Satire, evil, and the capacity to be a supreme being’s moral superior.
The role of the satirist in the representation of evil is interesting because the satirist exploits the nature of the relationship that they have with their reader/audience. As readers, “We bring to the text what we know of the world, of others, and of ourselves, and place this knowledge at the disposal of an absent author’s words, with the understanding that our mental furniture, as reinstalled by the text, maybe radically rearranged and that some pieces may be junked altogether”#. A satirist presumes this knowledge, and highlights the inconvenient data that has been left out in a philosophy or mythology that they assume you to have a prior knowledge of. According to Northrop Frye’s theory of Satire#, Satire parodies romance by ‘applying its mythical forms to a more realistic situation’, thereby utilising the effect of militant irony, in creating a story/situation where the structure of moral norms are relatively clear to the reader/viewer, to expose absurdities within life, theories or philosophies. Since romance is founded on the interactions of the representations of ideals, and often conforming to the archetypal good vs. evil, this allows the satirist to highlight both a depiction of evil (whether heterogenous or not) and, using the reader’s assumed knowledge of this description, highlight what they believe to be wrong with it, by installing it as an object of their satire’s attack.
Sir Terry Pratchett is a prolific author that use humour in a satiric manner to reveal ideas about our own world, by revealing its absurdities in a universe called the “Discworld”. Within this universe, Pratchett arguably creates a condition of hyperreality, where the distinction’s between Bauldrillard’s Simulcra and that which they simulate is eroded into nothing. This condition, according to Madan Sarup’s summary of Baudrillard#, is “a world in which all we have are simulations, there being no ‘real’ external to them, no ‘original’ that is being copied. There is no longer a realm of the ‘real’ versus that of ‘imitation’ or ‘mimicry’ but rather a level in which there are only simulations.” Christopher Bryant gives an example of this with the constant recreation and re-arrangement of the City of Ankh Morpork, citing the recurrant phrase of Pratchett’s book, “Technically, Ankh-Morpork is built on loam, but what it is mainly built on is Ankh-Morpork” and highlighting that the inhabitants are willing to accept substitutions of new versions of their reality as the absoloute reality# thereby suggesting that, “It is little more than a logical leap to postulate the idea of “textual reality.” In the Discworld, everything is treated as a text; within a universe that is encapsulated in a text. In Small Gods#, it is revealed that the history books of the disc are, literally, textual; not “books in which the events of the past are pinned like so many butterflies to a cork” but, rather, books from which history is derived. An example of the malleability of reality in the Discworld would be from the book “Guards! Guards!” in which Pratchett writes of the citizens of the fictional Ankh Morpork:
“You tell them a lie, and then when you don’t need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they’re progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they’ll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable.” #
By creating this universe in which ideas can literally be subverted, the author creates a space in which our idea of evil can be substituted for another. In the Book Carpe Jugulum, he uses a witch as the Agroikos, or foil to the Alazon of a moderate priest in a conversation on the nature of sin. The Alazon is the representation of convention; in this case, Oats plays the part of the moderate religious figure, where Granny Weatherwax challenges his ideas in the following conversation:
“There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example.’
‘And what do they think? Against it, are they?’
‘It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of grey.’
‘Nope.’
‘Pardon?’
‘There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’
‘It’s a lot more complicated than that-‘
‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.’
Pratchett identifies a common idea; that evil deeds are comparable, and that there are sinful acts that can be not wholly evil given the complexities of living in our society. A historical example of this situational-based idea of morality would be from the idea of Fletcher, the founder of situational ethics, in which he stated, “The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.” In other words, the rationale or situation that guided a person to willfully commit an act must always be considered before you can determine whether the deed was good or evil. It is this idea that Oats, the priest, is proposing. Pratchett uses the satirical literature device of the Agroikos to reveal the flaws in his support of this argument, through an actual argument in the dialogue of the text. In essence, Pratchett’s object of attack is grand ideas; philosophies and justifications. He uses Granny Weatherwax as a tool to identify evil in the most basic of actions, and even as fundamental to human nature. Prefacing with Granny’s statement that “Judging is human” (and that there’s nothing wrong with that), they continue their debate as follows:
Mercy’s a fine thing, but judgin’ comes first. Otherwise you don’t know what you’re bein’ merciful about. Anyway, I always heard you Omnians were keen on smitin’ and crushin’.’
‘Those were… different days. We use crushing arguments now.’
‘And long pointed debates, I suppose?’
‘Well, there are two sides to every question…’
‘What do you do when one of ‘em’s wrong?’
The reply came back like an arrow.
‘I meant that we are enjoined to see things from the other person’s point of view,’ said Oats patiently.
‘You mean that from the point of view of a torturer, torture is all right?’
