4
Not content merely to undermine other people’s icons and heroes, the satirist is particularly alert to debunk authors—other writers certainly, and even himself. When pomp and pride are being forced to take a fall, no one is safe or exempt. For, after all, who is not pleased to preen and praise himself? Jonathan Swift, in one of his major satires, affirmed that “WHOEVER hath an Ambition to be heard in a Crowd, must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb with indefatigable Pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain Degree of Altitude above them.”1 He so much appreciated this imagery of “king of the mountain” as being man’s characteristic way of life that he repeated it many years later in one of his best poems:
WE all behold with envious Eyes,
Our Equal rais’d above our Size;
Who wou’d not at a crowded Show,
Stand high himself, keep others low?
I love my Friend as well as you,
But would not have him stop my View;
Then let me have the higher Post;
I ask but for an Inch at most.2
Every man, no doubt, has inflated pretensions, but learned men are distinctively more articulate in framing their own “advertisements for themselves,” as Norman Mailer would term them. Here is one leader’s self-devised titles, according to the gospel of Evelyn Waugh: “Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University.”3 Even the redoubtable Swift himself, despite his apparent demise, nevertheless manages to affix a host of abbreviated titles after his name in the “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.” It is precisely after those who would puff up their reputations that the satirist courses in eager pursuit.
Other vices deserve any satirist’s attention, to be sure, but pride—particularly the unwarranted or excessive pride of a learned man concerning his intellectual ability and attainments—draws some of satire’s sharpest assaults. The Parson in The Canterbury Tales delivers a long sermon about it. He warns that pride is “the general roote of alle harmes” and gives an extensive list of other sins that spring from this evil root. The list includes not only the remaining six mortal sins but sixteen lesser sins ranging from “Inobedience” to “Veyne Glorie.” Actually, “no man kan outrely telle the nombre . . . of harmes that cometh of Pride,” says the Parson.4 In An Essay on Criticism, Pope sounds a similar warning:
Of all the Causes which conspire to blind
Man’s erring judgment, and misguide the Mind,
What the weak Head with strongest Byass rules,
Is Pride, the neverfailing Vice of Fools.5
As Gilbert Highet points out, “Satire vaunteth not itself and is not puffed up, but God help those who vaunt themselves.”6 The satirist shows no mercy for the litterateur (or pretender to wit, culture, and learning) who believes that he is superior to other men because of his high I.Q., his university education, or his published writings. In the eyes of the satirist, such false pride ignores the reality of man’s dual nature. According to the satirist, man always must remember that he is neither beast nor angel, but remains
on this isthmus of a middle state
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die and reas’ning but to err.7
Thus, the artist who thinks of himself as an ethereal being producing great masterpieces through divine inspiration and the scholar who considers himself a cerebral being concerned only with erudite theories are ridiculous because they have forgotten their human state. The satirist has only scorn for those who believe that they are unlike other men.
Chaucer’s Parson suggests that the remedy for the sin of pride is “humylite or mekenesse,” and satirists through the ages have worked enthusiastically to restore proper humility to those whose pride has led them astray.8 The errant litterateur finds himself attacked from all sides: his work is belittled; the honors that he holds dear are so exaggerated that they become ludicrous; his physical appearance is caricatured unmercifully; and, through the satirist’s process of discussing him in physiological or mechanical terms, he finally is reduced to the subhuman level of a beast, a vegetable, or a machine. The satirist shows no mercy.
One of the methods that the satirist uses to deflate the pride of learned men is directed especially toward authors. Unlike the romantic, who elevates the work of the writer by suggesting that his words are so important that they will last eternally, or at least “so long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,” the satirist devalues the writer’s efforts by emphasizing their unimportance and ephemerality.9 So the satirist demolishes the romantic’s “winged words,” attaches them firmly to a page, and then depicts the ignominious fate of that page.
