The satiric tradition Bob reconstructs as a genre-history in dialogue 24, and the frame through which Eric McLuhan read his father's work. Named for the Greek Menippus, revived by the Roman scholar Varro, renamed "Varronian" by Dryden, retrieved as "Menippean" by Bakhtin and popularized by Kristeva, it is defined less by a fixed form than by a recurring impulse — to wake the reader rather than fascinate him, remade with every major shift in media. Bob uses it to place McLuhan (the Menippean, by Theall's temperament) against Joyce (the Varronian); Cameron uses its very multiplicity to refuse the timeline. Start with the four-hundred-year thesis, then Cameron's "chords on the piano."
Across the dialogues
Enters as the genre-history set piece — Bob threads Menippus through Varro, Dryden's "Varronian," Bakhtin and Kristeva to Eric McLuhan's law of four-hundred-year renewal, and Cameron converts the whole lineage from a timeline into a chord
The tradition's origin is a media-mixing — Menippus's outrage was to combine poetry and prose "meant to be separate," which Bob reads proleptically as McLuhan's "mix your media."
"It was outrageous in the early phonetic days, you know, the early writing in Greek culture. So he mixed his media, is what McLuhan would say later."
Dryden, rediscovering the form through Varro and distinguishing it from the public-figure satire of Horace and Juvenal, gave it the name "Varronian" — the label that held until Bakhtin restored "Menippean."
"he called it Varronian satire."
Eric McLuhan's governing thesis — no single definition can hold, because the form re-answers each new medium, renewing itself roughly every four hundred years from Alan of Lille through Rabelais and Tristram Shandy to the Electric-Age Cantos and Finnegans Wake.
"new technologies change society, and the Menippean satire is always a response to the changing effects in the medium."
Theall's typology sorts the moderns by temperament — Lewis' cynicism is Menippean, Joyce's hedonism Varronian — and places McLuhan, by disposition, on Lewis' Menippean side.
"Wyndham Lewis was the Menippean, not Varronian. Joyce was the Varronian, James Joyce."
Cameron dissolves the genre-history into simultaneity — the variants are not a sequence in time but perceptual possibilities sounded at once, "way too linear" as a timeline.
"I would just see these as different chords on the piano of perceptual possibility."
The Take Today epigraph retrieved — "Utopians and Menippeans... obsessed with a period preceding their own" set against Orwell, the genre stretched into a tool for dating the present
The McLuhan epigraph Bob reads from Take Today to place Orwell — the satirist's backward fixation diagnosing 1984 as already having happened in 1930.
"Utopians and Menippean are always obsessed with a period preceding their own."
Named as the archive's aggression — the Menippean mode Bob attributes to Finnegans Wake and the Android Meme as they play human history back at us
Bob gives the archive's replay a genre — Menippean aggression — the mode in which Finnegans Wake and the Android Meme mirror human history mockingly back at us.
"The archive come alive and playing back our history to ourselves with a Menippean aggression."
Its unwritten history surfaced — Bob points past the 1997 book to the hundred-page account in Eric McLuhan's PhD, and recalls Eric defining the form by pointing to a bum outside the Art College
Bob points past the ten pages in Eric McLuhan's 1997 hardcover to the hundred-page history of the form in Eric's PhD — the fuller account, tracing the genre and its renamings, that most readers never reach.
"But the history of Menippean satire is brilliant."
Bob recalls Eric McLuhan defining Menippean satire not by a text but by pointing to a bum "shitting and eating" outside the Art College of Ontario — a living embodiment of the philosophy of cynicism.
"you see that bum that sits out in front of the Art College? He sat there, you know, shitting and eating by the entrance to the... hoity-toity museum and he said that's a Menippean satire"
Promoted from a genre with a lineage to a strategy with a purpose — the form is offered as McLuhan's chosen instrument for a communication problem he could not otherwise solve, and then, in the same breath, conceded to have failed at it, which turns the genre from an inheritance into an unfinished assignment
The premise that makes the genre necessary — nothing has to be discovered, only transmitted, so the whole problem is one of form.
"what needs to be understood in these questions isn't something new. It was known by the Egyptians. It was known by Plato. It was known by Aristotle. So what's needed is the communication of these things that people have always known."
McLuhan's comedy classified as method rather than manner — the satire and the media theory are two attempts on the same problem, which places the funny McLuhan and the serious one on one footing.
"Talking about media is one way. Trying to use Menippean satire is another way. And so his comedy is part of a Menippean satire strategy of seeing if that would work to communicate."
Made the name for McLuhan's late turn and defended against Bob's reading of it as surrender — the change of style recast as a different attempt to communicate rather than the end of the attempt
The late style read as a retreat — satire as what is left when the program fails.
"he gave up and fell back into Menippean satire because nobody was going to implement whatever he thought could be done, some kind of collective action or program."
The refusal that keeps the corpus continuous — if the satire is still an attempt, the late work is not a different man but the same failure pursued by other means.
"he's not actually giving up. He's just changing his mode of approach, right? I mean, his Menippean satire is an attempt to communicate. It's just a different kind of attempt."
Connections
In Theall's typology Lewis is the Menippean — cynical, aggressive — against Joyce the Varronian.
Joyce is cast as the Varronian — the joyful, hedonistic satirist — to Lewis' Menippean bite.
Eric's thesis — you can't fix one definition, since the form re-answers each new medium.
Cameron refuses the linear history for a simultaneity — "different chords on the piano of perceptual possibility."