4. The bitter laugh: The mock-heroic mode as a grimace of moral disgust.
Satire as a genre--we have only to think of its founding father Aristophanes--is not afraid of using the filthy and obscene in order to humiliate man's pride, to literally cast dirt on his aspiration to be a rational animal. Now neoclassical taste, though by no means prudish, put a ban on any detailed or drastic representation of man's more animal aspects like the sexual or the excremental functions. Readers of Gulliver's Travels, however, will remember that the disgusting aspects of man's animal nature play a conspicuous part in the satiric narrative, especially in Book IV, which presents a shockingly unflattering picture of mankind.
Pope dedicated his second mock-epic The Dunciad to his friend Swift, and something of Swift's taboo-breaking 'excremental vision' seems to have found its way into the elegant heroic couplets of Pope's masterpiece, which caused a public outcry when it first came out in 1728. In tone and subject matter it could not be more different from the [sic.] Rape of the Lock. Following the lead of Dryden's Mac Flecknoe, Pope outdoes his model, and uses Virgil's Aeneid as a heroic foil to stage the coronation of a king of dunces and the coming into power of a mindless mass culture of dulness in Britain.
MLA7:
Werner, von Koppenfels. "'Nothing Is Ridiculous But What Is Deformed': Laughter as a Test of Truth in Enlightenment Satire" A History of English Laughter: Laughter from "Beowulf" to Bekett and Beyond. Ed. Manfred Pfister. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. 57-67. Print. (The entire excerpt is taken from Page 64.)
