Greece & Rome, Vol. 49, No.

1, April 2002

IN PUBLIC AND SATIRIC GROTESQUES PRIVATE: JUVENAL, DR FRANKENSTEIN, AND ABSOLUTELY RAYMOND CHANDLER FABULOUS
By SUSANNA MORTON BRAUND AND

WENDY

RASCHKE

No one would dispute that satirists typically locate themselves in the public spaces of the city,1 whether that city be Rome or London or Hollywood. The satirist stands at the busiest crossroads in Rome to make notes on the people who go by, as Juvenal describes at Satire 1.634, or he walks around and 'reports' the outrages and excesses he sees on the streets of London, as in John Gay's Trivia: The Art of Walking the Streetsof London (1716), or he finds himself swept away like a piece of flotsam on the mob rampaging through the streets of Los Angeles in the terrifying finale to Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust (1939). As Matthew Hodgart said, satire is 'an urban art'.2The satiristfinds an easy target in the spectacle of monstrosity gratuitously displayed by the world on the streets of its cities. But the satirist's world is not exclusively public. There is also an intensely private world in which he goes behind the scenes to do his work. This dimension of his activities has received less attention from critics. In this paper we aim to supplement that gap by examining first what happens when the satirist goes behind closed doors to conduct his investigations and then how the monstrosities of his private creativity are launched into the public realm. In each case, we produce modern analogies to illuminate the mechanisms of Juvenal's satire. In the first part we deploy the classic image of the private eye created by Raymond Chandler and in the second part we invoke Mary Shelley's creation, the mad scientist Dr Frankenstein and his monster. In both cases, we suggest that the public consumption of the private grotesqueries of satire raises profoundly troubling questions for the audience of satire.
Muse: Satire of theEnglishRenaissance(New Haven, 1959), 7-8; S. H. A. Kernan, The Cankered Braund, 'City and Country in Roman Satire' in S. H. Braund (ed.), Satire and Society in Ancient Rome (Exeter, 1989), 23-47. 2 M. Hodgart, Satire (Verona, 1969), 129.

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Finally, we bring our discussion up to date by offering the suggestion that the TV programme Absolutely Fabulous raises similar questions about the public display of private monstrosities by the satirist.

Behind closed doors: the satirist as private eye In the first part of this paper we shall examine the times when the satirist goes behind closed doors and exposes to the spotlight the privatevices of his victims. We shall argue that at such moments, his status is altered from his self-proclaimed and self-arrogated role as the guardian of public morality - the role bolstered by the military imagery in Juvenal Satire 1, for example (lines 19-20 and 168-71) - into something much more dubious: a private eye who investigates illicit behaviour or a snoop who records the gossip that he hears and a voyeur who peers through keyholes. In this paper, we shall focus first upon the moments when Juvenal's satirist goes behind closed doors or looks through the keyhole, the moments when he passes from the public domain into private territory. Our examination of what the satirist-sleuth sees and hears will reveal a remarkablyhomogeneous body of material. Then we shall take a quick look at Juvenal's private eye in action, carrying out an investigation. All this will furnish evidence of the distinct ambivalence of the satirist's moral position and will provoke a reassessment of the relationship between satirist and audience. Let's start by going behind closed doors and looking briefly at the opening of Satire 14, one of the later and (these days) less fashionable poems, most of which consists of an attack on the various manifestations of avaritia which fathers wittingly and unwittingly encourage in their
sons (14.1-33):3
Fuscinus, there are many, many things that deserve a bad reputation and that fix a lasting stain to shining lives which are actually demonstrated and passed on to sons by their parents. If it's ruinous gambling that is the old man's pleasure, his heir is a player too while still a boy, rattling the very same weapons in his tiny dice-shaker. And if a young man has learned how to peel truffles, to marinade mushrooms, and to sink floating fig-peckers in the mushroom sauce under instruction from his waster of a father's white-haired gluttony, none of his relatives can entertain better hopes for him. Such a boy, when his seventh year has just passed by and before all his teeth have grown again, will always want to dine in lavish style without declining from his grand cuisine, though you bring in thousands of bearded tutors on his left and his right. Someone who
3 All translations from Juvenal are Braund's draft for Loeb Classical Library.

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revels in the clank of chains, who is extraordinarily excited by branded slaves, chain gangs and dungeons - what is his influence on his youngster? Is Rutilus teaching gentleness of spirit and a disposition which doesn't overreact to minor lapses? And that he thinks that the souls and bodies of slaves consist of the same stuff and elements as our own? Or is he teaching cruelty, when he enjoys the harsh racket of a flogging and considers the lash better than any Siren? He's the Antiphates or Polyphemus of his trembling household, only happy whenever the torturer has been summoned and someone's being scorched with the glowing iron, all because of a couple of towels. Do you naively expect Larga's daughter not to practise adultery? She could never name her mother's lovers so quickly or reel them off at such a pace that she didn't need to draw breath thirty times. As a little girl she was her mother's accomplice. Now, as her mother dictates to her, she fills her notelets and gives them to the same pathics for transmission to her lover. That's nature's law. Bad examples in the home corrupt us more speedily and quickly, because they creep into our minds with powerful authority.

When the satirist states explicitly that 'Bad examples in the home corrupt us more speedily and quickly' (velocius et citius nos Icorrumpunt vitiorum exempla domestica:14.31-2) he is claiming that what goes on behind closed doors is a legitimate area for the satirist's concern. The cases he cites here are gambling (4-5), extravagant dining (6-14), cruelty to the household slaves (15-24), all of which are learned from the paterfamilias,and adultery, which is learned by a daughter from her mother (25-30). This passage provides a marvellous overview in miniature of Juvenal's treatment of what goes on behind closed doors, as emerges when we set this passage alongside the survey we have made of the Satires. According to Juvenal, the satirist'sprivileged knowledge is constituted by the topics of gambling (1.89-92, 8.10-11), extravagant dining (the criminal-in-exile's life of luxury 1.49-50, the wealthy patron feasting alone (1.135-9), selfish gluttony (4.11-33, esp. 22: emit sibi), cruelty to slaves (6.474-94) and adultery (the husband 'pimping' his wife 1.55-7, a father and his daughter-in-law 1.77, brides and teenage boys in adultery 1.78, Domitian's adultery with Julia 2.29-33, lessons in adultery from mothers-in-law to daughters-in-law 6.231-41, many more examples of adultery throughout Satire 6,4 e.g. the Bona Dea festival 6.314-45, women's intimacy with cinaedi in the household 6.01-26), all of which feature in Satire 14, along with the other topics not mentioned in Satire 14, namely other sexual activity ('midnight cowboys' 1.37-41, Hispo's varied sexual tastes 2.50, three-in-a-bed 2.58-61, the Armenian hostage and the Roman tribune 2.163-5, the lust of Greek 'amiczi 3.109-12, sleeping with a Vestal 4.9-10, Messalina's
4

See S. H. Braund, 'Juvenal- Misogynist or Misogamist?', JRS 82 (1992), 71-86.

