Undenominational Satire. Chesterton and Lewis Revisited

The University of Notre Dame
Undenominational Satire: Chesterton and Lewis Revisited

Author(s): Robert A. Kantra
Source: Religion & Literature, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 33-57
Published by: The University of Notre Dame
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UNDENOMINATIONAL SATIRE:
CHESTERTON AND LEWIS REVISITED
Robert A. Kantra
The intricate affinities of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis are
nowadays often mentioned though still undefined. In the always unfinished business of literary theory, among proponents of religion and
literature,and between religionorliterature,Chestertonand Lewis can
be seen to provokemuch dysfunctionalsympathy. I have been pondering anew what looks like an amorphous and not altogether agreeable
"Chesterlewis"that is crowding out Shaw's"Chesterbelloc"and looming large as a cultural artifact since mid-century. Especially apparent
in the literary industry of Christian apology, its point of origin is
Lewis's autobiographicallyexpressed indebtedness to Chesterton rebyJoy 213, 223, 235). Much
gardinghis religious conversion {Surprised
less attention has been given heretofore to other kinds of Chestertonian influences on Lewis, and on Lewisiana also; that influence and
the literary heritage behind it are rather more extensive than seems
to me to have been acknowledged,or understood. This essay addresses
an imbalance of appreciation regarding GKC and Lewis precisely
as religious satirists, in relation to their wider renown as Christian
apologists.
How and whether the genres of religious literatureconnect with the
varieties of religious experience can be quite problematicfor scholars
as well as for more generalreaders,as when Lewis alludesto "thatwhole
tragic farce we call the Reformation"{SixteenthCentury37); here, he
appraises an important phenomenon in the history of religion in the
language of mixed literary genres. Lewis's Protestant partiality also
certainly looks compromised in the context of his three designated
R&L 24.1 (Spring 1992)
33
34
Religion & Literature
classes for the prose works of Thomas More; they are "firstthose of
a 'pure'or comparatively'pure'literature, secondly the controversies,
and thirdlythe moral and devotionaltreatises"(165). Lewis is a literary
theoristratherthan a denominationalapologistin acclaimingthe "sense
of tragedy, and a sense of humour"in a Catholic saint, with special
praise for the Utopiaspecificallyas satire (167-71), and in
applying his
first genre classification, in its "comparatively 'pure' " reaches, not
only to More but also to Lucian, Erasmus, Rabelais, Swift, and the
ErewhonButler. For most of Lewis'svariously Protestantand Catholic
readers, religion and satire do not have a ubiquitous equipoise. His
penchantfor literarytheory aside, Lewis does not have denominational
allegiances that are ascertainablein his own satire, either, as when,
for example, in TheScrewtape
Letters,he takes his epigraphs from both
Martin Luther and Thomas More, identifying Luther and More
equally as advocatesof religious vituperation, specificallyon the value
of jeering, flouting, scorning, and mocking the Devil.
I do think that Lewis provides importantmeans to a possibly wider
and larger understanding of Chesterton and his art, as well as of his
own, in his definition of literary genres, at least in part by his juxtaposing of Catholic and Protestant perceptions. Satirists, secular controverters, and denominational enthusiasts can be loquacious schismatics; all three kinds of literary activists (sometimes one and the
same person) can be seen to change their masks before, during, and
aftertheyjostle into one another. Religion and satireboth, individually
and discretely, can be said to explore important realities not always
translatableinto words, or at least not easily. Religious satire (and I
don't think there is such a thing as a satiric religion) is always a variously understood, not widely appreciatedliterarygenre. It is a difficult
as well as commonplace art, ideal for complicated authors'intentions,
but also a provocation for ambivalent readers'responses, which can
be apparentlyreligious, or not. Chesterton and Lewis indeed did live
in the different modern worlds of journalism and scholarship,just as
it is a fact that their denominational affiliationswere discretely Catholic and Protestant. Despite their disparate verbal milieus, they certainly wrote for a similarly various religious and literary readership.1
Nevertheless, I argue here that because Lewis's literary appreciation
of Chesterton is so far-reaching, it can be seen they shared both
a sense of humor and a religious affinity.
Seven years ago, I put the case that all religious satirists, whatever
their ecclesiasticaffiliationsin whatever century, might be said to live
in an age of reformation. They describe their reformatoryage in ver-
ROBERT A. KANTRA
35
bal configurationsdemonstratinga shared sense of humor. I suggested

that insofar as Lewis'sgeneric categories span four centuries they may
as well include Chesterton's. By distinguishing among Chesterton's
three related though discrete kinds of efforts- satiric, controversial,
and devotional- I tried to account for the varieties of appraisals of
Chesterton, and Belloc and "Chesterbelloc"too, along the lines of
divergently Catholic and Protestant religious allegiances (All Things
Vain 112-34). I again adapt Lewis's generic categories for Thomas
More's prose as applicable to GKC's, reaffirming in greater detail
Lewis'slegacy from GKC. I am developing furthermy contentionthat
Chesterton's The Napoleono/Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday,
TheBall and the Cross, and The Flying Inn are not only his largest satires
but rightly considered to be his best as well. His early argumentative

