Introduction: Understanding Satire

Abstract

But still, despite our cleverness and love, Regardless of the past, regardless of The future on which all our hopes are pinned, We'll reap the whirlwind, who have sown the wind.(Timothy Steele, ' 'April 27, 1937'') The SatiristIf, at the end of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story ''Young Goodman Brown'' (1835), the ''darkly meditative,'' aging, and ''distrustful'' protagonist, believing he once saw his Salem neighbors and newlywed wife (''Faith'') cavorting in a witches' Sabbath one wild night in the forest, had chosen to take up the quill instead of bitterly retreating from life, he would have written satire. For satirists do not wither in despair but, on the contrary, feel compelled to express their dissent. Juvenal is as typical a satirist as he is a great one for being so singularly dissatisfied and wanting to tell others about it.Living in an imperial Rome that has thoroughly surrendered its former republican glory, he tells his readers from the outset that it is difficult for him not to write satire (difficile est saturam non scribere; Satires 1.30). Indignant, he must speak out against the decadence and corruption he sees all about him. Thus satirists write in winters of discontent.And they write not merely out of personal indignation, but with a sense of moral vocation and with a concern for the public interest. In his second ''Epilogue to the Satires'' (1738), Alexander Pope's poetic speaker is called ''strangely proud'' by his adversarial friend, who would have him stop writing satire altogether. The poet agrees that he is ''odd'' -for ''my Country's Ruin makes me grave'' -and that he is ''proud'' -''proud to see / Men not afraid of God, afraid of me: / Safe from the Bar, the Pulpit, and the Throne, / Yet touch'd and sham'd by Ridicule alone.'' The poet's satire is a Quintero / Companion to Satire 1405119551_4_000 Final Proof page 1 13.9.2006 2:24pm ''sacred Weapon! Left for Truth's defence, / Sole Dread of Folly, Vice, and Insolence!'' and that prosecutorial weapon of words has been entrusted only to his ''Heav'ndirected hands'' (Dialogue II,. As in the formative Roman verse satires of Horace and Juvenal, Pope's poetry creates a people's court of blame and shame, and his satirist litigates and adjudges misconduct that, though not restrained by legislated law, is subject to the unofficial law of satire (lex per saturam).Such sanction for scorn or ridicule, however, does not mean that the satirist can lash out or laugh at just anything. Not only must a boundary between truth and libel be respected, but also a socio-ethical boundary regarding satirical subject matter. It may be true, as Ronald Paulson observes, that punishment is ''the most extreme, and at the same time most common, consequence in satire'' and ''conveys a definite admonition: this is the consequence of your foolish act, this is the effect of X's evil act; or, beware! This is what you could look like or what X in fact looks like' ' (1967: 10, 14). But, in order to be laid bare and satirized, X's ''evil act'' must be an evil of error, not pur...

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