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The Bricoleurroman:
Notes Toward Redefining the Anatomy and Menippea
Brady Harrison
Time is suffering. — Carlo Rovelli
The certainty of death is attended with uncertainties, in time, manner, places.
—Thomas Browne
In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye observes that “it is the anatomy in particular that has baffled critics, and there is hardly any fiction writer deeply influenced by it who has not been accused of disorderly conduct” (313). In fact, according to Frye, the “usual critical approach to the form resembles that of the doctors in Brobdingnag, who after great wrangling finally pronounced Gulliver a lusus naturae” (313). Although “baffled” may be too strong a term for contemporary critics—after all, generations of readers and scholars have benefitted from the definitions, explications, and analyses of Frye, Mikhail Bakhtin, Howard D. Weinbrot, and others—a great many of the works that concern us here continue to challenge the expectations, sense-making categories, and interpretative strategies of readers and scholars. As Frye points out, some of the difficulties in reading works such as Tristram Shandy and Moby-Dick seemed to stem, and perhaps still stem, from the ascendancy of the novel in the popular and critical imagination: in works that Frye dubs the “anatomy,” “the intellectual structure built up from the story makes for violent dislocations in the customary logic of narrative, though the appearance of carelessness that results reflects only the carelessness of the reader or his tendency to judge by a novel-centered conception of fiction” (310). While Frye may, once again, be too hard on readers and scholars, part of the problem may lie in the critical terminology employed by Frye and others. That is, the term, “anatomy,” may be helpful only in certain contexts, and may, in fact, contribute to difficulties in making sense of what Sterne and his fellow travelers are up to.
Although Frye offers a serviceable description of the genre he dubs “anatomy,” the manner in which he adopts the term perhaps betrays a sense on his part that the word is not quite the right thing. While he rightly acknowledges the prominence of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy in the tradition, and while he employs the term for his own synoptic analysis, he does not mount a very persuasive argument for naming these seemingly odd works of literature: “The word ‘anatomy’ in Burton’s title means a dissection or analysis, and expresses very accurately the intellectualized approach of his form. We may as well adopt it as a convenient name to replace the cumbersome and in modern times rather misleading ‘Menippean satire’” (311-12). If we can concur with Frye that “Menippean satire,” or “menippea” as Bakhtin labels the form (Problems 114), may be cumbersome and misleading, at least in terms of the works that concern us here, “anatomy” does not work much better, and his phrasing, “may as well adopt it as a convenient name,” appears somewhat fainthearted and unconvincing. While the term accurately describes a great deal of the force of works such as Melville’s masterpiece, Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, its usefulness in helping us make sense of, say, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones, or Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children seems less certain.[i] In sum, we need a different critical descriptor, one that more accurately describes the narrative practices, strategies, concerns, and thematics of authors working in the wake of Tristram Shandy, the foundational and still most important narrative in the tradition that concerns us.
In lieu of “anatomy” or “menippea” (or “shandy”), I propose another term: bricoleurroman. The compound draws in the first place on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ analysis in The Savage Mind: the “bricoleur” is “someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman” (17).[ii] In the second, we will borrow the suitably international term—the form, although perhaps predominantly European and North American, has adherents beyond the Western world—that means both a tale of adventure or chivalry and novel. We will return to the logic of combining these terms in more detail, but at this point we can at least assert that “bricoleurroman” comes closer to the spirit of the form since Sterne than either “anatomy” or “menippea”: as Paul Surgi Speck, also citing Lévi-Strauss, notes, Sterne “is a bricoleur extraordinaire who shuffles and reshuffles material” (65). And, even as we will be relying a great deal on Frye, Bakhtin, and others in re-delineating the genre, before turning to a more detailed consideration of its key features—this essay is not a work of genealogy; a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of the form will have to wait for another, more spacious occasion—we can offer a working definition of this devious form: the bricoleurroman is a mixed-genre, often digressive, sometime self-reflexive, sometime parodic, sometime satiric, often comic, most often harrowing adventure- and idea-driven infinity machine narrative that puts considerable pressure on the reader and that features an often melancholic narrator (or protagonist) who fears and seeks to fly from (and yet inevitably toward) death. This definition, while seemingly a baggy monster that consists of too many moving parts to be helpful or anything like precise, suits, as we shall see, the form: often bursting at the seams with ideas, jokes, noses, desires, detours, derailments, dissections, critiques, adventures, shaggy dogs, philosophers, lists, and a truly profound fear of death, the bricoleurroman, as a voluminous, almost out-of-control, infinity-obsessed form, requires a capacious description.
I. Antecedents
As Bakhtin contends, “for the correct understanding of a genre [. . .] it is necessary to return to its sources” (Problems 106): if we have already offered a working primary definition of the form, in this section we can offer a more concise secondary definition: the bricoleurroman, in the wake of Tristram Shandy, represents, in varying measure, the fusion of the Menippean satire, anatomy, and novel. Drawing on these three traditions, and depending on their interests, ambitions, and inclinations, an author may, in bricoleur fashion, take up, revise, or reassemble the plots, settings, milieux, characters (or character types), themes, philosophies, and narrative strategies embedded within each of these forms. As Bakhtin argues, form is a kind of memory that exerts a pressure on acts of creation; put another way, form is a sort of DNA that brings forward plots, settings, milieux, characters, themes, and more:
“Does this mean that Dostoevsky proceeded directly and consciously from the ancient menippea? Of course not. In no sense was he a stylizer of ancient genres. Dostoevsky linked up with the chain of a given generic tradition at that point where it passed through his own time, although the past links in this chain, including the ancient link, were to a greater or lesser degree familiar and close to him [. . .]. Speaking somewhat paradoxically, one could say that it was not Dostoevsky’s subjective memory, but the objective memory of the very genre in which he worked, that preserved the peculiar features of the ancient menippea” (Problems 121).