treatises include Hereticsand Fancies VersusFads, Orthodoxy
being the first
Man.
of a long line of devotionalworks, the best of them TheEverlasting
I
The cacophonousworldof journalismregardedChesterton'sOrthodoxy
not as an expression of his faith in the Christian creed but rather as
a mere posing of paradox, a stunt or a joke; some readers were surprised, upon hearingof his religiousconversion,that he had not always
been a church member. It was not until fourteen years after its publication, when in 1922 he formallyentered the church, he says, that athe
full horror of the truth burst upon them; the disgraceful truth that I
180). Such surprise
really thought the thing was true"(Autobiography
and then horribleand disgracefultruth can all be said to have occurred
cheek by jowl with much apparent comfort in the intellectual parable
of metamorphosis in Chesterton's religious thought, moving from
liberalism through humanism to theism, similar to Lewis's to the extent that religious conversions are at all alike. Yet it remains a fact
that readerswith a more secularbent, often proud of their misreading
and never inclined to be unanimous, also may and may not be disposed to identify Chesterton's satiric personae as autobiographical
mouthpieces.WhetherChesterton'ssatiresare identifiablyfor or against
Roman Catholic dogmas is, of course, a question that will continue
to be argued both ways, for some of the same reasons that Lewis's
Protestantism is and is not perceived as doctrinary. But my point is
that the connection between verbal fun and religious truth can be not
so much tenuous as crucial in religious conversion, as when, for
example, Chesterton writes, "I had no more idea of becoming a
36
Catholic than of becoming a cannibal. ... I imagined I was noting certain fallacies partly for the fun of the thing and partly for a certain
loyalty to the truth of things"{Conversion
59).
In Heretics,GKC's introductory and concluding chapters are both
concerned with uthe Importance of Orthodoxy"as an ecclesiastic and
even theologicalconcept, with the redefinitionof orthodoxyas aanenormous and silent evil of modern society"(11). Throughout this book,
he writes about real matters of dispute with real people, not fictional
ones, plainly stating his case without much apparent effort given to
rhetoricalpersuasionor poetic indirection,as though he believedthathere I paraphrasePatrickDalroy in TheFlyingInn- even a saint sometimes has to fight the world in the same way as a rascal. "Blasphemy
is an artistic effect,"writes GKC, "becauseblasphemy depends upon
philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief [too], and
is fading with it"(20). He quarrels with artists and writers who seem
to him incapable of communicating such an effect as blasphemy; he
deploresunbeliefinsofaras it has particularand practicalconsequences.
Thus, RudyardKipling is aa Heretic- that is to say, a man whose view
of things has the hardihood to differ from mine," and Bernard Shaw
is "a Heretic- that is to say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid,
quite coherent, and quite wrong" (22). Kipling, Shaw, and many
others, receive hard knocks: Kipling for his imperial worship of the
ideal of discipline spreadover the whole world; Shaw for his delusions,
including his presumed discovery of a new god in the unimaginable
future; and H.G. Wells for the fault of his personal hypocrisy, even
as he categorically charged the religions of the past with that fault.
Chesterton singles out the Salvation Army and Auguste Comte's"religion of humanity,"in the nineteenth century, as particularexamples
of heretical - that is, partial - good derived from the crash of brass
bands and other vulgar "mummeryand flummery,"though his insistent point is that these are enduring heresies. His larger purpose is
to excoriate all "undenominationalreligions"(92).
Such undisguised and inclusive derision, as Chestertonpracticesit,
seems to me a little mollified only by his careful aesthetic theorizing:
"Whereveryou have belief you will have hilarity, wherever you have
hilarityyou will have some dangers. And as creed and mythology produce this gross and vigorous life, so in its turn this gross and vigorous
life will always produce creed and mythology"(101). He puts the case
that "all jesting is in its nature profane" (216). His own strategy
is "Divine Frivolity"that (he quotes from one of his critics) should be
admonished for its "giving people a sane grasp of social problems by
ROBERT A. KANTRA
37
literarysleight-of-hand"(220). In amplification,Chestertonbothersto
identify"threedistinctclassesof great satiristswho are also greatmenthat is to say, three classesof men who can laugh at somethingwithout
losing their souls": First, one who, like Rabelais, can enjoy one's
enemies; "hiscurse is as human as a benediction."Second, uthesatirist
whose passions are released and let go by some intolerable sense of
wrong," like Swift, whose "saevaindignatiowas a bitterness to others,
because it was a bitterness to himself." And third, the satirist who*
like Pope, is "superior to his victim in the only serious sense which
superioritycan bear, in that of pitying the sinner and respecting the
man even while he satirises both"(240-41). Measured by these standards of his, Chesterton seems to me to be a great satirist and a great
person, three times over. No less than Lewis'sthree genre classes, his
articulation of these "threeclasses"is incontrovertiblewith regard to
religious satirists and their art.
Chesterton says, "This book is meant
In his Preface to Orthodoxy,
to be a companion to 'Heretics,' and to put the positive side in addition to the negative."This means, I think, that if Hereticsis a literary
attackin which the defense of Christianityis incidental, then Orthodoxy
is a statement of personal belief rather than institutional dogma: "No
one can think my case more ludicrousthan I think it myself; no reader
can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him: I am the fool in
this story"(12). Disavowing controversial or devotional intent, but
acknowledging a satiric author'svulnerability, he says he wrote "not
an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography"(13).
Chesterton'sdefinition of Christianity is not the answer to everyone's
arguments, but to his own dilemma and needs. Many of Chesterton's
as well as in Hereticscarry with them not only
utterances in Orthodoxy
incidental levity but also large-scale vituperation, and some literary
theory: "The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone
mad"(30). Or, "Satiremay be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes
an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes
a standard. . . . And the curious disappearanceof satire from our literature is an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce about"(42). Still, there is in this book, and not in
Heretics,frequent reiteration of personal and devotional rather than
argumentative and societal intention: "I do not propose to turn this
book into one of ordinary Christian apologetics; I should be glad to
meet at any other time the enemies of Christianity in that more obvious arena. Here I am only giving an account of my own growth in
spiritualcertainty"(142). Chesterton'ssatiric fantasies, by his own ac-
38
count, do not fit the more obvious arena of Christian apology; neither
can they be understood at all as inventories of spiritual certainty.
Chesterton's reputation is unendingly redefined, the extent and
nature of his literary importance unsettled. Garry Wills's biography
of Chesterton and Carlos Baker'sappreciativereview of it suggested,
thirty years ago, that Chesterton'slife is a suitable model for people
who would aspireto be Catholicintellectuals.Baker'sdelightwith Wills
was that "inunmasking the rotund master and exploring the lean and
leathery mind beneath, he has done a signal service both to us and
to our memory of what Chesterton achieved."Baker lauded Chesterton not for his sense of humor but rather for his essential seriousness:
the reality of his ideas, and his several concurrent battles with temporal provinciality,with worshipof progress,with boorishmodernism,
with impertinentdepreciationof classicallearning, and with reductive
views of religious culture. Still, what Wills's concluding chapter
celebratesis Chesterton'splayof reality. Michael Ffinch'smore recent
biography rightly receives cautionary appraisals ("Three Views"). It
sustainsan equallycommonplaceand unpraisingcharge- an especially
time-wornand customaryone, regardingsatirists- that Chestertonand
his times are idiosyncratic and paradoxical; a review by Hugh Kenner rightly concludes that Chesterton "awaitsdefinition,"that "there's
still a book to be written"about him; and it recallsattentionto Chesterton's old but still new article on "Humour"(in the 14th edition of the
EncyclopediaBritannicain 1929, reprinted in The Spice of Life) precisely
because its explicit definitions of humor, sense, and nonsense are

especially relevant to understanding Chesterton. David Chesterton,
a relative of GKC who attended the 1986 Chesterton Conference in
Toronto, made a familial referenceto what he would like to have more
widely known, namely, "the 'puckish'humour that all my older relatives talk about when recalling Gilbert Chesterton."
Some of GKC's most carefulreaders,of course, have come to understand the subtlety of some of his aesthetic intentions, and, therefore,
his achievements not only in the world of words but also his continuing legacyin the realworld, in relationto his senseof humor. Chesterton
often wrote about Dickens and the extraliterary significance of his
novels (including a Dickens essay, also for the 14th Britannica),and
James R. Kincaid, in his important exegesis on Dickens and the
rhetoric of laughter, leans on Chesterton as a literary theorist of
the first rank.2 Nevertheless, the recent sense of the "Chesterton
on Dickens"connection is problematical for what it says and how it
looks (see Hunt), and has a longer shelf life than the "Chesterlewis."
ROBERT A. KANTRA
39
This other "IdealPair"also is variously appraised, even as it is a fact

