Militantly Ironic Claudius or Satiric Hero in Five Movements
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Date
2016
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Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Abstract
Pursuant to Hayden White’s line of reasoning, historical consciousness is a set of assumptions from which a historian departs in his or her writerly investigations of past events. Albeit not blatantly obvious at first glance, they can be pinpointed on the basis of a structural analysis of a given text. White avers that, structurally, a historical text is organized on three levels, i.e. emplotment, formal argument, and ideological implication; as well as prefigured by the trope one writes within. The level of emplotment, of shaping a story in the form of either romance, satire, comedy or tragedy, showcases the author’s view on humanity. And thus, a romantic history is a drama of self-identification with the hero vanquishing evil. Satiric accounts limelight the protagonist who fails in his quest to win with his or her nefarious adversaries. Comedies laud harmony between the natural and the social, whereas tragedies stage the protagonist whose demise brings him or her – but also the reader – “the epiphany of the law governing human existence.” My intention is to use White’s emplotment theory as a point of departure for an analysis of selected fragments of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God in order to substantiate the thesis that the Gravesian hero is a satiric hero who uses irony to manage the real.
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Bemben A.: Militantly Ironic Claudius or Satiric Hero in Five Movements. [w:] R. Borysławski, J. Jajszczok, J. Wolff i A. Bemben, red., HistoRisus. Histories of Laughter and Laughter in History. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2016, s. 187-200, ISBN-13: 978-1-4438-9711-2.