Towards a Poetics of satura

Towards a Poetics of satura (Sina Dell’Anno, September 2016) This thesis examines the possibilities of thinking non-form (Unform) as a poetological concept. The Satyrica of Petronius present a singular example for such unclassifiable amorphousness. After the first chapter, dedicated to an overview of the upside-down world the textual cosmos of this ,novel‘ presents, I attempt to track down the specific formlessness of the Satyrica by means of a theory of “satura” (lit. “mixed dish” and “stuffed full”). I thus challenge the entrenched label “novel” Petronius’ work has been tagged with in order to emphasise the ,satiric‘ pedigree of a text of striking hybridity and intertextual hypertrophy. In chapter 2 (“satura”) I look at the various ways in which, in the history of Roman satire and especially its early commentaries and poetics, the reflection of satire has struggled with its prominent lack of form. Revising the most popular explanation for the amorphy of satiric texts, indignation (indignatio), I propose a new approach to the destructive impetus of satire: Rather than attacking vice or despicable (social, political, ethical) circumstances, the satirist’s aggression turns towards his own text: Investing a thought of Giorgio Agamben, Juvenal’s famous “facit indignatio versum” (Juv. Sat. I,79) can be read “indignation makes a (U-)turn”. Satire thus becomes ,inverse language‘ or – as I show in this chapter – language that denies itself. Focusing on the etymology of “satura”, the second part of the chapter adds to this speculative theorem the notion of culinary overabundance and radical heterogeneity: satires should literally be thought of as “concoctions” (Juvenal’s “farrago”, Juv. Sat. I,1). Moreover, as a literary ,genre‘ – my thesis privileges the term ,mode/way of writing‘ (Schreibweise) – this culinary origin allows us to conceive “satura” as a radically material approach to language: as language being eaten up. As I contend in the following chapter (“Menippea”), it is the ,anti-genre‘ (Relihan) of Menippean satire that challenges satura’s word, celebrating its own deformity and potpourri-structure along with exercising a gesture of radical destruction rooted in its cynic origins. Against the backdrop of the disparate catalogue of characteristics recognised scholars of Menippean satire (Frye, Bakhtin, Relihan, Koppenfels) have established, my primary focus is the nexus between eating, drinking, i.e. bodily consumption and a production of texts whose hypertrophic intertextuality and untamed mixture of styles stages an incontrollable recycling of literary material. To use a very productive concept by M. Bakhtin: this thesis heuristically pictures Menippean satires as grotesque text-bodies, poetic corpora of monstrous dimensions: deformed by digressive swellings; open to their textual surroundings and insatiably incorporating verbal material, this radical satura behaves as a textus edax. Consequentially, my interpretation of the Satyrica sets out to observe a very concrete incorporating, ruminating, spewing out and feeding in of literature. But in contrast to V. Rimmels seminal study of the Satyrica’s corporeality, my aim is to trace these practices from the bottom level of the single letter up to the work in its whole as a poetics of (self)ingestion of the satiric text. As a satura Menippea (I tend to say) this text performs a literal mastication of verbal/linguistic material, it chews on words, breaking them up just like bites of food in order to gain vital energy. The Cena Trimalchionis, to which I devote my particular attention (chapter “textus edax”), in this light represents a poetological feast, staging this equation of discourse and food. Against the backdrop of such Saturnalian gluttony I try to show that also the last surviving scene of the Satyrica can conclusively be integrated into the k

poetics of consumption, of “inverted/devoured language” (ver ehrte Sprache). My thesis thus z also tries to present an approach to the fragmentary state of the Satyrica that conceives the disintegration of the textual corpus not as an accident of its tradition, but as a consequence of its inherent poetological dynamics. My study closes with an epilogue that presents a perspective on Rabelais’ Gargantua as the prototypical edacious text of menippean (varronian) provenance in Early Modern Age. The adaptation of the Gargantua by Johann Fischart (Geschichtklitterung, 1590) carries an excessive mastication of verbal material ad nauseam. By examining this unleashed translation and its saturated poetics I aim to broaden the scope of my observations towards a comparative poetics of the monstrous text.