For as long as there has been satire there has been an effort to explain what exactly it is. A vast critical literature chews over matters of definition and classification. But the task has never fallen only to critics and theorists. Since ancient Rome it has often been the satirists themselves who have spoken most volubly about the proper way to describe their art. In his verse Horace didn’t only mock the vices of his contemporaries (hypocrisy, Stoic philosophy, avarice); he laid out the correct form satire should take—terse, conversational, “in a style rather close to prose.” Juvenal railed against particular groups of people (Greeks, women, the old), but he also proposed a kind of theory of satire as the most ravenous literature: “All human endeavors, men’s prayers, fears, angers, pleasures,/joys and pursuits, make up the mixed mash of my book.” In one famous line he suggested that writing satire simply meant documenting the everyday horror show in front of you. Difficile est saturam non scribere: if you’re paying attention to present conditions, it’s difficult not to write satire.
Satire is not exceptional in its self-consciousness. Other literary modes may also announce what they are doing. But the attempt to define satire, more than other modes or genres, tends to involve pronouncing not just what it is, but what it is for. Satiric literature identifies people or institutions or situations in order to hold them up for ridicule. It is therefore an unusually reactive kind of art, and its response to those incitements can give the impression that it wears its purpose freely, that its objectives are never far from its articulations, indeed that it cannot be understood apart from its conscious motivations for exposing the world’s imbecility.
The complication is that satire usually goes about this assignment in indirect ways. A targeted attack may shroud itself in irony or circumlocution. An utter seriousness of purpose might be camouflaged by jest or insolence. A satirist will hide behind a persona. And so the motive underlying satire can be at once explicit and deceptive, stable and volatile. Just because writers tell you what their aim is doesn’t mean that you should believe them. The Swift scholar Claude Rawson, writing about some extreme phrasings in the work of that most comprehensive of satirists, gets at this quality best: the satiric voice is a “mixture of meaning it, not meaning it, and not not meaning it.”
For Dan Sperrin in State of Ridicule, the basic definition of satire is unambiguous: satire is political. It “offers interpretations of power,” though its point is never merely interpretive. It wants to intercede in matters of state and government, sometimes in support of the existing regime and frequently in opposition to it. For hundreds of years English satire has been consumed with recurring subjects and problems: the legitimacy of rule, the succession of dynasties, the ambition of prime ministers, the administration of government.
There has been some variation. The political satire of earlier centuries was entangled in religious dispute. In medieval literature, in Chaucer for instance, anticlerical satire was dominant; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Catholics and then nonconformists began to find themselves regularly at the end of the satirist’s lash. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, political satire was often openly partisan, with Whigs or Tories deserving the scourge depending on the affiliation of the satirist. But for Sperrin the target is continuous. For nearly two thousand years satirists have been moved to ridicule one domain above all others: politics in its most explicit form.
Studies of satire don’t usually take in such a large scope, and Sperrin’s book, beginning with the Romans and ending in the 2010s, is most praiseworthy for its sheer ambition and erudition. Sperrin calls this a “longue durée” approach to satire. The phrase goes unattributed, but it comes from Fernand Braudel and the Annales school of history. The idea was that only an analysis encompassing the “long duration” of social structures, demography, the environment, and what the Annales school called mentalités could free historiography from the shorter-term studies of events and politics that tended to obscure the most important processes and continuities, and that had characterized the discipline in France in the first part of the twentieth century.
It is an irony of Sperrin’s book that he uses the phrase. Unquestionably his history of satire covers a very long stretch of time. But he is actually indifferent to the kind of social history, extended across time and space, that the Annales school wanted the longue durée to make visible. Instead, Sperrin’s focus is relentlessly on the opposite: 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 half of the eighteenth century and Pitt the Younger at its end. Sperrin’s book is not a longue durée history but instead an exceedingly thorough study of English political life since Roman times, and satire’s responses to it.
To contain both the span and the details, Sperrin settles into a formula. He will begin with a full description of the political circumstances of a period—who’s in power, who seeks power, who wants what for England on the European stage—and will then turn to the contemporaneous satirists who enter the fray, addressing their work as a response to those precise circumstances. In Sperrin’s account, 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.”
