Satirists thick and thin

From Juvenal to Armando Iannucci, satire is an ancient and necessary art

by Michael Silk

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.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5278530.ece