Satire

A Critical Reintroduction

Dustin Griffin

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813156248
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Here is the ideal introduction to satire for the student and, for the experienced scholar, an occasion to reconsider the uses, problems, and pleasures of satire in light of contemporary theory. Satire is a staple of the literary classroom. Dustin Griffin moves away from the prevailing moral-didactic approach established thirty some years ago to a more open view and reintegrates the Menippean tradition with the tradition of formal verse satire.

Exploring texts from Aristophanes to the moderns, with special emphasis on the eighteenth century, Griffin uses a dozen figures—Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Lucian, More, Rabelais, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Blake, and Byron—as primary examples. Because satire often operates as a mode or procedure rather than as a genre, Griffin offers not a comprehensive theory but a set of critical perspectives. Some of his topics are traditional in satire criticism: the role of satire as moralist, the nature of satiric rhetoric, the impact of satire on the political order. Others are new: the problems of satire and closure, the pleasure it affords readers and writers, and the socioeconomic status of the satirist.

Griffin concludes that satire is problematic, open-ended, essayistic, and ambiguous in its relationship to history, uncertain in its political effect, resistant to formal closure, more inclined to ask questions than provide answers, and ambivalent about the pleasures it offers.

1

Theories of Satire in Polemical Context

Most satiric theory, at least since the Renaissance, is polemical, ranging itself against some previous practice or claim and attempting to displace it. Typically the theorist establishes his model—Horace, say, or Juvenal—and urges that all satire follow this pattern. More generally, satiric theory may be seen as a series of attempts to deny one or both of two elements that have long clung to satire and challenged its claims to morality and artistic unity—satyr (the half man-half beast, suggesting that satire is lawless, wild, and threatening) and lanx satura (the “mixed” or “full platter,” suggesting that satire is a formless miscellany, and food for thought). Theorists have long sought to repress or domesticate the shaggy, obscene, and transgressive satyr that ranges through satire’s long history, lurking in dark corners, and to make it into the model of a moral citizen. Or they have resisted satire’s traditionally farraginous nature and insisted that every satire must display thematic unity and formal clarity. When theorists happen also to be practitioners of satire (as in the case of Horace and Dryden), they are likely to be propagandizing for their own particular way of writing satire. And not infrequently their theory fails to account for their own practice. To recognize the unacknowledged limitations of earlier theories helps us see more clearly that modern theory has inherited the same limitations.

Classical Theory

Some of the earliest pronouncements about the nature of good satire come from one of its first great practitioners, Horace. In several so-called “programmatic satires” (1.4, 10; 2.1) Horace provides his own implicit theory of satire: that the satirist, speaking out freely, seeks to laugh men out of their follies. A long tradition of “Horatian” satire springs from these early pronouncements. So did the convention of announcing one’s satiric program, typically by means of a verse satire toward the beginning of a satirist’s “book.”¹ But before we let Horace’s words solidify into law, binding on all his successors, or let them swell into a “theory,” we need to remember two aspects of Horace’s situation as a writer. First, his satiric “program”—like all programmatic satires—is not so much a writer’s preconceived manifesto as a response to attacks on his poems as malicious, libelous, or excessively bitter. Thus in defending his own satiric practice, he does not give a comprehensive account of what he called his sermones but focuses on the element of moral satire—the frank censure of abuses. Second, he was engaged in the complex process of honoring his satiric predecessor, Lucilius, declaring a continuity between their work and at the same time trying to distinguish himself carefully from the older poet.²

In defending himself Horace makes opportunistic use of his predecessors to make the best case for his own practice: Lucilius was outspoken before me; so were the writers of Old Comedy, who censured fools “multa cum libertate” (Satire 1:4.5). As classical scholars have pointed out, we should not assume that Horace’s compressed account of satire’s origins in Aristophanes and his fellow dramatists—“hinc omnis pendet Lucilius”—represents his considered view of the matter.³ This “deliberate exaggeration”⁴ is designed for local purposes—to defend an outspoken manner against attack. For this purpose Horace finds it convenient to emphasize his affinity with Lucilius.

