale of a Tub. D'Urfey simply gives the vortical theory another tropical turn. When he recounts his arrival at the ideal world, Gabriel says, “it was some surprise to find my self very Gravely turning round upon my own Axis” (124). Like the “Archetype of all Real Sculls,” which was making “Circumvolutions about its own Center” (125) in the Ideal World, he was spinning in circles, giving Gabriel to speculate, “And this probably might be the Reason that my Brain was seiz'd with a most violent Sickness” (124). The reader does not speculate, but smiles. Gabriel is dizzy, his head (and body?) spinning around in his bed back in the sensible world. Gabriel's guide in this adventure is the French Idealist philosopher, Father Nicolas Malebranche. The lack of interest in the characters themselves reflects Bakhtin's definition of Menippean satire as the “adventure of an idea” (Dostoevsky's Poetics 94). Gabriel John recognizes his predecessor Malebranche, even though he has never seen him before, because, in Gabriel's words, he “found an Innate Idea to know him by any Description, or even Sight of his Person” (114). A marginal gloss explains the absurd recognition scene: “If we had not an Innate Idea of a Circle, &c. saith Mr. Norris, we could never acquire an Idea of a Circle by seeing material Circles” (114). The joke D'Urfey knowingly foists on the reader is that Norris has rejected the theory of innate ideas in his Theory, and earlier in his 1690 debate with Locke, “Cursory Reflections upon a Book called, An Essay concerning Human Understanding.” D'Urfey corrects his error in a mock endnote (226), but the damage is done. Misleading the reader helps D'Urfey make the obscurantist even more obscure.

The joke about innate ideas nevertheless strikes at the heart of Norris's theory by focussing on the difficulty of using the necessary, permanent, and immutable ideas as the “guide” for, or intelligible measure of, contingent, material nature. If, for example, vision, the privileged sense, sees the eternal idea of the circle in the sun, and the sun as a changeable material object of the senses, how can the two worlds be distinguished? How can the perfect, intelligible circles be kept distinct from the imperfect, empirically experienced circles?¹² More importantly, how can Gabriel distinguish his ideal from his real self, let alone the ideal from the real Malebranche?

After questioning the guide, the reader feels that Gabriel is “travelling blind,” metaphorically speaking. Taking a proverbial expression literally forms the basis of D'Urfey's satiric reduction of the idealist's ecstatic transports. D'Urfey even provides the readers with their own experience of Gabriel's “Illuminating Blindness.” To achieve this effect, D'Urfey extends the metaphor of travelling blind into an allegory of the reader's experience of the narrative. He then adds the devices of false wit, such as oxymorons, false allusions, and, as we shall see, lacunae, to enact at the formal level the effect of blindness that we read about at the level of content. Without a firm narrative thread to follow, the reader feels as lost as Gabriel.

In spite of the ascent toward divine revelation suggested by Gabriel's location of the Ideal World, or at least their journey towards the “Lunar Regions” (215), Menippean travellers symbolically descend into a lower world, exhibiting a kind of learned lunacy under the moon's bewitching influence. Instead of wings, for example, Malebranche advises Gabriel, to his surprise, to put out his eyes, as the philosopher Democritus of Abdera did, for the senses are an impediment to knowledge and philosophy. He states further, “for Alas—we should find our Eyes infinitely sharper, if it were not for Light; nay we should even Ideas themselves, did not the Outward Light stand in the way” (116). Choosing only to cover his eyes, Gabriel then delivers an invocation to the “Cumaean Goddess” (117), the cave-dwelling Sybilline prophetess from Virgil's Aeneid, lowering himself into further darkness by speaking of “mysterious Secrets of Truth uncreated” and “Scenes of Invisible Light” (117). Gabriel's prayer to acquire power from a goddess of the lower, and ironically darker, regions exemplifies, in the passage below, those characteristics of a magic charm that Frye argues go to the source of the creative process. But Gabriel's misguided petition to the powers of darkness pushes his vision of the Ideal World even further out of view. The reader, we will discover, simultaneously loses sight of meaning.

The correspondence between Gabriel and the reader grows out of their yearning for an authoritative power to explain the world and, consequently, give them at least some control over it. When the light of philosophical speculations come to nothing, Gabriel turns to the darker powers of magic that reside in the tradition of mystical speculation. When one part of the narrative comes to nothing, the reader's traditional recourse is to other, more meaningful parts of the narrative that indicate a restoration of the text's overall meaning and, by implication, the author's discursive presence. Gabriel's reference to the mystical authorities as “Extatick Dreams” hints that they are as much beyond Gabriel's reach as the meaning is to the reader in the prayer:

All Ye revered Powers, Ye fleet and aiery Inhabitants, indigenary and Born-Members of the Archetypal Republick; Conceits, Whimsies, Hopes, Fears, Caprices, and Chimeras, with all other sovereign Disposers and Guides of Human Conceptions, Designs and Attempts; Grant me now your kindly Influence; permit me without offence, to bring to Light Things invelop'd in ancient Darkness, and Veil'd from human Minds by the Interposition of blind Reason.

(117-18)

The prayer's alliteration and assonance overwhelm the sense of the words with sound, breaking down the conscious will—if not in the reader, then certainly in Gabriel. However, the complex pattern of repetition in the rhetoric of charms, a rhetoric which is “dissociative and incantatory” (Frye, “Charms” 126) seems hardly necessary. If Gabriel's “Conceptions” flow from comically ambiguous sources like “Conceits, Whimsies, Hopes, Fears, Caprice and Chimeras,” they are already dissociative. For the reader, Gabriel's prayer brings about the very conditions he seeks. His self-induced hypnosis brings to light the unconscious whimsical nonsense normally “Veil'd from human Minds by the Interposition of blind Reason,” or, in modern language, suppressed by the conscious mind. With his philosophical speculations on such unsteady ground, Gabriel cannot hope to govern himself or his thoughts. He can only be governed.

