“[ It ] is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it,” goes Jonathon Swift’s famous definition of satire and indeed spoken like a true Sagittarius.
But is there not a fundamental issue neglected if – be it polemic or poem, history or novel – the writer has connected the reader with the world and not himself? I mean, one can be imperialist England and connect with the world, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the Conquistadors of Spain!- but if satire is, what Defoe describes as “reformation” or what Johnson describes as the “censure” of “wickedness and folly,” then what is reformed or (in Dryden’s case) ‘amended’ if left on paper once out of a readers hands?
Of course, in his definition of satire, Swift is emphasizing the trouble ‘human nature’ brings to a story in the form of its reader, which keeps the satire so entertaining. Kudos, Swift, for your insight into the ‘human condition.’
But again, that condition. Human nature and its condition.
Among ‘thinking’ writers there is a condition that the writer must only ask questions and never give answers. So, we may hack and re-hash those eternal questions driving the world to its grave (the worst of which is perhaps, ‘What does it mean to be human?’) for all eternity. But what good is a question alone?
There is another element of society that is so conditioned to asking questions. They are called children. Not to diminish the imagination and wisdom of a child at all. Children often fail solely by the answers they bring, and this has more to do with the dynamic of an adult bestowing upon a child then any child’s fault. I tend to believe that children, given the most questions, are inclined to the best answers. Children, in fact, prefer answers to adults (grown children), who prefer the excuse of a question to the obligation that comes with an answer. The question, for an adult, becomes more entertaining, and given the charge of a failing mind and world, this entertainment may further delay the responsibility to answer – And the poor child is always pinned, condemned solely to her and his questions when discovering an answer an adult does not like, an answer that reveals his or her face in the mirror among everybody else.
Maybe writers got too proud with wanting answers, and so, the learned and anxious critic of the adult mind is now excusing writers to their questions alone, but I encourage writers never to neglect their inner child. A writer’s mind, after all, is a terrible thing to waste in a fictitious society.
Remember that children ask in trust, and that a child is never compelled out of trust by the question but by everybody else. So, let us bless the child’s mind and trust the question, because the reason for having children is the same for writing stories, to teach us all we have forgotten and to aid us in discovering what we alone could never know. Because, in children and in stories, will all searching questions become rhetorical. – N
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