satire

/sat"uyeur/, n.

1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.

2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.

3. a literary genre comprising such compositions.

[1500-10; < L satira, var. of satura medley, perh. fem. deriv. of satur sated (see SATURATE)]

Syn. 1. See irony¹. 2, 3. burlesque, caricature, parody, travesty. SATIRE, LAMPOON refer to literary forms in which vices or follies are ridiculed. SATIRE, the general term, often emphasizes the weakness more than the weak person, and usually implies moral judgment and corrective purpose: Swift's satire of human pettiness and bestiality. LAMPOON refers to a form of satire, often political or personal, characterized by the malice or virulence of its attack: lampoons of the leading political figures.

* * *

Artistic form in which human or individual vices, folly, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to bring about improvement.

Literature and drama are its chief vehicles, but it is also found in such mediums as film, the visual arts (e.g., caricatures), and political cartoons. Though present in Greek literature, notably in the works of Aristophanes, satire generally follows the example of either of two Romans, Horace or Juvenal. To Horace the satirist is an urbane man of the world who sees folly everywhere but is moved to gentle laughter rather than to rage. Juvenal's satirist is an upright man who is horrified and angered by corruption. Their different perspectives produced the subgenres of satire identified by John Dryden as comic satire and tragic satire.

* * *

Introduction

      artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, parody, caricature, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform.

      Satire is a protean term. Together with its derivatives, it is one of the most heavily worked literary designations and one of the most imprecise. The great English lexicographer Samuel Johnson (Johnson, Samuel) defined satire as “a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured,” and more elaborate definitions are rarely more satisfactory. No strict definition can encompass the complexity of a word that signifies, on one hand, a kind of literature—as when one speaks of the satires of the Roman poet Horace or calls the American novelist Nathanael West's A Cool Million a satire—and, on the other, a mocking spirit or tone that manifests itself in many literary genres but can also enter into almost any kind of human communication. Wherever wit (humour) is employed to expose something foolish or vicious to criticism, there satire exists, whether it be in song or sermon, in painting or political debate, on television or in the movies. In this sense satire is everywhere. In literary works, satire can be direct or indirect. With direct satire, the narrator speaks directly to the reader. With indirect satire, the author's intent is realized within the narrative and its story. Although this article deals primarily with satire as a literary phenomenon, it records its manifestations in a number of other areas of human activity as well.

The nature of satire

Historical definitions

      The terminological difficulty is pointed up by a phrase of the Roman (Latin literature) rhetorician Quintilian: “satire is wholly our own” (“satura tota nostra est”). Quintilian seems to be claiming satire as a Roman phenomenon, although he had read the Greek dramatist Aristophanes and was familiar with a number of Greek forms that one would call satiric. But the Greeks had no specific word for satire; and by satura (which meant originally something like “medley” or “miscellany” and from which comes the English satire) Quintilian intended to specify that kind of poem “invented” by Lucilius (Lucilius, Gaius), written in hexameters on certain appropriate themes, and characterized by a Lucilian-Horatian tone. Satura referred, in short, to a poetic form (poetry), established and fixed by Roman practice. (Quintilian mentions also an even older kind of satire written in prose by Marcus Terentius Varro and, one might add, by Menippus and his followers Lucian and Petronius.) After Quintilian's day, satura began to be used metaphorically to designate works that were satirical in tone but not in form. As soon as a noun enters the domain of metaphor, as one modern scholar has pointed out, it clamours for extension; and satura (which had no verbal, adverbial, or adjectival forms) was immediately broadened by appropriation from the Greek satyros and its derivatives. The odd result is that the English satire comes from the Latin satura; but satirize, satiric, etc., are of Greek origin. By about the 4th century AD the writer of satires came to be known as satyricus; St. Jerome, for example, was called by one of his enemies “a satirist in prose” (“satyricus scriptor in prosa”). Subsequent orthographic modifications obscured the Latin origin of the word satire: satura becomes satyra, and in England by the 16th century it was written satyre.

