Satire in English Literature

For as long as there has been literature in English, there has been satirical English literature. Satire as a literary device traces its roots to ancient Greece, where Aristophanes used plays to ridicule political leaders. All eras of English literature include satirical works -- from the "Canterbury Tales" to Sue Townsend and with many stops in between. Satire serves a purpose, often a political purpose, in literature.

What Satire Does

“Satire is a powerful art form which has the ability to point out the deficiencies in certain human behaviors and the social issues which result from them in such a way that they become absurd," according to the University of Rhode Island’s Megan LeBoeuf. Most literary works of satire make reference to contemporary events with an eye to shedding a new light upon the circumstances.

An Example of Satire at Work

One of the most famous works of satire in English is Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Swift recommends eating Ireland’s urban poor children to prevent them from being a social strain. The full title of the article, which was published anonymously, gives a hint at its satirical nature: “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.” Satire is often coupled with sarcasm or irony to hide the true meaning of the writer’s work. Swift, of course, didn’t wish that any children be eaten; he was parodying other political solutions to save people from poverty, mimicking the language of other political authors while presenting an absurd suggestion.

How Satire is Effective

Satire isn’t overt criticism. In other words, instead of writing a scathing review or direct attack on a political opponent or institution, the satirist can present metaphors or fictional characters as a stand-in for the real thing. When reading satire, the reader is forced to fill in the gaps between the fiction and the truth, forging a deeper understanding of the topic and allowing the reader to feel as if he is in on the joke. In most cases, satire protects the writer from legal action of the person or group being ridiculed as the text works on implications rather than direct statements.

Satire for Political Change

“There are specific periods where satire is necessary,” LeBoeuf quotes Canadian media critic John Doyle. During times of political oppression -- or religious oppression, in earlier centuries -- satirists were able to forward political agendas or speak out against church rules through subversive work. Modern versions of this still exist in “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” and the lighthearted approach to serious issues is still effective for informing readers of publications like "The Onion."

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, book of a lifetime: The author realistically captures life

I've read The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James three times. The first time I read it, I was impatient. I was unschooled in the art of literature. I skimmed over entire chapters. I was reading for plot and, though in James there is always an engaging tangle, there are miles to travel before anything happens.

The second time I read the novel it was when I was in my mid-twenties. A friend of mine with whom I generally share the same taste in books recommended it. She said that what she loved about James was how he writes about consciousness.

The third time I read the novel I read it as a novelist. I was searching for insights into how to create character. In his essay "The Art of Fiction", James writes: "The air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel."

James sought in his fiction to realistically capture life, and indeed on one level The Portrait of Lady can be read as a novel about choices. In the novel many men are infatuated or in love with our heroine and by the end we feel as if we know this remarkable woman. First, there is Lord Warburton, an aristocrat whom Isabel finds fascinating but is not in love with. There is her infirm and touching cousin, Ralph. If we are to believe in soul mates, then indeed Ralph and Isabel are these to each other. Then there is the kind American, Caspar Goodwood, to whom Isabel is drawn.

Nevertheless, she postpones marriage to travel abroad for a year and seek her independence. Gilbert Osmond, an American art collector living in Florence, seduces Isabel and marries her – motivated, we soon learn, for the fortune she has inherited from her uncle. He treats her like one of the many objects he covets, and after his seduction is complete, she remains to him nothing more than an object on his shelf or a painting on his wall.

Throughout this novel we watch and witness Isabel's life become more complex. Her increasingly difficult and emotionally moving choices not only become painful and confining to Isabel; they become painful to the reader as well. She has become flesh, blood and soul to us. She is a real person with whom we can identify.

Perhaps the mark of a genuine work of literature is how it draws us back again. I fully intend to read The Portrait of a Lady a fourth time. And I'm certain I will discover in it something new.

Herbert Read

The Impact of ‘Regional Ethos’ on the Creative Process: An Analysis of Herbert Read’s Standpoint in “The Writer and His Region”

Herbert Read was and remains better known as an art critic. He was a champion of modern British artists, such as Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stimer. He had read Bergson, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx etc. discovering explanations linking the aesthetic and the socio-political. This experience sowed the seeds of his moral and spiritual convictions. Dividing Read’s writings on politics from those of art and culture is difficult because he saw art, culture and politics as a single congruent expression on human consciousness.

