5
As we have seen, the satiric/comic artist deliberately seeks to undercut conventional audience expectations. His fictions demolish heroes and even pervert ideas of the noteworthy author and his enduring reputation. The satirist’s implication, of course, is quite simple: his cynical vision proposes that in our defective society heroism is tainted or bogus and in our deteriorating era the pious aims, exalted motives, and self-congratulatory claims of artists are at best pompous and misguided, at worst entirely spurious. Doubtless we get the kinds of flaws and folderol that we deserve. Simply put, the satiric author will not permit us to continue to float securely upon a cloud of virtuous platitudes and grandiloquent delusions.
Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised to learn that the satirist similarly undercuts traditional ideas of staid diction, consistent or comely style, and lucid language. Overall, satiric plots regularly dramatize the triumph of folly or vice. Satiric form is most commonly anticlimactic, foreshortened, perplexing, defective—ending unsatisfactorily.1 Hence the audience distinctly feels the absence of resolution and catharsis and is therefore not infrequently perplexed, frustrated, and let down. As such a recipe for disappointment, satire is that ancient lanx satura (literally a “medley,” or “farrago,” a mixed dish of foods), a provender so distasteful and cluttered that it causes aesthetic heartburn or outright indigestion.2
All this clutter and disarray results from the fact that the satiric artist renders an “imitation” of the excessive, the imperfect, and the negative; his work may often be laughable and diverting, but it is always somehow discomforting—providing not merely Dickensian M’Choakumchild, but M’Choakumeverybody. Hence, as a necessary part of such an imitation, the satirist, like the parasite, attaches himself to virtually any literary form or forms.3 And this kind of inclusive imitation specifically applies to language, to thought, and to style.4 The satirist frequently imitates the ignorant man; just as he can imitate faulty action, so can he also imitate the action of the faulty imitation.5 And he accomplishes these imitations of the defective with a simulated naïveté that requires, in fact, considerable artistry. In such a manner, we might say that Lucian creates a historian who writes a very poor and incredible Vera Historia; Horace (in Satire 1.5) composes a “newsletter” so poorly managed that it produces not one single piece of important news. Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis and Byron’s Vision of Judgement are poorly managed formal literary apotheoses; Chaucer’s Sir Topas is very bad metrical romance. Similarly, Gay writes wretched pastorals and dislocated opera; Swift composes poor philosophical treatises and turgid astrological predictions; Dedekind (in the Grobianus) devises a miserable manual of human conduct; Lytton Strachey (in Queen Victoria) produces commonplace celebratory biography; and Nathanael West generates in Miss Lonelyhearts a monumentally incompetent writer of advice columns for the lovelorn.
Needless to say, many readers and critics have taken the satirist at his word, and have presumed that the satirist is the master of bad style, disjointed structure, corrupted thought. Paradoxically—in spite of the fact that most critics do not think so—satirists are normally delighted if their debilitating imitative romances, novels, or treatises are taken for the real thing. Amusingly, Jonathan Swift produced in “A Famous Prediction of Merlin” (1709) a black-letter “prophecy,” supposedly printed in 1530, that indirectly advised Queen Anne to marry. Swift would have been, I am convinced, perfectly content to have learned that this imposture deceived Dr. Johnson and came to be included, later in the eighteenth century, in the Typographical Antiquities of the British nation.6 If the reader misunderstands the satirist so far, then the satirist has demonstrably perfected his negative utopia and has imitated very well indeed. Such readers (or misreaders) are members of the vulgar “mob,” excluded from participation in the long tradition of satiric imitation; they respond inadequately to the satirist’s art and become at a stroke inherent parts, inhabitants, of the negative utopia the satirist pictures.7
Recently, for instance, a critic bitterly complained that Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was “intolerably sentimental.” Both Heller and Yossarian, he believes, emotionally overrespond and fail ultimately to use reason.8 Yet we might well inquire why one must apply the standards of reason to Catch-22’s world at all, since the novel not only zestfully delineates warfare’s universal irrationality but also mimics in its language and thought the same irrationality. Who can lay down laws and proclaim that the satiric author cannot fashion whatever story and devise whatever linguistic surface he desires?