CHARM AND RIDDLE

The contradictory emphasis on visual metaphor and its eclipse into blindness in Gabriel's prayer tells us that he sees the ideal world as Paul does in Corinthians, through a riddle in a mirror (1 Cor. 13:12).¹³ Trapped in a world of shadow and reflection rather than substance, Gabriel loses control of his faculty of judgment. He cannot discern the difference between true and false, dream and reality, in the light of his intelligible sun. Out of his confused enthusiasm, for instance, Gabriel draws a ridiculous, but comically appropriate, comparison between a “raree-show,” or peep-show in a box, and the Ideal World. Lavishing the reader with every detail from the popular street spectacle, Gabriel describes a person removing a hat and bending over to peep at the puppets through the hole in the box.

There lies near the Equator of this Mundane Fabrick, a private Aperture or Hiatus, wrought, as it is reasonably suppos'd, by the Force of penetrating Heat, or violent Perustion; where, by Virtue of a certain Pellucid Quality, the Species Intentionales are freely transmitted and pass to and fro at pleasure. Hither is directed each dignified Virtuoso, to make his so desired Speculations; he bows himself approaching Submissive, and lifts off the wide Circumference of his renident and pinguedinous Bonnet, in Token of Reverence to the Guardian's Person and Office.

(135)

The learned language of the passage makes the carnivalesque conceit almost unreadable. It remains, however, a fit emblem for our section on charm and riddle, since Gabriel's encounter with the raree-show culminates in an ecstatic vision that permits him to hear the heavenly music of the nine spheres in heaven.

What concerns us most in the passage above relates to the philosophical phrase “Species Intentionales.” Amidst the mock solemnity of latinate words like “perustion,” “renident,” and “pinguedinous,” readers may lose patience and dismiss the species intentionales as just more of Norris's Neoplatonic rhetoric. An impatient reader would then fail to discover that Norris had rejected the scholastic theory that material objects emitted intentional species or images (Norris 2: 329-76).¹⁴ D'Urfey mischievously attributes a false notion to Norris, in order to obfuscate the speculator's theory. Norris, an Occasionalist, holds the view that only God gives us the ideas of material objects on the occasion of sensing them. Neither intentional species nor the light of Newtonian optics meets with the idealist's approval, since both locate the source of ideas in a material cause. Material objects in the sensible world have only a limited existence in time. Norris reasons that, since ideas are eternal, they cannot not be. Ideas must exist in themselves without any external cause. Allowing no idea to be seen by the natural light of the sensible world, Norris in a strange way commits himself to living in the dark.

The success of D'Urfey's satiric fable is not limited to showing that idealists are doomed to darkness because that is the way their wit wanders. D'Urfey's greater satiric success includes keeping the reader in the dark too. Readers participate in the idealist's romantic quest for the intelligible world through their attempts to find a meaning for the text. Readers are not deluded in their search for an intelligible meaning any more than Norris. The satirist intervenes only at the moment when the idealist settles on one “Idea” to explain all the other ideas. The satirist, similarly, prods readers along to prevent them from fixing on a single master referent or meaning. There is no referent that we can decide on, once and for all, that could “saturate … its referral to Otherness” (Gashé 281). No words in Norris's theory fully explain the “idea,” the thing, the “other” he seeks outside his system. And, since D'Urfey believes Norris has decided that the idea of a material thing is more real than its material manifestation, he sets out to prove that Norris's intelligible Idea without its sensible other is, in his own words, “a Subtilizing upon a fine nothing” (Norris 1: 10; D'Urfey 5).

D'Urfey's most memorable, and most traditionally Menippean example, of an idealist subtilizing upon nothing is the textual lacuna or hiatus. Gabriel proudly displays the hiatus in his text by calling attention to it in advance through the chapter heading: “The Method of making a Chasm, or Hiatus, judiciously; the great Reach of Thought required for the Contrivance thereof, together with the Difference between the French Academies and the English” (162). We never learn the difference between the two Academies, ostensibly due to the hiatus in the text, but the narrator's inability to stay on topic may account for the omission too. The reader, nevertheless, may feel some promise in the textual hiatus, owing to the hiatus encountered earlier in the raree-show, which proved to be no less than an “Emblem of the Ideal World” (138). As the emblem of access to the Ideal World, the hiatus raises high expectations in the reader's mind. To save readers the labour of having to read between the lines of long dashes scattered on the empty page, Gabriel explains in the margin:

The Author very well understands that a good sizable Hiatus discovers a very great Genuis, there being no Wit in the World more Ideal, and consequently more refined, than what is display'd in the elaborate Pages, that have ne're a Syllable written on them. Yet this Vacuity, now under your Consideration, was not designed, or compiled, upon the Inducement, but full sore against the Author's Will, who has been forced to suppress a Multitude of his choicest things, in Compliance with Mr. Stationer; a Person of so scrupulous Intellectuals, as to refuse to print Things which, he said, he could not understand.

(D'Urfey 163)

The wit in this page depends on the paradox that the less it says, which in this case is nothing, the more it says. Placing himself within the venerable satiric tradition of the paradoxical encomium or ironic eulogy, which praises trivial things, D'Urfey's narrator praises nothing. To praise nothing presents the greatest challenge a wit can face, a challenge met, for instance, by Swift's Hack in the Tale (208) and by Fielding in “An Essay on Nothing.”¹⁵