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gilded nipples as she stands for hire in the brothel 6.120-5, arguments in bed 6.268-85, night-time exploits of Maura and Tullia at the altar of Pudicitia 6.306-13, loss of sexual potency 10.204-9, the rape and castration of beautiful teenagers by tyrants 10.306-9), the abuse of power (Domitian humiliates the members of his consiliumin Satire 4), partying all night (in front of ancestors' statues 8.11-12, in a seedy diner 8.158-78), effeminate behaviour (men spinning 2.53-7, men putting on women's clothing and make-up 2.83-109, male depilation 8.13-18), physical illness (the pathic's piles and smooth ass-hole 2.11-13, Julia's abortion 2.29-33, loss of faculties 10.203-4, the illnesses of old age 10.217-32, onset of Alzheimer's 10.232-6) and, finally, mental anguish (guilt experienced during a meal and at night 13.210-22, cf. 1.165-7). As is obvious from the above survey, Satires2 and 6 furnish a sizeable proportion of this material, yet these are not the only poems in which the satirist ventures behind closed doors. Significantly, even in his opening, programmatic, satire, Juvenal insinuates a few glimpses of essentially private and unverifiable scenes: the 'midnight cowboys' and the size of their endowments (37-41), Marius' life of luxury in exile (49-50), the complaisant husband (55-7), seductions within families (77-8), and the patron feasting alone (135-9). And Satire 4, with its depiction of the abuse of power perpetrated by the emperor Domitian over the members of his consilium,Satire 8, with its exploration of the decadent hypocrisy of the elite who contradict their pedigrees by partying all night and depilating their bodies in front of the family statuary, together with the depiction of the miseries of old age in Satire 10 and the horrors of a guilty conscience in Satire 13, offer further excursions behind the scenes. The largest category here is undoubtedly that of sexual misconduct, which includes but is by no means confined to adultery. That said, it is salutary to note some of Juvenal's omissions. He is not concerned with incidents of sleaze and corruption and murder, with backhanders and backroom deals and jobs for the boys, with the ancient equivalents of drug-running and gun-running and laundering money and hiring heavies and hitmen - some of which surely happen behind closed doors, even in the essentially outdoor life of the Mediterranean, where, in Michel Foucault's rather provocative wording, ancient societies 'remained societies of promiscuity, where existence was led "in public"'.5 Rather, in this remarkably homogeneous
5 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (tr. R. Hurley) (London, 1986), 42 and in general 37-68: 'The Cultivation of the Self'.

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body of material set behind closed doors, Juvenal seems primarily concerned with the intersection of private and public morality, with the way that private morality can be extrapolated into public morality, especially in terms of the use or misuse of the body, which amounts to a lack of self-control, a subject well discussed by Catharine Edwards,6 and a lack of control over others over whom one should be able to exercise control. That gives some idea of the scope and the limitations of Juvenal's scenes behind closed doors. Now we will turn our attention to two extended passages set behind closed doors, when the satirist becomes a private eye and apparently spies on or infiltrates meetings that are secret and exclusive. These are the descriptions of cross-dressing in secret by the effeminates of Satire 2 (83-116) and the perversion of the Bona Dea rites to which, according to tradition, no men were admitted, in Satire 6 (314-45). In both texts, the degree of closely-observed detail is worthy of a Raymond Chandler-type treatment - and in both cases, those salacious details might suggest or even invite the questions 'How does the satirist-sleuth know all this? Is he there?' These questions not only problematize the authority of the satirist but also invite an honest appraisal of the satirist's relationship with his audience. Do his lavishly detailed accounts of gender-bending and sexual frenzy compromise his claims to the moral high ground? Is he any better than the lascivious poet in Persius whose poetry gives his audience a sexual thrill (1.19-23), as it 'enters their backsides and tickles their inmost parts with its verse vibrations' (cum carmina lumbumlintrant et tremuloscalpunturubi intima versu)? And - sotto voce - what are we doing by drawing attention to these texts and thus privileging them? Of course we realise that these passages from Satire 2 and 6 do not map 'reality' (whatever that is) in any straightforwardway, as is shown by the evident complexities of using these poems as evidence.7 But we can undoubtedly utilize these scenes to isolate areas of anxiety for the male elite about society and its norms, about the matrix of gender and ethnicity, about standards of male and female behaviour, about the qualities of virtus and pudicitia, which are central to Roman ideology, as David Konstan has demonstrated persuasively for Satire 2,8 and Barbara
6 C. Edwards, The Politics of Immoralityin Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 1993), 195-8 (on slavery to bodily pleasures). 7 Braund, op. cit. and 'A Woman's Voice? - Laronia's Role in Juvenal Satire 2' in R. Hawley and B. Levick (edd.), Womenin Antiquity: New Assessments(London and New York, 1995), 207-19. 8 D. Konstan, 'Sexuality and Power in Juvenal's Second Satire', LCM 18.1 (1993), 12-14.

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Gold now for Satires 2 and 6.9 That is not our concern here. Rather, we propose that we here enter into the world created by the satirist and ask how verifiable what he is telling us is. And we have to conclude that, despite the fact that these texts have been set to work to illustrate the decadence of Roman society, there is no way of securely testing what he knows. In these scenes behind closed doors, especially the extended scenes in Satires 2 and 6, the only people present were all complicit - or slaves (and therefore automatically of dubious reliability, according to ancient thought). Our satirist-sleuth is short of reliable witnesses to his allegations: when he sneaks behind closed doors and sees what people get up to with their accomplices, their spouses, their subordinates and their slaves, who is likely to 'spill the beans'? The most likely answer is a disaffected subordinate or a slave with a grudge to settle.10This we discover graphically in Satire 9, which is the only occasion when we see Juvenal's satirist-sleuthactually in the process of carrying out his investigations. Everything else is simply his narrative of his findings - the report he files to his paymaster. What happens in Satire 9 is in some ways radically different from anything else in Juvenal. In a chance encounter in the street, he encourages the naive Naevolus ('Warty') to share confidences with him and thus lures him into detailed revelations about his sexual relationship with his former patron, who is a wealthy pathic, and his wife. Here is a sub-Chandleresque version of the opening of the poem, as the private eye is gearing up to his interrogation, in a thoroughly West Coast version, with apologies to Raymond Chandler.11
The minute I set eyes on him again, I knew something was wrong, badly wrong. Ira Warty was looking like his name, with a face overcast like he'd just challenged a poker king and lost. He looked as gloomy as a sidekick caught dipping his moustache in his boss's woman's muff. A loan-shark wouldn't be more glum, looking for fools to take his triple interest rate and not finding any. 'You've sprouted wrinkles overnight. How come? Your sense of humour left town?' I asked him. I remembered him as a slick piece of work, the party wiseguy cracking jokes which had teeth. Not any more. His face could have sunk a battleship, his hair stuck out like porcupine's quills, and that well-oiled sheen had abandoned his skin like the first-class passengers had jumped the Titanic. He was so emaciated you'd have figured that AIDS was his flatmate. Everything about him shouted that he was a walking specimen of a tortured soul. 'Looks like you've changed your lifestyle since we last met. It's not so long ago that you were gracing the lobbies of the
9 B. Gold, 'The House I Live In Is Not My Own' in S. M. Braund and B. Gold (edd.), Vile Bodies: Roman Satire and CorporealDiscourse,Arethzusa 31.3 (1998), 369-86. 10 On the absolute control over slaves' bodies exercised by masters, with no defacto legal redress, see K. R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire (Brussels, 1994), 113-37.

