John Arbuthnot, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. Wow.
Why so many authors? There was a society in Britain in the early 1700s called "Scriblerus", which was composed of several of the cleverest and most sarcastic men then active. They got together periodically to drink coffee and complain about British life, and being writers themselves, they decided to write about it. This is the result. It's shorter than we might expect for a work produced by a bunch of people accustomed to writing a lot, but then again I imagine they spent a certain amount of time getting out of each other's way (when they weren't trying to get in each other's way, I suppose). Apparently, they intended to write more, but they must have allowed various other projects to distract them.
That's probably just as well. The intention of this piece was to make fun of the most extreme sorts of writing and thinking of the day, like assuming that the ancient Greeks knew everything and that anyone that contradicted them must be a damn fool, or exaggerating melodrama over good sense. Which is pretty funny, but today it requires more knowledge of 18th Century thinking than most of us have. That explains the multitudinous footnotes, but it slows up the reading.
The story tells of Martinus Scriblerus' life from before his birth to his young adulthood, overseen by his father Cornelius, who carefully raises his son according to strict guidelines allegedly laid down by the ancients to develop a person's intellectual prowess. Indeed, Cornelius goes so far as to forbid his wife certain foods that he believes will damage the child's brain during her pregnancy, and to forbid the infant's wet nurse certain foods for the same reason before he is weaned – none of which makes him very popular with the women of his household, of course. Unsurprisingly, Cornelius insists upon giving his son only the foods dictated by the ancients, only the lessons dictated by the ancients, and only the games known by the ancients. The surprise is that it works, at least in a certain sense. Martinus grows up to be an advanced philosopher, and indeed a famous physician. Unfortunately, we readers (if not his contemporaries) can recognize just about everything he says or does as utter nonsense.
Even more unfortunate for Martinus, he falls in love with one of a set of conjoined twins. Why unfortunate? Not only does he find her beautiful, he's tremendously attracted to her unique state. That is, he loves her not only for all the usual reasons, but also for philosophical ones. Alas, the other twin loves Martinus as much as he loves her sister, giving rise to one of the most complicated love triangles in literature. Then the traveler who was making a good living by displaying the twins for pay gets involved, wanting to prevent his prize exhibit from going away. Hijincks, as always, ensue.
Anyway, there's more than enough opportunity here for the authors to satirize whatever they can get their hands on. I imagine that readers in the 18th Century knew pretty much what they were poking fun at. That's not so much the case today, in the smaller details at least. On the other hand, even these days we can recognize characters so wrapped up in their philosophical points of view that they don't recognize what makes sense and what doesn't. This means that, once you get past the stuff that makes you laugh, "Martinus Scriblerus" takes a bit longer than a book of less than 100 pages should take. It also means that you can get a good laugh out of it without too terribly much effort.
Benshlomo says, Sometimes the more you study the footnotes, the more worthwhile a book is.
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