SARCASM
"
SATIRE
~
I
and E. E. Cummings. Swinburne, Hardy, and Pound are generally conceded to have been
the most successful modern writers of sapphics. The following by Swinburne is given
qualitative scansion:
Then to Ime so Ilyfng a Iwake a Ivision
Came with lout sleep lover the Iseas and I touched me,
Softly I touched mine Ieyelids and [Iips and I Itoo,
Full Ofthe Iv IsIon.
Here are the opening stanzas of Hardy's "The Temporary the All" and Pound's "Apparuit":
Change and chancefulness in my flowering youthtime,
Set me sun by sun near to one unchosen;
Wrought us fellow like, and despite divergence,
Fused us in friendship.
Golden rose the house, in the portal I saw
thee, a marvel, carven in subtle stuff, a
portent. Life died down in the lamp and flickered,
caught at the wonder.
Sarcasm
A caustic and bitter expression of strong disapproval. Sarcasm is personal,
jeering, intended to hurt. See IRONY.
Satanic School A phrase used by Southey in the preface to his Vision of Judgment
(1821) to designate the members of the literary group made up of Byron, Shelley,
Hunt, and others, whose irregular lives and radical ideas-defiantly
flaunted in their
writings-suggested
the term. They were contrasted with the "pious" group of the
LAKESCHOOL-Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. More recent writers who have attacked conventional morality sometimes have been spoken of as belonging to the
Satanic School.
Satanism
The worship of Satan, possibly a survival of heathen fertility cults. In the
twelfth century it gained strength through a secret rebellion against the Church. At its
center is the Black Mass, a parody of the Christian Mass, with a nude woman on the
altar, with the Host sometimes being the ashes and blood of murdered children. It was
revived during the reign of Louis XIV in France and again in the 1890s, when it attracted some literary attention. Interest in witchcraft and Satanism, or at least their literary expression, seems to be increasing.
Satire A work or manner that blends a censorious attitude with humor and wit for
improving human institutions or humanity. Satirists attempt through laughter not so
much to tear down as to inspire a remodeling. If attackers simply abuse, they are writing invective; if they are personal and splenetic, they are writing SARCASM;
if they are
sad and morose over the state of society, they are writing IRONYor a JEREMIAD.
As a rule
modern satire spares the individual and follows Addison's self-imposed rule: to "pass
over a single foe to charge whole armies." Most often, satire deals less with great sinners and criminals than with the general run of fools, knaves, ninnies, oafs, codgers,
U'f\
and frauds. Indeed, a good deal of enduring satire has to do with literature and the
literary life itself.
Satire existed in classical antiquity (Aristophanes, Juvenal, Horace, Martial, and
Petronius). Through the Middle Ages satire persisted in the FABLIAU
and BEASTEPIC.In
Spain the PICARESQUE
NOVELdeveloped a strong element of satire; in France M'oliere
and Le Sage handled the manner deftly, and Voltaire later established himself as an
archsatirist. In England, from the time of Gascoigne (Steel Glass, 1576) and Lodge (A
Figfor Momus, 1595), writers condemned vice and folly (Hall, Nash, Donne, Jonson).
By the time of Charles I, however, interest in satire had declined, only to revive with
the struggle between Cavaliers and Puritans. At the hands of Dryden, the HEROICCOUPLET,already the favorite form with most English satirists, developed into the finest
satiric form. The eighteenth century .in England became a period of satire; poetry,
drama, essays, and criticism all took on the satirical manner at the hands of such writers as Dryden, Swift, Addison, Steele, Pope, and Fielding. In the nineteenth century
Byron and Thackeray were sharp satirists.
Early American satire naturally followed the English in style. Before the Revolution,
American satire dealt chiefly with the political struggle. Of the HARTFORDWITS,
Trumbull produced M'Fingal, a Hudibrastic satire on Tories. Hopkinson amusingly attacked the British in his "Battle of the Kegs" (1778). Freneau (The British Prison Ship)
wrote the strongest Revolutionary satire. Shortly after the Revolution, the Anarchiad,
by Trumbull, Barlow, Humphreys, and Hopkins, and Modern Chivalry (fiction), by
Brackenridge, attacked domestic political difficulties and the crudities of our frontier.
Irving's good-humored satire in The Sketch Book and "Knickerbocker's" History,
Holmes's society verse, Lowell's dialect poems (Biglow Papers), and Mark Twain's
prose represent the general trend of American satire up to the twentieth century. Since
1900, such British writers as G. B. Shaw, Noel Coward, Evelyn Waugh, and Aldous
Huxley maintained the satiric spirit in the face of the gravity of NATURALISM
and the
earnestness of SYMBOLISM.
In America, Eugene O'Neill (on occasion), Edith Wharton,
Sinclair Lewis, George Kaufman and Moss Hart, John P. Marquand, and Joseph Heller
commented satirically on human beings and their institutions.
Satire is of two major types: formal (or direct) satire, in which the satiric voice
speaks, usually in the first person, either directly to the reader or to a character in the
satire, called the ADVERSARIUS;
and indirect satire, in which the satire is expressed
through a narrative and the characters who are the butt are ridiculed by what they themselves say and do. Much of great literary satire is indirect; one of the principal forms of
indirect satire is the MENIPPEAN.
Formal satire is fundamentally of two types, named for its distinguished classical
practitioners: Horatian is gentle, urbane, smiling; it aims to correct by broadly sympathetic laughter; Juvenalian is biting, bitter, angry; it points with contempt and indignation to the corruption of human beings and institutions. Addison is a Horatian satirist,
Swift a Juvenalian.