Throughout the books, Pratchett identifies the idea of morality as a human conception; and questioning the idea of ideals at all. Morality is a fiction in the disc (and in our world), however, the fiction is crucial to our existence. In a universe of textual reality, the imaginary nature of morality does not negate its existence. This is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that, in a literal comparison, Death, one of the forces of nature of the disc universe that has been given form by collective imagination, talks to his (mostly) human grandaughter Susan on the nature of imagination and how it is crucial to human existence.
‘All right,’ said Susan. ‘I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
“REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE”
‘Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little- “
“YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES”
‘So we can believe the big ones?”
“YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING”
‘They’re not the same at all!”
“YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET— “
Death waved a hand. “AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME… SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED”
‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—-”
“MY POINT EXACTLY”#
Pratchett is, throughout his books, undermining the ideas of Justice, Mercy, Duty, Religion and Philosophy, but not the neccessity for their existence. Rather, his character Death, is a Baudelarian thinker (amusingly so, because Baudelaire himself was obsessed with death), who has come to love humanity for their everyday pecuiarities, and sees greatness in the mundane. Baudelaire is said to have said, “He shall be the true painter who can pull out of everyday life its epic side and make us understand just how great and poetic we are in our neckties and polished boots.”# For Baudelaire, vice is natural. For Pratchett, the existence of the idea of vice is what gives us our humanity (and, when the capacity to conceive of big ideas enters other creatures within the universe, (from rats, to dogs, ravens, the embodiment of Death and even the auditors of the universe) it intrinsically alters them so that they can no longer truly belong to their previous species or genus, because they move closer to humanity, but have an awareness from being outside it. The evil present in Pratchett comes from lack of imagination; it stems from the world around us. Lord Vetinari, the tyrannical dictator of Ankh Morpork, whose endurance is down to the fact that the city would be unimaginable without him now, notes this in a conversation with two (wizarding) university archchancellors on the nature of evil in the book Unseen Academicals:
“I see evil when I look in my shaving mirror. It is, philosophically, present everywhere in the universe in order, apparently, to highlight the existence of good. I think there is more to this theory, but I tend to burst out laughing at this point.”
He goes on to give an example of how acts that we consider evil are hardwired into the natural order of existence.# This idea is also raised in Voltaire’s infamous satirical novella “Candide”, written to point out the fallacy of Gottfried William von Leibniz’s theory of
optimism and demonstrate the hardships brought on by the the inaction that follows optimism’s deliberate ignorance toward the evils of the world.
The Patrician took a sip of his beer. ‘I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I
suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I
was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very
endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived
into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to
a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I
remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the
delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of
nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And
that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe.
Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to
all of us to become his moral superior.’
The two wizards exchanged a glance. Vetinari was staring into the depths of his beer
mug and they were glad that they did not know what he saw in there.
This view would contrast with that of the Alazon created in Voltaire’s Novella, Dr. Pangloss, who is a follower of Leibnizian philosophy, using the line “in this best of all
possible worlds….#” emphatically. Leibniz chose to believe that God in his perfection, despite having the ability to pick from an infinite number of worlds, chose this world, “the best of all possible worlds,” even though it contains the presence of evil. Vetinari’s idea that if there is a supreme being, it is up to us to be his moral superior, would directly contrast with the perfection of god that Leibniz’ theory presupposes.
For Pratchett, Evil, as an imagined Human creation, is an observable part of nature that we have chosen to define as such. It can be one of the most destructive, disruptive and upsetting parts of our nature; the horrors of abuse and victims a testament to that, and one recurrent theme of his books, is the way in which innocent ordinary people become caught up in events beyond their control. This follows the example of the wager in Voltaire, in which Martin, Voltaire’s Agroikos, wagers that a couple seen to be laughing and singing are probably not happy in response to Candide’s comment, “At least you must admit that these people are happy.#” Allen Plaskett# identifies the source of evil acts in humanity as H-trauma; the capacity to carry them out formed in the minds of the most vulnerable. He cites a television show, from the early 1990s, in which a child-abuser was presented to the public, ultimately to be bullied, abused, mocked and strung up by the viewing audience in a public display of hatred (Despite his mild mannered and polite appearence), in order to show that abuse is cyclical, saying,
“An infant boy who is provoked and abused in secret by his father till he is beside himself with suffering and anger often finds himself a generation later provoking and abusing his son in secret in the same way. He beats his son with the same instruments, chides him with the same phrases, feels the same abusive feelings, and he relents only when he elicits the same misery, and the same hatred. And he gets sthat same relief… and feels afterwards the same remorse….He IS his Father at such times.”
