The Top is a New Bottom

The most idle of man’s activities is introspection. He usually does it badly, as he is trapped in the supposition that self-knowledge is the same as self-esteem and ends up writing off his sins as negligible, even if he has found them. Yet he can have self-knowledge thrust upon him, with his sins heading the account and all that he found to be proud of omitted. Such is the satirist’s business. Man, for the satirist, is an animal in disgrace with himself and his God. The satirist differs from the theologian and moralist in that he does not cheer up or guide or incite. He merely points out, with damning care to make a tight case, that no matter where man has arrived, the place is thereby under his feet and what he wants is still above; for it is not his status but his nature he needs to change, and that, sighs the satirist, is like the leopard and his spots.

Friedrich Duerrenmatt, the Swiss master of conundrums and ambiguities, writes what any reader knows to be heresy for three-quarters of his novel, though he is merely setting us up for the spill. He shows us a subsub-bookkeeper in a firm that manufactures everything from forceps to A Bombs. Archilochos is our hero’s name, and his namesake, the first known Greek poet after Homer, was also the first satirist that we know of, a soldier, poet, and nettle-tongued disturber of the peace. The bookkeeping Archilochos is a vegetarian crank, Old New Presbyterian, teetotaler, and mouse. Lo, how his fortunes changed one day! Suffice it to say that he makes Dick Whittington look like a washout. Wealth, happiness, position, beautiful wife: all his within twenty-four hours.

GD

About the Author

Guy Davenport

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The most idle of man’s activities is introspection. He usually does it badly, as he is trapped in the supposition that self-knowledge is the same as self-esteem and ends up writing off his sins as negligible, even if he has found them. Yet he can have self-knowledge thrust upon him, with his sins heading the account and all that he found to be proud of omitted. Such is the satirist’s business. Man, for the satirist, is an animal in disgrace with himself and his God. The satirist differs from the theologian and moralist in that he does not cheer up or guide or incite. He merely points out, with damning care to make a tight case, that no matter where man has arrived, the place is thereby under his feet and what he wants is still above; for it is not his status but his nature he needs to change, and that, sighs the satirist, is like the leopard and his spots.

Friedrich Duerrenmatt, the Swiss master of conundrums and ambiguities, writes what any reader knows to be heresy for three-quarters of his novel, though he is merely setting us up for the spill. He shows us a subsub-bookkeeper in a firm that manufactures everything from forceps to A Bombs. Archilochos is our hero’s name, and his namesake, the first known Greek poet after Homer, was also the first satirist that we know of, a soldier, poet, and nettle-tongued disturber of the peace. The bookkeeping Archilochos is a vegetarian crank, Old New Presbyterian, teetotaler, and mouse. Lo, how his fortunes changed one day! Suffice it to say that he makes Dick Whittington look like a washout. Wealth, happiness, position, beautiful wife: all his within twenty-four hours.