For the satirist is concerned with the perfection of his imitation; he is “maker” of types of perfected falsehood, the constructor of the ideally inept. It is not his business either, as artist, to provide maps, telegrams, explanations, cartes d’entrée. Like Evelyn Waugh in Edmund Wilson’s phrase, the typical satirist “never apologizes, never explains.”9 You must take his witty, mangled, ironic, creative art, or you must leave it alone. Naturally, the satirist is not entirely disappointed in his own powers, surely, if he discovers that his foolish audience mistakes his foolish imitation for grave reality; for the satirist’s imitation (and indictment) is precisely that something has gone wrong with contemporary manners, morals, and taste.
Obviously, the satirist’s production contains a strong element of playfulness and fun.10 Yet there is ever present in his pages a moiety as well of dreadful earnest. C.S. Lewis once observed that “it is a very old critical discovery that the imitation in art of unpleasing objects may be a pleasing imitation.”11 But the unpleasant remains the unpleasant still, and satire successfully commingles the comic and the gross into a kind of witty grotesque. Much literature and criticism has been mightily attracted to its crazy realm. And indeed, the monstrous and the far-fetched have always found a way of being particularly alluring to the satirist, and what is “indecorous” to pastoral or to tragedy is well suited to satire.
In this chapter, we are most concerned with the manipulation of language and style. For crippled language and turbulent style precisely mirror the defective world. “Wheresoever, manners, and fashions are corrupted, Language is. It imitates the publicke riot. The excesse of Feasts, and apparell, are the notes of a sick State; and wantonesse of language, of a sick mind.”12 Candidly, the satirist has an incredible ability to isolate the fleet, the fake, and the ephemeral in language within vast mausoleums. By so doing he merely seeks to outdo the prevalent outpourings of charlatans, humbuggers, and propagandists who placidly manipulate and cauterize language to further their ruthless, selfish, and destructive ends. Hence, the satirist’s imitative practice is much akin to the enshrinement of drivel in temples of marble and gold.13 What better way to preserve, display, shock, and expose the diseases of our works and our words?
In a demented fairy tale, entitled “The Peach in Brandy,” Horace Walpole tells of a stillborn fetus of a royal heir that is retained in a pickle jar. Alas, the archbishop mistakes it for a peach: “He gulped it all down at once without saying grace. God forgive him!” Thereupon the five-year-old princess cries out, “Mamma, mamma, the gentleman has eat my little brother.” The ambiguities of language here are rife: perhaps the archbishop should say grace before daring to eat a peach; but then, the assertion that he ate the baby “without saying grace” insanely implies that one could feast upon babies—if only one followed appropriate ritual observances first.14 Much the same observation about the stretches of language applies to the little girl’s announcing that the “gentleman” has eaten her brother; cannibalism, to be sure, puts a severe strain upon the common acceptation of the word gentleman.
The satirist is always busy shuffling and redefining our everyday words, dropping them nicely into a newer slot. Evelyn Waugh does this, for instance, with the words war and peace. Once, Wenlock Jakes, Waugh’s famous American reporter whose presence anywhere betokens the “news centre of the world,” was sent to cover a revolution in one of the Lowland Countries. By some slight accident, he arrived in the wrong nation. All was quiet, but he immediately cabled home a thousand words of “colour”:
Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny—and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution under way, just as Jakes had said. . . .
They gave Jakes the Nobel Peace Prize for his harrowing descriptions of the carnage.15
Even an orgy can serve as the occasion for dislocated meaning. On shipboard, Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow finds himself in the midst of an orgiastic party. People of all conceivable races, colors, and creeds are panting and plugging into random orifices; octogenerians as well as children spontaneously participate. One young woman wields “an enormous glass dildo inside which baby piranhas are swimming.” “A C-melody saxophone player has the bell of his instrument snuggled between the widespread thighs of a pretty matron”; he is playing “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” All this seems perfectly in order—except that the matron is wearing sunglasses: “Yes, sunglasses at night, this is some degenerate company Slothrop has fallen in with all right,” the author assures us. The orgy is commonplace, matter-of-fact, but sunglasses are avant-garde and “degenerate.”16
Commonly, the satirist dislocates his readership by dropping a solitary bolus of absurdity, into his paragraph. Such is Mark Twain’s strategy in this purple passage from “A Double-Barreled Detective Story”:
It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless wild things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the woodland; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary esophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God.17
Twain was always proud of that “esophagus”; he had thrown it up casually, and most of his readers had swallowed it down. He was particularly delighted, however, that two professorial types had written to inquire about it. Needless to say, of course, the entire passage is a tangle and a jangle of confusion: pendulous bushes of flowers in the “upper air,” wild animals visiting together up there, amazingly “deciduous” flowers, the “swooning atmosphere.” And hovering above them all, sound asleep upon a “motionless wing,” floateth a very humanoid esophagus. What we encounter, then, in this sleepy parodic dreamworld, is the sudden, lightning appearance of nonsense, or, if you will, of the comic grotesque.
