Of Idiocy, Moroseness, and Vitriol Soloists of Rage in Ben Jonson's

Of Idiocy, Moroseness, and Vitriol Soloists of Rage in Ben Jonson’s Satire Rui Carvalho Homem A punitive design energised by a sense of self-righteousness is probably the most persistent defining trait of the satiric voice within a conventional understanding of this literary mode. Em- powered by a set of exacting values, the satiric persona inveighs against vice or folly, his or her verbal energy hardly accommodating the possibility of doubt. Satire’s ‘radical moral stance’, its assuredness regarding ‘standards’, and its sharp sense of ‘direction’ have often been critically argued. And its appertaining urge to discriminate, with vehemence and imperiousness, is best served by the singularity of a raging voice, unforgivingly pronouncing on the ills of other indi- viduals or of a community. The work of Ben Jonson contains several generic environments in which the satiric mode can become manifest, ranging from the ostensibly monological regime of the Epigrams or the pro- logues to his plays to frequent tirades delivered by unflinching or obsession-driven dramatic characters. A discursive feature of those characters in the comedies who voice their highly strung satiric indignation is precisely that, even when they do so as apparent contributions to dramatic dialogue, their verbal excess highlights the isolation, self-centredness, and inability to communi- cate that defines them. But the moment when the satiric ranter becomes an object as much as an agent of satire is also when the rationale for the supposed normative value of satiric denunciation reaches its breaking point. By setting off the strong presence of irony and inconclusiveness in Jonson’s construction of satiric solo performances, this paper partakes in the interrogation of traditional definitions of satire that has characterised recent critical revisitations of the mode — while it also underlines the extent to which such interrogation coincides with a fundamental swerve in Jonson’s critical reputation. Satire has long been beset by a particular perplexity. Within theoretical frame- works that one might dub ‘traditional’, it has been construed as predicated on a sense of ethical certainty and hence rhetorical directionality — indeed, as ‘militant irony’, empowered by ‘[a] radical moral stance’;1 however, its place within the literary system has often been described as uncertain, fluid, and unstable — a ‘[…] most problematic mode to the taxonomist, since it […] can take almost any external form’.2 This oppositional nexus between the mode’s supposedly defining sense of legitimacy and purpose, and the protean nature of its relation to literary forms, has in fact been eroded (if not resolved) in re- 1. The phrases come respectively from Northrop Frye’s classic essay on ‘The Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire’ and Alastair Fowler’s no less canonical study of genres and modes: Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1973), pp. 223–24; Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 110. 2. Fowler, p. 110. 158 Rui Carvalho Homem cent years, as the association of satire with moral assuredness has come under fire. This recent development largely reflects the currency of the poststructural- ist choice tropes of ambivalence and indeterminacy, and of a related preference for truncated or fluid form. A concomitant tendency to construe laughter — certainly the human response through which satire most commonly pursues its ends — as inherently subversive and non-authoritarian contributes to a grow- ing emphasis on any ironical and self-cancelling elements that can be seen to undermine the moral high ground so often taken by the satiric persona through- out the history of the mode. And this has also entailed phasing out another conventional critical distinction, that which opposed the punitive, segregating laughter of satire (energised by a stark sense of the distinction between its agents and butts) to the gregarious, all-absolving laughter of comedy.3 Dustin Griffin’s programme in his study Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (1994) is characteristic of the recent reconfiguration of critical discourse on satire. From the outset, Griffin’s avowed purpose is to challenge ‘the old theoretical consensus […]’ established in the early 1960s on satire as ‘a highly rhetorical and moral art’. Griffin further declares his scepticism vis-à-vis all universalising accounts of a characteristically diverse, ‘farraginous’ and ubi- quitous mode. A major acknowledged influence (on Griffin as on most recent theorists of the literature of laughter) is of course Bakhtin on Menippean satire and on grotesque realism, an influence that shows in Griffin’s contention that ‘with few exceptions, satirists want to keep their work open, ambiguous, un- resolved, even when declaring that they have finished’.4 When investigating the satiric voice as a solo performance, I will largely and generally endorse the current view of satire (and comedy) as just characterised by Griffin. To move in that direction, though, I will first have to point out that ‘the old theoretical consensus’ of the mid-twentieth century in fact echoed many of the explicit pronouncements on their art by authors — like Jonson — who largely crafted the English satiric tradition. It is by read- ing them against the grain, and in particular by highlighting those moments in 3. This opposition was evident in critical remarks from the 1950s to the early ’80s, such as (on the one hand) Ronald Paulson’s view that ‘[p]unishment is the most extreme, and at the same time most common, consequence in satire’, and (on the other) Frye’s understanding that ‘[t]he tendency of comedy is to include as many people as possible in its final society’, or yet David Farley-Hills’s proposal that ‘[a]mbiguity and paradox lie at the heart of comedy […]. The comic mode accepts that as far as the human mind is concerned truth is a plurality’ — Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 10; Frye, p. 43; David Farley-Hills, The Comic in Renaissance Comedy (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 32–33. 4. Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: The University Press of Ken- tucky, 1994), pp. 1–2, 3, 111 and passim. .

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