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Satire and the limits of literary theories

Article  in  Critical Quarterly · October 2013

DOI: 10.1111/criq.12057

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ROBERT PHIDDIAN

Satire and the limits of

literary theories
The great age for theory of satire stopped suddenly, shortly after 1970.
Since then, the principal object being described by the bulk of satire
theory – classic literary satire, especially from classical Rome and
eighteenth-century Britain – has become only a small and relatively
unproblematic part of the field one witnesses in the modern, multimedia
saturated world. Satire never has been an exclusively literary activity. It
is, rather, a rhetorical strategy (in any medium) that seeks wittily to
provoke an emotional and intellectual reaction in an audience on a
matter of public (or at least inter-subjective) significance. This paper
seeks to explore how and why satire’s ‘ownership’ by literary theory has
occurred. In doing so, it will focus particularly on why it is more useful
to conceive of satire as a mode rather than a genre, and on why an
account that addresses intention (unfashionable though that has been in
literary theory for some decades) is necessary for an understanding of
the mode. Finally, I will suggest that a more empirical approach to
mapping the effects of satirical provocations in individuals and cultures
provides a way around the impasse that literary approaches to satire
have led to.

The formalist reading of satire and its limits

George Rousseau and Neil Rudenstine’s anthology English Poetic Satire:
Wyatt to Byron1 of 1972 has a remarkable ‘Selective Bibliography’ which
lists fifty items, forty-one of them books and the remainder critical
essays. Of these fifty, thirty-four mention satire explicitly in the title,
while thirty-two have publication dates between 1950 and 1970 (all but
three are from the twentieth century). Moreover, because the anthology
explicitly focuses on formal verse satire, several more books from those
busy post-war decades on prose satirists such as Jonathan Swift or
novelists are not listed.2 While the scale of the literary–critical and
literary–theoretical industries has swollen in the decades since this
‘Selective Bibliography’ was published, one could not produce a
remotely comparable list for satire these days. A current selection of the
theory of satire would, indeed, still need to include many of the texts
Rousseau and Rudenstine list, and only add a handful of literary books
addressed directly to satire as an object of definition have appeared
 Satire and the limits of literary theories 45

since.3 These have deepened and modulated the debate, but not
transformed it. It has, broadly, continued to be a discussion about
how to read a canon of literary works presented as transcending
mere topicality. Whenever a problem has arisen, literary scholars
have done what we are programmed to do, which is resort to more
subtle and virtuosic close reading of form and context. Endearing
though this is as a habit, it does not provide much intellectual
equipment for understanding the sudden satirical controversies that
balloon in the media over the Satanic Verses or the Mohammed cartoons
in Denmark.4 Satire appears across the literary genres and beyond in
many other areas of cultural controversy, from political cartoons,
through music, film and television (e.g. Jon Stewart’s Daily Show in
the US or The Chaser’s War on Everything in Australia), to the varied
wonders of the blogosphere. On the face of it, it appears that satire has
become more multiform and ubiquitous in recent decades, so why has
there been a hiatus in the explanation of this complex cultural
phenomenon?
In a significant (but largely unanswered) challenge from stylistics,
Paul Simpson has argued that ‘satire, as an everyday mode of discourse,
is more endemic and more outside anything approaching “high culture”
than . . . many critics appear to realize’.5 He concludes his critique of the
existing scholarship with the proposition that satire

is a complexly interdiscursive mode of communication. It is also a mode of

communication that, frankly, does not sit easily beside forms of literary
discourse such as poems, plays or prose, but which nonetheless seems
to have been totally appropriated into literary study. The critics thus
inherited a term which could only marginally be aligned with literary
writing, but aligned it had to be, which may explain the consistent
attempts to canonize, subsume and genericize this type of discourse. To
some extent, satire needs to be wrested away from ‘Literature’ and to be
put instead in the context of popular and populist discourses.6

