In 2007, Tony Blair’s erstwhile Director of Communications, Alastair Campbell,
invited the actor Peter Capaldi (who played a comparable figure in Armando
Ianucci’s award-winning television series The Thick of It) to interview him,
in character, to help publicize Campbell’s new book. And Capaldi’s response
was: “Look, I’m an actor. It’s not really me”. The anecdote (recorded in The
Times, January 25, 2008) not only sums up the elusiveness of the “reality”
inhabited by spin doctors, but also points to the special relevance of
reality to satire. In truth, the whole issue of realities and “realities” is
central to satire and our understanding of it, and accordingly to the three
books under review: Ralph M. Rosen’s Making Mockery: The poetics of ancient
satire, William Kupersmith’s English Versions of Roman Satire in the Earlier
Eighteenth Century, and a prime example of today’s satirical writing, the
scripts of Iannucci’s The Thick of It, from 2005 to 2007. The cultural gulfs
between New Labour present, the eighteenth century and classical antiquity
may seem distractingly wide. The satires in question, though, are readily
discussible under a common heading, even if admirers of the poetic
sophistication of Juvenal and Alexander Pope have to reckon with something
more abrasive in Ianucci’s televisual prose.
Not that “readily discussible” is a phrase one would rush to apply to satire
as such. Like reality or “reality”, satire itself can be elusive, and,
partly for that reason, productive theorizations of the satirical have never
got very far. There are other reasons, too. Arisotle never theorized satire
(for once, indeed, the Greeks didn’t quite have a word for it), so
aftercomers had no convenient, and possibly authoritative, point of
reference. Then again, like comedy, satire is often vulgar, therefore repels
the high-minded (Matthew Arnold’s “demotion of Chaucer and Burns to Class
Two”, said Northrop Frye, was motivated by “a feeling that comedy and satire
should be kept in their proper place”). And again, being directly implicated
in reality (vulgar or not), satire is an awkward category for metaphysically
minded theorizers, therefore awkward for the great German theorists of
literature and related fields, from Herder to Heidegger (though Schiller had
a go). In more recent times, conversely, that same implication in reality
has been no less off-putting for theorists influenced (as so many have been)
by postmodern credos, because postmodernity (like T. S. Eliot’s “human
kind”) “cannot bear very much reality”, preferring to focus on
“constructions” or (in Roland Barthes’s famous phrase) “the effect of the
real” – and all this despite satire’s evident association with those
favourite postmodern facilities, irony and parody. And finally, unlike the
novel (which, like satire, is directly implicated in reality and is also,
sometimes, vulgar), satire is not a genre, or a set of genres, but a mode –
which makes theorizing harder.
What is satire? A short, provisional definition might be: mocking criticism
(more or less artistic) of current human behaviour. Current: not necessarily
strictly contemporary behaviour, but, so to speak, behaviour still in the
public domain. Criticism: unlike comedy, which may be sympathetic (as
Pirandello argued) or “innocent” (Freud) or all-embracing (Bakhtin), satire
is negative and addresses a definable target. But mocking criticism: in the
Gospels, Jesus is frequently critical of human behaviour, but without
mockery, and no one reads the Evangelists’ Jesus as a satirist; contrast
Plato’s Socrates, who does mock, and can be so read. And human behaviour:
the subject of satire is (in Juvenal’s words) “whatever people do”, its
domain the moral and social realm. We do not associate satire with
philosophical logic or nature poetry – either of which may have profound
human implications, but neither of which is centred on that moral and social
realm.
Other features of satire are implicit in the definition or its ramifications.
Though negative, satire is widely and plausibly held to be impossible
without some sense of a contrastive positive: a moral or social norm or
ideal (usually assumed, rarely spelled out in full), against which the
behaviour mocked can be identified and placed. In this respect, satire might
be said to be inherently conservative, even if radical and subversive in its
critiques; unlike some comedy, satire is not open-ended; it closes down and
closes out (another problem for postmoderns?).