that "Dickenscriticism has covered a lot of new ground since Chesterton'sdeath, in 1936"(Brookhiser).Numerousotherliterarystudieshave
also emphasized the substantive focuses of Chesterton'searly novels:
the imprecise identity of madness and sanity in human consciousness,
the legitimate because deserveddistrustof the state in all politicalparts
of the modern world, the waning enthusiasm for private life in contrast to the growth of shared participation in public activities, the
blurred definitions of moral right and obligation.
That the continuing legacy Lewis inherited from Chesterton is
complicated is suggested in several places by Lewis's most recent
biographer, too. A.N. Wilson takes great pains to consider how
Lewis'smany transatlanticadmirersseem to him to dislikeone another
with a disconcerting and violent idolatry, alas, there being a "Great
Schism"among Lewis's"devotees,"perceiving, as they do, "twototally
differentLewises"in Belfast and Wheaton {Biography
ix-xvii). Wilson's
identification of Lewis, the man and the mask, does not sit easy,
either, with appraisers of his biography in Chicago and Glendale,
Queens (see "Sins and All," "Legacy").Lewis's sense of humor was
perhaps learned or inherited from his father, Wilson suggests, in the
direction of making warmly sympathetic observations on human
foolishness, and then it was modified over thirty years, by the first of
the two previously married women with whom he lived: "I suspect
that Mrs. Moore's sense of humour contributed much to the genuine
streak of misanthropy in Lewis's nature" {Biography5, 94-95). The
widow Joy Davidman Gresham and Lewis married late in his life,
and hers. She and Lewis are major dramatis personae in William
which opened on BroadNicholson'sbiographicaldrama Shadowlands,
in London, and telerun
a
in
November
1990, following year's
way
These
several
versions.
A&E
and
PBS
vised
renderings are variously
as
appraised "ShadyDoings"(Mimi Kramer);the play "dramatizesthe
romance that may have eclipsed Narnia"even as it depicts "alove that
challenged faith"(Finkle), and is valued not only because its literary
strengthand religious commitments are solid but also because "agood
cry is not bad form" (Richards). Lewis's love lives, as depicted in
Wilson's biography, are also regarded as significant for the light
they shed on the Narnia series in the genre of Children's Books for
Christmas (McNulty). Such contrasting light and shadow appear not
only in Lewis's literary canon; they occur in that general industry of
literary biography that thrives on individual authorshipwithout having any more apparentpurpose than its own existence (see below, the
40
popular acceptance/rejectionaccorded Salman Rushdie'sHaroun,and

SatanicVersesfor Christmas).
Wilson also remarkson Chesterton's"greatinfluence"on Lewis (55),
which was both early and lasting: "Chesterton, always a favourite
author, was a Christian; . . . Lewis read The EverlastingMan, and
it made a profoundimpressionon him"(108). Wilson here is referring
to one of the brief GKC passages in Surprised
byJoy that seems to have
Chesterton,
caught everyone'seye.
though "comparablewith Lewis,"
Wilson says, enjoyeda literarytone of voice and productivitythat came
earlier; it was only after Lewis's"fullconversion to Christianity"that,
accordingto Wilson, "worksof scholarship,fantasy, literaryappreciation, and apologetics poured from his fertile brain" (133). Wilson
briefly mentions Lewis's lifelong proclivities as a parodist and critic
(17, 168, 208), a partialexplanationof why, Wilson says about Lewis,
"onemust view with ambivalence his excursion into the realm of religious apologetics"(163). This caution is worth heeding to the extent
that massive attention to Lewis'sapologetics keeps religious satire out
of focus. It is in TheEverlasting
Man- I think it is important to note that Chestertonslips in this little piece of literarytheory:"Themodern
world is madder than any satires on it" (81).
Biographyand literary theory do not always, of course, come close
together, side by side, at least not clearly, as when they both employ
old, comfortableacademic saws. Whereas Wilson identifies Lewis as
a "self-confessedfollowerof the Romantic movement in literature"and
a "Romanticegoist"(38, 210), Peter J. Schakel, a more unabashedly
enthusiasticand partisanbiographerthan Wilson, makesthe claim that
becauseLewis is thought to be a romantic fantasist, Lewis's success as
a satirist has been largely neglected. Schakel posits one of the most
ordinarygeneralizationsin literarycriticism- the Classicand Romantic
opposition of satire and fantasy - in his explanation of how Lewis's
imaginationworks and why his satire is even now insufficientlyappreciated. Surely, it seems to me, satire and fantasy connect in the way
that Richard Gerber makes definitive, rather than as the alternative
or evolving compositions Schakel claims to identify in Lewis's satiric
and Lewis'sSurimagination. Referring to Chesterton'sAutobiography
and
other
evidence
E.
aside,
prisedbyJoy,
leaving
James Barcus makes
an argument that is similarly brisk in its antitheses, namely, that
"althoughLewis learned from Chestertonand freely acknowledgedhis
indebtedness, significant differences exist between the minds of the
two men." Barcus's conclusion is conditional, but intransigent too:
"Perhaps,if Chestertonis correctin saying that all differencesare essen-
ROBERTA. KANTRA
41
tially religiousdifferences,Lewis, the Anglicanprotestant,and Chesterton, the Roman Catholic from the edge of town, may symbolize those
two poles of thought that have jousted throughout Christendom since
the Reformation"(343). 3 As I have elsewhere written, much important satire is not autobiographyor apologetics, neither devotional nor
controversialin its design, but rather the expression of practicalwisdom and satirichumor ("PhilosophicFictions").Sometimes, biography
can seem entirely irrelevant to literary theory. And of course literary
theory has abstract fascinations quite apart from biography.
It strikes me that Shaw's"Chesterbelloc,"the transatlanticcelebration of the sharedachievementof Chestertonand Lewis, and the "Ideal
Pair"of GKC and Dickens are altogether abstract dualistic visions.
Because religious satire hovers between devotional and controversial
propensities, which indeed have always figured in it, it always suggests secular incongruity, this-worldly mystery, the intellectual (not
necessarilyspiritual)delights caused by, and existing within, the confines of literary controversy. Awareness of that fact can mollify the
specialenthusiasmfor Chesterton, and Lewis too, specificallyas Christian apologists.4Religion and satire are often rewound and reworked
to do a double duty in literary theory, in opposition or united. Keith
Fort differentiatesbetween the respectivelyliteraryand religiousmeanings of satire and gnosticism, while simultaneouslydiscussing satire's
"gnostic side," and the relation between what he calls orthodox and
gnostic voices. These are examples of what I referred to earlier as
schismatic hat tricks. Still, if I had not already made other similar
claims, I would have to agree with Fort that "satire reflects a soul
poised between choosing to live in and through this world or fleeing
from it" (1,2), that "gnosticismis a dualistic vision," that "the power
of irony moves the self towards agnostic dualism"(3), and that "dual,
contradictory, even schizophrenic intentions distinguish satiric statements from other propositions"(16). I have already made extended
argumentsfor Fort'sclaim that some satiristsare defendersof the faith,
even when or if their satire seems heretical, that is, not to themselves
but to their readers.5
Even though Chesterton says, in Everlasting
Man, that the modern
of that modern
his
evaluation
on
satires
than
world is madder
it,
any
on
his
based
in
to
show
I
want
world is, as
appreciative
special detail,
understanding of earlier satirists' art, as we have seen, the art of
Rabelais, Swift, and Pope. First, however, I do want to say that
Lewis's sense of undenominational satire is rooted in literary history.
Lewis writes in the present tense about what he calls the "satiricele-
42
merit"in Jean de Meun's medieval world: "Whateverclaims reverence

