The formal technique of applying epic grandeur to trivial subjects, from Pope’s Rape of the Lock to Monty Python

By Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson, Ph.D. — satire.info

Mock-heroic satire is among the most formally sophisticated of the satirical modes, requiring its author to be genuinely at home in the form being mocked. You cannot write a successful mock-epic unless you can write the real thing — the satirical effect depends on the precision with which epic conventions are deployed and the comic accuracy with which they are applied to a wholly unsuitable subject. This is why the form has tended to attract literary virtuosi: Dryden, Pope, Boileau, and their successors could write mock-epic because they could write the real thing, and the satirical play between form and content is visible only to readers who know the form being played with.

The Technical Requirements: Pope’s Achievement

Epic poetry in the classical tradition observes a set of conventional features — the invocation of the Muse, the in medias res opening, the formal simile, the divine machinery, the catalog of forces, the formal speeches before battle — that function as a signature of the elevated genre. Mock-heroic satire applies these features, with precise formal accuracy, to subjects that are trivially domestic, commercially vulgar, or socially pretentious, creating comedy through the grotesque mismatch between the grandeur of the form and the smallness of the content.

Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714) is the perfection of this technique. The poem applies every convention of Homeric epic to the theft of a lock of hair from a fashionable young woman at a card party: the sylphs who protect the heroine take the place of Homeric divinities; the game of ombre takes the place of the Trojan War; and the lock itself, transformed at the poem’s conclusion into a constellation, undergoes an apotheosis that parodies the deification of heroes. The satirical target is the social world that takes these trivial matters with epic seriousness. The poem laughs at this world with incomparable wit and surprising warmth. British satire’s classical achievement is nowhere more evident than in Pope’s mock-heroic virtuosity.

From Dryden to Python: The Historical Range

Mock-heroic satire has a longer history than Pope alone. Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1676) applies the conventions of royal coronation and epic elevation to the installation of a bad poet as King of Dullness. In the twentieth century, the mock-heroic impulse appears in forms far removed from verse epic. James Joyce’s Ulysses applies the structure of the Odyssey to a single day in the life of an ordinary Dublin advertisement canvasser, using the ironic gap between heroic form and mundane content to make complex arguments about heroism in modern life. More straightforwardly comic is the mock-heroic tradition in film and television: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) is a sustained mock-heroic exercise that deploys the conventions of Arthurian romance with comic precision against the anachronistic intrusion of the modern world.

The satirical argument of mock-heroic is ultimately ambivalent and more interesting than it first appears. The technique not only mocks the world that takes small things so seriously, it also asks whether the grand forms themselves were ever fully appropriate to their ostensibly grand subjects. Are real wars really heroic, or are they more like quarrels over locks of hair conducted with more dangerous weapons? Mock-heroic literature is philosophically serious in a way that it would never dream of acknowledging directly — which makes it the most ironically self-aware of the satirical forms.

Source: satire.info | Satire Techniques: A Reference