When Juvenal advises his readers that certain writing deserves to be consigned “to some dark nook, / . . . for only worms will give it its due look,” he sounds the satirist’s twofold theme: the author’s words will go unread, and the pages on which the words are written will serve some purely utilitarian purpose. Persius’s adversarius in Satire 1 enlarges on Juvenal’s suggestion that books frequently become merely food for worms: “Do you mean to tell me that any [author] who has uttered words worthy of cedar oil [that will preserve the manuscript from moths] will disown the wish to have earned a place in the mouths of men, and [will disown the wish] to leave behind him poems that will have nothing to fear from mackerel or from spice?”10 This passage implies that every author would, if he could, cherish the idea that his work will survive to all eternity; he aspires to escape from moths, and more particularly he yearns to escape that ignominious fate whereby his forgotten pages serve as fish-wrapping or as confetti for the crating of spice. But the satirist loves nothing better than to puncture the pride of authors by picturing the real utilitarian uses most literature will be put to. And the satirist’s implication is clear: the page as product is more meritorious than anything the scribbler can write upon it.
Horace similarly confides that he does not wish to be celebrated by bad poets in ill-written verse, lest he wind up—together with such scrap paper (“chartis ineptis”)—in the marketplace as tissue for wrapping frankincense, pepper, and perfume. Indeed, such an inglorious and ludicrous fate for trivial authors and their manuscripts was a favorite topic of the satirists. Catullus envisions the outpourings of Volusius as serving for fish-wrappers, and Martial repeatedly stresses that trashy writings will provide wrappers for incense, pepper, pies, and fish in public kitchens and stalls.11
What is attractive to the satirist is the alacrity and the absurdity of this not-so-tragic fall. As John Lyly phrased it, “We commonly see the booke that at Christmas lyeth bound on the Stacioners stall, at Easter be broken in the Haberdashers shop.”12 The dates here are sacrilegious, introducing by comparison an embarrassment: the book that is born at Christmas fares altogether differently from the Savior; at Eastertide the book has “fallen” into bits and pieces upon the marketplace. Unlike the Savior, such a book shall never rise again. Oh, what a falling-off was there. Hic transit in gloria mundi: today’s best-seller is tomorrow’s pillow for pantaloons or parcel for stinking fish.
Such a trajectory is the perfect exemplum for pride. “All is vanity,” in the classic words of the preacher. “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh.” And there is nothing new under the sun, nothing of vain, moiling man that is even to be remembered: “There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come.”13 T.S. Eliot reduces the life cycle to an incongruous and absurd repetitive triad:
Birth, and copulation, and death
That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all,
Birth, and copulation, and death.14
In fact, this general mortification of vanity is, if anything, exacerbated in our more “modern” ages by the increasing worship of speed, of immediacy, and the introduction of evanescent best-sellers and top-forty hits that usually triumph and disappear within several months. In the Dunciad (a poem entirely devoted to disappearing modern fashionable dull poetry), Alexander Pope mentions “Each Cygnet sweet of Bath and Tunbridge race,” and the annotations of Martinus Scriblerus confirm that such poets are indeed dying swans: “There were several successions of these sorts of minor poets, at Tunbridge, Bath &c., singing praise of the Annuals flourishing for that season.”15 But already these persons are and ought to be nameless.
Swift exaggerates this volatile tendency in his satire upon modernity, A Tale of a Tub. There, the modern persona objects to posterity that the horde of immediately known and fine writers suffers dreadfully because its “never-dying works” “are devoted to unavoidable death”: “ ’Tis true indeed, that altho’ their Numbers be vast, and their Productions numerous in proportion, yet are they hurryed so hastily off the Scene, that they escape our Memory, and delude our Sight.” This transition from high to low, from freshness to darkness and ignominy, is startlingly rapid and described with almost biblical relish. Brand-new works are in a few hours utterly lost: “I enquired in vain, the Memorial of them was lost among Men, their Place was no more to be found.”16 The concept that modern works of trash shall somehow receive rapid transit to the void is frequently reported (as here in Swift) with an almost intense religious relish: the enemies of culture (like the enemies of the Lord) shall receive their just comeuppance. Indeed, their demolition or demotion is but a species of cosmic irony, whereby fate and the deity levy suitable punishment upon upstart pieces of writing noteworthy only for their bad taste. If there is a perdition for sinners among men, then it is only appropriate that the vile and the offensive among books should likewise be allocated to their underworld, a site where moths devour their innards and decaying fish become enfolded with them in an interminable embrace.