9.1-26. l Juvenal

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swankiest hotels in the Bay, providing an "escort" service for all the dames - everyone

knew that. And, what you kept under wraps - that you were servicing their husbandstoo. So what happened?'

During the dialogue that follows - this is the only poem of Juvenal's to use the dialogue form throughout - we learn that before he was ditched by his patron, Naevolus anally penetrated him, saved his marriage by satisfying his wife sexually and fathered two children for him (27-90). After getting Naevolus to 'spill the beans', the satirist then takes the moral high ground by advising Naevolus that it is impossible for any rich man ever to have any secrets because his slaves inevitably rat on him as an act of revenge for the beatings and punishments they've received from him (90-123). This indirectly invites us to draw the conclusion that Naevolus is no better than a slave, in that he too has revealed his patron's secrets out of a sense of grievance. But however much we may endorse the satirist'sobvious sense of superiorityto Naevolus, the role of the satirist himself is problematized. We suggest that in this poem Juvenal provides a graphic picture of the ambivalences of the satirist's position: he may claim the moral high ground and see the results of his investigations as a legitimation of his intrusions (the ends justifying the means), but his methods of investigation and his attitudes to his victims tend to render his revelations of private conduct morally suspect. There is a disturbing tension here. The fact is that the satirist, like the private eye, is a marginal, lonely, and isolated figure in relation to society. He may present himself as one
kind of detective - simply seeking to expose the truth - but reveal

himself as another, the kind who is more obsessed with his investigation than he should be. In an essay on John Le Carre and Raymond Chandler, Glenn Most conducts his own investigations into the figure of the detective and offers a distinction between what he calls the English tradition, in which the detective is superior, aloof from involvement, carrying out his investigation to discover the truth, and the American tradition, in which the detective becomes inextricably intertwined with the events he is investigating, often in terms of violence and sex and sometimes as the catalyst for those very events.12 We suggest that the gulf between these two models is collapsed in the case of the satiristcum-detective, because the satirist's infatuation with the salacious seriously compromises his moral authority.
12 G. W. Most, 'The Hippocratic Smile: Le Carre and Detection' in A. Bold (ed.), The Questfor Le Carre (London and New York, 1988), 144-53.

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But we want to close this part of our discussion by turning attention away from the satirist and on to ourselves, the audience, and asking how we react to the satirist-sleuth's revelations of the seedy side of life. This takes the argument about moral ambivalence one disconcerting stage further. When the satirist explicitly reveals to us - and not to anyone else - what goes on behind closed doors, do his revelations make us uncomfortable? And should they? A quotation from Martial, which Hinds uses in the closing pages of Allusion and Intertext,'3emphasizes this point. In his self-styled 'Saturnalian'eleventh book (11.2.5), Martial presents a picture of Hector and Andromache's adventurous sex life and of what their slaves got up to (11.104.13-14):14 'The Phrygian slaves used to masturbate behind the door whenever Hector's wife sat astride her horse.' Our question - and this is, or should be, an uncomfortable question - is: are we any better than these voyeuristic slaves when we are constructed by the satirist as the audience for his revelations of what goes on behind closed doors? The only way to resist this construction and manipulation is to stop listening or reading. But of course we are all hooked by the satirist's revelations into surrendering the ability to resist. The classic discussion of the complications involved in the combination of satire, sex and 'scopophilia' is probably that of John Sullivan in his book on Petronius.1s But the overtly dialogic form of verse satire surely makes the situation even more dangerous for its audience than does Petronius' narrative form. That is, we suggest that not only is the satirist compromised by his description of sexual secrets, but that we too are heavily implicated in this process. The satirist-sleuthcan hardly offer resistance to being labelled a voyeur - and when he reports his investigation to us, we too are rendered voyeurs. This issue is not confined to the Roman past. In modern British culture there is a satirical magazine that presents itself as a guardian of public morality, a magazine which could not have a more apposite title: Private Eye. Page after page in this fortnightly magazine is devoted to the exposure of corruption, nepotism, sleaze and incompetence in public life. By contrast, very few column inches are devoted to the sex lives of
13 S. Hinds, Allusion and Intertext. Dynamics of Appropriationin Roman Poetry (Cambridge, 1998), 129-35. 14 masturbabantur Phrygii post ostia servi Hectoreoquotienssederatuxor equo. 15 J. P. Sullivan, The 'Satyricon'of Petronius. A Literary Study (London, 1968), 238-53, who reads this phenomenon as a genuine reflection of the author's psychosexual interests. For a challenge to this view cf. N. Slater, Reading Petronius (Baltimore and London, 1990), e.g. 38-49 and G. B. Conte, The Hidden Author. An Interpretationof Petronius' Satyricon (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1996), e.g. 104-39, who both discuss the difficulties surrounding the narratorin the Satyricon and especially the destabilizing role of sexual activity.

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public figures.16But there are occasional lapses from this policy - usually when the pull of the material is too strong and when an opportunity for wit is afforded. One such instance at the height of 'the Monica Lewinsky affair'is a cover which construes us as eavesdroppers to an interrogation of Bill Clinton, a situation in essence similar to that of Juvenal's ninth Satire.17This picture can invite us to challenge our view of the morality of any satirist-sleuth or 'special investigator' - and to feel uneasy about our own complicity in such investigations. It is difficult to frame the question better than Juvenal did when he asked quis custodietipsos custodes?(6.031-2): 'Who's going to chaperon the chaperons themselves?' This question of the morality of satire is raised just as urgently by the image of the satirist in the role of creator, to which we now turn.