risks ridicule. As long as there is any religion we shall laugh at
parsons."Lewis, even more than Chesterton, can look as though he
is violating rigidities of literary chronology when he praises Ariosto's
Orlando
Furiosoin English terms, saying what Dryden said of Chaucer,
and paraphrasingwhat Samuel Johnson said of London: "It is 'God's
plenty*:you can no more exhaust it than you can exhaust nature itself.
When you are tired of Ariosto, you must be tired of the world." In
making his greatest anachronisticclaim for Ariosto, Lewis's identification of Ariosto's relevant qualities is expressed in unique terms of
high praise for Chesterton:"Thereis only one English criticwho could
do justice to this gallant, satiric, chivalrous,farcical,flamboyantpoem:
Mr. Chesterton should write a book on the Italian epic." For Lewis,
the genres of satireand epic, like the talents of Chestertonand Ariosto,
are close: "ifyou abandon'high seriousness',if brillianceand harmony
and sheer technical supremacy are enough, in your eyes, to constitute greatness, then TheMadnessof Rolandranks with the Iliadand The
Divine Comedy"(The Allegoryof Love 144, 302-303). Though it might be
speculation to say that Lewis derived his satiric sense from Chesterton, I think it is accurate to say that he shared it. Whether the nature
of satire reveals itself in both classical antiquity and modern literary
theory is not a disputed question. How it does so, however, is. And
I am considering here why the connections between religion and
satire can be relatively imponderableand comparativelyneglected in
scholarly inquiry.6
One dispositionsharedby Lewis and Chestertonis simplicity'sneed
for a sense of humor, the sense that humility truly is a mode of greatness, a disposition and a mode that are conjoined, literary as well as
religious. Lewis's sixth chapter on "Sense"in Studiesin Words(133-64)
alludes to two discrete meanings in an unconscious or unaware
antithesis in "the word sense:(a) ordinary intelligence or 'gumption,'
and (b) perceptionby sight, hearing, taste, smell or touch."Lewis cadis
this second meaning of sense aesthesis,
though the firstor ordinarysense
"have
is
antithetical
to
its
"late, bookish, and abstract"
(to
sense")
which
so
does
much
to
define
the professional goal (somemeaning,
times merely the pretense)of literaryscholars. Lewis finds the original
noun meaning of "sense"in the verb form, "to experience, learn by
experience, undergo, know at first hand," in Cicero, Ovid, Horace,
Virgil and other sources in classical Latin. Lewis identifies bifurcations of meaning in Catullus (LXXXV): "Ilove and hate. You ask me
how? I don't know; but I feel it happening (sentio)and it is torture."
ROBERT A. KANTRA
43
Then, in his seventh chapter on the word "Simple"(165-80), Lewis

grapples with the fact that it has come to be enormously popular in
the moral notion that simplicity is a synonym for humility. Simplicity
seems so good and decent in itself, but lacking also what Lewis calls
a "dangeroussense." Unlike humility, the kind of thing which saints
might be proud of, simplicityimputes not only virtues but also defects.
Lewis's own literary idiom is from Dante (Purgatorio
xvi.85): "Dante
writes: 'From the hand of Him who loves her before she is, like a
prattles, with laughter and tears, forth comes Vanima
young girl who
" Here
simplicity, revealing itself in the union of laughter
semplicetta.'
and tears, is a gift from God.
Lewis'sallusion to Chesterton in this religious context not only puts
the case that simplicity is like humility, solving the riddle of tears by
combining them with laughter. Lewis also argues, here with a succinct
parenthesis, for the proximity of humility and humor: "Humilitydisarms us, and we seldom acknowledgea man's moral superiorityto us
in guilelessness and truth without reimbursing our self-esteem by a
feeling that we are at least equally superior to him in acuteness and
knowledge of the world. (The humour of Chesterton'sFather Brown
stories depends on the continual pricking of this bubble)"(178). Of
course, Chestertonand Lewis are no more identicalthan their religion
or their satire; nonetheless, I do think that their literary affinities are
substantial. To say this is to argue a point: their shared sense of
of satirists
humor is a culturallegacy that is legendary in the indignatio
and the furorpoeticusrunning through Western literature. Satiric indignation and furor can perhaps be expressed in Shakespearianparaphrase:Some are born humble, some achievehumility, and othershave
humility thrust upon them.
II
The case has yet to be made for GKC'sbody of poetry, for the definition of its genres and the determinationof their aestheticqualities. For
example, "Antichrist,or the Reunion of Christendom: An Ode" apPoemsin 1915,
pearedwithoutother genericclassificationin his Collected
is reprintedoften as an ode, and is included in the FaberBookof Comic
Verse,where I think it does not belong, and in The OxfordBookof
SatiricalVerse,where it does. I am not sure how to define Chesterton's
so-called light verse in relation to his poetic satires, though I would
certainly agree with Gertrude M. White that "the world of Chesterton's verse is as strange and surrealistic as that of Bosch or Dali"
44
("DifferentWorlds"233) and that it reveals what she more than once

calls Chesterton's"complexityof attitude,"that is, his "appreciationof
absurditywith an equally amused awareness of a human frailty from
which no one is exempt"("TrueWords"17, 24). But, no question, his
four large satiric fantasies are superb.
TheNapoleonofNottingHill, written in the prophetic past tense but
also, long before George Orwell, set in the year 1984, is both medieval
and futuristic. The story of a war between London suburbs, it is at
once and in part a parody of H.G. Wells's scientific fantasies and a
prehistoryof current news reports. Quite within the long tradition of
Menippean satire, Chesterton'snarrator-persona"I"locateshimselfsub
after and "above"the false prophets in his narrative.7
specieaeternitatis,
Like other Utopian books in Thomas More's literary tradition, this
satire nowhere clearly suggests that this imperfect world can ever become some finer, other world. Notting Hill as a place-name (personaChesterton says parenthetically)may be derived from Nutting Hill,
an allusion to the rich woods which no longer cover it, or may be a
corruptionof Nothing-Ill, referringto its reputationamong the ancients
as an earthly paradise. In the genre-specific title of the concluding
chapter of Book One, Notting Hill is "The Hill of Humour."
Just as Chesterton'sBritannica
essay on "Humour"is a fine theoretical
statement,NottingHill is a practicaldemonstrationof it. AuberonQuin
is a hero-aesthete who makes a joke out of being a prophet-king;he
sees the social and political ridiculousness of his joke, which is his
imaginativecomparisonof real London with a better if also imaginary
place. Auberon sees the social reformationin laughter, the purgative
and individual value of jokes "receivedin silence, like a benediction."
For him, "truehumour is mysterious . . . the one sanctity remaining
to mankind."He regards his function as social and political leader to
"be funny in public, and solemn in private,"to "playthe fool"in this
"Paradiseof Fools"(42-44). It is difficult to imagine that Auberon's
sense of things here is not also Chesterton's.
Adam Wayne, the other major-domo in NottingHill, is "the new
Adam," whom Auberon regards as the only other sane man, even
though- or, more accurately,because- he sees deificationas ludicrous:
"
*Yes,'he cried, in a voice of exultation, 'the whole world is mad but
Adam Wayne and me. . . .All men are mad, but the humorist.' "
Adam, in a connecting rather than contrasting way, says, "Crucifixion is comic. It is exquisitely diverting. . . . Peter was crucified, and
crucified head downwards. What could be funnier than the idea of a
respectableold Apostle upside down? What could be more in the style
ROBERT A. KANTRA
45
of your modern humour?"(72-76) The difference between Auberon

