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The art of satire
JUST after World War II, George Orwell entertained everyone except the leftists with his little book Animal Farm which interpreted the Russian revolution in the allegory of a farmyard. Farmers were dispossessed of their land, the once-browbeaten animals took control through brutal and violent means and in a very short time established a totalitarian regime presided over by a dictator pig. Soon their state was in no way distinguishable from conditions under the rule of the farmer. In 1948, Orwell followed this up with a considerably more challenging book — Nineteen eighty-four — in which he painted a nightmarish picture of life in England a generation later. A considerable part of this book is not so much satire as a working out of worst possibilities. Ridicule is a vital part of satire and yet there is a quality about the totalitarian state that seemed to fascinate Orwell. Perhaps, it was the brutal efficiency of the secret police and its efficient ways of hunting down dissidents, that he was not able to bring ridicule into play. Many people are frightened by Nineteen eight-four, but several critics have attacked it on the ground that it was bad prophecy and that whatever the future might hold for us, it would not be the particular unpleasantness and nightmare of Nineteen eighty-four. Did Orwell underestimate the tremendous inner strength and vitality of a functioning democracy? Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence is also set in the future, but it is a more pessimistic book than Nineteen eighty-four. Huxley forsees a world devastated by atomic warfare. In the milieux of the book, California, the survivors have lost all the arts of civilisation. They even pillage pre-atomic war graves for clothes to wear and as a result of irradiation, women give birth to malformed and grotesque infants who are then slaughtered. It would once again be misleading to read the book as a prophecy, although it is intended as a warning. By casting the narrative in the form of a film script, Huxley has deliberately created a kind of uncertainty about it which at times is strangely in variance with the outbursts of horror and despair. The two satirical novels by Evelyn Waugh — Scott King’s Modern Europe and The Loved One — are more limited in scope than the books by Orwell and Huxley, but they are more successful. They are both very short. Modern Europe is a witty expression of Waugh’s distaste for the confused politics of our times. Waugh narrates the extraordinary adventures of an English school master who is invited to the tercentenary celebrations of an obscure English poet who lived in that part of England which is now the totalitarian state of Neutralia. The celebrations, as might be expected, are organised for political and propaganda purposes. After Scott King had lived in neutralia long enough for him to understand the essential nature of a totalitarian state and its hospitality, the unfortunate school master finds himself without enough money to return home or the effective protection of his consulate. He has to escape by the "underground" which is the means of escape for communist agents, spies and others and eventually arrives in Palestine with a shipload of Zionists. The Loved One is a brilliant satirical novel on one aspect of life in Southern California — the strange and macabre ceremonies and fanfare with which funeral rites are carried out there. It is a devastating commentary on the crass materialism with which a Californian (and by extension an American) thinks that he can defeat death by balming the "loved one" — an American undertaker’s euphemism for a human corpse, attiring him in evening dress and finally putting him to rest in a grandiose mausoleum in a garden called the "Whispering Glades" where organ music is piped thru’ a countless number of sound amplifiers. Waugh’s analysis of the
commercialisation of death is elaborate and matchless to those who are
squeamish about death. The pride of the Chief Embalmer — he can give any
expression to the "loved one" — judicial, stoical, serene,
surprised, horrified, avaricious or even philosophical — is shown to
be so ridiculous that the materialistic culture of which he is a
characteristic expression, is made to look ridiculous, too Waugh has
never done anything better than this book. It is a true satire — a
profound commentary on the 20th century.
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