satire: 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 Rochesters A Satyr against Mankind, 1675, and much of
Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels, 1726, especially Book IV) the entire human race.
The distinction between the comic and the satiric, however, is sharp only at its
extremes. Shakespeares Falstaff is mainly a comic creation, presented primarily for
our enjoyment; the puritanical Malvolio in Shakespeares Twelfth Night is for the most
part comic but has aspects of satire directed against the type of the fatuous and
hypocritical Puritan; Ben Jonsons Volpone (1607) clearly satirizes the type of person
whose clevernessor stupidityis put at the service of his cupidity; and John
Drydens 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
vice 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
satiricin 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 Popes Moral Essays, 173135), 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 speakers comments. (In Popes 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 absurditiessometimes including
his own. Horace himself described his aim as to laugh people out
of their vices and follies. Popes Moral Essays and other formal satires for
the most part sustain an 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 an unillusioned
sadness at the aberrations of humanity. Samuel Johnsons London
(1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) are distinguished instances
of Juvenalian satire. In its most denunciatory instances, this mode of
satire 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 authors
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, Varro; Northrop Frye, in
Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 30812, suggests an alternative name, the anatomy,
after a major English instance of the type, Burtons 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 prominent 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), Voltaires Candide
(1759), Thomas Love Peacocks Nightmare Abbey (1818) and other satiric fiction,
and Aldous Huxleys 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 Carrolls 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 Drydens Absalom and
Achitophel turns Old Testament history into a satiric allegory on Restoration
political maneuverings. In Gullivers 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 Addisons Spectator papers are satiric essays; Byrons Don Juan is a versified
satiric form of the old episodic picaresque fiction; Ben Jonsons The
Alchemist, Molires The Misanthrope, Wycherleys The Country Wife, and
Shaws Arms and the Man are satiric plays; and Gilbert and Sullivans Patience,
and other works such as John Gays eighteenth-century Beggars Opera and its
modern adaptation by Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (1928), are satiric
operettas. T. S. Eliots The Waste Land (1922) employs motifs from myth in a
work which can be considered by and large as a verse satire directed against
what Eliot perceives as the spiritual dearth in twentieth-century life. The
greatest number of modern satires, however, are written in prose, and especially
in novelistic form; for example Evelyn Waughs The Loved One, Joseph
Hellers Catch-22, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.s Player Piano and Cats Cradle.
Charlie Chaplins Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940) are
classic instances of dramatic satire in the cinema. Much of the satiric thrust in
current black humor is directed against 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, plays, and cinema, still commands

a wide audience; and W. H. Auden is a twentieth-century author who

wrote superb satiric poems. The proportioning of the examples in this article,
however, indicates how 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, Aphra Behn, Addison, Pope, Lady Mary
Wortley 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 Willies 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 Molire, the most eminent of all
satirists in drama. In the nineteenth century, American satire broke free of
English domination with the light satiric touch of Washington Irvings 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); Fredric V. Bogel, The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from
Jonson to Byron (2001). 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 satire. For
references
to satire in other entries, see pages 8, 35, 80, 378, 382.

satire, a mode of writing that exposes the failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule and scorn. Satire
is often an incidental element in literary works that may not be wholly satirical, especially in *COMEDY. Its tone may
vary from tolerant amusement, as in the verse satires of the Roman poet Horace, to bitter indignation, as in the verse of
Juvenal and the prose of Jonathan Swift (see Juvenalian). Various forms of literature may be satirical, from the plays of
Ben Jonson or of Moliere and the poetry of Chaucer or Byron to the prose writings of Rabelais and Voltaire. The
models of Roman satire, especially the verse satires of Horace and Juvenal, inspired some important imitations by
Boileau, Pope, and Johnson in the greatest period of satirethe 17th and 18th centurieswhen writers could appeal to
a shared sense of normal conduct from which vice and folly were seen to stray. In this classical tradition, an important
form is 'formal' or 'direct' satire, in which the writer directly addresses the reader (or recipient of a verse letter) with
satiric comment. The alternative form of 'indirect' satire usually found in plays and novels allows us to draw our own
conclusions from the actions of the characters, as for example in the novels of Evelyn Waugh or Chinua Achebe. See
also lampoon. For a fuller account, consult Arthur Pollard, Satire (1970).