A Brief Introduction to Restoration and Eighteenth
Century Satire
[This document is the text of a lecture delivered, in part, in English 200, Section 3, in November 1998, by Ian Johnston. This lecture is in the public domain, released November 22, 1998]
A.
Historical Note
When
we move from the Metaphysical Poets and Milton to consider Dryden (and, next
semester, Pope and Swift) we are passing over an important watershed in English
literary history. And although English 200 is not, as I keep stressing, a
history course, it is appropriate here to say a few words about the historical
context, because there is an abrupt change in literary style in the last third
of the seventeenth century. This change in style is very much the product of a
different cultural temperament which redefines the role of literature and
which, hence, has a profound influence on the style of poetry and prose.
One
key date all students of literature should remember is the year 1660, the date
of the Restoration, when the great republican experiment under Oliver Cromwell
came to an end and the British reinstated the monarchy by inviting Charles II
(the son of the king whom Cromwell had executed about twenty years earlier) to
come back as king in a restored monarchy. King Charles and his friends had
spent their exile in France and the new court climate was very influenced by
French manners and literary styles.
Beyond
that, the Restoration came at a time when Europe had, after about a century and
a half of religious warfare, reluctantly come to the realization that religion
could no longer serve as a suitable basis for a shared communal life. Since
there was no longer any shared agreement about what the revealed word of God meant
or about an authority which might interpret that revealed word for everyone (as
the Roman Catholic Church had done for centuries), the social and political
life of the nation had to find some other grounding if people were to live
together without killing each other over religious questions.
Out
of this cultural climate increasingly grew a hope that the basis of social and
political life must be a new reasonableness, combined with a concerted attempt
to limit emotional excesses that had prompted so much religious bloodshed. Part
of this new program of cultural reform stressed paying attention to all forms
of language, both in the popular and in the high cultural forums. Language
needed to be purified of passionate rhetoric and misleading metaphors, the major
features of much of the enthusiastic preaching and general rabble rousing which
had accompanied the religious conflicts. Public discussions should use simple,
clear language and appeal to the reasonable sentiments of educated people.
Appeals
to reform language encouraged certain literary efforts and discouraged others.
For example, they led to increasing demands for words which were clearly
defined with meanings everyone shared; hence, here begins the great age of
dictionaries, attempts to codify the meanings of words in ways that everyone
could understand. There were repeated attempts to purge language of complex
metaphors, especially religious metaphors. These were incapable of clear
exposition in a way that satisfied everyone, and since people could not agree
on their meaning they only promoted disagreement. Styles of literature should
move from the passionate lyric or the account of visionary religious experience
to more public, restrained, and polite forms. The common popularity of the
heroic couplet, for example, reflects the desire for a poetic style that is
inherently more restrained, incapable of generating the eomotional momentum of
an impassioned verse paragraph (for example, in Shakespeare or Milton).
It's
important to realize that in this period words like "imaginative,"
"extraordinary," "visionary," "fanciful,"
"enthusiastic," and so on are words of serious criticism, indicating
a form of thinking or behaviour in which reasonableness has surrendered to
passionate feeling. In the vocabulary of Swift, Pope, Johnson, Austen and many
others, this value system is built into the language, and you will have trouble
understanding some of their texts if you fail to recognize the deep distrust of
passionate feeling unaccompanied by reasonable control (e.g., Swift's praise of
the horses in Book IV of Gulliver's Travels because they are not
"fond" of their children, a phrase which strikes the modern reader as
rather odd). The term of the highest praise is "sensible," because it
suggests an imagination which confines itself by experience and does not impose
visionary schemes on experience or rely upon impassioned metaphors.
Accompanying
this cultural shift, there is a new phenomenon, a rising middle-class of
literate people with a significant amount of spending power and leisure. And so
we begin to see an increasing concern with public manners, how men and women
(especially in the middle class) ought to conduct themselves, particularly in
their leisure time (reading, entertainment, courtship, and so on). The
development of magazines and journals is directly linked to the growing
importance of this group and concerns to educate it in the appropriate ways. It
is no accident that literary criticism as a regular activity begins here in
England, and Dryden is England's first great literary critic, concerned about
the public taste in what people read and write. For example, the central
concern in "Mac Flecknoe" is bad literature; Dryden's central concern
is to make sure people recognize it for what it is. The fact that this is now a
concern illustrates the growing importance of literature in shaping public
taste.
