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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Enough!
In defense of satire
Thursday, 2008-08-14 | Philosophy
| Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. |
It has recently been brought to my attention that there is widespread confusion about the intersection of satire and good taste.
In plainer, more specific terms, recent events in Big Media have caused a number of seemingly intelligent people to claim that a certain satirical work has "gone too far" or that a certain bit of satire was, in fact, not satire, and was actually nothing more than plain, un-nuanced verbal abuse.
As it is one of my favorite compositional tools--I've been known to rely on it in prose, poetry and pill-form--I feel like I should do my bit to clear up some of that confusion. I feel like the problems people have with satire are a direct result of a general confusion about its origins, meaning and function.
The word "satire" comes from the Latin word "satura." It doesn't take an advanced degree in a dead language or applied linguistics to arrive at the conclusion that satura, which is the root of such English words as "saturate", means "enough" or "full".
It does, however, take a bit of additional book-learnin' to know that satura is also used in ancient texts to describe a "medley" or "melange" of subjects or styles in a composition.
Satire, then, is any composition or part of a composition that leaps rapidly from one difficult or complicated subject to the next, intentionally blurring the lines between them by portraying them in an excessive manner. A good gloss for "satire" might be something, "too much, too fast" or "everything all of a sudden".
It follows, then, that as a compositional tool, satire is messy. It relies on collateral damage rather than precise blows to make its effects felt. Whereas an essayist will assail his adversaries with clear prose, his personal convictions and in accordance with contemporary rules of persuasive writing or political discourse, the satirist will go after his quarry by any means available.
He might break the compositional rules of his medium: a satire of literary culture might be rife with spelling and grammatical errors. The satirist might adopt viewpoints that are not his own: political satirists frequently take up the positions an opinions of their adversaries in order to portray them in a strategically advantageous way. A satirist might even lapse into a long-abandoned dialect or accent, compose according to the obsolete aesthetic or organizational conventions, etc. The satirist, to continue with the martial metaphor, is a Berserker: a fighter who, like the Vikings who famously charged naked into battle, uses his apparently willingness to disregard taboo and common sense to befuddle and demoralize his adversaries. His ultimate goal is to invoke enough conflicting ideas and emotions in an excessive enough manner that he is able to cause enough semantic and emotional chaos to undermine his opponents and prevent them from carrying the day.
It is a difficult tool to use. Blake's famous line "Enough! or too much" summarizes the satirist's craft nicely. If the goal of satire is to provoke sufficient outrage, confusion and general disorder of emotion to prevent one's political or rhetorical opponents from being able to make their arguments in a coherent and convincing fashion, the ultimate difficulty in realizing this goal comes from what Artistotle called "the defects of our auditors".
Aristotle said that in order to argue convincingly, we must choose diction and metaphors and analogies that will appeal directly to those seemingly unrelated beliefs in our audience that make them different from us (i.e. that make them "wrong" and us "right"). First we have to see "eye to eye" on the basics, and then we can start making converts.
And so, since the goal of satire is to provoke sufficient outrage, confusion and general disorder of emotion in one's auditors, the satirist must be able to gauge precisely where those lines exist and how to stand upon them without crossing them.
And this, for better or for worse, is the history and meaning of satire.
What is more important than its origins and meaning, however, is the function of satire. It exists. But what does it do?
Well, for one thing, the most important thing that satire does is counteract zealotry and fundamentalism.
One hardly needs to start with the Levites or Phineas and trace the bloody line of fundamentalism through history to Jerry Falwell or al Quaeda. Likewise, one needn't subject oneself to the monomaniacal humdrum of a Fox News or a Huffington Post to recognize that the world is and has pretty much always been populated with zealots and fundamentalists.
Additionally, most people eventually learn not to bring up politics at family gatherings because of the utter futility of attempting to employ sober, logical argumentation in the face of deeply held beliefs and strong feelings.
Fundamentalism abounds and proliferates. Argumentation seldom changes minds and is often completely unsatisfying.
Satire, then, is the only tool available to an intelligent person living in a world of lizard-brained fucktards who insist on blacks and white and who refuse to admit of tints and shades. Often as not, the only satisfaction to be found is to be found in excess.