In the Public Eye - the Satirist as Frankenstein In her 1831 Introduction to her novel Frankenstein Mary Shelley describes the development of her subject in her imagination and her comprehension of the horror of a scientific creation of this kind. She states:
Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the World. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken.

It is important for our understanding of the novel to realize that it was the product of a young woman still in her teenage years who had recently given birth to an illegitimate child and seen it die. Shelley's work focuses on the animation of lifeless matter, on bringing the dead to life. That she herself makes the metaphorical connection between literal and literary (re)production is clear, when she refers to the novel as her 'hideous progeny' which she invites to 'go forth and prosper'. In a similar way, the scientist Frankenstein himself reflects on his goals: 'I thought, that... I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption'18 and he manufactures a monster who becomes an agent of destruction and a victim of parental
This is in strong contrast with the highly intrusive tabloid press in Britain, which can virtually be characterized by its neglect of issues of political significance in favour of prying into the private lives of the 'celebrities' of politics, sport, and entertainment. 17 The headline above the picture of Clinton under interrogation is 'The Filth Amendment'. The speech bubbles have Clinton being asked 'Did you ask the witness to lie?' and Clinton replying 'No Sir. Just kneel.' 18 M. Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus(New York, 1993), 62 (hereafter cited as . Frankenstein)
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abandonment. The literary work and its subject are equally monstrous offspring of their creator.19 Frankenstein, the primary subject, is the generative force through which the monstrous body is provided with life. In a comparable way, the Roman satirist creates unsavoury progeny, both the poetic corpus and the satiric persona, through whose agency a variety of bodies representative of disintegrating Roman society are given voice. Both Shelley/Frankenstein and Juvenal/personaare creators, assemblers of parts who work skilfully behind closed doors at their creations. Each also inherits a tradition in his area of speciality: Juvenal readily acknowledges his desire to follow in the footsteps of Lucilius, but will place his own characteristic mark upon the genre. Frankenstein's soul exclaims: '. .. more, far more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.20 Both perform experiments which require technical knowledge, Frankenstein as a laboratory scientist, Juvenal as one who brings a fresh approach to the art (techne) of satiric composition (Satire 1.170-1): 'I'll try what I may against those whose ashes are buried under the Flaminian and Latin ways' (experiar quid concedatur in illos quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina). Juvenal establishes his intent to employ the dead as his materials. He will re-create the life of Rome by having recourse to the dead. Similarly Frankenstein observes that 'to examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.' As a result he fashions his creation from the bodies of the deceased and is 'led to examine the cause and progress of [this] decay, and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnelhouses ... [I] saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life.'21As
one critic has remarked, '. . the only way he [F.] can ... [create life] is by

grubbing furtively around graveyards.'22 The resulting monster is a grotesque assembly of pieces cobbled together, even as in the hands of Juvenal the literarycomposition, the lanx satura,is a complex of traditions - satiric, epic, dramatic, rhetorical: a multi-faceted phenomenon as
19 On the importance of her reproductive experience in the life of Shelley, see E. Moers, Literary Women (New York, 1976), 92-9. The birth imagery is clear: Frankenstein speaks of 'days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue' and 'so much time spent in painful labour' before he comes to the discovery of the principle of life (59). 20 Frankenstein 53. A new twist on the story has recently been added by filmmakers at Universal Studios, who are using computers to produce a remake of the old monster: now machine makes man?? (Los Angeles Times, 2nd October 1998, Section F, 23). 21 Frankenstein58-9. 22 D. Seed, 'Frankenstein - Parable or Spectacle?', Criticism24.4 (1982), 329.

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at the beginning of the Ars envisaged by Horace in his image of compositio Poetica (1-9):
If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here, now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favoured with a private view, refrain from laughing? Believe me, dear Pisos, quite like such pictures would be a book, whose idle fancies shall be shaped like a sick man's dreams, so that neither head nor foot can be assigned to a single shape.

Horace is concerned with incongruity in composition, variety without techne,which lacks vision of the whole and may have 'monstrous' results; in line 30 seems dangerously close to monstrum! Monstrosity prodigialiter is what emanates from poor poetic skills; it is also the result of Frankenstein's unhappy combination of ill-assorted parts. Similarly, the graveyards of the deceased - poetic forerunners and historical personalities alike - provide the sinews and the substance from which a new corpus of satire is developed. The image of the literary corpus is employed by Horace also at Satires 1.4.63 where, in a discussion of literary composition in which he reflects the Aristoteliantheory of the integrity of the 'body' of verse, metathesis is viewed as a 'butchering' or 'dismembering' of a living whole (disiecti membrapoetae). The image has been described by commentators as 'surgical', but in a Roman environment it would more likely have summoned up visions of the defeated gladiator. (It also recalls, as we shall see, Bakhtiniandiscussion of the grotesque body and the giant, whose 'dismembered, scattered, or flattened body' is envisaged in the natural landscape.)23And in a sense the composition is a monstrum,a spectacle, an eye-witness account painted in bold colours, whose effect depends on the audience, internal (as implied by dialogue form or direct address) and external (the public listener/reader).
Such 'grubbing . . . around graveyards' is not a much-celebrated

occupation. At least one critic perceives Mary Shelley's novel as denying 'any grandeur either to Frankenstein's ambition or to his enterprise.' He may be identified in a subtitle to the novel as a second Prometheus, but Frankenstein 'creates not a higher being, but a mutant';24and the idea of fire, normally associated with Prometheus, appears as a destructive force, a dazzling spectacle, closely related to the monster himself
23 The use of poetaefor poemamakes clear the metaphor; cf. K. Freudenberg, The WalkingMuse (Princeton, 1993), 158-9. For Bakhtin's description see M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (tr. H. Iswolsky) (Indiana, 1984), 342. 24 Seed, op. cit., 330. Cf. Lucilius 587M = 723 W: nisi portenta anguisquevolucris ac pinnatos scribitis,and the discussion of C. O. Brink, Horaceon Poetry. TheArs Poetica (Cambridge, 1971), 85.

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(though admittedly in some respects Frankenstein and the monster are synonymous). We have seen the activities of the creator in his secluded laboratory or study. The end product is ultimately destined for the public eye, and the creator's awareness of his audience is revealed through his treatment of a variety of narrative topics: the self-conscious disavowal of talent; the emotional experience of the creative process; the perceived danger to society posed by his creation; and its visual impact upon his audience. Let us examine these one by one. Both Frankenstein and Juvenal profess humility, but, as we shall see, this humility is false. Frankenstein admits:
... I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.25

The surrounding commentary, however, betrays his real sense of pride. He speaks of the 'great esteem and admiration' which his discoveries brought him at the university, and how the university no longer had anything to teach him (p. 57). Juvenal similarlyunderrates himself in the well-known lines (1.79-80):
si natura negat, facit indignatio versum qualemcumque potest, quales ego vel Cluvienus.