and Adam is not a social and political issue; it is, rather, a philosophic
and humorous dilemma. In "TwoVoices," the title of the last chapter,
the issue is not only metaphysicaland aesthetic, but physical too, even
strictly cerebral:
You and I, Auberon Quin, have both of us throughout our lives been again
and again called mad. And we are mad. We are mad because we are not two
men but one man . . . becausewe are two lobes of the same brain, and that brain
has been cloven in two. . . . When dark and dreary days come, you and I are
necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied
a great wrong. We have lifted the moderncities into that poetrywhich every one
who knows mankind knows to be immeasurablymore common than the commonplace. . . . We are but the two lobes in the brain of a ploughman. (197-99)
This last of Adam's dualities - physical and metaphysical, at once

cerebral and religious - connects the "blasphemous grotesques" of
medieval cathedrals with the laughter and love of modern people.
GKC's medievalism is mollified by an understanding of modern
neurology. Left-brainand right-brainidioms are now as commonplace
in daily newspapers as they are in science fiction, but I suspect they
were little known in 1905. Consider also that Lewis's two discrete
meaningsof sense are physiological,but theologicallyemployedas well:
"gumption,"and sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, revealedin laughter
and tears, in humility and humor, as gifts from God. It is precisely
such literary images that neatly embellish Chesterton's expository
thoughts, in Heretics,about the relation of mind to brain:
Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed,
for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any
theory which is debatable but has not been debated. . . . The human brain is
a machine for coming to conclusions;if it cannot come to conclusionsit is rusty.
When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something
having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. (285-86)
Rightly emphasizingthe nature of "Chesterton'sconcerns, personaand

style,"John Coates applauds his "voice of sanity sadly needed in the
battle against the mythopoeic currentsof thought in the new twentieth
century"{CultureCrisis 1). Employing persuasively dualistic literary
idioms, Coates perceives "the value of the dichotomy in his nature,"
arguing that "Chestertonhad two sides to his head. Both were brought
into play in his consideration of myth, to achieve a peculiarly comprehensive and balanced view of the subject"(165).8
The problem apparently most troublesome to readers of TheMan
is the character
in 1908, the same year as Orthodoxy,
WhoWasThursday
46
of the "realanarchist"called Sunday, who, Chesterton himself says,

"in one sense not untruly, . . . was meant for a blasphemous version
was adapted for the
of the Creator"{Autobiography
98). When Thursday
to
offer up this clariChesterton
tried
almost
later,
twenty years
stage
fication: "Thereis a phrase used at the end, spoken by Sunday: 'Can
ye drink from the cup that I drink of?' which seems to mean that
Sunday is God. That is the only serious note in the book, the face of
Sunday changes, you tear off the mask of Nature and you find God"
seven anarchistsare,
(quoted from Ward'sChesterton
136). In Thursday,
in a confusing and ambivalent story-line, detectives in disguise; these
anarchist-detectivesare led by the forebodingSunday. Together, they
provide a literary vision of destructive and benevolent forces, even
perhaps a composite rather than dualistic sense of God Himself.
Paired-off poets, Lucian-Gregory and Gabriel Syme, engage in a
flyting-matchat SaffronPark, a suburbwith a "socialatmosphere"like
"writtencomedy." Lucian, the satirist-anarchist,"seemedlike a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape"(207). Gabriel, the
story'shero and a kind of archangel, is pitted against him. Lucian is
on the side of lawlessness in art and art in lawlessness;Gabriel, a poet
of law and order, argues that Chaos is dull and that man can make
Victoria into a New Jerusalem. For both of them, finally, destruction
and benevolence, order and anarchy, lawless art and artful lawlessness, come to be the same thing. One possible explanation why many
reviewershave called the story irreverentis that it is about Nature and
God, real and unreal, naturaland supernatural,this-worldlyand otherworldly at once, but certainly also not denominational. To the extent
that they make satiric sense, I do not think the ideas in Thursday
any
more obscure than those in Orthodoxy.
As Chesterton himself has said
in FanciesversusFads, "The ordinary orthodox person is he to whom
the heresies can appear as fantasies"(vi). A readerwho finds the myth
of Orthodoxy
as conunacceptableor muddled may also regard Thursday
fused in its sense of grotesquerie,or as irreverentin its objectof attack.
However, in neither case would such an effect in the readernecessarily
mean that the book itself lacks clarity.
In TheBall andtheCross,ProfessorLucifer and a holy man, a monk
"oneof whose names was Michael"(10), are typical introductoryprotagonists, with quasi-biblicalnames, as different and as functional as
the symbols in the title of this satiricfantasy. Swooping down over fogenshrouded London in a flying ship, Lucifer and Michael barely miss
smashing the ball and cross atop St. Paul'sCathedral, Lucifer arguing
his case against Christian humbug:
ROBERT A. KANTRA
47
"Whatcould possibly express your philosophy and my philosophy better than

the shape of that cross and the shape of this ball? This globe is reasonable;that
cross is unreasonable. It is a four-legged animal with one leg longer than the
others. The globe is inevitable. The cross is arbitrary. Above all the globe is
at unity with itself; the cross is primarily and above all things at enmity with
itself. The cross is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilabledirection.
That silent thing up there is essentially a collision, a crash, a struggle in stone.
Pah! That sacred symbol of yours has actually given its name to a description
of desperation and muddle. When we speak of men at once ignorant of each
other and frustratedby each other, we say they are at cross-purposes. Away
with the thing! The very shape of the thing is a contradiction in terms."
"What you say is perfectly true," said Michael with serenity. (53)
Despite the inherent complexity, of "desperation and muddle," the

seems clearenough:
religiousand satiricsymbolismof "cross-purposes"
the world and the other world, the natural and the supernatural,
Nature and God, the objects of rational analysis and of acceptanceby
faith.
Evan Maclan andJames Turnbull are a second pair of protagonists,
more terrestrial and down-to-earth than either Lucifer or Michael;
Maclan is a simple Catholic lad from the Scottish Highlands, and
Turnbull a sincereatheist. Like NottingHilts Auberon and Adam, they
are "Two Voices," in effect not two men but one man, "twolobes of
the same brain."The brain is in some literalsense Chesterton's,though
it is at any rate their story that forms the bulk of the fantasy. Maclan
and Turnbull see no alternative but to fight out their differences in
a duel to the death. And yet in the end they are reconciled. Maclan
is the only man to regardTurnbull'ssecularistnewspaperwith serious
respectj and it seems to Turnbull that as years of his life go by, the
Death of God in his Ludgate shop is less and less important. When
young Maclan smashes Turnbull's shop window upon seeing an
atheistic insult to Our Lady, Turnbull is overjoyed about their differenceson Mariology. Londoners, far and wide, play up their curious
disagreement for its outlandish novelty. They end up in the garden
of a lunatic asylum near Margate, a microcosm of the modern world
that Chesterton says is madder than any satires on it:
"Turnbull, this garden is not a dream but an apocalyptic fulfillment. This
gardenis the world gone mad. . . . The world has gone mad,"said Maclan, "and
it has gone mad about Us." (380-81)
Just as Lucifer and Michael appraise two worlds, Maclan and Turnbull represent principles that are opposed, contradictory, but nonetheless true. Like the "Two Voices" of Adam Wayne ("You and I,
Auberon Quin"), the dilemma of the clash between good and evil in
48
them is complicated, in the Miltonic sense that it occurs in both