If this is true for the pressure the menippea exerts, then we could argue that it is also true for the force the anatomy and novel exert on the minds and works of our authors, and we turn now to each of these antecedent genres.
We begin with the Menippean satire, a form that has its roots in the ancient world. Bakhtin captures, perhaps more than any other scholar, the exuberance of the genre, and in his analysis, the form brings forward the energies and practices of carnival, or “the people’s second life, organized on the basis of laughter. It is a festive life” (Rabelais 8):
“The carnivalized genre, extraordinarily flexible and as changeable as Proteus, capable of penetrating other genres, has had an enormous and as yet insufficiently appreciated importance for the development of European literatures. Menippean satire became one of the main carriers and channels for the carnival sense of the world in literature, and remains so to the present day” (Problems 113).
In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, he finds, in the carnivalized world view, “a new mode of interrelationship between individuals,” “carnivalistic mésalliances,” and “profanation,” among other qualities (123). These radical practices and carnival’s upside-down ways of being survive, albeit transformed into narrative, in the menippea and Bakhtin offers a list of what he sees as the form’s fourteen “basic characteristics” (Problems 114). These include—and here I emphasize some of the qualities that interest us most in this study—the “unrestrained use of the fantastic and adventure” (114), “an extraordinary philosophical universalism,” (114), “slum naturalism” (115) “a dialogic relationship to one’s own self” (117), and “a wide use of inserted genres: novellas, letters, oratorical speeches, symposia, and so on” (118), among others.[iii]
If Bakhtin categorizations radiate an excitement of their own, we probably should concur with Weinbrot that he is not always accurate in his history and definition of the form.[iv] In fact, Weinbrot’s much narrower definition and analysis emphasizes the critical aspects of the genre and excludes many of the more good-humored works that Bakhtin favors. As Weinbrot contends, following a list of more than thirty works ranging from Alice in Wonderland to The Waste Land, “This avalanche of titles is not the syllabus for a grandly ambitious course in Western letters from late antiquity to the late twentieth century. It is a small fraction of some thousand works that have been labeled ‘Menippean satire’ in about the last fifty years” (1).[v] According to Weinbrot, scholars (including Bakhtin and Frye) have gone too far, have expanded the list of works that we might consider as examples of Menippean satire beyond reason, and he argues that we must look to the foundational texts, including “Varro, Petronius, Lucian, Seneca, and Julian. I banish Apuleius for reasons that soon will become clear” (5).
As Weinbrot sees matters, the true Menippean satires—this includes, after the classical era, Swift and Pope but not Sterne—distill to two key features and two key tones:
“Menippean satire, then, is a form that uses at least two other genres, languages, cultures, or changes of voice to oppose a dangerous, false, or specious and threatening orthodoxy. In different exemplars, the satire may use either of two tones: the severe, in which the threatened angry satirist fails and become angrier still, or the muted in which the threatened angry satirist offers a partial antidote to the poison he knows remains” (6).
Weinbrot sees Menippean satire as serious business and he excludes The Golden Ass for being too genial, for being a narrative where the characters’ “comic, erotic, and magical adventures do not reflect a collapsing state” (8): “Fun in Apuleius remains fun; fun in the Menippean Dunciad, as in A Tale of a Tub, becomes frightening” (8). How far apart are Bakhtin and Weinbrot? Bakhtin finds The Golden Ass to be “a full-blown Menippean satire” (Problems 113).
In Frye, we can both advance our consideration of the hallmarks of the Menippean satire and make our transition to a consideration of the anatomy as a form: Frye too easily entangles two genres that, while there may be overlaps, have less in common than the entanglement suggests. On the positive side, Frye, like Bakhtin, captures the enthusiasms of the menippea: “The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior” (309). More, the form mixes prose and poetry—a mixture classical scholars call “the prosimetric” (Schmeling 484)—and “the Menippean satirist, dealing with intellectual themes and attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon” (311). While these assertions describe Menippean satire, this is also the moment where Frye trips and attempts to make equal two forms that should be thought of as distinct: “This creative treatment of exhaustive erudition is the organizing principle of the greatest Menippean satire in English before Swift, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy” (311).[vi] While I find Burton endlessly comic, diverting, and exhaustive, and while Burton cites the classical writers that Weinbrot names, nevertheless Menippean satire and Burton’s Anatomy differ in two fundamental manners: Burton’s majestic tome lacks even the rudimentary characters of, say, Swift’s A Tale of a Tub—we could scarcely count, I think, Democritus Junior—and anything like a narrative. Yes, many of the Menippeans attempt to overwhelm the reader, as Burton—laughing to himself—surely does, but one is a duck and the other a goose. Or, as Alistair Fowler puts it, “Menippean satire and systematic treatise are very different genres” (119).