That Gabriel's textual hiatus needs a context, a history of nothing, to account for his ironic display of erudition, confirms the adage that “only nothing can be created from nothing.” D'Urfey, however, aims at more than the negative theology in Norris's mysticism. It is true that D'Urfey's chasm satirizes the mystic's worship of silence, based on the claim that nothing can be predicated of God, that words tell us what He is not, never what He is. Yet another target may be found in Richard Bentley's infamous Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris (1697). Just before the hiatus, D'Urfey suggests the well-known debate between the ancients and the moderns when this narrator supposes that the reader, “grown weary of the Words Sensible and Intelligible,” will comply with his humour to “change them for the Terms Old and New” (162). Some fragmented Latin lines which begin the hiatus on page 162 provide stronger evidence. But when Gabriel gives an outrageously elaborate scheme (which we will discuss below) to interpret the chasm, we know that the inventor of “conjectural criticism,” Bentley, is intended. In his scholarly effort to expose the alleged “Epistles of Phalaris” as a forgery, Bentley offends the popular essayist William Temple, who holds up the Epistles as proof of the superiority of the ancient world over the modern. Despite being right about the forgery, the satire in Swift's Tale of a Tub wins sympathy for Temple, the gentleman amateur, by depicting the learned Bentley as a foolish pedant. The ancients-moderns debate is well known to most eighteenth-century readers, but less known is the hiatus in the classical text through which Bentley sees the forgery and embarrasses Temple.

To instruct us on the “Method of making a Chasm, or Hiatus,” D'Urfey chooses Bentley's method of conjectural emendation as his model. One of the most conjectural, or speculative, moments in Bentley's text occurs when Bentley discovers a previously unnoticed hiatus in a text taken from a marble engraving. The audacity of Bentley's method stirs Charles Boyle, editor of the Epistles, to call Bentley a “young Phaeton” who mounts his chariot to drive “boldly” through the “loftiest region of the critic” but tumbles down “headlong in a most miserable manner” (Bentley 1: 297). What Boyle and Bentley disagree on is how to interpret a text engraved on the Arundel Marble. Bentley argues that the engraver has omitted some lines from his original text, obscuring important chronological data related to Thespis, the inventor of tragedy (Bentley 275-304). Chronology serves the crucial function of establishing a basis for comparing facts relevant to the tyrant Phalaris's reign. Inconsistent references to money, towns, and people, for example, reveal the medieval forgery. Bentley, furthermore, astutely shows that the epistles are written in Attic, rather than in the more appropriate Dorian dialect used in Phalaris's reign. Most of the lacunae, or chasms, in Swift's Tale do not parody Bentley's daring through legitimate use of chasms, but rather they parody esoteric knowledge. Guthkelch and Smith's edition of the Tale rightly points out that D'Urfey's “‘chasms’ are partly imitated from the Tale” (36n3). D'Urfey's parody, however, concentrates more specifically than Swift's on the conjectural, speculative quality of Bentley's influential critical method.

Attempting to absorb the reader into the Bentleyan kind of learned speculation, Gabriel follows the hiatus with the words “These, O Europe, are wonderful Speculations, nice, dark and abstruse, but important; the Philosophy lies deep absconded, but may easily be drawn out, and laid open in the following Scheme” (164). The narrator begins the scheme with geometric and algebraic equations of “Cubick Sections and Conick Roots” (164). With an eye on the reader, he adds that these equations will proceed “Graphically, but always Parallelipipedonically, when the thing can be conveniently so done” (164). He then graphically presents an absurd equation which the “Ancients used to perform by nine Cyphers,” also represented by nine circles printed on the page in a square pattern, three by three. This mock-learned exercise ends with Gabriel claiming that from the whole procedure we arrive at Virgil's second Georgics. Lines 277-87 of the Georgics in Latin are followed by Ogilby's translation of them. The passage recommends to farmers a spacious pattern of tree-planting that Virgil compares to an army in loose formation preparing for battle. Ogilby's liberal translation turns the comparison of trees and soldiers into a mock-epic one where trees become circles: “Even so thy Circles thou, like Nine-Pins, place / That Lines may have both Elbow-room and Space” (166). Surprised to find that the elaborate scheme to explain the hiatus resolves into a game of bowling, the reader descends from the expectation of sublime speculation (on nothing) to a ridiculous game, which in the “learned” context means nothing.

Carried swiftly along the a-logical chain of association initiated by the hiatus, the reader's expectations, to echo a phrase, suddenly collapse into nothing (Kant, Critique of Judgement 199; qtd. in Freud 6: 199). Anticipating Freud, Kant's philosophical definition of laughter theoretically describes the “art of sinking” in D'Urfey's satiric practice. The sudden collapse of the reader's expectation that some meaning will conclude Gabriel's nonsensical associations does lead to laughter. But since so much of D'Urfey's text remains, in the end, nonsensical, we need to devote close consideration to the problem of how the wit of the lacuna functions differently from the scheme to explain it. D'Urfey's mock-interpretation of the lacuna fits Freud's definition of the nonsense joke as “play with thought,” yet the lacuna, like Sterne's famous marbled page, involves, in itself, no verbal processes. Similar to the nonsense joke, the humour of the lacuna relies on wit's power to bring suppressed mental processes into consciousness, processes which often reveal thoughts contrary to conscious intention. In fact, we can attribute the violent dislocation of narrative structure throughout D'Urfey's entire text to wit, which gives the Menippean satirist “freedom to include whatever comes to mind” (Tovey 58). The uniquely visual, non-verbal process behind the riddle of the lacuna, however, emerges most effectively in Northrop Frye's analysis of the visual and musical elements of literature in his theory of charm and riddle.

In Menippean satire, the narrator's tendency toward psychologically regressive associations frequently takes the reader to the sources of the creative process itself. Gabriel's answer to the riddle of the lacuna, for instance, holds together only by a loose, arbitrary set of visual and aural associations. His prose style, here and throughout his rambling, digressive discourse on the intelligible world, reflects the associative rhythm of what Northrop Frye calls a “free prose” style (Well-Tempered Critic 82). Through Gabriel, D'Urfey's style reminds us of Sterne, and of Rabelais, whose “disintegrating approach of form and logical connection,” Frye believes (Well-Tempered Critic 82), is congenial to prose satire. Unlike the finished prose of Johnson and the finished verse of Pope, the broken syntax of Sterne's aposiopesis and dash only approach the sentence. D'Urfey most closely resembles the associative rhythm of Burton's writing in the Anatomy of Melancholy. With its “quotations, references, allusions, titles of books, Latin tags, short sharp phrases, long lists and catalogues,” Frye calls the Anatomy “a masterpiece of free prose” (Well-Tempered Critic 83). Because the associative rhythm “represents the process of bringing ideas into articulation” (Frye, Well-Tempered Critic 99), it clarifies a basic element in the process of Gabriel's wit.

