The Literature of Satire (review)

When, after many years of reading, thinking, teaching, and writing, a scholar leaves us a handsome record of what he has learned, we ought to be grateful. It is with such gratitude that we should welcome Charles A. Knight's The Literature of Satire. Knight has provided us with an elaborate account of the European literature of satire. Of the writers studied here only Nabokov lived for a long time outside Europe. Yet he never ceased to be European. Every work discussed in this book, therefore, is European in provenance or inspiration.

Beginning with a stimulating and comprehensive attempt to define the bases of satire, Knight goes on to chapters on "Satiric Nationalism," where eighteenth-century prose, such as Gulliver's Travels, The Persian Letters, and The Citizen of the World, are briefly examined, and "Satiric Exile," where Pale Fire, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Shame receive more detailed analysis. In part 2 of this book, Knight presents a chapter on dramatic satire, in which he examines plays by Jonson, Molière, Ostrovsky, and Brecht. Next, under the chapter heading "Horatian Performances," Knight discusses Horace's satires and a number of works that owe their derivation to Horace, including Rochester's Artemiza to Chloe, Marvell's Last Instructions to a Painter, Pope's Dunciad, Swift's Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, and Byron's Don Juan. In chapter 6, "Satire and the Novel," Knight examines Roderick Random, Bouvard et Pécuchet, some satires by Lucian, and Machado de Assis's Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.

Although the scope is diverse, the reader should also be prepared for glances at many other books. It is difficult to find a common denominator here beyond Knight's regarding all these works as satires. But an exception to this is chapter 7, which is more a work of historical scholarship than criticism. It details the French failure to demolish Dunkirk as required by treaty obligations. The focus is on Steele's journalism and on the responses of others to this issue. Knight's desire to include journalism as a legitimate form of satire is worthwhile, but this episode in eighteenth-century history and journalism does not fit comfortably with the other chapters. Even more odd to some readers, I suppose, will be Knight's concluding with a chapter on the German satirist Karl Kraus, who serves as an exemplar of the modern satirist.

As one can see from this list of topics, The Literature of Satire encompasses a wide variety of satiric subject matter. Many students of satire will, therefore, find discussions of works and authors that interest them. But Knight's criterion for choosing subjects of discussion is mainly his interest in them (1). There is no suggestion that these works represent an essential pattern in satiric literature.

Knight's discussion of the origins of satire is not merely conventional. His speculations on the ancient commentator Diomedes are original and stimulating. I do, however, object to his description of satire as a proto-genre, especially when his later discussions seem to assume that it is a genre. "Proto-genre" does little to solve a theoretical problem. It simply establishes a category that makes the generically discrete satires of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius something vague and transitional. Despite this uncertainty, Knight is confident and perceptive in his analysis of individual satires. But just what he believes the essence of satire to be remains unclear.

The title of this book is old-fashioned enough to attract a reviewer's attention. This title out of the early years of the twentieth century is slightly pretentious and hardly specific. It promises too much and too little at the same time. Knight's view of satire seems to encompass a wide variety of works, but a more specific argument for regarding those poems, plays, and novels as satires would be welcome. Knight's predilections are of interest, but they do not advance materially our understanding of satire. From another standpoint, however, Knight's...