.
For centuries the word satire, which literally means "a dish filled with mixed fruits,"
was reserved for long poems, such as the pseudo-Homeric Battle of the Frogs and
Mice, the poems of Juvenal and Horace, Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman,
Chaucer's "Nun's Priest's Tale," Butler's Hudibras, Pope's "The Rape of the Lock," and
Lowell's A Fable for Critics. Almost from its origins, however, the drama has been
suited to the satiric spirit, and from Aristophanes to Shaw and Noel Coward, it has
commented with penetrating irony on human foibles. There was a notable concentration of its attention on Horatian satire in the COMEDY
OFMANNERS
of the RESTORATION
SATURDAY CLUB
SAUSSUREAN
LINGUISTI(
i
AGE. But it bas been in the fictional narrative, particularly tbe novel, that satire has
found its chief modern vehicle. Cervantes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Swift, Fielding, Jane
Austen, Thackeray, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley,
Evelyn Waugh, John P. Marquand, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon all have made
extended fictional narratives tbe vehicles for a wide-ranging and powerfully effective
satiric treatment of human beings and institutions.
In England since 1841, Punch has maintained a high level of comic satire until closing
in 1992. After being re-launched in 1996, the magazine finally ceased publication in 2002.
In America, The New Yorker has demonstrated since 1925 the continuing appeal of sophisticated Horatian satire. The motion pictures, tbe plastic and graphic arts, and the newspaper comic strip and political cartoon have all been instruments of satiric comment on
human affairs. The playwright and wit George S. Kaufman is supposed to have said that
"Satire is what closes on Saturday night"-a remark that gave the title in 1975 to NBC's
Saturday Night, later Saturday Night Live, a long-running television satire.
[References: R. C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (1960); John
Heath-Stubbs, The Verse Satire (1969); Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of
the English Renaissance (1959); Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in EighteenthCentury England (1967); John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature
(1956); James Sutherland, English Satire (1958).]
Saturday Club A club of literary and scientific people in and around Cambridge and
Boston in the mid-nineteenth century who came together chiefly for social intercourse
and good conversation, at irregular intervals. Some of the more famous members were
Emerson, Longfellow, Agassiz, Prescott, Whittier, and Holmes; among the frequent
visitors were Hawthorne, Motley, and Sumner. Holmes paid tribute to the organization
in verse (At the Saturday Club), and Dr. E. W. Emerson wrote an official history.
I
t~
I
~ i
\
:'11
.\
S.lJ:
I
',
jr
"
!
_:IIf,
·r
:j)
"
.'.;.
Satyr Play The fourth and final play in the BILLof tragedies in Greek drama: so called because the CHORUS
was made up of horse-tailed goat-men called satyrs. The satyr play was intended to bring COMIC
RELIEF
after the three tragedies that preceded it. It had the structure of
a tragedy and subject matter from serious mythology but was grotesquely comic in manner.
Euripides's Cyclops is the only surviving satyr play. (In 1819 P.B. Shelley prepared The Cyclops: A Satyric Drama Translatedfrom the Greek of Euripides; it was published posthumously in 1824.) Some conjecture that Euripides's Alcestis may belong to the type, and a few
lineaments survive in that play's modem avatar, Eliot's The Cocktail Party. Thornton Wilder
wrote a modern satyr play, The Drunken Sisters. Since Igor Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex is too
short to make up a whole program, it has been suggested that the same composer's Mavra
follow it "as satyr play." W. H. Auden applied "miniature satyr play" to the intermezzo
called "The Judgment of Calliope" in The Bassarids. The American composer Harry
Partch's Plectra and Percussion Dances is subtitled Satyr-Play Musicfor Dance Theater.
Saussurean Linguistics
An influential theory derived from the work of the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure tried to put linguistics on a scientific footing by emphasizing the priority of the abstract underlying system of language (la langue) over particular mutable manifestations thereof in actual speech
(la parole), along with the priority of timeless or simultaneous phenomena considered
synchronically over historical or successive phenomena considered diachronically. He
defined the linguistic SIGNas a combination of a SIGNIFIER
and a SIGNIFIED
and insisted
that the essential nature of the sign is an arbitrary and conventional relation that does
Ferdinand de Saussure.
not reach out, back, or down to any substance, entity, or absolute outside language
Saussure's emphasis on synchronic systems-instead
of diachronic so-called organisms somehow evolving continuously-has
had far-reaching effects in linguistic and
literary study, anthropology, psychiatry, and historiography.
Because signifier and signified are radically discontinuous, and because the system
of language is similarly discontinuous from any world conceived of as its environment,
a staggering range of concepts have to be modified. We are enjoined to take care in
thinking about etymology as important; "noon" and "November," say, both contain an
element that historically means "nine," but noon is not the ninth hour and November is
not the ninth month: these signs are arbitrary and can function perfectly as long as the
community of speakers can agree on the meaning of "noon" and "November." (In his
thinking about arbitrariness and discontinuousness, Saussure admitted a debt to the earlier American linguist William Dwight Whitney and to the school of German Neogrammarians; he could almost as well have seen a kinship with Stephane Mallarme.)
Because of Saussure, critics have revised their ideas of everything from ONOMATOPOEIA
to MIMESISand expression. More recently, the Saussurean concept of language as a