The
development of a new faith in reasonableness in England, speaking quite
generally, we can see going in two directions. Traditional Christians
maintained their faith in scripture and insisted that the appropriate way to
proceed was to maintain the faith, with limited tolerance for those who were
not of the Anglican persuasion, but with no quick dismissal of scripture or
political and social traditions. A second group saw in the growing power of
science a way of reforming society without reference to religion (or with a
decidedly less emphasis on religion). Out of these two views grew the dominant
political reality in England in the eighteenth century: the conservative
Tories, Anglican traditionalists who defended the state religion and existing
institutions, and the more reform-minded Whigs (the ancestors of the modern
liberals), more committed to rational reform or subjecting religion to the
demands of reason (dismissing the irrational from religion as much as possible)
in the interests of improving society, increasing trade, and gradually making
the political system more inclusive.
A
third group, somewhat outside the mainstream political process, included those
unwilling to give up traditionally enthusiastic religion. This group was made
up principally of more radical Protestants: Baptists, Methodists, Quakers and
others collectively called Dissenters (because they dissented, or refused to
comply with the main articles of the Anglican faith). These people often
suffered oppression and discrimination of various kinds (as the life of Bunyan
reveals), but the most extreme forms of persecution of them for the most part
ceased. In spite of the discrimination, the dissenting religions continued to
exercise a growing appeal among the working people of England (by the end of
the eighteenth century, Methodism, for example, was numerically the largest
body of organized opinion in England). For the student of English culture, it
is important to realize that the official religion of the country, the Anglican
Church, has never been a "grass roots" belief with an enormous and
enthusiastic public following. People in England who have demanded passion in
their religion have, by and large, sought that either in Roman Catholicism or
in the dissenting chapels.
For
our purposes here, the important point to observe is that the demands for a new
reasonableness in public conduct and literature encouraged a special attention
to satire, that form of literature which is most directly concerned with
addressing public issues with a strong didactic intention. In one way or
another, most of the greatest writers in English literature for the next century
(Dryden, Pope, Swift, Defoe, Johnson, among others, up to and including Bryron)
directed some of their considerable energies into writing satires. And this age
following the Restoration until the early nineteenth century produced some of
the greatest satires ever written. In many respects, the great satiric
tradition launched by Dryden at the Restoration ends with Lord Byron.
B.
Introductory Note on Satire
Formally
defined, satire is "A composition in verse or prose holding up vice or
folly to ridicule or lampooning individuals. . . . The use of ridicule, irony,
sarcasm, etc., in speech or writing for the ostensible purpose of exposing and
discourage vice or folly."
In
other words, satire is a particular use of humour for overtly moral purposes. It
seeks to use laughter, not just to remind us of our common often ridiculous
humanity, but rather to expose those moral excesses, those corrigible sorts of
behaviour which transgress what the writer sees as the limits of acceptable
moral behaviour.
Let
me put this another way. If we see someone or some group acting in a way we
think is morally unacceptable and we wish to correct such behaviour, we have a
number of options. We can try to force them to change their ways (through
threats of punishment); we can deliver stern moral lectures, seeking to
persuade them to change their ways; we can try the Socratic approach of
engaging them in a conversation which probes the roots of their beliefs; or,
alternatively, we can encourage everyone to see them as ridiculous, to laugh at
them, to render them objects of scorn for the group. In doing so we will
probably have at least two purposes in mind: first, to effect some changes in
the behaviour of the target (so that he or she reforms) and, second, to
encourage others not to behave in such a manner.
In
that sense, what sets satire apart from normal comedy (and the two often shade
into each other in ways which make an exact border line difficult to draw), is
that in satire there is usually a clear and overt didactic intention, a clear
moral lesson is the unifying power of the work. Whereas in normal comedy, we
are usually being asked to laugh at ourselves and our common human foibles, in
satire the basis of the humour is generally some corrigible unwelcome conduct
in a few people. Normal comedy, if you will, reminds us of our inescapable
human limitations; satire focus rather on those things which we can correct in
order to be better than we are. It invites us to scorn the target in order to
spurn that activity. This is no doubt a somewhat muddied distinction at this
point, but it should become clearer as we proceed.