There is a virtue in such specificity, and the earlier sections of the book in particular are models of scholarly meticulousness. Sperrin’s chapter on Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman literature provides a continuity between the Roman and early modern periods that is lacking in most histories of satire. He is quite good on the early Tudor poet John Skelton, who became tutor to the future Henry VIII and wrote verses that enforced some of the ecclesiastical orthodoxies of the early 1500s. He provides a fine portrait of the Elizabethan prose satirist Thomas Nashe, who called himself an “evil angel,” hated Puritans, and gave later satirists a useful proverb: “Who feeds revenge hath found an endless Muse.”
Sperrin views satire as “a literature that is often enmeshed in transient and inflamed political contexts,” so it makes sense that someone like Skelton or, later, John Dryden would be well suited to his approach. These are writers who operated near the courts or governments they lauded or condemned in their verse. But it’s an approach that keeps a lot of others out. Sperrin not only insists on satire’s total attachment to the practice of politics; he dismisses other ways of comprehending its polemical drive. If we don’t focus on satire as a field of “motivated agents” with “interventionist purposes,” he warns, there is a risk that “it will become a literature of decontextualised 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.”
Never mind that no critic would say that Juvenal, Dryden, and Swift were doing exactly the same thing. The deeper problem is that the choice Sperrin presents—satire is either a “literature of motivated practical activities” or “decontextualised social comedy”—is a false one. He seems suspicious of the considerable 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. He does not want to consider satire as a moral literature (as distinct from a political literature), a view that dominated the heyday of satire criticism in the 1950s and 1960s and that has informed the scholarship ever since. 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.
Both the rewards and the shortcomings of this approach are evident in Sperrin’s section on Restoration literature. The period between 1660 and the 1690s inaugurated the crucial phase of English satire, which came to fruition in the early eighteenth century, preeminently in the work of the so-called Augustan writers Swift and Alexander Pope. In the Restoration poets Dryden and John Wilmot, better known as the Earl of Rochester, we can see English satire solidifying and sharpening itself.
Dryden is Sperrin’s ideal subject. He was a satirist in the tradition that went back to ancient Rome, keen to stake out his terrain and define his art. In works like A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693), Dryden codified satire for English literature: its inheritance from Latin, its proper versification. Above all he was a thoroughly political writer. His allegorical poem Absalom and Achitophel was a salvo in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1681, which arose in anticipation of the problem of who would succeed Charles II. Dryden embraced the partisanship. The poem was known as a “pen for a party” satire: it was unapologetic propaganda. A case like this befits Sperrin, and when he calls Dryden “a satirist possessed of exceptional arbitration capabilities” he means it without irony, and as the highest praise.
Dryden’s contemporary Rochester was nothing like him. In fact they detested each other. In 1679 an anonymous writer insulted Rochester in a poem called “An Essay Upon Satire.” At the time the author was popularly assumed to be Dryden (though scholars are now almost certain it was someone else). Rochester seems to have hired some brutes to beat Dryden up in the alley outside a London pub. Rochester was a courtier during Charles II’s reign, but to think of him as mainly a political writer would be to miss the point. Rochester is one of the filthiest, profanest, and funniest poets in the English language. Despite his small body of work (he died of some combination of syphilis and alcoholism at thirty-three), his influence on the course of satire is as enduring in its way as Dryden’s. He wrote less about monarchical succession and more about dildos, whores, and erections—but also vanity, disillusion, and freedom. A poem like “A Ramble in St. James’s Park” (1673), a vicious fantasia of sexual jealousy and antipathy, cannot be assimilated to Sperrin’s method.
And so, though Sperrin gives Rochester his due as a “complexly aggrieved and charred satirist,” he does not get at the feverish nature of a satire rooted in the disenchantment of being an intelligence trapped in a body, with its dark Juvenalian top notes of decrepitude and debasement, rather than a satire about maneuverings in the antechambers of court. Rochester’s poems do not become merely decontextualized social comedy when read for something other than their political valence. They might seem to us “universalist” or “atemporal,” qualities that Sperrin earlier denigrated, but this may be because Rochester is devastating about the turpitude of certain human behaviors that did not expire in 1680.
Extremely learned about English political history, oddly cold to almost everything else: the pattern is consistent across Sperrin’s hundreds of pages. This explains why, in the section on The Canterbury Tales, he has a lot to say about the anticlerical Monk’s, Friar’s, and Summoner’s tales but very little about the Miller and nothing about the Wife of Bath. Their tales also expose hypocrisies and double standards in the social order, through scenes of flatulence and cuckoldry—elements of satire, not just farce, but only obliquely related to political power.