Where this programming tried to represent an ‘Evil’ of society, that of Child abuse, and even offered an abuser a chance to represent himself, really it became a paegent for society to retaliate and continue the cycle of abuse. With a true representation of the evil, the creators merely continued a cycle of abuse. According to Robert Harris,# satire allows the creator to remove their work from this cycle. He cites Swift’s“Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”# in which the poet points out that his satire points “At no defect but what all mortals may correct”. With no specific target, but a fictional one, the system cannot be abused in order to engender abuse.
“The best satire does not seek to do harm or damage by its ridicule, unless we speak of damage to the structure of vice, but rather it seeks to create a shock of recognition and to make vice repulsive so that the vice will be expunged from the person or society under attack or from the person or society intended to benefit by the attack (regardless of who is the immediate object of attack); whenever possible this shock of recognition is to be conveyed through laughter or wit: the formula for satire is one of honey and medicine. Far from being simply destructive, satire is implicitly constructive, and the satirists themselves, whom I trust concerning such matters, often depict themselves as such constructive critics.
If Pratchett is pointing out that morality is little more than a set of ideas, then what is he correcting? It would appear, in the words of the author himself’s acceptance of the Carnegie prize#, that he is suggesting that we entertain the dea that “Homo Sapiens might actually be capable of thinking,” and, paraphrasing GK Chesterton, “We now know that the monsters may not simply have scales and sleep under a mountain. They may be in our own heads.” For him it is the negation of imagination and unthinking (lack of imagination and empathy) that is truly terrifying. The elves of his books live outside morality; in a world literally parasitic to that of the disc. Their horrifying-ness stems from their enslavement of the human population. The auditors, vampires; all of the great villains of the Pratchett books, their villainy stems from their inability to share the ideas that Death listed above; to empathise with humanity. While an evil-overlord can be satirised affectionately, even to the point of joining the archetypal heroes in their adventure, these ‘unthinking’ characters are laid out bare in his books. The following passage from The Light Fantastic# could be said to summarise this:
…There were far worse things than Evil. All the demons in Hell would torture your very soul, but that was precisely because they valued souls very highly; Evil would always try to steal the universe, but at least it considered the universe worth stealing. But the grey world behind those empty eyes would trample and destroy without even according its victims the dignity of hatred. It wouldn’t even notice them.
However, is it possible that sometimes we see satire and meaning when it does not exist? For the art critics Kimmelman and Glenn O’Brien, Painter John Currin’s work is a neccessary exposure of hypocrisies that exist within our society, acting as a sort of devil’s advocate. His brash images of nude women, taken from pornography, “Get people talking. In a time of widespread academic feminism, his paintings of voluptuous nudes came across as, perhaps, unexpectedly daring.”# The idea that the beautifully painted images are taken from pornography, an industry that exists in a morally ambiguous situation within our society; tied as it is to sexuality, perversity, the commodification of the human body and power-exchange through sex, raises questions about morality in the trade of images and in the trade of sexual acts. (As indeed does Pratchett with the euphemistically titled “Guild of seamstresses”, in which if a girl were ever to turn up with a thimble, it would be most unusual, and in which the girls exploit themselves. However, where O’brien and Kimmelman see social commentary, is there only an aesthetic value for the creator? Can satire, a device from literature, be applied to the visual arts? Currin says, “”I love grand, classically nude paintings and there is really no situation where plausibly you have criss-crossing limbs and stuff like that except in pornography.” Because Currin paints from photographs, a neccessity because of the slow, labour intensive technique that he employs of painting in glazes, it is arguably the most logical source of photographs that will be clear and, in many ways, composed (For even pornographic photographers are photographers.) In this case, this stems from an aesthetic decision.
On the other hand, Currin himself finds it hard to express his motivations, except for identifying a need to find beauty in something stereotypically portrayed as bad and stupid; arguably identifying with the corrective intention, through art that is humourous that is a common theme of satire as a device; finding the beauty in the humour. It could almost be called satire reversed. He says, “It’s not because I want to shock people or show how open-minded I am, but for some reason stupidity is a theme for me in painting and I find it liberating… I don’t know why, but I feel freer. But perhaps there is some need I have to redeem this silliness with something really solemn and sombre and beautiful.”
Talking about The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, Pratchett argued that there can be a solemnity, weight and beauty found in humour that is often missed by people. This is a commonality he has with Currin, though I would argue that, although also playing with silliness, common perception, and altering them, Currin’s ideas cannot conform to the use of Satire as addressing or correcting a social evil; they lay in correcting a common aeshetic jusgement as it relates to a social evil, it is the image of beauty in pornography, rather than addressing the morality and ethics of pornography and exploitation. However, it is interesting to note his comments on finding weight in the silly; as it is an idea that satirists such as Pratchett rely upon.