The nonsense need not be restricted to single words or isolated occasions. Particularly interested in capturing that vapid bit of fashionable fluff—the popular hit song—Aldous Huxley describes a popular cabaret dance in the roaring twenties in Antic Hay:
They are playing that latest novelty from across the water, “What’s He to Hecuba?” Sweet, sweet and piercing, the saxophone pierced into the very bowels of compassion and tenderness, pierced like a revelation from heaven, pierced like the angel’s treacly dart into the holy Teresa’s quivering and ecstasiated flank. More ripely and roundly, with a kindly and less agonising voluptuousness, the ‘cello mediated those Mohammedan ecstasies that last, under the green palms of Paradise, six hundred inerrable years apiece. Into this charged atmosphere the violin admitted refreshing draughts of fresh air, cool and thin like the breath from a still damp squirt. And the piano hammered and rattled away unmindful of the sensibilities of other instruments, and banged away all the time reminding everyone concerned, in a thoroughly business-like way, that this was a cabaret where people came to dance the fox-trot; not a baroque church for female saints to go into ecstasies in, not a mild, happy valley of tumbling houris.
At each recurrence of the refrain the four negroes of the orchestra, or at least the three of them who played with their hands alone—for the saxophonist always blew at this point with a redoubled sweetness, enriching the passage with a warbling contrapuntal soliloquy that fairly wrung the entrails and transported the pierced heart—broke into melancholy and drawling song:
What’s he to Hecuba?
Nothing at all.
That’s why there’ll be no wedding on Wednesday week
Way down in old Bengal.
“What unspeakable sadness,” said Gumbril, as he stepped, stepped, stepped through the intricacies of the trot.18
Here is amassed a gorgeous melee and cacophony of image and sound: the Christian saint, the Mohammedan paradise, and the Indian song; the instruments of “compassion and tenderness” juxtaposed with a “hammering,” “rattling,” and “banging” piano; ecstasy and sweetness counterpointing the businesslike mechanical stepping of dancers to the fox-trot. The vocabulary, too, provides a miasma of conflicting dictions; that which is “meditated,” “warbling,” “quivering,” and “ecstasiated,” somehow affecting the “bowels,” the “entrails,” “the flank,”—all wonderfully “transporting the pierced heart” to some indeterminate destination.19
But the song’s refrain itself properly deserves most of our attention. It is a typical “popular” lyric, concerned, as so many pop tunes are, with the failures of everyday love. Still, there are more serious matters. The metrics are uneven, even violently askew (as in the third line). And, we might logically want to know, if Hecuba is wholeheartedly uninterested in the young gentleman, why has a wedding been scheduled in the first place? There is, of course, no answer. But most important, to be sure, is Huxley’s allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in this idle ditty.20 The player, in reciting the tale of the death of Priam at the hands of Pyrrhus and of the conflagration of Troy, was actually able, assimilating Hecuba’s point of view, to blanch and to weep; Hamlet later chastizes himself for responding less fully, although Hamlet has the actual “motive and cue for action.” Seen in this light, the popular jazz song contains a still-greater plethora of confused motives and ideas. Shakespeare’s actor at least sympathizes with the downfall of a major culture; Huxley’s dancers and blackamoors can only confuse the epical and the tragic with the trite modern tango of the She loves me, she loves me not. Like Eliot in “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” Huxley by this amalgam reveals that noble suffering and passion (in the tradition of, say, Agamemnon and Christ) have been eroded, drained of significance, trivialized. Such a fox-trotting monkey-culture shuffles without motive among the ashes and ruins of a once-meaningful civilization. The wretched song is nothing less than a broken farewell to the past.
