An absurd century: Varieties of satire

Abstract

The nineteenth century's dominant narrative of the history of painting described a progress in accuracy of representation, from a two-dimensional world of medieval art to a three-dimensional modern realism. A similar view of prose fiction held sway: the novel, supposedly beginning in caricatures characteristic of satire, was said to have moved steadily toward committed realism as its primary mode. E. M. Forster's famous distinction in Aspects of the Novel (1927) between flat and round characters is one point of overlap between this view of fiction and theories of representation in the visual arts. Although Forster assigned a role to “flat” characters, the role was secondary. The primary function of the novel, like painting, was to be “round,” to give thereby a more real representation of life. In this context, narrative tending to rely on the less realistic style of satire was eclipsed, and assigned to an earlier era. The “great tradition” of fiction - as critic F. R. Leavis identified it - was not the satiric tradition of Smollett or Peacock but the realism of Austen, George Eliot, James, and Conrad. Writers with a strong satiric bent such as Dickens either were presented as “early” realists; or were misread so as to fit into this progressive narrative. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, realism gave way to new forms of artistic representation that include modernism. The revolutionary impact of modernism on visual representation was immediate, and the narrative of progress towards accuracy of representation lost its hegemony. In fact, the dominant narrative became inverted: a narrative of progress away from representation toward abstraction.