The literary–theoretical tendency to ‘genericize’, to describe satire as an

entity, exists despite the fact that very few texts, in whatever media, can
usefully be described formally as satires. As Conal Condren points out,
it is much better to describe the emergent feature of texts we call ‘satire’
adjectivally as ‘satirical’.7 The satirical appears in all sorts of places, more
often in texts that are governed overall by other generic rules than in the
relatively small group of texts that can be designated simply as satires.
Poems in the manner of Horace, Juvenal, and Pope; prose commentaries
in the manner of Lucian and Swift; collections of prose or dramatic
diatribes in the manner of Michael Moore and P. J. O’Rourke; these can
safely be called satires. It is a stretch, however, to name a great realist
46 Critical Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3

novel like Bleak House as, by genre, a satire, though its potent attack on
the Victorian legal system is undoubtedly satirical. Moreover, even
in the most clearly framed place for satirical commentary in newspapers,
the editorial cartoon, only a minority of cartoons function satirically –
many are ‘merely’ humorous gags, with little coherent rhetorical
purpose. The satirical is not a brute, formal fact about texts, but a
perception of purpose speaking rhetorically through them. It is only a
genre in the loose sense of calling up a body of expectations in an
audience, expectations that are only ever selectively fulfilled. It is better
described, following Simpson’s assertion and using John Frow’s recent
formulation, as a mode:

Rather than standing alone, modes are usually qualifications or

modifications of particular genres (gothic thriller, pastoral elegy, satirical
sitcom), and in this respect they resemble the first term in Guérard’s
classificatory scheme (dramatic lyric, lyrical drama, epic drama . . .); they
specify thematic features and certain forms and modalities of speech, but
not the formal structures or even the semiotic medium through which the
text is to be realized.8

This, it seems to me, is how satire routinely works, as a turn to forms

of cultural production that are not in themselves essentially satirical.
The satirical can emerge in literary classics and in current daily media
practices which have enough in common to merit the use of the same
word, but not so much that the theory designed for one group may
merely be transposed to the other. What literary attention to satire
does is treat things as a problem of form and interpretation. One
needs, implicitly, to work through attention to formal generic
characteristics to the correct interpretation of a specific work of art. It
would be hard to find a literary critic naïve enough to insist that there
can be only one correct interpretation, but satire scholars are still in the
market for rich and correct interpretations (plural) of formally rich
texts. While close attention to textual nuance is a valuable activity, it is
only part of the story for this complex cultural practice and its
reception. For a political scientist, for example, how voters interpret a
satire and what it causes them to think or do are the important
questions, not whether they reach an accurate or subtle interpretation
of it. Liberal readers can enter and leave Garner’s Politically Correct
Bedtime Stories feeling that their convictions have been exercised and
affirmed; conservative viewers of The Colbert Report can return without
a blink to Bill O’Reilly’s opinionated news show on FOX.9 What is
interesting for political analysis is that audiences can have diverse
responses to satiric stimuli, not whether they perform technically
competent acts of interpretation.
 Satire and the limits of literary theories 47

Intention and the thin discussion of satire in the

poststructuralist era
But I am getting ahead of myself. I need to explore in more detail
whether and why the theoretical analysis of satire became a backwater,
even while satirical practice became more various in theme and
medium. A simple and economical explanation is that the formalist
satire boom of the 1950s and 1960s glutted the market. Theorists could
see that satire had been ‘done’ and could feel no need to add to a mature
body of scholarship. This was almost certainly true temporarily, but its
explanatory power waned with every year after 1975, and lost any
cogency once Dustin Griffin and others started consciously readdressing
satire as a category in the early nineties. For a long time now it has been
impossible to maintain that the formalist theory of satire provides a
satisfactory account of the mode. It does not even provide a terribly
useful base any longer for undergraduate teaching, even in courses
devoted to the Scriblerians. It is a body of theory marked by its own
period and also by the ‘Augustan’ period of literature it particularly
focused on, but the earth has moved beneath the feet of the consensus
about values on which the formalist account depended. For example,
the discovery that there are women in the lecture theatre transformed
the degree of assent one might feel like according Pope’s brilliant,
chauvinist and patronising Epistle to a Lady (1735); and this change of
heart can be recognised in the dramatic changes in the headnote for the
poem between the fifth (1986) and sixth (1993) editions of the Norton
Anthology of English Literature. A confident consensus about how to read
Pope (that most explicit of poets) could not survive the re-evaluation of
power, gender, class, and race that occurred in the late twentieth
century. The same forces made satirical voice available to a wider range
of authors than before, and they took to it gleefully, with feminist,
revolutionary and postcolonialist satire aplenty. Atwood’s feminist and
Rushdie’s postcolonialist satirical novels were just the tip of a very large
iceberg of satire from anti-authoritarian sources that cannot be easily
assimilated with Augustan assumptions about the proper decorums of
cultural critique. There was, nevertheless, little attempt to remake the
theory of satire to fit the changing circumstances. There has been a major
opening up of who and what satirical expression is for, and that change
has lacked a master-narrative. In what was otherwise a great age for
theory, why the lack?
A wise statement made at the apogee of post-war satire criticism,
recently quoted by Ashley Marshall, can set the scene: ‘Gulliver’s Travels
is an especially clear example of the error of modern criticism of satire,
which says that in satire “standards of judgment are indubitable” or that
48 Critical Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3

