Wendy RASCHKE Satirist As Frankenstein: In The Public Eye


In recent years Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein has been re-presented in modern filmic versions, which have (re)vitalized the public imagination and have opened up new criticisms in the face of "potentially disastrous" technological advances. A number of points of contact can be identified between the young scientist and the Roman satirist: both deal with the construction of bodies; the one with the literal assemblage of body parts and the life force to produce the monster; the other with the literary construction (and deconstruction?) of a corpus of verse (cf. the disiecta membra poetae), which in turn employs the body and its parts to symbolize the disintegration of Roman society. The good citizen has become like a maimed body that has lost the use of its hands (Juvenal 3.47-8).

Like the text of Mary Shelley and like some ancient historians, the satirical text invites us to consider the evidence, to scrutinize in a "theatrical" manner (theasthai); it provides us with sequences of characters, rendered as through a camera lens which focuses only upon the most essential elements and leaves the viewer to reconstruct the whole. The emphasis on part over whole bears witness to the dislocation of values in the society. The audience/spectator is offered an extraordinary image—a self-propelled belly; the ear and the cock's comb of a tyrant; the funereal perfume of a Crispinus; a cup weakened by shaking and demanding retirement—to wonder at: this is the thauma of Herodotus, the miraclum of Lucilius (17W), the monstrum of Juvenal. The poet in private creates a grotesque prodigy of parts; when it is released, it confronts a public which responds with awe (the attonita urbs of Juvenal 4.77; cf. moneo as the root of monstrum) and horror: when Lucilius roars... the listener blushes (Juvenal 1.166ff.). The accused is no more than a face, a sum of "death, disease, and poison" (Lucilius 37W).

Clothes also "make the man," as in the case of Creticus (Juvenal 2). The "vain delights" of outrageous spectacle and brightly coloured costumes appealed to the Roman audience (Horace, Epp. 2.1.189ff.). The height of spectacle is achieved in the amphitheatre, that microcosm of Roman society in which its pariahs serve their sentence and the pleasure of the masses. The gladiator, unrecognized by law as a human being, is an animal form, the "jut-tooth of Bovillae with his one little projecting tooth... a very rhinoceros" (Lucilius 109-110W), or the meat in a butcher's shop, "with one eye and two feet, halved like a pig." The mutilated flesh of the gladiator embodies what is wrong with Roman society. A grotesque sum of parts, he is giant and prodigy, star and outcast. Monstrous in appearance (Juvenal 6.105ff.), he is the creation of empire and satirist, a body to be exposed to the popular gaze, as Horace envisages his little book (Epp.1.20) and, like the turbot of Juvenal's fourth satire, subject to being rendered into pieces at the whim of an emperor.