The Fictions of Satire Paulson, Ronald Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Paulson, Ronald. The Fictions of Satire. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.67852. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/67852 [ Access provided at 2 Oct 2021 23:08 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. HOPKINS OPEN PUBLISHING ENCORE EDITIONS Ronald Paulson The Fictions of Satire Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Published 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3012-6 (open access) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3012-6 (open access) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3057-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3057-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3097-3 (electronic) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3097-5 (electronic) This page supersedes the copyright page included in the original publication of this work. THE FICTIONS OF SATIRE THE FICTIONS OF SATIRE By Ronald Paulson THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS Baltimore, Maryland Copyright © 1967 by The Johns Hopkins Press Baltimore, Maryland 21218 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-17490 Printed in the United States of America To Maynard Mack ACKNOWLEDGMENT A certain interdependence must be confessed between this essay and the author’s Satire and the Novel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967). Although separate and independent works, completed at different times, they were orig­ inally conceived as a single whole dealing with the development of fictive techniques in satire. The Fictions of Satire places its emphasis on satire, Satire and the Novel on the eighteenth- century English novel, but in a sense the one is an introduction to, and even includes a few passages that also appear in, the other (in the sections on picaresque and the “ Quixote Fiction” ). In this book I am interested almost exclusively in practice; in the other, where critical dicta importantly influence practice, I consider in some detail theories of satire and comedy in the eighteenth century. For some of the material of this book I have drawn on essays previously published. Parts of Chapter I, “The Central Symbol of Violence,” “Relationship: The Fool and the Knave,” and “Picaresque Narrative: The Servant-Master Relation,” have appeared in different form in Rice University Studies, LI (1965) under the title “The Fool-Knave Relation in Picaresque Satire.” Sentences and occasional paragraphs, especially of sections of Chapter II entitled “The Satirist and the Satirist-Satirized” and “The Fictions of Tory Satire,” have appeared in reviews pub­ lished in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. Part Vili A cknowledgments of Chapter III, “Swiftean Romanticism: The Satirist as Hero,” was originally published as “ Swift, Stella, and Permanence” in ELH A Journal of English Literary History, XXVII (i960). My first thanks go to the University of Illinois and the American Philosophical Society for grants that enabled me in the summers of i960 and 1961 to begin thinking about the subject of satire. Since then, other grants from universities and learned societies that contributed directly to other projects have incidentally offered moments in which I could return to it. Rice University generously provided a typist for the final draft. Jack Stillinger read much of the manuscript in a very early form and helped me in the many ways to which his friendship has long accustomed me. I must also thank, once again, Maynard Mack, who read both parts of the original manuscript, and to whom I have dedicated the finished product as an overdue token of gratitude and esteem. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Rhetoric and Representation Introduction ....................................................................................3 The Central Symbol of Violence ............................................9 Relationship : The Fool and the K n ave ....................... 20 Fiction as D evice: Lucian ................................................ 3 1 Satura into Prose Fiction ................................................... 42 Picaresque Narrative : The Servant-Master Relation .................................... 58 II. From Panurge to Achitophel The Satirist and the Satirist-Satirized .......................... 75 The Satirist as K nave and as H e ro : Panurge and Pantagruel........................... .................. 80 The Satyr-Satirist and Augustan Realism .................. 88 The Quixote Fiction ............................................................. 98 Turnus and Satan ................................................................... n o The Fictions of Tory Satire ............................................... 120 III. Swift: The Middleman and the Dean From Rhetoric to Fiction: The Drapier’s Letters .129 Swift’s Version of the Tory Fiction .................................138 Swiftean Realism: The Bickerstaff Papers ....................150 Swiftean Picaresque : Gulliver’s Travels .......................162 Swiftean Romanticism: The Satirist as H e ro .............185 Conclusion : The Fiction of Whig Satire ...................... 2 10 THE TICTIONS OF SATIRE I. RHETORIC AND REPRESENTATION Introduction Сontemporary definitions of satire usually join two terms: “wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd” for one, and “ an object of attack” for the other; or fantasy and a moral standard; or indirection and judgment. One is a wild, not quite stable comedy; the other a moral condemna­ tion. Both are attitudes or tones, although implied is “ an object” to be acted upon. Put into Aristotle’s correlation, satire can be said to study an ugliness in a manner that is not itself painful, and its approach consists of denigration or attack.1 To the extent that satire presents, and so represents,. its “ object,” it is related to other mimetic forms. But to the extent that satire attacks, it is rhetorical— the vituperatio o f laus et vituperatio— and there is a persuasive end in sight. However much mimesis or representation is involved, the generic end is rhetorical. As Swift wrote to Gay following the success of The Beggar’s Opera in the eventful spring of 1728: “The B eggar’s Opera has knocked down G u lliver; I hope to see Pope’s Dulness \_The Dunciad~\ knock down the Beggar’s Opera, but not till it has fully done its job” (my italics). The “job”— Swift later 1 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N .J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), P· 224; Ellen Leyburn, Satiric Allegory: Mirror of M an (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1956), p. 7; Aristotle, Poetics 5, I. 3 The Fictions of Satire refers to it as the “ task” — is a sine qua non of satire.2 Satire imitates, presents, explores, analyzes the evil (the term I shall use instead of Aristotle’s “ugly” ), but it must at the same time ( i ) make the reader aware of a pointing finger, of an ought or ought not, that refers beyond the page to his own life, or— and this is not always the same thing— (2) take a moral stand, make a judgment, and place or distribute blame. The first can develop into an extremely elaborate rhetorical structure; the second re­ quires only that the object be made to appear evil or ridiculous, not neutral or acceptable. The element of judgment is acutely described by David Worcester as a “closeness of pursuit” and an “ intensity of condemnation” ;3 by the comparative intensity of these qualities satire is distinguishable from the freer, more careless and permissive world of comedy. Satire has a certain specific business to do, and it does it. Clearly Worcester’s dis­ tinction leaves a great deal to opinion, but it does designate in comedy a residuum of pure exuberance. There is always a strong sense of efficiency in satire : nothing is done without a purpose. It has no time for loitering and highjinks. But if comedy is the pure substance which satire uses for its own businesslike ends, we might wonder if satire is anything more than a tone attached to certain forms and subject matters. Without an article “ satire” refers more to a tone than to a form. It is not at all the same thing to say that Pope wrote satire and to say that he wrote a satire. The latter introduces ideas of form and convention as well as of tone; but a novel, or a play, or a poem, can be satire without being a satire, and the adjective “ satiric” is much the most popular form of the word. Following is a typical view of satire’s form, or non-form: “One thing satire, as a form, is incapable of doing: it cannot provide the plot for a novel. Traditionally, satire has always borrowed its ground-plan, parasitically and by ironic inversion, from other 2 Letter to Gay, 28 March 1728; to Pope, 10 May. See The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1963), III, 278, 286 (I have modernized for purposes of clarity in this instance). 3 The Art of Satire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940), pp· 37-38. 4 Rhetoric and. Representation forms of ordered exposition in art or in life. Historically, the satirist has often had to be on his guard and hide his satires beneath the sheep’s clothing of a commonly accepted form. Whether the satire appears to be a children’s tale or sheer non­ sense, it offers both the author and the audience an opportunity to take it that way— for self-protection. Moreover, an object of satire is best attacked through a generally understood form that is perverted to convey the satiric message. Satire’s purpose ordinarily is not to create something new but to expose the real evil in the existing. In the troubled England of the seventeenth century, this could best be done through a happy form like the nursery tale or a pious one like the liturgy or a hymn, under which is revealed an unexpected impiety.