Hitesh S. Vaghani
Roll no. - 21
SEM - II
Paper no. – 08
Year – 2010-11
Topic: “Satire M H Abrams in Glossary of Literary Terms’’
Submitted to Dr. Dilip Barad
Department of English,
Bhavnagar University.
Satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire derides; that is, it uses
Laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual (in "personal satire"), or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even (as in the Earl of Rochester's "A Satyr against Mankind," 1675, and much of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, 1726, especially Book IV) the entire human race. The distinction between the comic and the satiric, however, is sharp only at its extremes. Shakespeare's Falstaff is a comic creation, presented primarily for our enjoyment; the puritanicalMalvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is for the most part comic but has aspects
of satire directed against the type of the fatuous and hypocritical Puritan; Ben Jonson's Volpone (1607) clearly satirizes the type of person whose cleverness—or stupidity—is put at the service of his cupidity; and John Dryden's satire.
MacFlecknoe (1682), while representing a permanent type of the pretentious poetaster,
Satirized specifically the living author Thomas Shadwell.
Satire has usually been justified by those who practice it as a corrective of human voice and folly; Alexander Pope, for example, remarked that "those who are ashamed of nothing else are so of being ridiculous." Its frequent claim (not always borne out in the practice) has been to ridicule the failing Rather than the individual, and to limit its ridicule to corrigible faults, excluding those for which a person is not responsible. As Swift said, speaking of himself in his ironic "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (1739):
Yet malice never was his aim;
He lashed the vice, but spared the name. . .
His satire points at no defect,
But what all mortals may correct....
He spared a hump, or crooked nose,
Whose owners set not up for beaux?
Satire occurs as an incidental element within many works whose overall mode is not satiric—in a certain character or situation, or in an interpolated passage of ironic commentary on some aspect of the human condition or of contemporary society. But for some literary writings, verse or prose, the attempt to diminish a subject by ridicule is the primary organizing principle, and these works constitute the formal genre labeled "satires." In discussing such writings the following distinctions are useful.
(1) Critics make a broad division between formal (or "direct") satire and indirect satire. In formal satire the satiric persona speaks out in the first person. This "I" may address either the reader (as in Pope's Moral Essays, 1731-35), or else a character within the work itself, who is called the adversarius and whose major artistic function is to elicit and add credibility
To the satiric speaker's comments. (In Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," 1735, Arbuthnot serves as adversarius.) Two types of formal satire are commonly distinguished, taking their names from the great Roman satirists Horace and Juvenal. The types are defined by the character of the persona whom the author presents as the first-person satiric speaker, and also by the attitude and tone that such a persona manifests
Toward both the subject matter and the readers of the work.
In Horatian satire the speaker manifests the character of an urbane, witty, and tolerant man of the world, who is moved more often to wry amusement than to indignation at the spectacle of human folly, pretentiousness, and hypocrisy, and who uses a relaxed and informal language to evoke from readers a wry smile at human failings and absurdities—sometimes including his own. Horace himself described his aim as "to laugh people out of their vices and follies." Pope's Moral Essays and other formal satires for the most part sustain a Horatian stance.
In Juvenalian satire the character of the speaker is that of a serious moralist who uses a dignified and public style of utterance to decry modes of vice and error which are no less dangerous because they are ridiculous, and who undertakes to evoke from readers contempt, moral indignation, or unillusioned sadness at the aberrations of humanity. Samuel Johnson's "London" (1738) and "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (1749) are distinguished instances of Juvenilia
Satire. In its most denunciatory modes, it resembles the jeremiad, whose model is not Roman but Hebraic.