From the mockery, meanwhile, it follows that satirical criticism will be
associated with a distinctive range of tone and tactics: with irony (compare
Socrates again; contrast Jesus), with parody, with wit. From which it
follows further that satire is liable to involve some kind of pose:
“straightforward” denunciation is unlikely to be satirical. This posing
aspect helps to explain why satire should often seem elusive. It is
characteristic, for instance, that satire can invite enjoyment in the
misbehaviour it projects so critically: Juvenal’s satire is a famous case in
point; so, too, The Thick of It.
There is more. The human behaviour criticized must be identifiable behaviour.
The reality that satire is implicated in, therefore, must be recognizable
reality, which means that satire is realist in spirit, in the sense that the
nineteenth-century novel is realist in spirit, representing or targeting the
world of social and moral interplay in all its “consequential logic and
circumstantiality” (J. P. Stern’s admirable formula). From which it follows
that, like the novel, satire is likely to accommodate an analytical
understanding of the social and moral worlds.
From its realist spirit, it follows further that satire (again, like the
realist novel) is likely to be worldly in idiom. In terms of stylistic
level, it will be “low” or else composite, but covering a range of the
stylistic spectrum that reaches “down” towards the low: hence the
association with vulgarity. One will not expect to find satire in a
straightforward high style – in Racinian tragedy or Virgilian epic, or
coexisting with the elevated oratory of the Gettysburg Address or with the
romantic sublime. Horace, representatively, called his satires
“conversations” (sermones), and if Juvenal’s satire occasionally reaches the
heights of “tragic” declamation (his own self-description in Satire VI), it
also reaches down (in the same poem) to harsh obscenity. Pope’s satires
likewise reach up, and down.
And one large implication: as these considerations of provenance suggest, and
like realism (or, again, like humour), satire is a mode, not a genre. In
literary contexts, one finds satire in many genres – for instance, in novels
(from Petronius’ Satyricon to Dickens’s Hard Times) and in drama (from
Aristophanes’ Clouds to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane). Satire may be alien to
particular genres (as to high tragedy); it is not a genre itself.
Diagnostically, like other modes (realism, humour), satire is freely
operative beyond the sphere of literature and also beyond the sphere of art
proper: in cartoons, comedy clubs, tabloid headlines, political repartee.
Conversely, though, like any mode, satire can be concentrated into a
particular literary form, as it notably is into the dactylic-hexameter verse
form the Romans called satura (whose name is the etymological source of the
name “satire”), and which Roman poets, including Juvenal and Horace,
cultivated for the purpose; and notably again into the heroic-couplet verse
form that classicizing poets in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England,
from Dryden to Pope to Johnson, used in imitation of Roman satura.
Except for the verse forms, however, such writing has no decisive generic
characteristics that are not shared by satiric writing outside such forms.
It is symptomatic that Horace finds precedents for satura in a quite
different genre, Aristophanic Old Comedy (Satires I. 4), and that the Romans
in any case acknowledge even satura in a second form: Varro’s prose/verse
hybrid, loosely labelled “Menippean Satire” in modern scholarship, and
explicitly called a second, alternative form of satire (“alterum saturae
genus”), a century after Horace, by the rhetorician Quintilian.
When a mode is concentrated into a literary form, however, it may well be that
the concentrating shows up distinctive aspects of the mode in question. With
Roman satura, this is arguably the case in one important respect: the posing
aspect is perhaps most obvious here. Or – then again – perhaps too obvious
here. Until about fifty years ago, Roman satura was the paradigm of artistic
mocking criticism; maybe it still is. But in the meantime, professional
understandings have changed drastically, and the change has centred on the
significance of the pose, with – in the first instance – special reference
to Juvenal.
