The satirist, the law, and society

The relations of satirists to the law have always been delicate and complex. Both Horace and Juvenal took extraordinary pains to avoid entanglements with authority—Juvenal ends his first satire with the self-protective announcement that he will write only of the dead. In England in 1599 the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London issued an order prohibiting the printing of any satires whatever and requiring that the published satires of Joseph Hall, John Marston, Thomas Nashe, and others be burned.

Today the satirists who attack individuals may risk financial loss to themselves and their publishers. In totalitarian countries the consequences are higher, and a satirist may suffer imprisonment, exile, or death. Under extreme conditions, satire against the reigning order is out of the question. Such was the case during the 20th century in the Soviet Union and most other communist countries; Osip Mandelshtam is an example of writer whose savage epigram against Joseph Stalin set in motion a conflict with the Soviet state that culminated in 1938 with his arrest and death in transit to a labour camp.

One creative response that satirists make to social and legal pressures is to try by rhetorical means to approach their targets indirectly; that is, a prohibition of direct attack fosters the maneuvers of indirection that will make an attack palatable (e.g., irony, burlesque, and parody). It is a nice complication that the devices that render satire acceptable to society at the same time sharpen its point. “Abuse is not so dangerous,” said Samuel Johnson, “when there is no vehicle of wit or delicacy, no subtle conveyance.” The conveyances are born out of prohibition.

Anthony Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, writing in the 18th century, recognized the “creative” significance of legal and other repressions on the writing of satire. “The greater the weight [of constraint] is, the bitterer will be the satire. The higher the slavery, the more exquisite the buffoonery.” Shaftesbury’s insight requires the qualification made above. Under a massively efficient tyranny, satire of the forms, institutions, or personalities of that tyranny is impossible. But, under the more relaxed authoritarianism of an easier-going day, remarkable things could be done. Max Radin, a Polish-born American author, noted how satirical journals in Germany before World War I, even in the face of a severe law, vied with each other to see how close they could come to caricatures of the Kaiser without actually producing them. “Satire which the censor understands,” said the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, “deserves to be banned.”

The 20th-century American critic Kenneth Burke summed up this paradoxical aspect of satire’s relation with the law by suggesting that the most inventive satire is produced when the satirist knowingly takes serious risks and is not sure whether he will be acclaimed or punished. The whole career of Voltaire is an excellent case in point. Bigots and tyrants may have turned pale at his name, as a famous hyperbole has it. However, Voltaire’s satire was sharpened and his life rendered painfully complicated as he sought to avoid the penalties of the law and the wrath of those he had angered. Satirists such as Voltaire and Kraus and the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin attack evil in high places, pitting their wit and moral authority against cruder forms of power.

Readers have an excellent opportunity to examine the satirist’s claim to social approval by reason of the literary convention that decrees that satirists must justify their problematic art. Nearly all satirists write apologies, and nearly all the apologies project an image of the satirist as a plain, honest person, wishing no harm to anyone worthy but appalled at seemingly ubiquitous evil and forced by conscience to write satire. Alexander Pope’s claim is the most extravagant:

Yes, I am proud; I must be 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.
O sacred Weapon! left for Truth’s defence,
Sole Dread of Folly, Vice, and Insolence!

After the great age of satire in the 17th and 18th centuries, which Pope brought to a close, such pretensions would have been wholly anachronistic. Ridicule depends on shared assumptions against which the deviant stands in naked relief. The satirist must have an audience that shares a commitment to certain intellectual and moral standards that, in turn, validate the satirist’s attacks on aberration. The greatest satire has been written in periods when ethical and rational norms were sufficiently powerful to attract widespread assent yet not so powerful as to compel absolute conformity—those periods when the satirist could be part of society and yet separate from it, in a space that allows a double vision.

Neoclassical writers had available to them as an implicit metaphor the towering standard of the Classical past; for the 19th and 20th centuries very few, if no, such metaphors were available. It is odd, however, that, whereas the 19th century in general disliked and distrusted satire (there are of course obvious exceptions), the 20th century—a period, arguably, bereft of unifying symbols, scorning traditional rituals, searching for beliefs—still found satire a congenial mode in almost any medium. Although 20th-century satire was often dismissed as self-serving and trivial, there were notable achievements. Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 (1961) once again made use of farce as the agent of the most probing criticism: Who is sane, the book asks, in a world whose major energies are devoted to blowing itself up? Beneath a surface of hilariously grotesque fantasy, in which characters from Marx Brothers’ comedy carry out lethal assignments, there is exposed a dehumanized world of hypocrisy, greed, and cant. Heller was a satirist in the great tradition. If he could no longer, like Pope, tell his audience with confidence what they should be for, he was splendid at showing them what they must be against. The reader laughs at the mad logic of Catch-22—and, as the reader laughs, the reader learns. This is precisely the way satire has worked from the beginning.