According to Read, ‘Regionalism’ is product of historical tradition as well as geographical restriction, where the basic factor is landscape. For example, Hardy’s novels are called ‘Wessex’ Novels, as all of them are based in Wessex region. Here, landscape not only denotes natural scenery, but also familiar scene. This is expression of people who create them generation after generation. It depends on political set up of a particular region not of one but of several generations. Region implies heritage, tradition, continuity of race, culture etc. A locale suggests all these as well as accepted customs, continuity of language that is intonation, dialect, pronunciation etc. Another is the mindset of people; climate, landscape, speech, customs make up this. All of these contribute to an unconscious bond of feeling – the invisible matrix. Here comes the concept of ‘ethos’. Original Greek meaning of ‘ethos’ is prevailing spirit of a city. This is dependent on the situation and physical character of the city. Each city has its own mythology. Greek God is not a blank term. Ethos is interested in region, mindset. In this connection, Read clarifies the differentiation between ‘Provincialism’ and ‘Regionalism’. Whereas the former is a derogatory term, the latter is always universal although centered in a locale. To illustrate this point Read provides various examples.

Though Read flirted with philosophical communism, he was finally dissuaded from close association with this movement because of its antipathy towards all realities of creative art, except the one it had contrived in social realism. He was appalled to discover that, like Fascism, it had stamped out avant-garde art and his conclusion was that contemporary art had to become active rather than contemplative, partisan rather than disinterested, and subliminal rather than super-evident. In other words, artists and theorists had to adopt a militancy of a sort that was, in the 1930s, most apparent in Surrealism, and contemporary aesthetics had to assume less easily victimized forms. The most prominent themes of Art and Society were that the greatest art of the past had belonged to communal societies, and that the modern artist, conscious of an ability to transform the world by his or her visions of a new reality, had to become a more consistent communist than those, so called, who would compromise with the aesthetic conventions of a last phase of capitalism.

In his philosophical outlook, Read was close to the European idealist traditions represented by Friedrich von Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, believing that reality as it is experienced by the human mind was as much a product of the human mind as any external or objective activity. In other words, the mind is not a camera recording the reality it perceives through the eyes; it is also a projector throwing out its own reality. This brings Read’s realization as an artist that region is not all that important in shaping a creative process. Here, Read often comes close to the Romantics. He rejects the notion of Lockian Empiricism that mind is a ‘tabula rasa’, where only outer sensations engrave upon, and create knowledge. Rather Read endorses Kantian philosophy that knowledge is ‘a priori’, there is an analytical power of mind. Following Kant, Read does not deny the processes of experiencing sensory perceptions and declares that analytical power of mind coheres the sensations and turns them into knowledge. In this connection, Read comes closer to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Poet’s realization is related to organic sensibility. Deep feeling leads to thought and thought leads to perception of Beauty and Dignity. Feeling gives importance to action and situation. Poetic genius sustains images, thoughts, emotions of poet’s own mind. According to Coleridge imagination is ‘essemplastic’. Creation does not come instantly. Creative process is a conscious, willful process. Read has serious objection to identify creation as something momentary. It needs an inspiration, which is a complicated relation between artist-environment, artist-material and artist-technique. Environment has its own impact.

Similarly, in Tagore’s “Realization of Beauty” in considering the realization of beauty as a process of “extention of one’s consciousness”, Tagore argues that the ‘extension’, in this context, means widening of one’s aesthetic awareness as well as one’s vision of life. In fact both are interlinked, when one has the larger awareness, one finds beauty not merely in the thing or object, but in all things. This is totally nullifying the impact of region on the creative process that Tagore indicates in the essay.

In this connection, Herbert Read also comes closer to Postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory negates concepts of region and border. Everything written or painted is actually a collage. There is no point on emphasizing cultural-local-geographical specificity. This meant that art was not, as many Marxists believed, simply a product of a bourgeois society, but a psychological process that had evolved simultaneously to the evolution of consciousness. Art was, therefore, a biological phenomenon, a view that frequently pitted Read against Marxist critics such as Anthony Blunt in the 1930s. Read, in this respect, was influenced by development in German Art Psychology. His idealist background led Read towards an interest in psychoanalysis. Read became a pioneer in the English speaking world in the use of psychoanalysis as a tool for art and literary criticism.

Henry MILLER

In 1934, Henry Miller, then aged forty-two and living in Paris, published his first book. In 1961 the book was finally published in his native land, where it promptly became a best-seller and a cause célèbre. By now the waters have been so muddied by controversy about censorship, pornography, and obscenity that one is likely to talk about anything but the book itself.