“Anger makes me write”, says Juvenal (“facit indignatio versum”, Satire I);
and throughout the satires, especially the earlier ones, he assembles an
inventory of deplorable features of Roman life, from the corrupt relations
between patrons and clients to the sexual perversions of the elite. These,
then, are the targets which the satirist’s righteous “indignation” leads him
to satirize – or so most readers of Juvenal supposed, until a series of
revisionist discussions from the late 1950s onwards, notably by William
Anderson, changed everything. Juvenal’s target, it now seemed, was not the
deplorable features of Roman life; the target was rather the bluster of the
angry voice itself. Juvenal might or might not be righteous, but the
indignant satirist is a pose, and himself the object of the satire.
Fifty years on, this kind of posing has been identified, more and more
broadly, across Roman satirical writing, and then read back into satirical
equivalents in ancient Greece as well. Making Mockery, Ralph M. Rosen’s
investigation into ancient satire, is conducted in this spirit. Rosen offers
a learned and subtle elucidation of “mockery”, which ranges from Homer to
Greek myth, from the harsh invectives of Archilochus (seventh century bc) to
the allusiveness of Callimachus (third century) and the “self-mockery” of
Juvenal (four centuries later). The anthropologist and the cultural
historian will profit from Rosen’s informed readings of ancient conceptions
of mockery and their diverse embodiments. At the same time, Rosen’s readings
of ancient satirical texts are not so diverse, because they all tend towards
what, for convenience, one might call Andersonianization.
Defining ancient satire, overall, as “a peculiar mixture of comedy and
didactic posturing”, Rosen duly privileges the posturing, and the “comedy”,
at the expense of the didactic. So Archilochus “claims to be morally
indignant, but . . . ”; Callimachus realizes “that the moralizing substratum
of satirical poetry is as much a trope as its invective”; Horace “inches his
way toward conceptualizing satire primarily in terms of poetic tropes and
dynamics”; then in Juvenal (paradigmatic, as in Anderson, for “the supreme
act of self-mockery”) “the moralizing tropes of satire . . . exist solely
for the purpose of generating comedy”; and for good measure the “long
tradition” of ancient satirists who “direct their satire at themselves”
includes, according to Rosen, the poets of the Old Comedy (Aristophanes and
others).
The particular characterizations offered are illuminating, in varying degrees,
for the various writers in question. Overall, though, one must surely query
the plausibility of such a relentless privileging of “tropes” and “claims”
and “buts”. One must also, in any case, challenge the superimposition of
satire onto comedy. “I understand satire as a species of comedy”, says Rosen
at one point. That position is untenable. Between the modes of the satiric
and the comic, there is no inherent link – witness modern examples of satire
such as Citizen Kane, or an ancient example such as Clouds, where the
satirical portrayal of Socrates (unlike the non-satirical treatment of the
old man Strepsiades) takes place largely in a comic-free zone. The fact that
the satiric and the comic often do co-exist is neither here nor there.
Humour and realism often co-exist, but no one wants to see realism as a
sub-type of humour (or vice versa). Northrop Frye, more plausibly,
represented the satiric and the comic as modes of equal status, but adjacent
to one another, with comedy as the “mythos” of spring, and satire (and
irony) as the “mythos” of winter.
Kupersmith’s study of satire in the English eighteenth century is no less
learned, but more circumspect. Concentrating on specifiable imitations of
Roman satires, but surveying a wide range of texts, from minor writers like
William Diaper and Soame Jenyns all the way up to the masterpieces of
Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, Kupersmith is properly sensitive to
poses: “like Juvenal, Pope was a punitive satirist who portrayed himself
increasingly as an outsider living in an era of social, literary and
political depravity in which everyone except the satirist and perhaps a few
friends is either daft or corrupt”. But, as that unqualified “punitive”
indicates, the premiss here is not Andersonian. The pose is acknowledged; it
may, and probably does, complicate the satire (making it more elusive); but
it does not, simply by virtue of being a pose, eliminate the satirical focus
on an ostensible target.