aL'Allegro" and "IIPenseroso," or in the postmodern companionate
sense of the "You and I" in T.S. Eliot's Prufrock.
Chesterton'ssubsequentsatiricfantasy, TheFlyingInn, is most usually
regardedas a "completelyframelessUtopiannovel"(Gerber 116), and
is not much read in its entirety, though it should be. It is best known
for its drinking songs, which are frequently anthologized, and for
several prosaic parts that parody several undenominational religions
having sometimes funny names: Sublapsarianism,Higher Criticism,
Higher Polygamy,Vegetarianismin the Drawing-Room,Vegetarianism
in the Forest, and the Seven Moods of Dorian Wimpole, Poet of the
Birds. Parody is at once a precise and indelicate art in TheFlyingInn,
and those comparativelyfew who recognize it see also its "seriousness
and unity"over against the "lingeringnotion that Chestertonhad produced a mere diversion, a gallimaufryof fun and fantasy,"andagainst
the charge that its "polemicis unfair"(Coates "ReligiousBackground"
303-28). Like Notting Hill and Ball and Cross, Flying Inn has the appar-
ently hodgepodge structureof much Menippean satire, sustainedprose and incidental verses. It also has a large-scale and still important
subject, namely, the new growth of ancient Arabic-Hebrew religion
in the soil of Edwardianculture. Its enthusiasticsocio-politicalpersonae
adapt to their own secular uses the cross of Christianity and the
crescent of Islam, settling themselves down in numerous pubs at
Pebbleswick-on-Seaand other more "fashionablewateringplaces."The
first chapter, "A Sermon on Inns," describes the sites of many ersatz
religiousconvocations,some of them extendeddisputesbetweenPatrick
Dalroy and Lord Ivywood. Their verbal exchanges, like the fantasy's
visual symbols, show how the pretensions of "Chrislam"are as ridiculous as they are unseen, as comic as they are powerful. Preaching a
lukewarmgospel of toleration, Ivywood says in a double negative that
he is not "so illiberal as not to extend to the ancient customs of Islam
what I would extend to the ancient customs of Christianity"(427).
Chesterton marksthe similaritiesratherthan the contrastsbetween
Christianity and Islam, the ways in which West imitates East, including beliefs in Us and Them, a Manichean perception of good and evil
within the microcosm of human hearts and in global conflict: "Like
every other civilization known to history, the Muslim world in its heyday saw itself as the center of truth and enlightenment, surrounded
by barbarians whom it would in due course enlighten and civilize"
(Lewis "Muslim Rage" 49). Curses in verses, "the art of cursing and
blessing,"function in the Persian Gulf today, cultivated by "minstrels
ROBERT A. KANTRA
49
of malediction";they derive from a pre-Islamicera which Muslims call

the Age of Ignorance, in imitation of the warlock Balaam: "Just as
preachers of the fire-and-brimstonevariety retain the ability to chill
lapsed churchgoerswho thought they had put old-style religion behind
them, so these latter-dayBalaamshave a mesmerizingeffecteven when
their listeners do not fully comprehend them"(Ya'ari 25). What Ivywood advocatesis an internationaldenominationalismthat is precisely
^denominational: "Ours is an age when men come more and more
to see that the creeds hold treasuresfor each other, that each religion
has a secret for its neighbor, that faith unto faith uttereth speech and
church unto church showeth knowledge"(429). Unfortunately, he is
unable to practice what he preaches, becoming "quite a Methody
parson who pulls down beershops right and left"(435). This prohibition is the emergent occasion of Patrick'sFlying Inn, a furtive, "floatthat tends to the "spiritual"needs of all persecuted Englishing" pub
men. " 'All roads lead to Rum,' as Lord Ivywood said at the Church
Congress"(461). However, Patrick, who believes that "even a rascal
sometimes has to fight the world in the same way as a saint"(467),
is ultimately successful in his missionary work. Rolling his round
cheese and keg of rum through the countryside, Patrickbrings tidings
of comfort, and joy.
Ill
The title of TheFlying Inn with regard to its "Chrislam"content
seems to me a matter worth pressing even further. Its transporting
idiom, like the opening scene in BallandCross,hints at its being merely
a turn of the century period piece, like one of Jules Verne's, or in the
juvenile science fiction that is always more fantasy than technology.
The whimsicaljourney through time and place is a controlling metaphor for the book, more like Salman Rushdie's in Shame,where he
says he has "a theory that the resentments we mohajirs[immigrants]
engender have something to do with our conquest of the force of
gravity. We have performedthe act of which all men ancientlydream,
the thing for which they envy the birds; that is to say, we have flown.
. . . The anti-myths of gravity and belonging bear the same name:
flight. . . . We have floated upwardsfrom history, from memory, from
Time" (90-91). This metaphor functions throughout Rushdie'sSatanic
Verses,where it is explicitly satiric. Gibreel and Saladin are united in
air-spacein their "endlessbut also ending angelicdevilishfall"(5), and
Abu Simbel"laughsat minstrelssinging vicious satires.. . . And if rivers
50
of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish
him. He is the satirist, Baal"(97).
Fantasy looks closer to juvenilia than to satire, though these like all
other genre classifications are not hard and fast. In his essay "On
Stories,"Lewis says, "No merely physical strangenessor merely spatial
distance will realize that idea of othernesswhich is what we are always
trying to grasp in stories about voyaging through space: you must go
into another dimension. To construct plausible and moving 'other
worlds' you must draw on the only real 'other world' we know, that
of the spirit. . . . No book is really worth reading at the age of ten
which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age
of fifty- except of course books of information"{OtherWorlds13, 15).
And in his essay on "ThreeWays to Write for Children,"Lewis warns,
"The dangerous fantasy is always superficiallyrealistic. . . . We must
meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their
equals"{OtherWorlds30, 34). The worlds of spirit and informationare
frequently confounded, like the worlds of childhood and maturity.
Rushdie's Harounand theSea of Storiesis "another dangerous story"
even as it is representativeof other children'sfantasies because they
delineate "the shadows of real and often unhappy events in their
authors'lives"(Lurie). Rushdie had to be surroundedby bodyguards
as he accepted an award for Haroun,from the Writers'Guild of Great
Britain ("Rushdie surfaces").Like Lewis, Rushdie lives in a kind of
shadowland. Lewis's Narnia tales are Christmas Books for Children
and TheSatanicVersesis one of a baker'sdozen titles lauded as Christmas reading for adults ("Editors'Choice").
Rushdie's binaries, like Chesterton's and many other religious
satirists',have provokedboth popular acclaim and notoriety, precisely
as they are religious satire. Self-contained as they are in religious
satire and expressed in its history, knowledge of them provides some
explanation of continuously mixed appreciationfor the genre. There
can be no surprise when Gibreel, with "sucha damn fool nickname,
angeV(122), is an agitator in most of his reincarnations, or when,
"afterthe repudiation of the Satanic Verses, the Prophet Mahound
returns home to find a kind of punishment awaiting him"(124). The
SatanicVerses
has generatedsome articulateand insightfulcommentary
on Rushdie (Cunningham,Mortimer),some carefuland subtledescriptions too of Rushdie'sliterary intentions and achievement (Leithauer,
Mojtabai), but these have certainly not assuaged rampant dissatisfaction with both the subject matter and the form of the book. John Le
Carre, who admires neither Rushdie nor SatanicVerses,makes a hard
ROBERT A. KANTRA
51
claim in favor of the adverse critics of the book and he poses an unwieldy question about the varieties of religious experience in relation
to the literary marketplace:"I don't think there is anything to deplore
in religious fervour; American presidents profess to it almost as a
ritual; we respect it in Christians and Jews. . . . Or are we to believe
that those who write great literaturehave a greaterright to free speech
than those who write pulp?"Shabbir Akhtar, one of Rushdie's most
value as literaryart specifically
influentialcritics, rejectsSatanicVerses's
because "the confusion of the sacred and the profane, the good and
the evil, allegedly revealed truth and purely human truth, supplies the
central metaphysical theme of the novel"(17); his rejection is formal
as well as substantive, insofar as "thereare many techniques of reverent yet penetrating scepticism that do not carry the dangers attending
satire and ridicule"(130). As we have seen, Lewis himself carefully
defines the "dangeroussense"built into simplicity, so good and decent
in itselfbut imputing defects as as well as virtues. Like Lewis, Rushdie
is dangerousfor children'sfantasiesand dangerousfor his ridiculetoo.
Sometimes, satirists can't win for trying.
Chesterton and Lewis's riddle of joy may never be finally solved,
and so too the Rushdie File expandslike a giant accordion.Life-threats
to authorsaside (see Gelb), the comparativepoint is this: to the extent
that Chesterton's Gabriel or Rushdie's Gibreel are not aesthetically
and SatanicVerses
pleasing, much less religiouslysalvationary, Thursday
can be said to have suffered the same inter- and intra-culturalfate.
In an important essay about the variety of Rushdie's Islamic readers'
responses in London, Jane Kramer makes this finite religio-literary
argument: "The fact that there is a tradition of religious satire in
Islam, or an 'ironist' school of interpretation of the Suras and the
Hadith, is not somethingthat concernsthem, and they would probably
be as reluctant to acknowledge that a lot of educated Muslims think
The Satanic Verses' is a good book"(65). And she makes this broader
statementconcerningthe CAralamicside of the Rushdie Affair:"Evangelicals, of course, tend not to believe in metaphoricaltruth or allegorical truth in different vocabularies for divinity. They believe (like
Dante, like the mullahs who bewilderthem now) in the revealedliteral
truth of doctrine, and many of them consider the issue of blasphemy
against Islam to be a false issue, saying that you cannot blaspheme
against a false prophet - you can blaspheme only against God-inChrist as He appears in their version of the Bible" (74).
To the extent that the issues of metaphor and blasphemy are unlimited in point of time and place, religious satire is alwaysundenomi-
52
national. When, say, Umberto Eco in TheNameof theRoseshows how

