We have no ideas, and they’re pretty firm.
– Joseph Heller
The decline in satiric novels as a robust, recognized category of U.S. fiction tends to be taken as a foregone conclusion, lamented but passively accepted, even as the need for satire turns acute.
I say: Let’s not give up so easily. Satire and its cousin the lampoon (directed at a specific individual) function in the body politic like an immune system, seeking to counter the infection of a plague of vanity, folly and absurdity run amok. My friend Nick Kulish, an accomplished foreign correspondent, paid homage to the great Evelyn Waugh in his Iraq War novel Last One In, and for me every page of that book was a delight, informed by a caustic wit, deftly muted. We need more books like that.
Compared to the British, our flair for satire in fiction has always been underdeveloped. Americans tend to see satire as Mad Magazine-style silliness-with-a-twist, but in fact satire as a broad category also includes damning, indelible thought-experiments like the George Orwell classic 1984, which its author intended as a form of satire. Talking to someone of college age recently, I was startled by the impression that she had just read the book as a work of pure imagination, a kind of free-form nightmare for humanity, instead of seeing it as a direct extrapolation forward of the totalitarian impulse Orwell saw rolling forward all around him in the 1940s.
In a letter to a friend written in 1945, the year before the end of World War II, Orwell elucidated the state of mind that prompted him to conjure Winston Smith and his world: “Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.”
Emotional nationalism? A tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth? We tend to celebrate as somehow unique the idiocy of our times, fueled as it is by 140-character bumper-stickers-as-thought sloganeering, and a bottom-line-ravaged Fourth Estate (that would be the press) that long ago abdicated its responsibility to challenge and inform the public. And yet – dig down a layer or two and the demagoguery now afoot in the land is really not so new.
Jon Stewart-style satire helped many of us get through the last decade, and he is missed. But it’s also fair to ask whether quick-hit satire is the only way. Fully conceived, carefully constructed worlds of imagination,, such as 1984, can and must be essayed to try to jolt the public imagination wherever possible. Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series, despite what many seem to think, was not actually conceived as a star vehicle for Jennifer Lawrence, or a jobs program for stylists and wardrobe consultants, but as a pointed commentary on a culture dominated by a lurid form of reality television. Again: Sound familiar?
It’s easy to write Collins off as an exception; she’s so talented, such a writer’s writer, she could pull off what others couldn’t – and there’s some truth to that. But if its dystopianism has spawned a thousand imitators, why aren’t we seeing more writers prodded or inspired to emulate its deep social satire?
I think a fundamental problem is structural: Traditional New York-based publishing is like your overweight neighbor, feet propped up on the coffee table, paralyzed in front of the TV, cheese dogs in hand, wanting to change, wanting to get up and move, but somehow finding it very hard to alter the pace. There are times when it makes sense to develop novels with promiscuous use of time as an ally, as in wine making; there have to be ways to contract the necessary time frame to develop top-level novels that go from idea, to first draft, to polished draft, to working with an editor, to the “New Fiction” table at your local bookstore. What I’m talking about, done right, intended to hold up and stand the test of time, is imposingly difficult, but the cultural importance of success would be considerable.
I’m not talking, for example, about a collection of writers all checking in with short, quick humorous riffs on that buffoon well on his way to landing the Republican nomination for President. Such a collection, even if David Remnick edited it personally and attracted the best writing talent in the land, would be like snack food.
But couldn’t a master of satire like Christopher Buckley be encouraged to think ahead a bit, and give us a novel of a Trump-like character as President? John Steinbeck threw off a little novel somewhat in this vein with his satire The Short Reign of Pippin IV? Personally, I’d like to see Stephen King send up the Donald – with any horror-novel twists he cared to include.
How about instead of the X Prize, a Silicon Valley billionaire funded an S Prize with a cool million bucks awarded to the novelist who checked in with the most hilarious, devastating, fictional take on the clown-show reality TV spectacle the Republican Primary presidential race has become – or thinking forward to the potential consequences of the flood of nihilism and no-nothingism among potential voters this political season has represented? I have to think such a prize would spawn an instant bestseller.
– Steve Kettmann
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