Satire: "I’m trying to beat you all up and beat myself up too"

"Have you seen that piece on satire by Colin Burrow in the London Review of Books?" asked Lord Bonkers over lunch. "It's Terribly Good."

It turned out to be a review by Burrow of State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature by Dan Sperrin:

The disappointment​ with satire that emerges from this book is in part a product of its method. The alluringly simple-seeming question ‘What is this text trying to do?’ is a much less good one to ask of satire than it might sound. It immediately excludes the possibility that a satirist might be a confused mess of self-censorship mixed with odd lunges for freedom, in which a desire to make a mark on the world as an individual intersects riskily with a desire to make people change their behaviour. 

The question ‘What is this satire trying to do?’ also implies that authorial intentions are clear, and that so long as you know enough about the day-to-day politics of the Walpole administration you can pin those intentions down and label them like dead butterflies in a display case. Many of the most successful satirists – Evelyn Waugh, even dry old Orwell – had a streak of madness and self-contradiction within them which might lead them to answer the question ‘What are you trying to do?’ with something like ‘I’m trying to beat you all up and beat myself up too.’ 

Furthermore, asking the same question of satire that one might ask of a political pamphlet aimed at redressing an immediate political wrong radically restricts the parameters within which satire can operate. It makes satire a mode that addresses a particular moment rather than a mode which might have an afterlife, or even change how people see the world in the longer term. You might say that’s not just a recipe for disappointment with satire, but for missing the point.