At
the basis of every good traditional satire is a sense of moral outrage or
indignation: This conduct is wrong and needs to be exposed. Hence, to adopt a satiric
stance requires a sense of what is right, since the target of the satire can
only be measured as deficient if one has a sense of what is necessary for a
person to be truly moral. And if this satire is to have any effect, if it is to
be funny, then that sense of shared moral meaning must exist in the audience as
well. Satire, if you like, depends upon a shared sense of community standards,
so that what is identified as contrary to it can become the butt of the jokes.
This
moral basis helps to explain why a satire, even a very strong one which does
nothing more than attack unremittingly some target, can offer a firm vision of
what is right. By attacking what is wrong and exposing it to ridicule the
satirist is acquainting the reader with a shared positive moral doctrine,
whether the satire actually goes into that doctrine in detail or not. Dryden in
"Mac Flecknoe" does not discuss what good literature is; but by
attacking bad literature, he makes it clear what needs to occur if literature
is to be valued.
[I
should note here that it is possible to write satire in the absence of any
shared sense of moral standards, but the result is a curious form of
"black" satire. This genre is particularly common today. Modern
satire typically makes everything look equally ridiculous. In such a satiric
vision, there is no underlying vision of what right conduct is and the total
effect, if one tries to think about it, is very bleak indeed--a sense that we
might as well laugh at the ridiculousness of everything because nothing has any
meaning. Whether we call this Monty Python or Saturday Night Live or
This Hour Has Twenty-two Minutes or whatever, it seems to add up to an
attitude that since there's no significant meaning to anything, we might as
well laugh at everything. That will enable us to retreat with style from the
chaos. Such an attitude is certainly at odds with traditional satire, which
tends very much to work in the service of a moral vision which is being abused
by particular people]
Satire
may be very topical, that is, refer directly to people and events known to the
readers from their own immediate context (e.g., satires on President Clinton),
or it may focus upon more general human characteristics or upon both. Very
topical satires which have no interest in universal characteristics tend to
lose their impact very quickly, once the details of the context are no longer
shared by the readers (e.g. Saturday Night Live). Satires which focus on
the lasting characteristics of human experience (in addition to their topical
interest) tend to have a longer life (e.g., Gulliver's Travels).
One
central challenge to the satirist is to be subtle and varied enough to keep the
reader interested in the wit of the piece, while at the same time making it
clear (but not obvious) that there is a satiric intent. The major interest
satires provoke in the reader often arises from the style, which invites the
reader to share the joke. Since most satires depend upon a certain awareness in
the reader (awareness of events, of literary models being satirized, of irony
working in the language), skilful satires tend to require a certain
sophistication in the readers or viewers. A person insensitive to levels of
irony in language will normally find satires difficult to follow (unless the irony
is very obvious).
Whatever
the style of the satire, the writer must avoid at all costs becoming
predictable and dull. Satires which are boring are ineffectual, and satires in
which the ironies do not register properly simply don't work as satires, since
the readers fail to see the satiric intent and take the distortion or the irony
literally (e.g., Machiavelli's The Prince (perhaps), All in the
Family).
C.
Satire: Some Key Terms
The
satirist has a number of traditional stylistic techniques at his or her
disposal. Some of the more common are as follows:
Invective: describes very abusive, usually nonironical
language aimed at a particular target (e.g., a string of curses or name
calling). Invective can often be quite funny (e.g., in Fawlty Towers),
but it is the least inventive of the satirist's tools. A lengthy invective is
sometimes called a diatribe. The danger of pure invective is that one can
quickly get tired of it, since it offers limited opportunity for inventive wit.
Caricature: refers to the technique of exaggerating for
comic and satiric effect one particular feature of the target, to achieve a
grotesque or ridiculous effect. The term caricature generally refers more to
drawing than it does to writing (e.g., the political cartoon). Almost all satire
relies to some extent on the distortion of caricature. In that sense, satire is
not concerned with psychological verisimilitude. The natural state of the
target is pulled out of shape to make a satiric point (like a distorting
mirror). Often the humour in a satire, especially a long satire, depends upon a
fertile basis for the caricature, which enables the writer constantly to amuse
the reader with some detail of the distortion in constantly witty ways.
One
key technique linked to caricature is the development of a unique perspective
on a common human action. Shifting the reader's perspective to an unusual point
may then enable the satirist to caricature normal human actions in a really
witty manner. This is most skillfully and famously illustrated in the first two
books of Gulliver's Travels, in which the simple disproportion in
physical size between Gulliver and the inhabitants of the new worlds enables
Swift to describe all sorts of human actions in a way that stresses their
ridiculousness.
Burlesque: refers to ridiculous exaggeration in language,
usually one which makes the discrepancy between the words and the situation or
the character silly. For example, to have a king speak like an idiot or a
workman speak like a king (especially, say, in blank verse) is burlesque.
Similarly, a very serious situation can be burlesqued by having the characters
in it speak or behave in ridiculously inappropriate ways. In other words,
burlesque creates a large gap between the situation or the characters and the
style with which they speak or act out the event.
Mock
Heroic, a particular form of
burlesque (see above) is a satiric style which sets up a deliberately
disproportionate and witty distance between the elevated language used to
describe an action and the triviality or foolishness of the action (using, for
example, the language of epics to describe a tea party). Mock heroic appeals to
the sophistication of the reader familiar with the epic original and encourages
the reader to see the ridiculousness of the heroic pretensions of really
trivial people. It is thus an excellent vehicle for making fun of people's
pride. Two of the greatest mock heroic satires in English poetry are "Mac
Flecknoe" by Dryden and Rape of the Lock by Pope. The mock heroic
style in the 18th century typically uses a heroic couplet (like so
much other poetry of the time): a series of blank verse rhyming couplets.
Irony: a stylistic device or figure of speech in which
the real meaning of the words is different from (and opposite to) the literal
meaning. Irony, unlike sarcasm, tends to be ambiguous, bringing two contrasting
meanings into play. Often irony works by an incongruity between an action or a
proposal and the moral words used to describe it. Many forms of language,
except perhaps those of mathematics and science, are inherently ironical, since
words carry complex connotations. Irony becomes satiric when the real meaning
appears to contradict the surface meaning (e.g., A Modest Proposal). Irony is
not, of course, confined to satire.
Lampoon: generally refers to a very harsh and personal
attack on a very particular recognizable target, focusing on the target's
character or appearance.
Parody: refers to a style which deliberately seeks to
ridicule another style. This may involve, in less talented parody, simply
offering up a very silly version of the original. In more skilful parodies, the
writer imitates the original very well, pushing it beyond its limits and making
it ridiculous. To achieve this second form of parody, the satirist has to be
able to compose as well as the original. The very best writers are hard to
parody in this second sense, simply because the style of the original is
impossible to push any further without revealing that the parody is less
skilful than the original (e.g., King Lear, Macbeth). The effect
of parody obviously depends upon the reader's being familiar with the original.
One
curious effect of some parody is that the satire is so skillfully done that it
becomes a better work of art than its original and lasts long after the
original has been forgotten and the satiric intention is lost (e.g., The
Beggar's Opera, Spinal Tap).
Reductio
ad absurdum: is a popular satiric
technique (especially in Swift), whereby the author agrees enthusiastically
with the basic attitudes or assumptions he wishes to satirize and, by pushing
them to a logically ridiculous extreme, exposes the foolishness of the original
attitudes and assumptions. Reductios are sometimes dangerous either because the
reader does not recognize the satire at work or because the reader fails to
identify the target clearly. The most famous example of this technique in an
English satire is Swift's "A Modest Proposal."
D.
