Class of May 24, 1948
Report by Sheldon Kranz
Note: Sheldon Kranz wrote informal reports of some of the earliest classes Kranz attended with Mr. Siegel. Teaching for four decades (1941-1978) in New York City, Eli Siegel gave thousands of thrilling lectures and classes on the arts and sciences—scholarly and groundbreaking. Based on the principles he taught, the Aesthetic Realism Foundation provides classes via Zoom.
In the class of May 24, 1948, Eli Siegel discussed satire as part of a series of talks he is giving on the large subject of humor. The purpose of true satire, he explained, is to take an ugly thing and present it gracefully and humorously so that the ugliness is seen. It’s based on the desire to make reality more beautiful. For example, when Jonathan Swift wrote his great satire Gulliver’s Travels, he was trying to show up the weaknesses of people in order that they change, so that the world would be a better place. However, Mr. Siegel pointed out, when the purpose of satire is to make reality less, as we find it in bad “kidding” and in sarcasm, satire is not on the side of beauty and can do harm.
Always About Pretense
Satire at its best, he continued, has three forms: satire of one person, as we find it in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt; satire of a group—Gilbert and Sullivan in their operetta Patience were satirizing the aesthetic movement of the 1890’s. And third, there is a satire of humanity in general—Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is one of the best examples in literature.
In all of these, Mr. Siegel went on, it can be seen that satire is always about pretense, about how persons will choose what is false in order that their vanity be undisturbed. We have a picture of ourselves which truth will destroy; and so to protect that picture of ourselves, we will accept what is untrue and unimportant.
“The Owl Critic”
Satire changes a bad thing into a good thing, an untrue thing into a true thing. Satire makes us laugh to make the ugly more apparent. To illustrate this, Eli Siegel read a poem called “The Owl Critic” by the 19th century poet James Thomas Fields. In this amusing poem we see how a person, because of his vanity, can mistake what is authentic. The critic in the poem comes into a barbershop and devastatingly criticizes the stuffed owl that is part of the decor. The young man says:
“Don’t you see, Mr. Brown,”
Cried the youth, with a frown,
“How wrong the whole thing is,
How preposterous each wing is,
How flattened the head is, how jammed down the neck is –
In short, the whole owl, what an ignorant wreck ’tis!
I make no apology;
I’ve learned owl-ology.”
The poem ends this way:
Just then with a wink and a sly normal lurch,
The owl, very gravely, got down from his perch,
Walked round and regarded his fault-finding critic
(Who thought he was stuffed) with a glance analytic
And then fairly hooted . . . .
And the barber kept on shaving.
Eli Siegel went on to discuss other things that can be satirized. Disproportion can be satirized, as for example, the person who devotes a whole life to money grubbing. This was a favorite theme in Victorian novels. On the other hand, there are the dreamy persons—the Don Quixotes, or the romantic girls who don’t want to think about dirty dishes or making a living. Satire goes after criticizing our mistakes, our vanity—it’s part of the desire in us to be critical of ourselves.
We Satirize Ourselves
We can all see our inconsistencies and satirize them, he pointed out. We can poke fun at ourselves for saying we will never talk to a certain girl again, and then call her up the next day. We can satirize ourselves for telling a person not to do something, and then doing it ourselves. The neurotic is always satirizing part of him or herself unconsciously. Not wanting to be with people satirizes the desire in us to be in the middle of things; wanting to be gloomy satirizes the part of us that wants to laugh.
We can satirize the way we were in the past. At 30 we can satirize the way we were at 16; at 50 we can satirize the way we were at 30. The married woman who, in her mind, once satirized the married life can later satirize the single life. Satire can express bitterness, Mr. Siegel said, but it is bitterness with grace; it is opposition with beauty.
Mrs. Jellyby
Then there has been satire of someone who only thinks of oneself; also the persons who are so involved in causes, they forget people. Here Mr. Siegel read about Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House, who has a family around her that is in a constant state of neglect and disintegration. But Mrs. Jellyby is intensely involved, twenty-four hours a day, in writing letters for causes in South Africa and obscure little islands in the South Pacific.
Using Humor for Beauty
What has too often happened is that we are against things, but our motives are not ones we are proud of, and so there is no real pleasure. If we make the beautiful ugly, Eli Siegel concluded, we are cynical and sarcastic. If we take the ugly and make it funny, we are using humor for beauty. True satire is humor on the offensive. If we are against the ugly clearly, we will have pleasure in being against something in a good way.