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-:''[[rhapsodic]]''+'''''At Swim-Two-Birds''''' is a 1939 novel by Irish author [[Brian O'Nolan]], writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It is widely considered to be O'Brien's masterpiece, and one of the most sophisticated examples of [[metafiction]].
-'''Menippean satire''' is a term broadly used to refer to [[prose]] [[satire]]s that are [[Rhapsody|rhapsodic]] in nature, combining many different targets of [[ridicule]] into a fragmented satiric narrative similar to a [[novel]]. The term is used by classical grammarians and by philologists mostly to refer to satires in prose (cf. the verse [[Satires of Juvenal]] and his imitators).+
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-Menippean satire moves rapidly between styles and points of view. Such satires deal less with human characters than with the single-minded mental attitudes, or "[[humour]]s", that they represent: the [[pedant]], the [[braggart]], the [[bigot]], the [[miser]], the [[quack]], the [[seducer]], etc. Critic [[Northrop Frye]] observed, +
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-:''The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect […] ''+
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-He illustrated this distinction by positing Squire Western (from ''[[The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling|Tom Jones]]'') as a character rooted in novelistic realism, but the tutors Thwackum and Square as figures of Menippean satire. +
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-==Terminology==+
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-The form is named after the Greek [[cynic]] [[Menippus]]. His works, now lost, influenced the works of [[Lucian]] and [[Marcus Terentius Varro]]; such satires are sometimes also termed '''Varronian satire'''. [[M. H. Abrams]] classifies Menippean satire as one form of [[indirect satire]], the category opposed to the [[formal satire]] of direct criticism in the [[first person]]. +
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-Paul Salzman, taking Menippean satire as a genre as "rather ill-defined", describes it as a mixture of [[allegory]], [[picaresque]] narrative and satirical commentary. Frye found the term "cumbersome and in modern terms rather misleading", and proposed as replacement '''anatomy''' (taken from Burton's ''[[Anatomy of Melancholy]]''). In his theory of prose fiction it occupies the fourth place with the [[novel]], [[Romance (genre)|romance]] and [[confession (genre)|confession]]. +
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-==Classical tradition==+
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-Varro's own 150 books of Menippean satires survive only through quotations. The genre continued with [[Seneca the Younger]], whose ''[[Apocolocyntosis]]'', or "Pumpkinification," is the only near-complete classical Menippean satire to survive. The Menippean tradition is later evident in of [[Petronius]]' ''[[Satyricon]],'' especially in the banquet scene "Cena Trimalchionis," which combines epic, tragedy, and philosophy with verse and prose. In [[Apuleius|Apuleius']] ''Golden Ass'', the form is combined with the [[comic novel]].+
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-==Later examples==+
-Contemporary scholars including Frye classify the following works as Menippean satires:+
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-*[[François Rabelais]], ''[[Gargantua and Pantagruel]]'' (1564); +
-*[[John Barclay (poet)|John Barclay]], ''Euphormionis Satyricon'' (1605); +
-*[[Joseph Hall (bishop)|Joseph Hall]], ''Mundus Alter et Idem'' (1605); +
-*[[Robert Burton (scholar)|Robert Burton]], ''[[The Anatomy of Melancholy]]'' (1621); +
-*[[Jonathan Swift]], ''[[A Tale of a Tub]]'' and ''[[Gulliver's Travels]]'';+
-*[[Voltaire]], ''[[Candide]]'' (1759); +
-*[[Thomas Love Peacock]], ''Nightmare Abbey'' (1818); +
-*[[Thomas Carlyle]], ''[[Sartor Resartus]]'';+
-*[[Charles Kingsley]], ''[[The Water-Babies]]''; +
-*[[Lewis Carroll]], ''[[Alice's Adventures in Wonderland|Alice in Wonderland]]''; +
-*[[Aldous Huxley]], ''Point Counter Point'' (1928); +
-*[[Flann O'Brien]], ''[[At Swim-Two-Birds]]'' (1939).+
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-==Bakhtin's theory==+
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-Menippean satire plays a special role in [[Mikhail Bakhtin]]'s theory of the novel. In ''Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics'', Bakhtin treats Menippean satire as one of the classical "serio-comic" genres, alongside [[Socratic dialogue]] and other forms that Bakhtin claims are united by a "carnival sense of the world," wherein "carnival is the past millennia's way of sensing the world as one great communal performance" and is "opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change." Authors of "Menippea" in Bakhtin's sense include [[Voltaire]], [[Diderot]] and [[E.T.A. Hoffmann]].+
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-== See also ==+
-* ''[[Satire Ménippée]]'' (1594) - a satirical work in France during the [[Wars of Religion]]+
 +The novel's title derives from ''Snámh dá Én'' ([[Middle Irish|Middle Ir.]]: lit. "Swim-Two-Birds" but really means "The river current of the two birds"), a possibly apocryphal place on the river [[Shannon]], reportedly visited by the legendary [[Buile Shuibhne|King Sweeney]], a character in the novel.
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At Swim-Two-Birds is a 1939 novel by Irish author Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It is widely considered to be O'Brien's masterpiece, and one of the most sophisticated examples of metafiction.

The novel's title derives from Snámh dá Én (Middle Ir.: lit. "Swim-Two-Birds" but really means "The river current of the two birds"), a possibly apocryphal place on the river Shannon, reportedly visited by the legendary King Sweeney, a character in the novel.

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