Satire in an Age of Realism by Aaron Matz (review)

Aaron Matz’s elegantly argued, eminently readable, and masterfully written study of late nineteenth-century fiction and drama powerfully enters recent conversations concerning the representational projects of realism and satire, as well as the temporality and history of genre. Both narrow and expansive, Matz carefully limits his claims about the relationship between satire and realism to a particular moment in literary history while reaching back to eighteenth-century satire and its classical antecedents, forward to modernism, and south to the French tradition from Gustave Flaubert to Louis-Ferdinand Céline. With chapters on the relationship between Augustan satire and Victorian realism, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Henrik Ibsen, and Joseph Conrad, Matz’s book should be required reading for anyone working not only on the Fin de Siècle but also on nineteenth-century literature and the novel more generally.

Matz argues that realism and satire have always been intertwined: while the expansive scope of the realist novel enables a broad social critique, satire naturally dependes on claims to accuracy and verisimilitude. The “hybrid” genre of satirical realism in the late nineteenth century, however, constituted a new, “non-corrective” approach to the social and political—different from, for example, Charles Dickens’s attacks on the New Poor Law or Chancery (xii). While Matz focuses on realism’s engagement with the particular and individual, as well as its investment in sympathy, he also troubles the assumption that these features define the genre. This is most wonderfully and perversely the case in his first chapter’s reading of George Eliot and the “sustained satirical temper of so much of Eliot’s writing. . . . Seeing clearly in George Eliot does not only enable forgiveness: it can often lead to scorn instead” (15). Here and elsewhere Matz analyzes the exploration of the limits of realist practice and ideology by late-Victorian writers.

Matz’s first chapter develops the connections between satire and realism by attending to their shared interest in the accurate depiction of the ordinary and the ugly; he focuses on images of human skin from Jonathan Swift to Eliot. Skin neatly captures the “representational dilemma” of both Victorian realism and satirical realism (19): the space for recording individual particularity, it also effaces difference as a universal and transhistorical “shared complexion” (8). Satirical realism presents “a dilemma of person and people. It wants to depict the individualized human person in all her idiosyncrasy; and yet it wants to scorn all mankind” (19).

The succeeding chapters elaborate Matz’s sense that when taken to their extremes the premises and techniques of realism become not only a form of satire, but “absolute satire” (23). “To be absolute means to condemn universally, to subject mankind to broad attack,” without any interest in suggesting a remedy (125). Each of these chapters focuses on one author and does justice not only to his or her fictions, essays, and correspondence; he also incorporates the late nineteenth-century critical discourses around realism, satire, and genre. In addition to probing generic boundaries, Matz studies generic temporality and periodicity more generally. As genres of “lateness,” realism and satire “come necessarily after other modes and traditions have been exhausted . . . expressing the impossibility of writing in that earlier way” (4). While this argument recalls Carolyn Williams’s recent description of parody, Matz is more interested in the ways in which late nineteenth-century satirical realism helped usher Victorian realism into the past. As Matz says of Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), “it comes not to praise realism but to bury it” (173).

Matz’s chapter on Jude the Obscure (1895) effectively shows the ways in which Hardy’s narrative omniscience can express a paranoid sense of a cruel and satirical God. In doing this, Matz argues, Hardy succumbs “to the temptation of personifying circumstance; and this is to take certain rules of the realist novel and reread them as satire” (53). Calling this “prepositional satire,” Matz links the strange chapter titles of Jude...