Mock Epic

Mock epic is a poetic genre that originated in a parodic or allusive dependence on the epic genre but eventually developed its own identity and its own dynamism. Its heyday was the 18th century, when rationalism banished the marvelous from poetry but allowed it to survive in humorous and satirical form.

The ancestry of mock epic is diverse. In ancient times, the Homeric epics were parodied in the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and Mice), once ascribed to Homer but probably dating from the 5th century BCE, in which a war among tiny creatures is described in the comically inflated language that later came to be called mock-heroic. Such grandiose language was similarly applied to a trivial topic by Alessandro Tassoni (1565–1635) in his La secchia rapita (The Stolen Bucket, 1622). Mock epic derived a fund of narrative material from Italian romance epic, especially from the humorous [Page 514]narrative of love, war, and enchantments in Orlando furioso (Orlando Enraged, 1532) by Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533). It drew also from the genre of travesty, in which the action of a serious literary work is retold in comic, vulgar, and often anachronistic language: A famous example is the travesty of Virgil’s Aeneid by Paul Scarron (1610–1660).

Full-blown mock epic emerges in the Enlightenment era. While Alexander Pope (1688–1744) wrote mock heroic on a trivial subject in The Rape of the Lock (1712–1717), his Dunciad (1728–1743) is mock epic in parodying epic—the epic suffix -iad announces a satire on dunces, or inferior writers and scholars—in a twofold movement. The many allusions to Virgil and John Milton not only serve to debase Pope’s targets, such as the playwright Colley Cibber and the scholarly editor Richard Bentley, but also to give them a playful, even endearing liveliness, and, with the “awful Aristarch” Bentley, a paradoxical dignity. Parody liberates Pope’s imagination so that scatology, as when the dunces compete in urinating, coexists with grandeur, seen most famously in the closing invocation of the apocalyptic extinction of true learning by the goddess Dulness. Mock epic thus transcends mere parody and creates a space for unrestrained imaginative play.

The mock epic La pucelle (The Maid, 1755) by Voltaire (1694–1778) retells the story of Joan of Arc as a satire on the Church and on superstitious belief in marvels and miracles. It includes a comic combat between the patron saints of France and England; a visit to hell, which is full of clerics; and the machinations of a lecherous archbishop. Joan’s greatest miracle is said to be that she preserved her virginity for a whole year. But when she willingly surrenders to her lover Dunois, Voltaire celebrates a love that is both physical and tender, in contrast to the brutal rapes carried out by Joan’s English antagonists. Again, the license of mock epic permits an unexpected range of emotions.

Among the many witty novels, essays, and poems of Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), sometimes called the German Voltaire, his mock epics Idris und Zenide (1767) and Oberon (1780) stand out; the latter was translated into English by U.S. president John Quincy Adams. The unfinished Idris, set in a sensuous fairyland, gently mocks the Platonism of its hero, who in search of an unattainable ideal love overlooks the physical possibilities at hand. Oberon, a rewriting of the medieval romance of Huon of Bordeaux, compromises more with the prudery of Wieland’s public. Its hero, one of Charlemagne’s paladins, is given the task of challenging the Caliph of Baghdad and bringing back his daughter and four of his teeth. In this absurd mission, he is helped by the fairy Oberon, on condition that Huon and Amanda (as the Caliph’s daughter is christened) must abstain from sex before marriage. They fail and must do penance by captivity in Tunis, where Huon resists the assaults of the lustful Sultaness, and the two lovers, about to be burned at the stake, are finally saved by a relenting Oberon.

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