Wednesday
A friend recently alerted me to a review of Don Sperrin’s State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature in the New York Times Book Review, which gives me an excuse to explore my own mixed feelings about satire. While I specialized in the golden age of British satire (the Restoration and 18th century) and for years taught such satirists as the John Wilmot, John Dryden, William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Fanny Burney, and Jane Austen, some part of me has always bridled at satire’s judgmental stance. More on that in a moment.
Sperrin, it appears, regards literary satire as always local and political, not universal and moral. In his view, satire wants to change conditions as they are at the time, not make grand pronouncements about human beings. Thus, as reviewer Aaron Matz summarizes Sperrin’s project,
Satire is never so sweeping as to say, “Rulers and politicians are like this.” Instead it says, “This person, in this year, with this background, in service to this regime, in response to this crisis, did this.”
This means that Sperrin concentrates on specific historical moments, from the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans through the Victorians, along with a brief glance in his conclusion at the 20th century. As Matz puts it, in Sperrin’s book we encounter
the decade-to-decade, even year-to-year march of English political history, with one king giving way to another, Catholics to Protestants, Whigs to Tories, Walpole as prime minister in the first of the the eighteenth century and Pitt the Younger at the end.
Despite the sweep, Sperrin does not talk about satire as a timeless genre and dismisses those who do. In Matz’s summary,
If we don’t focus on satire as a field of “motivated agents” with “interventionist purposes,” [Sperrin] warns, there is a risk that “it will become a literature of decontextualized social comedy referring to little other than a series of poorly defined social values.” Critics who go down that path are doomed to “construct universalist, atemporal definitions of satire” and to conclude that “satirists as different as Juvenal, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Skelton, John Dryden, and Jonathan Swift, for instance, were all doing exactly the same thing.”
Given this perspective, it makes sense that Sprerrin would be drawn to Dryden, whose masterpiece Absolom and Architophel is a detailed treatment of the “exclusion crisis” of 1679-81. This was an attempt to exclude James, the brother and the rightful heir to Charles II, from the throne on account of him being Catholic. Instead, the plotters were hoping to replace him with Charles’s Anglican but bastard son the Duke of Monmouth. (Side note: Bates family lore has it that we are descendants of Monmouth, although through a second wrong-side-of-the-bed twist. I tell the story here.)
Early in my teaching career, I gave up teaching Absalom and Architophel because, amazing poem though it is, my students would get lost in the convoluted politics. The same was true of Pope’s Dunciad, another magnificent poem which, however, requires comprehensive knowledge of the early 18th century publishing wars to be truly appreciated. It’s far easier to teach the (also magnificent) Gulliver’s Travels, whose political context can be summed up in a tidier fashion.
So I suppose, from Sperrin’s point of view, we English professors are part of the problem: we’re scared of politics and so settle for vapid generalizations about satire of the past. To further compound the crime, in this blog I regularly pull satiric works out of their historical period to apply them to our own. Matz sums up what Sperrin sees as wrong with this:
[T]he choice Sperrin presents—satire is either a “literature of motivated practical activities” or “decontextualized social comedy”—is a false one. He seems suspicious of the considerably body of satire that exists between these two poles, neither consumed with day-to-day matters of statecraft nor given over to airy ruminations about human nature…Sperrin is unmoved by the fact that satire excoriates human behavior beyond the corridors of the palace or the parliament. But that more nebulous realm is where a lot of satirists have always been skulking.
Even though I myself used a both/and approach in teaching satire—I both contextualized and universalized–I understand Sperrin’s single-minded insistence on politics: it discovers things other scholars have missed. Matz points out, however, this stance causes Sperrin to overlook some of the literature’s greatest satiric works, such as Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.
Now, to a personal story. When I met with my advisor to choose a dissertation topic in 1978, I knew I wanted to break out of formalist New Criticism’s belief that only text is important and that everything else, including historical context and reader, is irrelevant. For this reason, the New Critics had problems with satire, which so clearly engages with context. Since satirists are overtly interested in changing reader behavior, I thought I wanted to study satire.
In retrospect, I should have said I wanted to study readers’ relationship to literature because I then wouldn’t have spent the next two years immersed in a cranky Scottish satirist with an immense chip on his shoulder. The fact that I’ve never taught Tobias Smollett in a course tells you it was a mistake, even though I learned a lot while writing it.
I now realize that all kinds of literature can change lives and that, in some ways, I’m most interested in literature that does so indirectly. “Tell the truth but tell it slant,” as Emily Dickinson writes. Like many people, I don’t like to be told bluntly how to behave. Now, I still value satire, but I prefer Horatian satire, which gently mocks, to Juvenalian satire, which lashes out in savage indignation. Many of my favorite authors combine satire with sentimental comedy, authors such as Fielding, Goldsmith, Burney, Austen, Dickens, and Trollope. Even as satire engages with social conditions, comedy distances one from these same conditions. Close but not too close appears to be my sweet spot.
In short, while I’m interested in Sperrin’s findings—how satire engages with the politics of the time–it sounds like he undervalues satire’s comic side and its general entertainment value, which is where my heart lies. While I enjoy watching Austen skewer Mr. Collins, I appreciate her wit even more. And that wit (as Ben Jonson wrote of Shakespeare) is not of an age but of all time.
