Wole Soyinka: The books that really change the world?
Sergei Fadeichev\TASS via Getty ImagesAs the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka publishes his first novel since 1972, Cameron Laux explores the role of satire in literature.
The distinguished Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has just published his first novel in almost a half century, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth – a scorching satire on contemporary Nigerian society that teems with life, rather like one of the big books by Charles Dickens (Bleak House) or William Thackeray (Vanity Fair) – or even, if you want a more classic reference point, the effervescent social satire of Gargantua and Pantagruel by the Renaissance writer François Rabelais. Soyinka's use of the word "happy" is heavily ironic; his Nigeria is dominated by corruption, sleaze, self-interest, and brutality upon brutality. "Happiness" is just a government PR slogan used to cover up numerous ugly realities. (One is reminded of the empty happiness in another satire, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.) Soyinka even invents some new ugly realities to make a point: in a dystopian kleptocracy like his Nigeria, what could possibly beggar the imagination?
Satire has been around for a very long time. In one of its oldest recorded forms, painted papyri from ancient Egypt, the natural order of things is amusingly turned on its head. A 3,000-year-old papyrus in the British Museum shows a lion playing a board game with a gazelle (later in the sequence the two animals are having sex) and a cat herding geese. This is satire at its most gentle, very obliquely poking fun at the status quo, but if we view it as a cartoon it seems a direct ancestor of the cartoon satire of our day, such as Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau or the many sight gags in the animated TV series The Simpsons.
John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London is a literary polymath, but his most recent book, The Artful Dickens, portrays Dickens as an ingenious satirist and "innovator who broke all the rules".) When asked if satire should set out to change the world, Mullan tells BBC Culture, "Satire is a negative art… it does not come with some kind of manifesto for a better world. It tells you what's wrong; it doesn't tell you what you should do." So political satire often sets out to do as much damage as possible, to sweep away; this perhaps s for its savagery.
Satire as it is commonly understood in the West – as art that mounts a darkly humorous socio-political critique – really coalesced in ancient Greece and Rome, known to us through the works of, for instance, the Greek writer Aristophanes (5th to 4th Centuries BC) and the Roman writers Horace (1st Century BC) and Juvenal (1st and 2nd Centuries AD). Juvenal excoriated the hypocrisy, lack of comion, pomposity, and avarice of contemporary Roman society in his poetry, and it is to him we owe such quotations as "Who will watch the watchers">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });