diffused satire in contemporary american fiction

Diffused Satire in Contemporary American FictionAuthor(s): Kathryn HumeReviewed work(s):Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 105, No. 2 (November 2007), pp. 300-325Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/588102 .Accessed: 08/03/2012 20:48

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Works described as satires have become ever more diverse. Mosttwentieth-century satire theory was founded upon examples pro-duced in eighteenth-century Britain, and those were varied to beginwith: they included verse satire (heavily influenced by the classics),freer novelistic satire, prose squibs, lampoons, and genre-defying pieceslike Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704). In later twentieth-centurycriticism, “menippean satire” became so wildly popular a term thatHoward D. Weinbrot calls it “The Genre That Ate the World.”1 Thatvery popularity caused definitions of menippean satire to fractureinto two major and many minor types. The major types consisted of(1) carnivalesque satire based on body- and lower-class orientation(Mikhail Bakhtin’s version) and (2) intellectual satire (NorthropFrye’s concept).2 Since Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and other large, com-plex fictions seemed menippean and at the same time encyclopedic,the ambitions of encyclopedism (as defined by Edward Mendelson)came to attach themselves to the intellectual variety of menippea,making that form even more difficult to define clearly.3

1. Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the EighteenthCentury (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 1.

2. For Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of menippean satire, see his Problems of Dostoevsky’sPoetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (orig. Russian, 1929; Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1984), chap. 1, and for his treatment of the carnivalesque spirit thatlies behind menippea, see Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (orig. Russian,1965, though written in 1940; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). Northrop Frye dis-cusses menippean satire, or as he prefers to call the form, anatomy, in Anatomy of Crit-icism (Princeton University Press, 1957), 308–12.

3. Edward Mendelson, “Gravity’s Encyclopedia,” in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on ThomasPynchon, ed. George Levine and David Leverenz (Boston: Little Brown, 1976), 161–95.

Diffused Satire in Contemporary American Fiction

K A T H R Y N H U M E

Pennsylvania State University

David Cowart, Thomas Lockwood, Brian McHale, Ashley Marshall, John Whalen-Bridge, and Robert D. Hume have provided immensely helpful criticism of my arguments.

Kathryn Hume „ Diffused Satire 301

Complicating this picture yet further are the black humor in the1960s, Fredric Jameson’s blank parody or non-ironic stylistic pastiche,and the ironic interrogation of history carried out in the texts LindaHutcheon describes as historiographic metafiction.4 While notmatching any of these latter groups exactly, satire uses some of theirtechniques and shares some of their concerns. Finally, the varietiesof satire double if we recognize the two different impulses behindsatire that Steven Weisenburger identifies.5 One produces generativesatire, which hopes to reform some portion of our imperfect world.The degenerative impulse breaks down values and leaves us recoilingfrom the void rather than reassuring us that a high moral norm existsand should be our model. Though both impulses are found in allperiods, Weisenburger sees the degenerative as prevailing in the con-temporary scene. Given the perpetually and necessarily fragmentedstate of satire theory, problems arise when one tries to discuss anywork as satire, let alone propose yet another form of it.

I was driven to think yet another definition might be helpful by theodd effects of some contemporary novels. By chance, several of thenovels I taught recently in a seminar on contemporary fiction seemedto “feel” like satires. Students would start discussing a work by saying,“You might analyze it as a satire”—but somehow that assurance alwaysfaded during discussion. We usually ended with “or if it’s not a satire,at least it’s satiric.” Even demoting a text from “satire” to the vaguer“satiric” did not help us find ways to approach these novels; we didnot have the concepts or vocabulary needed to explain, for instance,something that felt satiric yet had no obvious target. The work mightdisplay a bit of intellectual satire or a bit of blank parody, but we didnot feel comfortable with applying the existing labels. We simply didnot know what to make of the satiric tone of such works as MargaretAtwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Barry Unsworth’s Song of the Kings(2003), Colson Whitehead’s Intuitionist (1999), and Gerald Vizenor’sHeirs of Columbus (1991).

Defining literary works by a tone or flavor is problematic. Thosequalities are hard to pinpoint textually, and not all readers will comeaway with the same response. Notwithstanding such difficulties, these

4. Bruce Jay Friedman, Black Humor (New York: Bantam, 1965); Fredric Jameson,Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 1991), 17; and Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction(New York: Routledge, 1988), 105–24.

5. Steven Weisenburger, Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 15–29.

M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y302

terms help to capture the fugitive qualities that signal what I shallcall diffused satire. Seminar members were responding to a kind ofauthorial disparagement that belongs in the satiric tradition, thoughfew of the texts reached the level of intensity expected for satiric hos-tilities. The works also seemed ironic, but fantasy was too prominentfor a simple designation of irony. Since fantasy elements often supplythe distortions that estrange the world of satire—Swift’s Lilliputians, themedical “miracle” of George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931)—weare used to fantasy and irony interacting in satiric scenes. When wemeet that combination, we have good reason to expect satire of somesort.

In an attempt to understand this strain of contemporary fiction, Ihave gathered some examples where the satiric flavor interferes withour ability to explain how the novels work in nonsatiric terms yet doesnot yield clear results when conventional satire analysis is applied. Iam not arguing that these authors were consciously working in somenew subgenre. Clearly some of their effects are attributable to theusual postmodern suspects: loss of master narratives, cynicism overpolitical leaders and government, rapid changes in cultural patterns,and a moral relativism that makes righteous indignation difficult. How-ever, this new kind of satire cannot just be explained by a shift in thecultural dominant, because traditional satire continues to be createdin postmodernist culture, as can be seen in such recent films as TeamAmerica (2004) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and in books such as WilliamKotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat (1976), Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring (1993),and Po Bronson’s Bombardiers (1995).

Let me juxtapose several examples of recent American fiction thatdiffer in content, form, and market niche in hopes of eventually findingsome common satiric ground. The Propheteers (1987), Mason & Dixon(1997), The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut (2002), TowingJehovah (1994), and The Intuitionist (1999) all seem satiric, but nonefits conventional definitions of satire very well, and each seems satiricin a different fashion. Apple, Pynchon, Coover, Whitehead, andMorrow have little in common except reputations for originality orexperimentalism. I will start with a brief discussion of what satiretheory can offer toward the study of these works and then try to iden-tify what makes these seem different from conventionally definedsatiric types. What I will call diffused satire overlaps with previouslyidentified kinds of satire yet is often differentiated by its loweremotional intensity, so low at times that the target may be difficult todetermine. In brief, diffused satire seems to be a more meditativeform than hard satire, one that forces readers to articulate their ownvalues as well as to work to understand authorial values. In keeping


with the postmodern era, this version of satire starts by underminingour ontological certainties.

T H E M A R K E R S O F S A T I R E

Recent scholars have argued that satire is better seen as a modeadaptable to various genres than as a genre or kind with an identi-fiable structure.6 As Alastair Fowler distinguishes between these con-cepts, a kind is represented by a noun (e.g., an epic) but a mode isusually rendered adjectivally (e.g., as satiric or elegiac). He admitsthat “modes may amount to no more than fugitive admixtures, tingesof generic color. All the same, they are more than vague intimations of‘mood.’ As we have seen, a mode announces itself by distinct signals,even if these are abbreviated, unobtrusive, or below the threshold ofmodern attention.”7 Satire need not empty the form it feeds on throughparody. Fowler points to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) as being satiricyet also remaining a novel. In Fowler’s terms, satire as a mode caninhabit a text without defining the text generically. Theorists of satirewho think in terms of mode rather than genre thus free themselvesfrom the obligation to produce restrictive definitions, with the advan-tage that they are no longer bedeviled by the embarrassing exceptionsto their narrow definitions.8

I would like to follow Fowler and consider satire a mode, and I willgo further into Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family resemblance theory, whichFowler only mentions in passing. I suggest that we conceptualize satireand the satiric as a family defined by a bundle of features. No singlefeature need be present, just a substantial number of them. In theory,features A through F might give us a sense of the mode’s parameters,but one example might have A, C, E and another, B, D, and F; theywould not overlap in any particular feature, yet still be identifiably

6. For the shift from genre to mode, see Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 3–5. For his summation of twentieth-century satire theory, see 28–34. Critics who launched the shift from genre to modeinclude Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Satire’s Persuasive Art (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1979); and Michael Seidel, The Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais toSterne (Princeton University Press, 1979).

7. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 107.

8. If definitions demand that satire must target historical particulars, then Gulliver’sTravels IV is not a satire; if satire can only attack universals, then attacks on Walpole orClinton or Bush are not satires. Such narrow definitions invariably rule out works thatare generally considered satires.


part of the same family. That would be an extreme case; a more typicalsituation would be that each example has four of the six features, andthus they would overlap somewhat. The more family features present,the more easily we can recognize membership in the family. Wittgen-stein only tosses off the notion of family resemblance as a way of talkingabout language, so I am extrapolating its applications to this literaryproblem.9 He provides no basis for assigning a minimum number offeatures to define membership in a family. Is something still satiricif it has only one feature? Usually not, although in the Renaissance,splenetic railing (attack) without other features passed for satire. Familyresemblance theory seems less problematic when several features arepresent, even a majority, if we are to call something satire. I grant thislack of precision, but still find satire defined as a bundle of character-istics helpful for conceptualizing how works on the edge of the maprelate to more central, easily recognized, members of the family.

In addition to the presence of characteristics, I suggest that theintensity with which those features operate is also important for classi-fying the satire. Intensity is not a concept much used in satire theory,although we find partial equivalents. For instance, much classical andneoclassical satire is recognizable from the passion of its denuncia-tion, the famed saeva indignatio. Dustin Griffin cites Renaissance andeighteenth-century commentators who connect spleen, gall, hot blood,and other sympathetic physical manifestations with both writing andreading satire.10 Other theorists have noted the shifts in tone fromthe vitriolic name-calling of the 1590s to wittier though still scabrousRestoration texts of Rochester, the refinements of Dryden, and theincreased politeness and hence quieter voice of much eighteenth-century satire, though the degree of harshness tends to characterizeindividual writers rather than periods, and some voices devoid of pas-sionate anger can nonetheless be intense in other ways.11 Intensity hassomething in common with saeva indignatio and with the violence ofattack but can also be found in quiet but seriously committed authorialearnestness and engagement and in the degree to which the text triesto demand audience agreement and even action. Intensity can include

9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (NewYork: Macmillan, 1953), item 67, p. 32.

10. See Griffin, Satire, 169–80.11. See Claude Rawson, introduction to English Satire and the Satiric Tradition, ed.

Claude Rawson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), v–xiii, for the overall shifts in anger over time.Thomas Lockwood argued (e-mail dated October 31, 2006) that anger is more accuratelyassociated with individual satirists than with a period.

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the clarity and directness with which a subject is targeted. It alsoshows in the amount of trouble an author takes to make a fantasticsituation seem compelling, and in the intensity of emotions expressedby characters in the satiric text. Diffused satire of a sort now common,however, works at a much lower emotional temperature and often lacksthese various forms of intensity associated with the satiric tradition.

Having studied various definitions of satire, I tally nine familyfeatures, most of which are present in works generally accepted assatires. The first two are the most important, even essential accordingto most satire theorists. (1) Attack is central to definitions of satire,though theorists quarrel over whether the attack must have a histori-cally specific target or whether general human problems will suffice.12

(2) Humor or wit modifies the attack and differentiates it from hell-fire sermonizing or foul-mouthed name-calling, and part of this wit is(3) the author’s glorying in his or her literary performance. (4) Some-times understood as a manifestation of the wit but often separable fromit is a penchant for exaggeration, extrapolation of present patterns toa more extreme future version, and fantasy. (5) Another element thatsets satire apart from extravagant insult, say, is a hard kernel we areasked to recognize as moral or existential truth, however much we maysense that it is being twisted or distorted. (6) Since attacks are rarelylaunched out of loving kindness, another element is some versionof authorial malice, disgust, righteous indignation, or an attitude ofmockery and ironic disparagement. (7) The approach, however, mayinclude inquiry rather than confident condemnation. Two furtherelements, once considered central but now downplayed by Griffinand Weisenburger, among others, are (8) the presence of a moralstandard (or high moral norm) that justifies denigration of the targetand reminds us of the ideal and (9) the rhetorical aim of reformingthe audience’s behavior. That last, though it corresponds to one of theoldest claims made for satire, is perhaps the weakest element if takenat face value, since evidence that satire produces reform is tenuousindeed, and those satirists who relish displaying their wit would be

12. One side of this quarrel is exemplified in Edward W. Rosenheim Jr.’s Swift and theSatirist’s Art (University of Chicago Press, 1963). He insists on the historical particularityof the target: “Satire consists of an attack by means of a manifest fiction upon discern-ible historic particulars” (31). Yale theorists coming out of New Criticism ignored suchparticulars and stressed the rhetorical aims of satire; Ronald Paulson, for instance, saidthat satire need merely imitate “a vice or folly” (Paulson, The Fictions of Satire [Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967], 7). More recent critics have avoided such anextreme either/or stance.


as put out as the biblical Jonah was with repentant Nineveh if theiraudience did reform.13

These elements constitute the basic bundle, though one could doubt-less add other features. When most of them are strongly present,readers educated in the Western tradition would identify the work as“a satire” or as “satiric.” If the elements are not all present or if theylack emotional or moral intensity, then something may feel satiricwithout being clearly classifiable as a satire. The more attenuatedthe qualities, the more diffused the effects, and the more resistant tostraightforward rhetorical interpretation the work will be. In the novelsdiscussed here, for instance, these diffused elements affect the aestheticlegibility of works that without the satiric features would appear to bean alternate industrial history, a Künstlerroman, a comedic pastiche oftall tales and historical anecdote, a quest romance, and a noir thriller.

How does the family resemblance theory work in practice? Foran example of a work lacking some elements in the bundle yet stillseeming satiric, consider the novel that started my seminar’s hunt forsatire: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Dystopias, because theyimplicitly attack contemporary society by showing an extreme, ex-trapolated form of it, are often considered a subdivision of satire, asare utopias, at least to the degree that they include reflections on real-world society.14 Atwood’s dystopic vision of human nature is very muchin the satiric vein. Oryx and Crake has the extrapolation, the kernel oftruth, the authorial anger, the attack on certain human behaviors, thesense of morality, and the rhetorical aim of warning, which impliesdesire for reform. The humor or wit, however, except in the form ofexaggeration and fantasy, is absent from the texture of the readingexperience, and authorial self-display is not prominent. Atwood’s char-acters occasionally make jokes, and readers may find the geneticallyaltered humans a wryly amusing solution to human aggression andsexuality, worth comparing to Kurt Vonnegut’s devolved humans inGalápagos (1985). Nothing in Oryx and Crake, however, rollicks or

13. John Whalen-Bridge (in e-mail correspondence, May 31, 2006) argues againstthe face-value claim to reform: “A satirist does not claim to do good so as to point youto the good he has done. The satirist claims to do good so as to make his motivation forattacking someone, perhaps viciously, a bit more acceptable.” That may indeed be asuccessful ploy, but relatively few contemporary satirists would claim that they trulyhoped or expected to make a difference in the outside world, and so this element insatire has faded from contemporary practice.