To put the matter plainly: anatomies anatomize. Anatomies atomize. They dissect, they break their subjects into parts, categories, schemas; as Patrick Murray writes, “In figuring types of knowledge as organic entities, scholars were able to take on the role of the dissecting anatomist, investigating their subjects through cutting up and exploring its metaphorical viscera” (37). The anatomy offers system, vast erudition; they paraphrase and quote and seek to understand—even as they know that they finally cannot—the subject or object of scrutiny. As William H. Gass observes, Burton’s anatomy constitutes a vast, detailed structure: “the word ‘anatomy’ signifying its dissected analytical layout, its deployment of commentary descending through partitions, sections, members, into subsections, and adding to those body parts appendices, poetic addresses, a daunting synopsis, and a preface nearly the length of an ordinary book” (x-xi). Burton divides, lists, ruminates, jests, thinks along with, against, and about his innumerable sources, carefully constructs his barely numerable pages. He reads and writes, and then goes to the pub. Menippeans like their data, too, attempt to bury the reader in language, in pages, but only some seek to do what an anatomist does.[vii]
While many of Sterne’s successors anatomize, just as many do not, and Frye’s term should be applied only to those works that demonstrate a clear passion for surveying or breaking their subject into parts. Among all of Sterne’s descendants (that is, those writers whom we know read and admired Sterne—or have learned from one of more of his literary descendants—and take up at least some of his strategies, concerns, and themes), we see the impulse to anatomize most clearly in Melville. As Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford write, “In London in December 1849, Melville bought and read Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, reveling in its liberating gamesomeness toward the lofty task of bookmaking” (434). Yet Sterne himself, we might argue, can only be counted—even as he “borrows” frequently from Burton—as a rather inconsistent anatomist of the life of a country squire (in Walter) or a former military officer (in Uncle Toby), and Melville adapted the spirit of dissection more from his reading of Burton. Once more, from Parker and Hayford: “Beginning in 1847, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy served as Melville’s sonorous textbook on morbid psychology” (434), and, clearly, the impulse to atomize. As Ishmael remarks, in the process of trying to find meaning in everything from the whale’s spout to its head to its skeleton to the movement of its tail, “we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish” (292). Yet for all his endeavors, for all his efforts to understand what Moby Dick might be, he realizes that the process of anatomizing his subject will not answer the questions that haunt him: how can I make sense of what happened to the Pequod and its crew? what is the true nature and meaning of Moby Dick? As he laments, “Dissect him how I may, then, I go but skin deep; I know him not and never will” (296). An anatomy, Melville tells us, is doomed to failure; no matter how much you know, you will never truly know your subject.
To clarify the differences between Menippean satire and anatomy, and to further our case against Frye’s term for the genre, we can turn for a moment to Woolf’s Orlando. In the first instance, Woolf numbers herself among Sterne’s literary kin; in the comic Preface to her mock biography, Woolf writes, “Many friends have helped me in the writing of this book. Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne [. . .]–to name the first that come to mind” (5). More, Woolf wrote the Introduction to a 1928 edition of A Sentimental Journey; as she remarks, in that Introduction, of Tristram Shandy, “It is a world in which anything may happen. We hardly know what jest, what jibe, what flash of poetry is not going to glance suddenly through the gap which this astonishing agile pen has cut in the thick-set hedge of English prose” (vi). Woolf, in Orlando, does not work as an anatomist (she reflects, throughout, on the writer and their art, but could hardly be said to have anatomized the subject), but rather draws on Sterne (and, via Sterne, on Rabelais and Cervantes) and the Menippean satire form: just as Sterne parodies the autobiography and novel, Woolf parodies the biography and novel; like Tristram, Orlando goes on a rather fantastical journey (Tristram to the Continent, Orlando to Constantinople); like Tristram, Orlando has, at least by times, a vexed romantic and sexual life; yet whereas Tristram will do anything to slow the passage of time, Orlando gets around the problem of death simply by not dying.[viii] Sterne does so many different things, mixes so many genres and impulses and traditions in his masterpiece, that “anatomy” does neither Sterne nor the form justice.
To conclude this section, we now turn to the third form woven into the bricoleurroman, the novel, a genre that reaches back to the ancient world and that includes, in its deep lineage, works as diverse as The Matter of Britain, The Arabian Nights, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote, and more.[ix] Since we cannot, here, offer an anatomy of the novel, we will have to rely on just three descriptions of the form and its history. For the first, we will draw on the work of Ian Watt since Sterne sought, even as the novel in English emerged thanks to Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, to parody and interrogate the form and its realist impulses. As Watt argues in The Rise of the Novel,
“Formal realism, in fact, is the narrative embodiment of a premise that Defoe and Richardson accepted very literally, but which is implicit in the novel form in general: the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its readers with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions [. . .]” (378).
Against this definition of the realist novel, in the second instance, we can consider two rather more spacious and complementary definitions of the form, the first offered by Franco Moretti in the preface to the gargantuan critical collection, The Novel:
“[T]he novel is for us a great anthropological force, which has turned reading into pleasure and redefined the sense of reality, the meaning of individual existence, the perception of time and language. The novel as culture, then, but certainly also as form, or rather forms, plural, because in the two thousand years of its history one encounters the strangest creations, and high and low trade places at every opportunity, as the borders of literature are continuously, unpredictably expanded. At times, this endless flexibility borders on chaos” (ix).
Noting the form’s elasticity and rather tumultuous, endlessly inventive nature—he might well be describing the wild hybrid that concerns us here—Moretti perhaps finds company in Guido Mazzoni: “What is the novel today? [W]e might say this: Starting from a certain date, the novel became the genre in which one can tell absolutely any story in any way whatsoever” (16). If we were to follow this rather generous conclusion—and there may be reason to do so—we might agree with Viktor Shklovsky: “It is commonly stated that Tristram Shandy is not a novel. For those who make this statement only an opera is music and a symphony is disorder. Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel of world literature” (qtd in Bakhtin and Medvedev 107). At this point, we could call all the works that concern us here “novels,” and be done, but we are after some rather finer sifting: the novel may be able to consume and incorporate just about any experience or literary form, but Menippean satire, anatomy, and novel remain separate forms with different conventions, strategies, and ambitions; at a certain distance, they might look like siblings, but they are certainly not triplets.
II. The Bricoleurroman
Having set the antecedents to the form, we can now turn to the particulars of the bricoleurroman, beginning with a fuller elaboration of the critical descriptor. As Lévi-Strauss argues, the bricoleur fashions from their art (or idea, theory, or object, whatever the case may be) from whatever they have at their disposal:
“[T]he rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions” (17).
