Which Home Do You Choose?

Of satire, there are essentially three forms: Horatian, Juvenalian, and Menippean, invented by Horace, Juvenal, and Menippus, respectively. Each one has a different position towards critique. As I understand it, Horatian satire is akin to gently correcting the behavior of a cherished group of friends by kindly suggesting refinement through warm-hearted raillery. Juvenalian is reserved for when one is having a particularly bad day and interested in a full-frontal knuckle-up with the perceived object responsible for that day’s downward trajectory, often people or institutions. And Menippean is something a bit more abstract, something like inviting those with distasteful ideas and mental attitudes into one’s home and speaking with them about those same ideas and mental attitudes that one finds to be ready for the trash can. Then, without attributing this garbage to them directly, one chooses instead to soften things up a trifle by conveying information through analogy, metaphor, or allegory. In this form, extraordinary settings and narrative abstraction are quite common.

Unlike other forms of humor that rely on generally unbiased observations of human behavior and its foibles, satire operates by placing its selected subject matter under a certain scorn, derision, or ridicule, with the hope that, by doing so, a shock of recognition will jolt through the reader that renders one repulsed by the hitherto uncontemplated vice or folly and in desire of dispossession at the personal or societal level. And a particularly successful satire will have convinced its reader that all will benefit from the banishment of the iniquity exposed and denounced therein. 

And, if this reads as at all religious in temperament to you, you are neither imagining things nor gaslighting yourself, for satire requires a special something promised by the divine: judgement. 

Satire exists exactly because of its element of judgement, which, channeled through the satirist’s belief system, originates in the satirist’s idea of a more perfect world. The perceived negative elements of personality, philosophy, or society to be receiving the axe are juxtaposed against the satirist’s ideal conceptions thereof, which are championed in a way that should convince the reader of the superiority of those ideals. But a rusty broadsword to the thorax, though diplomatic, won’t quite do here. While satire is, without a doubt, an attack, its vanguard lead neither with lash out nor lambast—seldomly effective routes—rather with humorous irony. A spoonful of sugar makes the satire go down roughshod, and its recuperative effects should eschew the taste of destruction as much as possible, in favor of a constructive relish.

Evelyn Waugh’s 1932 novel, Black Mischief, provides a piercing example of satire anent the theme of birth control. In the Empire of Azania, an advertisement for birth control is placarded on the city wall. And a curious case ensues:

     It portrayed two contrasted scenes. On one side a native hut of hideous squalor, overrun with children of every age, suffering from every physical incapacity—crippled, deformed, blind, spotted and insane; the father prematurely aged with paternity squatted by an empty cook-pot; through the door could be seen his wife, withered and bowed with child-bearing, desperately hoeing at their inadequate crop. On the other side a bright parlour furnished with chairs and table; the mother, young and beautiful, sat at her ease eating a huge slice of raw meat; her husband smoked a long Arab hubble-bubble (still a caste mark of leisure throughout the land), while a single healthy child sat between them reading a newspaper. Inset between the two pictures was a detailed drawing of some up-to-date contraceptive apparatus and the words in Sakuyu: WHICH HOME DO YOU CHOOSE?

     Interest in the pictures was unbounded; all over the island woolly heads were nodding, black hands pointing, tongues clicking against filed teeth in unsyntactical dialects. Nowhere was there any doubt about the meaning of the beautiful new pictures.

     See: on right hand: there is rich man: smoke pipe like big chief: but his wife she no good; sit eating meat: and rich man no good: he only one son.

     See: on left hand: poor man: not much to eat: but his wife she very good, work hard in field: man he good too: eleven children: one very mad, very holy. And in the middle: Emperor’s juju. Make you like that good man with eleven children.

As in the case of Modernity, I’m likewise undecided.