Text and Talk
September 7, 2024
‘Satire’
Jim Roseman
According to the OED, satire is “a poem or (in later use) a novel, film, or other work of art which uses humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize prevailing immorality or foolishness, esp. as a form of social or political commentary.” The term comes from the Latin satura, which usually refers to poetic medley. It enters English (saˌtī(ə)r) from French (sætaɪər) in the sixteenth century, and is described as the “art of making someone or something look ridiculous . . . in order to embarrass, humble, or discredit its targets” (Evan Gottlieb, professor of British Literature), or “artful ridicule of folly or vice as a means of exposing or correcting it.” Some call it a genre, others a mode of expression in literature or rhetoric. Examples of satire date way back, e.g., Aesop’s Fables (7th/6th century BC), Aristophanes (5th/4th century BC), to Horace in the Roman Republic days and Juvenal and Lucian in the Roman Empire days. It enters the Western canon in earnest with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400), and in the sixteenth century with Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly (first printed in 1511), Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), and of course many of Shakespeare’s works. It continues in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote (1605–1615), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729), and Voltaire’s Candide (1759) – eighteenth century Britain has been called the “golden age” of political satire with its use in newspaper cartoons. The nineteenth century saw new enduring voices of satire in many authors, including Jane Austen (Love and Friendship), William Thackeray (Vanity Fair), Charles Dickens (Hard Times, Tale of Two Cities), and Mark Twain in the U.S. (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, et al). Stretching into the twentieth century the pace of the use of satire in literature picked up with writers like Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Will Rogers, P. G. Wodehouse, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ray Bradbury, Flannery O’Connor, and on and on and on.
During the twentieth century, literary and rhetorical satire became an increasingly dominant form of social, cultural, and political critique. It has in many ways become a specialized form of the modern novel. Late in the twentieth century and especially since, satire has become the dominant form of political criticism. To see this, just watch any of the comedy talk shows (Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Tonight Show, Last Week with John Oliver, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Show, and particularly The Late Show with Stephen Colbert). But modern satire is applied not only to politicians. Satire is also famous as a basis of cultural critique as seen in Orwell, Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Ray Bradbury (e.g. Fahrenheit 451). Other somewhat lesser-known writers have used satire to critique the prevailing culture. The one I want to focus on today is Jerzy Kosinski, in his 1970 novel Being There.
—See the synopsis of the movie version on page three—
Sidney Gottlieb, Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut says, Being There “is one of the truly essential fables about the far-reaching dangers of electronic media to classical notions of what defines us as humans and to the prospects of shaping and maintaining a culture and society that help make us more fully human.” He calls it a fable. That seems right, but it can also be called a parable, too. Using the form of a novel rather than non-fiction, Kosinski dramatizes Marshall McLuhan’s non-fiction critique of mass media in his 1964 Understanding Media, in which he coined the now famous phrase “the medium is the message.”
Being There was made into a very famous Academy Award nominated movie by the same name in 1979, staring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, Richard Dysart, and Jack Warden. The movie follows the book very closely in part because Kosinzki was an active consultant on it. In his review in Cineaste Magazine, Gottlieb points out that Kosinski was more than casually aware of the Orwellian threat, having been “born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1933.” He captures the terror of Nazi Germany in the young boy character “who wanders the landscape of war and Holocaust in his novel The Painted Bird (1965).” In Being There Kosinski captures the concerns of Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business—Interestingly Postman’s book was the adaptation of a 1984 lecture he gave in celebration of Orwell’s book by that title at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Postman said there and in the forward of the book that the current state of the world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We are more addicted to amusement than oppressed by state violence, as in Orwell’s work. Kosinski captures this and more in Being There.
