The Thomas Chandler Haliburton Symposium

Stratagems of Satire in North American Literature Before Haliburton: A Background Paper

Stratagems of Satire in North American Literature Before Haliburton: A Background Paper THOMAS VINCENT An dealing with the "art" of Haliburton's fiction, most critical studies begin by classifying his work as "humour," and on the basis of that assumption develop their approach to his narrative structures and artistic intentions. As a result, the emphasis in their analyses usually falls on his skilful use of dialect for comic effect, on the anecdotal pattern of his narratives, and on his ability to create "comic character," notably Sam Slick. While all these studies recognize the elements of social and political criticism built into Haliburton's fiction and generally accept that Haliburton's intention in these matters is prescriptive , they do not go on to point out that this aspect of his work is firmly rooted in a widely recognized, well-developed, and long-standing tradition of satiric literature which occupied a central position in his cultural and intellectual milieu as an Englishman, as a North American, and as a Nova Scotian. Not surprisingly, these studies do not much explore the effect of satiric strategies on the structure and intention of Haliburton's work. In this paper, I want to discuss some of the patterns of satiric attack found in North American narrative satire in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This tradition of satiric literature in North America, and in Maritime Canada in particular, provides an important perspective from which to approach Haliburton's work. I am particularly interested in the way satiric authors manipulated their narrators and in how they used narrative structures to achieve their satiric intentions and to articulate social and moral reflections. In exploring this subject, I hope to show that Haliburton, writing in the first instance for a local readership, was not only influenced artistically by well-established satiric traditions but 54 also, because of that literary heritage, was able to depend upon a sophisticated level of reader response to the satiric implications of his narratives and to their social and moral purpose. At the same time, I hope the paper will demonstrate something of the range of ironic effects and the complexity of satiric attack that seems to be present in (at least) the first series of The Clockmaker. I have limited my study to the "first series" because (in my mind) it was clearly aimed at a Nova Scotian readership, and not significantly affected by the author's hopes of reaching a broader audience. Because of that, it reflects the state of satiric perception and reflection in Haliburton's immediate cultural and intellectual milieu. In order to appreciate the condition of satire in early 19th-century Nova Scotia, it is helpful to look at the literary context from which it evolved. This involves first looking at the broad development of satire in British literature in the early 18th century (from Butler to Churchill roughly), and second, looking at what happened to satire in North American literature in the later 18th century. In discussing this subject, it is not my intention to review the literary history of 18th-century English satire. However, I do wish to point out a fundamental flaw in the view taken by many critics with respect to the inherent nature and focus of satire as developed by English satirists through the first half of the century . The problem (it seems to me) stems from their assumption that there is a uniformity of ideological perspective and purpose in 18thcentury English satire. Critics pay very little attention to its developmental character as the century unfolds. As a result, 18th-century English satirists are often treated as if they formed a "school" of writers. At the same time, however, critics have long recognized the ideological fragmentation and polarization of the general intellectual milieu of 18thcentury England, a ferment that reached into the heart of its literary activity. Perhaps the best example lies in the debate between the relative value of the "Ancients" and the "Moderns," reflected in such works as Swift's The Battle of theBooks. For Swift, the issue was not simply literary ; it was political, moral, aesthetic, and epistemological in nature. Why then is satire viewed as having a single focus? The reason (I believe) is because the pattern of satiric writing at the beginning of the 18th century is in fact notcharacterized by the ideological dichotomy of the intellectual milieu, but appears to be identified with one side of the debate. All the major satirists of this early period— Butler, Dryden...