      Elizabethan writers (Elizabethan literature), anxious to follow Classical models but misled by a false etymology, believed that satyre derived from the Greek satyr play: satyrs being notoriously rude, unmannerly creatures, it seemed to follow that the word satyre should indicate something harsh, coarse, rough. The English author Joseph Hall (Hall, Joseph) wrote:

The Satyre should be like the Porcupine,

That shoots sharpe quils out in each angry line,

And wounds the blushing cheeke, and fiery eye,

Of him that heares, and readeth guiltily.

(Virgidemiarum, V,3, 1–4.)

      The false etymology that derives satire from satyrs was finally exposed in the 17th century by the Classical scholar Isaac Casaubon (Casaubon, Isaac); but the old tradition has aesthetic if not etymological appropriateness and has remained strong.

      In the prologue to his book, Hall makes a claim that has caused confusion like that following from Quintilian's remark on Roman satire. Hall boasts:

I first adventure: follow me who list,

And be the second English Satyrist.

      But Hall knew the satirical poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Skelton, among other predecessors, and probably meant that he was the first to imitate systematically the formal satirists of Rome.

Influence of Horace and Juvenal

      By their practice, the great Roman poets Horace and Juvenal (Juvenalian satire) set indelibly the lineaments of the genre known as the formal verse satire and, in so doing, exerted pervasive, if often indirect, influence on all subsequent literary satire. They gave laws to the form they established, but it must be said that the laws were very loose indeed. Consider, for example, style. In three of his Satires (I, iv; I, x; II, i) Horace discusses the tone appropriate to the satirist who out of a moral concern attacks the vice and folly he sees around him. As opposed to the harshness of Lucilius, Horace opts for mild mockery and playful wit as the means most effective for his ends. Although I portray examples of folly, he says, I am not a prosecutor and I do not like to give pain; if I laugh at the nonsense I see about me, I am not motivated by malice. The satirist's verse, he implies, should reflect this attitude: it should be easy and unpretentious, sharp when necessary, but flexible enough to vary from grave to gay. In short, the character of the satirist as projected by Horace is that of an urbane man of the world, concerned about folly, which he sees everywhere, but moved to laughter rather than rage.

      Juvenal, more than a century later, conceives the satirist's role differently. His most characteristic posture is that of the upright man who looks with horror on the corruptions of his time, his heart consumed with anger and frustration. Why does he write satire? Because tragedy and epic are irrelevant to his age. Viciousness and corruption so dominate Roman life that, for an honest man, it is difficult not to write satire. He looks about him, and his heart burns dry with rage; never has vice been more triumphant. How can he be silent (Satires, I)? Juvenal's declamatory manner, the amplification and luxuriousness of his invective, are wholly out of keeping with the stylistic prescriptions set by Horace. At the end of the scabrous sixth satire, a long, perfervid invective against women, Juvenal flaunts his innovation: in this poem, he says, satire has gone beyond the limits established by his predecessors; it has taken to itself the lofty tone of tragedy.

      The results of Juvenal's innovation have been highly confusing for literary history. What is satire if the two poets universally acknowledged to be supreme masters of the form differ so completely in their work as to be almost incommensurable? The formulation of the English poet John Dryden (Dryden, John) has been widely accepted. Roman satire has two kinds, he says: comical satire (comedy) and tragical satire (tragedy), each with its own kind of legitimacy. These denominations have come to mark the boundaries of the satiric spectrum, whether reference is to poetry or prose or to some form of satiric expression in another medium. At the Horatian end of the spectrum, satire merges imperceptibly into comedy, which has an abiding interest in human follies but has not satire's reforming intent. The distinction between the two modes, rarely clear, is marked by the intensity with which folly is pursued: fops and fools and pedants appear in both, but only satire has a moral purpose. And, although the great engine of both comedy and satire is irony, in satire, as the 20th-century critic Northrop Frye has said, irony is militant.

      Nicolas Boileau, Dryden, and Alexander Pope (Pope, Alexander), writing in the 17th and 18th centuries—the modern age of satire—catch beautifully, when they like, the deft Horatian tone; however, satire's wit can also be sombre, deeply probing, and prophetic, as it explores the ranges of the Juvenalian end of the satiric spectrum, where satire merges with tragedy, melodrama, and nightmare. Pope's Dunciad ends with these lines:

Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor'd;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

And Universal Darkness buries All.

