SATIRIC DEFINITIONS

Cerberus is the three-headed dog who guards the gates of Hell – the bane of visitors from Hercules to Robert Graves. He has an ambivalence characteristic of dogs: he greets the dead who enter but seizes upon those who seek escape. This mixture of welcome and despair makes him a fitting emblem of satire, and the classical association of dogs with cynics allows him further levels of meaning. Whether as guard dog or yapping cynic, he retains the same powerful satiric function: his role is to protect the living from the dead. I am less concerned with his exactness as an image than with the possibilities of an emblematic and Cerberean mode of defining satire. Satire, like Cerberus, functions to mark and defend boundaries. My object here is to see the ways in which it in turn may be bounded by definition.

Edward Rosenheim's definition of satire as an indirect attack on historical particulars, especially if one adds the characteristic feature of humor, is, with some adjustment, inclusive enough to serve as a working definition. Nonetheless, some indirect attacks on historical particulars – Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and The First Circle, for example – do not seem to be satires, and other works that have traditionally been considered satires may lack one or more of the terms that constitute Rosenheim's definition.