So you think you like satire? Not so Swift. The term ‘satire’ has grown so muddled with over-use, one hardly knows what it is and isn’t. It would seem it reigns over this age. We have no end of stand-up comedians and professional wits, sharp-tongued tweets, trolls and memes.
Authority figures of all kinds are roundly mocked, if not across media, then at least on social media. Satirising has become so central to our speech that wherever we are not permitted to mock, we protest that we are not permitted to speak. Not that ‘anything goes’, for we too possess standards of judgement of what is acceptable and unacceptable satire. Those, however, depend on our politics.
This anomie is the fate of all important terms. And once a thing has been rendered boring, it is doubly boring even to try to prove it interesting. But if the very grammar of our discourse has become corrupt, our discussions cannot possibly bear fruit. ‘Satire’, we know and believe, is a praiseworthy thing. But can we tell it apart from its counterfeit? If not, then we are in danger of being continually impoverished, even as we imagine ourselves growing richer and richer.
Out of joint
The only remedy for such a situation is the shock of reality; the encounter with the primordial power of whatever it is we have lost the knowledge of, whether truth, or love, or that scoffing which is carried out for their sake. ‘Swiftian’ is still a popular adjective, regarded as bestowing the highest praise on a piece of satire. It is used as a matter of course, but if we think about it, just what do Jonathan Swift — who would have turned 350 years old this November — and others of his ilk, help us to learn about the craft they exalted?
Firstly, I submit, that satire is intellectual. “It perceives”, wrote Chesterton, “some absurdity inherent in the logic of some position, and... draws that absurdity out and isolates it, so that all can see it.” Gulliver goes on his travels, growing bigger and smaller and generally being put out of joint, all so that we may get a better view of, for instance, that science-worship so indistinguishable from superstition, which prevails among the islanders of Laputa (but surely nowhere else!).
Secondly, satire is imaginative. To hit a mark that is very distant, a bow must be drawn very taut; vibrations must run through the string. Imagination is an obvious feature of full-length works of satire, such as Gulliver’s Travels, which carries the wonder of an adventure story, or The Little Prince. But it must necessarily be present in every satirical statement. Swift’s A Modest Proposal, advocating the eating of little children as a solution to the problem of poverty and neglect in Ireland, is not (as some would have it) an exercise in ‘black humour.’ It is a work of pathos; the sensation being conveyed by the radical imagination.
Thirdly, satire is devastating. Here we may start to see the chasm between the mockery that suffuses the air today, and the genuine article. Swiftian satire is not pitched at the level of this or that politics or ideology; it possesses scale. For only a vast ambition can entitle the satirist to strike as hard and as wildly as he or she does. Therefore, satire has one legitimate target, the pride and foolishness that afflicts all humanity, the satirist included.
For instance, even as Saint-Exupéry unmasks the puffed-up royal, the wealth-obsessed businessman, the narcissist (“But the conceited man did not hear him. Conceited people never hear anything but praise.”) his lamentations regard all ‘grown-ups’, and the narrator too must bow his head in shame, when the little prince exclaims: “You talk just like the grown-ups!” (He does not say — “You talk just like the right-wingers/ left-liberals/ mansplainers/ feminists.”)
Fourth, satire is passionate. This word too has become practically meaningless, but I speak of it as we do of ‘the passion of the Christ’. It is a movement, not merely of the mind, but of the entire being, from which it exacts a correspondingly thorough price. “Of all my books”, wrote C.S. Lewis, “there was only one I did not take pleasure in writing... The Screwtape Letters [his satirical masterpiece]. At the time I was thinking of objections to the Christian life, and decided to put them into the form, ‘That’s what the devil would say.’ But making goods ‘bad’ and bads ‘good’ gets to be fatiguing.”
The modern reader might wonder at this, for have we not been given to understand that inverting good and bad is wonderfully ‘liberating’? Yes, if we are content to make a mess and leave it at that.
But Lewis has in mind the true satirist, for whom, after all contortions of the intellect and imagination, the work must be in order, and point unerringly to the good — as every shadow points to the light.
This takes a toll. Swift ended his days near madness. Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher, was writing furious satire against worldly Christianity, when he collapsed at 42.
A cynic’s eye
Fifth, it follows that satire is timely. In its very nature, a passionate outpouring cannot occur every day. Moreover, unless satire is urgent, it is also pointless, because it has as its object the awakening of those who are falling asleep in their errors. Satire is a prodding, which does not move the dead, and is not necessary for the wide awake, but can only turn back those who are slipping into the twilight.
We may add here, sixthly, that satire is always more or less disliked, because its true audience is not its cheerleaders, who already side with the satirist, but those who disagree enough to be moving in the opposite direction. Nobody who is about to slumber enjoys being jerked awake (though they may be profusely thankful afterwards).
So among the ones he or she is concerned about, the satirist is likely to be labelled a ‘cynic’, for which Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary, provided the following definition: “A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic’s eyes to improve his vision.”
Violence may be averted, however, if, having shaken up his hearers, the satirist is able to switch faculties and speak to them in another vein. Jonathan Swift, we should remember, was not (and could not possibly have been) a full-time satirist. He was the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. So seventhly and lastly, satire is grounded in, arises out of, and continually returns to: earnestness.
It fights for some concept of human virtue, and is not ashamed to weep for it, even as a child might. For the satirist is essentially child-like, one who stands apart from the ways of the world, not gleefully proclaiming that nothing is sacred, but standing and demanding: ‘Is nothing sacred?’
With this in mind, the reader may assess for himself or herself what is false in the so-called satire of our times. Is it not true, that it involves no intellectual heavy-lifting, but is, for the most part, an endless attitudinising and riffing? That it is petty, the stuff of political quarrels? That it is entirely without passion and without risk; indeed, that it is proud of being coolly removed from the fray? That it is not timely, but an all-the-time, daily dribble of words? That it does not brave unpopularity, but revels in the admiration of those already beholden to it? That, lastly, it lacks all earnestness; that it is a disembodied smirk, not in love with anything but itself?
Lullabies of mockery
Its effect on us, too, is the opposite of true satire’s. Rather than wakening us to our dangerous tendencies, it croons its lullabies of mockery while we sink deeper into destruction. Kierkegaard, who could read the signs of the times with other-worldly acuteness, wrote a little parable.
“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”
Since such are the stakes, we ought not to believe the tired, deadly refrain that the modern world is somehow beyond satire, that politics has entered a post-satire phase; that the character of a Donald Trump, for instance, is satire-proof. It is true that all these have the advantage in mockery, for whoever has the crowd on his or her side, will win a match of mockery.
Yet mockery is itself a fit target for satire, which is sure to overcome it, since satire does not draw its sustenance from the crowd, but from the truth. The more we remind ourselves, therefore, of what is true, the more we will be spurred to satirise the modern error regarding the satirical. We might then regain the use of our senses in time to put out the fires already raging — and Swift, Kierkegaard and many others could cease turning in their graves.
The writer is a novelist whose most recent book is The Persecution of Madhav Tripathi.