But this is nothing new. Like D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller has long been a byword and a legend. Championed by critics and artists, venerated by pilgrims, emulated by beatniks, he is above everything else a culture hero—or villain, to those who see him as a menace to law and order. He might even be described as a folk hero: hobo, prophet, and exile, the Brooklyn boy who went to Paris when everyone else was going home, the starving bohemian enduring the plight of the creative artist in America, and in latter years the sage of Big Sur.

His life is all written out in a series of picaresque narratives in the first-person historical present: his early Brooklyn years in Black Spring, his struggles to find himself during the twenties in Tropic of Capricorn and the three volumes of the Rosy Crucifixion, his adventures in Paris during the thirties inTropic of Cancer.

In 1939 he went to Greece to visit Lawrence Durrell; his sojourn there provides the narrative basis ofThe Colossus of Maroussi. Cut off by the war and forced to return to America, he made the yearlong odyssey recorded in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Then in 1944 he settled on a magnificent empty stretch of California coast, leading the life described in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.Now that his name has made Big Sur a center for pilgrimage, he has been driven out and is once again on the move.

At seventy Henry Miller looks rather like a Buddhist monk who has swallowed a canary. He immediately impresses one as a warm and humorous human being. Despite his bald head with its halo of white hair, there is nothing old about him. His figure, surprisingly slight, is that of a young man; all his gestures and movements are young.

His voice is quite magically captivating, a mellow, resonant but quiet bass with great range and variety of modulation; he cannot be as unconscious as he seems of its musical spell. He speaks a modified Brooklynese frequently punctuated by such rhetorical pauses as “Don’t you see?” and “You know?” and trailing off with a series of diminishing reflective noises, “Yas, yas . . . hmm . . . hmm . . . yas . . . hm . . . hm.” To get the full flavor and honesty of the man, one must hear the recordings of that voice.

The interview was conducted in September 1961, in London.

Henry Green

Henry Green is a tall, gracious, and imposingly handsome man, with a warm, strong voice and very quick eyes. In speech he displays on occasion that hallmark of the English public school: the slight tilt of the head and closing of the eyes when pronouncing the first few words of some sentences—a manner most often in contrast to what he is saying, for his expressions tend toward parable and his wit may move from cozy to scorpion-dry in less than a twinkle. Many have remarked that his celebrated deafness will roar or falter according to his spirit and situation; at any rate he will not use a hearing aid, for reasons of his own, which are no doubt discernable to some.

Mr. Green writes at night and in many longhand drafts. In his memoir, Pack My Bag, he has described prose in this way:

Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone . . .

An ancient trade compliment, to an author whose technique is highly developed, has been to call him a “writer's writer”; Henry Green has been referred to as a “writer's writer's writer,” though practitioners of the craft have had only to talk with him momentarily on the subject to know that his methods were not likely to be revealed to them, either then or at any other time. It is for this reason—attempting to delve past his steely reticence —that some of the questions in the interview may seem unduly long or presumptuous.

Mr. Green, who has one son, lives in London, in a house in Knightsbridge, with his beautiful and charming wife, Dig. The following conversation was recorded there one winter night in the author's firelit study.

Hellenic and Hebraic Elements in Milton's Poetry

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Hellenic and Hebraic Elements in Milton's Poetry

Milton devoted to form and coherence which separates him from the great romantic. This gives separated him from the great romantics. This gives a delicacy and granite to the beauty if his verse. Like Ben Jonson he favoured the Hellenic or classical conventions in performance to the happy-go-lucky methods of romanticism. But like Jonson he did not follow scholarship to freeze his creative imagination. This Hellenic quality is exhibited to the best on the early poems—“A’Allegro”, La Penseloso,” Comus” and “Lycidas”. These poems have all the youthful charms and freshness and show off the lighter and more fanciful side of Milton’s genius. 

In his address to Melancholy, Milton says,” come, Pensivenun, devout and pure,” there is also a stateliness of manners added to the sense of beauty which makes Milton’s poetry highly dignified, unsurpassed and unequalled.

Paradise lost is considered the most Hebraic of great English poems. Milton codifies and concentrated all his puritan meditations on the Bible. He points the visions received from the Bible. He freely interprets the scripture but with utmost faith. He believes in the authenticity of the bible and its sacredness. Milton projects himself his feelings, knowledge and aspirations into the characters of the epic, both the primitive human creatures and the superhuman beings whether heavenly or hell or inferno. There s a complicit between his faith and his nature which shows sympathy in spite of the poet’s intentions. 