If nature fails, then indignation generates verse, doing the best it can, as I do or Cluvienus;

earlier (1.63-4) he seems to imply that writing is a talent inherent in anyone. But his self-deprecatory pose is hard to accept in light of the claims to education which he has made in lines 15-17 of the same
satire.

Juvenal associates creative power with emotion. The anger and indignation projected in Satire 1 are selfish passions and the creative activity to which they give rise an indulgence of individual emotion.26In a comparable way Frankenstein describes how his 'internal being was in a state of insurrection and turmoil' as he anticipated his future work and how 'my application was at first fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded, and soon became so ardent and eager that the stars often disappeared in the light of morning whilst I was yet engaged
Frankenstein59; Seed, op. cit. 329. Compare also lines 3-5: impune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas, hic elegos? impune diem consumpserit ingensITelephus.. .?
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in my laboratory.'27Frankenstein finds himself particularly attracted to 'the structure of the human frame and indeed any animal imbued with life',28but subordinate animals are soon lost in the search for the secret of human life. Frankenstein's focus is physiological; the satirist claims that his focus is human activities (1.85-6):
quidquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago libelli est. What men do - their hopes and fears, anger and passions, joy and bustling activity, is the mixed offering of my volume.

Yet the physical and the physiological figure prominently in the sequence of characters presented to Juvenal's audience as the farrago (a very physical culinary concept) of his little book.29These characters, as we shall see, are rendered as through a camera lens which focuses upon only the most essential elements and leaves it to the imagination of the viewer to reconstruct the whole. The emphasis on part over whole bears witness to the dislocation of values in the society. The poet in private creates a prodigy of parts (monstrum);when it is released, it confronts a public which responds with astonishment (attonita urbs, Juvenal 4.77), awe and horror. The satirist is a slasher (Persius 1.114), a sword-brandishing warrior (Juvenal 1.165-7), a dangerous beast with hay on his horns (Horace, Sat. 1.4.33-4). Like Frankenstein's monster, satire can be dangerous for its targets; the satirist is a creator of destruction.30 Archilochus and Hipponax, whose work is not strictly speaking satire but has much of the invective spirit of the more aggressive later Roman satirists, are said to have caused deaths by their verses.31It can also give rise to retaliation upon
Frankenstein53. Ibid., 58. 29 On the of Food in Roman culinary concept, see E. Gowers, The Loaded Table.Representations Literature(Oxford, 1993), 192. The creation of a 'spectacle' in film is discussed by L. Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema' in Visual and Other Pleasures (Indiana, 1989), 17 and 19ff. (whose particular concern is the objectification of female characters). 30 R. C. Elliott, ThePower of Satire:Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, 1960), 3-15. On Frankenstein (the new Prometheus) as overreacher, see Moers, op. cit., 95. The monster destroys all that Frankenstein holds dear and eventually Frankenstein himself. The idea of the destruction of the creator by the creation is mirrored in the murder of the child of Frankenstein:when the monster sees the image of the mother in the locket worn by the child, he recalls his own lack of creative prospects and becomes enraged (189). Similarly the murder of Frankenstein's new bride, discussed below. 31 Archilochus was engaged to a young noblewoman, Neobule. When Lycambes, her father, found out that Archilochus was a slave, he cancelled the engagement. Archilochus responded with bitter iambics, which supposedly were the cause of their deaths. Hipponax, a rather unattractive individual, responded negatively to a sculpture of himself which grotesquely exaggerated his faults; he wrote iambic verse against the sculptors, Bupalus and Athenis, who as a result committed suicide. For discussion of the deadly power of satirical verse, see Elliott, op. cit., 3-15.
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the creator himself. Frankenstein's monster, who declares 'You are my creator but I am your master - obey!', brings about the destruction of many who were near and dear to the young scientist, and eventually the death of Frankenstein himself. The satirist similarly must beware the consequences of his creation, especially in the imperial period. In his hybris and fear of reprisal he is remarkably reminiscent of the original Prometheus. The possibility of reprisal is customarily presented in the form of a pattern of warning and reply in the programmatic poems of the leading satirists and has been elucidated particularly by Griffith.32 We can see comparable patterns in Horace, Satires 2.1, Persius Satires 1, and Juvenal Satires 1: and Griffith has identified a number of fragments of Lucilius which appear to conform - indeed they would have provided the original model! However, the 'final evasion' takes different forms: Lucilius and Horace plan to publish to a strictly limited audience; Persius ends up keeping a private secret; Juvenal, exceptionally, anticipates general publication, a spectaculum,if you will, for the eyes and ears of all. In this way he parallels Frankenstein, whose creation, conceived and developed in the private space of his laboratory, is destined to reach the world at large to the astonishment and horror of all who confront him.33 This movement from private to public, which has been identified as a key element in the structureofJuvenal's second satire,is underlined by the climax of Juvenal's first book as a whole. At Satires 5.170-3 the image of the clown, interpreted as the ultimate disengagement of the satirist from the cliensand his servility, also represents the idea of public spectacle.34 The presentation of such a spectacle raises moral questions common to scientific and satiric production. What responsibility does the creator bear towards society? How far can his own quest for fulfilment justify the involvement of and harm to the public at large? These are issues still pertinent to scientific and literary work in our own day. There exist tensions between creator and consumer, and between product and public, whether the creator has produced a multifaceted monster or a stinging satire. As the investigations of the sleuth-satirist open up his
32 J. G. Griffith, 'The Ending of Juvenal's First Satire and Lucilius, Book XXX', Hermes 98 (1970), 56-72. Cf. S. H. Braund, Roman VerseSatire (Oxford, 1992), 22. 33 See P. O'Flinn, 'Production and Reproduction. The Case of Frankenstein' in F. Bolling (ed.), Frankenstein(New York, 1995), 27 on the lack of social control involved; the activity of creation is pursued for private motives. 34 S. M. Braund, Juvenal, Satires,Book 1(Cambridge, 1996), 169-70 and on 5.171. The clown is an obvious object of public entertainment. The amphitheatre provided for some individuals an opportunity of demonstrating unwillingness to live in perpetual servitude to a tyrannical emperor; cf. C. A. Barton, The Sorrowsof the Ancient Romans (Princeton, 1993), 25 f.