Or, as the OED, citing Lévi-Strauss, puts it, “a person (esp. an artist, writer, etc.) who appropriates and improvises with a diverse range of existing materials or sources to create a new artwork, theory, etc.” In the spirit of the bricoleur, the next move involves borrowing an international term that means both a tale of adventure or chivalry and novel. Put together, a first step toward a definition of bricoleurroman would be: a tale of adventure, that is also a novel, constructed with whatever sundry tools and from whatever sundry materials, obtained from previous constructions and destructions, as may be available to the author and fashioned into something, to borrow again from Lévi-Strauss, “unforeseen” and “brilliant” (17).
Although we could cite any number of works as exemplars of the bricoleur’s ability to create something new and brilliant from whatever is at hand—while Melville, for example, fashions his exploration of humanity’s relationship with the cosmos not only from his experiences aboard the Acushnet (and other whalers), but also from the dozens of sources in his library, borrowed from friends, or otherwise known to him; and while Sterne fashions his comic ramble through a few generations of the Shandy family and their acquaintances in part from his own experiences as son of a peripatetic military office, cleric, country gentleman, and literary celebrity—one of the greatest practitioners of the literary bricolage, or the fine art of putting one’s hand, either literally or figuratively, to whatever one needs wherever one may find themself, must be W.G. Sebald. As he tells us at the outset of The Rings of Saturn, “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work” (3). Suffering, he tells us, from one of the melancholies Burton takes the most pains to explore—“Love of Learning, or overmuch Study. With a Digression of the Misery of Scholars” (Anatomy First Partition 300)—he sets out on a walking tour that, drawing from memories, countless sources, the places he sees, and the people he meets along the way, leads him to a meditation on entropy, the human compulsion for destruction, and the holocaust.
Getting off the train at “the halt for Somerleyton Hall” (31), for example, leads Sebald into a reverie on colonialism and the inevitability of decay: “It takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes” (31). On holiday, he finds a material counterpart to his melancholy, and in the space of a few pages, he ponders the fortunes made in the construction of railroads, evokes Coleridge, and seems wrenched out of the present and into a chaotic, threatening jumble of other eras and places: “There are indeed moments, as one passes through rooms open to the public at Somerleyton, when one is not quite sure whether one is in a country house in Suffolk or some kind of no-man’s land, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean or in the heart of the dark continent. Nor can one readily say which decade or century it is, for many ages are superimposed here and coexist” (36). In the course of his journey, prompted by a complex train of associations, he will recall the menace of Orbis Tertius, the overfishing of herring, the slave trade, and the holocaust: “Seven hundred thousand men, women, and children were killed [at Jasenovac camp] alone in ways that made even the hair of the Reich’s experts stand on end” (97). Like Melville and others of vast erudition, Sebald allows his mind to wander as he wanders through the countryside, and in bricoleur fashion, he constructs a complex narrative of misery and death. In the closing pages, Sebald offers, in Browne’s “Musæum Clausum,” an image of his own technique (one which we could perhaps refashion into yet another definition of our form): “a catalogue of remarkable books [. . .] listing pictures, antiquities and sundry singular items that may have formed part of a collection put together by Browne but were more likely products of his imagination, the inventory of a treasure house that existed purely in his head and to which there is no access except through the letters on the page” (271).
As Umberto Eco remarks, “The list is the origin of culture” (“Interview”), and, following Bakhtin’s practice, I will number what I take to be some—though certainly not all—of the basic characteristics of the form.
1. Melancholy
As we have already seen in Sebald, the narrator or protagonist of the bricoleurroman often suffers from melancholy. In Sebald’s case, he reports that although he had “seldom felt so carefree” as he did during his walking tour of Suffolk, about a year later, he was nevertheless hospitalized “in a state of almost total immobility”(3): “in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralyzing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place” (3). The places that he sees or, through a process of association, that come to mind, and the people that he meets or recalls produce “certain ailments of the spirit and of the body” (3), and by the end of the book, we know why: he has, in fits and starts, directly and obliquely, been staring into the abyss of the holocaust and the seemingly endless human capacity for violence and annihilation.
Burton’s Anatomy stands—along with Hamlet and other works—in the background to this key feature of the narrator or protagonist. We can see this, for example, in Tristram Shandy. In his comic, yet also serious way, Tristram laments his mother’s seemingly inopportune mention of the clock and the consequences of that untimely query for his “animal spirits” (2): “I tremble to think what foundation had been laid for a thousand weaknesses both of body and mind, which no skill of the physician or the philosopher could ever afterwards have set thoroughly to rights” (3). As Christopher Tilmouth notes, a “melancholy shadow [. . .] certainly haunts” (938) Tristram Shandy: “Anxieties about loss pervade a novel which chronicles asthma attacks, crushed noses, and groins beset by shrapnel, chestnuts and sash windows, and which mourns the deaths of Yorick, Bobby, Le Fever, Trim, and (proleptically) Tristram himself” (938). Yet for all of that, as Tilmouth argues, Sterne “turns its material to genially comic but also skeptical effect” (938). As Tristram himself remarks, his book “’tis wrote, an’ please your worships, against the spleen” (218).
If Sterne and Melville, among others, were admirers of Burton’s often comic study of sorrow, the reasons for offering a narrator or protagonist beset by melancholy run deep in the form. As we shall see in more detail, there scarcely could be a more death-haunted genre. When Ishmael, for example, sits down to tell us the story of the Pequod—“Some years ago—never mind how many” (18)—he already knows what happens to Queequeg, Ahab, and his shipmates: “It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan” (427). Already prone to melancholy—“I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen” (18)—Ishmael, like Ahab, wonders about the nature of the cosmos: whatever else we can be guaranteed of, we can be guaranteed of loss, grief, and suffering; we will all surely die, and not always peacefully. Melville takes an almost Gnostic view of creation, and an existential darkness pervades many of the works under consideration here: Hal Incandenza, in Infinite Jest, suffers from some sort of breakdown—caused by his addiction to marijuana? by “the without end pursuit of happiness” (320)?—that leaves him unable to communicate and barely able to function; in Sebald, the holocaust looms over all. Melancholy seems, under the circumstances, to be a perfectly justifiable and understandable response to life.