The only twentieth-century critic, after Freud, who has systematically dealt with how artists bring ideas into articulation in the creative process is Northrop Frye. For the aural and visual elements of subconscious association in the artist, Frye uses the terms melos and opsis, respectively. Identifying paranomasia or puns as one of the essential elements of verbal creation, Frye develops a contrast between verbal wit and hypnotic incantation, which he calls oracle. Wit and oracle are virtually indistinguishable in paranomasia, or the regressive stage, where the association of sounds and images rises, uncontrolled, into consciousness. But, as the associative process becomes controlled by consciousness, wit and oracle represent separate functions. Wit, addressed to the awakened intelligence, Frye says, “makes us laugh; incantation is humourlessly impressive” (Anatomy 276). More significantly for the self-conscious detachment in D'Urfey and Menippean satire, Frye states, “Wit detaches the reader; the oracle absorbs him” (Anatomy 276-77). Oracle, the musical aspect of language, and wit, the visual aspect, Frye later renames “charm” and “riddle,” respectively (Anatomy 278, 280).

Denominating the visual creative process as “riddle” stems, for Frye, partly from the puzzling effect it has on the reader. The name is also appropriate for the process of reducing language to a visible form, since “Riddle is from the same root as read: in fact ‘read a riddle’ was practically a verb with a cognate object, like ‘tell a tale’ or ‘sing a song’” (Frye, “Charms” 124). The defining characteristic of the riddle is a “fusion of sensation and reflection, to use an object of sense experience to stimulate mental activity in connection with it” (Frye, Anatomy 280). Ironically, Gabriel's lacuna is a riddle without an object of sense experience because his theory will not allow thought to originate from objects of sense. Ideas, occasioned by God's intervention, alone stimulate mental activity. The riddle's pictorial affinities relate it to the visual aspect of emblems, conceits, ciphers, acrostics, rebuses, concrete and shaped poetry. Frye's observations on the riddle's relationship to the emblem and the conceit concern D'Urfey most.

The “strong bias” Frye sees in the riddle “toward humour and joking, to puzzle and paradox, to a sense of absurdity in juxtaposing of visual images and ideas” (“Charms” 141) well describes the techniques and effect of D'Urfey's peep-show as an emblem of the Ideal World. Frye's notion of the riddle as a “verbal spider-web” (“Charms” 139) also conveys something important about its effect. To spring the verbal trap of the riddle without being caught like Gabriel, the reader must “guess” the object described, or circumscribed, by the circle of words. Until it is solved, Frye informs us, the riddle acts like a charm, a magic charm whose compelling, hypnotic power restricts our freedom to act. Despite locating the charm's power in an anthropological context, Frye's theory parallels Freud's psychological explanation of the nonsense joke's power to lure us in through our desire to know and see. Trying to point to the object outside the verbal construct represents “the revolt of the intelligence against the hypnotic power of commanding words” (Frye, “Charms” 137). Delaying the reader's referential search for meaning constitutes an essential pleasure of the text for the reader. Yet Sterne reminds us in Tristram Shandy that the author shares in that playful dalliance for, as Tristram says to the reader, “‘tis enough to have thee in my power” (7.6.584).

The most common forms of verbal trap in D'Urfey's text, besides the spurious references and allusions, are emblems and conceits, such as the Hobbesian centaur. The paradoxical metaphor or conceit, along with the emblem and the shaped poem or technopaignia, represents the principal technical development of the seventeenth-century poetics of wit. The conceit, which marks the style of many Menippean satires, resembles the riddle by fusing a concrete image with an abstract concept. Since his text remains so well known in the twentieth century, this “conceited style” (New 67) has been noticed in Sterne's Tristram Shandy, but not in other Menippean authors. Sterne renders us another valuable service by linking his own pictorialism with the emblem and other typographical oddities like the Greek technopaignia. By appropriating the emblem tradition for his own typographical oddities, Sterne provides the literary context necessary to appreciate the visual wit of D'Urfey's lacuna.

The riddling quality in the emblem usually requires that a supplementary “motto,” or word be added to aid the reader's understanding. At times, Sterne follows this didactic tradition. Tristram, for example, supplies a motto for the famous flourish of Trim's stick printed on the page: “A thousand of my father's most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy” (9.5.744). Drawing a straight line across the page to show how well his narrative could proceed, Tristram later refers to the line as the “emblem of moral rectitude” (6.40.572). D'Urfey's elaborate scheme to explain his lacuna, which leads to Virgil's Second Georgics, parodies the didactic emblem. That D'Urfey regards his lacuna as an emblem may be inferred from Sterne's examples above, as from the one about to follow, below.

In his vain attempts to keep his autobiographical narrative moving chronologically forward, Tristram admits to feeling that the world is “beset on all sides with mysteries and riddles” (9.22.776). Tristram communicates the “mysteries and riddles” of life through his visual wit, which starts, appropriately, with the Rabelaisian riddle of Tickletoby's mare:

Who was Tickletoby's mare!—Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read,—or, by the knowledge of the great saint Paraleipomenon—I tell you beforehand, you had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading, by which your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been unable to unravel the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.

