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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 modelâHorace, say, or Juvenalâand 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 unityâsatyr (the half man-half beast, suggesting that satire is lawless, wild, and threatening) and lanx satura (the âmixedâ or âfull platter,â 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 satireâs long history, lurking in dark corners, and to make it into the model of a moral citizen. Or they have resisted satireâs 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 âprogrammatic satiresâ (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 âHoratianâ satire springs from these early pronouncements. So did the convention of announcing oneâs satiric program, typically by means of a verse satire toward the beginning of a satiristâs âbook.â1 But before we let Horaceâs words solidify into law, binding on all his successors, or let them swell into a âtheory,â we need to remember two aspects of Horaceâs situation as a writer. First, his satiric âprogramââlike all programmatic satiresâis not so much a writerâs 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 satireâthe 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 âmulta cum libertateâ (Satire 1:4.5). As classical scholars have pointed out, we should not assume that Horaceâs compressed account of satireâs origins in Aristophanes and his fellow dramatistsââhinc omnis pendet Luciliusâârepresents his considered view of the matter.3 This âdeliberate exaggerationâ4 is designed for local purposesâto 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 âfull platterâ 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, âlittle talksâ or âconversationsâ (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 âsatiric purposes.â6
In fact, Horaceâs 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 Horaceâs programmatic satires of his digressiveness, his chattiness, the ironic disparity between moral idea and practice, between spirit and material circumstance. From his âtheoreticalâ pronouncements, one could not expect the famous âJourney to Brundisiumâ (Sat. 1.5), the meeting with âThe Boreâ (1.9), or Priapusâs narrative of the witch Canidia (1.8). Sometimes, as Isaac Casaubon later said, Horace fails to follow his own rules for good poetry: âThe very method that Horace wisely prescribed to othersâthat a poem should be simplex and unum [Ars P. 23]âhe 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.â7 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 âdelicateâ 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
Horaceâs 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 settledâiambi, satyra, satura, sermoâand its muddled ancestry retrospectively clarified. What, after all, was the practitioner-theorist in Horaceâs 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 âmedleysâ (miscellaneous in both versification and theme)? By distributing his satiric work over several formsâsatires, epistles, and epodesâHorace himself only made the job of generic classification and definition more difficult.9 Grammarians as early as the first century B.C. knew of satireâs 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 satireâs ancestryâeven as early as the time of Varroâwas 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 satireâits 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, Quintilianâs claimâa century after Varroâthat âsatura tota nostra est.â 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 âpatriotic labours,â seeking to âconstruct an early history of Latin literature and derive the various literary genres from an Italian past, not Greek.â13 In any case, his claim (like many claims in the history of satire) simplifies a complicated history by focusing on one elementâhere the tradition and progressive refinement of formal verse satire from Lucilius through Horace, Persius, and Juvenalâto 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 âa verse composition . . . defamatory and composed to carp at human vicesâ (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 satireâs 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 âmoral obsession of literary criticism in later antiquity,â16 who lead more or less directly to the emphasis on satireâs 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 âcomplaintâ17 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 âpresented the lives of Satyers, so that they might wiselye, under the abuse of that name, discover the follies of many theyr folish fellow citesens.â19 George Puttenhamâs Arte of English Poesie (1589) reemphasizes that satire originates as drama and makes explicit the link between satyrs and satire: âThe first and most bitter invective against vice and vicious men was the [dramatic] Satyre: which to thâintent 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.â In time there arose poets who, like the impersonated satyr-gods on the Greek stage, âtaxe[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.â20 As Kernan has shown, most of the practicing satirists in England from 1590 to 1620 thought a satire should be rude, derisive, harshâwritten 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 âSatyrique tragedyâ (not bitter railing but comic parodies of mythical tales, like Euripidesâ Cyclops, âpartly Serious, and partly Jocular,â 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 âAgainst Lawyersâ or âAgainst Doctors.â 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 âJuvenalianâ moods such satirists derived some encouragement from Renaissance discussions of the second-century rhetorician Hermogenesâ âIdeas of Style,â and especially from the âideasâ 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 Donneâs poems, whose rhetoric is derived more from Horace than from Juvenal. Donneâs fawning courtiers (Satires 1 and 4) are Horatian, as is the satiristâs presentation of himself as foolish victim. Donne furthermore rejects the satiristâs angry rant. Though he âhatesâ the town, he says, foolish poets arenât worth hating. In his famous third satire, âkind pittyâ...