2. Mixed-Genre
In this one matter, Bakhtin, Frye, and Weinbrot agree: the literary descendants of the menippea mix genres. In fact, the bricoleurs seem, constitutionally, unable to restrict themselves to telling a straight-forward narrative; they seem compelled to mix genres and languages and to jump from one form to another, from the language appropriate to one group to another. From my perspective, this is one of the features that makes the form great: if a reader expects a consistent plot and a reliable set of narrative conventions and strategies, they have come to the wrong place: the bricoleurroman gains considerable energy from mixing together genres; from trying out diverse kinds of writing and bending them to suit their own purposes; from constructing often massive narratives from diverse element; from pushing around the reader and upending their expectations. The form, by its nature, might well be about intellectual excess, and that includes exploring just about any type of writing or language that interests the writer. The form seems to be about rejecting constraint, about setting free the mind, about testing (and perhaps exceeding) the limits of narrative and genre.
Sterne, of course, did not invent the strategy of exuberance, but Tristram Shandy may be the greatest example of it. Sterne mixes together any number of genres and, in his genial manner, mocks most of them. In the first place, and as we have already noted, Sterne offers a parody of the autobiography; as Barbara M. Benedict notes, “When Tristram invokes ‘ye POWERS’ who ‘preside over this vast empire of biographical freebooters,’ he mocks the newly popular form for ignorance and hypocrisy” (487). In one of his best send ups, he caricatures legal documents and bends the language of lawyers in Elizabeth Mollineux’s “marriage settlement” (28) to his comic purposes, loading it with doths, to wits, thereofs, aforesaids, and—“with all the rights, members, and appurtenances thereof” (30)—double innuendos. As Bakhtin argues, “the word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (Dialogic 293), and Sterne makes legalese his own. Along the way, he also parodies genres (and their concomitant languages) as diverse as dedications, prefaces, sermons and religious doctrines, curses, treatises on education, philosophical dialogues, travelogues, eulogies, soldiers’ memoirs, comedies of manners, and more. As Woolf noted, with Sterne we never know what jest—or form—will come next and while Tristram does everything in his power to slow down the narrative, the mixing of genres itself lends an abundant dynamism. We have, in effect, a strange brew: an often melancholy narrator or protagonist and an exuberant, multi-genred narrative structure.
3. Sometime Parodic, Sometime Satiric, Often Comic (Yet Still Serious)
Here, we can perhaps reconcile, in some measure, Bakhtin and Weinbrot: the bricoleurroman includes both those who sing with and those who excoriate. On one side of the spectrum, we have genial parodists like Sterne and Lewis Carroll; on the other, we have harsh (and often unlaughing) satirists like Silko; somewhere in between, oscillating as suits their kaleidoscopic interests and purposes, we have Flaubert, Rushdie, Wallace, and others. Collectively, they parody or satirize genres, historical figures, philosophers and philosophies, politicians, professions, writers, and more, yet even if many of the bricoleurs mock or critique, being parodic or satiric is not a requirement of the form: some, like Sebald, maintain a generally somber, unironic tone, and not all draw on the parodic or satiric impulses of the menippea. At the same time, most of the form’s practitioners do seem to have a predilection for the comic: while few writers are as funny, line by line, as Sterne—Joseph Heller, Zadie Smith, and John Kennedy Toole come to mind, though they cannot be said to write bricoleurromans—several of his descendants come close. Melville, in the early scenes between Ishmael and Queequeg, offers an amiable tone—“Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” (36)—and few passages could be more comic than Aadam Aziz and Naseem Ghani’s courtship “through the mutilated sheet” (21). Building on the lineage of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Burton, the form favors the comic, favors wit, even silliness, but not at the exclusion of the deadly serious: Tristram sees his own death coming; Saleem and the other midnight’s children are born into the whirlwind of partition and war and witness scenes of catastrophic brutality.
4. Self-Reflexive
At least some of the humor and parodic energy derives from the form’s tendency toward ironic self-awareness: in their dedication to exploring the limits of forms and ideas, many of the bricoleurs reflect on—and make fun of—how narratives work. Sterne—like Denis Diderot, Woolf, Wallace, and many others—enjoys dissecting the conventions and workings of fiction: in one of the most famous gags in the book, for example, Walter and Toby pause on the stairs, engaged in a consideration of life’s many misfortunes. As the conversation unfolds, Tristram wonders how many chapters might pass before the brothers resume their descent: “Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down one pair of stairs? for we are got no farther yet than to the first landing, and there are fifteen more steps down to the bottom; and for aught I know, as my father and my uncle Toby are in a talking humour, there may be as many chapters as steps” (180). A few chapters later, exasperated with the pace of both events and his ability to narrate them, Tristram calls for help to get the brothers off the stairs; in turn, this leads him to realize the impossibility of telling his life story:
“I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and not farther than to my first day’s life—’tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at—on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back [. . .]” (182-83).
Beyond being exceedingly funny, Tristram’s lament pulls away the curtain on narrative conventions and the contract between writer and reader; Sterne keeps calling attention to the process of storytelling, keeps jarring the reader, keeps forcing us to think about how narratives work. In effect, Sterne reminds us that we live in stories, in worlds of stories, and we make sense of our lives through the stories we hear or read or tell; we should give some thought, he suggests, to stories and how they work and how they achieve their effects (and affects). Perhaps, after all, we learn what it means to be human through stories.