Petronius, too, is capable of ringing changes upon a conventional scene—the patching-up of a love-quarrel between two jealous homosexual contenders for the favors of the boy Giton. The scene commences, as might be expected, with melodramatic fervor:
With the tears streaming down my face, I begged Eumolpus to make his peace with me too. After all, I reminded him, it was simply not in the power of a lover to master his transports of jealousy. For my part, I solemnly promised neither to say nor do anything in future which could possibly give him offense. Only let him, as a poet, that most humane of all humane vocations, cure himself of his scabrous anger, yes, efface even the scars of it from his mind. “Reflect,” I cried, warming to the occasion, “how on the rough barren uplands, the winter snows lie late and long. But where the land, tamed by human love, glisters beneath the plow, the frost falls light and vanishes away in the twinkling of an eye. So too with the anger in our hearts; it strikes deep where the spirit is harsh and gross, but glances lightly away from a civilized mind.”21
The argument has the clarity of mild sludge: I cannot (nor can anyone) control my jealous rage; I will, however, promise “solemnly” hereafter to control my jealous rage; and you must control your jealous rage. Then follows what we normally designate as the “epic simile,” reduced and made Farmer Brown humble. At first glance, the analogy appears lucid enough: snow is like anger; both fall heavily upon barren highlands; yet neither is encountered in cultivated human valleys.
But there are several difficulties with this comparison. First, anger is usually equated with heat, not with cold. Moreover, snow always falls more heavily in the uplands, whether human cultivation exists in the lowlands or not. Further, snow does occasionally fall heavily upon the lowlands. And finally, anger may, but snow does not necessarily, “strike deep” upon the hill country. For a moment, the falling snow, the anger, and the sharp plow all confusedly interfuse, and the elaborate figure trembles and shakes. The speaker is, after all, an emotional fairy, who moves from tears to elaborate discourse in a matter of seconds; he is the would-be orator, “warming to the occasion,” as he says, the rhapsodic rhetorician delighting in cliché and debate. Whatever the stimulus, the response is only partially rational and definitely risible.
Most of the passages cited represent complex amalgamations (and parodies) of a host of literary kinds: back-to-nature primitivism, the detective story, the quest romance, the popular song, the melodramatic lover’s quarrel, the oratorical disquisition. It should remind us that satire is never so happy as when it is savaging a half-dozen genres. Northrop Frye calls our attention to the fact that the ironic or satiric mode represents “the literature of experience”; this mode is one of the last to fully mature in any civilization. Consequently, it is an extremely self-conscious and aesthetic mode, borrowing from all the past literary kinds, mocking conventions, systems of reasoning, and aesthetic forms themselves.22 Thereby it becomes a sophisticated, learned, and cultural literary kind. It delights in flights of ratiocination or in soaring aesthetic constructs that somehow come tumbling to the ground. The analyses and pronouncements of the “formal” literary critic and raisonneur in The Pooh Perplex provide a perfect example: “what, in essence, is the end purpose, the teleology, of poetry or poesis? It is, of course, to take the building blocks of language, combined with the glue or mortar of experience, and to join them in whole meaningful structures which, upon noesis on the part of the trained critic, prove analyzable or decomposable into their constituent elements.”23 This passage is amusing because it jumbles together the vocabulary of Aristotelian philosophy, contractor’s cement, and children’s glue. The mixture is awful, but it sticks. Mumbled and patched together are the vocabularies of infant and professional. And of course, the trajectory of such a passage’s “thought” helplessly progresses from compilation to decomposition.
Upon occasion (though seldom enough, alas) such a reductive and prescriptive philomath will even concede that his “difficult” thoughts and mathematical conceptions travel at a goodly pace—beyond his own ken. Such is the case with the “hypothecator” at one point in Swift’s Tale of a Tub: “The present Argument is the most abstracted that ever I engaged in, it strains my Faculties to their highest Stretch; and I desire the Reader to attend with utmost Perpensity; For, I now proceed to unravel this knotty Point.”24 What follows is an apogee, a brace of asterisks, a desunt nonnulla. But your average philosophaster stumbles along, never once conceding his learned ineptitude.
