Don Theall on the Church of the SubGenius
purple
Theall (former President of Trent University in Ontario, Canada) posted this
on the McLuhan-L list in response to my "The Latest" post you received the
other day:
[Monday, 17 Jan 2005 09:00 pm EST
Many thanks to Andrew and to Bob and Michael for having moved the list's
discussion into a very illuminating and helpful direction.
As for Bob on McLuhan as a scientist - dead on, and he is a
scientist marrying art, technology and science in his analyses and
discoveries. A sense of science as finally returning to its roots with
respect to knowledge and its relation to art as "techne". This certainly
permeates McLuhan's project of marrying past and present and insisting on
the importance of the poetic in that process.
Before turning to my main issue, I'd just like to make an aside on
percept and concept, since we often tend to put these in a context rather
different from the one McLuhan was working in. If one consults the OED,
which McLuhan always did (he had the twelve volume edition on the shelves in
his office, there being no electronic editions readily available through
your university library or by online subscription, if you are not attached
to a library). Items from the OED show that there is clearly no opposition
between percept and concept, but that percept is perhaps both a prior and
more complex conceptual grasp from which many, not all concepts, arise. In
any case, McLuhan could simultaneously be a conceptual scientist and a
perceptual poet in his "prophetic" visions based on a Thomistic view of
natural prophecy where the future and past interpenetrate.
As for the main issue, Menippean satire, I previously wrote a note
to the James Joyce List about it, but since not all the individuals in the
present discussion have seen it, here it is:
. . . the question of Menippean satire. This is really quite
complex and I am just here briefly digesting a few points from my new book
on McLuhan (2001), James Joyce's Techno-poetics (1997), and The Medium Is
the Rear View Mirror (1971). First of all, McLuhan's interest in Menippean
satire preceded Frye's, since he became interested in the mode in the early
1950s when we were working together on the little epic and I was writing
graduate papers on Pope, and he was beginning his search into mysticism,
cults and secret societies. In 1952 I wrote a paper for Douglas Grant's
graduate seminar in the neo-Augustan era on Pope's The Dunciad in which I
used material from Dryden's essay on satire that discussed what Dryden
called Varronian satire - what actually inspired Pope's mixture of prose and
poetry in his "Varronian" or Menippean satiric "little epic", or epyllion.
My "personal discovery" had been triggered by the ways in which Marshall
queried things.
Menippean satire was a genre well-recognized by the classical
scholars, since it had been recognized throughout literary history from
Lucian's satiric dialogues and Varro's satire. It is a tradition which in
various ways the work of Rabelais, Swift, Pope, and Sterne, among many
others, can be included. Marshall and I were discussing this in 1951
before Norrie's [Frye] 1957 articulation of it. In fact, this is
necessarily too brief an account of a very complex subject.
Dryden's having used Varro rather than Menippus to name it is
possibly relevant in two ways. First, Menippus's satires did not survive,
so that the first Menippean satirist in distribution was Lucian; and second,
while Menippus came from the cynical philosophical tradition, Varro was more
purely literary and lighter.
When we start speaking about whether later strands of the
Menippean-Varronian tradition require a mixture of prose and verse, we
overlook certain aspects of the classical tradition and certain theoretical
aspects about prose and poetry. This was certainly recognized at various
moments throughout the tradition - and in any case we may, as Eliot would
have said, be mixing various definitions of the term, poetry.
Peter mentions Eric's thesis, which I first looked at quite
recently. He has a summary of the history and nature of Menippean satire at
its beginning. In the thesis, Eric is developing a theme about Joyce that
Marshall had explored in the early 1950s - before Frye's Anatomy - when we
were researching the epyllion, or little epic, Pope, Joyce, and Lewis.
Much, but not all of the story of this, can be found in various sections of
my recent book, so I won't go on at length now.
The main point is that Marshall early on knew about
Menippean-Varronian (or learned) satire and realized its relevance to the
work he was doing. The two of us and Norrie all realized the relevance of
this to writers like Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Apart from my graduate paper
for Professor Grant, I implicitly articulated this in 1953 with respect to
Lewis in an unpublished item on The Dunciad and The Apes of God, prepared
for an issue of "Shenandoah"; and I gave a paper at a conference on "Pope's
satiric Program" which was in the first publication published by the newly
founded Association of Canadian University Teachers of English. Later in
1971 in The Medium is the Rear View Mirror, I explicitly connect Joyce's
Menippean satire (which I consider more Varronian than cynical) with
Marshall's works, though I did not distinguish between the Joycean
transformation of the long-standing tradition of learned satire and that of
Marshall's or Wyndham Lewis's, which were closer to the original Lucianic
strands rather than Joyce's Rabelais and neo-Augustan mode.
Complex historico-critical recognition of Menippean satire preceded
not only Bakhtin and Kristeva or Frye, but even McLuhan and me, since it was
part of that complex of literary history and practitioners of satire who
often imitated the classical sources in developing their own transformations
of the genre. Perhaps the most conscious use in English literary history
before Joyce was the critical recognition of Dryden and the practice of
Pope, Swift, and the Scriblerians.
For more corroboration of this, consult my books that I have
mentioned. I only write at length since I felt that, although his
contribution is significant, Norrie Frye, being assigned a kind of primacy
in this, does tend to conceal both complexities of literary history and the
way this particular issue surfaced at the University of Toronto.