(3.36.268)

The reader's having to guess the moral of the motley emblem makes it a riddle. The reader may also suspect that Tristram's self-conscious interest in his own processes of expression “lies mystically hid” under most of his riddles. Speaking of Tristram's diagrammatic lines depicting the narrative of the first five volumes, one of Sterne's readers states that the submerged metaphor in the word “line” erupts into a page of “graphic wit that reveals the very root processes of language” (Holtz 83; see Tristram Shandy 6.40.570-72).

Having bypassed the restraints of his own psychological and social decorum, Tristram's visual wit seems satirically designed to bypass the reader's sense of decorum as well. Tristram says that “the eye … has the quickest commerce with the soul,—gives a smarter stroke and leaves something more inexpressible upon the fancy, than words can either convey—or sometimes get rid of” (5.7.432). Frye's term “verbal abstract expressionism” (“Varieties” 171), which we might use to describe the technique of Tristram's black and motley emblems, and indeed of D'Urfey's lacunae, suggests that the rational censor of judgment has been suppressed rather than the imaginative process. In Dryden's words, the “Wild and Lawless” faculty of the poet's imagination has been given free rein by the learned wit (Ker 1: 8). Disregarding imitation of reality, Tristram and Gabriel abstract a quality of some thing and represent it the way it appears to their imagination. The abstract nature of the emblems gives them an enigmatic quality that allows the reader to participate in producing their meaning. The emblems “leave something … inexpressible upon the fancy” which the reader may try to express as if guessing the answer of a riddle.

The riddle in D'Urfey and Sterne transforms their relationship with their reader from an innocent to a complicitous one. While critics have discussed the “relations of complicity” that Sterne foists upon his reader, no-one has adequately connected this relationship to the witty emblems and other typographical oddities. The “relations of complicity” represent the wit's endeavour to tempt the reader into a playful game of wit. Modern critics like John Stedmond and Richard Lanham have taken seriously the “spirit of play” (Stedmond 100n12) in Sterne; but even these seminal books do not fully integrate visual wit with rhetorical wit. Adopting the word technopaignia for these emblems and other tyographical tricks will help inform the playful relationship between writer and reader. The Greek technopaignia contributes significantly to the English emblem tradition, and the word itself is a visual “game of art” which need not be limited to verse.¹⁶

Visually graphic wit extends to the typographical under Sterne's newly canonized patron of satiric attack, “Saint Paraleipomenon.” Sterne's figure is saintly, for it represents “Things omitted in the body of a work,” many things which will remain omitted and not “appended as a supplement” because of their scandalous content (269n2-3; see OED, “paraleipomenon”). The figure may, however, leave something in the reader's imagination. Paraleipomenon's ironic figure, representing nothing, or something absent, relates to the praise of nothing, a locus classicus of the paradoxical encomium. Menippean satirists invoke Saint Paraleipomenon's spirit most often, through elisions veiled with the asterisk and the dash. Textual elision stimulates the reader to speculate on what lies hidden beneath the veil. One of Sterne's most sexually charged ellipses comes from the good-natured Toby. Defending Mrs. Shandy's refusal of Walter's male midwife, Dr. Slop, on the grounds of modesty, Toby states,” My sister I dare say … does not care to let a man come so near her * * * *” (2.6.115). Granted, the riddle solves easily in this case. D'Urfey's “epitaph on a Maidenhead” invites a similar sexual object of reflection when he addresses the epitaph “To Mrs. C—s” (128). Oliver Goldsmith rightly calls Sterne the “successor of D'Urfey,” but adds that where Sterne “does not excel him in wit, the world must confess he out-does him in obscenity” (Works 2:224, Citizen of the World; qtd. in Howes, Yorick 33).

The Menippean satirist's play with printer's conventions such as the ellipsis forms part of the technopaignia, or game of art that transforms the material text, the book, into an aesthetic object.¹⁷ Both D'Urfey and Sterne, for instance, omit pages and chapters in their texts. Tristram feels obliged to tear out Chapter 24 in Volume Four. The printer honours the author by skipping by ten the numerical pagination. In Volume Nine, Chapters 18 and 19 are left blank, but are restored in Chapter 25. Tristram looks upon a chapter “which has, only nothing in it, with respect,” but goes on to say that nothing “is no way a proper subject for satire” (9.25.785). D'Urfey plays with his text by also promising chapters, like Section “XLVI. Of Criticks” (sig. A6^v), and Section “XV. The Divided Heart” (sig. A2^r) as well as an index (193), which never comes. If Tristram Shandy is, as one of Sterne's contemporaries states, a “riddle without an object” (Howes, Sterne 169), the same can be said of D'Urfey's Essay. Their texts appear as riddles without an object by refusing to respect the rules of referentiality. But, if their referential riddles reduce book and word to empty signifiers by pulling the wool over our eyes, their words also approach the empty signifier of music by playing with sound so much that it only seems to echo sense and becomes nonsense.

Menippean satire's “free play of intellectual fancy” (Frye, Anatomy 310) does not rely exclusively on trompe l'oeil. Learned wits ravish the reader's ears with “Song unutterable” (D'Urfey 139). As if aspiring to the condition of music that, according to Walter Pater, all art should, D'Urfey fills his book with song. D'Urfey's musical exuberance also manifests itself in the popular songbook of the eighteenth century, Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy (edited by D'Urfey), where he contributes 350 songs (see vi). Except for his political songs, the content of his court and country songs tends strongly toward the sexually explicit. Of the latter kinds found in the Essay, “The Ideal or Precarious Beauty” (40), “The Mourning Nymph” (49), and “A Vow to Cupid, or the Fair Sacrifice” (200) typify D'Urfey's lyrical practice. He interrupts a less typical, ten-page ballad, “Pope Joan's Kissing-Dance” (28), for instance, at a point when a sexual embrace appears immanent between “Roger,” slang for the phallus, and Amy, his “Consort” (31). The very title alludes to the sexually transgressive fable of a female pope. Although the Essay boasts many of the kinds of songs that made D'Urfey famous in his day, his wit regresses beyond the song's sexually transgressive subject matter. D'Urfey's music turns from the meaning of words to the sounds of words themselves.