in satire the reader is “sure what the author’s attitude is or what his own
is supposed to be”.’10 Raymond Bentman’s comment about Gulliver’s
Travels sends us back to Swift’s assertion that he wrote ‘to vex the world
rather then divert it’;11 some of the most enduring satires are clearly
designed to be provocations to interpretation, not messages in a bottle of
fictional or poetic form. The presumption of consensus on ‘standards of
taste’ is the other intriguing thing. As Bentman’s sceptical scare-quotes
suggest, the liberal post-war consensus on taste, on which formalist
literary scholarship depended, was in the process of collapsing. The year
1970 was nearly the last moment when one could maintain that satire
reflected an agreed moral framework for a culture. The death of Man put
paid to that, so that working-class, feminist, and postcolonial dissent
undercut the assumption that close and careful reading would lead to
moral and hermeneutic unity. The broadly liberal cultural politics of the
proponents of satire theory in the 1950s and 1960s were overtaken by
the summer of sixty-eight and its implications. They had focused on the
eighteenth century, where satires circulated in a relatively small, elite,
and homogenous public sphere. By contrast, from the sixties onwards,
satire quickly became visibly multicultural and multimedia. The satirical
action was headed out of elite literary culture into middlebrow and
often decidedly popular media such as gonzo journalism and current
affairs sketch satire on television (for example The Frost Report in Britain,
This Day Tonight in Australia, and, a little later, Saturday Night Live in
the US). Through performance, radio, television, film, comics, and
(eventually) digital media, a much wider range of satirical voices
entered an ever broadening public sphere from the mid 1960s onwards.
In the class-, gender-, and race-based subaltern critiques, there was
much talk of subversion, dialogue, and interrogation, but little effort was
made to fit this to what was known theoretically about satire as a cultural
practice. This, quite legitimately, was not urgent in the moment.
The way of reading that did seem urgent and bracingly ‘political’ was
deconstruction, which presents a problem for understanding satire
because of its attitude to intention. The text of the break was (as so often)
Roland Barthes’s ‘Death of the Author’ (1968), which was widely
interpreted as making recourse to the idea of deliberate, authorial
intention untenable. The idea had liberatory consequences in many
ways, but it made an understanding of satire hard to articulate. The
obvious point is that, if talk of authorial intention is forbidden, then
discussion of satire is severely cramped. To call something satirical is to
imply a satirist more concretely than a sonneteer for a sonnet or a
scriptwriter for a situation comedy. Sonnets or TV shows do not require
the concept of an author function12 to make them work for an audience,
but satires require that the audience members imagine a shaping
 Satire and the limits of literary theories 49

intention (at least a ‘point’ being made) for the work to be intelligible as
satire. It is necessary to ascribe a rhetorical purpose to it, even if others
see the purpose differently, and even if you then go on to criticise how
coherent or consistently pursued that purpose may be. It is certainly not
necessary to demand universal assent from audiences on a single
determinate meaning for each satirical work. The irony that so often
cohabits with satire ensures that there is no requirement of universal
agreement, or desire of it on the part of the creators, but satire does need
to be construed as purposive, as intentional. To construe a text as
satirical is to construe it as making a point.
I have done a lot of work on Australian political cartoons in recent
years, and have often received quite contradictory interpretations of
individual cartoons from people with competent contextual knowledge.
They are, nevertheless, confident that the cartoon they are looking at is
deliberately saying something about politics and politicians. Viewers
interpret a cartoon as designed in rhetorical, in other words critical
and persuasive, ways. That the message they intuit so often reflects
their own pre-existing opinion, sometimes despite a more obvious
construction of meaning being available to a more dispassionate or
differently opinionated viewer, might seem to present a problem for an
intentionalist model. It is a real problem, however, if only a single,
reliably conveyed intention will do, and that is not necessary for a
pragmatic model of satirical reception. People who hold various or even
diametrically opposed interpretations of a satirical and ironic text still
agree that intention matters, they just differ on the content or value of
the intention. It is also possible to analyse the formal beauty of a political
cartoon or the parodic complexity of Swift’s A Tale of a Tub without
attending to the satirical aspect of those texts, but they are not, for the
purpose of such analysis, satires. An audience needs to intuit and react
to some level of satirical purpose (if only an intent to provoke) for a piece
to work as satirical.13
Charles Knight is moving towards this transactional bedrock when he
argues that ‘the satiric frame of mind’ must be shared by both author
and audience.14 An audience must think and feel that a piece has a
satirical purpose, whether or not there is much agreement on the piece’s
meaning. Agreement, quite clearly, is often not universal, especially so
these days in cartoons that deploy the risky stereotypes of race. A richly
contested anecdote can illustrate the point. On 11 February 2009, the
New York Post published a cartoon by Sean Delonas that depicts two
policemen who have just shot a monkey. The obvious context was the
recent killing of a chimpanzee called Travis, who had gone on a rampage
in Connecticut. As is often the case in political cartoons, this event in
popular media was linked to politics, in the voice bubble that reads
50 Critical Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3