The moral thesis of Genesis is submission to the Almighty which makes disobedience on to sin. In spite of himself Milton was in deep sympathy with Satan that great rebel of Heaven and the Enemy of God. It is into Satan that Milton has most of himself, his pride and temperament. Milton as a sincere believer wanted to justify the ways to God to man.

Harper's meeting with Murdoch-The Real story

"Don't be surprised if Prime Minister Harper pays a quiet visit to Murdoch the next time Harper happens to pass through New York City, where Murdoch spends most of his time," Smith presciently wrote.

Four months later Harper paid the quiet visit. And the visit would have remained quiet except for the diligent digging of a resourceful Canadian Press reporter who searched mandatory disclosures filed with the U.S. Justice Department by Ari Fleischer, media consultant and former George W. Bush press secretary. As a result, the get-together hit the front pages.............
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Harper's meeting with Murdoch-The Real story

Why would big-time global media tycoon Rupert Murdoch meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to discuss how miniscule Canadian media tycoon Pierre-Karl Péladeau could set up a Quebecor Media television knock-off of Murdoch's Fox News channel?

The answer is that he wouldn't -- and didn't. Even Kory Teneycke, who was Harper's chief spokesperson at the time and was at the lunch meeting in New York on March 30, 2009, claims the Quebecor venture was not discussed.

That hasn't stopped Teneycke, the huckster for the project, from piggybacking on the Fox News brand. Four months after the meeting with Murdoch, he left the Prime Minister's Office and almost immediately obtained a contract with Quebecor to develop a conservative television channel. Teneycke, who has worked for the Reform party, Mike Harris's Ontario Tories and the Saskatchewan Party, may have coined the phrase "Fox News North" to attract attention and put it on the political agenda.

And he certainly did. Mainstream media and the blogosphere are humming with strident commentary, both for and against. Google "Fox News North" and you'll come up with over 750,000 hits.

But, like Victor Frankenstein in the Mary Shelley thriller, Teneycke created a monster that in the end consumed him. The controversy became too hot for his corporate masters and he resigned, replaced by public relations executive and former Brian Mulroney spokesperson Luc Lavoie.

But back to Murdoch. A clue to the real reason for the Harper-Murdoch lunch was provided -- inadvertently -- by libertarian ideologue Tasha Kheiriddin in an open letter she wrote to Margaret Atwoodin the National Post. She berated the Canadian literary icon for signing a petition calling on the government not to allow Fox News North to proceed.

"FYI," Kheiriddin hectored Atwood, "Mr. Murdoch routinely meets with politicians. He granted US President Barack Obama an audience in 2008... Mr. Murdoch has also met with other politicians, including former Australian PM Kevin Rudd and current UK PM David Cameron. How he found the time to add Stephen Harper to his schedule I don't know, but it's more a compliment than a plot."

Kheiriddin is wrong. Think plot, not compliment. There's one big difference between Harper and the other politicians Kheiridden mentions. Murdoch owns media properties in their countries -- Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. He owns none in Canada -- so far.

It is well-known that Murdoch meets with national leaders to advance his corporate interests. In a blog posting in December 2008, Georgia Straight editor Charlie Smith reported on a biography of Murdoch that focused on "how the media baron ingratiated himself with political leaders, who helped him build his empire.

"Don't be surprised if Prime Minister Harper pays a quiet visit to Murdoch the next time Harper happens to pass through New York City, where Murdoch spends most of his time," Smith presciently wrote.

Four months later Harper paid the quiet visit. And the visit would have remained quiet except for the diligent digging of a resourceful Canadian Press reporter who searched mandatory disclosures filed with the U.S. Justice Department by Ari Fleischer, media consultant and former George W. Bush press secretary. As a result, the get-together hit the front pages.

The Fox News North story received the ink, but what Murdoch wants from the prime minister -- and can give him by way of support -- may be a more important story.

Murdoch -- along with other non-Canadian media owners -- has so far been stymied in his quest to penetrate the lucrative Canadian media market. One roadblock is Section 19 of the Income Tax Act, which allows advertisers to deduct their costs of advertising in Canadian newspapers only when the paper is 75 per cent owned by Canadians. Since newspapers obtain about 80 per cent of their revenues from advertising, this requirement effectively kills foreign control of Canadian newspapers.