14. See Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Universityof Chicago Press, 1970), 3–24: “Satire and utopia are not really separable” (24). Seealso Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 310, on utopias as a form of menippean satire.


glories in its own wit, a fact lamented by some reviewers.15 I wouldcall Oryx and Crake satiric because of the intensity of those satiric valuesthat are displayed, because of the characteristic negative evaluationof human nature, and because of the fantastic elements that preventthe negative judgment from turning the argument into a sermon. Byconventional definitions that demand both attack and wit, however,the lack of overt humor makes the satiric identification disputable.

Wit is not the only element that can be found missing in contem-porary novels that nonetheless register as satiric. Mason & Dixon jokesunceasingly and launches witty remarks by the score; where, though,is the truth and where is a meaningful target? Does a hostile portrayalof slavery and slaughter constitute the evocation of a moral truth?Pynchon’s colonial elements bespeak considerable research, but onlya historian can tell the difference between his historically accurateand his invented details. Another satire that lacks what would usuallybe a key feature is Jessica Mitford’s nonfictional American Way of DeathRevisited (1998). Exaggeration, extrapolation, fantasy, and indeedopenly fictional details are normally important to making us feel thatwe are reading satire. Unexpectedly, Mitford’s best passages are ex-tensive quotations from death industry magazines, and she takes painsnot to twist her materials. The overall effect is devastatingly and prettyunarguably satiric, despite her avoidance of fantasy and exaggerationin this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction exposé. Given the centrality ofattack in satire theory, several diffused satires offer what is probablythe limit case of a missing element, a satiric-feeling piece that has noclear target. The absence of attack pushes the limits of the form morethan absent humor, truth, or exaggeration. Authorial disparagementis sensed, but we are not sure what exactly is under attack in White-head’s The Intuitionist or Morrow’s Towing Jehovah or Coover’s TheAdventures of Lucky Pierre. Without an obvious object of attack, howcan one even talk about satire? And yet, I shall argue that we should.

T H E R O L E O F FA N TA S Y I N D I F F U S E D S A T I R E :T H E P R O P H E T E E R S A N D T H E A D V E N T U R E S

O F L U C K Y P I E R R E

I shall start with Max Apple’s The Propheteers, because it has alreadyprovoked disagreement on its status as satire. This novel won Appleaccolades such as “the sweetest of satirists” and “a kindly satirist,” and

15. See, e.g., Martha Montello’s review, “Novel Perspectives on Bioethics,” Chronicleof Higher Education, May 13, 2005, B6–B8.


the book was called “a gentle fable.” Michiko Kakutani identified hisattitude as “not rage but amused reverence” (presumably for America),and she called his tone “tender nostalgia.” Alan Wilde quotes thesedescriptions with incredulity and insists the novel is “one of thebleakest and grimmest portraits of America to have appeared inthe last decade . . . bleaker and certainly grimmer than Coover’s ThePublic Burning”—an extreme statement, given the power, fury, intensity,and length of Coover’s vision.16 Wilde belabors the reviewers who thinkApple sweet and gentle, yet if ever a vision lacked intensity, barringthe last two pages, it would be this one.

The novel renders the lives of several American industrial luminaries:C. W. Post, his daughter Margery Post, Clarence Birdseye, HowardJohnson, and Walt Disney. Nothing but their names, however, corre-sponds to history. C. W. Post did make millions from cereal, but hewas not the saintly and ascetic Nazarite embodied in his fictionalnamesake. The death of the fictional Post from polio puts the town ofBattle Creek in mourning, yet the historical Post seems to have marriedmore than once, to have divorced, to have had nervous breakdowns,to have had major real estate concerns in Texas, and to have ended hislife in California by means of suicide. The fictional Birdseye, MargeryPost, Howard Johnson, and Walt Disney are similarly unrelated totheir historical counterparts.

As we start reading, we wonder how best to place this book. Is it ahistorical novel, a fantasy, a nostalgic mood piece for an earlier stage ofAmerican development, or a satire? The stories about these magnatesare unlikely enough that even if we do not bother to Google them, wesense that we are reading a fantasia on American industrial names,not a historical novel. If this were a fantasy rather than mildly fantastic,we might be disappointed that it has none of the intellectual challengesor obvious departures from reality of the Alice books, and none of thetrappings of heroic fantasy or romance. It does not portray a dream-scape, except in the attenuated sense of evoking the rather material-istic American dream of wealth acquired innocently by well-meaningand scrupulously righteous visionaries. Were that the point, this couldbe a nostalgic mood piece. The last two pages of grotesque publicconfrontation, however, discredit that line of interpretation.

Most readers are made uneasy by this fantasia on historical people,and that discord between fantasy and historical reality is one of the

16. Alan Wilde, “Max Apple and the American Nightmare,” Critique: Studies in Con-temporary Fiction 30 (1988): 27. Michiko Kakutani’s review is found in the Books of theTimes column, New York Times, February 4, 1987, late edition (East Coast), C25.


strongest motives for our trying to identify this work as satire. If wecannot read this straight, and if we sense exaggeration and fantasy,then perhaps the artistic motive is satiric. Given the title, which com-bines “prophet” and “profiteer,” we naturally look for profiteering inHoward Johnson and C. W. Post. All that we find, though, is highlymoral behavior. Howard Johnson, we are told, “contemplated themap [of his restaurants] and saw that it was good.”17 We recognize theoutlandish comparison to God looking at creation, but as Johnson isnot likening himself to deity, he betrays no hubris that would makethe portrait satiric. Abraham Post wishes to raise his infant son as aNazarite. His wife tries to clip the baby’s hair to violate the rules of hisoblation, but a cat startles her into dropping the scissors into a boilingpot. “Abraham Post took the miraculously spared Nazarite in his armswhile the angels that his wife heard not sang Hosannas so gloriouslythat the soul of the cat, instantly and long before the death of thebeast, entered the highest rung of the Heaven that has no end” (76).The touch about the cat keeps readers from lapsing into a straightreading, but hardly makes us feel confident that we are readingsatire—if so, on what?18 On a pious man and beliefs about heaven?They occupy much too little of the book to constitute its target.

Having kept us in a state of mild suspension for the whole of thebook, Apple brings things to a crisis in the final pages. Margery Postis trying to prevent the creation of Disney World in Florida. Her hugeestate is besieged by the protesting mob orchestrated by Disney’sbrother. Margery herself refuses to turn on the electric fences becausechildren are pressing up against them, but Walt Disney, of all people,flips the switch.

Margery saw those angelic faces contort, those pudgy fingers cling briefly and then fall free. It was like a scene from a concentration camp film. Those little bodies fell to the ground. . . . The youngest ones were on their feet, shaking the bewilderment from their limbs. The older children were now being shocked. She saw the five- and six-year-olds writhe, then rise, and brush themselves off. Quickly lines began to form

17. Max Apple, The Propheteers: A Novel (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 3. Ref-erences hereafter cited in the text.