The satirist most often creates a persona who is frantic with ideas and activity—one who wonderfully dramatizes the Chaucerian concept of “bisinesse,” a kind of empty officiousness and hyperefficiency, what Dryden designates as “Pangs without birth, and fruitless Industry.” E.M. Forster observes that “obviously a god is hidden in Tristram Shandy, his name is Muddle. . . . Muddle is almost incarnate.” Delightful and true as this observation is, we must not forget for one moment that muddle bears two faces, the false face of laughable folly, as well as the grim satanic mask of vice. Thus Henry James speaks with awe about an evil power in the universe, what he calls “the constant force that makes for muddlement.”25 The satirist dramatizes such a fuddled and bemuddled archetype.
Updating Bacon in her chapter on the “idols of the laboratory,” Susanne Langer analyzes the failures of the social sciences through undue emphasis upon mathematizing, physicalizing, methodologizing, objectifying their data. But the greatest sin among the infant sciences remains their susceptibility to jargon—the creating of a “language which is more technical than the ideas it serves to express.”26 Undoubtedly, satirists have known this for centuries and have provided literature with hundreds of pompous buffoons and dangerous lunatics spouting their own particular jargon—divines, physicians, lawyers, scientific projectors.27 The twentieth century cheerfully adds psychologists, sociologists, economists, Freudians, Marxists, educators, and literary critics to the heap.
Let us examine the simplicity and diversity of a number of such busy voices in the satiric tradition. We will commence with the “fools,” and then move on to more complex, even demonic, types. First, let us consider the anonymous naïf in the prologue to Lazarillo de Tormes, the first picaresque novel (1554):
I think it fitting that anything so outstanding—perhaps never before heard of nor seen—should come to the attention of many and not be buried in the tomb of oblivion, for it is possible that somebody who reads of it may discover something there to please him, and those who do not make too profound a scrutiny may be entertained.
And concerning this idea, Pliny says that every book, no matter how bad it may be, may contain something of profit. In the first place, all men’s tastes are not the same; what one person eats ruins another. And so we see that many things held by some to be of little worth are not so regarded by others. My point is simply that nothing should be lost or ruined; on the contrary, if a thing is not too loathsome, it ought to be imparted to everybody, especially since something fruitful may be got from it, and that without any harm.28
This passage accomplishes a full circle of apologetics. The author proposes at once that his work is “outstanding,” yet he incessantly thereafter proffers apologiae and the “humility topos” as counterpoint: a “few,” and “somebody” (who doesn’t scrutinize too carefully), might find it entertaining. People “may” and possibly might find a work pleasing. Thus, such a work cannot “ruin” everyone. Therefore (and here the logic marvelously breaks down), if a work is not too hideous, it should be imposed upon everyone—particularly since it is harmless. The remainder of the prologue is of a piece—absurd, tautological, diligent, and inane. Nothing can halt the incessant stream of broken logic that carries all before it, like a flood. The speaker’s is an idiot voice of the apologetic, the aggressive, preface, of a kind that we encounter all too often: solipsism über alles, what Keats called the “Words-worthian sublime.”
A similar case of incredible exaggeration occurs in the only instance extant of a cante-fable. The supposed knight Aucassin, imprisoned by his intransigent father, laments his more-than-divine Nicolette, filling his isolated cell with “wailing” and moan:
Nicolette, white lily-flow’r,
Sweetest lady found in bow’r;
Sweet as grape that brimmeth up
Sweetness in the spiced cup.
On a day this chanced to you;
Out of Limousin there drew
One, a pilgrim, sore adread,
Lay in pain upon his bed,
Tossed, and took with fear his breath,
Very dolent, near to death.
Then you entered, pure and white,
Softly to the sick man’s sight,
Raised the train that swept adown,
Raised the ermine-bordered gown
Raised the smock, and bared to him
Daintily each lovely limb.
Then a wonderous thing befell,
Straight he rose up sound and well,
Left his bed, took cross in hand,
Sought again his own dear land.
Lily-flow’r, so white, so sweet,
Fair the faring of thy feet,
Fair thy laughter, fair thy speech,
Fair our playing each with each.