And why should it? Why should a reader be expected to be so impressed by the
pose, and so unconcerned with the ostensible target? Or – if a reader is
indeed nudged into being so unconcerned – what a curious diminishing of
substantive interest that implies. But it is not as if readers of satire
clamour for alternatives to ostensible targets. Until fifty years ago, most
readers of Juvenal were happy to relish his ostensible targetings. And
readers of satire who recognize themselves in ostensible targets have always
been quick to respond with more than ostensible retribution. Alastair
Campbell may have enjoyed his targeted portrayal in The Thick of It; not so
with a long series of satirical victims, from the politician Cleon (targeted
in Aristophanic comedy) to the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst
(targeted in Citizen Kane).
A distinctive but instructive example, admirably elucidated by Kupersmith, is
Johnson’s imitation of Juvenal’s Satire X in The Vanity of Human Wishes
(1749). Among much else, Johnson converts a portrayal of Hannibal’s
humiliation after his ill-fated assault on Rome into a portrait of Charles
XII of Sweden, likewise humbled after his invasion of Russia. In both
writers, the target is far from contemporary – Charles’s defeat, at the
battle of Poltava, was in 1709, forty years before Johnson’s treatment,
Hannibal’s takes place three centuries before Juvenal’s satire – but both
cases focus on a paradigmatic event still current in the popular, or at
least the educated, imagination.
Juvenal sums up Hannibal’s condition in one moment of precise, satirical
analysis. In defeat, Hannibal flees into exile, and “there he sits, a
client, mighty and magnificent, in a royal waiting-room, until it please his
Bithynian majesty to wake up”. And Johnson’s “vanquish’d hero”, in “distant
lands”, likewise: “Condemn’d a needy Supplicant to wait, / While Ladies
interpose and Slaves debate”. Both of these grandiose doers are reduced to
waiting, while in particular Johnson’s deflating conjunction of grand-manner
“vanquish’d hero” and mundane “ladies . . . slaves” makes his satirical
point, as Juvenal’s juxtaposition of “mighty and magnificent” with “client”
(“magnus mirandusque cliens”) makes his. With or without any poses or
“tropes” elsewhere, here futile heroism is placed, powerfully and precisely,
in both the English imitation and its Latin original, and the ostensible
target – what else? – is the focus of a reader’s interest.
The Thick of It consisted of six felicitous episodes (two less impressive
“specials” can be passed over). The action takes place in the antechambers
of political power in today’s Britain, in the fictitious Ministry of Social
Affairs, headed by the ineffectual Hugh Abbott, who is patronized and
bullied into shape by the PM’s enforcer, a coarsely energetic Scot (the
Peter Capaldi character), Malcolm Tucker. The other characters include a
lesser group of Ministry-specific spinners (the most distinctive of them,
probably, the smug posh boy, Ollie); as in a sitcom, the players have
contrastive stereotyped characters. But this is no sitcom, and, comic
aspects apart, The Thick of It is an exemplar of classic satirical features,
from realist treatment of social and moral interplay to vulgar idiom. In
particular, the sense of mockery is strong, because the workings of
political manipulation are on vivid display, because most of the characters
are remorselessly cynical (a satirical concern in its own right), and
because these characters spend much of their time mocking others and each
other. This they do in classic low style, sometimes justly, sometimes
self-revealingly, sometimes both.
Posing, then, is multiple and pervasive. One of its characteristic features is
coarse, and often highly inventive, put-downs: “he’s as useless as a
marzipan dildo”; “Excellent. You win a year’s supply of condoms. Which in
your case is four”. And in good satirical fashion, abusive posing can be
paraded as such, and even commented on: “So how do we respond to this?” “We
don’t – we don’t exchange insults with bloody Simon Arsepipes Titty twat.”
“Is that honestly the best swearing that you can come up with?”. But the
satire is for real, with the culture of cynical manipulation its central
target. The odious Malcolm himself is used both as a walking-talking
embodiment of the cynical and the manipulative, but also to show up the
incidental odiousness of others, not least of smug Ollie: “Feet off the
furniture, you Oxbridge twat. You’re not in a punt now”. Above all, it is
Malcolm whose force of personality is deployed to pinpoint and spell out the
basic premisses of political spin: “Now, I know he doesn’t know what he was
fucking talking about, but he’s got to appear as if he does, right? . . .