18. Post is viewed satirically for wishing to paint over Old Masters so that wine andmeat do not show in the pictures, but he does not succeed, so any sense of outrage isdissipated. Apple makes it clear in interviews that he is not attacking the cereal; as oneinterviewer describes Apple’s own relationship to cereal, “It was the battleground wherehe won the right from his grandmother to be American, to eat the American breakfast,cereal and cold milk, rather than her Old World breakfast of rolls and coffee. ‘When Iwon,’ he said, ‘that’s when I became an American.’ ” See Sally Levitt Steinberg, “C. W.Post’s Life in Metaphor,” New York Times, March 27, 1988, late edition (East Coast), A23.


at each of the flashing red lights. Parents were taking snapshots of their children as their gums rolled up in shock.

The crowd was getting orderly again. Everyone began moving toward the back of the line. She heard some of the fallen ones saying that they could hardly wait until their next turn. . . . “Yes,” Walt Disney said, “that fence is really something, better than Cinderella’s Castle. I think we’ll leave it just as it is.” (305)

Margery gives up because “he was giving them what they wanted” (306).This last scene is undeniably satiric, a “central symbol of violence”

of just the sort that Ronald Paulson identified as characteristic ofsatire.19 It is grotesque; it carries overtones of horror; and it rousesthe reader’s disgust. Can those two pages, though, make the wholeairy book bleaker than The Public Burning (1977)? I fail to see anyvery clear satire of Howard Johnson or Clarence Birdseye or Margeryor Walt Disney or C. W. Post. The products delivered to the publicby these magnates are not here lampooned, nor are their businessmethods impugned. In the case of Disney’s films, Apple’s portrait ofa man fascinated with motion rather than plot is interpreted by AlanWilde as showing lack of concern with people and their sufferings.The text, though, does not dwell on any such moral failings.

Disney World alone draws textually explicit wrath. It stands in forall that is inauthentic and lacking moral purpose in American life, andrepresents a falling off from a more moral, visionary past. Apple limnsthe people standing in lines for safe little nightmares of thrills andchills. They crave pleasure and amusement, with nothing demandedof them but passive waiting and money. If human beings need foodand shelter as their basic requirements, then Post and Birdseye andJohnson provide a fantasized version of how America’s preferred typescame into being. Apple’s concern is the way we fill our time once wehave food and shelter, and the quintessential American solution fillshim with disgust. Although Apple does not draw this comparison, hispeople at the fence resemble experimental rats that will ignore hungerand thirst and rest (the Post-Birdseye-Johnson concerns) to stimulatetheir pleasure centers.

The attack at the end confirms a satiric motivation, but what makesus try to read this as satire from the outset is its mildly fantastic atmo-sphere. The fantasy is not heroic, so we discard that possible reading.Neither does it seem sparkling nonsense. Lacking other signposts,such a fantasy-reality mixture with ironic touches seems able to pro-duce a diffused satiric effect by itself, even though no obvious target

19. Paulson, Fictions of Satire, 9.


emerges until the very end. Even without the final scene, this combi-nation might make us shake our heads and mutter that the book feltsatiric, even if it was not exactly a satire.

Like The Propheteers, Coover’s The Adventures of Lucky Pierre signalssatire when it starts with a strange fantasy that we could hardly readstraight. We first see L. P. in snowy weather nattily dressed except forthe fact that his erect penis sticks out of the coat, and those around himconsider this totally unremarkable, or they make joshing comments,as if a naked penis were no stranger than bare hands in the cold. Westart seeing him as an ironic protagonist in Northrop Frye’s sense whenwe find ourselves “looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, orabsurdity,” because L. P. does live in the mostly “unrelieved bondage”of the ironic world.20 This is not bondage of the black leather sort,but the kind where his work makes obsessive demands on him that hecannot escape. His job consists of making varied and imaginative loveto nine luscious women/muses and turning this lovemaking into films.When he is not physically experiencing the scenarios, he is dreamingthem, unable to separate past or potential films from present reality.As we see his helplessness in the hands of others, his inability to es-cape his obligations, plus the number of times he is hurt physically,we tend to think him at least arguably a target or victim, enslaved toan activity he cannot escape. Because that activity—sex—is not one welook on as unpleasant labor, we are not sure how to judge what ishappening. Coover may be arguing that we are enslaved by bodilypleasure and should throw off that yoke, but how many readers wouldagree and renounce their sexuality?21 Being forced to make frequentlove is a promising reversal of values on which to base a satire, yet wedo not see just where it leads, an uncertainty that is strung out for theentire length of the book. Here we find the elements of satire exceptthe most fundamental and obvious one—a clear target being attacked;nor does Coover tip his hand in the last few pages as Max Apple does.

Reversal of social values is a form of fantasy and a common tech-nique for producing satire.22 L. P. is a porn star, but he operates in aworld where everything is pornographic. All ads show genitals, sex, andfour letter words; public figures like the Mayor of Cinecity exercisetheir sexuality openly, be it by wearing dominatrix gear at city func-tions or by exposing genitals. L. P. is the protagonist of all the classical

20. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 34, 238.21. For Coover’s treatment of existential bondage, see Kathryn Hume, “Robert

Coover: The Metaphysics of Bondage,” Modern Language Review 98 (2003): 827–41.22. Eric S. Rabkin considers reversal of values a defining characteristic of fantasy in

The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton University Press, 1976), 8–9.


pornographic films, all perpetually being rerun in city theaters, andmost of them made with female sexual partners who have now becomefilm directors. Those erstwhile costars are his muses and the directorsof his new films as well as sexual partners in those shows, and some ofhis current films remake his old pictures frame by frame, though weassume that the newer version differs from the old not just by virtueof his changing physical age but by the changing values of the times.

Sex is L. P.’s job; he works very hard at it, feeling “sick of keeping itup but scared not to.”23 Like anyone in a competitive job, he worriesabout losing his and is reluctant to take any time off. What he pro-duces is also art, and he suffers for his art—humiliations, stinging cold,near drowning, falling from heights, and physical blows even to theboner for which he is famous. His directors will go to extremes fortheir art, and we readers get jerked back and forth thinking thatsomething dire is happening to L. P. and then learning that it is just ascenario that he may have to shoot again or that can be run backwardsas film. He himself is never aware that a dangerous event is just a con-structed scene; his directors evidently maneuver him into periloussituations and shoot without his knowing he is being filmed.

Given L. P.’s ithyphallic appearance and behavior, we expect somekind of satire. If he were more degraded or nastier, the satire wouldbe a sardonic, hostile, feminist view of men as rutting animals, but heis not particularly degraded. He is often self-centered, but at least asoften he is helpless and victimized, and some of his misadventuresprovoke a modicum of sympathy. Besides, most of the women are aswilling to engage in the sex as he is in the present-day scenes, thougha few of his classic films with sadistic themes involved victims, oneof whom may have died in the course of the activities.

If L. P. is not an obvious target, then our own society would be thelogical alternative. Its simmering sexuality is prostituted to sell cars,computers, perfume, and sunglasses; possibly that is provoking satiriccondemnation. The uses to which sexuality is put in Cinecity are openand honest by contrast, but they hardly seem worth imitating ashigh moral norms. Furthermore, more sex more openly achieved isnot that interesting to read about, so the book does not seem designedto achieve that end. Society is also targeted when L. P.’s penis pokesan old woman from behind by accident and she falls under a bus.Instead of being horrified, onlookers complain that street cleaners

23. Robert Coover, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut (New York: GrovePress, 2002), 4.


aren’t there when you need them, and the crone’s remains aretrampled underfoot by pedestrians. Evidently those too old to partic-ipate in sexuality have no value or social meaning whatever; alterna-tively and allegorically, older values are trampled by the newer, andwe never stop to consider what we may be losing. This scene sug-gests satiric possibilities, but its point is made and dropped. Furtherpossible targets include city hall politics, cinematic art-speak, history-of-film trivia exchanges, and the artists/cinematographers and theirtheories of filmmaking. We nod at the academic discourse hereapplied to pornography, and nonacademic readers doubtless snicker,but Coover’s portrayal is not extreme or exaggerated enough for usto be sure he is satirizing this discourse in anything more than an off-hand fashion.