Satire: Some Comments on the Range
Given
that central to what we call traditional satire is some underlying moral
vision, so that the "negative" portrayal of the target works in the
service of a "positive" moral vision, it is clear that satire can
take on a wide range of tones. That is, the moral indignation in the heart of
the satirist can lead him to something really vicious and savage, an
unrelenting and unforgiving attack on what he sees as extreme moral corruption
in what he is ridiculing, or, alternatively, at another extreme the indignation
of the satirist may temper itself with some affection for the target, so that
the satire is much more good natured, less abusive and aggressive, even to the
point where we are not sure just how much the comic portrait is really satiric
or simply comic (as in, say, a celebrity "roast," where a group of
people attack one of their friends, but do so in an affectionate way, so that
the target really has nothing to complain about, even if some of the jokes hit
a tender nerve at times).
It
seems clear, for example, that Chaucer's "General Prologue" has a
satiric intention in places. And yet the satire is so gentle and affectionate
that generally the distance required for effective satire collapses, and we are
left quite uncertain. For instance, is the portrait of the Prioresse a satire?
It has some of the elements, but at the same time the narrator is so clearly
drawn to the woman and his portrait expresses an admiration that works against
any potential satiric effect. If this is satire, it is surely so amiable that
we are hardly tempted to mock the lady. Even in cases where the satire is
clearly stronger (as in, say, the Wife of Bath's portrait), the strong current
of pleasure and full appreciation in the portrait seriously undercuts the
seriousness of any satiric edge.
No
such ambiguity appears in Dryden's portrait of Shadwell in "Mac
Flecknoe." Here the caricature is clear, the satiric distance is always
maintained, and we as readers are not invited to enjoy any admirable qualities
in the target, but rather to witness his ridiculous pretensions. The mock
heroic style and the attention to the discrepancy between the heroic detail and
the foolishness of the event maintain a sharp satiric edge throughout.
Satire
thus can come in many forms, from savage to gentle, but it remains satire so
long as we feel that the writer's main purpose is making us laugh at conduct
which he believes ought to be corrected. This purpose is much more important
than giving us any psychological insight into why the person might be acting in
that way. What matters for the satirist is the behaviour which he or she sees
as corrigible and wrong.
Whether
we see Dryden's portrayal of Shadwell as aggressively vicious or as much more
affectionately funny (and there seems little doubt that it is much more the
former than the latter), the satiric purpose remains clear so long as we sense
that Dryden intends us to see Shadwell's work (and the people who admire it) as
stupid. To the extent that Shadwell and his retinue become attractive to us (say,
because of the energy and humour they display), the satiric purpose is
diminished. That does not seem to be a problem with Dryden's satire here, but
in some famous satires the attractiveness of the target does raise some
problems (especially in Pope's Rape of the Lock, the most famous mock
heroic poem in English).
E.
Satire: Some Basic Techniques
How
does a satirist set about ridiculing the vice and folly she wants the audience
to recognize as unacceptable? Remember that the challenge to the satirist is to
get the moral point across with humour, so that the audience or the reader
laughs in the appropriate manner. Put another way, the challenge is to put
across serious matters in humorous ways.
Let
me restate this point because it is crucial. The central message of satire is
often very simple and can be stated quickly. Satire is, for reasons we shall
consider in a moment, not a genre which encourages complex explorations of deep
psychological issues in the characters. It's much more like a repetitive insistence
on the foolishness of certain kinds of behaviour. So the problem for the
satirist is to make his treatment funny, that is, to keep the jokes coming
quickly and with sufficient variety that the audience stays interested in what
is going on. Nothing is staler in art than a satire which runs out of steam or
which starts to repeat itself in predicable ways. That's why the staple form
for modern satire is the short skit--set up, punch line, fade out. In a longer
satire, like an Aristophanic play or Swift's Gulliver's Travels the
problem is to keep the reader interested through the variety in one's stylistic
technique.
Well,
there are a number of basic strategies. I list them here in no particular
order.
1.
First, the satirist sets up a target-for instance, the poet Shadwell--which
will symbolize the conduct he wishes to attack. Satire, in other words, has a
clear target. Setting up the target in a way that can generate humour in a
variety of ways is an important talent. The coronation of Shadwell, for instance,
is not just a one-line joke about the nature of bad poetry; in the poem it
becomes the source for a number of other jokes and insults which arise
spontaneously but amusingly out of the dramatic setting Dryden has invented In Gulliver's
Travels, if you go on to read it, you will probably notice a distinct let
down when you reach Book III, in part because Swift doesn't anchor his satire
there on a good target metaphor, or at least not on one which works nearly so
well as the size metaphor in Books I and II.