Give them the lines. Right?”.
Intermittently, meanwhile, the ineffectual Hugh reveals traces of genuine
political convictions – but convictions clumsily dispensed with as the
situation dictates: “I mean why do we want to close down schools for kids
with special needs? It’s the one thing that I really, really, actually do
not want to do” – and then: “I’m going to the PM and I’m going to tell him
straight up – this bill is a load of old bollocks”. “No you’re not.” “No,
I’m not, but it would be great if I did, wouldn’t it?”
All of which temporizing is suddenly overtaken by a crass blunder, whereby a
coarse email from the same Hugh on a minion’s computer gets sent out to an
innocent member of the public, beyond the safety zone. Malcolm takes charge:
the ineffectual minister must be protected; the minion (a woman, Terri) must
take the blame; and Malcolm is made to gesture towards the supra-satirical
positive in the very act of justifying cynical manipulation tout court.
Terri protests: “Why should I lie for Hugh?”. And Malcolm tells her:
“Because it’s your job to make him look good . . . . Are you going to take a
bad story and make it worse? You say, ‘Oh, hi there, everyone, I know this
looks bad but wait till you hear this – it was actually the Minister for
Social Affairs and Citizenship who called a small child a cunt . . .’. If
you were to go out there and tell the truth . . . . It would be morally
repugnant, because what you’d be doing is you’d be condemning a guy who’s
doing his fucking best to try and make things better”. Yes: in the real
world, ministers do try, however ineffectually, and should try, and the
admission – the unexpected positive gesture that emerges as the climax of
Malcolm’s peroration – makes the satire perhaps more conservative, but also
more telling and (yes) more real.
“If you were to go out there and tell the truth . . . .” It is characteristic
of The Thick of It, and richly symptomatic, that words like “truth”,
“actual” and “real”, wherever they surface, are enveloped in layers of
awkwardness, practical or rhetorical: “Sometimes . . . when you meet the
real – the actual people . . . the beady eyes and mean mouths and sneering .
. . . I mean, I know this is what they think people like me think, so I hate
thinking it, but I find myself thinking . . .” (Hugh). In such linguistic
manoeuvres – such awkwardly uncovered poses – the relevance of actual
reality to spin, to politics, to satire, is irresistibly conveyed.
In a satirical poem from an earlier era, “Toland’s Invitation to Dismal, to
Dine with the Calves-Head Club”, Jonathan Swift fashions a line from Horace
into a memorable couplet: “Suspend a while your vain ambitious Hopes, /
Leave hunting after Bribes, forget your Tropes”. Swift’s rendering points us
to a real world of ambition, corruption – and redundant posing. Furthermore,
his “forget your tropes” might serve as a useful warning (a memento vivere,
as it were) to the expositors of ancient satire for whom poses and tropes
threaten to displace such reality altogether. Perhaps ancient satire in
general, even Juvenal’s satire, is reality-centred, after all – like The
Thick of It, like Swift and Pope and Johnson and most satire – and is not
simply about its poses. Alternatively, if and when it isn’t reality-centred,
then perhaps it represents a strange tangent and isn’t the ultimate paradigm
of satire that we – and Swift and Pope and Johnson – took it to be. There
are significant implications here for the understanding of satire as a
whole. Either way, I think we should be told.
Ralph M. Rosen
MAKING MOCKERY
The poetics of ancient satire
294pp. Oxford University Press. £32.99 (US $75).
978 0 19 530996 6
William Kupersmith
ENGLISH VERSIONS OF ROMAN SATIRE IN THE EARLIER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
271pp. University of Delaware Press. $54.50; distributed in the UK by
Eurospan. £46.50.
978 0 87413 960 0
Armando Ianucci, et al
THE THICK OF IT
395pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £16.99 (US $32.95).
978 0 340 93706 8
Michael Silk is Professor of Classical and Comparative Literature at
King’s College London. His books include Aristophanes and the Definition of
Comedy, 2000.