Most satiric and comic authors foster this vein of debunking in a light, amusing manner. Rabelais repeats the now-familiar thought that manuscripts become food for vermin when he reports that “the rats and moths, or (that I may not lie) other wicked vermin, had nibbled off the beginning” of “The Antidoted Conundrums.” And Swift in the Tale of a Tub laughs at the supposed author who wrote in 1697 but whose manuscript was not published until 1704. After such a protracted period of time (by the standards of modern wit and fashion) the work is essentially incomprehensible, and the manuscript virtually worn away, as its editor observes: “The Title Page in the Original was so torn, that it was not possible to recover several Titles which the author here speaks of.”17
Rabelais also presents another possibility, whereby the pages of the written work might be utilized (if not for reading) superstitiously as relic, nostrum, poultice, swab, or bandage: “There are . . . others . . . who when they are suffering intensely from toothache, after having spent all they had on doctors without getting any relief, have been able to find no more effective remedy than that of placing those same Chronicles [of Gargantua] between two very hot cloths and applying them to the sore spot, sinapizing them with a little powdered dung.”18 The fact that these pages must be combined with heated dung in order to be effective even as a remedy for toothache devalues them completely.
For surely such works survive only to be employed in some wholly unliterary procedure. Under the pseudonym of Homer Wilbur, James Russell Lowell writes on this theme in The Biglow Papers, reminding journalists of the ephemerality of their work. “The wonder wears off, and tomorrow this sheet [of newspaper], in which a vision was let down to me from Heaven, shall be the wrapping of a bar of soap or the platter for a beggar’s broken victuals.” Once more, the satirist reminds all writers that the page of which they are so proud will soon serve a utilitarian purpose, and the wonder of the words that they so carefully arranged on the page will be wholly forgotten. Pope similarly speaks of those rare volumes “Redeem’d from tapers and defrauded pies”: most writings have their pages confiscated to supply candlewicks or to serve as pie pan cushions, as window patchings, and as fish-wrappers. Swift likewise remarks that if one were to seek evanescent books, one might seek “oracular conviction” by being sent to “an Oven, to the Windows of a Bawdy-house, or to the sordid Lanthorn.” Poor literary productions are absolutely destined to die the death and to be tortured and torn asunder to serve the most mercenary purposes. Only the book, Pope caustically remarks, that is burnt alive will retain the purity of its “maiden sheets; / While all [its] smutty sisters walk the streets.”19
Hence, the lurid and sordid demise of pretentious books has been the satiric and comic theme of many an author. In part 1, chapter 9 of Don Quixote—one of the most influential books in Renaissance literature—we suddenly learn that the “manuscript” of this “history” has abruptly come to an end, leaving Quixote and his Biscayan opponent both standing with weapons held aloft, frozen on the verge of direct combat. The story remains imperfect, as the narrator tells us. After a diligent search, the would-be author, due to “Providence, Chance, or Fortune,” discovers a boy offering to sell to a shopkeeper a parcel of manuscripts—in Arabic. Only at this moment does the befuddled reader learn that the history of the “Life and Miracles” of the Knight of La Mancha is indeed an “aged document,” written in Arabic by the Arabian historiographer Cide Hamete Benengeli. How the tale of the addled modern would-be knight of Spain got to be told in Arabic in an “ancient” manuscript is anybody’s guess. That leaves the current narrator reduced to being merely a translator. But we abruptly learn, too, that the narrator cannot read Arabic, for he hires a lad who, for very little cash, translates the whole of the new manuscript. Arab street urchins, it seems, can in such an atmosphere become authors overnight. The whole business of bookmaking and authorship is wonderfully called into question by such satiric strokes.20
