ENCAENIA ... et alia ...

As we all set off in our moth-eaten red silk to celebrate Encaenia, the minds of right-thinking people naturally turn to Jokes in the Latin Language.

I have no doubt that the funniest book ever written is Ovid's Metamorphoses. But I never go around commending it to the Reading Lists of others, because, if you don't know Latin, and Latin literature, pretty well, you can't read Ovid. His humour depends so profoundly upon slight points of Latin grammar and vocabulary and word-order, and the interplay of genres, and the use of wickedly impish intertextualities and pastiches, that, if you buy and read a translation, you won't be reading Ovid. Yes ... you will have in your hand a nicely written collection of Greek myths in the English (or whatever) language, immensely readable; indeed, better reading by far than most of the stuff in the bookshops ... but you won't have Ovid.

After the Metamorphoses, I would regard the next two Funniest Books Ever Written in any language (I suppose in my pompous way I really mean 'Which I have ever read') as The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh; and Zuleika Dobson  by Sir Maximilian Beerbohm. Here I have a question of terminology, of jargon, in which I ask help of Englit specialists.

The Loved One begins with a meeting of two Englishmen for whisky and soda at sundown in a distant and barbarous land; against a background of the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever-present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts, they take their ease. In the days of Empire, they are the counterparts of numberless exiled fellow-countrymen.

Except ... that this isn't quite the whole picture.

Back to Oxford In Summer Time ... In Zuleika Dobson, the beautiful Zuleika drives the entire appassionato male undergraduate body of the University of Oxford to mass suicide by drowning in the River Thames. What more proper (and more literary) than that Keen Remorse should then drive her to join them in their Watery Fate? So ... "And Zuleika? She had done a wise thing and was where it was best that she should be. Her face lay upturned on the water's surface, and round it were masses of her dark hair, half floating, half submerged. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were parted ... what to her now the loves that she had inspired ...".

Except ... that this isn't quite the whole picture.

I say no more. My lips are sealed. I refuse to spoil these exquisite works of comic genius (in combination with Death) for those literary virgins among you, who, fortunate souls, are privileged still to have the opportunity of coming to them fresh and undefiled.

I suppose that this device is a rather baroque outworking of the topos which we Classicists in our dim prosaic way call the para prosdokian. But I feel sure that you Englit specialists, hot as ever from the perusal of Frank Kermode, will have a more spot-on technical term for it.

Yes?