‘They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill’. The
simple implication of the cartoon is that the federal government’s fiscal
stimulus bill, recently passed by Congress, is so bad that a chimp must
have written it. Behind this lies some fairly hackneyed allusion to the
death of King Kong (apparent in the posture of the dead monkey and
‘local’ to New York) and to the old idea of an infinite number of
monkeys with typewriters eventually writing the works of Shakespeare
at random. The explosive thing, however, is the link with the racist
cliché that negroes are monkeys. Given that President Obama was the
ultimate sponsor of the bill the cartoon attacks, many construed the
cartoon as a racist slur on the president and some saw it as an incitement
to shoot him. Others thought this a tortured interpretation of the image,
while still others probably saw and approved of the slur (though they
did not enter the public debate). It would make no difference to the
validity of these various positions if we could somehow scan Delonas’s
brain to scientifically determine a specific intention one way or the other
on this. He does not even need to have had a moment of clearly formed
intention one way or the other. The point is, rather, that readers of the
cartoon reacted emotionally to it as an intention-bearing piece of
communication. They made an assessment of the ‘satirical frame of
mind’ it derives from and encourages; no one seems to have construed
it as simply a play of signifiers.
‘Satirical purpose’ might prove to be a more useful formulation than
either intention or frame of mind, because it comes with slightly
different baggage. Intention is especially vexed as a word because the
formalist account of satire already laboured under the edict of Wimsatt
and Beardsley’s intentional fallacy. It had provoked its proponents to
come up with theories of satire based, as far as possible, in the words
themselves rather than in relation to extrinsic authorial purpose or
context. But this was more an indirection than a serious blockage for
formalist analysts of satire, as they could put the deliberate authorial
mastery at one remove, on the other side of the persona, for example,
and draw context in to explain the formal precision of the joke. Even
William Wimsatt himself permitted some annotation in his edition of
Pope.15 Form implied mastery, implied rhetorical purpose, implied (or,
at least, permitted) intention; satirical form could even be construed as
having purpose. As long as you could declare that all this pertained to
the objective properties of the words on the page or an artful persona,
you were in the clear. Moreover, it is genuinely possible to read a
satirical text for an appreciation of the formal beauty and force of the
language; indeed, it is one of the better reasons for reading texts whose
subject matter is long-extinct feuds, Pope’s Rape of the Lock being a classic
example. This partial truth, however, is in large part a back formation
 Satire and the limits of literary theories 51