Lawrence Sterne is squarely in this tradition: the inordinately sensitive Yorick uncovers “The Fragment” of a tale on waste paper used to overlay a print of butter. Inveterate snooper into quaint trivia that he is, Yorick finds this “old” manuscript to be in Gothic letter and in the French of Rabelais’s era. Needless to say, the remaining sheets must be diligently sought, and they prove to have been “wrapt round the stalks of a bouquet to keep it together” and “presented [by his servant] to the demoiselle upon the boulevards.” If anything, the manner in which Henry Mackenzie supposedly finds the manuscript that constitutes his novel The Man of Feeling (1771) is still more absurd: a sporting curate employs portions of the old manuscript piecemeal as “wadding” for his gun. Obviously, the manuscript as it comes to us is extremely mutilated and fragmented.21
Women are perhaps the most callous in dealing with litterae. In Congreve’s The Way of the World, women find themselves “persecuted with letters” of admirers. Millamant candidly admits that she utilizes them “to pin up one’s hair.” Not, of course, with all letters. “Only with those in verse. . . . I never pin up my hair with prose. I fancy one’s hair would not curl if it were pinned up with prose. I think I tried it once.”22 In The Rivals, Sheridan similarly strikes this lighter tone but conveys nonetheless an equally somber message about the fate of the written word. At first the attitude of the young ladies in the play toward serious literature seems encouraging; the ladies insist on keeping heavy religious volumes in the bedroom. Unfortunately, the ladies do not want the books for moral or intellectual improvement. The books are meant to convince older relatives that the young ladies are properly concerned about serious moral issues; even more important, from the young ladies’ point of view, is the fact that the heavy books provide a steady supply of curling papers and a place to press wrinkled hairnets.
Lucy tells her mistress that one of the big books is “only The Whole Duty of Man where I press a few blonds, ma’am.” The juxtaposition of the limiting adjective only with so large and weighty a subject prepares the audience somewhat for the discovery that the whole duty of man, in this case, is simply to smooth ladies’ hairnets. When Lydia asks Lucy to “leave Fordyce’s Sermons open on the table” before visitors arrive, Lucy replies, “O burn it, ma’am! the hairdresser has torn away as far as Proper Pride.”23 One doubts that pride is in any sense “proper”; and certainly the reference here to pride is indeed a two-edged blade. Most obviously, it cuts at the ladies’ pride in their appearance, since they have allowed their hairdresser to use the pages of a serious religious work for the frivolous purpose of improving their coiffures. But the reference to pride is also intended to stigmatize the pride of authors who smugly suppose that their words will ever meet with anything approaching the thought and consideration that the authors themselves accorded them.
Moreover, such mutilation of authors is intended to be directed at hosts of such writers. At the end of his “Defense of Satire,” Horace threatens, “If you aren’t tolerant . . . a great host of poets—for we are more than half the world—shall come to my rescue and, like the Jews, we will compel you to join our crowd.”24 This view of the author as simply one of an enormous flock or shoal robs him of the heroic individualism and the superhuman solitary mystique accorded him by the romantics and makes him seem very ordinary—merely one carton in a carload. Such an author is no longer a separate entity inspired by a private muse, but rather one member of a herd that foolishly floods the world with more words than the world can (or ought to) absorb. Voltaire makes the same point in Candide (1759), when the naive Candide inquires of an abbé about dramatic productions in France:
“Pray, sir, . . . how many theatrical pieces have you in France?”
“Five or six thousand,” replied the other.
“Indeed! That is a great number,” said Candide, “but how many good ones may there be?”