But in other respects Horace wants to put some distance between himself and Lucilius, even where their practice is similar. Both poets, from our vantage, write in the satura tradition. Their satires admit a great variety of material and tones, as befits the “full platter” of mixed fruits and nuts after which it is named. But Horace, looking back at Lucilius, saw artlessness and even crudity (Sat. 1.10). Lucilius was a diamond in the rough, whose vigor needed to be smoothed and refined. Horace emphasized that his own work, by contrast, was polished and artful. Thus he at first determined to suppress the idea of his satire as satura, since for him the idea was discredited by its associations. In his first book Horace calls his work not saturae or satirae but sermones, “little talks” or “conversations” (another term derived in fact from Lucilius). It is only in his second book that Horace, having established his identity as an artful satirist, adopts the older term satura.⁵ As William Anderson has noted, Horace (like his successors) represents his predecessor in such a way as to advance his own “satiric purposes.”⁶

In fact, Horace’s own practice is considerably different from that of Lucilius and Aristophanes. He is oblique rather than blunt, smiling and hinting rather than attacking directly. And the theory of moral satire that he advances misrepresents his own range of interests. One would not know from Horace’s programmatic satires of his digressiveness, his chattiness, the ironic disparity between moral idea and practice, between spirit and material circumstance. From his “theoretical” pronouncements, one could not expect the famous “Journey to Brundisium” (Sat. 1.5), the meeting with “The Bore” (1.9), or Priapus’s narrative of the witch Canidia (1.8). Sometimes, as Isaac Casaubon later said, Horace fails to follow his own rules for good poetry: “The very method that Horace wisely prescribed to others—that a poem should be simplex and unum [Ars P. 23]—he himself never or rarely kept to in his own satires. For whenever he sets out on some material, he soon deserts it, often piling up unadorned precepts. . . . And so most of the Horatian satires give us an exact idea of that very dish, so copious and fruit filled.”⁷ But the fault does not lie wholly in Horace himself. Later commentators and theorists have often misrepresented him and in particular neglected to remember his almost continuous irony, his facetiousness, his pretending not to be a poet, and his claim that his poems are mere trifles.

Satire, as Horace practices it, is considerably more diverse than laughter at folly. The Horatian sermo is “delicate” not only in its correctness (an artful improvement over the rough practice of Lucilius) and its gentle humor but in its extraordinary mobility of tone and nuance. Horace is not simply a stern moralist who speaks his mind with sincerity, like Persius. He slides noiselessly from plain speaking and ethical advice into ironically lofty and pompous verse (and sometimes into the mock-heroic), from there into sincere and artless emotion (as in the praise of friendship in 1.5), and thence into a highly allusive mode, quoting directly from his predecessors, often for ironic purposes.⁸

Horace’s theoretical pronouncements about satire thus need to be read with great care, since they come down to us not as theory but as dramatic utterances, enmeshed in particular satiric poems at a time when the genre was still being shaped. What is more, the very terminology for the form was yet to be settled—iambi, satyra, satura, sermo—and its muddled ancestry retrospectively clarified. What, after all, was the practitioner-theorist in Horace’s day to make of the rich variety of satiric forms, from the Greek satyr plays, Old Comedy, Stoic diatribe, and Archilochan iambics to the Latin Fescennine insuits, New Comedy, and satirical “medleys” (miscellaneous in both versification and theme)? By distributing his satiric work over several forms—satires, epistles, and epodes—Horace himself only made the job of generic classification and definition more difficult.⁹ Grammarians as early as the first century B.C. knew of satire’s multiple forms. But as C.A. Van Rooy and others have shown, they disagreed about the lines of descent relating them. Did Lucilian invective descend from Old Comedy, from satyr plays, or from Archilochus? The point to insist on is that almost any reconstruction of satire’s ancestry—even as early as the time of Varro—was a partisan interpretation and an implicit definition of the proper nature of satire.¹⁰ It depended on what element the historian thought was most important in satire—its rambling variety, its defamatory invective, its free speaking, its ribald ridicule, or its moral function.¹¹

This principle applies likewise to what is perhaps the most famous classical pronouncement about satire, Quintilian’s claim—a century after Varro—that “satura tota nostra est.” Some scholars argue that Quintilian was trumpeting the superiority of Roman to Greek satirists; others, that he means to speak of satire as a wholly Roman kind of poem, at least in its perfected form.¹² Classicists even today suspect that Quintilian, like other early Roman theorists and historians of literature, was engaged here in “patriotic labours,” seeking to “construct an early history of Latin literature and derive the various literary genres from an Italian past, not Greek.”¹³ In any case, his claim (like many claims in the history of satire) simplifies a complicated history by focusing on one element—here the tradition and progressive refinement of formal verse satire from Lucilius through Horace, Persius, and Juvenal—to the exclusion of other satiric forms, particularly the Greek Menippean tradition and what might be called the unruly spirit of satyr.

