Satire

Jonathan Swift defined satire as “a sort of glass [a mirror] wherein beholders do generally discover everyone’s face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so many are offended with it.”[1] The famous children’s story, The Emperor’s New Clothes, may well help illustrate what Swift meant. In the story, only the child who was not sucked in by the ruse of the traveling con artists was willing to admit that the emperor was naked. Swift’s definition of satire says that those who are part of the satire will likely not see it as satire and will find nothing offensive about it. The rest, like the child in the story, will find it utterly amusing that others have been so blinded as to believe that the emperor is wearing new clothes when he, in fact, is naked.

The satirist is an upholder of standards, moral and otherwise. He points to a given situation and then draws such an aberrant analogy that many will not even notice the comparison. In A Modest Proposal, Swift maintained that English landlords have already devoured the adults of Ireland, thus they might as well feed on the children as well. He was making a gross analogy between the economic exploitation of the Irish and the supposed remedy to the hunger that was rampant in Ireland at the time. To prove his point, many thought he was being serious and decried the work as “written in bad taste.”

Satire is thus called an attack on “social and moral evils by means of humor.”[2] Veith maintains, rightly, that all satire requires a presupposed standard for moral action. Whatever is held up against this standard is found lacking. In satire, humor is often used to draw attention to the fact that the standard has not been reached or has been transgressed in some obvious way. Swift’s picturing the politician’s of Lilliput dancing and jumping over colored ropes to gain positions in the government is a very humorous satire on the methods of choosing ministers based on party politics rather than on merits.

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[1] Quoted in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, ed. J.A. Cuddon (New York: Penguin, 1999), 780.

[2] Gene Edward Veith, Jr, Reading Between the Lines (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1990), 111.