“About fifteen or sixteen.”25
Pope reduces the concept of overproduction to absurdity in his satiric mock manual, the Peri Bathous (1727). His scholarly mouthpiece, Martinus Scriblerus, provides a how-to handbook for the writing of bad verse and includes several “recipes” for cooking up plays and epics into the bargain. The implication is that there are so many cooks about (as well as poets), that everything commonplace should be done by trivial rules and instructions. Needless to say, the broth is spoiled—and so is the poetry.
Satirists continued throughout the Renaissance to assault the pride of authors with these combinations of ideas: first, that there are too many authors producing too many works; and second, that most of the works have little value beyond that of the paper on which they are printed. Indeed, the Renaissance made a point of celebrating the rise of authors and nationalistic pride. And the printing press certainly made works available—in excess. That was surely the topic satirists more and more came to stress during the later Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In making their case, satirists frequently turned scatological and satirically tart. For example, Quevedo’s The Life of the Great Rascal (“The Swindler” or El Buscón) contains this proclamation: “AND CONSIDERING the vast harvest of roundelays, songs, and sonnets there had been these fertile years WE DO ORDAIN that all bundles of them found to be unsuitable for grocers’ shops, be placed in privies without further appeal.”26 Naturally, the toilet became a favorite locale for the satirists; throughout the ages, separate sheets of paper obviously could be made to serve—to pun a little—a “fundamental” purpose in the outhouse. And furthermore, satirists love nothing better than to shock the audience into attention by flinging about some element of filth. This tradition is very old.
Catullus long ago debunked the writings of the would-be litterateur Volusius as cacata charta,—“shit paper.” Aretino similarly dedicates his Dialogues to his monkey, reminding the reader that monkeys and great lords look much alike, and expects the worst, as he does of any work fawningly and obsequiously dedicated to some “great person.” He candidly tells his monkey: “How, my Supreme Highness Bagattino (for that is how one addresses great lords who are worthy of such dignity as you), take these pages of mine and tear them up, for great lords not only tear up the pages dedicated to them but even wipe themselves with them, as I almost didn’t tell you.” Jonathan Swift consigned most proliferating works directly “to a Jakes, or an Oven.”27 Needless to say, the satirist implies that the toilet is precisely the place for wretched, stinking, fifth-rate productions (or “excretions”) of mundane, bathetic writers.
Dryden, in “MacFlecknoe,” scores the Augustan point that was frequently put forward: modern authors fill the world with overwriting and bad taste. He perfectly pictured what happens to “neglected authors”; their pages have inevitably (and deservedly) become “Martyrs of Pies and Reliques of the Bum.” And indeed, a great tidal flow of bad writing purportedly threatens the life of London society. Writings are everywhere: “Loads of Sh—— almost choakt the way.”28 Here the satirist portrays the complete devaluation of Shadwell’s writings, while the punning double entendre on sh—— reduces the man to excrement. Not only does the public ignore the work itself while using its pages in nonaesthetic ways, but also the works themselves are devalued simply because of the vast numbers of writings that have inundated society. The number of filthy pages is portrayed as being so great in London’s streets that Shadwell’s “imperial” train can barely push through the detritus.
Alexander Pope’s Dunciad simply enlarges that magnification of refuse. In book 4, after “Fame’s posterior Trumpet [is] blown,” a vast herd of dunces mechanically assembles:
The gath’ring number, as it moves along,
Involves a vast involuntary throng.
