Designs on Truth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock-Epic

Abstract

Designs on Truth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock-Epic, by Gregory G. Colomb. Pennsylvania State U. Press, 1992. Pp. xxi + 228. In this book Colomb pursues two primary goals. Firstly, he tries to provide a useful summary description of the Augustan mock-epic. Secondly, he wants to shed light on the poetics of the genre. He is especially concerned to explain how the mock-epic uses satiric fictions to compel readers to adopt its judgmental "pieties" (xii), a feat that seems remarkable since its representations often utterly conflicted with contemporary readers' more empirically grounded knowledge of the historical counterparts. These objectives are, of course, commendable. Colomb might have produced a valuable study of a genre we would all like to know more about. But his book is not such a study. To begin with, Colomb does not present his materials cohesively, and his stance is pretentious. His book is "arrayed in two parts" (xvii): one focusing on mock-epic settings, the other on satiric portraits. An initial section, though, focuses on the mock-epic fable. In his preface Colomb states that he develops arguments about how the mock-epic "isolates its individual persons in terms of a wealth of particulars arrayed in a diagnostic network of metonymic (and causal) relations" (xvi), about how the mock-epic "is fascinated by language, its powers of social control, and its frightening--and thrilling--malleability" (xvi), and about how the genre maintains "a complex relation to law" (xvii). Many other plans are announced in this preface and in the course of the book. Some are taken up, but never for very long, and none are sufficiently developed. Colomb is, however, reliable, if no less profusive, in his statements about what his book does not do: "not a story of influence .... Nor is it a genetic story" (xi); "I do not attempt a comprehensive account of these poems"; "I will show little interest in tracking down epic sources of this or that mock-epic detail"; "I will not, unfortunately, have much to say about how mock-epic changes when it becomes a poem about a woman" (xvii); "I leave to posterity the question of whether The Dispensary can become again a work of intrinsic interest" (xix). "Part One" of Designs on Truth follows the "Preface," an "Introduction," and a "Prologue." "Part Two" is framed by another prologue and an epilogue. The postmodern--or "Modern"--mode of this study reminds this reader of nothing so much as the delirious energies of Swift's Tale, but without the intentional parody. There is, though, little that is innovative about Colomb's sense of what constitutes an Augustan mock-epic, a theory he sets forth piecemeal in the first half of his book. Four traits are seen as crucial: (1) a "strong, if caricatured resemblance to the epic fable" (1-30), (2) a sprawling contemporary urban landscape (33-58), (3) satire (59-77), and (4) a moral precept that shares with the epic a concern with the social order (79-116). With the exception of the trait of imitating the epic fable, Colomb has borrowed his formulation wholesale from theorists of satire of the 1950s and '60s, notably, Maynard Mack, Alvin Kernan, and Ronald Paulson. But no case is made for the more appropriate application of their theory to the genre of mock-epic. In fact, Colomb does not even acknowledge his debt here. Nor does he position his formulation in relation to longstanding modern commentaries on the mock-epic, such as those by Courthope, Tillotson, and Bond. He does not, moreover, show any evidence of having read a number of more recent commentaries. This is a crucial omission since these accounts have downplayed the role of satire in defining the genre, stressing instead its ability to elevate present-day subject matter (Michael Edwards, "A Meaning for Mock-Heroic," YES [1985]), to mock the epic (Jacob Fuchs, "Knowing and Remembering: The Resources of Mock-Epic," PQ [1990]), and to give rise to a frivolous and playful, rather than harshly satirical, art form (Ulrich Brioch, The Eighteenth-Century Mock-Heroic Poem [1990]). …