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audience to unwanted voyeuristic experiences, so the crazed scientist exposes innocent bystanders to the temperamental behaviour of a subhuman. Frankenstein himself is slow in recognizing this and only truly explores the moral dilemma when the monster demands that the scientist create a mate for him.35 In the Introduction to FrankensteinMary Shelley expressed the idea that 'invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating
out of void, but out of chaos . . .' Her creation was a novel which was

essentially the product of its time - in a literary sense, because it has strong affinities with the Gothic novel, and socio-politically, because (it has been argued) it reflects the tension of the period of the Industrial Revolution. That the political relevance of the monster image is not limited to the era of Shelley is clear from the consistent appearance of films based on the novel. 'It is,' observes one critic, 'at precisely moments of crisis that Frankenstein's monster tends to be summoned by ideology and to have its arm brutally twisted until it blurts out the statements that ideology demands.'36 The earliest filmic version of Frankenstein was released precisely at the depths of the U.S. Depression. Monsters raise their ugly heads in the political theory of Hobbes and Burke as metaphors for a body politic which has become rebellious and discordant: that body loses its recognizable form and is dispersed into a chaos of dismembered and contending organs.37The reduction of the body to an assembly of inharmonious parts is equally essential to Roman ideas of political breakdown (and monstrosity). Lucan (Bellum civile 1.79-80) presents the discorslmachina (note the break in the line) of Roman power. As Johnson notes, 'For any machinery concord is of the essence; its parts must mesh exactly.'38Rome is a bad machine which will self-destruct, just as Frankenstein's monster, created of ill-assorted parts and unable to find harmony in itself or in the world of humans, turns destructive and forecasts his own downfall, which he alone can effect. Lucan populates his universe with 'momentary monsters', 'phantoms disgorged by chaos'; more enduringly monstrous is the figure of Erichtho in the later part of Book 6, a witch who searches for a
35 Frankenstein220-3. 36 Cf. O'Flinn, op. cit. 43. 37 C. Baldrick, 'The Politics of Monstrosity' in Bolling, op. cit. 52, and further 55, on the dismemberment and reassembly of parts. On the creation of mixed beings, half human, half beast, as a means to explore the boundaries between the two, see H. King, 'Half-human Creatures' in J. Cherry (ed.), Mythical Beasts (San Francisco and London, 1995), esp. 138-40. 38 W. R. Johnson, MomentaryMonsters.Lucan and his Heroes (Ithaca and London, 1987), 17.

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corpse, turns it into a zombie and forces from it revelations about Roman history. Here already are the elements of Frankenstein's monster, a creation of the living from the dead with a political message. Thus, by the time of Juvenal, the 'idea' of the monster as a product of and mirror for the malaise of Roman society is already established in poetic literature.39 Discussion elsewhere of monstrain Juvenal Satire 4 has concluded that its application is religious, that the term is there used to mean 'omens' or 'portents'.40 While the religious aspect of the term remains pertinent, here our concern is with the monstrous in the sense of the unnatural. Shelley's - and Frankenstein's - monster is a cultural creation, which becomes part of nature simply as a body, no more. It is in a sense oxymoronic, in that it is composed of natural materials (parts of corpses) but is an unnatural being. Its size is one facet of its abnormality: 'I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionately large.'41 Similarly, Juvenal's monstra, for example the passive effeminates of Satire 2, are perceived as 'abnormal' according to 'normal' standards, and are in this way separated from the mainstream of Roman society. The erotic body animates and disrupts social order even as Frankenstein's monster, frustrated in his desire for a mate, launches a programme of negative behaviour.42 The importance of social contact is clear in Shelley's novel. Monstrosity cuts off Frankenstein's monster from society and he regrets it; he feels the loss of it and is driven by bitterness for its loss to anti-social behaviour. Such anti-social behaviour can be seen in Juvenal's monsters: the patron who on his own eats enough for a group (1.135-41); the reticence of Domitian and his seclusion in his villa (4.60-4);43 the hypocritical effeminates who rarely talk and have a passion for silence
39 Ibid., 19. Baldrick, op. cit. 51 defines what he believes constitutes monstrosity in the Classical world: 'it is an almost obligatory feature of the monsters in Classical mythology that they should be composed of ill-assorted parts, sometimes combined from different creatures (centaurs, satyrs, the Minotaur, the Sphinx) sometimes merely multiplied to excess (Argus, the Hydra).' See also King, op. cit. passim. 40 C. Deroux, 'Domitian, the Kingfish and the Prodigies' in C. Deroux (ed.), Studies in Latin Literatureand Roman History vol. 3 (Brussels, 1983), 287. 41 P. Brooks, 'What is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein)' in Bolling, op. cit. 102. On size: D. Sweet, 'Juvenal'sSatire 4: Poetic Uses of Indirection', CSCA 12 (1979), 299. Quotation is from Frankenstein61. 42 Sweet, op. cit. 270-1. Note the parallel between Crispinus and the Vestal Virgin, and Frankenstein's monster and Justine, in that the monster's behaviour in each case brings about the death of the woman. 43 Here rage and insults never reach him: Domitian is not a part of Roman society. On his 'menacing invisibility', see Sweet, op. cit. 285 ff.

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(2.14); the silence of the wife who sleeps third in a bed (2.61). Language
- or lack of it - is a significant element. Frankenstein's monster

recognizes the importance for him of learning language as a potential bridge to society. It appears to offer him a means of escape from the order of the specular and visual relations in which he is demonstrably a monster.44 But his hope is to be disappointed, since the primary standard of human judgement in relation to him will be visual. The emotional distancing of the monster from society is echoed by the descriptions of physical geography. The landscape becomes bleaker as the monster proceeds with his programme of destructive revenge. The glacier provides the backdrop for the crystalization of the conflict between maker and monster.45 Its icy, sterile surroundings at once reflect the monster's inability to reproduce and stand in contradistinction to the fire of the new Prometheus, Frankenstein. Heat and cold, life and death: in Juvenal the creative power of the satirist blazes, while his chosen adversary freezes mentally (1.165-7):
ense velut strictoquotiensLucilius ardens infremuit,rubetauditor cui frigida mens est criminibus,tacita sudant praecordiaculpa. Whenever the hot Lucilius rages in anger, as if with sword in hand, the listener blushes, his mind chill with a sense of sin and his conscience sweating with secret guilt.

