The End of Carnivalism, or The Making of the Corpus Lucianeum

Abstract

In a key passage for the understanding of Lucian’s work, the Fisherman 25– 27, the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope complains that Parrhesiades, a Lucianlike authorial figure, mocks philosophers not within the fixed boundaries of a carnivalesque festival, as Old Comedy used to do, and to which Lucian’s work is otherwise highly indebted, but by means of his constantly published writings. This statement is even more relevant, since the Fisherman belongs to a group of texts which show clear cross-references to other writings within the corpus (such as Essays in Portraiture Defended, Apology, and The Runaways). By creating indirect authorial commentaries and intratextual references throughout his œuvre—a hidden (auto)biobibliography, as it were—, Lucian thus reinforces the idea of an organic literary work and the coherency of his corpus which is—notwithstanding its thematic variatio—well-publicized and far away from carnivalesque exceptionality. In this way, the aesthetics of perpetual transgression is in a unique way related to the construction of authorial self-referentiality in Lucian’s satires.