This week: Candide is a major part of the modern canon. It’s a picaresque, a bildungsroman, and a satire. It’s that last descriptor we examine this week as we try to figure out what is satire? Then a small sidetrack into some linguistic news, some footnotes, and we’re out. Let’s get to it.
During my freshman year of high school, I had an English literature teacher who had set up a small “ABCs of Literature” shelf next to his desk. We could read through those books and do short book reports on them in lieu of tests or essays. I read the entire shelf, one book per letter.
The book holding court as the letter C1 had a tattered cover that proclaimed it to be the best satire ever written. I had my doubts. But I asked Mr. Westphal, my teacher, about it. “Oh, you’ll like that. It’s making fun of philosophy. It’s really punk.”
Mr. W, you should understand was not one of these teachers who threw new lingo about as a way to connect with the kids. He wore a neat collared shirt and tie most days and rarely raised his voice, instead connecting to we bratty teens through gentle humor and an encyclopedic knowledge of music. So, when he said punk, he meant to turn a critical eye on everything and tear down the establishment. I was intrigued.
So I read Candide and it was everything Mr. W had promised. The novel sent the protagonist through all manner of Hell, never once letting up in its snarky observations of people acting against their own interests nor of people just generally being assholes at every opportunity. I loved it, even though I didn’t understand half of the references2.
But the biggest sticking point for me was that I couldn’t figure out which books it was parodying. When I asked Mr. W he explained that to his knowledge, Candide wasn’t a parody of any one work, but instead a satire of the entire age of enlightenment. And that’s where all this talk about an 18th-century French novel has been leading, of course, to asking the question, just what is satire and how come it’s not parody?
The Glossary of Literary Terms3 spends three densely written pages trying to give an answer that is both concise and yet covers every aspect of satire. Here’s the most salient bit:
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 that exists outside the work itself.
Meanwhile, parody gets a paragraph and a half-buried inside the main entry of burlesque:
A parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a
particular literary work, or the distinctive style of a particular author, or the typical stylistic and other features of a serious literary genre, and deflates the original by applying the imitation to a lowly or comically inappropriate subject.
It seems fairly obvious that from these definitions, parody can be considered a form of satire if it’s meant to, as the passage says, deflate the original. In other words, Don Quixote’s skewering of the tropes and features of chivalric stories could be considered both a satire and a parody. But, something done good-naturedly, like every song recorded by Weird Al Yankovich would be anything but satire.
But let’s look, at that second part of the definition - comedy is for the lols, satire is meant to sting. There’s a concept in stand-up comedy called “punching up.” The general idea is that your joke should never be seen as targeting anyone with less social power than the teller. So, if you’re on stage, telling a joke about the president is fine because the office of the president has more social power than just about anyone, regardless of who holds the office. But, an able-bodied person targeting wheel-chair users…that reads as bullying and punching down.
For me, I think that has to be the key point. Satire, to be effective and to be actual satire rather than just bullying, has to be punching up. Good satire targets institutions and the decision-makers that hold too much sway in our lives. In the best instances, it holds a barbed pen to the throats of those in power and cries for ridicule and reform. And that is, as Mr. Westphal said, punk as fuck.
Stay curious,
J
Sidenotes:
Tik Tok is a hotbed of linguistic change and two words that have been making their way from the trendsetters to the general public are amusing me right now: sus and fit.
Sus is a recent shortening of either suspect or suspicious, depending on who you ask, and is used about like you might expect. Something fishy is now sus. I’m sure you knew this already, but, just in case, consider yourself informed.
Fit, on the other hand, appears to have acquired a new noun form in a somewhat unusual process. The word outfit has been shortened to just fit. You see the kids on Tik Tok doing “fit checks” and showing off their fit for the day. What makes this odd is that fit was already a word by itself, just not one with this meaning. No one seems to be exactly sure where it came from, which is a little sus, but if the word fits…
Right after All Quiet on the Western Front and Brave New World and just before Down, Watership. W was reserved for The War of the Worlds.
Which, frankly, makes it even better because it sends you down the rabbit hole chasing references and historical facts just so you can understand the joke that much better. These days, you can just hop on the internet to figure it all out. Back then, I spent several hours in the school and county libraries doing more research than I ever would have dreamed of spending on a normal school assignment.
A Glossary of Literary Terms, Tenth Edition by M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. Published by Wadsworth, 2012. Page 353 for “satire” and page 38 for “parody.”