The other theoretical locus classicus represents a similarly narrow focus. In the late fourth century the grammarian Diomedes defined satire as “a verse composition . . . defamatory and composed to carp at human vices” (maledicum et ad carpenda hominum vitia).¹⁴ Furthermore, he has in mind only the tradition of Roman verse satire as written by Lucilius, Horace, and Persius (whom he names), omitting the Varronian or Menippean tradition altogether. Though he acknowledges satire’s complex etymology, from satyrs or the lanx satura or the lex satura,¹⁵ Diomedes defines the form in wholly moral terms. He says nothing of wit, humor, playfulness, exaggeration or fantasy or paradox, iconoclasm or the carnival spirit. It is ultimately writers like Diomedes, reflecting what G.L. Hendrickson called the “moral obsession of literary criticism in later antiquity,”¹⁶ who lead more or less directly to the emphasis on satire’s moral function that dominates satiric theory from the Renaissance into the mid-twentieth century.

Elizabethan Theory

Sixteenth-century English writers on satire inherited several different traditions: a broad medieval tradition of “complaint”¹⁷ that ranged in English alone from Langland and Chaucer to Barclay and Skelton; Lucianic dialogues, once prized for their sophistication but by the Reformation increasingly associated with scoffing atheism; a line of epistolary satire in Italy from Vingiguerra to Alamanni and Ariosto, based primarily on Horatian models. Oddly enough, with all this wealth of living tradition and despite the recovery of classical Roman formal satire, the dominant theory of satire among Renaissance writers was based on their notion of Greek satyr plays (of which they knew almost nothing), a theory that could account for very little of the satire with which they were familiar. Though they knew of the idea that satire derives its name from satura and ultimately from the lanx satura,¹⁸ their theory in effect ignored or suppressed the notion of satire as miscellany.

For example, in his Defence of Poetry (1579) Thomas Lodge discovers the origin of satire in a form of early Greek drama, which “presented the lives of Satyers, so that they might wiselye, under the abuse of that name, discover the follies of many theyr folish fellow citesens.”¹⁹ George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) reemphasizes that satire originates as drama and makes explicit the link between satyrs and satire: “The first and most bitter invective against vice and vicious men was the [dramatic] Satyre: which to th’intent their bitterness should breede none ill will, . . . they made wise as if the gods of the woods, whom they called Satyres or Silvanes, should appeare and recite those verses of rebuke.” In time there arose poets who, like the impersonated satyr-gods on the Greek stage, “taxe[d] the common abuses and vice of the people in rough and bitter speaches, and their invectives were called Satyres, and themselves Satyricques: such were Lucilius, Iuvenall, and Persius among the Latines, & with us he that wrote the booke called Piers Plowman.”²⁰ As Kernan has shown, most of the practicing satirists in England from 1590 to 1620 thought a satire should be rude, derisive, harsh—written in the kind of language one might expect from a woodland satyr.

Such a theory may well have had its practical uses: it helped a generation of young English poets produce a satyrlike kind of satire in the 1590s. But as theory it is markedly deficient. It is based on misunderstandings about the nature of Greek satyrs (it was Roman artists who first portrayed them as the half man-half goat the Elizabethans imagined) and the nature of “Satyrique tragedy” (not bitter railing but comic parodies of mythical tales, like Euripides’ Cyclops, “partly Serious, and partly Jocular,” with happy endings).²¹ It is based too, as the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon was soon to point out, on insufficient knowledge of the distinction between the Greek satyric tradition and the Roman satira. More important, the satyric theory is unable to account for the chatty or reflective-philosophical Horace. Elizabethan theorists have little to say about Horace. They much preferred Juvenal as their model; unlike Horace, he wrote nothing but satire (and was thus easier to categorize), and his rhetoric, to be sure, answers better to their theory. Even so, they were obliged to imagine a rancorous and savagely indignant Juvenal, not the highly skilled declamatory rhetorician. By the same token, the idea that a satirist should virtually fume and sputter in rage does little to explain those poems in which a satirist such as Joseph Hall constructs a kind of set piece “Against Lawyers” or “Against Doctors.” True, Kernan is able to show that much but not all of the satire of Hall and John Marston seems to follow the theory of Lodge and Puttenham. It is possible that in their “Juvenalian” moods such satirists derived some encouragement from Renaissance discussions of the second-century rhetorician Hermogenes’ “Ideas of Style,” and especially from the “ideas” of asperity, vehemence, and vigor (all subcategories of Grandeur). One late sixteenth-century commentary on Hermogenes pointed to examples of asperity and vehemence in Persius.²²

But Hall and Marston, though still too little discussed today, are finally secondary figures. The best of the Elizabethan satirists, by common consent, is John Donne, and the idea that the satirist is a sort of satyr founders when one takes up Donne’s poems, whose rhetoric is derived more from Horace than from Juvenal. Donne’s fawning courtiers (Satires 1 and 4) are Horatian, as is the satirist’s presentation of himself as foolish victim. Donne furthermore rejects the satirist’s angry rant. Though he “hates” the town, he says, foolish poets aren’t worth hating. In his famous third satire, “kind pitty”...