      It is the same darkness that falls on Book IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, on some of Mark Twain's satire—The Mysterious Stranger, To The Person Sitting in Darkness—and on George Orwell's 1984.

Structure of verse satire

      Roman satire is hardly more determinate in its structure than in its style; the poems are so haphazardly organized, so randomly individual, that there seems little justification for speaking of them as a literary kind at all. Beneath the surface complexity of the poems, however, there exists, as one modern scholar has pointed out, a structural principle common to the satires of the Roman poets and their French and English followers. These poems have a bipartite structure: a thesis part, in which some vice or folly is examined critically from many different angles and points of view, and an antithesis part, in which an opposing virtue is recommended. The two parts are disproportionate in length and in importance, for satirists have always been more disposed to castigate wickedness than exhort to virtue.

      Most verse satires are enclosed by a “frame (frame story).” Just as a novel by the early-20th-century writer Joseph Conrad may be framed by a situation in which his narrator sits on a veranda in the tropics, telling his tale, stimulated into elaboration by the queries of his listeners, so the satire will be framed by a conflict of sorts between the satirist (or, more reasonably, his persona, a fictive counterpart, the “I” of the poem) and an adversary. Usually the adversary has a minor role, serving only to prod the speaker into extended comment on the issue (vice or folly) at hand; he may be sketchily defined, or he may be as effectively projected as Horace's Trebatius (Satires, II, i) or his awful bore (I, vi) or his slave Davus, who turns the tables on his master (II, vii). Similarly, the background against which the two talk may be barely suggested, or it may form an integral part of the poem, as in Horace's “Journey to Brundisium” (I, v) or in Juvenal's description of the valley of Egeria, where Umbricius unforgettably pictures the turbulence and decadence of Rome (Satires, III). In any event, the frame is usually there, providing a semidramatic situation in which vice and folly may reasonably be dissected.

      The satirist has at his disposal an immense variety of literary and rhetorical devices: he may use beast fables, dramatic incidents, fictional experiences, imaginary voyages, character sketches, anecdotes, proverbs, homilies; he may employ invective, sarcasm, burlesque, irony, mockery, raillery, parody, exaggeration, understatement—wit in any of its forms—anything to make the object of attack abhorrent or ridiculous. Amid all this confusing variety, however, there is pressure toward order—internally, from the arraignment of vice and appeal to virtue, and externally, from the often shadowy dramatic situation that frames the poem.

The satiric spirit

      Thus, although the formal verse satire of Rome is quantitatively a small body of work, it contains most of the elements later literary satirists employ. When satire is spoken of today, however, there is usually no sense of formal specification whatever; one has in mind a work imbued with the satiric spirit—a spirit that appears (whether as mockery, raillery, ridicule, or formalized invective) in the literature or folklore of all peoples, early and late, preliterate and civilized. According to Aristotle (Poetics, IV, 1448b–1449a), Greek Old Comedy developed out of ritualistic ridicule and invective—out of satiric utterances, that is, improvised and hurled at individuals by the leaders of the phallic songs. The function of these “iambic” utterances, it has been shown, was magical (magic); they were thought to drive away evil influences so that the positive fertility magic of the phallus might be operative. This early connection of primitive “satire” with magic has a remarkably widespread history.

      In the 7th century BC, the poet Archilochus, said to be the “first” Greek literary satirist, composed verses of such potency against his prospective father-in-law, Lycambes, that Lycambes and his daughter hanged themselves. In the next century the sculptors Bupalus and Athenis “knit their necks in halters,” it is said, as a result of the “bitter rimes and biting libels” issued by the satirical poet Hipponax. Similar tales exist in other cultures. The chief function of the ancient Arabic poet (Arabic literature) was to compose satire (hijāʾ) against the tribal enemy. The satires were thought always to be fatal, and the poet led his people into battle, hurling his verses as he would hurl a spear. Old Irish literature is laced with accounts of the extraordinary power of the poets, whose satires brought disgrace and death to their victims:

. . . saith [King] Lugh to his poet, “what power can you wield in battle?”

“Not hard to say,” quoth Carpre. . . .“I will satirize them, so that through the spell of my art they will not resist warriors.”