Taking “the adventures of an idea” (Bakhtin 94) from the lighted regions of the eye to the dark caverns of the ear, D'Urfey ridicules Norris's idealism by treating his words concretely, focussing on their sound or visual appearance, rather than treating them abstractly as signifiers of ideas. Ironically, he empties words of their contents in his table of contents. In the title to Section 32, he writes:

A short Apostrophe to the Ideal World, in which all the principal Matters are brought in by the Bye: viz. an Extasy, a Welcome, Glory, Thanks and Acquaintance. A Quotation, Day all abroad, Mirror of Intelligences, Pillars of the Fabrick of Wisdom, Chaos, All and Nothing, Quakers, Eclypes, Shadows, Visions and six beautiful Non-entities; besides the Haecceiteiteiteiceiceitieiceity of the Haecceiteiteiteicceiceity of the Haecceiteiteiteiceity of the Haecceiteiteiteity of the Haecceiteiteity of the Haecceiteiteity of the Haecceiteity of the Haecceity of HAEC.

(sig A4^v)

Even as Gabriel describes the overflowing “Extasy” of his vision of the Ideal World, the words he uses to capture its transcendent ideality overflow. But, while the ideal world defies description, so his words, failing to signify the “Haecceity of HAEC,” the “thisness of this,” the individuality of the individual, also defy understanding. To the eye, the meaning of Gabriel's words is opaque; to the ear, he leaves behind a remainder of meaningless sound.

When Gabriel makes music itself his theme, the satirist takes issue with the way the idealist “makes sense” of music. The contradiction in Gabriel's “musica speculativa,” (Hollander, Untuning 24) his theory of music, stems from the paradox that harmonious music of the spheres, the foundational assumption of the idealist theory, transcends the hearing of human sense. D'Urfey takes his lead from Butler who, in Hudibras, expresses the contradiction with his usual pointed wit. The idealist makes the “music of the spheres, / So loud, it deafens mortal ears” (Hudibras 118). Still under the influence of his ecstatic vision of the raree-show, Gabriel makes the same point more obscurely:

Nor did the intelligible Orbs surcease their Raree Harmony, but blest my Ear with Song unutterable, (not carnal Ear, but that which inly hears the gentle Whispers and still Voice of Truth, in Philosophick Slumbers) nor does its Loudness drown the harmony in silence, as of old of Chrystal Spheres by learned Sage was sung. For Who is with the Faculty endured of innate Deafness, here has the Privilege undoubted to enjoy the rapturous Song

                                                                                                    (hear Even Deafness' self has equal Power to Th'Ideal Musick of Ideal Spheres.)

(139)

The blank space parodies the mysterious silence of negative theology, which devalues the “carnal Ear” and pins its faith on impossible ecstatic states where only the deaf hear the “Song unutterable.”

Gabriel inadvertently weakens the veracity of his claim to truth when he reports his vision of the heavenly sphere “in Philosophick slumbers.” Earlier on in his text, before he begins his voyage into the Ideal World, Gabriel confesses that his mind was too restless to make the journey until “Morpheus in great Compassion step'd in to my Relief and not only gave me present Ease, but an infallible Amulet against any Relapse” (112). Gabriel has fallen under the power of Morpheus, the god of sleep. Gabriel's dissociative and incantatory rhetoric, then, reflects the confused mental condition of a person falling under the hypnotic power of some magic charm, or a drowsy person falling asleep. Even when Gabriel is not writing songs, the repetitive patterns of sound in his discourse overwhelm the sound. Descanting on truth appearing in person in the Ideal World, he writes:

Nor is it any Wonder, that Truth should be here in Person, when very Personality in Person, and the Person also of Personality of the Personality of the Person of Personality is here to be seen in Person. All other things have only the Shadow of a Person, whereas this is the True, the only True, Substantial Compleat Person; and a very Charming Person it is indeed.

(144)

The “charming” effects of this “person” spring from the word's repetition which, as Frye argues, has the effect of breaking down and confusing the conscious will. The repeated sounds act like a charm and hold those who hear the sounds “spellbound” or compel them to certain courses of action (Frye, “Charms” 126).

Gabriel's self-professed reason for being strongly attracted to music is the “Idea of Harmony” (154). Music's association with the god of light, through Apollo, who also serves as the god of music, offers further incentive to an idealist who seeks enlightenment. We have already shown that D'Urfey subverts the idealist's desire to reify the musical abstraction of harmony and proportion by showing that one need not even hear music to appreciate these qualities. Moreover, to ensure that the sensual qualities of music get a fair hearing, D'Urfey emphasizes the sound associations of language in Gabriel's text. There is, however, another level of parody related to music and aimed at the learned debate between the ancients and moderns. Sir William Temple's preference for the ancients over the moderns provokes perhaps a more personal satiric reaction from D'Urfey. Even though D'Urfey has attacked Temple's learned enemy, Richard Bentley, the text's parody of classical learning has, now and then, Temple for its butt. For example, the fragmentary mock-epic poem which Gabriel eventually entitles “Phoebus's Oration / Canto IV. / The Argument” (205) carnivalizes the epic and the god Apollo. Apollo's epic song complains about the loss of his oxen to Ulysses and his thieving band of sailors. All appearances of classical dignity, however, vanish when the argument preceding the poem mentions the rape of Apollo's “Milk-maid, Susanna Skimmington of Cheesewick, who would not have been ravish'd for Any Thing” (206). The distinctly modern, sexually vulgar tone of Apollo's song concerning the rape of an English milkmaid falls too far short of heroic virtue to win Temple's approval.

