Persius and the poetics of stoic laughter

Barnes, Robert

Persius and the poetics of stoic laughter

Date

2017

Authors

Barnes, Robert

Type

Thesis

Abstract

The satires of Persius are famously humorless. As Heinsius suggests, the dearth of humor may derive from the satirist’s adherence to the staid ways of Stoicism, since, at first blush, Stoicism and laughter would seem to exclude one another. But here we run into a problem: if Persius abstains from humor because he is Stoic, why does he still cackle (cachinnare), why does he characterize himself as saucy (petulans 1.12), why are the pages of his little book chock-a-block with his chuckling? There is a gelastic disjunction between author and audience: Persius laughs while his readers sit in the dark and laughless cave of Trophonius. I argue that the problem of humor in Persius’s satires does indeed derive from Stoicism, as Heinsius and others have suggested, but not from some Stoic aversion to laughter. Instead, it derives from a Stoic re-appropriation of laughter. As I illustrate below, Stoic laughter laughs at itself and, in doing so, frees the one laughing from his or her false values. I argue that Persius’s little book of satires dramatizes an attempt to laugh Stoically, to turn the mirthful response of laughter against itself,and to free that laughter from the false values that inspired it. Persius’s satire does not promptly promote laughter with or at the satirist, as most satiric humor does; it does not readily inspire the bitter laugh at that which is not good or the hollow laugh at that which is not true. On the contrary, it better promotes a sort of self-reflexive-cum-self-reflective laughter, reminiscent of Beckett’s “risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh.”