On Satire

In 1946 Evelyn Waugh declared that 20th-century society – ‘the century of the common man’, as he put it – was so degenerate that satire was no longer possible. But before reaching that conclusion he had written several novels taking aim at his ‘crazy, sterile generation’ with a sparkling, acerbic and increasingly reactionary wit. In this episode, Colin and Clare look at A Handful of Dust (1934), a disturbingly modernist satire divorced from modernist ideas. They discuss the ways in which Waugh was a disciple of Oscar Wilde, with his belief in the artist as an agent of cultural change, and why he’s at his best when describing the fevered dream of a dying civilisation.

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Further reading in the LRB:

Seamus Perry:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n16/seamus-perry/isn-t-london-hell

John Bayley:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n20/john-bayley/mr-toad

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By the end of 1895 Oscar Wilde’s life was in ruins as he sat in Reading Gaol facing public disgrace, bankruptcy and, two years later, exile. Just ten months earlier the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest at St James’s Theatre in London had been greeted rapturously by both the audience and critics. In this episode Colin and Clare consider what Wilde was trying do with his comedy, written on the cusp of this dark future. The ‘strange mixture of romance and finance’ Wilde observed in the letters of his lover, Alfred Douglas, could equally be applied to Earnest, and the satire of Jane Austen before it, but is it right to think of Wilde’s play as satirical? His characters are presented in an ethical vacuum, stripped of any good or bad qualities, but ultimately seem to demonstrate the impossibility of living a purely aesthetic life free from conventional morality.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

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Read more in the LRB:

Colm Tóibín on Wilde's letters: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n08/colm-toibin/love-in-a-dark-time

Colm Tóibín the Wilde family: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n23/colm-toibin/the-road-to-reading-gaol

Frank Kermode: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n19/frank-kermode/a-little-of-this-honey

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza. But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’? In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is: they see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

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In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Read more in the LRB:

Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/clare-bucknell/his-own-dark-mind

Marilyn Butler: Success

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/marilyn-butler/success

John Mullan: Hidden Consequences

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n21/john-mullan/hidden-consequences

Thomas Jones: On Top of Everything

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n18/thomas-jones/on-top-of-everything

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on Emma as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider how the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Read more in the LRB:

Barbara Everett

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n03/barbara-everett/hard-romance

John Bayley

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n03/john-bayley/yawning-and-screaming

Marilyn Butler

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n12/marilyn-butler/jane-austen-s-word-process

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so far has featured succinct and damning portrayals of recognisable city types, Sterne’s comic masterpiece seems to offer the opposite: a sprawling and irreducible depiction of idiosyncratic country-dwellers that makes a point of never making its point. Yet many of the familiar satirical tricks are there – from radical shifts in scale to the liberal use of innuendo – and in this episode Clare and Colin look at the ways in which the novel stays true to the traditions of satire while drawing on Cervantes, Rabelais, Locke and the fashionable notion of ‘sentiment’ to advance a new kind of nuanced social comedy.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Clare Bucknell on syphilis:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n14/clare-bucknell/colonel-cundum-s-domain

John Mullan on Sterne:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n11/john-mullan/shandying-it

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, and The Dunciad is his monument to the hate he felt for almost all the other writers of his time. Written over fifteen years of burning fury, Pope’s mock-epic tells the story of the Empire of Dullness and its lineage of terrible writers, the Dunces. Unlike other satires featured in this series so far, it makes no effort to hide the identities of its targets. Clare and Colin provide an ABC for understanding this vast and knotty fulmination, and explore the feverish, backstabbing and politically turbulent world in which it was created.

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Read more in the LRB:

John Mullan: Clubs of Quidnuncs

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n04/john-mullan/clubs-of-quidnuncs

Barbara Everett: Tibbles

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n18/barbara-everett/tibbles

Colin Burrow: Puppeteer Poet

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n08/colin-burrow/puppeteer-poet

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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In 'The Beggar’s Opera' we enter a society turned upside down, where private vices are seen as public virtues, and the best way to survive is to assume the worst of everyone. The only force that can subvert this state of affairs is romantic love – an affection, we discover, that satire finds hard to cope with. John Gay’s 1727 smash hit ‘opera’, which ran for 62 performances in its first run, put the highwaymen, criminal gangs and politicians of the day up on stage, and offered audiences a tuneful but unnerving reflection of their own corruption and mortality. Clare and Colin discuss how this satire on the age of Walpole came about, what it did for its struggling author, and why it’s an infinitely elusive, strangely modernist work.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Frank Kermode: Liveried