D'Urfey's satire hits closer to the mark when Gabriel quotes Temple's “Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning.” Temple's lament over the loss of western civilization's former greatness gives him to ask, “What have we remaining of Magick, by which the Indians, the Chaldeans, the Aegyptians, were so renown'd” (155: Temple 469-70). Gabriel replies to Temple by referring him to modern magicians such as Faustus, Friar Bacon, and “Vandermaster the German” (158). But, given what we know of D'Urfey's reputation as a songwriter, we are especially interested in Gabriel's reply to Temple's questions regarding music:

What are become of the Charms of Musick (says the great Author that chose himself to represent the Ignorance of the modern People) Charms by which Men and Beasts, Fishes, Fowls and Serpents, were so frequently enchanted and their very Natures chang'd; by which the Passions of Men were rais'd to the greatest Height and Violence, and then as suddenly appeas'd, so as they might be justly said to be turn'd into Lyons or Lambs, into Wolves or into Harts, by the Power and charms of this Admirable Art?

(154: Temple 469)

Gabriel's answer to Temple places all of the charms of music “in the Ideal World” (154). Gabriel finds the “Idea of Harmony” infinitely more charming than the “most exquisite compositions of Purcel, Baptist, or Carrissime” (154), the moderns.

Signs of the author's presence show through the narrative persona at the mention of the composer “Purcel.” D'Urfey's success as a songwriter is “due in no small measure to the composers who set his songs to music,” and foremost among them, Cyrus Day tells us, is Henry Purcell (Songs 33). D'Urfey's desire to reveal himself in musical contexts, albeit indirectly, takes a less flattering shape when he appears as Apollo, “God of Wit” (74). When Apollo discovers his cattle are stolen, the god of music stutters, as D'Urfey did:

                                                                                                              he swore
This was a Rogue, and that a Whore;
They ne'er had heard the like before.
Conva-va-vart ye now, quo' he,
Would ye were all at York, for me.
Death and Fuf-furies!

(75)

In D'Urfey's satiric style, the charms of music travel through the lower, sensual medium of the ear. Depicting the god of music as a babbling stutterer takes the reader to the sound associations out of which the creative process develops rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and puns.

D'Urfey indicates his determination to show Temple what has happened to the charms of music while analyzing the essay “Of Heroic Virtue.” Gabriel infers that those, like Temple, who advocate the superiority of the ancients believe that value proceeds from the distance with which a thing is placed relative to the present time. The older the better. He spots the parallel assumption in Temple's essay that spatial distance from the place we presently occupy determines value. It is not remarkable, then, reasons Gabriel, that the Greeks and Romans have culturally outstripped their “Contemporaries, the modern French and English, chiefly by reason that the Chinese are great Wits” (85). Gabriel's nonsensical logic leads even further away from the meaning of Temple's essay, which Gabriel cites in his margin, to the playful association of words Temple gives him:

Nor is it less Remarkable, that no Kingdom, or Commonwealth, whatever (always excepting those unrival'd States in Utopia) is allow'd to be framed, model'd and constituted with such a Vein, a Strain, a REACH, a RACE, a STRETCH, a FETCH, a JIRK, a QUIRK, a SPIRIT, POWDER of Politick and Critique, as those of China and Peru, which are OUT-LYING Nations, I don't know how far beyond the Worlds End.

(86)

Gabriel's wordplay fails even to register on Addison's typology of false wit, though we may loosely place it under the category of the pun, which Addison describes as a “Sound, nothing but Sound” (263). Ironically, Gabriel succumbs to the charms of music, not to the meaning, in Temple's essay.

That the processes of charm and riddle are indistinguishable in their formative stages justifies our calling a charming quality of language false wit. Expressing in a pointed phrase his readiness to supply a “Pun ambiguous, or Conundrum quaint” (149) demonstrates just how closely Gabriel places the play of sound with the play of thought. D'Urfey at his most psychologically regressive does not, however, go as far as Sterne. Sterne's wit goes beyond wordplay and puns, words which sound alike, to sounds themselves. Tristram's “fiddling” in Volume Five, for instance, combines the sensual pleasures of onomatopoeia with sexual slang: “—Twaddle diddle, tweddle diddle,—twiddle diddle,—put—trut—krish—krash—krush.—I've undone you, Sir” (5.15.444). The “crushing” crescendo to Tristram's wordplay foreshadows the crushing of his “nose” by the window sash two chapters later. The analogy between Tristram's sexual “fiddling” and the window sash proves that for the Shandy family “nothing was well hung” (5.17.449), even in the imagination. However, while Sterne's infantile babble more often breaches sexual decorum, D'Urfey's babble more often breaches the psychological decorum of rational, adult thinking. Gabriel's obsession for transcendent universal ideas clashes with the unwanted intrusion of the senses and the singularity of material things, especially the “words congeal'd” as things (143).

Implicit in our discussion of D'Urfey's satire on metaphysic wit lies the false dichotomy of true and false wit. To undo this opposition, the Menippean satirists' false wit, their manipulation of words and print conventions, such as the lacunae, need to be recognized, not only as equally important as true wit, but as the very condition which makes true wit possible. We have shown that the move to exclude the true from the false wit repeats the traditional distinction of the literal and the metaphorical. Both literal meaning and true wit traditionally represent things in a reasonable and accurate way. False wit obscures representation and defers the acquisition of a single, fixed meaning. For example, Sterne's motley emblem and other visual conceits, his “typographical tricks,” are dismissed as “debatable examples of wit” (Howes, Yorick 34). Francis Quarles makes a remark in 1629 which throws into relief the riddling quality associated with wit and gives a clue to its aesthetic function. Quarles criticizes the “itch of wit” in conceits or “strong lines” such as John Donne's. Quarles censures conceit-writers for venturing too far “in trusting to the Oedipean conceit of their ingenious Reader” (Quarles 240; qtd. in Williamson 47). Oedipus gains his heroic stature by solving the Sphinx's riddle. Authors who cast the reader in the role of Oedipus, for Quarles, however, permit the reader to “felloniously father the created expositions of other men” (24). Quarles feels, in other words, that wit allows the reader too much interpretive authority.

