Satyre
I’m using the old Elizabethan spelling of “satire,” as I
first studied it seriously in a course in Elizabethan poetry and prose writing.[1] I
suspect that most people go immediately to “A Modest Proposal,” by Jonathan
Swift, when looking for examples of satire. No doubt this is because most
people who’ve studied (i.e., been forced to study) satire as literature read
that essay as part of some high school or college assignment on the subject.
Teachers love to teach “A Modest Proposal” because that piece exhibits one
particular kind or flavor of satire—irony—in such a way as they get to have
some laughs at their students’ expense, much in the way Swift surely got some
laughs out of the public reaction to his writing.
So irony is the Number One component of satire for most of
us, for better or worse. Here’s what I
mean: Swift wrote the piece to draw attention to the mistreatment of the
Irish by the English in 18th Century England, and in London’s
ghettos in particular. That phrase “to
draw attention to” is the defining purpose of satire, by the way. But he wanted to “speak” in a persona other
than his own. Swift himself was of course outraged by the poverty, destitution,
starvation, squalor and inhumane conditions in which the Irish lived under
English rule. He was even more outraged—incensed, indeed—at the lack not only
of compassion on the part of the English bourgeoisie, but their apparently willful
ignorance of the plight of the Irish. Speaking directly, Swift might have stood
on a soap box in some square and shouted at passersby. But who listens to these crazy people? No, to get his point across, he must appear
not crazy but reasonable. Thus, a
modest, reasoned, carefully thought-through proposal to rid the Kingdom of
street urchins and their filthy ways by . . . eating them.
Swift was attacked in some mainstream journals for seriously
proposing such a solution to London’s mean and dirty streets in 1750. Which is precisely why teachers of Freshman
Comp and Lit Survey courses in America love teaching “A Modest Proposal”! Jonathan Swift, the man of conscience, meant
exactly the opposite of what the persona of “A Modest Proposal”
proposed, and anybody who understood satire and irony would get that
immediately. The point for us: Swift was not drawing attention to the plight of
the Irish in London in the middle of the 18th Century. Rather, he
drew attention to the willful ignorance of Londoners about what was then
going on in their midst. He was rubbing
his fellow citizens’ noses in their own refusal to acknowledge suffering.
So you can begin to see why Swift chose satire for his
vehicle instead of direct appeal. If his fellow citizens refused to see what
was daily before them, they would not hear “mere facts.”[2] They had to be drawn in first, fooled, so
that the truth could be revealed to them—the “truth,” again, being not the
plight of the Irish, but their own self-lying about it. Satire was the perfect instrument for
accomplishing this.
Satire, then, is a shadowy enterprise, unlike diatribe which
is plein-aire and in your face. Where
jeremiad and mere scolding come at you head on, satire insinuates itself. It draws you in, it implicates you first, so
that you are invited to see yourself in it.
A fine recent example of a bit of satire in American politics: last
spring, at a high school commencement in a decidedly red state, the
Valedictorian delivered a speech to the assembled parents in which he quoted “Donald
J. Trump”: “Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better
yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table.” Thunderous applause. Then he
corrected himself: actually, it was Barack Obama who said that. Total silence,
even a boo.
Point made. In politics, the messenger’s ideology outweighs
the message by far. Or, put differently,
in politics we don’t really hear the message, just our own ideology.
“A Modest Proposal” is satire in prose form. But, more to
our interests, how does it look in poetry?
Here are two examples from Howard Nemerov (1920-91), a poet known for
his satirical bent.
Style
Flaubert wanted to write a novel
About nothing. It was to have no subject
And be sustained upon style alone,
Like the Holy Ghost cruising above
The abyss, or like the little animals
In Disney cartoons who stand upon a branch
That breaks, but do not fall
Till they look down. He never wrote that novel,
And neither did he write another one
That would have been called La Spirale,
Wherein the hero’s fortunes were to rise
In dreams, while his waking life disintegrated.
Even so, for these two books
We thank the master. They can be read,
With difficulty, in the spirit alone,
Are not so wholly lost as certain works
Burned at Alexandria, flooded at Florence,
And are never taught at universities.
moreover, they are not deformed by style,
that fire that eats what it illuminates.