Monsters and giants are commonly perceived in the landscape: local legends tend to connect natural phenomena, such as rocks and mountains, with the bodies of giants or their parts: this means that their bodies are inextricably interwoven with nature.46In ancient myth giants are the sons of earth; after they were defeated by the gods, they were believed to be buried under volcanoes in various parts of Greece and Italy.47In ancient art they are often represented as monsters with snaky legs. Thus there was a slender line (if any) in the ancient imagination between giants and monsters. For Frankenstein monster and nature become one, as Frankenstein is battling against both. Like the ubiquitous immorality of Rome which frustrates the speaker's wish to elude it (Juvenal 2.1-3, 153-70), the monster is everywhere and omnipotent; it cannot be escaped.48
Brooks, op. cit. 100, also 83, on the issue of sight as a source of judgment. Cf. Seed, op. cit. 336. So Bakhtin, op. cit. 329; cf. 357 on the Hippocratic view of earth as a huge body. 47 E.g. Ovid Pont. 2.10.24: flamma, subpositus monti quam vomit oregigans. One wonders how, if at all, these ideas affect the interpretation of Juvenal 4.98: undefit ut malimfraterculusessegigantis. 48 Note especially glacialem Oceanumin 2.1-2; Frankenstein300. See Seed, op. cit. 337.
44

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The terror which a monster inspires is at least in part due to its grotesque appearance. While the term 'grotesque' is a later development, the idea originates in Augustan architecture and involves the confusion of heterogeneous elements. Vitruvius associates it with the transgression of the laws of nature and proportion and even uses the word monstrato describe the representation of fantastic forms.49 Similarly, Frankenstein's monster, while composed of natural parts, is an unnatural being in its lack of wholeness. Unlike the child of Lacanian theory, who had been a sum of parts prior to viewing himself in a mirror, the monster seeing in a pool for the first time his dislocated form realizes the horror of himself from the viewpoint of an onlooker. Grotesqueness, whether associated with architecture or monsters, is primarily identified by the visual faculty. Furthermore, the word monstrum,from which 'monster' derives, is cognate with monstrare'to show, demonstrate'. Thus a monstrumis something or someone to be shown, usually a freak or lunatic whose display provides a warning (monere) to the errant of the results of vice and folly.50 There are of course religious overtones too: in pre-Christian usage the monstrumis a prodigy, an omen or sign from the gods (cf. Juvenal's use in Satire 4). In Augustine the monster is argued to be a manifestation of the will of God. Again the focus is firmly on the visual.51 In the same way monstrosity in Shelley and Juvenal is presented in visual terms: in Shelley's novel there is consistent emphasis on the importance of seeing in shaping our views. Having learned early on that his appearance begets horror in humans, Frankenstein's monster lies low in an abandoned building for some time before attempting to communicate with the De Lacey family; when he does, he chooses the moment when only the blind father is at home. The monster's reception by the blind man is at first welcoming, for he responds only to the eloquence and kindly tone of the monster. But when the remainder of
49 Vitruvius De Arch. 7.5.3: sed haec, quae ex veris rebusexemplasumebantur,nunc iniquis moribus improbantur.(nam pinguntur) tectoriismonstrapotius quam ex rebusfinitis imagines certae . . . Cf. W. Kayser, The Grotesquein Art and Literature(repr. New York, 1981), 20; P. Thomson, The Grotesque(London, 1972), 12. 50 On the lack of wholeness, see Brooks, op. cit. 88-9. The etymology and implications of monstrumand the ideas of Foucault are laid out by Baldrick, op. cit. 48-9. 51 On the religious interpretation, the association of prodigia with disasters, and the marginalization of the deformed, who frequently became scapegoats, see N. Vlahogiannis, 'Disabling Bodies' in D. Montserrat (ed.), Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings (London and New York, 1998), 13-20. Disability became closely associated with punishment. This has particularrelevance to the amphitheatre, where the marginalized elements of society perform a kind of ritualpurification for society at large. See P. Plass, The Game of Death in Ancient Rome (Wisconsin, 1995), 25-6; Barton, op. cit. esp. on devotio, 40-5; and cf. Gowers, op. cit. 207.

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the family (with their sight) returns, he is driven away; they respond primarily to the visual impression of the monster. Shelley's monster exists to be looked at and pointed to, nothing more. Similarly Frankenstein himself becomes a monster after he falls asleep in his boat in his pursuit of his monster late in the novel, and arrives among a strange people: he is treated like a fiend by the townspeople and emphasis is laid upon Frankenstein's appearance and physical configuration.52 Even Frankenstein himself, immediately after completing his creation, is appalled by the sight of what he has made - his purpose had been to make a beautiful being. The visual and its more specific refinement, the grotesque, are characteristic of the satire of Juvenal. Thomson, in his discussion of the grotesque, has voiced the opinion that the average satirist using the grotesque may run the risk of obscuring his didactic point for the reader. But he goes on to say that 'clever (our emphasis) satirists are able to extract maximum effect from the use of the grotesque without diminishing the strength of the overall satiric point'.53 Juvenal's descriptions of monstrous characters - and we think here particularly of Book 1 - are deft. His monstraappear as sums of parts. Frequently he employs a parade of individuals distinguished by one or two features, caught as if in a couple of frames of a camera lens. For example, in Satire 1 Crispinus, a blob of Nilotic scum busily hitching up his purple cloak and flaunting a ring on sweaty fingers; the litter of Matho filled with himself. In Satire 3 the enumeration of the damage sustained to specific body parts and the garments of the ordinary citizen as he attempts to travel the city streets, which reflects the fragmentation of the citizen body, while the rich man travels unscathed in his litter.54In Satire 4 the belly of Montanus; Crispinus again - this time a cloud of funereal perfumes; Pompeius with his throat-slitting skills; and Fuscus, saving his flesh to provide a feast for the Dacian vultures; the climax is Veiento and deadly Catullus, the latter specifically defined by Juvenal as a grande et conspicuum nostro quoque tempore
Brooks, op. cit. 102. Frankenstein232; 238. Thomson, op. cit. 45. Juvenal 1.26-35; 3.245-8; 254-61. The sense of the body as a sum of parts is reflected in Shelley's work at several points. After the monster is rejected by the De Lacey family, the monster recalls that he 'could have torn him (Felix De Lacey) limb from limb, as the lion rends the antelope' (178); similarly, the son of Frankenstein, seized by the monster who hopes he will become his companion, covers his eyes (note the visual emphasis) and screams '. .. monster! ugly wretch! you wish to eat me, and tear me to pieces' (188); and Frankenstein 'tears to pieces' the female monster on which he has been working (223).
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monstrum(Satire 4.115, 'a great and remarkablefreak even in times like