Quarles's witty conceit on the “Oedipean conceit” of the reader demands the restoration of wit's true father, an author fully responsible for his meaning. True wit restores patriarchal authority to its author. What happens when we conceive of the rivalry between author and reader outside the Oedipean rivalry? Far from attempting to take responsibility for their meaning, Menippean authors frequently abandon meaning altogether. Rather than constructing a rivalry to authorize interpretation, the Menippean satirist's false wit, in the form of catachreses, riddles, typographical trickery, and magical charms, plays with the possibility of meaning.

To avoid reconstructing false wit as a patriarchal wit, I will rename false wit “mother wit.” In “Alexander's Feast,” Dryden refers to a female patron of music as bestowing “mother wit” (1433) on a deserving musical enthusiast, Timotheus. Mother wit aptly names the qualities of false wit, including musical enthusiasm, a quality marginalized and even excluded in typologies of wit. False wit, like music, represents a play of empty signifiers to which a plurality of meanings may be given. Mother wit preserves the readerly alterity that Quarles would deny through his Oedipean conceit. The tragic figure of Oedipus, then, would become the comic Aufsitzer. Instead of relying on his own wits to possess the answer to the riddle of his existence, at the expense of his mother, Oedipus would give up the answer, the pursuit of complete possession. He would return to an earlier moment before possession, recognize the Sphinx as mother wit, and pursue the play of mirrors, the existence of the riddle.

Notes

1. See OED, “speculate,” which gives the etymology as specere, to see or look.

2. For Norris on the self-conscious mind, see 2: 279; see also Malebranche 237-39; and McCracken's commentary, 170-72.

3. See Acworth's useful discussion, pp. 136-37.

4. For Norris on the sensible body, see 2: 370.

5. For biographical information on D'Urfey, see Cyrus Day.

6. For further vagaries of Gabriel's Neoplatonic nonsense, see D'Urfey's latin poem on pages 17-18. The Latin passage, even in translation, reads bombastically. The references to the obscure, antique figures Belos and Ninus probably came from Temple's essay “Of Heroic Virtue,” pp. 317, 398.

   CONCERNING THE PLATONIC IDEA AS ARISTOTLE UNDERSTOOD IT.

   Tell, O guardians of the sacred groves of the Goddess; and you, O blessed mother Memory of nine-fold holiness; and you, O leisured Eternity, you who recline far off in an immense cavern, guarding the annals and the fixed laws of Jove, and the registers of Heaven, and the diaries of Gods: what is that first Source from whose image skilled Nature fashioned the human race—eternal, incorruptible, as ancient as the Pole, singular and universal, a likeness of God? That Twin of unwed Pallas will not stay rooted, the internal offspring of the mind of Jove; yet however much It is more universal than Nature, It nevertheless exists apart, as it were, alone; and—a wondrous thing!—It touches upon a fixed space and location—whether It, the sempiternal companion of the stars, wanders through the tenfold ranks of heaven and dwells on the globe of the Moon nearest to the lands of the Earth; or whether, resting among the forgetful souls by the waters of Lethe, It lies dormant, about to enter a body; or whether, perchance in a remote region of lands, It goes forth, a huge, gigantic Archetype of men, and, tremendous, lifts up its head to them—greater than Atlas, the bearer of stars. The Dircaean augur, to whom blindness gave a profound light, did not perceive it in his lofty heart; nor did the winged swift descendant of Pleione reveal It in the silent night to the wise chorus of seers, nor did the Assyrian priest know It, although he mentions the ancient ancestors of antique Ninus, and olden Belos, and glorious Osiris. Nor did that thrice-great Hermes, blessed in his triple name (though learned in the arcane) bequeath It to the worshipers of Isis. But you, the perennial Glory of the field of Academe (if you first introduced these marvels to the schools)—now will you call back the poets, exiles from your city—you yourself the greatest teller of tales; or, as a teacher, you yourself will go abroad.

   (D'Urfey 17-18)

   My deep appreciation goes to Margaret Drummond, at the University of Alberta, for translating the obscurities of D'Urfey's Latin.

7. See Vickers 46, for a justification of Sprat's paranoia in the History. See also Jackson and Cope's introduction to the History, xxvi.

8. See Derrida, “White Mythology” 253-54. In order to convey the philosopher's impossible desire to capitalize on a word's loss of metaphorical meaning, Derrida uses the French word usure (another metaphor), which combines the paradoxical meanings of wearing down, as with coins, and usury, the accumulation of too much interest. Derrida employs this metaphor to exemplify the way meaning wears down or accumulates with metaphors, as we struggle to fix the meaning of things. Norris hopes to profit from reactivating the dead metaphors of sight in the words “theory” and “idea” but, ironically, loses control of them by appealing to metaphors of light.

9. See Derrida, “White Mythology” 209n2.

10. See Hoyles's discussion of this passage in relation to Norris as a transitional figure between old medieval scholasticism and new Enlightenment philosophy (112).

11. See Kirk's index for other examples of “Fantastic Imaginary voyages.”

12. See Acworth's discussion, 142-44.

13. See Frye, “Charm” 147.

14. See Acworth 127-32.

15. For the tradition of the paradoxical encomium, see Miller; and Kirk, who extends the tradition to Menippean satire in Menippean Satire (see index, under “Paradoxical encomia”).

16. On the meaning of the word “technopaignia” see A Greek-English Lexicon. For the historical influence of the Greek technopaignia, see Hollander, Vision (chapter 12); and Adler.

17. See Peter J. de Voogd's two informative articles on Sterne's game of art with printed book conventions.

Works Cited

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Adler, Jeremy. “Technopaignia, carmina figurata, and Bilder Reime: Seventeenth-Century Figured Poetry in Historical Perspective.” Comparative Criticism 4 (1982): 108-47.

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