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n09/frank-kermode/liveried

E.S. Turner: Delightful to be Robbed

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n09/e.s.-turner/delightful-to-be-robbed

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths, which, upon any sort of provocation, came almost naturally from him.’ It’s certainly hard to miss Rochester's enthusiastic use of obscenities, though their precise meanings can sometimes be obscure. As a courtier to Charles II, his poetic subject was most often the licentiousness and intricate political manoeuvring of the court’s various factions, and he was far from a passive observer. In this episode Clare and Colin consider why Restoration England was such a satirical hotbed, and describe the ways in which Rochester, with a poetry rich in bravado but shot through with anxiety, transformed the persona of the satirist.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Germaine Greer: Doomed to Sincerity

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n18/germaine-greer/doomed-to-sincerity

Terry Eagleton: In an Ocean of Elizabeths

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n20/terry-eagleton/in-an-ocean-of-elizabeths

Christopher Hill: Reason, Love and Life

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n22/christopher-hill/reason-love-and-life

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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What did English satirists do after the archbishop of Canterbury banned the printing of satires in June 1599? They turned to the stage. Within months of the crackdown, the same satirical tricks Elizabethans had read in verse could be enjoyed in theatres. At the heart of the scene was Ben Jonson, who for many centuries has maintained a reputation as the refined, classical alternative to Shakespeare, with his diligent observance of the rules extracted from Roman comedy. In this episode, Colin and Clare argue that this reputation is almost entirely false, that Jonson was as embroiled in the volatile and unruly energies of late Elizabethan London as any other dramatist, and nowhere is this more on display than in his finest play, Volpone.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Blair Worden: The Tribe of Ben

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/blair-worden/the-tribe-of-ben

Terence Hawkes: Jonson and digestion

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n10/terence-hawkes/lore-and-ordure

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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In their second episode, Colin and Clare look at the dense, digressive and often dangerous satires of John Donne and other poets of the 1590s. It’s likely that Donne was the first Elizabethan author to attempt formal verse satires in the vein of the Roman satirists, and they mark not only the chronological start of his poetic career, but a foundation of his whole way of writing. Colin and Clare place the satires within Donne’s life and times, and explain why the secret to understanding their language lies in the poet's use of the ‘profoundly unruly parenthesis’.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more on John Donne in the LRB:

Catherine Nicholson: Who was John Donne?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n02/catherine-nicholson/batter-my-heart

Blair Worden: Donne and Milton's Prose

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n12/blair-worden/things-the-king-liked-to-hear

Tobias Gregory: Lecherous Goates

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n20/tobias-gregory/lecherous-goates

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Clare and Colin begin their twelve-part series on satire with the big question: what is satire? Where did it come from? Is it a genre, or more of a style, or an attitude? They then plunge into their first text, The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus, a prose satire from 1511 that lampoons pretty much the whole of sixteenth century life in the voice of Folly herself. 

Erasmus’s influential work grew partly out of his close friendship with Thomas More, and their shared love of the 2nd century satirist Lucian, but also emerged at a moment (a few years before Luther’s 95 theses) when the worldliness of the Catholic Church could by satirised without necessarily being heretical. Folly’s harshest critiques are levelled at Erasmus’ particularly bugbear, those theologians who resisted humanist reformers (such as Erasmus) who sought to make textually accurate translations of scripture. But she also targets the whole panoply of human weaknesses, arguing (controversially) that not only is folly a necessary human quality that we couldn’t survive without, but that Christianity is folly and Christ himself was a fool.

Non-subscribers will only hear extracts from most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Further Reading in the LRB:

James McConica: A Foolish Christ

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n21/j.b.-trapp/the-miller-s-tale

J.B. Trapp: On Erasmus

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n21/j.b.-trapp/the-miller-s-tale

M.A. Screech: Possible Enemies

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n11/m.a.-screech/possible-enemies

James Wood: Thomas More

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n08/james-wood/the-great-dissembler

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Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell present their series, On Satire. Over twelve episodes, Colin and Clare will attempt to chart a stable course through some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in English literature, as they ask what satire is, what it’s for and why we seem to like it so much.

Authors covered: Erasmus, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Earl of Rochester, John Gay, Alexander Pope, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark.

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, and regular contributors to the LRB.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extracts of most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Read more on satire in the LRB:

Jonathan Coe: Sinking Giggling into the Sea

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n14/jonathan-coe/sinking-giggling-into-the-sea

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.