from the tenets of formalism, and is not a full or satisfactory explanation

for how or why the great bulk of satire is produced and consumed in its
original time and place. As Pope himself wrote in his Epilogue to the
Satires: ‘[P.] Ye Rev’rend Atheists. F. Scandal! Name them, Who?’
(Dialogue II, l. 18) the actual audience hungers to know who is being got
at, and why. Delightful form is good, but inferable purpose is essential.
In formalist criticism of satirical texts, intention kept sneaking back in
through practical criticism.
A more complex convolution was needed to address Barthes’s
apparent fatwa on the author and his proxy intention. As Sean Burke and
others have argued, poststructuralist theory, understood in its French
context, probably did not actually mean to ban intention either, but in its
Anglophone reception among philosophically naïve literary scholars, it
was made to mean that.16 Barthes meant to kill off the great ordaining
artist of the French l’homme et l’oeuvre academic tradition, but this
Romantic figure was long gone in Anglophone academic criticism,
replaced by attention to ‘words on the page’ and rather abstract versions
of tradition derived from T. S. Eliot. Consequently, the death of the
author was made to mean something far more radical (and untenable) in
English than in French, while assent to the idea of the death of the author
became a sort of test of radical credentials rather than a coherent
approach. As satire is a mode or attitude rather than a genre or
identifiable set of textual practices, the removal of recourse to arguments
about a deliberate intent to persuade an audience (of the beastliness of
Domitian’s Rome, of Walpole’s duplicity, of Thatcherism’s brutality, etc.)
makes it close to untheorisable. It is, moreover, a mode given to
moralising abruptness, something particularly antipathetic to the
laudable ethic of sympathy for the Other that infused much
poststructural analysis, from Foucault onwards.
‘Reading against the grain’ might deploy satire as a way of attacking
established patterns of thought, for example in the literary criticism of
Terence Hawkes where he would ridicule the practices of establishment
Shakespeareans.17 To reflect on satire, with its tradition of caricature and
its potentially violent channelling of interpretive possibilities to coercive
ends, was another matter. These were decades of hermeneutic liberation,
even permissiveness, where the free play of the signifier and the
liberation of the other sat ill beside the often judgemental cultural
politics of much satire. If one wanted to read satirical texts approvingly,
one almost had to make them into something else – parodies, allegories
of resistance or complicity to Modernity/capitalism/patriarchy/
colonialism, displacements of psychological trauma. There is a benign
attitude among some people of progressive political disposition that
satire is only a corrosive against error, that it will only ever support
52 Critical Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3

disdain for oppression and sympathy for the Other. This is, sadly, an
illusion that will not survive much inspection. Satirists worked for the
Nazis as well as against apartheid; the US houses P. J. O’Rourke as well
as Michael Moore. Satire brings with it no default ideology, whether
it be good, bad, or indifferent. Satirists certainly tend to moralise, but
they do not do so from a single, coherent morality that comes pre-
installed in the genre. They can be reactionary, progressive, anarchistic,
or revolutionary; to call something satirical is to predict very little about
its ideological content. It will have attitude, for sure, but there will be no
a priori grounds for assuming which way that attitude will tend. For
politically engaged cultural analysis, this is a problem.

Beyond the literary theory of satire

Satires moralise and they also simplify. The two processes are linked,
though not identical, and both are contrary to the spirit of the scholarly
age. In the decades around the turn of the millennium, academic
research in the humanities and social sciences can be relied on to render
that which it studies as complex and nuanced. Bogel’s wonderfully
subtle The Difference Satire Makes follows this line furthest for some of
the classics of satire. If you give current academic researchers a problem
in their discipline to characterise, they will almost invariably want
to give a nuanced, complex, even ambiguous account of it. Satire as
it is experienced by engaged audiences, by contrast, simplifies. It
is impatient. It apportions blame and caricatures issues with an
arbitrariness that good-natured academic complexity-hunting can only
avert its eyes from. Irony, verbal ambiguity, allegory of resistance to
oppression; these are perfectly good places to avert your eyes to, not
least because there is often plenty of hermeneutic gold to mine from
these seams in texts which are also satirical. It is not that the classics of
satire cannot be read fruitfully in these variously poststructuralist and
postmodern ways.18 Instead, I am suggesting that to read them in these
ways is not to read them as satirical, and the relative atrophy of the
theory of satire since 1970 is a symptom of this fact.
Is this lack a problem? After all, by the time the evangelical fervour
of deconstruction subsided, there was plenty of room for the ‘thick’
culturally and politically aware analysis of texts in the new historical
mode (discovering allegories of race, class, and gender) to keep students
of satirical texts from wanting to generalise about genre or mode. The
satisfactory level of critical industry devoted to classic satirical texts by
scholars without a current or adequate synoptic map of the mode
suggests, perhaps, that a generic or modal theory is an unnecessary
extra. Nevertheless, a few within literary studies, such as Frank Boyle in
 Satire and the limits of literary theories 53