Another note should be added to this and that has to do with the
marriage of the epyllion (the little epic) and the Menippean-Varronian
(learned, anatomical, allegorical) type of satire at points in literary
history. It is partly because of this marriage that Pope's Dunciad is the
concluding moment of The Gutenberg Galaxy, for it both appropriately
announced the forthcoming end of that Galaxy, while presenting it in a
discontinuous, allegorical, anatomical (in the sense of Burton's Anatomy),
satirical, and poetic form (involving prose and verse).
Apologies for the length, but it seemed quite relevant to some of
the topics under discussion.]
The Great Bob Dobbs
ouroboros rex
how terminally boring he really is. lol
"purple" <pur...@tellurian.com> wrote in message
news:BE136CD1.12B75%pur...@tellurian.com...
Rev DJ Epoch
news:csm5qm$e6d$1...@news.ks.uiuc.edu:
> As we see here, insane Stang-stalker Bob Dean just has absolutely no
> idea
> how terminally boring he really is. lol
>
> "purple" <pur...@tellurian.com> wrote in message
> news:BE136CD1.12B75%pur...@tellurian.com...
>>
--===>> snip a buncha mcluhan effluent <<===---
>>
>> The Great Bob Dobbs
>>
>
Ya know Sparky, if you'd just KILLFILE the bitch I would never have even
seen that drollery.
Just sayin'
--
12th Epochalyptic MegaFisTemple Dungeon of The Church of Our Lady of
Perpetual Motion
Cathedral, Carwash and Dancehall- Home of the Traci Lords Memorial Brothel
Rev. DJ Epoch - proprietor and janitor
Divine Southern Redneck Yeti Clench Recruitment site: http://revdjepoch.COM
"Oh give me a hoooome, where the buffalo roam, AND I'LL SHOW YOU A HOUSE
THAT STINKS TO HELL!!!"
-- DJ Epoch
Den Mu
DJ Epoch go killfile yourself.
ouroboros rex you don't know what Bob is talking about that is why it
is boring to you.
BOB,
This techne and poiesis looks like Heidegger stuff let us just hope
that Bob will not impose a Reich upon us without at least giving us a
chance to "bring-forth" our own freedom.
As for the techne there is so much techne it would be a lifetime to
find all the techne there is.
Where does the word Rhyee come from?
What is its origins?
Etymology speaking.
How is Akasha important to you?
What did you find?
Do you see anything on the horizon for me?
Or do you get a bad vibe that something is bad going to happen to me
and you don't have the heart to tell me?
Why is the xenochony site down?
Don't your friends have a webmaster to fix that?
I haven't seen anything significant on that site yet.
I am keeping good faith that you will inform me when there is.
purple
rex" <c-b...@itg.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> As we see here, insane Stang-stalker Bob Dean just has absolutely no idea
> how terminally boring he really is. Lol
LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Great Bob Dobbs
purple
Xns95E395A51C6C...@129.250.170.92, "Rev DJ Epoch"
<nuny...@noway.com> wrote:
> "ouroboros rex" <c-b...@itg.uiuc.edu> wrote in
> news:csm5qm$e6d$1...@news.ks.uiuc.edu:
>
>> As we see here, insane Stang-stalker Bob Dean just has absolutely no
>> idea
>> how terminally boring he really is. lol
>>
>> "purple" <pur...@tellurian.com> wrote in message
>> news:BE136CD1.12B75%pur...@tellurian.com...
>>>
> --===>> snip a buncha mcluhan effluent <<===---
>>>
>>> The Great Bob Dobbs
>>>
>>
>
> Ya know Sparky, if you'd just KILLFILE the bitch I would never have even
> seen that drollery.
>
> Just sayin'
You scared of me!!??
The Great Bob Dobbs
purple
1106177498....@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com, "Den Mu"
<hexa...@techemail.com> wrote:
>
> DJ Epoch go killfile yourself.
>
>
> ouroboros rex you don't know what Bob is talking about that is why it
> is boring to you.
They is so mundane because they's pinks, Den Mu.
The Great Bob Dobbs
Linus Minimax
> so that the first Menippean satirist in distribution was Lucian; and second,
> while Menippus came from the cynical philosophical tradition, Varro was more
> purely literary and lighter.
I typed up the relevant chapter and posted it to the McLuhan-L list but got no response, DT was still alive but not for long, maybe not so responsive by that time. I hope March's discovery got to him in time.
Anyway it was always obviously appropriate to describe the Church of the SubGenius as 'Menippean satire', except in the sense that it's rude or bad etiquette or otherwise 'wrong' to 'explain the joke'. Personally, it seemed that SubGenii were protesting far too much, especially so long after XDay, at the idea that they might be participating in a tradition described by truly Old and even Ancient comedy nerds, beyond the more local & familiar traditions of scifi & sales & rubecalling & mindfuck.
If 'creating a fake authority as a pen name' was one of Varro's tricks, that would aid the case for emphasizing his name more than Menippus, in this context. But I used to joke that Eric McLuhan's old list of 'Menippean Topics' (recently published in his excellent book 'Cynic Satire') ought to have been titled 'memo to Stang re: creating propaganda for the 'antienvironmental Church' project'.