What we have is numerous situations made for satire, yet no clear,sustained target. L. P.’s behavior can be criticized, but that criticismwill arise only if readers impose their own values. Coover does notdirect us to a condemnatory reading; his nearly neutral tone justgives L. P. the chance to present himself, faults and all. We may feelsome slight sympathy with L. P.’s uneasiness when he learns that hiscinematographers are referring to the current project as his last fuck,and he realizes that they might snuff him to secure a gripping film.We may sense a certain authorial mockery when L. P. wallows in self-pity or nostalgia, or when he suddenly realizes that his recent sufferingsare scripted rather than real. One can view the novel as a Künstlerroman,the portrait of an artist, whose early work is given us in flashbackand in discussions of the early films, and whose current projects aredescribed as they are filmed. He may be looking back on his life andwondering what it adds up to, yet the satiric potential of a life beingemptied of meaning by imminent death is not developed. Manyreaders, for that matter, would envy L. P. his numerous orgasmswith beautiful women, and might not be swayed by the argument thatsuch activities are meaningless in the face of death. The situations areripe for satire, but the tone is close to zero-degree.

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre gives us life essentially from the pointof view of a penis. If something in the vicinity moves, hope you canfuck it, or at least think about doing so. Does transferring that view-point upward to the level of the man make it ludicrous? Of course;that would be a very narrow and repetitive life for a human. Giventhat L. P. is creating entertainment (and possibly art) with his activities,though, he has a purpose beyond achieving the next orgasm. Someof the old films described sound amusing, not just grunt and grind;some also sound sinister. Whatever political correctness may dictate,we know that sexually violent material will seem gripping to many


viewers, a desirable end from an artist’s point of view.24 Coover hascreated a fictive world of at least arguably artistic porn, and characterswho refer to seeing the films do not seem like Apple’s zombied con-sumers of Disney World rides. All the situations in this novel that inother hands would lead to satire seem here not to create and holdthat kind of target. We have humor, wit, exaggeration and extrapola-tion, and a feeling of attack that somehow never fully develops. If weare to claim that an attack is taking place, we as readers have to supplythe moral grounds underpinning the attack, be they feminist, philo-sophical, or spiritual. Coover almost never shows much warmth towardcharacters in this or his other novels, but distance does not necessarilyimply attack or disparagement. We can bring our own moral standardsto the ubiquitous display of polymorphous sexuality, but such a readingdoes not seem inherent to the text.

TA R G E T S E V E R Y W H E R E : M A S O N & D I X O N

No one ever said that a satire must have only one target, and the pres-ence of many can often be explained as an assault on “human nature”or “modern values” or some such blanket concept that encompassesthe various targets. Moreover, menippean satire as currently under-stood is much given to scattershot strikes at anything and everything.Mason & Dixon’s multiple targets, as well as their intellectual nature,has won for it the menippean label. Its use of eighteenth-century lan-guage reflects Jameson’s blank parody and its setting certainly raisesquestions of the sort that concern historiographic metafiction. Never-theless, like Coover, Pynchon seems mostly lacking in animus. All thatremains is a hint of authorial condemnation or distance.25 Almosteverything shown, from George Washington to talking dogs, seems to

24. In “An Interview with Robert Coover,” Critique 11.3 (1969): 25–29, Coover tellsLeo J. Hertzel that “if we are moved by nightmarish fiction, I mean when somethinghits us strong enough, it means it’s something real. Otherwise we look at it and say it’sa cute act, you know, but it doesn’t touch me at all” (27).

25. John Whalen-Bridge (in an e-mail, June 1, 2006), suggests that Pynchon andCoover are both retreating from the rage-oriented politics reflected in The Public Burn-ing and Vineland, and points to the criticism they drew from Robert Alter in Motives forFiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) for the oversimplificationscreated by that rage. Those oversimplifications were an inevitable part of hard satire,however, and I claim no insight into the reasons for the two novelists’ working in a lessintense vein in the works discussed here. Whether the rage proved impossible to sustain,or more youthful radicalism has died down, or whether the subjects they are tacklingdo not deserve such a response, or whether they are influenced by later modes of post-modern thought is not determinable from the novels.


be laughed at or at least smiled at sardonically. Slavery and genocideare the two exceptions; Pynchon does not make fun of them. Thesituations that make us uneasy, though, do not heat up into expres-sive indignation.

The lack of any important, central target is confirmed by the amountof effort that early critics put into figuring out what Pynchon mightbe viewing with disapproval. A target that must be painstakinglyextracted by experts is not being assaulted splenetically. Their severalaccounts might be summed up as understanding his disapproval tobe directed at the scientific, rationalist impulse to impose order on theburgeoning formlessness of life by drawing lines, as in the archetypalline being cut by Mason and Dixon through the wilderness of colonialAmerica.26 In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon talks of “Modern Analysis”as Europe’s original sin, and its intellectual empires as orders of“Analysis and Death,”27 empires that reached fruition in WorldWar II. Pynchon may well have wished to trace this impulse to analyzeback in history for this novel, and what he found was a source in theEnlightenment. Even if such line drawing is part of empire, property,capitalism, and the subjection of conquered peoples, though, Masonand Dixon are not obviously blamed for their activities within the novel.Pynchon questions the Enlightenment project but avoids the kind ofdemonization that would take place in a conventional satire.

The impulse behind drawing lines may be Pynchon’s ultimate target,but his animus seems mild compared, say, to that shown towardWeissmann’s desire for transcendence in Gravity’s Rainbow or towardBrock Vond’s villainy in Vineland. Pynchon can attack fiercely, butthe rhetoric of this book does not work us up to any intensity ofemotion. This is not to say that Pynchon has retreated from moral

26. In “The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon,” American Literature 71 (1999): 341–63,David Cowart sees the imposition of the line as an assault of reason against a mysticaland magic sense of creation; reason thus desacralizes the world. Samuel Cohen relatesthe line to the failed Enlightenment project in “Mason & Dixon & the Ampersand,”Twentieth Century Literature 48 (2002): 264–91. Various magic, mystic, and religioussides of the world threatened by the impulse to draw the line are touched on by DanielPunday and Justin Scott Coe; see Punday’s “Pynchon’s Ghosts,” Contemporary Litera-ture 44 (2003): 250–74; and Coe’s “Haunting and Hunting: Bodily Resurrection andthe Occupation of History in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon,” Reconstruction 2 (2002),http://reconstruction.eserver.org/. Brian McHale links the early colonial freedoms lostthrough imposition of the line to the open Zone of Gravity’s Rainbow; see “Mason &Dixon in the Zone, or A Brief Poetics of Pynchon-Space,” in Pynchon and “Mason &Dixon,” ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin (Newark: University of Delaware Press,2000), 43–62.

27. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), 722.


issues; his portraying various forms of slavery speaks to his concern.The issue of line drawing, though, is not handled with a rhetoric thatwould churn up a reader’s feelings. Instead, the tone is leavened byrepeated fantastic intrusions, such as flying mechanical ducks, ChineseJesuits, and talking dogs. Pynchon could have displayed more emo-tional involvement over missed forks in the path, whether in thebickering relationship of Mason and Dixon, who never seem to levelwith each other,28 or in American history, but he does not reach theintensity that he did in Gravity’s Rainbow when he talked of WilliamSlothrop’s philosophy as America’s missed path in this same colonial-era America.29 Mason & Dixon can be called a menippean satire, butthe low-keyed nature of its attack suggests that diffused satire mightbe a more useful descriptor. The intellectual concerns of menippeaare there, but the emotional engagement is lower than in Gargantuaand Pantagruel (ca. 1532–64) or Candide (1759), right on the satirethreshold.

S A T I R E B Y W A Y O F T H E S A C R E D A N D H E R O I C : T H E I N T U I T I O N I S T A N D T O W I N G J E H O VA H

Mergers of fantasy and reality, reversals of social values, and an indis-criminate irony are standard satiric techniques that help make usbelieve a work to be satiric, even if the satire seems diffused. Anothertechnique that makes us grope for a satiric explanation is the retell-ing of a well-known sacred, legendary, heroic, or traditional story incynical terms. The British novelist Barry Unsworth’s The Song of theKings relates Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigeneia. Robert Coover’sBriar Rose (1996) elaborates variations on the fairytale of that name.The presence of one cynical priest, Realpolitik leader, or posturing,self-conscious prince in a traditional, heroic, or sacred setting putsimmediate pressure on us to read something as satiric. Colson White-head’s The Intuitionist uses a version of this technique in creating afantasia upon black labor relations and the heroic struggle to breakracist practices. Nothing, though, in the Pullman labor struggle corre-sponds to Whitehead’s invention of engineering by means of intuitionand fantastic visualization techniques, especially when applied to theprosaic realm of elevator safety. Here we have a demystifying of past

28. Celia M. Wallhead analyzes this oddly unresolved relationship in “Mason andDixon: Pynchon’s Bickering Heroes,” Pynchon Notes 46–49 (2000–2001): 178–99.

29. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 554–56.

One Line Short


heroics (black labor, Pullman) as well as a level of fantasy that leadsus to look for some kind of satiric treatment of a historical episode.30

The Pullman movement enjoys the sacredness of legend. In addition,Whitehead uses Christian resonances to introduce tonal uncertainties.He sprinkles his account of his intuitive engineering or intuitionismwith religious phrases. When Lila Mae first learns about intuitionismin the classrooms of the Midwestern Institute for Vertical Transport,she “saw the light” (though this is also literally a light in the library).31

Someone who teaches intuitionism at that institute left the job ofinspecting “to preach the new gospel” (59). Otis’s original elevatorsdelivered us from the five or six story limitation; the “second elevation,”growing from elevator theorist James Fulton’s hypotheses, “will grantus the sky” (61). In Fulton’s two-volume text that theorizes how toconstruct an elevator from the elevator’s point of view, Lila Mae re-members seeing the statement that “There is another world beyond thisone” (63). Fulton also writes, “An elevator is a train. The perfect trainterminates at Heaven” (87). Lila Mae ponders the faith that rules herlife: “Intuitionism isn’t about passion. True faith is too serious to haveroom for the distraction of passion” (99). Lila Mae has “always con-sidered herself an atheist, not realizing she had a religion” (241).Citizens are to be warned so they can “prepare themselves for thesecond elevation” (255). Lila Mae’s whole modus operandi is to rejectreason and empiricism for the intuitive revelation that she applies toelevator machinery. To her credit, we are told that she has a 10 percentbetter diagnosis rate than any other inspector. Whatever she is doingworks, but it comes from some kind of symbolic visualization andpsychic communication applied to the machinery. This is not Swift’smechanical operation of the spirit but, rather, a spiritual operation ofthe mechanical, and like Swift, Whitehead joins two realms—mechanismand religious spirit—that can hardly ever be put together without satiricintent.

30. Michael Bérubé has argued that the story signifies on “the Great NorthernMigration, that well-worn trope of the narrative of African-American experience ofmodernity; a look back at the fitful integration of African-Americans into the nation’smunicipal civil service agencies and transportation industries; and, most obviously,a tongue-in-cheek reworking of the discourse of racial ‘uplift’ ” (Bérubé, “Race andModernity in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist,” in The Holodeck in the Garden: Scienceand Technology in Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris[Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2004], 163).

31. Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1999; New York: Anchor, 2000), 45. Ref-erences hereafter cited in the text.


Despite Whitehead’s religious-sounding terms, however, religiondoes not seem central to his satire. No real exposé of a faith-orientedoutlook takes place. Lila Mae’s total identification with cutting edgetheory in her field (a theory that proves ultimately to be a hoax, butwhich somehow nonetheless works, at least for her) might also pointto contemporary critical theory as a partial target.32 If theory is thetarget, though, the race materials are largely irrelevant or at leastbelong to a separate strand of satire. Furthermore, Lila Mae’s assur-ance of being always right, her preference for intuition over empiri-cism, and her willingness to extend the hoax may indict theory, but itdoes not target any specific theory. Particular targets are mostly madeimpossible by Whitehead’s deliberate superimposition of eras. Partsof his story are marked with 1930s and 1940s allusions, while otherssuggest the 1960s and after.

What makes us think this must be satire is the demystifying oflegendary history, the fantasy elements that resist a straight reading,and the misused echoes of Christian thought patterns. What frustratesus, though, is lack of a clear target, plus mixed messages on how torespond to the protagonist, who is cool and smart, but who may beas totally wrong in her final analysis of why the elevator fell as sheproves to be about a black co-worker. She is poker-faced, a traditionalattribute of a noir detective, in this instance seeking the saboteurbehind an elevator crash. We never know quite where we are to standwith her. Again, the low emotional temperature is what leaves usunsure how to read the satiric elements.

Whereas religion is merely part of the irony that makes satire likelyin The Intuitionist, it is central to James Morrow’s Towing Jehovah.God has died, and his two-mile-long corpse floats in the Atlantic. TheCatholic Church and representatives of Protestant and Jewish tradi-tions try to deal with this brute fact. Both the death of God and theinstitutional responses seem ideal for satire, but on what?

One answer would be to say that the book satirizes all religiousapproaches that think of God as having a body, whether in terms ofMoses’s seeing the hinder parts of God or in terms of the familiarpicture of an old man with white hair and beard.33 Fair enough, but

32. Alan D. Sokol’s famous hoax article in Social Text even sounds as if it might bepart of Lila Mae’s project to transcend gravity in the “second elevation”: see his “Trans-gressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,”in “Science Wars,” ed. Andrew Ross, special issue, Social Text, no. 46/47 (1996): 217–52.

33. This interpretation of the satire was suggested to me by Philip Jenkins, professorof history and religious studies at Penn State.


why should an atheist care, and how many people think seriously inthose literal terms now anyway? Most of Morrow’s readers are likelyto be more or less secular humanists. Furthermore, making a physicalGod real by supplying the corpus dei rather undermines satire on thatkind of religious belief within the world of the narrative. Quite strikingis Morrow’s delicacy in not debunking religion per se and in showingfar less hostility to the institutional side of religion than many satiristswould permit themselves.34 Morrow’s later novel, The Eternal Footman(1999), is more overtly antireligious, but Towing Jehovah seems carefulto avoid cheap shots at religion. The author simply develops his givenand then backs off and lets the action unfold.