There march’d the bard and blockhead, side by side,
Who rhym’d for hire, and patroniz’d for pride.29
More and more fools join the throng until “crowds on crowds around the Goddess press, / Each eager to present the first Address.” When the goddess calls for pedants, “Thick and more thick the black blockade extends, / A hundred head of Aristotle’s friends.” Finally, of course, so many fools glut the world with so many foolish words that Genesis is reenacted in reverse, the world is uncreated in a monumental satiric catastrophe, and “Chaos! is restor’d; / And Universal Darkness buries All.”30
Matthew Hodgart asserts that the “basic technique of the satirist is reduction: the degradation or devaluation of the victim by reducing his size and dignity.”31 Thus, when a character in satire is described in terms usually reserved for portraying an animal, vegetable, mineral, machine, or madman, the character immediately relinquishes his human dignity and declines toward the level of the metaphor with which he has been associated. Critics frequently term such a satiric strategy meiosis, or “diminution” and “belittling.”32 Joseph Bentley terms this phenomenon “semantic gravitation,” whereby words and images “sink” a character:
A total, or unselective, image of an object would include all known facts about it—high . . . as well as low . . . —and the value attached to the image would . . . accord with its total reality. [Yet usually] unfavorable aspects of [an] image are suppressed . . . the resulting image . . . thereby [being] raised in value. Semantic gravitation [halts] the process of suppression . . . upon which high values depend. Satire . . . is . . . the technique of distorting reality by bringing previously excluded reality back into the picture.33
It might not be true that satire merely “reduces” by restoring “reality” or revealing the “whole picture,” but satire certainly does diminish by seasoning liberally with degrading figures, with depressants. Surely the artist is most violently debunked when he and his writings are deemed synonymous with food, drug, and universal vacuity. That is one of the satirist’s trump cards in his hand that contains, after all, many wonderful dirty tricks.
And what of twentieth-century satire? The modern satirist, like his predecessor, emphasizes the short life and inglorious fate of the written word. Some of what the modern satirist has to say on the subject sounds very familiar: an indifferent public remains unimpressed by the written word but finds practical uses for the paper on which it is written. In Orwell’s 1984, for example, posters are used to wrap sausages, just as poems and hack compositions were so employed for centuries in the satiric tradition. If anything, the deliberate destruction of words is exacerbated and augmented. In Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, the glut of writing that Augustan authors anticipated and dreaded has become so enormous that most words must be destroyed so that the pages on which they are printed can be recycled to make room for still more composition. In Libertyville, Georgia, trucks and trains bring in hundreds of tons of unwanted printed material every day so that old newspapers, magazines, and books can be pulped to make new paper. Reminiscent of Shadwell’s paper-choked coronation route, Libertyville has “pieces of books and magazines and so on blowing all over town.” In fact, there are so many books in Libertyville that “they used books for toilet paper in the jail.”34
In addition, however, following the apocalyptic rumblings frequently sounded in earlier satire, particularly in the Dunciad, the modern satirist more strongly suggests the possibility of demolition, of massive, and even universal, destruction. To this he adds a new note: the word is not merely a victim of indifference or of overproduction; it is itself under direct attack. New, more absolute tyrannies are envisioned (and made plausible by modern history of the likes of Hitler and Stalin). Satirists throughout the ages have complained that careless poets or mindless scholars misuse words so that the life of language is endangered, but modern satirists frequently foretell that the word will fall victim to some deliberate or willful scheme to destroy it entirely. Librarians, authors, and especially books themselves are singled out for attack by the ruthless street gangs of the future in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. And in Animal Farm, the bureaucracy inevitably deals with words—but only so that they might be shredded and destroyed: “Pigs had to expend enormous labours every day upon mysterious things called ‘files,’ ‘reports,’ ‘minutes,’ and ‘memoranda.’ These were large sheets of paper which had to be closely covered with writing, and as soon as they were covered they were burnt in the furnace.”35
Like so much sawdust or so many splinters of wood, words here survive only long enough to be gathered in piles and incinerated. In earlier satires, words were destroyed because the material the words were written on seemed more important than the words themselves. But in Animal Farm, words are decimated because they are words; files and reports do not get consigned to the furnace because paper seems potentially dangerous in itself.