his Swift as Nemesis, register the necessary difficulty of dealing with

provocative texts within a historical frame.19 As Boyle’s fascinatingly
self-divided book suggests, there are many moderately useful things
a professional critic can say about texts like Swift’s. However, the
satirical is a volatile mode that only takes on its real moral urgency
when the reader becomes the subject rather than a scholarly witness.
Meanwhile, the scope of satirical activity has gone well beyond the
limits of printed literature, which was the classic object of mid-
twentieth-century literary studies, into non-literary writing, drama,
visual arts, radio, film, television, and digital media. In the early twenty-
first century, satirical art and commentary is a huge and multiform
cultural and political phenomenon with, for example, substantial legal
ramifications in defamation, sedition, and copyright laws.20 Very little in
the history of satirical theory provides useful synoptic perspectives on
this increasingly globalised phenomenon. So literary scholars are still
trying to enumerate the forms of satire – it is, after all, what we are
trained to do – but a multidisciplinary phenomenology of how satire
works in intra- and inter-cultural communication would be more
useful.
That is why we need to push our understanding of satire beyond the
limits of literary theory. That theory is marked by the habits of literary
criticism, whose deepest desire is the reading that interprets the text
with maximum sophistication and faithfulness. Literary criticism treats
satire as a problem of interpretation, when the really interesting thing is
the range of response. We literary critics, affronted by the plentiful
evidence that satires do not change the world, tend to want to explain
why our favourite texts, properly understood, are such superlative
works of art that Walpole should have resigned immediately in disgrace,
or Nazism should have fallen immediately from popularity. There is a
yearning for the satire as silver bullet that, when confronted with the
reality of satire’s rare and miscellaneous actual effects on the world,
descends into a melancholy gesture of restorative justice through subtle
and sympathetic interpretation. I’ve done it myself, when trying to
harmonise my sense of the great satirical power of Swift’s Modest
Proposal with the dearth of contemporary reaction to it.21 It is
demoralising that so compelling an attack on Anglo-Irish misrule failed
to cause any political change, or even draw much attention, but it is
true. Instead of writing back to lost causes, we might instead pursue
the actual effects of satire – often limited or hit-and-miss, often
counterproductive, seldom directly successful, sometimes little more
than a consolation for the defeated or merely grumpy.
Satirists often present themselves as prophets, and project a
confidence that good satire is somehow ‘true’, or ethically visionary.
54 Critical Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3

This can happen, and consenting audiences have a vested interest in

believing it, but the satirical is visceral and reductive in its appeal, so it
has no necessary logical link with ethics or truth, pace Pope’s superlative
and occasionally true description of it as ‘O sacred weapon! Left
for Truth’s defence,/ Sole Dread of Folly, Vice, and Insolence.’22
Consequently, we also should be able to account for the power of satire
which runs with unpleasant political and ideological views. We cannot
avert our eyes or simply write such work off as unfunny. It is silly to
deny the power of Wyndham Lewis’s proto-fascist satire when what we
really need to do is account for how that power can be harnessed to a
revolting political and cultural project. Nor are all the enemies of one’s
enemies necessarily good satirists. Both The Satanic Verses and the
Danish Mohammed cartoons satirised fundamentalist Islam (an attack
I am broadly, if not indiscriminately, in favour of), and both elicited
murderous responses from some who took offence. Both were defended
by their supporters as expressions of free speech, necessary to the health
of liberal democracy, but we lack an account of satire that would permit
us to judge whether these defences were both adequate justifications.23
Are both texts equally justifiable provocations of fundamentalist Islam?
I don’t think so, but I can’t find a functional theory of satire to help me
explain why. We need a theory that crosses disciplinary boundaries to
allow an understanding of the wider social and cultural effects of satire.
If threatened by lynching or process of law, satirists will retreat to the
all-purpose defence of ‘it was just a joke’. That may be fair enough for
practitioners, especially if threatened with murder, but satire is far too
pervasive a phenomenon not to be better explained than that for the rest
of us. Free speech is not an unfettered right to libel and insult, but
neither should it be constrained by a requirement that we only represent
others and their views as they would wish to be represented. Satire
cannot do this because it is an unmasking process, a deliberate
withholding of sympathy from knaves and fools. It is relatively arbitrary
because it works by provocation, not detached rational argument or,
whatever Pope might have us believe, prophetic access to Truth. It is
important to realise that the satirical is not particularly well attuned to
the postmodern humanities’ ethic of sympathy to the Other. It is, for
better or worse, an othering process. It caricatures and stigmatises its
targets, shames them, encourages people to laugh at them. It is one of the
more robust parts of the robust free speech that liberal cultures pride
themselves on, and it is a risky exercise because of the exhilaration it
licenses in those who agree with it. Pope is certainly right to call it a
weapon and, maybe, when the meek inherit the earth it will become a
superannuated mode. Until then, however, we need some sense of the
rules of engagement.
 Satire and the limits of literary theories 55