(“The Second Battle of Moytura,” trans. by W. Stokes, Revue Celtique, XII [1891], 52–130.)

      According to saga, when the Irish poet uttered a satire against his victim, three blisters would appear on the victim's cheek, and he would die of shame. One story will serve as illustration: after Deirdriu of the Sorrows came to her unhappy end, King Conchobar fell in love again—this time with the lovely Luaine. They were to be married; but, when the great poet Aithirne the Importunate and his two sons (also poets) saw Luaine, they were overcome with desire for her. They went to Luaine and asked her to sleep with them. She refused. The poets threatened to satirize her. And the story says:

The damsel refused to lie with them. So then they made three satires on her, which left three blotches on her cheeks, to wit, Shame and Blemish and Disgrace . . . . Thereafter the damsel died of shame. . . .

(“The Wooing of Luaine…” trans. byW. Stokes, Revue Celtique, XXIV [1903], 273–285.)

      An eminent 20th-century authority on these matters adduced linguistic, thematic, and other evidence to show a functional relation between primitive “satire,” such as that of Carpre and Aithirne, and the “real” satire of more sophisticated times. Today, among various preliterate peoples the power of personal satire and ridicule is appalling; among the Asante (Ashanti) of West Africa, for example, ridicule is (or was recently) feared more than almost any other humanly inflicted punishment, and suicide is frequently resorted to as an escape from its terrors. Primitive satire such as that described above can hardly be spoken of in literary terms; its affiliations are rather with the magical incantation and the curse.

Satirical media

Literature

      When the satiric utterance breaks loose from its background in ritual and magic, as in ancient Greece (when it is free, that is, to develop in response to literary stimuli rather than the “practical” impulsions of magic), it is found embodied in an indefinite number of literary forms that profess to convey moral instruction by means of laughter, ridicule, mockery; the satiric spirit proliferates everywhere, adapting itself to whatever mode (verse or prose) seems congenial. Its targets range from one of Pope's dunces to the entire race of man, as in Satyr Against Mankind (1675), by John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester (Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd earl of), from Erasmus' attack on corruptions in the church to Swift's excoriation of all civilized institutions in Gulliver's Travels. Its forms are as varied as its victims: from an anonymous medieval invective against social injustice to the superb wit of Chaucer and the laughter of Rabelais; from the burlesque of Luigi Pulci to the scurrilities of Pietro Aretino and the “black humour” of Lenny Bruce; from the flailings of John Marston and the mordancies of Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas to the bite of Jean de La Fontaine and the great dramatic structures of Ben Jonson and Molière; from an epigram of Martial to the fictions of Nikolay Gogol and of Günter Grass and the satirical utopias of Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and Orwell.

      It is easy to see how the satiric spirit would combine readily with those forms of prose fiction that deal with the ugly realities of the world but that satire should find congenial a genre such as the fictional utopia seems odd. From the publication of Thomas More (More, Sir Thomas)'s eponymous Utopia (1516), however, satire has been an important ingredient of utopian fiction. More drew heavily on the satire of Horace, Juvenal, and Lucian in composing his great work. For example, like a poem by Horace, Utopia is framed by a dialogue between “Thomas More” (the historical man a character in his own fiction) and a seafaring philosopher named Raphael Hythloday. The two talk throughout a long and memorable day in a garden in Antwerp. “More's” function is to draw Hythloday out and to oppose him on certain issues, notably his defense of the communism he found in the land of Utopia. “More” is the adversary. Hythloday's role is to expound on the institutions of Utopia but also to expose the corruption of contemporary society. Thus he functions as a satirist. Here Hythloday explains why Englishmen, forced off their land to make way for sheep, become thieves:

Forsooth . . . your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters, now as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their fore-fathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure nothing profiting, yea, much annoying the weal-public, leave no ground for tillage. They enclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made a sheep-house.

(More's Utopia, Everyman edition, 1951.)

      Here are characteristic devices of the satirist, dazzlingly exploited: the beast fable compressed into the grotesque metaphor of the voracious sheep; the reality-destroying language that metamorphoses gentlemen and abbots into earthquakes and a church into a sheep barn; the irony coldly encompassing the passion of the scene. Few satirists of any time could improve on this.

