Satire is a reaction to being alive and aware of the world at-large. And because history tends to repeat, satire sometimes feels like a prediction — months, years, decades, even centuries after it was written. Satire can speak truth to power. It can be a defiant act. It can deliver new ways of thinking about the world. It can reinforce community and remind people they’re not alone. But at its core, it is catharsis. It is an immediate and tangible way to grapple with the hardness and weirdness of life and of being a human.
In many places around the world and at many times throughout history, writing satire could get you banished from society — or, worse, a job in politics. Luckily, so far, I have avoided both of those fates. And I feel fortunate to live in a time and a place where I can write something like the above chapter in my book and be relatively confident that I will not be forced into exile. But we’re certainly headed in a direction that makes me less confident every day that a book like mine won’t be banned or, turning Bradbury into Nostradamus, burned. Perhaps that’s how you know a piece of satire really works — when it’s been set on fire.
It’s often said, in our age of absurdity, that satire is dead. It died when Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. Or it died with Trump. Or it died yesterday, suddenly, in its sleep, and we’re just barely too late to revive it. Sometimes I try to stop writing satire altogether. I think to myself, I should just write a movie in which Tom Cruise has to run somewhere. That would do well. Who do I get in touch with about that?
But then I put pen to paper. Or, much more often, fingers to keyboard. And, of course, much less often, quill to parchment. And when I do that, even when I’m writing in new structures or longer works, I find it almost impossible to center my writing — if only by way of a subtle nod — anywhere other than satire.
Out of curiosity, I googled the word “satire” before writing this essay. Now’s a good time to remind you that I have a lot of bad ideas. For instance, it may have been a bad idea to tell you I googled something to write these final paragraphs.
In my ensuing search, I found that among ancient humorists like Aristophanes and Zhuangzi, one of the earliest and most explicitly satirical collections was written by a Roman poet named Juvenal who lived about two thousand years ago. (I say all this, once again, to look like I know what I’m talking about.) It turns out Juvenal had the same disease I do, since my google search told me he once wrote the following, roughly translated:
“It is difficult not to write satire.”
Some things never change.
No comments:
Post a Comment