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George Bernard Shaw 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.
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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 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 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'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.
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; 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.
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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 (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.
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 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 and most other communist countries. For example, the poet Osip Mandelshtam 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 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, 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 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, “deserves to be banned.” The 20th-century American critic Kenneth Burke 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 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. |
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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'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. |
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. |
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