Satire: A Critical Reintroduction

by Dustin Griffin

Here is the ideal introduction to satire for the student and, for the experienced scholar, an occasion to reconsider the uses, problems, and pleasures of satire in light of contemporary theory. Satire is a staple of the literary classroom. Dustin Griffin moves away from the prevailing moral-didactic approach established thirty some years ago to a more open view and reintegrates the Menippean tradition with the tradition of formal verse satire.

Exploring texts from Aristophanes to the moderns, with special emphasis on the eighteenth century, Griffin uses a dozen figures―Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Lucian, More, Rabelais, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Blake, and Byron―as primary examples. Because satire often operates as a mode or procedure rather than as a genre, Griffin offers not a comprehensive theory but a set of critical perspectives. Some of his topics are traditional in satire the role of satire as moralist, the nature of satiric rhetoric, the impact of satire on the political order. Others are the problems of satire and closure, the pleasure it affords readers and writers, and the socioeconomic status of the satirist.

Griffin concludes that satire is problematic, open-ended, essayistic, and ambiguous in its relationship to history, uncertain in its political effect, resistant to formal closure, more inclined to ask questions than provide answers, and ambivalent about the pleasures it offers.

Genres: Criticism, Philosophy

256 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 1994

Reviews

[Timons Esaias · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am putting together a satire workshop, and in preparation I looked around for "how to write satire" books, and basically found none. I picked up three academic titles on the subject, and this is the first of the three that I read. My review is from a practitioner's view rather than an academic's.

Griffin wrote this book to argue against an academic consensus that had formed during the 1960s regarding satire. That consensus roughly stated that satire was a genre, and that it should be analyzed from the basis of Classical verse satire, with the possible addition of so-called "Menippean satire" which might be verse, or prose, or a combination of both. According to this definition, satire had basically stopped being written in the very early 1800s. What about all the satire novels people think of when they think of satire? Well, um, maybe they're derivative of Menippean??

In other words, the consensus academic view of satire had decided to conveniently omit most satire from the definition. [Does this remind me of how the astronomers defined the Moon as not actually being a moon, but part of a double planet system? Does it remind me of those same twits, two generations later, defining the planet Pluto out of planethood? Oh, yes.]

Griffin then explains that satire is really a "mode" or "procedure" (which is what I will be teaching), and he proceeds, at length, to go through the history of attempts to define satire, starting all the way back with the Classical Greeks and Romans. Basically, at every step you had people make up a definition of satire that:
• didn't actually account for the satire they were writing, or that was being written in their time
• didn't account for John Donne
• didn't account for Jonathan Swift
• doesn't seem applicable to modern novels, even though Don Quixote, often considered the first modern novel, is a satire. You'd think they'd have learned to deal with it.

Which means that all these attempts to define it as a genre were useless. And I agree, but for a practitioner, you could have made that case in one page. Did I make workshop notes as I read this book? Almost none.

What annoys me about this book, even in its own terms, is that Griffin spent the whole book undermining the definition of satire as being verse satire ending in the 1800s, and some Menippean satire, but then that's exactly what he takes as the limit of the subject he will deal with. He tells you right off the bat that he isn't going to discuss novels. Which is negligent, but then he makes it clear that Gulliver's Travels will be the benchmark satire to which he refers time and again. (The index devotes an entire column to Swift page references.)

Gulliver's Travels is, ahem, really a novel.

He will tell us that his subject is primarily verse satire, and he will use "A Modest Proposal" as the ideal of satire (which it is). "A Modest Proposal" is prose, not verse.

If you read this book, you will feel a strong urge to go find this guy and just slap him.

But before we hurt him, we need to acknowledge that he is right to blow up all those failed theories of satire, and he is right to point out that satire is "more inclined to ask questions than to provide answers". There are some very perceptive pages in this book, and I'll be quoting some lines in the workshop and in documents. As a heavily self-limited academic exercise this is quite effective.

But does a practitioner of satire need to read this book? No.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A model survey. Griffin writes very clearly, in a skimmable-but-interesting way; the book is very well organized, and full of information that you can either dig down into or skip over without losing much. His claim that satire can be best defined as an inquiry or provocation seems about right, and does a nice job of avoiding the insipidities of 'satire is moralization' as well as the stupidities of 'satire is a language game.' On the downside, it was published in 1994, and slips into period-pieceness at times: no literary work can be closed, it has to be open; irony has to be unstable; there can't be any straightforward relationships between anything, they must always be ambiguous or questionable or undermined by a reliance upon an other and other such nonsense.
Griffin makes the accurate point that theorists of satire have almost never been able to find satirical works that fulfill the criteria of their theories; and that, despite this, they write very good criticism of individual works. The same can be said for him: although he insists that satire is open/ambiguous/unstable and so on, when he actually discusses books or poems all of that goes out the window, and he makes you want to read the stuff.

The discussion of the 'conditions for satire' is very good, but leads to a very strange conclusion: that Byron was the "last great English satirist." This is the book's major limitation: Griffin discounts satire in the novel (hence Byron can be the '*last* great...'). Too bad; I'd like to know what he thought.

[Travis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kinda dry ... but I guess it is a standard reference.