a murder in a medieval monastery derives from a lost book containing Aristotle'stheory of comedy and laughter, it has seemed inevitable
and necessary that he then writes transatlantic sequels. Like Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World and then Brave New World Revisited, Eco's
The Name of the Rose and Postscriptto the Name of the Rose are represen-
tative of an unending commerce in popular culture (Stille, van Innis's

cartoon), even as they challenge the too easy sense of differentiation
between poetry and prose, fiction and fact. No less than Huxley and
Eco and Rushdie after him, Chesterton envisions and derides bodies
of heresy in the disguise of orthodoxy, his personae similarly consistent indicators of profoundly satiric purpose. Like Eco's William of
Baskerville and Adso of Melk, Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne in
NottingHilly Lucian-Gregory and Gabriel Syme in Thursday,Evan
Maclan andJames Turnbull in Ball andCross,and PatrickDalroy and
Lord Ivywood in FlyingInn are, all of them, "two lobes of the same
brain."
The clash of either literary or religious hegemonies is no surprise,
to the extent that, within and between them, during mass communication, it can be said that low-, middle-, and high-levels do not understand their responsibilitiesto one another.9Chesterton'searly nonfiction aroused much animosity in a way that his satiric fantasies sui
generisdid not. Even before he establishedhis life-long and larger-thanlife reputationas a controversialand devotionalwriter, Chestertondoes
not always create personae to express his belligerence. Nor is he concerned with metaphysicalcomforting, in Hereticsand Orthodoxy,
for example, where, in Lewis'slexicon, he is being controversialand devotional as distinct from satiric. But, of course, generic distinctions cannot be hard and fast; and religion and satire do not have a universally
recognized counterbalance. These two books, taken together, can be
said to represent the limited applicability of Chesterton's sense of
humor in relation to his undenominational satire. Bafflement is very
nearly a twin to aggravation in the dysfunctional sympathy of reader
responses, even when presumably both honest and knowledgeable.
In the direction of what Kincaid neatly describes as the rhetoric
of laughter, I would say that bafflement and aggravation can be
counted among its intended effects, or at least inevitable results.10
Chesterton frequently depicts what he identified in Ball and Crossas
the "conflictof two hostile lines, of irreconcilabledirection."Perhaps
it can be said that the artistry of his dual personae reveals itself in
some of the bafflement they have given his readers, as products of his
ROBERTA. KANTRA
53
literary imagination. Apart from what Chesterton, in Orthodoxy,refers