5. Travels, Adventures, and Sundry Relocations (and Home)
As Bakhtin argues, in the menippea, the “bold and unrestrained use of the fantastic and adventure is internally motivated, justified by and devoted to a purely ideational and philosophical end: the creation of extraordinary situations for the provoking and testing of a philosophical idea, a discourse, a truth” (114). While Bakhtin takes too narrow a view—such complex works cannot be reduced to a single idea, discourse, or truth—nearly all examples of the bricoleurroman involve some sort of trip or adventure that brings the narrator or protagonist into confrontation with profound (and sometimes unanswerable) questions. In Sterne, Tristram flees for the continent: will I be able to escape death (and might happiness be possible)? In Melville, somewhere along the line to the west of Fanning Island, Ahab, Ishmael, and the crew of the Pequod encounter Moby Dick: can we pierce the fabric of the cosmos in order to discover who or what might exist beyond the “pasteboard mask” (140)? In Woolf, Orlando journeys to Constantinople and, after riots and a prolonged sleep, awakens: “He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! We have no choice left but confess—he was a woman” (102): what is the self? or, rather, who are the selves and how changeable might we be? In Rushdie, Saleem, unsure of his own identity after being hit in the head by the silver spittoon during an air raid, becomes part of the Pakistani army’s invasion of Dacca, where he witnesses catastrophic violence and atrocities: will life always be this tempestuous, this brutal? can we extricate ourselves from the nightmare of history?
While travels, adventures, or relocations of some sort appear integral to the form (and to life), not all of a work’s ideas and questions arise, of course, from leaving home and going out into the world. For all its good humor, for example, a seriousness and a fundamental question underwrites Tristram Shandy: what does it take to live a good life? Tristram ascribes some measure of his problems to his mother’s faux pas and its humoral consequences, but Sterne offers an answer to the abiding question: family, friends, community, and, if you are very lucky, love. If we can be certain about the abiding affection between Walter and Toby, and between Toby and Trim, the relationships between the men and women receive less attention and seem more vexed. We do not know a great deal, for example, about the relationship between Elizabeth and Walter—they seem to get along well enough, but we also know that Walter has convictions all his own—and the Widow Wadman’s campaign against Toby fails, in no small measure, due to Toby’s obtuseness and lack of experience. We know even less about Tristram’s love life—in fact, while we have considerable access to his opinions, we know next to nothing about his life—and know very little about his “dear, dear Jenny” (34). While William E. Rivers, for example, places great stock in Tristram’s relationship with Jenny—“The pain generated by this unfulfilled emotional and physical desire is one major reason he writes his ‘Life and Opinions’ (2)—about all we can really conclude is that, like Uncle Toby, Tristram seems unable to “fully express” his “love for Jenny because of his physical limitations” (2). During his flight from death, Tristram has a glimpse of what the good life might be—“Why could I not live and end my days thus? Just disposer of our joys and sorrows, cried I, why could not a man sit down in the lap of content here—and dance, and sing, and say his prayers, and to heaven with this nut brown maid?” (342)—but he knows that death will again be at his heels and that he must return home. Excluded from the good life, he accepts his fate: “Then ’tis time to dance off, quoth I” (342).
6. Idea-Driven
As both Bakhtin and Frye argue, the menippea tends to be a hyperintellectualized form. Bakhtin, in his sweeping, enthusiastic manner, argues that the genre seeks “to contemplate the world on the broadest possible scale. The menippea is a genre of ‘ultimate questions.’ In it ultimate philosophical positions are put to the test” (Problems 115). Frye, thinking along the same lines, asserts that the form presents “abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent” (309). The bricoleurroman differs, of course, from the menippea, and as Frye observes, Menippean satire began in the 18th century “to merge with the novel,” with Sterne combining the energies of both forms with the “greatest success” (312). Both Bakhtin and Frye see Menippean satire as idea-driven, but the bricoleurroman tempers that impulse and seeks, in fusing the menippea with the novel, “to dissolve”—to borrow Frye’s phrasing—its concerns and theories more into character and personal relationships. At the same time, the bricoleurroman is not wholly a novel, either, and so retains some of the propulsive force of the menippea in its presentation of ideas.
7. Harrowing
While not all bricoleurromans offer truly harrowing scenes, a good many do and the form seems somewhat interested in exploring our fragility and confronting the reader with scenes designed to provoke distress. We can find such moments abundantly in, say, Rushdie, Silko, and Sebald, but one passage that always comes to mind for me occurs in Moby-Dick. In “The Castaway,” the boats lower in pursuit of whales, and Pip, frightened by the tempest of activity, jumps twice. On the second occasion, Stubb leaves him in the wake and “Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably” (321): “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul” (321). Pip witnesses “the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it” (321-22). As Ishmael imagines matters, Pip, a mere child with few defenses against a hostile world, witnesses the machinery of creation, sees suns and planets being formed, sees God at work, and it blasts his mind and soul and makes him mad. While any number of works, of course, feature horrifying scenes—a moment’s reflection will call to mind, say, Absalom, Absalom!, Beloved, or The Round House—this passage might be counted among the most harrowing in American literature, and Pip sees, Ishmael speculates, what lies behind the curtain of creation; he sees what Ahab hopes to discover. The form, for all its pleasures and dedication, by times, to the comic, puts before us scenes of devastation, grief, and loss.