Sweet thy kisses, soft thy touch,
All must love thee over much.29
As medieval plaint, this passage is utterly astounding. Its matter is pilfered from tales of saints and martyrs, telling of the “miracle cure” of a Christian pilgrim. But the “sickened” pilgrim is healed by exposure to the holy relics, in this case, the female body. Whatever the stretch of imagination, this tale is sacrilegiously outrageous and is somehow to be perceived as Aucassin’s “complaint.” As the instigator of a new religion, he alone conceives of the virtue of Nicolette as a woman of holy parts. For a moment we are shocked by the blatancy of this sacrilege; but upon second thought concerning such a spoof on the religious cult of women, we are richly rewarded and amused.
To turn from the supposedly sublime to the blatantly ridiculous, here is Mikhail Zoschenko describing the insignificant, the everyday, the inane. His own “voice” mimics this material, and his style becomes casual, childish, trivializing:
Here’s an incident that happened in Arzamas. As it now turns out, there’s a felt factory there. . . .
Here’s what happened in that factory.
During their lunch hour five girls got together and started fooling around and babbling all kinds of stuff and nonsense. Well, naturally—that’s the way young girls are. They have just finished working. Now they’re having a break. And, of course, they felt like joking a little, laughing, and flirting.
Besides, they are not professors, dried-up pedants, interested only in things like integrals and so on. They are simply the most ordinary kind of girls, from eighteen to twenty years old.
So that their conversation was rather of a frivolous nature than possessing a scientific foundation.
In short, they were discussing the boys they liked and which one each of them would like to marry.
There’s nothing bad about that. Why not talk about it? The more so that it was their lunch hour. And even more so that it was a splendid spring day. The end of February. The first, so to speak, awakening of nature. Sunshine. Madness in the air. Birds chirp-chirping. You feel light-hearted and joyous.30
Such prose reeks of the prosaic, the commonplace, the everyday mundane. There is no truck with intellectual or scientific or highfalutin stuff. There is never a touch of poetry—just plain, down-to-earth chirp-chirping. Such prose almost becomes soporific and idiotized. There are dozens of paragraphs and loads of minor digressions, and the syntax breaks down toward the close into mere sentence fragments. Here is an everyday joe, a writer of the people.
Zoshchenko clearly establishes this ethos, and it permits him to mock almost anyone who is the least bit serious, intellectual, businesslike, or official. He is for pikestaff-clear simplicity and naturalness. And who can dislike nature? Moreover, what Hugh McLean calls Zoshchenko’s artistic method—“a combination of irony, ambiguity, and camouflage”—stood him in good stead.31 He published for some twenty-five years under the Soviet regime before he was “officially” denounced, and even after that, he managed to survive. His double-talk and mock idiocy prevailed.
Equally successful in finding a unique voice is Ezra Pound’s “Portrait d’une femme.” Pound had been toying for a number of years with personae, and this quiet, denunciatory voice seems just right for the occasion. The lady, like Victorian London itself, has become a veritable museum of assorted imperial spars, snippets, savings, and wares:
Great minds have sought you—lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind—with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.32
One finds the seeming contradictions of content and style at once striking. In effect, the poem constitutes a scathing denunciation of a woman as tirelessly second-rate; and if anything, it gains in potency exactly because what is close to invective and curse is delivered in restrained and measured tonelessness. That such things could be said, and said with an aloofness that borders upon indifference, is the source of the poem’s impact. And it almost gives us a foretaste of the heartless center of twentieth-century thought and approach: cold and calculating “analysis.” Yet in the poem, this works for the good, for the central imagery throughout is of a floating and emasculated Sargasso Sea of tidbits and pieces. Therefore the speaker himself is incriminate and, in effect, “belongs.” He too is but one further exhausted ware and oddment fished from an emotionless sea; his tired and satiated listlessness is but one further “trophy” awash and paid to her in fee. The poem is powerfully conceived, faultlessly realized. The voice of its satirist/victim is one of its achievements.