The fate of the word in such a socialistic, totalitarian state mirrors the fate of the worker. Both exist solely for the benefit of the government and its leaders; neither has value beyond an immediate utilitarian purpose; and both are expendable. In 1984 the destruction of words (and of men) continues, if anything, revealing more forethought and greater selectivity. Just as in Animal Farm, records are destroyed or altered in accord with current government policy, and the words are regarded as tools of the state rather than as reflections of truth or beauty. But here the government plans to eliminate the threat of rebellion by eliminating words that would enable people even to think about rebellion. Syme, who works on adjectives in the eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary, explains the process simply: “We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.”36 Such official alteration of records and the transformation of truth should remind one of recent Soviet practice in the writing of history and of the ancient Roman habit of abolitio memoriae: those who offended the Senate were voted into oblivion with a decree ordering the destruction of all statues, monuments, or historic, civic, and private references to them. Names, people, concepts, words disappear suddenly and totally, overnight, like the victims in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1941), or they are whisked away and convicted, absurdly, of they know not what, and executed, like Kafka’s K in The Trial (1924).
Occasionally such destruction is merely a mild irony, as in Günter Grass’s The Meeting at Telgte, in which a congregation of authors at a writers’ conference aspires to devise a manifesto for peace, desiring to preserve their own compositions as emblematic of that which is truly German: “For . . . each of our rhymes, provided our spirit has fashioned it from life, will mingle with eternity.”37 Yet the novel concludes with their dream demolished, when the inn in which they meet, together with all their assortment of books, papers, and manuscripts, is consumed by fire.
Probably one of the seminal and most telling ways in which authors are debunked is achieved by a more intimate strategy. The author himself, his first-person persona, or his central protagonist is exposed and incriminated by what he says and does. Horace the satirist is interrupted by Davus, his own slave, who chastizes and lampoons Horace for committing a whole host of follies and vices.38 In the Satyricon, Petronius’s poet Eumolpus is revealed as a crazed artiste, a dull babbler of verses, but also as a vicious seducer of children; he is denuded by what he himself says and does. Petronius’s orators, Agamemnon and Menelaus, are in precisely the same case: they are cheap hangers-on, leeches at other men’s tables who nevertheless recite pious clichés about the general decline of virtue in the modern world. Lastly, Petronius’s narrator, Encolpius, the “author” of the piece, is slowly revealed to be no more than a low-life drifter, an escaped slave, a cheap adventurer, and a wanton homosexual. In Don Quixote, the “author” is belatedly discovered not to be Cervantes but one Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab “historian”; hence the Spanish author-editor must employ a stable boy to translate the work, which he then passes off as his own. Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver is author and reformer in Gulliver’s Travels, but he is discovered at the close to be a reclusive madman and misanthrope, one who at his best talks only to horses, inhabits a stable, and dines upon straw. Such authors, it is implied, are only to be trusted if we ourselves are mentally unfit.
The modern era opens with two superlative Russian pieces that dramatize the fitful and frenzied voices of two intellectuals gone awry: Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” (1835) and Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” (1864). Much writing in the twentieth century deliberately questions the integrity or sanity of its authors and writer figures. Such is the case with the inept “love song” composed by Eliot’s paralyzed Prufrock. And so it is with the two incompetent and neurotic psychiatrists impersonated by Thurber and White in Is Sex Necessary?, with the pathetically helpless writer of columns for the lovelorn in West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, with the learned but pathological sex maniac and nymph-chaser Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita, with the incompetent literary critic whose lunatic essays compose Borges’s Chronicles of Bustos Domecq. In short, key literary figures are analyzed and their defects uncovered in numerous major works in our century: the crazed sadistic teacher in Ionesco’s The Lesson; the incompetent newspaper reporters in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop; the literary historian Roquentin who arrives at an absurdist intellectual impasse in Sartre’s La Nausée; the effete and disillusioned poet Hugh Selwyn Mauberley who comes to grief in our society in Pound’s poetic sequence; and the aging and distinguished novelist Gustave von Aschenbach who comes apart at the seams while on an Italian holiday excursion in Mann’s Death in Venice. These writers simply do not have the values, the abilities, or the self-awareness and self-regulation to hold themselves together.
