Subsections below:
The moral rigor of
satire
Looking at real-life
satire, and wondering how to portray it
One writer’s example
This theme key is a sketch of ideas, with a tasty example
(my last theme keys were in very late December 2013, related to psychological precepts, and in early 2014, related to certain kinds of interpersonal relationships in films).
This key isn’t absolutely necessary in
order for you to follow my reviews of Coen brothers films, but it doesn’t hurt.
I foreshadowed this discussion in my multi-part review of Touch of Evil, on my other blog, in the
fall (I thought I would post this key then, but held off). People who are less
familiar with satire might misunderstand the type of humor. Some might see satire’s
comic viewpoint as “too dark,” or as suggestive of a jaundiced viewpoint (or
worse) in the artist.
The moral rigor of
satire
Having been a connoisseur of satire for many years, and
having written some (usually unpublished) over the decades, I would say that
satire (1) has the virtues of focusing on moral extremes (i.e., extreme
deviations from acceptable morality) in one of the most elucidating and
entertaining ways within literature, but (2) runs the risk of being (or
seeming) tendentious, in the sense of inherently espousing a code of morality,
however sincerely held, that might seem too rigid to some (of course, senses of
morality can vary among individuals), or just might seem like “one person’s
opinion.”
Another aspect is that in writing it, it usually isn’t
something that the writer goes into “intuitively,” sensitively working out the
art as if he or she has to subtly
feel his or her way along; there is something about it where you have some of
your moral strategy already set up. Then, the problem you face is not to be too
formulaic in skewering your targets.
But for readers who like it, these “heuristic” or
“logistical” matters of the creative scaffolding behind it are beside the
point. We as appreciative readers of it can be tickled pink by the sharpest of
humor skewering a target that we think deserves it.
Can satire go a little too far? This may be in the eye of
the beholder. To take an example from a filmmaker (Orson Welles) regarding whom
this “theme key” was first started, you might feel that his film Touch of Evil, for all its
genuine-enough points it is making, might be a bit extreme at times. The Coens’
films, as well, may seem a bit over the top at times (for some viewers).
Looking at real-life
satire, and wondering how to portray it
Let’s take another example of satire: my relatively short
(and unpublished) novel of the second-rate publishing industry, First Love, which I wrote in 2000-01,
based on places in New Jersey I’d worked at (as an in-house editor, whether
part-time or not) in the 1990s. (I situated the story largely in a fictional
environment very similar to the first national publisher I worked at, All
American Crafts, though obviously changes of some details from those of the real-life
setting were made to hew to the fictional framework of the book.) I very
deliberately took what I thought was the best strategic approach: I wrote on
real-life situations (disguising names, of course, among other things), but I
mixed these in with fully made-up situations. Then a selling point for the
novella was to say, “Some of this is based on real life, and some is fictional.
Can you tell which is which?”
This coheres with the fact that, as many of us Jersey
freelance editors might say (in the right context), you could readily satirize
the kinds of companies these second-rate publishers are just by describing,
straight, the crazier things that go on there. To me, satire works best when it
gives all indications of being a very “mimetic” account.
Incidentally, I have a certain kind of retrospective fondness
for AAC nowadays that I didn’t really have, say, in 1992-95, when I was
undergoing a few-year “posttraumatic” recovery from my experience there. I look
at the experience now the way some film directors (Coppola, Scorsese, or Ron
Howard) or actors (Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda) might have done about having
done pressured shlock work early in their careers for Roger Corman’s American
International Pictures, the famous studio where you could you do your first
directing work under the most parsimonious conditions imaginable. I did learn a
number of essential things about working for small print publishers at AAC, but
it was a sort of baptism by fire (a number of bizarre experiences typical of
small publishers that I would have at other places I had at AAC first, and some
of them there were the worst examples,
compared to later experiences).
In writing on a place modeled after AAC as part of the overall
story of First Love in 2000-01, I
wasn’t giving vent to unadulterated bitterness (about AAC), but was using a
sort of situational “substrate” for an elaborate story, from a sort of
emotionally collected viewpoint, that combined real-life events (from over
almost a decade) with fictional anecdotes.
##
As for how the strategy of mixing fictional and nonfictional
content worked: you’d be surprised to see how the two blend together; in fact, I
think most of the book’s pithier events were real-life, or close to real-life,
events. Here’s one example of how this could trick a reader (not
intentionally): When (in about 2001) I had had a longtime friend, with whom I
worked at a small publisher in 1997 and then did freelance work for from 1997
to 1999, read the novella, she was surprised to hear of one section in it being
from real life (actually, one of its longest and most substantial sections).
Also, from the writer’s perspective, the tone you intend can
also vary between readings, (1) in your own mind (as the writer) when you
return to the work years after you wrote it, and (2) as different readers might
vary in their reaction to the tone or emotional texture of the satire. When I
read the novella again within a few years after I’d written it, I was struck by
how it seemed sad, because of all the tawdry events that befell its “hero.” I’d
felt when writing it that it was taking a predominantly humorous (if darkly so)
tack. But the story ended up sometime later seeming, to my eyes which had
gained some objectivity about it, more sad than otherwise. Which quality may be
true in real life about the second-rate publishing industry, anyway.