Consequently, a theory of satire needs to be more a theory of rhetoric

– of free speech, its limits and responsibilities – than a literary theory of
verbal form. In particular, it needs to take account of the public emotions
and the ways they flow. This is a debate within liberalism and rhetoric
more than one within aesthetics. It is also a debate about the way
powerful and essentially hostile emotions – anger, disgust, shame – are
mixed in various media with humour to influence the reactions of
audiences. Consequently, the project should also have a cognitive base in
the account of human emotions that has recently been greatly advanced
in neuroscience.24 It is possible now to return to the ambitions of reader
response theory and to study in much greater empirical detail than has
been traditional for literary studies what actually happens when
different subjects perceive a text as satirical, and construct and value its
meaning in relation to that perception. Where satirical controversies
occur, it is these effects of satire that matter, and not some ideal or
virtuosic interpretation of the text of satire. Many of these effects can be
explored through techniques derived from a range of disciplines:
surveys, accumulation of multimedia satire and response, and even
(with appropriate care in design) experiment. The study of satire cannot
be reduced to a quantitative social science, but these perspectives could
inform real advances in our understanding of how satire works in and
between individuals and cultures.
It would be silly to pretend that the world might obey such a
theorisation as if it had some legislative power, but it could give a cogent
base to debate within and between cultures about toleration and its
limits. We palpably lack such a base at present, while so much dispute
manifests itself as a mere casting of anathemas from incommensurable
positions. Such an approach could also give a base for analysis of a
widespread cultural practice – satire – which works differently in
different times and places but which, nevertheless, shows many family
resemblances and is capable of being a measure of some kinds of
cultural and social freedom. There are inter- and intra-cultural
dimensions of particular satirical practices that are arguably both
healthy and unhealthy. ‘Healthy and unhealthy’ are palpably value
judgements, but we make these all the time in assessments of free
speech or artistic practice, and cannot help but make them while we live
in societies with any limits to individual conduct. Satirists try to police
those limits, and should not be blithely authorised to do so as
unchallenged vigilantes. On the other hand, authoritarians who wish to
ban satirical dissent should not be given free rein either. In the age of
globalised media and entertainment, the debate about the good and bad
effects of satire needs to be held in the messy, human territory between
these arbitrary positions.
56 Critical Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3

Notes
1 George Rousseau and Neil Rudenstine (eds), English Poetic Satire: Wyatt to
Byron (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972).
2 A few of the more prominent examples include John M. Bullitt, Jonathan
Swift and the Anatomy of Satire: A Study of Satiric Technique (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 1953); W. B. Carnochan, Lemuel Gulliver’s Mirror
for Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Ronald Paulson, The
Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); John R.
Clark, Form and Frenzy in Swift’s Tale of a Tub (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1970); Edward W. Rosenheim, Swift and the Satirist’s Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1963); Miriam Kosh Starkman, Swift’s Satire on
Learning in a Tale of a Tub (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). The
very influential C. J. Rawson, Gulliver and the Gentle Reader: Studies in Swift
and Our Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), marks something
of a turn away from direct attention to satire as an issue in its own right in
Swift studies.
3 See, for example, Fredric V. Bogel, The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and
Reading from Jonson to Byron (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Brian
C. Connery and Kirk Combe (eds), Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary
Criticism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), Dustin Griffin, Satire: A
Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994);
Reuben Quintero (ed.), A Companion to Satire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007);
Michael Seidel, Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1979); Charles A. Knight, The Literature of Satire (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
4 See Jytte Klausen, The Cartoons that Shook the World (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009).
5 Paul Simpson, On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a Stylistic Model of Satirical
Humour (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003), 51.
6 Simpson, Discourse of Satire, 62.
7 Conal Condren, ‘Between Social Constraint and the Public Sphere: On
Misreading Early-Modern Political Satire’, Contemporary Political Theory,
1 (2002), 71–101.
8 John Frow, Genre, New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2005), 65;
emphasis and ellipsis in original.
9 Lisa Gring-Pemble and Martha Solomon Watson, ‘The Rhetorical Limits of
Satire: An Analysis of James Finn Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories’,
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 89 (2003), 131–53; Lisa Colletta, ‘Political Satire
and Postmodern Irony in the Age of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart’,
Journal of Popular Culture, 42 (2009), 856–74.
10 Raymond Bentman, ‘Satiric Structure and Tone in the Conclusion of
Gulliver’s Travels’, SEL, 11 (1971), 547; quoted in Ashley Marshall, ‘Gulliver,
Gulliveriana, and the Problem of Swiftian Satire’, Philological Quarterly, 84:2
(2005). Marshall is very good on the pointlessness of searching in Swift’s
satire for a ‘single right reading’.
11 Swift, ‘Letter to Alexander Pope’, 29 September 1725.
 Satire and the limits of literary theories 57