As well, Broadcasting Act regulations exclude non-Canadians from owning radio or television stations. A non-Canadian is defined as any broadcaster whose foreign ownership exceeds 33.3 per cent of voting shares at the holding-company level.

A country's restrictions haven't stopped Murdoch in the past. He gave up his Australian citizenship to become an American so he could own American television stations. He divorced his wife of 30 years and married a Chinese national half his age, which seemed to give him leverage in prying open the Chinese satellite-TV market.

What will he do to get into Canada? Whatever he has up his sleeve, don't expect it to happen overnight. Murdoch is patient and persistent.

Working in his favour is the fact that neither Section 19 nor the Broadcasting Act regulations are as much of an impediment to foreign ownership as they once were. Lock enough lawyers and financiers together in a room and they'll soon find a way to subvert the goals of the legislation.

That's what happened to the CanWest Global media empire, which was owned by the Asper family -- all lawyers themselves. The company opened the door to significant foreign control with its 2007 deal to buy the 13 specialty cable channels of Alliance Atlantis Communications for $2.3 billion.

CanWest put up only $262 million of the purchase price, with the balance coming from the notorious Wall Street financial dealer Goldman Sachs. The company promised not to exert control. Right!

Perhaps forgetting Lord Chesterfield's dictum that "he who pays the piper calls the tune," the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission believed them and allowed the deal to proceed.

Then, after the company crashed and burned, the newspaper holdings were sold to a company called Postmedia Network, which now controls most of Canada's major metropolitan dailies, including theOttawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal and Vancouver Sun, as well as theNational Post. Its influence on public opinion is probably greater than anything Fox News North will ever achieve.

In defiance of Section 19, Postmedia Network seems to be owned by New-York-based GoldenTree Asset Management and other vulture funds. Their basic strategy is to look for troubled media companies and then scoop up the company debt -- usually bonds -- at a depressed price. The private equity firms snapped up CanWest's risky bonds and in May 2010 they received court approval to take over the newspaper chain for $1.1 billion.

Their interest is in speedy, double-digit returns, not quality, balanced newspapers.

Here, too, the federal government is likely to believe the company's claim it is Canadian-owned and controlled. Postmedia has a majority of resident Canadians on its board and gives legal assurances (the lawyers again) that the foreign owners will not be able to dictate company policies. But the Canadian directors are not likely to make decisions that will run contrary to the interests of the foreign owners, who are represented on the board.

Meanwhile the Sun TV monster lumbers on. Quebecor's newspaper chain already has a long list of social and economic conservatives writing on a regular or guest basis, such as Ezra Levant, Mercedes Stephenson, Michael Coren, Monte Solberg, John Snobelen (Mike Harris' education minister) and Salim Mansur. Far-right shock-jock Charles Adler has been recruited from Corus Radio. They're being primed to sprint into the Sun TV studio.

The main threat is that Sun TV will magnify the already substantial Canadian right-wing echo chamber. The Harper Tories issue talking points that are picked up by the conservative media -- Sun TV, National Post, talk radio, Maclean's, Sun newspapers, Postmedia commentators -- and bounced back and forth in the blogosphere until they become accepted as facts.

And Harper moves his agenda forward.

Worries that Sun TV will be a Conservative attack dog were fuelled by the hiring of Jason Plotz from the Prime Minister's Office. Plotz was in charge of issues research and provided the material the government needed to go after the opposition.

Lurking behind the Fox hysteria is an even bigger threat to democratic media. Rupert Murdoch waits patiently as Stephen Harper sets out to create Murdoch-friendly ownership regulations and a more compliant regulator. Perhaps he'll be meeting again soon with Murdoch in New York City to report on how things are going.

This time, though, we're not likely to find out.

Donald Gutstein is an adjunct professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and author of Not A Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy.

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter had recently moved into a five-story 1820 Nash house facing Regent's Park in London. The view from the floor-through top floor where he has installed his office overlooks a duck pond and a long stretch of wooded parkland; his desk faces this view, and in late October 1966, when the interview took place, the changing leaves and the hazy London sun constantly distracted him as he thought over questions or began to give answers. He speaks in a deep, theater-trained voice that comes rather surprisingly from him, and indeed is the most remarkable thing about him physically. When speaking he almost always tends to excessive qualification of any statement, as if coming to a final definition of things were obviously impossible. One gets the impression—as one does with many of the characters in his plays—of a man so deeply involved with what he's thinking that roughing it into speech is a painful necessity..............
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