to as "ordinary Christian apologetics," what his spiritual certainty then
has in common with satiric sense is that they are both identifiable in
fact as well as in fiction, in perceptions of a profane world represented
as literary personae not entirely limited to any one time or place or
genre. Praised, but not universally, Chesterton is the embodiment of
practical wisdom and satiric humor. His spiritual certainty is neither
of these things but surely connected to both.
Villanova University
NOTES
Clothesachieved considerable
1. Thirty years ago, Kathleen Nott's TheEmperor's
notoriety in attacking the dogmatic orthodoxy of C.S. Lewis and others, though,
astonishing to me, not Chesterton's.When I have said that "the humanist-Christian
antithesis is one of the most persistent and slippery commonplaces,"and that "there
is intellectual danger in setting up orthodoxy as a literary standard"(All ThingsVain
132, 141), I did not then, nor do I now, sympathize with the secularity of Nott's
literaryanalysis nor her inflexible rejectionof religious subtleties, including "Catholic
dogmatism"as enhancement orlimit in satirists'art. My "dangeroussense"is Lewis's.
Christian and secular humanisms continue their belligerence, between and among
themselves.
2. Beginning with Chesterton'sawarenessthat Dickens's"funwas very serious and
his seriousness often funny"(1), Kincaid defines "rhetoricof laughter,"in the most
literal sense, as the use of laughter to persuade, counting Chesterton among some
other well-knownexplainersof jokes, including Henri Bergson on the bitter aftertaste
of laughter, and Freud on everyone's reluctance to examine his own aggressive impulses, and on the function of laughter'skeeping our conscious attention at a distance
(3). Kincaid notes that among all of Dickens's critics Chesterton is the first and best
one to describe laughter in relation to irony and pathos (196, 224).
3. Literary classifications seem to me not inevitably based on what Barcus calls
"autobiographicimpulses,"whatever those are supposed to be. Like SchakePs"imagination and movement of thought,"Barcus'stheoretical"twopoles of thought"are not
only too numerousbut also too nebulous theoreticalcommonplaces.As this essay goes
to press, I am reading Lewisiana in WordandStory,the first half focusing on Lewis's
Revisited
"Bluspelsand Flalansferes,"the second half concludingwith aPerelandra
an essay on "oppositionalrelationshipsor- to use structuralistterminology- 'binary
oppositions' of all kinds"(297).
4. Even after decades of familiaritywith Lewis'sautobiography, with its title and
epigraph from Wordsworth, it seems still possible to be surprisedby joy, and to enjoy
redefining it. Recent editors of seventeen essays on Chesterton and Lewis give their
wide-rangingand occasionallyincompatiblecollectionan amalgamatedtitle, TheRiddle
ofJoy, overlaying Lewis's Wordsworthian surprise with a riddle from GKC and a
mystery from John Donne, namely, "the discovery that what is 'plain' and what is
54
'dazzling'are somehow two faces of the same enigma. The known and the unknowable, reason and rapture, duty and bliss, the lucid and the incomprehensiblemysteriously inhere in oneanother[italics theirs]; whenever they are sundered, they cease
to be"(xiii). These commonplace binomials are made to appear Siamese rather than
near twins (both of which I discuss throughout All Things Vain). Enthusiasm for
"Chesterlewis"can be both offhand and intense.
5. Beyond what he calls "the power of irony," Fort makes three additional statements, without a mention of Robert C. Elliott's The Powerof Satireor any other
documented references on the subject explicit in Elliott's title; these statements
by Fort I think are nonetheless accurate: "the great power of satire lies in its unresolved depiction of an existential state we have all experienced between the pulls of
gnosticism and orthodoxy"(4); "the power of satire depends on presenting both an
affection for the distancing world and the pull of the radical freedom of gnosticism"
(17); and "satire'strue power depends on its presenting the possibility of a gnostic
alternative to the orthodox cosmos"(18).
6. There are of course many publications on religion and on satire, but not on
both. The British Library Currentsubjectindex 1975 onwards, to 1985 cites All Things
Vainas the only book on religious satire, so too the MLA WilsonCDROMInternational
1/81 through 7/15/91, browsing religious satire. Wilsonline lists 1676,
Bibliography
1582, and 28 titles of all kinds, Wilsearch 4510, 1582, and 28, respectively, on the
three topics.
7. Postmodernliterarycritics have pretty much abandoned Northrop Frye; nonetheless, I call attention to Frye'sserviceableliterary theory of myths, which says that
two things are essential to satire: "one is wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense
of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack."The fact that so many
of his fictional charactersspeak like Chesterton himself testifies, first, to a harmony
of his intention and, second, to a functionallyconsistentuse of symbolswithin a framework of myth, which Frye has establishedas characteristicof Menippean satiristsand
their art (224, 308-12). In satire, violent dislocations in the logic of narrative should
not be an imposing difficulty. By definition, Menippean satire particularlyconcerns
abstractideas and theories ratherthan facts, and is "stylized"rather than naturalistic.
When the mental attitudes are offensive- in both senses of that word- the people or
the personae may seem to be obscure. Satire deals less with people "assuch"than with
mental attitudes, yet it does concern real people with real attitudes.
8. Neurology has seemed to me an inevitable and important considerationin the
development of modern literary theory, not least in Chesterton's. (See All Things
Vain, the indexed references for "Literarytheory: neurology.")
9. The ordinary responsibilitiesof multi-level communication are as problematic
as the more esoteric definition of genres in relation to the varieties of experience.
James Atlas, for example, tries to balance off what he calls the long and honorable
tradition of plagiarism over against the mere likelihood of literary reworking, or
"PromiscuousPilferage."Professionalmisreadingis a culturalcommonplace, not only
in "theprecinctsof journalism"but also in the "insoucianceof the writtenword"among
literary historians and biographers.
10. The rhetoric of religion, like the rhetoric of laughter, presents all readers at
any level with real problems which, perhaps, cannot be solved. Kenneth Burke's
Rhetoric
of Religionis requiredreading for any discussion of religious satire, and I have
elsewhere signified Burke's"Epilogue:Prologue to Heaven" (273-316) as especially
important to an understandingof unsolvable problems. Here, further, I recommend
ROBERT A. KANTRA
55
Burke's "Adolescent Perversity" (93-101), a discussion of Augustine's famous Stealing

of Pears, defining it as a kind of unintentional satire, "a perfect parody of Brotherhood within the Church, . . . the perfect parody of monastic motives generally," though
Burke's little discussion-title itself suggests that Augustine's Confessions,Book II is rather
broadly undenominational as well. See also Robert McMahon's discussion of what
he wants to call Burke's Divine Comedy, and my rejection of it ("Reading Kenneth
Burke").
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Undenominational Satire: Chesterton and Lewis Revisited

Religion & Literature

bal configurationsdemonstratinga shared sense of humor. I suggested

but rightly considered to be his best as well. His early argumentative

Religion & Literature

Religion & Literature

because its explicit definitions of humor, sense, and nonsense are

This other "IdealPair"also is variously appraised, even as it is a fact

Religion & Literature

popular acceptance/rejectionaccorded Salman Rushdie'sHaroun,and

Religion & Literature

merit"in Jean de Meun's medieval world: "Whateverclaims reverence

Then, in his seventh chapter on the word "Simple"(165-80), Lewis

Religion & Literature

("DifferentWorlds"233) and that it reveals what she more than once

of your modern humour?"(72-76) The difference between Auberon

This last of Adam's dualities - physical and metaphysical, at once

Rightly emphasizingthe nature of "Chesterton'sconcerns, personaand

Religion & Literature

of the "realanarchist"called Sunday, who, Chesterton himself says,

"Whatcould possibly express your philosophy and my philosophy better than

Despite the inherent complexity, of "desperation and muddle," the

Religion & Literature

them is complicated, in the Miltonic sense that it occurs in both

of malediction";they derive from a pre-Islamicera which Muslims call

Religion & Literature

Religion & Literature

national. When, say, Umberto Eco in TheNameof theRoseshows how

tative of an unending commerce in popular culture (Stille, van Innis's

literary imagination. Apart from what Chesterton, in Orthodoxy,refers

Religion & Literature

Burke's "Adolescent Perversity" (93-101), a discussion of Augustine's famous Stealing

Religion & Literature

Fort, Keith. "Satire and Gnosticism." Religionand Literature20.2 (1988): 1-18.

Rushdie, Salman. Harounand theSea of Stories.NY: Viking, 1990.

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