Satire

ESSENTIAL QUESTION:

What are the two types of satire?

Definitions

Satire--Literary art of diminishing a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn or indignation.  Takes its form from the genre it spoofs.

Horatian satire--After the Roman satirist Horace:  Satire in which the voice is indulgent, tolerant, amused, and witty.  The speaker holds up to gentle ridicule the absurdities and follies of human beings, aiming at producing in the reader not the anger of a Juvenal, but a wry smile.

Juvenalian satire--After the Roman satirist Juvenal:  Formal satire in which the speaker attacks vice and error with contempt and indignation  Juvenalian satire in its realism and its harshness is in strong contrast to Horatian satire.

Burlesque-- A form of comedy characterized by ridiculous exaggeration and distortion.A serious subject may be treated frivolously or a frivolous subject seriously.  The essential quality that makes for burlesque is the discrepancy between subject matter and style.  That is, a style ordinarily dignified may be used for nonsensical matter, or a style very nonsensical may be used to ridicule a weighty subject.

Parody--A composition that imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular work, or the distinctive style of its maker, and applies the imitation to a lowly or comically inappropriate subject.  Often a parody is more powerful in its influence on affairs of current importance--politics for instance--than its original composition.  It is a variety of burlesque.
Irony--Saying one thing and meaning another.



There are three main types of satire: Horatian, Juvenalian, and Menippean. While each type is distinct from the other in some factors, any satire may contain elements of all three. Horatian satire gently mocks, Juvenal aims to destroy and to provoke, and Menippean spreads its mental barbs at a wide number of targets. These types should not be confused with the different satirical devices, such as wit, sarcasm, and irony.
Horatian satire is the gentlest of the types of satire. It does not aim to find evil in things; instead, it is done from an affectionate, almost loving point of view. The emphasis is put on humor and on making fun of human dysfunction. While the subject of the fun can be social vices, it is usually an individual's follies that are teased. A key element of Horatian satire, unlike most other types, is that the audience is also laughing at themselves as well as at the subject of the mockery.
A good example of Horatian satire is the works of Jane Austen. Her novels, such as Pride and Prejudice, are mild mockeries of the Gothic novels produced by other female writers of her age. In Pride and Prejudice, she turns her Horatian satire on people and how they are viewed by the rest of society. This includes the noble landowner in Mr. Darcy, the priest in William Collins, and soldiers such as George Wickham.

Juvenal satire is the harshest type of satire, and it does not hold back in its barbed lacerations of its targets. Social vices, individuals, companies, and organizations can be the targets. The purpose of such invectives is to provoke an angry reaction from the audience aimed at the subject. As a result of this intention, the humor is put into the background and biting social criticism and polarized opinion come to the forefront.
William Golding's Lord of the Flies is a good example of Juvenalian satire. The object of mockery is people's need for power and rules, and it also mocks the lengths which people go to in order to obtain power and how this lust changes them. It is also an unsentimental look at the relationships between boys and how awful they can be.
Menippean satire is named after Menippus, and most closely resembles Juvenal's ideas on satire; however, it lacks the focus of a primary target. Rather than a single target, it takes a scattergun approach that aims poisonous prongs at multiple targets. As well as not sustaining narrative and being more rhapsodic, Menippean satire is also more mental. That said, this type of humor is typically baser at the same time.
While primary examples of the types of satire as produced by Horace and Juvenal themselves survive, the same cannot be said of Menippus. A good example of Menippean satire is Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. The whole novel is a random collection of satires about people Carroll knew or knew of and of Oxford itself, both as a city and as a lifestyle.