One of our finest modern ironists, Henry James, felt powerfully that he lived in a decadent, materialistic era. “The condition of [the English upper class],” he once affirmed, “seems to me to be in many ways very much the same rotten and collapsible one as that of the French aristocracy before the revolution—minus cleverness and conversation; or perhaps it’s more like the heavy, congested and depraved Roman world upon which the barbarians came down.” James felt this particularly acutely about the weekend at the country house: “The gilded bondage of the country house becomes onerous as one grows older, and then the waste of time in vain sitting and strolling about is a gruesome thought in the face of what one still wants to do with one’s remnant of existence.”33 What, then, are we to make of James’s specifically country-house novel, The Sacred Fount? Critics are not certain. Yet in this novel, Newmarch definitely is just such a country house. Vapid partyings, strollings, and smokings and the shadow of random liaisons and covert, polite fornications compose the totality of bland and banal aristocratic English life. But the sights are perceived through the eyes of an intellectual idealist, a narrator whose feverish, plodding, near-hallucinatory quest for secret “enchantments” and magical “systems” of fairy-tale bewitchments allows us to see through the glass of Newmarch’s triflings, but darkly. His fantastic imaginings and almost Herculean ratiocinations becloud the scene of the country house, casting upon it the glitter of the Arabian Nights somehow interfused with the deadly tractates of Kant or Leibnitz. James’s “torch of consciousness” enlightens (and indeed enflames) everything but the truth: the Newmarch of modern barbarians and their way of life are gratuitously mechanical, maudlin, and mindless; and such a culture is deadly, unconscious, and effete.
The narrator met Gilbert Long at the outset of the long weekend, and the narrator’s intuited sense that Long has vastly improved in his intellect and acuity launches the spinning of an enormous cobweb of a system to explain Long’s newfound sensitivity by attributing it to a fresh liaison. Moreover, the narrator comes to believe that Long is conscious of this new power; for the narrator, in fact, all events vibrate with monumental significance. Thus, on many occasions, he interprets the meaning of a look, of a receding back as someone leaves a room, and even of the “fixed expressiveness” of someone he cannot see.
We long to actually hear the conversation of this supposedly rejuvenated guest, although we only encounter people through the cerebral fog of the narrator’s analyses, perceptions, and hypothecations. At last, however, more than midway through the novel, we are given a summary of the presumably astute after-dinner discourse between the narrator and Long. We have been waiting for it, with baited breath and exacerbated anticipation.
I fear I can do little justice to the pleasant suppressed tumult of impression and reflection that, on my part, our ten minutes together produced. The elements that mingled in it scarce admit of discrimination. It was still more than previously a deep sense of being justified. My interlocutor was for those ten minutes immeasurably superior—superior, I mean, to himself—and he couldn’t possibly have become so save through the relation I had so patiently tracked. He faced me there with another light than his own, spoke with another sound, thought with another ease and understood with another ear. I should put it that what came up between us was the mere things of the occasion, were it not for the fine point to which, in my view, the things of the occasion had been brought. While our eyes, at all events, on either side, met serenely, and our talk, dealing with the idea, dealing with the extraordinary special charm, of the social day now deepening to its end, touched our companions successively, touched the manner in which this one and that had happened to be predominantly a part of that charm; while such were our immediate conditions I wondered of course if he had not, just as consciously and essentially as I, quite another business in mind. It was not indeed that our allusion to the other business would not have been wholly undiscoverable by a third person.
So far as it took place it was of a “subtlety,” as we used to say at New-march, in relation to which the common register of that pressure would have been, I fear, too old-fashioned a barometer.34
Here we have all the placid, egocentric, self-serving complaisance that we have come to expect from such a speaker. But what is amusingly anticlimactic is the topic of their conversation. They had been speaking, as usual, about the day’s “special” social charm. They had been speaking about each person present at Newmarch. They had been engaging, in short, in one further bout of idle chatter, vulgar and violent gossip, and boastful self-congratulation. Moreover, their minds race so furiously ahead with tattle and guesswork that they frankly do not listen to one another.
James manages to suggest in this tortuous novel with its insidious prose that the “sacred founts” of classical mythology are dry, that the days of magic and excitement have grown dark, and that the march of the barbarians has indeed come again. The final irony is that this narrator quests for a subtlety and a significance in civilized life that are no longer anywhere to be found; at the last, he himself has been drained of inspiration—at an empty fount. In romantic terms, James’s narrator, then, is an artist, without the beautiful. Thus, he is no meaningful artist at all. Despite his intense self-reflections, he lacks awareness and consciousness. The audience is expected to perceive many facets of what the narrator cannot.