8. Digressive
To say the least, the bricoleurroman runs against the grain of contemporary culture. We live in a hypermediaized age of twenty-four hour pundits, lies, and apps, and we have been conditioned, seemingly, to have fleeting attention spans. Where Fredric Jameson lamented the “waning of affect” (10) and “depthlessness” (12) back in the day, the barrage—the infiltration of technocapitalism into all aspects of life—has become so intense that worrying about such things as affect, historicity, or depth seems almost quaint. In such a world, while many readers clearly enjoy long books—Stephen King, who puts no scriptible pressure whatsoever on his “Constant Reader” (xiv,) sells lots of copies—Megatheria such as Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick, and Infinite Jest require that readers not be in a hurry, that they can settle in for digressions, non-linear plots, and complexity. They may not be books for our time.
If Sterne is the master of the digression—as Tristram asserts, “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine:—they are the life, the soul of reading” (49)—we can trace the impulse back to at least the 14th century CE: there can be no greater practitioner of the digression, perhaps, than Shahrazad. Although neither Menippean satire nor anatomy—we could place it the deep history of the novel as one of the story cycles of the 14th century, including The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales—The Arabian Nights offers a dizzying sequence of digressions, of tales within tales within tales. Shahrazad, on the fly, invents a narrative structure of potentially infinite nesting, all in an effort to maintain King Shahrayar’s interest and thereby save her own life: she begins a tale, yet morning comes; before completing the tale, she hints at another, even more exciting story, and begins, yet does not finish, that one; in short order, the reader, like King Shahrayar, has become dizzy from digressions within digressions, and Shahrazad lives for another day. Digressions, it turns out, might just save your life.
9. Infinity Machines
In “Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy?,” Wayne Booth concludes that “one finds every reason to believe not only that Sterne worked with some care to tie his major episodes together but that, with his ninth volume, he completed the book as he had originally conceived it” (173). As Booth determines, “The ‘story’ as a whole consists [. . .] of the substitution of one story-thread for another—Toby’s for Tristram’s” (181). For Booth, Sterne took considerable care to set up the transition of focus from Tristram’s early misadventures to Toby’s amours, and he notes that “in the last chapter, for the first time in the whole work, all the major characters are brought together in one room” (175). Where earlier scholars had argued that “Tristram Shandy is a careless, haphazard book, with little or no deliberate structure” (172), Booth sees an overall narrative arc—Sterne builds in the story of Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman right from the start, and in telling his uncle’s story, we learn, indirectly, more about Tristram’s sorrows—and we could hardly argue that he is wrong.
At the same time, we could hardly say that he is right. On the one hand, we could argue that, as a sort of novel, Tristram Shandy possesses a thematic unity that connects the two major narrative lines and that makes it into a work-as-a-whole. More, Sterne was perhaps weary of writing his uncatch-upable narrative, and he no doubt had some inkling that death would overtake him before he could write all the volumes he once had in mind: he needed to wrap the thing up, or leave it unfinished forever. On the other hand, Booth’s assertion misses what must be one of the most important features of the bricoleurroman: the form, by its antecedents and nature, appears infinite.
Well before Sterne, Burton realized that certain types of works are limited only by the circumstances or lifespan of the author: the work itself is an engine that knows few limits. Reflecting on his own project and practices, Burton writes, “In this labyrinth of accidental causes, the farther I wander, the more intricate I find the passage; multæ ambages [there are many windings], and new causes as so many by-paths offer themselves to be discussed. To search all out were an Herculean work, and fitter for Theseus; I will follow mine intended thread, and point only at some of the chiefest” (First Partition 357). As Burton notes, in any subject worth the time, there are many windings and an endless proliferation of new by-paths and associations; as Tristram, citing Locke, remarks, his “is a history-book [. . .] of what passes in a man’s own mind” (57) and only death will cease that flow. In his review of “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Borges, a master of the infinite form, calls Moby-Dick “the infinite novel that brought about [Melville’s] fame” (245); in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Stephen Albert, in attempting to puzzle through the form of Ts’ui Pên’s novel, itself an “infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times” (127), recalls “the night at the center of the 1001 Nights, when the queen Scheherazade (through some magical distractedness on the part of the copyist) begins to retell, verbatim, the story of the 1001 Nights, with the risk of returning once again to the night on which she is telling it—and so on, ad infinitum” (125). The bricoleurromans—including miniaturist examples like Borges’ “Garden”—offer structure, characters, plots (after a fashion), and themes, but they also constitute literary infinity machines that could go on forever.
10. Pressure on the Reader
We can, for a moment, return to Frye’s contention that many readers find the form baffling. While this perhaps overstates matters—a careful, patient reader will be fine, mostly—the form remains justifiably notorious: it puts a lot of demands on the reader. For one, and as we have noted, the works tend to be long: a reader has to be able to concentrate for long periods of time. More, the authors often do not seek to locate, guide, or give bearings to their readers: the narratives, such as they are, twist and turn, lose track of themselves, derail, rerail, and amble forwards and backwards. When in doubt, digress, launch a complicated joke, forget where you were, leave someone on the stairs. As Frye notes, the form violently dislocates narrative conventions and consistency of character, disregards plot, eschews, by times, settings we can actually visualize, and more. Put another way, these gargantuan works can be challenging to read, can be hard to follow, can be puzzling, can even be boring; wearing out the reader constitutes, by times, at least part of the point.
11. Death-Haunted
As Umberto Eco remarks about lists and infinity, “We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end [. . .]. We like lists because we don’t want to die” (“Interview”). This, along with the epigraphs taken from Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time and Browne’s Hydriotaphia, could be taken as a working thesis for the bricoleurroman. Death haunts the form, and we now know why these works tend to be so massive: the narrators or protagonists will do whatever they can to push death away, to postpone the inevitable; they will digress, anatomize, mix genres, parody, go on sudden journeys, report on the lives and loves of others, whatever it takes to keep death away, and we see this everywhere in the form and its antecedents.