Ars Poetica
—
Howard Nemerov
(apologies to Mr. MacLeish and Miss Moore,
but the poet who inspired this
one was a real toad
with imaginary gardens in him)
Even before his book came out
We knew there wasn’t any doubt
That these was poems forevermore,
Such as the guy wrote the slogan for:
They wuz not mean, they wuz—
Big pear-shaped poems, ready to parse
In the next Creative Writing clarse.
Yeah, he sure fell flat on his ars
Poetica that time, palpable and mute
As an old globed fruit.
These two examples are what you might call gentle satire,
the kind that only pokes fun. Like the Swift piece, they intend to draw
attention to something, in this case, art and the practice of it—usually badly
or falsely—and so are forms of cultural satire.
Also like the Swift piece, they have their share of irony: the voice of
the poems may or may not be that of Nemerov himself, but authenticity of voice
isn’t really the point. The point of these two poems is self-deprecation or,
self-satire, if you will. The poems are
as bad as they claim their subjects to be.
Behind them, and behind the persona that speaks them, stands the poet
himself—at a remove—commenting on art and culture, which of course include him
and his own output.
Most often, when we think of satire, we think of political
and religious satire. These forms of
satire can be more or less direct, sometimes verging on invective, diatribe,
jeremiad, and all mean to shed a light on false assumptions, mindless belief,
faulty reasoning, hypocrisy and so forth.[3] In modern poetry, you can find satire in one
form or another in the Eliot poems, like The
Wasteland, and throughout Pound’s poetry, like “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.” Some
of it was “acid satire,” and anti-Semitic as well.[4]
W. H. Auden was a master at the satirical thrust, especially
in short, epigrammatic forms:
A dead man
who never caused others to die
seldom rates a statue.
·
The last king
of a fallen dynasty
is seldom well spoken of.
·
Few even wish they could read
the lost annals
of a cudgeled people.
·
The tyrant’s device:
Whatever Is Possible
Is Necessary.
·
Small tyrants, threatened by big,
sincerely believe
they love Liberty.
·
Patriots? Little boys,
obsessed by Bigness,
big Pricks, Big Money, Big Bangs.
·
Assembling
with ceremonial pomp,
the Imperial Diet
gravely debated
legislation
it had no power to reject.
·
Victorious over
the foreign tyrant,
the patriots retained
his emergency
police regulations,
devised to suppress them.
·
Meet the new boss,
Same as the old boss . . .[5]
You might begin to see, or in this case hear, the satirical
tone: acerbic, acid, a bit comic, weary, knowing, ironic, but with serious
undertone. It is commentary in literary
form, and in this sense it is Latin, because it means to entertain while
educating. In the hands of lesser poets
(if I may say so, this means us), it can be acerbic and knowing and ironic, and
even funny, but usually is not what I’d call “literary.” It often is merely
clever,[6] as
in this poem that I wrote last year . . .
Forty-five
—an
inaugural poem—
Let us
pause today to pray for President Tweet,
The
hair, the hands, the ever excitable ego.
He has
big shoes to fill with his little feet.
No
difference foe or faux pas, just hit delete,
A
thumb on the Trigger or on Twitter, oh
Let us
pause today and pray for President Tweet.
The
border wall? A most ingenious REIT,
One
you’ll invest in as well, and soon, amigo.
The
shoes must be filled. So what he has
little feet?
SCOTUS
has an opening. Woohoo! Sweet!
We’ll
adjust the Founders’ Vision as we go,
But
first, pause and pray for President Tweet.
O
amber waves of grain and modified wheat!
Seriously,
the ACA for a lumbago?
Time
for the Big Boy shoes, bring on the feet.
We’re
back! So back! We’re gonna rebuild the Fleet.
We’ll
turn Cuba into Hotel Gitmo.
Today,
let us pause to pray for President Tweet.
He has
big shoes to fill with his little feet.
[1]
Would have been Indiana University, some time around 1970, if you’re
interested.
[2]
Now doesn’t that sound familiar?!
[3]
There’s a very good reason, historically, that satire is so prevalent in 18th
Century Western writing, that century representing the height of the
Enlightenment.
[4]
Which should serve as a cautionary note that satire respects no particular
frame of reference. Alex Jones can use it as well as any liberal pundit; Donald
Trump used acid satire liberally during the 2016 campaign. At some point, in more brutish hands, the
satirical impulse turns into mere put-downs and ridicule, no?
[5]
Okay, this one is cribbed from The Who.
[6]
You can easily argue, of course, that the examples from Auden are just that.
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