Consider the phrase “he’s just an empty suit.” While writing the book, Kosinski says “his ‘code name’ for [Being There] was Blank Page, and sometimes Dasein.”[1] Being There satirizes the contemporary world as just that. A world shaped, formed, and punctuated by outward accoutrements. A world so eager to accept what’s on the surface that it probs no further. This attitude is personified in the main character’s name Chance and his work (as a gardener, the only work he’s ever known). After being evicted from the only home Chance had ever known and never been outside of, he is hit by a car, a limousine while walking across the street. A woman gets out and insists he be taken to the mansion where she and her sick aging husband live. They’ll care for him while he convalesces. On the way the woman asks his name. He says Chance the gardener, and she concludes his full name is Chauncy Gardner. At the mansion Chance is introduced to the world of the elites. There the life of Chauncy Gardener begins anew. He rises to heights rarely seen, passively entering doors opened to him by the elites. Listening to his brief, pithy way of speech always tied to gardening or some TV show he’s seen, they take him to be a mysterious wise man who speaks in deep metaphors with extraordinary insight.
The story depicts a world of flotsam. Yet there are many biblical metaphors in Being There.
Ten years ago I wrote something using Being There as a parable for our current moment. I entitled that piece Living in a Being There Age of Sardonic Tales & Comic Relief, an age where there are only Slices of Plot with no Dénouement. Social media and AI were still in their infancy then. Things are much worse now. This kind of world affects how we do politics, how we discern the truth (and if there is Truth rather than just truths), and makes it very hard to find meaning in life.
Brief Summary of Being There, the film version.
It is a placid fable about Chance (Peter Sellers), a reclusive, illiterate, passive and simple-minded gardener who is well-groomed, fed on schedule, and dressed in custom tailored suits, has lived his whole sheltered life on the walled-in estate of an eccentric millionaire named Jennings …. His only knowledge of the “real” outside world, an encroaching inner-city ghetto area [shades of Gautama?], is through watching television. His meals have always been prepared by the estate’s black cook Louise (Ruth Attaway).
When Chance’s benefactor dies, he is evicted by the estate’s lawyers and wanders aimlessly and helplessly into the streets of Washington, D.C. As he emerges into the outside world, a version of Also Sprach Zarathustra [clear references to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra] is heard on the soundtrack. He is confronted by a young urban gang, and threatens to “turn them off” with a TV remote control channel-changer. Later in a freak accident, he is struck by a limousine owned by Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine) and bruises his legs. She takes him to her dying, patriarchal, industrialist husband Benjamin’s (Melvyn Douglas) home for treatment from her personal physician Dr. Allenby (Richard Dysart) and recouperation. During the trip, he identifies himself as “Chance … the gardener,” which is incorrectly interpreted to be his full name – Chauncey Gardiner.
Chance’s empty-headed pronouncements and generalizations, delivered dead-pan, are taken to be profoundly intelligent, metaphorically deep, and wisely insightful. He becomes wealthy, is treated as a famous celebrity in the media, and becomes a political advisor for the rich and powerful, including President “Bobby” (Jack Warden). His new-found popularity leads to talk-show appearances, insider parties, book publisher advances, and the potential to become a presidential candidate.
He offers simplistic responses to the most difficult questions, such as:
- First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And we get summer again.
Some of the amusing remarks he makes, almost Yogi Berra-isms, hint that he might actually be insightful:
- On looking out a car window: “This is just like television, only you can see much further.”
- On planting seeds: “Spring is the time for planting.”
- On economics (actually on gardening): “In a garden, growth has its season … as long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well in the garden.”
- On watching TV (the most famous line, misinterpreted by Eve as an invitation to sexually stimulate herself while he watches her): “I like to watch (TV).”
- On death: “I’ve seen this before. It happens to old people.”
The last line in the film is a quote from the late Mr. Rand, read at his funeral: “Life is a state of mind.”
The final scene of his walking on water across a lake gives the film a fanciful element, and leaves the viewer debating, wondering about, and struggling to interpret the fable-like story.[2]
[1] Martin Woessner, “Introduction: Being Here Heidegger and Reception History,” Heidegger in America, Cambridge University Press, December 2010. “Dasein,” which literally means “being there” or existence, is a word Heidegger coined. From an excerpt at https://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/18376/excerpt/9780521518376_excerpt.pdf.
[2] See the review by Tim Dirks at Filmsite.org: http://www.filmsite.org/bein.html.