We cannot, though, escape the feeling that somehow this is satiric.The priest, staring up God’s nostril, queasily reports “Marshes ofmucus, boulders of dried snot, nose hairs the size of obelisks: this wasnot the Lord God of Hosts they’d grown up with.”35 The same priesthad earlier been upset by sight of “the great veiny cylinder floatingbetween the legs (a truly unnerving sight, the scrotal sac undulatinglike the gasbag of some unimaginable blimp)” (115). Gigantism canproduce strange effects and questions in our minds, and is a traditionaltool of satire. Granting God a penis produces musings on what itmight be good for if he lacks any chance of a mate and presumablyhas no need to urinate. Are we to understand this as the originalLacanian phallus, or the essence of masculinity, in relation to whichall creation is feminine, as C. S. Lewis argues in That Hideous Strength(1945)?36 As we try to establish the attitude we are expected to take,we cannot, I think, just say that any thought of a material God isunsophisticated. He has a very material form within the story, so wemust shrug off our sense of the grotesquerie as an artifact of our ownlimitations and size.

34. In a thoughtful review, Michael Bishop says Morrow’s works “speak to me as aChristian with more passion and integrity than all but the disturbing beauty of theGospels and the most sublime of sacred music. . . . I see the engines of compassionateoutrage, the turbines of a ruthful anger.” Bishop analyzes this literalization of a metaphoras the “distinguishing characteristic of science fiction” and sees Morrow as satirizing“not only dogmatic theists, but also unyielding rationalists, militant feminists, [and]fanatical war-reenacting hobbyists.” See “James Morrow and Towing Jehovah,” New YorkReview of Science Fiction 67 (1994): 1, 8–11.

35. James Morrow, Towing Jehovah (New York: Harvest, 1994), 119. References here-after cited in the text.

36. “But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all thingsis so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it” (C. S. Lewis, That HideousStrength [1945; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1965], 316).


So what is being targeted? The quest romance seems to be playedstraight: Captain Anthony Van Horne, who attempts to tow God’sbody with an oil tanker, falls in love with a feminist protester andcomes to value marriage and their child. The quest romance, though,is trivial psychologically and literarily in comparison to the problemof dealing with the body. If this is menippean intellectual satire (withgross corporeal touches), the various human approaches to the deathof God could simply be the philosophical comedy being played out.Certainly some issues may amuse a nonbeliever, such as the spectacleof Christians worrying about the status of the trinity’s other twomembers, and wondering if heaven (the state of dwelling eternallyin God’s presence) is now gone, and lamenting that the proof ofGod’s existence is also the basis for destroying all faith, because Goddemonstrably no longer exists except as a corpse. Such issues deservecontemplation, however, if you grant the premise of God’s physicaldeath. Thus do elements that might be satiric undercut themselves.Only when Morrow gets to some human antics (atheistic liberals, WorldWar II reenactors) is he undeniably satiric in an ordinary sense, butthese elements fail to satisfy an audience’s need for a serious target.Even someone who hated secular humanists would be hard put toargue that they are important enough in this novel to count as itstarget and raison d’être, compared to the stupendous subject of thedeath of a physical god.

D I F F U S E D S A T I R E

Wit and attack have been the core markers of the form. Suppose werethink satire, though, as a bundle of characteristics that includes butdoes not depend entirely on these two. We then also take into consid-eration the intensity or dilution of the characteristics. What resultsis a new way of mapping satire. Near the center are works that attackstrongly, mock wittily, and roil with moral indignation. On the marginsare the less intense diffused satires, whose target is not always clearand whose wit is often less important than the element of fantasy. At themargins, possibly half in and half outside, are clusters correspondingto at least two types of menippean satire that sometimes overlap eachother or take on qualities from another form, such as encyclopedicnarrative. Toward the high-intensity center, you might find blackhumor. Out at the margins again would be historiographic metafictionand blank parody. This kind of map is necessarily messy, because in-dividual works may belong to more than one group or may be half-way in and halfway outside the boundaries of what any particularcritic regards as the satiric mode. Such a map, though, reflects the


kinds of manifestations of the satiric spirit that are possible in amodal conception.

What constitutes a working definition of emotional intensity, thenew dimension that I am claiming for diffused satire? Part of thatintensity often comes from the level of authorial anger; an authorwho does not feel there to be any point to scarifying humanity as themost odious vermin to crawl the earth is operating at a lower levelof emotional intensity and involvement than Swift. Such anger showsitself sometimes in the emotions of characters, but more reliably inthe polarization of good and evil. Anger is most feasible when onehas no doubts about the rightness or wrongness of a cause, so moreambivalent values characterize lower-intensity works. In Doctor Rat,William Kotzwinkle has no doubts that we shamefully abuse and tortureanimals; in Japanese by Spring, Ishmael Reed is convinced that academeis grossly unfair to men, especially men of color. Such authorial beliefscome out in the situations and injustices presented, and through char-acters’ comments and attitudes. In contrast, the lack of anger andthe considerable amount of sympathy for the dysfunctional familymembers in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) reduce theintensity so far that the faint attack and mild humor put that workhalf-in and half-outside the margins of the satiric map.37

Emotional intensity also attaches to the rhetorical aims of a satire.An author passionate to persuade us to do something or radicallychange our values will come across with more intensity than one whomerely wishes us to reconsider some one of our values. The degree towhich we are being asked to change will also relate to intensity; smallchanges need no huge rhetorical push and can be encouraged with alower-powered approach.

How an author presents the exaggerations and fantasies in thesatire can also affect emotional intensity. Gerald Vizenor presentsideas in The Heirs of Columbus that would take a lot of authorial forceto make us accept them, even within a fictive world: Columbus isdescended from Mayas who made it to Eurasia; someone with severe

37. Ronald Paulson calls satire legalistic, concerned with “character not as a per-sonality developing in time but as an identity which exists in terms of a certain action—a crime—committed at a particular time.” Paulson cites Basil Willey: “tout comprendrec’est tout pardoner, and the satirist ex officio cannot pardon, so he must decline to under-stand all and explain all.” See Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 4. Franzen does concern himself with the back-ground and development of his characters and pays a good deal of attention to under-standing why they have the moral shortcomings that they do. That clashes with hissatiric disparagement, and the two coexist uneasily.


genetic deformities can be healed by listening to tribal stories; peopleshould form sovereign nation states and demand recognition forthem.38 Because Vizenor neither piles up supporting detail norhas characters show any grasp of the immensity of this challenge toreceived reality, he denies us the intensity that would help us acceptthese ideas comfortably as givens.39 Euro-American readers, at least,are puzzled by his fantasy and miss the emotional conviction that wouldmake it palatable. I believe that Vizenor has refused to supply theemotional supports on purpose because he is attacking Western reasonwith nonreason; one result is a book that feels satiric yet does not fittraditional definitions.

The role of fantastic material in diffused satire deserves furthercomment. The fantastic and exaggerated elements, and the distortionsrepresenting futuristic extrapolation, were all classified as componentsof wit in traditional satire theory. In these contemporary novels, how-ever, the fantastic element seems to have taken on functions other thandisplay of wit, and it now serves further purposes. In PostmodernistFiction, Brian McHale identified ontological destabilization as themission of postmodern literature.40 I suggest that one of fantasy’sroles is to give our ontological certainties a jolt, to make us unsureof reality’s boundaries within these diffused satires. When fantasy issupported by intensity of presence and mimetic-seeming detail suchas magic that “works,” then the fantasy has substance, and we ascribethe generic status of fantasy to the work. The lack of such intensityand believability, however, leaves us less sure how to read such a work.This area of uncertainty contributes to diffused satire’s effect on ourontological discomfort.