12 Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ (1969); see Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual

Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1979).
13 See Kerry L. Pfaff and Raymond W. Gibbs Jr, ‘Authorial Intentions in
Understanding Satirical Texts’, Poetics, 25 (1997), 45–70; also see Simpson,
Discourse of Satire, on intention (pp. 154–8) and, more problematically on
sincerity (pp. 181–4).
14 Knight, The Literature of Satire, 1–10.
15 While the bulk of the edition’s annotations are Pope’s own or his literary
executor Warburton’s, there are a few that are Wimsatt’s own; see
Alexander Pope, Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William K.
Wimsatt Jr (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951).
16 Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in
Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1992), demonstrated this case powerfully a long time ago, at about the same
time as Richard Freadman and Seumas Miller, Re-Thinking Theory: A
Critique of Contemporary Literary Theory and an Alternative Account
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), gave a cogent account of
the unnecessary stigmatisation of intention in literary theory. We should be
able to start beyond this debate by now.
17 For example, Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical
Process (London: Methuen, 1986).
18 One example among many would be Robert Phiddian, Swift’s Parody
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
19 Frank Boyle, Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000).
20 See, for example, Klausen, Cartoons that Shook the World; Elizabeth Handsley
and Robert Phiddian, ‘Political Cartoonists and the Law’, in Robert
Phiddian and Haydon Manning (eds), Comic Commentators – Contemporary
Political Cartooning in Australia (Perth: Australian Public Intellectual
Network, 2008); Conal Condren, Jessica Milner Davis, Sally McCausland,
and Robert Phiddian, ‘Defining Parody and Satire: Australian Copyright
Law and its New Exception, Part 1’, Media Arts Law Review, 13:3 (2008),
273–92; Conal Condren, Jessica Milner Davis, Sally McCausland and Robert
Phiddian, ‘Defining Parody and Satire: Australian Copyright Law and its
New Exception, Part 2’, Media Arts Law Review, 13:4 (2008), 401–21.
21 Robert Phiddian, ‘Have You Eaten Yet? The Reader in A Modest Proposal’,
SEL, 36:3 (1996).
22 ‘Epilogue to the Satires’, Dialogue II, ll. 212–13.
23 Consider, for example, the complex issues that arise from the case of the
murder of Theo Van Gogh, as outlined by Ian Buruma in Murder in
Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (London:
Atlantic Books, 2006).
24 Rapid developments in neuroscience, especially the sophisticated analysis
of cognitive elements generating ‘cerebral’ and ‘visceral’ responses to visual
and written material (Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body,
58 Critical Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3

Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness (London: Vintage, 2000); Patrick

Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists
(New York and London: Routledge, 2003); Michael Gazzaniga (ed.),
The Cognitive Neurosciences III (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004); John
Cacioppo, Penny Visser and Cynthia Pickett (eds), Social Neuroscience:
People Thinking About Thinking People (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006);
Dale Purves, Elizabeth M. Brannon, Roberto Cabeza, Scott A. Huettel,
Kevin S. LaBar, Michael L. Platt and Marty Woldorff, Principles of Cognitive
Neuroscience (Sunderland: Sinauer, 2008)) allow us to begin describing the
biological basis of a ‘satiric frame of mind’. While Joseph Carroll briefly
connects satire with anger and disgust in his discussion of ‘Universals
in Literary Study’ in Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and
Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), Simpson, On the Discourse of Satire, is
the first extensive attempt to carry this thinking about mind into the
analysis of satire.

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