      Just as satire is a necessary element of the work that gave the literary form utopia its name, so the utopias of Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and Houyhnhnmland are essential to the satire of More's great follower Jonathan Swift (Swift, Jonathan). He sent Gulliver to different lands from those Hythloday discovered, but Gulliver found the same follies and the same vices, and he employed a good many of the same rhetorical techniques his predecessor had used to expose them. Gulliver's Travels, as one scholar points out, is a salute across the centuries to Thomas More. With this kind of precedent, it is not surprising that in the 20th century, when utopia turned against itself, as in Aldous Huxley (Huxley, Aldous)'s Brave New World (1932), the result was satire unrelieved.

Drama

      The drama has provided a favourable environment for satire ever since it was cultivated by Aristophanes, working under the extraordinarily open political conditions of 5th-century Athens. In a whole series of plays—The Clouds, The Frogs, Lysistrata, and many others—Aristophanes lampoons the demagogue Cleon by name, violently attacks Athenian war policy, derides the audience of his plays for their gullible complacency, pokes fun at Socrates as representative of the new philosophical teaching, stages a brilliantly parodic poetic competition between the dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides in Hades, and in general lashes out at contemporary evils with an uninhibited and unrivalled inventiveness. But the theatre has rarely enjoyed the political freedom Aristophanes had—one reason, perhaps, that satire more often appears in drama episodically or in small doses than in the full-blown Aristophanic manner. In Elizabethan England (Elizabethan literature), Ben Jonson (Jonson, Ben) wrote plays that he called “comicall satyres”—Every Man Out of His Humour, Poetaster—and there are substantial elements of satire in Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William)'s plays—some in the comedies, but more impressively a dark and bitter satire in Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, and King Lear. The 17th-century comedy of Molière sometimes deepens into satire, as with the exposure of religious hypocrisy in Tartuffe or the railing against social hypocrisy by Alceste in The Misanthrope.

 George Bernard Shaw (Shaw, George Bernard) considered himself a satirist. He once compared his country's morals to decayed teeth and himself to a dentist, obliged by his profession to give pain in the interests of better health. Yet, as inventive and witty as Shaw is, compared to the 20th-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose anatomizing of social injustice cuts deep, Shaw is a gentle practitioner indeed.

Motion pictures (motion picture) and television

 The movies have sometimes done better by satire than the theatre, and it is in the movies that an ancient doctrine having to do with principles of decorum in the use of satire and ridicule has been exploded. The English novelist Henry Fielding (Fielding, Henry) was reflecting centuries of tradition when, in the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), he spoke of the inappropriateness of ridicule applied to black villainy or dire calamity. “What could exceed the absurdity of an Author, who should write the Comedy of Nero, with the merry Incident of ripping up his Mother's Belly?” Given this point of view, Hitler seems an unlikely target for satire; yet in The Great Dictator (1940) Charlie Chaplin (Chaplin, Charlie) managed a successful, if risky, burlesque. Chaplin has written, however, that, determined as he was to ridicule the Nazi notions of a superrace, if he had known of the horrors of the concentration camps, he could not have made the film. Stanley Kubrick (Kubrick, Stanley)'s Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) denies all limitation; through some alchemy Kubrick created an immensely funny, savagely satirical film about the annihilation of the world. A combination of farce and nightmare, Dr. Strangelove satirizes military men, scientists, statesmen—the whole ethos of the technological age—in the most mordant terms; it shows the doomsday blast, yet leaves audiences laughing. “You can't fight in here,” says the president of the United States as doom nears, “this is the War Room.” The film's tone is less didactic than in most powerful satire—the mushroom cloud carries its own moral—yet satire's full force is there.

      In the mid-20th century, television proved itself erratically receptive to satire. That Was the Week That Was, a weekly satirical review started in England in 1962, had remarkable success for a time but succumbed to a variety of pressures, some of them political; when a version of the program was attempted in the United States, it was emasculated by restrictions imposed by sponsors fearful of offending customers and by program lawyers wary of libel suits. Jonathan Swift said that he wrote to vex the world rather than divert it; it is not an attitude calculated to sell consumer goods.