2.
Second, the satirist will typically exaggerate and distort the target in
certain ways in order to emphasize the characteristics he wishes to attack and,
most importantly, to provide recurring sources of humour. Such exaggeration and
distortion are a key element in the humour. The target must be close enough to
the real thing for us to recognize what is going on, but sufficiently distorted
to be a funny exaggeration, often a grotesque departure from normality.
The
example of a political cartoon is instructive here. When we laugh at the
cartoon of a well known political leader, we are responding to two things: a
recognition of the original and of what the satirist has done to distort the
original so as to make it ridiculous for a particular purpose.
In
that sense, all satire is, as I mention above, unfair, if by that we mean that
the depiction of the target is not life-like, not a true copy. Of course, it's
not. There would be no cartoon if all we had was a photograph of the prime
minister or president. Making the target ridiculous means bending it out of
shape (as in a distorting mirror), not beyond recognition but certainly far
from its normal appearance. The point of the satire often lies in the nature of
the distortion. Much of the best satire depends, in other words, on a skilful
caricature or cartoon, rather than on any attempt at a life-like rendition of
the subject.
So
to complain that Shadwell in "Mac Flecknoe" is nothing like the real
Shadwell is to miss the point. Dryden is setting up his Shadwell to symbolize
in a ridiculously distorted manner certain ways of behaving which he wishes his
audience to recognize as absurd. At the same time, the portrait has to have
some recognizable connection to Shadwell if the poem is to make a connection with
the audience. But it's important, too, to recognize that the main satire may
not be directed so much at Shadwell, ridiculous as he is, but at those who
worship Shadwell, who really do believe that he is an important author.
Such
distortion obviously involves setting up a certain distance between the target
and the audience. That is, we are not in a satire invited to consider the inner
feelings of the target or to speculate on any complex psychological motives for
why he behave the way he does. The satirist focuses on ridiculing external
behaviour, not on speculating about possible complex psychological motivation.
To do the latter is to bring the audience into the inner workings of the
target's heart and mind, and once one has done that, it is difficult to respond
to the target satirically. As the old French saying has it, "Tout
comprendre c'est tout pardonner" ["To understand everything is to
forgive everything"]. For that reason it's difficult to satirize anyone
whose inner psychological troubles are well known.
3.
Once the target is delineated in an appropriately distorted way, the satire
proceeds by an unrelenting attack. Here the satirist has a variety of weapons,
ranging from rude direct insults and a lot of robust physical humour
(pratfalls, misunderstandings, mock fights) to more complex assaults parodying
various forms of language and belief. "Mac Flecknoe" is justly famous
as a very robust satire featuring a wide variety of satiric techniques, in
particular a superb mock heroic style, larded with topical references to the
London literary scene, and with some skilful insults. The major pleasure one
derives from this poem comes principally from recognizing the witty disparity
between the heroic style and the triviality of the subject:
Now Empress Fame had published the
renown
Of Sh---'s coronation through the town
Roused by report of Fame, the nations meet,
From near Bunhill, and distant Watling Street,
No Persian carpets spread the imperial way,
But scattered limbs of mangled poets lay;
From dusty shops neglected authors come,
Martyrs of pies, and relics of the bum.
Much Heywood, Shirley, Ogilby there lay,
But loads of Sh---- almost choked the way. (94-103)
A
good many of these attacks are going to draw upon the shared cultural milieu of
the playwright and the audience (names of particular people and events,
excerpts from particularly well known speeches or plays, references to current
affairs, and so on). The aim of the satirist is to deliver an unremitting
attack on the target which the audience can laugh at, so that the audience's
shared response, its laughter, can effectively deal with the behaviour which
the satirist wishes to correct.