(2) Indirect satire is cast in some other literary form than that of direct address to the reader. The most common indirect form is that of a fictional narrative, in which the objects of the satire are characters who make themselves and their opinions ridiculous or obnoxious by what they think, say, and do, and are sometimes made even more ridiculous by the author's comments and narrative style. One type of indirect satire is Menippean satire, modeled on a Greek form developed by the Cynic philosopher Menippus. It is sometimes called Varronian satire, after a Roman imitator, Varrò; while Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 308-12, suggests an alternative name, the anatomy, after a major English instance of the type, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Such satires are written
In prose, usually with interpolations of verse, and constitute a miscellaneous form often held together by a loosely constructed narrative. A major feature is a series of extended dialogues and debates (often conducted at a banquet or party) in which a group of loquacious eccentrics, pedants, literary people, and representatives of various professions or philosophical points of view serve to make ludicrous the attitudes and viewpoints they typify by the arguments they urge in their support. Examples are Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (1564), Voltaire's Candied (1759), Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey
(1818) and other satiric fiction, and Huxley's Point Counter Point (1928); in this last novel, as in those of Peacock, the central satiric scenes are discussions and disputes during a weekend at a country manor. Frye also classifies Lewis Carroll's two books about Alice in Wonderland as "perfect Menippean satires."
It should be noted that any narrative or other literary vehicle can be adapted to the purposes of indirect satire. John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel turns Old Testament history into a satiric allegory on Restoration political maneuverings. In Gulliver's Travels Swift converts to satiric use the early eighteenth-century accounts of voyage and discovery,
And his Modest Proposal is written in the form of a project in
Political economy. Many of Joseph Addison's Spectator papers are satiric essays; Byron's Don Juan is a versified satiric form of the old episodic picaresque fiction; Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, Moliere’s The Misanthrope, Wycherley's The Country Wife, and Shaw's Arms and the Man are satiric plays; and Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, and other
Works such as John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera and its modern adaptation by Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (1928), are satiric operettas. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) employs motifs from myth in a work which can be considered as by and large a verse satire directed against what Eliot perceives as the spiritual dearth in twentieth-century life. The greatest number of recent satires, however,
are written in prose, and especially in novelistic form; for example Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Player Piano and Cat's Cradle. Much of the current vogue of black humor occurs in satiric works whose butt is what the author conceives to be the widespread contemporary condition of social cruelty, inanity, or chaos. Effective English satire has been written in every period beginning with the middle Ages. Pieces in the English Punch and the American New Yorker demonstrate that formal essayistic satire, like satiric novels and plays, still commands a wide audience; and W. H. Auden is a twentieth-century author who wrote excellent satiric poems. The proportioning of the examples in this article, however, indicates ho large the Restoration and eighteenth century loom in satiric achievement: the century and a half that included Dryden, the Earl of Rochester, Samuel Butler, Wycherley, Amphora Behan, Addison, Pope, Lady Mary Worley Montagu, Swift, Gay, Fielding, Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and late in the period (it should not be overlooked) the Robert Burns of "The Holy Fair" and "Holy Willie's Prayer" and the William Blake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This same span of time was also in France the period of such major satirists as Boileau, La Fontaine, and Voltaire, as well as Molière, the most eminent of all satirists in drama. American satire broke free of English in the nineteenth century with the light satiric touch of Washington Irving's Sketch Book, the deft satiric essays of Oliver Wendell Holmes (The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table), and above all the satiric essays and novels of Mark Twain.
See also light verse. The articles on burlesque, on irony, and on wit, humor, and the comic describe some of the derogatory modes and devices
Available to satirists. Consult James Sutherland, English Satire
(1958);
Gilbert Highet, the Anatomy of Satire (1962);
Alvin B. Kernan,
The Plot of Satire (1965); Matthew Hodgart, Satire (1969); Charles
Sanders, the Scope of Satire (1971);
Michael Seidel, Satiric Inheritance,
Rabelais to Sterne (1979);
Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction(1994).
Anthologies: Ronald Paulson, ed., Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism(1971);
Ashley Brown and John L. Kimmey, eds., Satire: An Anthology
(1977),
Which includes both satiric writings and critical essays
On sat ire.
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