In that sense, like all art, satiric art intends to broaden self-awareness. T.R. Edwards proposes that “though satirists understandably claim that they mean to reform the world by exposing its confessed vices, it seems more realistic to consider their art as descriptive drama, expressing the inner counter-workings of benevolence and malice, hope and despair, through which ethical self-consciousness defines itself.”35 The satirist’s creation of a host of languages and voices serves precisely to sharpen our awareness of logical, ethical, and aesthetic questions themselves.
We cannot do better than by concluding with a modern master of a whirligig of conflicting voices, Vladimir Nabokov. In his character of Humbert Humbert, Nabokov presents us with a virtual ferris wheel and Tilt-a-Whirl of conflicting attitudes and misguided schizophrenic selves. For at one time or another (and often simultaneously), Humbert portrays for us dozens of specific selves: the intellectual, the European of a genteel tradition, the artiste, the sensitive lover, the visionary, the confessor, the psychopath, and the vulgarian. Nabokov’s handsome ability to capture such a string of creatures and to allow us to perceive the myriad changes this character effects on language and style surely ought to impress us.
Somewhere beyond Bill’s shack an afterwork radio had begun singing of folly and fate, and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her gooseflesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D.—and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds . . . but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshiped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand péché radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I canceled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, alons vivre quelque part où nous ne serons jamais séparés; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn—even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.36
First, we must juggle our way among three time periods while reading this passage. The present-day “now” occurs in prison. The manuscript tells of Humbert’s rediscovery of Lolita in 1952, three years after he had lost her, this rencontre in the drab Eastern town of Coalmont. And there is the nontime of an eternal Lolita—the realm of the perennial nymphet—that is an unrecapturable past. Humbert has engaged in this elusive quest virtually all his life. We are jiggled and bumped in and out of these time spans, often with sudden hops and boggles.
Far more important are the mixed voices of Humbert the lover. First they exhibit a flickering tone of distaste for the banal reality of Coalmont and the “afterwork radio”; then, the repulsive “reality” of the pregnant Lolita, now age seventeen, with a flying detour to A.D. 2020. Then suddenly dawns the epiphany: he loved her. With this the voice launches into an echo of a standard romantic froth of the past, the alliteration of the “russet ravine,” the imagery of the “far wood” and the last solitary cricket. Humbert comes to an abrupt halt; for he did not cherish merely the euphoric dream. No, with an allusion to Verlaine’s verse (and the man’s love for Rimbaud), Humbert now perceives that he actually rejected selfishness and vice, which he “cancels,” as if they never existed. Then he bows rhetorically to a hypothetical hearing: the court can mock him, gag him, even “half-throttle” him (here the “half” is a considerable mathematical sacrifice); still he will “shout” of his love. Then he returns suddenly to the ugly present and the “polluted” Lolita. Then he is off, off again on allusive flight, reciting lines from Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen. As suddenly, he makes another devious but comical turn into an alley of concrete possibility: Where can they flee to? Ohio? A portion of Massachusetts? But the Humbertian mind rushes onward: “No matter.” Now we encounter the towering tragic language of a Shakespeare: even should she be rent and deracinated (and he is particularly sensitive to the corruption of her vital sexual parts), Humbert confesses, he would “go mad with tenderness” at the sight of her rather course face and the sound of her ugly voice.
With furious pyrotechnics, then, in a brief space we have been catapulted across oceans of thoughts, whimsies, romantic backwashes, and literary references and allusions; and we have been especially aflow in a tide of climaxes and reversals, tossed upon waves of rhetoric. And all this display merely lets Humbert assure his audience that he finally realizes that he truly loves Lolita and would “go mad with tenderness” even at the sight of her decaying carcass. Can we believe in this tender loving care? Had not Humbert come to Coalmont with his “chum,” expressly bent upon murder, mayhem, and revenge? Has he not taken a dozen detours, rushing off in his vocabularies and dictions in seven or eight directions together? Rather, has he not in fact, by throwing on so many coats of language, ultimately laid himself bare? For Humbert is revealed at the end to be an “unaccommodated man,” “a poor, bare, forked animal.” He is, but he is no better than he should be. “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.” But they are most often neither the best plans, nor laid by the best of men. Satire like this, with a virtuoso display of language and style, carries us far along to the higher reaches of art.