“The problem is that we think the opposite of funny is serious. It is not. In fact, as G K Chesterton pointed out, the opposite of funny is not funny, and the opposite of serious is not serious. Benny Hill was funny and not serious; Rory Bremner is funny and serious; most politicians are serious but, unfortunately, not funny. Humour has its uses. Laughter can get through the keyhole while seriousness is still hammering on the door. New ideas can ride in on the back of a joke, old ideas can be given an added edge.”
The power of humour is that it lets our defenses weaken; this is exploited by the author of satire. For Connery and Combe, satire is dangerous because, “The one thing we know about satire is that it promises to tell us what we do not want to know- what we may, in fact, resist knowing. One is apt to find one’s former consciousness uninhabitable when the work of the satirist is done,”# and “Satire establishes oppositions between good and evil, text and reader, reader and society, even between reader and herself.” It is necessary to question the motivations behind the satirist’s attack; in using a tool that so clearly is a tool of mental manipulation, the satirist is wielding a weapon. As Connery and Combe go on to say, “Most satirists- indeed virtually all English Satirists from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century- claim one purpose for satire, that of high-minded and usually socially oriented moral and intellectual reform; however, they engage in something quite different, namely, mercilessly savage attack on some person of thing that, frequently for private reasons, displeases them.” Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbon’s satirical attack on the romantic fiction of DH Lawrence and his kindred Romantic authors, could be seen as an attack on a genre of novels that she viewed as silly. On the other hand, the attack is an affectionate one, with beautiful and poetic descriptions of the countryside injected and interrupted by humourous outbursts, and the characters affectionately portrayed; although not attacking a great evil, this satire might perhaps be addressing the idea that we can attach ourselves onto one sole idea and follow that; something common to many satirical novels.
Jon Rowland sees the use of analogy in satire, particularly in the work of swift and Churchill, as an unacknowledged, “better means of approaching knowledge of evil [as opposed to ‘Good’]”. While he acknowledges that satire, in representing a representation, is often seen as a traditional “second best” as a means of “acknowledging what is ultimately unknowable” he questions the validity of this; as have done Terry Pratchett; Voltaire, in addressing Leibniz; Wezel, in addressing Voltaire and many other satirists. By referencing the idea that we bring to the text what we know of the world, of others, and of ourselves, the satirist plays with our awareness of the text as a text, of our ideas as derived from texts, and of the malleability of our ideas. This ultimately gives them an excellent tool in exposing our preconceptions to ourselves, as we witness what other texts have brought to us, and leads us to question our interaction with the text. Satire’s weakness is that it can only expose the weakesses in the evil that we already know; but this rearranges the reader’s thoughts to leave room for new formulations; it is a powerful literary and creative device.
1 Brian A. Connery and Kirk Combe, “Theorizing Satire: A Retrospective introduction” in Theorizing Satire: Essays in literary Critecism, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 1
2 “Northrop Frye’s Theory of Archetypes- Winter: Irony and Satire,” last modified Oct 14, 2008 22:39 http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/dherring/ap/consider/frye/indexwinter.htm
3 Madan Sarup, “An Introductory Guide To Poststructuralism and Postmodernism” (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester heatsheaf, 1993), 164
4 Christopher Bryant, “Postmodern Parody In The Discworld Novels of Terry Pratchett” Intenet, accessed 18 December 2011, available from http://www.lspace.org/books/analysis/christopher-bryant.html#fn6.
5 Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (London: Corgi, 1993), p.7
6 Terry Pratchett, “Guards! Guards!” (London: Corgi, 1990)107-8
7 Terry Pratchett, The Hogfather (London: Doubleday, 1996)
8 “Charles Baudelaire”. Internet. Available from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/baudelai.htm. Accessed 16th December 2011
9 Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals (London: Doubleday, 2009) 206
10 Voltaire. “Candide,” In Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories. Trans. Donald Frame, (New York: Penguin Group, 1961) 16
11 ibid. 80
12 Allen Plaskett, H-Trauma: The General Theory of Evil (US:Lulu.com(Self published) 2007)
13 Robert Harris, The Purpose and method of Satire. Internet. available from www.virtualsalt.com/satire.htm. Last modified October 24, 2004
14 Waingrow, Marshall. “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.” Studies in English Literature 5 (1965): 513
15 Terry Pratchett, Speech by Terry Pratchett winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2001 for Winning title: The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. Internet. Available from http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/pressdesk/press.php?release=pres_terspeach.htm. accessed
on 17 December 2011
16 Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic, (London: Doubleday 1986) 256
17 Glenn O’Brien, “John Currin” Interview Magazine accessed 22 December 2011 http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/john-currin/#page1
18 Brian A. Connery and Kirk Combe, 1
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