Festivals (feast)

      Yet satire does much more than vex, and even in Swift's work there is a kind of gaiety that is found in many nonliterary manifestations of the satirical spirit. Satire always accompanies certain festivals, for example, particularly saturnalian festivals. Many different cultures set aside a holiday period in which customary social restraints are abandoned, distinctions of rank and status are turned upside down, and institutions normally sacrosanct are subjected to ridicule, mockery, burlesque. The Romans had their Saturnalia, the Middle Ages its Feast of Fools (Fools, Feast of); and in the 20th century many countries still had annual carnivals ( Fasching in Austria, the Schnitzelbank in Basel, Switzerland, for example) at which, amid other kinds of abandon, an extraordinary freedom of satirical utterance is permitted. Even in Africa among the Asante, for whom ridicule has such terrors, there is a festival during which the sacred chief himself is satirized. “Wait until Friday,” said the chief to the enquiring anthropologist, “when the people really begin to abuse me, and if you will come and do so too it will please me.” Festivals such as these provide sanctioned release from social inhibition and repression, and, in these circumstances, satire directed at men in power or at taboo institutions acts as a safety valve for pent-up frustrations.

      Satire may often function this way. A story is told that the 16th-century pope Adrian VI was highly offended at satirical verses written against him and affixed to Pasquino's statue (a famous repository for lampoons in Rome), but he became a willing target once he realized that his enemies vented otherwise dangerous hostility in this relatively harmless manner. Similar mechanisms operate today when, at a nightclub or theatre, audiences listen to satirical attacks on political figures or on issues such as racial discrimination, identify with the satirist, laugh at his wit, and thereby discharge their own aggressive feelings. Satire of this order is a far cry, of course, from that written by a Swift or Voltaire, whose work can be said to have a revolutionary effect.

Visual arts (art)

 The critique of satire may be conveyed even more potently in the visual arts than by way of the spoken or written word. In caricature and in what came to be known as the cartoon, artists since the Renaissance have left a wealth of startlingly vivid commentary on the men and events of their time. The names alone evoke their achievement: in England, William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, Sir John Tenniel, and Sir Max Beerbohm; in France, Charles Philipon (Philipon, Charles) (whose slow-motion metamorphosis of King Louis-Philippe into a poire—that is, “fathead,” or “fool”—is classic) and Honoré Daumier; in Spain, Francisco Goya, and out of Spain, Pablo Picasso; and among 20th-century political cartoonists, Sir David Low, Vicky (Victor Weisz), Herblock (Herbert Block), and Conrad.

      The favourite medium of such individuals is the black-and-white print in which the satirical attack is pointed up by a brief verbal caption. The social impact of their art is incalculable. Dictators recognize this all too well, and in times of social tension political cartoonists are among the first victims of the censor.

The satirist, the law, and society

      Indeed, the relations of satirists to the law have always been delicate and complex. Both Horace and Juvenal took extraordinary pains to avoid entanglements with authority—Juvenal ends his first satire with the self-protective announcement that he will write only of the dead. In England in 1599 the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London issued an order prohibiting (censorship) the printing of any satires whatever and requiring that the published satires of Hall, John Marston, Thomas Nashe, and others be burned.

      Today the satirist attacks individuals only at the risk of severe financial loss to himself and his publisher. In totalitarian countries he even risks imprisonment or death. Under extreme conditions satire against the reigning order is out of the question. Such was the case in the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and most other communist countries. For example, the poet Osip Mandelshtam (Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich) was sent to a concentration camp and his death for composing a satirical poem on Stalin.

      One creative response the satirist makes to social and legal pressures is to try by rhetorical (rhetoric) means to approach his target indirectly; that is, a prohibition of direct attack fosters the manoeuvres of indirection that will make the attack palatable: e.g., irony, burlesque, and parody. It is a nice complication that the devices that render satire acceptable to society at the same time sharpen its point. “Abuse is not so dangerous,” said Dr. Johnson, “when there is no vehicle of wit or delicacy, no subtle conveyance.” The conveyances are born out of prohibition.