The proliferation of such mild fantastic effects that are not renderedbelievable suggests a postmodern inflection to the satiric impulse andpossibly identifies diffused satire as a postmodern development ofthat form. Attaching mildly weird actions to the names of real people,

38. Vizenor ignores the fact that various African-descended groups, survivalist right-wing groups, and religious cults have tried various kinds of secessions and have beenslaughtered by the U.S. or local government; MOVE of Philadelphia, Ruby Ridge, andWaco are examples.

39. Within science fiction and fantasy, any implausibility can be made plausible;giving storytelling the power to alter deformed bodies, as Vizenor does, could havebeen developed into an entire branch of magic, as in L. E. Modesitt’s Spellsong Cycle,where sung music, properly controlled, has the power to cause cliffs to fall or the groundto open. The emotions of the characters who achieve such consequences (or sufferthem) supply some of the intensity that encourages conditional belief.

40. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 3–25.


as Max Apple does for instance, disturbs our sense of the boundarybetween fantasy and history or fantasy and reality. Many passages inMason & Dixon could pass for parts of a serious historical novel, andthen we read something that blows away the assumptions we haveformed about Pynchon’s fictive reality. The Intuitionist is another workthat bothers us by seeming realistic, yet proving to be fantastic at anypoint that we pry into its world. The Midwest Vertical Transport Insti-tute is so plausibly presented as an educational institution equivalentto business or law school that we almost wonder whether we couldhave been ignorant of such a professional sector in society. As weprobe the relationship between fantasy and what we accept as reality,however, we are always aware of an attitude that feels satiric.

While the diffused satires I discuss all have a significant fantasy com-ponent that destabilizes our ontological assumptions about reality, theydiffer greatly in the amount of fantasy they contain. Sometimes thefantasy is minor and appears mostly as an early signal that satire isthe mode, as in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre. It may play a largerrole: in Towing Jehovah, the fantasy element is literally enormous, butthe novel’s desacralizing effects (dying angels wondering whether theYankees still lead in the World Series) maintain links to the world wethink of as “real,” in this instance the world in which World Seriestake place. Low-keyed satires without significant fantasy are possible.DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Road toWellville (1993) signal satire not with fantasy but with a high inci-dence of ironic remarks and grotesque behaviors. Those novels can,simply because of the density of such material, be handled adequatelyby traditional satire theory, though their relatively low-keyed tonelocates them away from the hot center of the mode out toward theboundary. The fantastic elements tend to make diffused satire feelslightly mysterious, because we are rarely sure exactly how we aresupposed to read them.

In these works, wit has partly metamorphosed into fantasy, and asfor attack, the other key element, diffused satire also undermines itscentrality. Part of the reduction in attack comes from a low emotionaltemperature. Within the satiric tradition, that is not new. Horace isfamed for his sunny reasonableness of tone, for example, and Pope’s“Rape of the Lock” is genial. Nonetheless, the diffused satires tendto have a nebulous sense of attack, either through multiplicationof targets or through unarticulated but somehow implied targets. Wesometimes cannot decide exactly what the author may be disparaging,whereas a more robustly hostile piece leaves us in no doubt.

The low intensity of emotional engagement and attack affects ourreading of values in a variety of ways. In high-intensity works, the


authorial values leap out at us. However, the longer and harder wemust study a text to understand its values, the more likely we areto find some value, even if that proves to be something we project.These relatively unfocused satires force readers to articulate theirown values as those apply to the situation in the novel. If a work thattries to dissolve all values sends one away cherishing one’s own, is itstill (in Weisenburger’s terms) degenerative? I would argue that theapplication of “degenerative” depends entirely on the reader’s willing-ness to engage seriously with a work. As Morrow shows us, even thedeath of God, which dissolves all the spiritual values of the Westernworld, leaves Captain Van Horne fiercely determined to be a goodfather and not replicate the cruel mistakes of his own father, and thatgives a generative flavor to his experience. Likewise, the corruptionof the guild world leaves Lila Mae cherishing her own ability to con-tinue Fulton’s work, even if it may be a hoax. She can rejoice in herown trickster ability to be smarter than those around her, and insofaras we too value such abilities, the very degenerative nature of that book’svision does not end in universal darkness covering all, but arguably inBlackness outsmarting all. Some works may persuade us that every-thing is hopeless, but they mostly need to operate with strong emo-tional intensity to prevent our articulating values of our own.

Is diffused satire simply satire-lite, a form for writers who lack thecommitment to a vision or the righteous energy to promulgate theirvalues forcefully? The writers here discussed would seem to countagainst that theory, for in other works, they are capable of a morefocused indignation. James Morrow’s The Eternal Footman savagelysatirizes a religious leader who takes advantage of human desperationto enrich and empower himself. In The Public Burning, Coover hasproduced one of the most violent satiric scenes of the twentieth cen-tury, the detailed rape of Richard Nixon by Uncle Sam, the action thatthereby promises Nixon the presidency. Likewise, Vizenor producedstrong, fairly obviously satiric scenes in Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles(1978, 1990). These writers may have changed strategies across nov-els, but in earlier works they have not lacked the passion, intensity, orimagination to create satire as it is generally understood.

I have mapped satire as a bundle of possible characteristics andhave suggested that both the number of characteristics present andtheir intensity contribute to the degree of satiric effect. Diffusedsatire operates out on the edges, away from the burning core. Thisconfiguration of qualities harmonizes with other literary develop-ments of our era, as evidenced by the techniques of diffused satire fordestabilizing ontological certainty, its antiheroic assumptions, and itslow-keyed emotional temperature that lends itself to presenting moral


complexity. If I judge from my own response to modern works with amuch more intense satiric bent, I find myself resisting the one-sidednature of satiric argument. I keep saying, “Be fair. Such-and-such is onlysometimes the case.” I do not approve of cruelty to lab animals, butWilliam Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat quickly trips my defensive responsesand makes me protest his claims. His mad narrator cites scientificarticles that, if real, would be damning. Many of the journals citedappear to have been invented, though, and none of the articlesturned up in database searches.41 Hence, I suspect that Kotzwinkle’sscholarly apparatus is bogus as science though traditional as satirictrimming; this does render Kotzwinkle’s more extreme claims unsup-portable. Satire with clear values tends to shove them down readers’throats, and even if readers are in complete agreement, they mayresist such force-feeding. Their awareness of complexity makes themdistrust easy answers. Traditional satire cannot handle complexity.Diffused satire seems better suited to that purpose.

Unlike the kind of satire defined as attack, diffused satire is nuanced,often ambiguous, and frequently teasing toward its reader. Diffusedsatire is not righteous or punitive. It is less judgmental, more provoc-ative of doubt and questions, sometimes self-reflexive in the fashionexhibited by John Gay in The Beggar’s Opera (1728), where the finalsatiric perception is that “The World is all alike.” In our age of com-plexities many readers are disinclined to trust easy answers or goodand evil differentiations of the sort usually propounded in hardsatire. In truth, hard satire rarely conveys complexities effectively. Itis in its basis a form that tends to simplify, clarify, and judge. Diffusedsatire of the sort described and analyzed here can be tough, funny,and bitingly provocative, but it seems to me generated by an acuteperception of moral and ontological uncertainty. Authors like Coover,Whitehead, and Pynchon are engaged but doubting commentators inthe works discussed here, not judges or propagandists. Diffused satireis less simple, less partisan, and more essentially ambiguous than thetraditional kinds of satire found at the hot center of the mode.

41. Science databases do not go back very far into the past, but every attempt I madeto track down any of the articles Kotzwinkle cited ended in failure.

diffused satire in contemporary american fiction

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