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Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante: The Art and the Scope of the Mixed Form
Comparative Literature, Winter 1997 by Paolo Cherchi
VERSE WITH PROSE FROM PETRONIUS TO DANTE: THE ART AND THE SCOPE OF THE MIXED FORM. By Peter Dronke. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1994, x, 148 p.
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The publication date of this book coincides with that of one on the same subject by Bernhard Pabst (Prosimetrum. Tradition und Wandel einer Literaturform zwischen Spatantike und Spatmittelater; Koln, 1994), a coincidence that shows a growing interest in the Menippean genre, due in great part to the influence of Bakhtin's studies. These two books have a different origin and range: Pabst's work was originally a dissertation, while Dronke's is the collection of his four Carl Newell Jackson Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1992; Pabst frames his research between the fifth century (Martianus Capella) and the fifteenth century (Jean Gerson), and deals only with Latin texts, whereas Dronke ranges from classical to medieval vernacular texts, up to the thirteenth century; moreover Pabst lists 131 prosimetra (previous publications have counted only 42 of them in the same span of time), while Dronke, who discusses several little-known works, is less systematic and wants to avoid committing himself to "mere enumeration and summary descriptions rather than to critical enquiry and an enquiry into poetics" (p. 2). Indeed, there are prosimetra of many kinds, and it is important to distinguish between those which occasionally quote some verses and those where verse and prose are "consubstantial" (p. 2), constituting an organic unity. Dronke focuses only on the latter type, and divides his inquiry of poetics into four topics that highlight the diverse uses of prosimetrum.
Given his interests in poetics, Dronke identifies, on the path of Northrop Frye and Bakhtin, a few basic patterns: a Menippean work tends to the farrago, the chaotic compilation, and makes use of satiric, paradoxical, and sometimes even polyphonic elements that may undermine each other, but also in this unconventional way set up a concordia discors through which a "search after the ultimate truth" takes place (p. 9).
The first testing of this formula is based on texts which are historically closest to the origin of the Mennippean tradition and have been, to a great extent, models for the genre. They are Petronius's Satyricon (where prose and poetry present respectively a caricatural and a perfect or redeeming form of love), and Seneca's Apolokintosis or Ludus de morte Claud (where poetry seems to undermine itself because the poetic laments of Claudius, in fact, satirize him). From the medieval Latin texts, Dronke chooses three: the Cosmographia bv Aethicus Ister (read anew and convincingly as a sort of pastiche that draws its comicity by the farrago of learning and solemn lists of auctoritates); the fragment of the Vita Galli bv Notkerus Balbus (where the narrative strategy is that of questioning the topoi of writing hagiographies); and an anonymous and little-known work entitled by its recent editor Petronius redivivus (a kind of novella-comedy that combines Boethian and Petronian features).
The Menippean elements take on a different role in other types of works studied in the second chapter, "Allegory and the Mixed Form." Martianus's De nuptiis has always been considered a peculiar encyclopedia. Dronke highlights some crucial moments of the work, and some satirical and grotesque overtones that undermine the very, matter they seem to present; the whole makes sense if we understand that such discordant elements are an allegorical way of undermining earthly knowledge as opposed to the divine. In the Consolatio Philosophiae the Menippean elements dramatize the ultimate question," which for the imprisoned Boethius is to make his own the philosophical principle-learned from the Neoplatonists and constantly recalled in the metra-that behind Fortuna there is a providential order. Then, instead of looking at the best-known prosimetra of the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Hildebert de Lavardin, Adelard of Bath, Bernardus Silvestris and Alain de Lille, all of whom dramatize in the Boethian manner the relation between poetry and prose, and between the figures of Philosophia and Fortuna), Dronke focuses on Hildebert's lesser-known Liber de quenmonia et conflictus carnis et spiritus seu animae (or Philosophia de interiore et exteriore ho-mine, as Dronke prefers to call it following a manuscript tradition). It is a kind of parody of Boethius's Consolatio because its characters have roles opposite to those of the model: Philosophia needs to be guided by Hildebert; but in the end the partners undermine each other; and, both being and not being figures of Hildebert, their interaction conveys an idea of ambiguity and slipperiness.
In order to analyze the uses of prosimetron in narrative genres ("Narrative and Mixed Form," ch. 3), Dronke examines the Vita Homeri, attributed to Herodotus, and the Certamen between Homer and Hesiod, both works of the second century. In these, the use of verse is intended to present a portrait of the poet who suffers adversity but is always superior to his persecutors. This reversal of roles is one aspect of the Menippean pattern, and it reappears, with some modifications, in Irish and Islandic sagas as well as in Provencal vidas. The Menippian pattern of the search for ultimate truth appears in the Greek and Roman histories of Alexander and Apollonius as well as in Aucassin et Nicolette, the French prosimetrum.