In
this connection, satiric irony is important. This is a technique which, as its
name suggests, confronts the audience with the discrepancy between what
characters say and do and what we fully understand by their actions. To
appreciate satire, that is, we have to have a sense of where the satirist is
coming from, so that we recognize the distortion and the ridiculous behaviour
for what it is. If we fail to see the satiric irony at work, then our response
may defeat the purposes of the satirist, because we will be tempted to say one
of two things: (a) well, life's not like that so I don't see the point (e.g.,
Shadwell was never crowned and it's silly to pretend that he was) or (b) hey, I
think that action by the target is just great; maybe we should all be more like
that.
If
we fail to see the function of the satiric irony, in other words, we may dismiss
the fiction as mere stupidity or we may embrace it as something admirable. So
the challenge of the satirist is to make the satiric intention clear but not
overly obvious, so that the audience derives a certain pleasure from
participating in the in-joke, in seeing what the writer is getting at through
the humour.
That
quality of satire makes it, for all its frequent crudity and knock-about farce,
a much more "intellectual" genre than many others. To appreciate
satire one has to be able to recognize the continuing existence of different
levels of meaning (that is, of irony), and the more sophisticated the satire
the more delicate the ironies. Or, put another way, satire requires a certain
level of education and sophistication in the audience. People can still respond
to the fun of Aristophanes, to the dramatic action and the crude fun, but with
no sense for satiric irony, the point of the piece will get rather lost.
4.
In assaulting the target in this way, the satirist is going to be pushing hard
at the edge of what the audience is prepared to accept. If the satirist wants
really to connect with the audience, then the writer is going often to be
pushing language at the audience in new ways, taking risks with what they are
prepared to accept. After all, if the purpose is to wake people up to the moral
realities of their daily situation, then often some fairly strong language is
going to be in order. That, of course, presents the risk of offending the
audience's taste. If an audience turns away from the work in disgust, then they
are not going to attend to whatever important moral lesson the satirist is
striving to call attention to. Hence the more aggressive the satirist, the more
delicately the writer has to walk along the line of what is acceptable and what
is not. It's no accident that expanding the envelope of what is acceptable on
the stage or in prose is often the work of our satirists. We see this in
"Mac Flecknoe" in the way Dryden is fully prepared repeatedly to
refer to shit, faeces, toilet paper, and so on, not the normal vocabulary of
polite poetry.
This
point is worth stressing, because if a satirist is really touching a nerve in
the audience, then a common response is to find ways to neutralize the satire.
I have sketched out four of the common methods one can use to do that: (a) take
the satire literally and dismiss it as absurd or embrace it as a good idea (the
satiric irony is thus lost and the point of the satire evaporates), (b) reject
the satire because it is too rude or crude (it offends my taste); (c) reject
the satire because it is "unfair" or not sufficiently true to life
(this is very similar to point a above); (d) reject the satire by failing to
respond to the ironies.
F.
Is Satire Ever Effective?
How
effective is satire at realizing its objective, that is, the moral reformation
of the audience. I suppose the short answer is not very often, especially
nowadays, when being laughed at is often a sign of celebrity rather than
something one is automatically ashamed of. I suspect that in closely knit
groups, where one's status and dignity are important, becoming a laughing stock
is something one worries about. Under these circumstances, the satirist may
indeed really connect with the target. That, however, may prompt extreme hostility
to the writer rather than a reformation of the target's character.
Swift
observed that satire is like a mirror in which people see everyone's face
except their own. That, I suspect, is a very accurate observation, and to that
extent the satirist is probably engaging in something of a vain endeavour: to
get people to recognize their own ridiculousness and to avoid it in the future.
Still, there may be some other, more useful point. For satire is not just a
matter of attacking the target; it's also a matter of attacking or at least
challenging those who believe in the target, who do not see, that is, the moral
imperfections at the basis of a particular social or political stance.
So
it may be the case that satire works most effectively at educating an audience
to see through the pretensions and folly of people whom it takes much more
seriously than they ought to be taken. If it does that, then it has used
laughter in a very constructive way, as mentioned above; it has helped to show
us that too often our sense of what we are, as individuals and as groups, is
too limited by delusions of grandeur. Too often we become enamoured of false
idols. Satire is one means of educating us against the practice.
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