##
Another, more amusing bit of “feedback” came in about later 2001.
I was doing something rather naïve, taking what I hoped was acceptable advantage
of a route of communicating that was new and exciting at the time, doing a sort
of multi-recipient e-mail to various freelance editors most of whom I didn’t
know, proffering some promotional information on First Love (including the fact, I’m pretty sure I pointed out, that
the novella mixed fact and fiction). This was to see how freelance editors of
various stripes would react to such a thing (market testing of this general
sort is something I still do, though almost never by e-mail). I got these
people’s address info from the Editorial Freelancers Association, with which my
association was just about ending by that point (after my constructive
involvement with the group from 1994 to 2000). As it happened, only a small
percentage of the total people I e-mailed responded.
One or more person(s) said it wasn’t quite right I did my
blast e-mail as I did to people I didn’t know, which was (retrospectively) a
good point (this is one reason I say this effort was naïve, today, though at
the time I thought it was worth a shot). The vast majority of these EFA people I
e-mailed to were based in Manhattan or some other New York City borough.
But the response that is of point here: one person (and I’m
sure this person was domiciled in NYC)
said, in such situations of ethical problems as my book was about, why not (in
real life) just complain to the Freelancers Union or National Writers Union (I
forget which)? Or some group like that (she mentioned just one by name).
Right (I say ironically).
Complain to X union about how I was screwed over at All American Crafts, or
Clinicians Publishing Group (the latter a definitely worse situation, in early 1994,
than was AAC in late 1991-early 1992). That
would work. In New Jersey .
Sure.
In fact, of course, as a freelance editor in New Jersey you
have no help from any union, or professional society, for the ways you can get
elbowed, trampled, screwed, etc., by what goes on in the second-rate publishing
industry here. (I wonder, can you really get such help for whatever trampling
you might get in NYC?) That was true in the 1990s, in plenty of ways, which is
why I ended up writing First Love. It
has been true in other ways with other types of media companies in the 2000s,
both before and after the Internet (through LinkedIn, Monster.com, etc., etc.)
starting defining, and intruding on, so much about this industry.
Let’s wrap up with a look at a concrete example of satire.
One writer’s example
Here is a general description of the novel I mentioned, First Love, which adapted (in 2008) the
earliest summary I had written of it (in about early 2001). The later description
was prepared for lawsuit discovery purposes in 2008 (and I had written the
older version, per the rigorous requirements of a literary agent, for her use
in submissions to trade-book publishers that I presume were done by this agent).
(A few editorial notes are added in brackets, and the last paragraph is deleted.)
This fast-moving, episodic satire of the lesser-quality, suburban-based
sector of the nationally distributing publishing industry shows just how
bad—and laughable—breaches of business ethics and manners can be. Blending
disguised accounts of incidents in the author’s experience with ludicrous
fictional situations (you can’t tell which are which), First Love portrays a small publishing company in financial straits
passed by its elderly owner, [whose company is called Gibmir, LLC] who made his
fortune from pornography, to his son, Phil Samson. Samson must re-fire the
company, which produces medical and handicraft magazines, with new trite,
also-ran magazines [designed as trite because, in a sense, they are put on the
market for tax write-off purposes].
Samson sweetens his increased charge at his father’s company by starting
an experimental lifestyle magazine that is premised on a sexual fetish of his.
The story is seen mostly through the eyes of Alex Crowell, a part-time
proofreader and copy editor subjected to classic cases of publisher double
standards that are topped only by insults afflicting some of his coworkers. He
and Samson, both in their thirties, are obsessive types, but Samson is
narcissistic, manipulative, irresponsible in a crisis, and given to think he is
entitled to be sleazier than his father without the hard [and coolly business-sensible]
experience leading to it.
Meanwhile, Alex is moderate and professional—and grossly taken advantage
of. At a climax in the novel, Alex deals with his own abnormal crisis of love,
triggered by office politics, but deals with it discreetly and humbly, unlike
Samson with his promoting his new lifestyle magazine, which has affinities with
Nazi propaganda.
In his incompetent attempts to bring in investment and new-business
opportunities, Samson makes a deal with a couple of peculiar men who want to
reprint the Malleus Maleficarum, a
book used to direct and justify the mass-murderous witch hunts of the fifteenth
through the seventeenth centuries in Europe. Another deal of Samson’s involves
a convoluted arrangement between the Gibmir company and a slightly shady
local-newspaper publisher, intending to produce a regional directory. This
project involves a stalker-like freelance editor who ends up preposterously victimizing
Alex, in a context independent of work, in connection with his service on a
local-government board. This occurs very similarly to a legally actionable
experience that JN—a friend of Alex’s with whom Alex trades notes on the Gibmir
company—had years before, with the same stalker-like freelance editor.
Of course, Alex ends up getting fired from the Gibmir company amid a
grotesquely self-dramatizing move by Samson. The one thing Alex doesn’t realize
is what an honor this is for him.
[...]
We may return to this “theme key” topic in the future. (I
didn’t want to do a rigid “Part 1”/“Part 2” arrangement here.) For instance,
how might we satirize certain kinds of media companies in New Jersey from the
period 2000-2015, in the age of the Internet? At least, the nonfictional
material we can add to the fictional would certainly be colorful.