This also explains why his discussion of Gulliver’s Travels, that encyclopedia of misanthropic rebuke, has the same narrow emphasis. Sperrin provides a fine overview of the book, and a particularly good discussion of the first two parts, the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, with their fun-house mirrorings of English government. Swift’s masterpiece is an “important and ambitious satire on the Hanoverian Whig regime,” driven by its attack on Prime Minister Walpole’s “executive apparatus.” Parts 1 and 2 of Gulliver’s Travels certainly bear this out, at least to a degree. But part 4, which for many readers represents the very core of the English satiric tradition, poses more of a problem.
This final part tells of Gulliver’s voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms, the speaking horses who possess an astonishing rationality. It is also the land of the Yahoos, disgusting humanoid pests that the Houyhnhnms are considering exterminating. One of the greatest moments in English satire comes when Gulliver is attacked by a lustful female Yahoo and realizes with horror that, since she sees him as a possible mate, he too must be a Yahoo. What kind of imagination generates a satire on the entire species? Sperrin writes:
The Yahoos emerge from a very particular territory of Swift’s political imagination that was defined by very deep contemplations of a world predating law, ethics, and security: a brutal and punishing world that, in Swift’s view, was only ever controlled by fragile or temporary state structures (if at all) and might at any moment reemerge if those structures are not constantly developed and maintained.
It’s true: state structures provide at best a tenuous defense against such savagery. Yet Sperrin seems to believe that the satirist is most interested in those fragile political guardrails rather than the nature of the Yahoos themselves. Here again he cautions against “universalist” interpretations. But his good Hobbesian point about these creatures hailing from a time before law and ethics reminds us that Swift’s “political imagination” was not confined to the political situation of his time, in England or in Ireland, and that when he wrote to his friend Pope about the “great foundation of Misanthropy” on which “the whole building of my Travells is erected,” he was not referring simply to local conditions circa 1725. Gulliver’s Travels ends with a screed against human pride, not against the Hanoverian regime.
Of course satire is very often political. It hates corruption, ambition, arrogance, stupidity, authority, charlatanism, depravity, futility, and above all hypocrisy. What better source than politics for an endless supply of these themes? But politics is a perennial satiric target because it opens onto everything else: culture, money, dogma, mores. The political sphere, as satire sees it, is rarely sequestered from life outside it. Indeed its vices reproduce the vices that pollute the rest of human life.
It is also a sphere that has changed enormously in England over the past several hundred years. A literary historian tracing political satire across two millennia must make clear, as Sperrin does, that the consequences for the satirist since the nineteenth century are not what they were in 1700 or 1500. Sperrin describes the dangers that writers as various as Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, and John Donne faced in circulating their work. Satire’s indirection (allegory, irony, obscurity) was often a way to evade prosecution. Later, in the 1660s, there were still acts of Parliament proscribing the publication of satires on state politics, though writers found ways to circulate them clandestinely. It is nearly a commonplace that satire thrives in repressive times, as Kenneth Burke noted in the 1930s:
The conditions are “more favorable” to satire under censorship than under liberalism—for the most inventive satire arises when the artist is seeking simultaneously to take risks and escape punishment for his boldness, and is never quite certain himself whether he will be acclaimed or punished. In proportion as you remove these conditions of danger, by liberalization, satire becomes arbitrary and effete, attracting writers of far less spirit and scantier resources.
If this is true, we may well ask what reach and what authority politically minded satire has now, under liberal conditions. Sperrin agrees with much of the consensus that there was a decline after the late eighteenth century. He is helpful about some of the reasons for this: affairs of state became too complex; the monarchy became more curtailed; satirists were no longer “sponsored” by a political client or faction; parliamentary reform lessened the insulated nature of the House of Commons; libel laws were tightened; revolutions on the Continent in the middle of the nineteenth century confounded satirists who, used to outdated forms of international affairs, could not keep up with the intricate diplomatic practices of the time.
These are all interesting explanations, and they all have to do with statecraft or government. There are other reasons too. Sperrin himself advances a more capacious theory, this one from William Makepeace Thackeray, who in his collection of lectures The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century (published a few years after Vanity Fair in 1853) expressed relief that the ferocity of Swiftian satire no longer held sway over English literature. Such satire, as Sperrin puts it, “could not be tolerated by a society struggling to maintain its own security, cohesion, and stability.”