Not only, however, are individual artists portrayed in various stages of decadence or collapse. More devastatingly, a strong literary trend in our age deploys a savage and even cosmic irony, envisioning for the future regular “regression” toward some negative utopian state, in which mankind and his writings will be annihilated altogether. Such is the continuous theme of a number of novels of the future that have been termed “dystopias,” a genre particularly fruitful in the twentieth century. A fiction might simply portray the destruction of a city, a society, or of all men and the planet, as in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts (1936), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), “Kilgore Trout’s” Venus on the Half-Shell (1974), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1963), Norman Mailer’s “The Last Night: A Story” (1962).39
Even when man is not destroyed completely, there is little cause to celebrate. For at these times, such fiction portrays a future of incessant warfare, as in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), John Hawkes’s The Cannibal (1949), and Karl Kraus’s monumental work The Last Days of Mankind (1922). Or, still more darkly, the future includes cannibalism as in Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed (1962) and in Barry Hannah’s “Eating Wife and Friends” in Airships (1978). Sometimes the future includes prefrontal lobotomies for thinking men; see Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Eugene Zamyatin’s We (1920). The possible total genocide by “purges” in the superstate are envisioned in works like Dobrica Cosič’s “Freedom.”40 The most insidious image for this totalitarian/destructive trend may lie in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), in which, in the new superstate, firemen are ceaselessly deployed to scour the state with flamethrowers, burning and destroying all books—and any readers of books as well. It comes almost as a relief when this entire civilization itself explodes, terminated in a massive bombing attack. Such an intrepid rapine against books is at its most cosmic and debonair in Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1971), in which, in the future, “the Great Collapse” occurs, caused by a “Hartian Agent” from “the third moon of Uranus”: “Unwittingly brought back to Earth by an early expedition, the Hartian Agent set off a chain reaction and paper disintegrated around the globe.”41 Ironically enough, when a bathtub manuscript is relocated, excavated in such an age, we learn that man had gotten to such a state of spying and deceit, that written documents had already ceased to make any sense or pertain to any truth: writing and man himself have become magnificently superfluous.
Here we have approached the furthest reaches of irony against the pride of authors: what you have written will be exterminated, and indeed man himself, together with all his petty pride, is doomed to desecration and dissolution. Satirists in the twentieth century—perhaps with reason—have been especially fond of promoting that destructive vision. But they are hardly alone, for satirists have always implied that affairs are fatally scheduled to get worse. Evils and corruptions, Jonathan Swift remarked in an issue of The Examiner, should be discovered to posterity.
I should be glad the Authors Names were conveyed to future Times along with their Actions. For, although the present Age may understand well enough the little Hints we give, the Parallels we draw, and the Characters we describe; yet this will all be lost to the next. However, if these Papers, reduced to a more durable Form, should happen to live until our Grandchildren be Men; I hope they may have Curiosity to consult Annals, and . . . find out.42
Swift compellingly implies that his papers will not survive—even for several generations. For the satirist assumes that human behavior coerces history to degenerate; and a popular image with a great satirist like Swift postulates that history will prove cyclical, a wheel of fortune that, from the satirist’s point of view, forever turns around—inevitably downward. Swift likes the image of the Gothic invasion—a recurrent cataclysm inflicted upon civilization by the invasion of barbarian hordes.
Censure, and Pedantry, and Pride,
Numberless Nations, stretching far and wide,
Shall (I foresee it) soon with Gothick swarms come forth
From ignorance’s Universal North,
And with blind Rage break all this peaceful Government.43
Whose pride of place can then withstand such a tide? Indeed, the imagery of the Goths and Barbarians as imminent invaders and destroyers is very similar to the repeated image of books being reduced to a tissue of foolscap, tattered wrappers, and toilet paper: all these depict civilization coming apart at the seams, culture being torn into shreds, the virtual shards and “fragments” that T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land” had wistfully “shored against [his] ruins.” There cannot be any more potent antidote to pride than that.