As Tristram tells us at the beginning of Volume VII—we have heard of his illness in bits and pieces along the way—“No—I think, I said, I would write two volumes every year, provided this vile cough which then tormented me, and which to this hour I dread worse than the devil” (305). Dubbing his book “a machine” (305), he reminds us that he “swore it should be kept going at that rate these forty years if it pleased the fountain of life to bless me so long with health and good spirits” (305). Tristram suffers from tuberculosis, and Death, “this son of a whore, has found out my lodgings” (305); beset, Tristram flies for his life, but he has been running hard for the entire book: in Volume I, he provides a list of just a few of the matters an author has to take into account when telling someone’s life story, and concludes, “In short, there is no end of it;–for my own part, I declare I have been at it these six weeks, making all speed I possibly could,–and I am not yet born” (28). Why all the digressions and derailments? Because once you are born, you will certainly die, and Tristram does all that he can to forestall the inevitable.
We can see this obsession with death, and an urgency to tell one’s stories, in any number of works. As even the most casual reader will notice, in Moby-Dick, after the comic scenes at the Spouter-Inn, Queequeg retreats from the stage; Ishmael, at least in corporeal form, also retreats from the narrative—the narrative itself, we could say, also retreats—and if we have ample access to Ishmael’s ruminations, the friendship falls out of focus: Ishmael, telling us the tale after the fact and adrift in life—who else but Ishmael could be the “Late Consumptive Usher” (7) and “poor devil of a Sub-Sub” (8)?—knows what is coming, knows that in making “Ahab’s quenchless feud” his own he is complicit in the destruction of the Pequod and the death of Queequeg. To keep the fatal encounter with Moby Dick at bay for as long as he can, he fills his tale with whale lore, cetology, and whatever else comes to mind. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem, too, feels an urgency to tell his story—“Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits” (3)—yet he begins telling his tale, like Tristram, long before he is born, and he packs his own life story with the stories of innumerable (sort of) family members and many of the children. Saleem, like Tristram and Ishmael, runs as fast as he can in several directions at once, all in an effort to elude death
III. Unfinalizability
The bricoleurroman, we can conclude, is a vast and complex form and my purpose here has been to be descriptive rather than proscriptive. Beyond the few titles I have mentioned in these pages, many more works might be included as exemplars; such a list, I think, would be longer than Weinbrot’s list of true Menippean satires but less extensive than the catalog of works that Frye calls anatomies. More, our list of eleven key features, while suggestive, should not be thought of as exhaustive; rather, I see these descriptors as a starting point, and more study seems in order. In his analysis of the features of the menippea, for example, Bakhtin describes a dialogic self: “the possibilities of another person and another life are revealed in him, he loses his finalized quality and ceases to mean only one thing; he ceases to coincide with himself” (Problems 116-17). I find this particularly suggestive in terms of the bricoleurroman: could this “noncoincidence” (Problems 117) be a wellspring, in part, of a narrator or protagonist’s melancholy and exuberance? Could dialogic “unfinalizability” (Problems 117) be yet another way to describe the form? That is, the bricoleurroman cannot be reduced to just one genre or language; the form itself seems to refuse limits, seems to possess an unfinalizability of its own.
[i] My thanks to Torey Davie for suggesting Infinite Jest as a bricoleurroman.
[ii] Although The Savage Mind has been supplanted by a more recent translation, Wild Thought, I prefer the old translation, particularly its use of the term “devious.”
[iii] Bakhtin does not mention Tristram Shandy in his analysis of the menippea, but some scholars assert that he no doubt had Sterne in mind. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, for example, contend that while “the only menippean satirist since the Renaissance whom Bakhtin mentions [in Problems] is Dostoevsky,” “he presumably also has in mind the Sterne of Tristram Shandy and the Gogol of Dead Souls” (462).
[iv] Among his critiques of Bakhtin, Weinbrot argues that “he does not even try to determine whether these authors or one after them could or did read Menippean works as he claims they did and as they probably did not” (15). Ultimately, Bakhtin “even surpasses Frye in creating a baggy genre into which almost any work can be made to fit” (15).
[v] This might be a good point to mention a couple of works that might be included in our list, but have not been: on the one hand, we could, as Frye does, make a case for Joyce’s Ulysses; while Frye’s argument is perhaps a little too systematic and tidy—after all, Joyce’s masterpiece might be a little more difficult to pin down—Ulysses certainly has much in common with Sterne. On the other hand, I do not favor Gravity’s Rainbow for the same reason that John Brenkman does not: we could put Pynchon in company with Sterne, but why would we: “Thomas Pynchon writes Menippean satire, bad Menippean satire” (818).
[vi] As Ashley Marshall writes of Gulliver’s Travels, “Most scholars might be prepared to agree that it is a Menippean satire, but that label does not get us very far” (221).
[vii] As Murray points out, as a literary form, the anatomy has a history of its own and constitutes its own tradition: “anatomy became an increasingly varied genre from the medieval period onwards. While originating in European thought as a dissection of biological organisms, later writers began to employ the approach to analyze diverse and often divergent subjects from mental illness to geographical landmasses” (39).
[viii] Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ Brás Cubas gets around the problem, we might say, by already being dead.
[ix] As Niklas Holzberg reminds us, the term, “novel”—or something like it—was not used by the ancients: “We know of no ancient termini even remotely similar in meaning to ‘romance’ or ‘novel’” (11).
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Weinbrot, Howard D. Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. The Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.
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Brady Harrison’s short fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Aethlon, High Desert Journal, The Long Story, Short Story, and Twelve Winters Journal. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, including the collection The Term Between (winner of the High Plains Book Award) and the forthcoming novel A Journey to Al Ramel. He has lived in France and Ireland, as well as in Missoula, Montana. Visit Brady’s webpage.
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