ours').55

One of the most remarkable images of nature in Shelley's novel is drawn after Frankenstein and Elizabeth marry and commence their honeymoon journey. As the day progresses and the clouds over Mt. Blanc suggest a flawed scenario to complement Elizabeth's unease, the sun sets over an 'amphitheatre of mountains'.56 The phrase summons up images of spectacle and death; it also foreshadows the wedding-night murder of Elizabeth by the monster, himself alienated from society and denied a mate. The two notions, of the social outcast and of the visual, come together in the Roman amphitheatre, that microcosm of Roman society in which its pariahs serve their sentence and the pleasures of the masses. Juvenal clearly appreciates the significance of this figure when he portrays the noble Gracchus as a retiariusin Satire 2 (143-8) and again at greater length in Satire 8 (199-210). Notable for the present discussion is the introduction given to Gracchus in Satire 2: vicit et hoc monstrumtunicati fuscina Gracchi... ('yet even this outrage is surpassed by the trident of a Gracchus wearing a tunic')! The gladiator, unrecognized by law as a human being, is portrayed by satirists metonymically: for Lucilius, he is the 'jut-mouth of Bovillae with his one little projecting tooth ... a very rhinoceros' (Lucillus 117-8M = 109-10W), or the meat in a butcher's shop 'with one eye and two feet, halved like a pig' (Lucilius 1342-3M = 112-13W). The mutilated flesh of the gladiator embodies what is wrong in Roman society and he is thus a recurrent image in satire.57 A grotesque sum of parts, he is giant and prodigy, star and outcast. Monstrous in appearance (like the gladiator at Juvenal, Satire 6.1059), he is the creation of empire and satirist, a body to be exposed to the popular gaze, as Horace envisages his little book (Epistle 1.20), and, like the turbot of Juvenal's fourth Satire, subject to being rendered into pieces at the whim of the ultimate monstrum,the emperor. Roman satire and the modern monster story share a productive aim. Shelley invents a misguided creator whose product mirrors the social pathology of egotistical scientific licence; ancient satirists create images of perversion emblematic of contemporary social decay. Intellectual
55 Juvenal 4.107-18; note esp. the visual orientation of conspicuumand mortiferoCatullo (113): clearly he has the same qualities as Frankenstein's monster. See also Sweet, op. cit. 291-2.

24, 27-8.

56 Frankenstein 261. 57 On the disabled and disfigured as metaphors for social transgressions, cf. Vlahogiannis, op. cit.

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culture and the verbal manifestation of it fall victim to the popular obsession with the visual (Horace Ep. 2.1.185-6): '... in the midst of the poetry they demand either a bear or boxers'. The artists of both cultures, by putting their respective monsters in the public eye, censure the monstrous aspects of their societies. Coda: satiric grotesques and Absolutely Fabulous From the discussion above it has become clear that a major issue is that of morality: is it morally acceptable for the sleuth-satirist to involve his audience in deplorable situations or for the creative scientist to devise in private a monster which he will release upon an innocent public? The essential elements here - the voyeuristic intrusion upon privacy by going 'behind closed doors' and the release of a work upon the public illprepared for its effects - persist in modern satiricalwriting. One brilliant example, the TV comedy Absolutely Fabulous, preserves many of the features of Roman satire. It also specifically represents the elements which have been key for our earlier discussions, as we shall now argue: 1. The conceptof the creativeprocess As Shelley's generation of the novel Frankensteinparallels the scientist's creation of the monster, so that literary and physical creation go handin-hand, and the satirist at once creates the body of the verse and the personaand/or subjects of the verse, so Jennifer Saunders, writer of the TV series, is also its star; that is, she is at once satirist and 'satirist'/ persona. Furthermore, her persona Edina is the mother of a teenage daughter, Saffy, so that both literary and physical (pro)creation coexist. 2. 'Behindcloseddoors' Much of the action of AbsolutelyFabuloustakes place in Edina's London house. In many early episodes she shares the house with her daughter Saffy, and omnipresent is the parasitic Patsy, an old school friend, who is an alcoholic and, like Edina, lives to party and shop at Harvey Nichols or Lacroix. When Edina (and Patsy) move from the privacy of the house into the public sphere, she is too rich a concoction for average consumption. Since Edina is a self-indulgent, spoiled and well-heeled remnant of the 60s, her freewheeling ways consistently bring her into

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conflict with society. For example: in one episode, entitled 'The Accountant', Edina is confronted with the prospect of having to reduce her living expenses. Saffy (who is too sensible for her young years and serves as a 'straight-man' for her outrageous mother in this topsy-turvy world) arranges an appointment for Edina and herself with Edina's accountant to discuss financial planning. The recalcitrantEdina only grudgingly attends the meeting, where it is resolved to take measures, inter alia, to shop at the supermarket rather than receive daily deliveries from Harrods, and to sacrifice her chauffeur-driven Jaguar (in which, rather like the litter of Matho [Juvenal 1.34] she rides through the city, oblivious to traffic) and buy a smaller car. The latter turns out to be a Spider Veloce! Edina and Patsy set out to shop for groceries at the supermarket, where Patsy steals a case of liquor, which they begin to consume en route. The resulting confrontation with the police leads to a law-court appearance (a conciliumdeorumattuned to the comic situation as in Lucilius, Juvenal and Seneca) at which Edina makes a protracted, illogical and anarchical speech to an increasingly intolerant judge. Her sentence is an enormous fine and community service. In the course of the courtroom scene the law's stand against Edina (i.e. society at large versus the satirical spectacle) is clearly indicated by the camera's focus on the judge's tribunal and on the coat-of-arms on the wall beside him as opposed to a very vocal Edina dressed in a large, witch-like hat. 3. Spectacleand the visual The visual and the spectacular are also essential elements in this modern satire. Edina's sense of dress verges on the outrageous; like Frankenstein she creates a sum of parts: combinations of inharmonious and gaudy items of clothing stretched over her somewhat plump physique are crowned by enormous and varied hats; the result is a spectacle which falls little short of the grotesque. Edina's image reflects the consumerism of society in which the selection of goods is based on designer-label snobbery rather than on suitability. The visual emphasis is extended to the very slender and fashionable Patsy, whose extremely short skirts might be thought, however, more becoming to a woman half her age. Saffy, by contrast, is as conservative in dress as in attitude. The irrepressible Bubbles, Edina's vacuous office assistant, appears as the clown figure (the stupidus of ancient mime) in chiffon and pompoms.

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4. Communicationand audience Edina's language is as flamboyant as her dress; her voice is loud, her expressions frequently hyperbolic and peppered with obscenities, many of them scatological. Yet the consistent repetition of the same indelicacies (bloody, bollocks, bastard, etc.) like commercial advertizing invades and titillates the souls of the audience, with or without their assent. We are reminded of the poets attacked by Persius (1.13-21), who shut themselves up and write something grand which, when read to the public, sexually stimulates their audience. The similarities are striking and disturbing: for when a satirist becomes so closely involved with the object of his satire, and when through his satire the moral integrity of his audience is endangered, both he and his audience are compromised. He is no better than the scientist who irresponsibly releases a monster into society, only later to discover its capacity for destruction.58
58 This paper originated as elements of a panel on satire at the APA organized by Tadeusz Mazurek. Our thanks are due to him for organizing an exciting panel. Thanks too to Will Washburn for help with formatting.