      Anthony Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of, Baron Cooper of Pawlett, Baron Ashley of Wimborne St. Giles), writing in the 18th century, recognized the “creative” significance of legal and other repressions on the writing of satire. “The greater the weight [of constraint] is, the bitterer will be the satire. The higher the slavery, the more exquisite the buffoonery.” Shaftesbury's insight requires the qualification made above. Under a massively efficient tyranny, satire of the forms, institutions, or personalities of that tyranny is impossible. But, under the more relaxed authoritarianism of an easier going day, remarkable things could be done. Max Radin, a Polish-born American author, noted how satirical journals in Germany (German literature) before World War I, even in the face of a severe law, vied with each other to see how close they could come to caricatures of the Kaiser without actually producing them. “Satire which the censor understands,” said the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus (Kraus, Karl), “deserves to be banned.”

      The 20th-century American critic Kenneth Burke (Burke, Kenneth) summed up this paradoxical aspect of satire's relation with the law by suggesting that the most inventive satire is produced when the satirist knowingly takes serious risks and is not sure whether he will be acclaimed or punished. The whole career of Voltaire is an excellent case in point. Bigots and tyrants may have turned pale at his name, as a famous hyperbole has it; however, Voltaire's satire was sharpened and his life rendered painfully complicated as he sought to avoid the penalties of the law and the wrath of those he had angered. Men such as Voltaire and Kraus and the Russian Ye.I. Zamyatin attack evil in high places, pitting their wit and moral authority against cruder forms of power. In this engagement there is frequently something of the heroic.

      Readers have an excellent opportunity to examine the satirist's claim to social approval by reason of the literary convention that decrees that he must justify his problematic art. Nearly all satirists write apologies, and nearly all the apologies project an image of the satirist as a plain, honest man, wishing harm to no worthy person but appalled at the evil he sees around him and forced by his conscience to write satire. Pope's claim is the most extravagant:

Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see

Men not afraid of God, afraid of me:

Safe from the Bar, the Pulpit, and the Throne,

Yet touch'd and sham'd by Ridicule alone.

O sacred Weapon! left for Truth's defence,

Sole Dread of Folly, Vice, and Insolence!

(Epilogue to the Satires, II, 208–13.)

      After the great age of satire, which Pope brought to a close, such pretensions would have been wholly anachronistic. Ridicule depends on shared assumptions against which the deviant stands in naked relief. The satirist must have an audience that shares with him commitment to certain intellectual and moral standards that validate his attacks on aberration. The greatest satire has been written in periods when ethical and rational norms were sufficiently powerful to attract widespread assent yet not so powerful as to compel absolute conformity—those periods when the satirist could be of his society and yet apart, could exercise a double vision.

      Neoclassic writers had available to them as an implicit metaphor the towering standard of the classical past; for the 19th and 20th centuries no such metaphors have been available. It is odd, however, that, whereas the 19th century in general disliked and distrusted satire (there are of course obvious exceptions), our own age, bereft of unifying symbols, scorning traditional rituals, searching for beliefs, still finds satire a congenial mode in almost any medium. Although much 20th-century satire was dismissed as self-serving and trivial, there were notable achievements. Joseph Heller (Heller, Joseph)'s novel Catch-22 (1961) once again made use of farce as the agent of the most probing criticism: Who is sane, the book asks, in a world whose major energies are devoted to blowing itself up? Beneath a surface of hilariously grotesque fantasy, in which characters from Marx Brothers' comedy carry out lethal assignments, there is exposed a dehumanized world of hypocrisy, greed, and cant. Heller was a satirist in the great tradition. If he could no longer, like Pope, tell men with confidence what they should be for, he was splendid at showing them what they must be against. The reader laughs at the mad logic of Catch-22, and, as he laughs, he learns. This is precisely the way satire has worked from the beginning.

Robert C. Elliott Ed.

Additional Reading

David Worcester, The Art of Satire (1940), a study of rhetorical techniques available to the satirist; James R. Sutherland, English Satire (1958), a sound scholarly history; Alvin B. Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (1959), valuable theory and criticism; Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (1960), on the origins of satire in magic and its development into an art; Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (1967), a study of satire in fiction from Lucian to Swift, and (ed.), Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism (1971), an authoritative and indispensable collection; Matthew J.C. Hodgart, Satire (1969), a well-illustrated, readable survey of satire in many forms and in many countries.

* * *