More about satire:

Satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire "derides"; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt existing outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual (in "personal satire"), or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even (as in Rochester's "A Satyr against Mankind," 1675, and much of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, 1726, especially Book IV) the whole human race. The distinction between the comic and the satiric, however, is a sharp one only at its extremes. Shakespeare's Falstaff is a comic creation, presented without derision for our unmitigated enjoyment; the puritanical Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is for the most part comic but has aspects of satire directed against the type of the fatuous and hypocritical Puritan; Jonson's Volpone (1607) clearly satirizes the type of man whose cleverness—or stupidity—is put at the service of his cupidity; and Dryden's MacFlecknoe (1682), while representing a permanent type of the pretentious poetaster, ridiculed specifically the living author Shadwell.
Satire has usually been justified by those who practice it as a corrective of human vice and folly; Pope remarked that "those who are ashamed of nothing else are so of being ridiculous." Its frequent claim (not always borne out in the practice) has been to ridicule the failing rather than the individual, and to limit its ridicule to corrigible faults, excluding those for which a person is not responsible. As Swift said, speaking of himself in his ironic "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (1739):

Yet malice never was his aim;
He lashed the vice, but spared the name. . . .
His satire points at no defect,
But what all mortals may correct. . . .
He spared a hump, or crooked nose,
Whose owners set not up for beaux.

Satire occurs as an incidental element in many works whose overall mode is not satiric—in a certain character, or situation, or interpolated passage of ironic commentary on some aspect of the human condition or of contemporary society. But in many literary achievements, verse or prose, the attempt to diminish a subject by ridicule is the organizing principle of the whole, and these works constitute the formal genre of "satires." In discussing such writings the following distinctions are useful.
(1) Critics make a broad division between formal (or "direct") satire and indirect satire. In formal satire the satiric voice speaks out in the first person; this "I" may address either the reader (as in Pope's Moral Essays, 1731-35; for example, Epistle II, "Of the characters of Women") or else a character within the work itself, who is called the adversarius and whose major function is to elicit and guide the satiric speaker's comments. (In Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuth-not," 1735, Arbuthnot serves as adversarius.) Two types of formal satire are commonly distinguished, taking their names from the great Roman satirists Horace and Juvenal. The types are defined by the character of the persona whom the author presents as the first-person satiric speaker, and by the attitude and tone that such a persona manifests toward the subject matter and the readers of the work.
In Horatian satire the character of the speaker is that of an urbane, witty, and tolerant man of the world, who is moved more often to wry amusement than to indignation at the spectacle of human folly, pretentiousness, and hypocrisy, and who uses a relaxed and informal language to evoke from readers a smile at human follies and absurdities—sometimes including his own. Pope's Moral Essays and other formal satires for the most part sustain an Horatian stance.
In Juvenalian satire the character of the speaker is that of a serious moralist who uses a dignified and public style of utterance to decry modes of vice and error which are no less dangerous because they are ridiculous, and who undertakes to evoke from readers contempt, moral indignation, or an unillusioned sadness at the aberrations of humanity. Samuel Johnson's "London" (1738) and "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (1749) are distinguished instances of Juvenalian satire,

(2) Indirect satire is cast in another literary form than that of direct address. The most common indirect form is that of a fictional narrative, in which the objects of the satire are characters who make themselves and their opinions ridiculous by what they think, say, and do, and are sometimes made even more ridiculous by the author's comments and narrative style.
One type of indirect satire is Menippean satire, named for its Greek originator, the philosophical Cynic Menippus. It is sometimes called Varronian satire, after a Roman imitator, Varro; while Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 308-12, suggests an alternative name, the anatomy, after a major English instance of the type, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Such satires are written in prose—though often with interpolated passages of verse—and constitute a miscellaneous form often held together by a loosely constructed narrative. Their major feature, however, is a series of extended dialogues and debates (often conducted at a banquet or party) in which a group of loquacious eccentrics, pedants, literary people, and representatives of various professions or philosophical points of view serve to make ludicrous the attitudes and viewpoints they typify by the arguments they urge in their support. Examples are Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (1564), Voltaire's Candide (1759), Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818) and other satiric fiction, and Huxley's Point Counter Point (1928), in which, as in Peacock, the central satiric scenes are discussions during a weekend at a country manor. Frye also classifies Lewis Carroll's two books about Alice in wonderland as "perfect Menippean satires."