Lurking in that sentence is a revealing word: society. It appears infrequently in Sperrin’s first five hundred pages, which cover everything before the nineteenth century. But by the Victorian period the now familiar meaning of the word—we can use Raymond Williams’s definition of society as “a system of common life”—had come to identify a predominant aspect of English literature and of the world it wanted to represent. Targets for old-school political satire were still perfectly available: there remained imbecilic prime ministers, corrupt members of Parliament, feuds between Tories and (now) Liberals. But the expansion of a shared social idea, and the gradual development of a mass culture, threatened to dwarf satire’s interest in those rarefied and cloistered precincts. There was now simply too much to puncture, the zone of power had far exceeded machinations in government, and a satire on politics could no longer leave out the vast arena of society. The boundary between the two had become too porous.
It is hard, then, not to feel that many of the truly significant works of English satire of the past two hundred years fall outside Sperrin’s book, even while the closing chapters bring us up to the present. He discusses Dickens but not Our Mutual Friend (1865), in which a satire on the corrosiveness of money includes a member of Parliament but expands to take in an entire London population in thrall to the pursuit of wealth. He does not mention Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), which caricatures the world of politics, law enforcement, and international intrigue but extends its grim view to the ordinary Londoners at the margins of that world. He addresses Waugh’s late war satires of the 1940s and 1950s but is tellingly silent on the most acrid masterworks of the previous decade, like Vile Bodies (1930) and A Handful of Dust (1934), with their ruthless dissection of the fantasies of self-styled modern people.
An especially conspicuous omission is the twentieth-century political satire that a general reader would be most likely to know, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which Sperrin calls a “surveillance dystopia” before moving on to other things. Perhaps this is because its political vision is also a social vision, and its political nightmare much more than narrowly English. Yet it is a book written in the main English satiric tradition, and Orwell was plain about the immense debt he owed to Swift: “Gulliver’s Travels has meant more to me than any other book ever written.”
In all these books the condemnatory element becomes part of a larger canvas, a panorama of collective life. It makes all the difference that they are novels, with their psychology and complex modes of narration and naturalist description; it’s a literary form in which the polemic of satire becomes diffuse. In his chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Sperrin seems more comfortable with periodicals like Punch, which he covers extensively, than with this most characteristic of modern literary forms. Reading State of Ridicule, one can forget that these writers were novelists (or poets, or dramatists) whose temperament or sensibility drove them to write satire, rather than political figures manqués who for whatever reason fell into literature.
To citizens who look out at the world of politics now and feel an acute nausea, Juvenal’s difficile est saturam non scribere can still have the ring of truth. It’s clear, though, that today the satiric compulsion is felt by different kinds of writers. The art of ridiculing specific people or institutions in government seems the province of television and the Internet rather than of literature. Is this because literature does not consider political satire worthy of its own literary ambitions?
There is a risk that such work will quickly become dated, and writers may worry about satire’s ephemerality. (This wasn’t an obstacle for the Augustans: Pope’s Dunciad is populated by actual figures from the 1720s, yet it has endured.) To make matters worse, the slow gestation of literature, with its protracted print publication schedules, means that you might not be timely enough. Television is quicker. Social media, with its epigrammatism, its fusillades of invective, and its ability to respond instantly to every political outrage, is even faster.
Those media have one other advantage too. They can lay claim to a shared public, both the rulers and the ruled, who have a common understanding of humiliation. Satire in general seeks readers who share the writer’s indignation, but explicit political satire, in its heart of hearts, also wants to be known by the fools it’s deriding. It wants them to feel its punishment. But people in government today obviously don’t care about literature, so the effort to ridicule them in literature can seem pointless or (worse) harmless.
Even those newer media’s prospects for success are uncertain, though, and one of the perennial arguments in the scholarship on satire has been about its very utility. Will anything happen to the buffoons and miscreants it skewers? Satire disparages, but does it also reform? V.S. Pritchett didn’t think so: “Satire is anger laughing at its own futility.” Dryden was more hopeful: “The true end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction.” It will take an energetic satirist to enter the scrimmage now with that kind of confidence.
English (US) · 