Counter-Currents
913 words 
This is the fourth and—I hope and believe—final installment of a series which sprang from what I originally intended as a single article. Previous pieces were “A Puzzling Situation”, “A Short Note on Satire”, and “Welcome to My Workshop.” The trouble started when the first piece met with more incomprehension than I had foreseen. The second piece was meant to provide a few clues; the third to provide a nearly comprehensive key; and this last piece to reflect on the entire experience.
“Welcome to My Workshop” was a nearly comprehensive key to the first piece, “A Puzzling Situation,” but not quite. As I remarked in “A Short Note on Satire,” the understanding of a satire may hinge not so much upon what is said as upon what gets left out, meaning in this case the word “marriage.”
Yet a careful examination of “A Puzzling Situation” will reveal that it does include a reference to marriage—one which probably escaped the notice of most readers. The only “marriage” mentioned in my satire is between the Gender Studies Professor Dr. Naomi Rosenberg and “a Guatemalan labor activist and woman of color.” In my satire, the abnormal has entirely replaced the normal.
Like a skillful magician who directs the audience’s attention where he chooses while carrying out the trick elsewhere, I put the solution to the riddle right there in the piece itself. It was hiding in plain sight.
If “A Short Note on Satire” was an introduction to the genre, this little point is the beginning of your intermediate course of study. I doubt I shall ever find time to teach an advanced course, but the careful reading of Swift, along with a few good secondary sources, will soon take the reader there. Here is a volume that can get you started.
It is a cliché that we live in a busy age that places many demands on people’s time. Yet it is a cliché because it is true. Less affluent times seem to have enjoyed greater leisure, and this means they did many things differently than we do. One thing they did differently was reading. Today most people read a lot and read it quickly, more frequently on the internet than in the pages of books. The internet itself had adapted to the resulting rush, helpfully placing notices next to articles to inform the busy consumer whether a piece is a “five-minute read” or a “ten-minute read.”
Sometimes one even comes across two-minute reads with titles like “Five Things You Must Know About Andrew Tate.” My reaction is usually to reflect that I can shave off an extra two minutes by remaining in blessed ignorance concerning Mr. Tate. Practically the only articles I ever find myself reading on the internet are ones marked “read when you have time to spare,” and I have to skip most of those as well, of course.
In other words, I am old-school. I still read old books, and do so as it used to be done: slowly, and often repeatedly. I find it more worthwhile to understand a few really valuable books deeply than to keep up with the latest on subjects of current interest. I am out of my time, I fear: a relic of a bygone age.
But I am not yet quite alone. One class of people who still read in the old way are the seriously religious. Many Christians study the Bible carefully and repeatedly. All who do so inevitably learn how much they missed the first time around, how much more there is to these old writings than meets the eye.
Yet the Bible is not the only literature of which this is true. Swift, for example, is an author who can be enjoyed by children. That is why children’s adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels still appear. Young people enjoy Gulliver’s goofy adventures in lands filled with giants and midgets.
The adult reader, however, is meant to perceive that the giants and midgets are not merely imaginary, but are satirical portraits—take-offs, send-ups—of real human types. Lilliput represents England, while its hereditary enemy Blefuscu represents France. The inhabitants of Laputa—each with one eye turned inward while the other looks constantly up at the sky, so that they never see what is right in front of them—is a satire on the Cartesian and post-Cartesian philosophers of Swift’s own day. And so on.
Swift’s writings were not meant to be read quickly. By contemporary standards, “A Modest Proposal” (discussed in my piece “A Short Note on Satire”) qualifies as about a ten-minute read. But the reader may have to read it twice or three times before he starts catching on to most of what Swift is doing in this short piece. The same point applies in spades to a book-length satire such as Gulliver’s Travels.
There is a danger that the significance of authors such as Swift may be lost to future generations due to decay in the art of careful and leisurely reading. And Swift is not the only, nor the most important, author to whom this reflection applies. Another favorite of mine, as well as of Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson, is Plato. The more you read him, the more unexpected treasures you discover. Acquiring the ability to read a satirical author such as Swift is good preparation for tackling Plato’s dialogues. And the careful study of Plato’s dialogues was once considered the most proper beginning of a serious education.
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11 comments
You say that we are superficial readers because we did not equate “M” for marriage, yet in your narrative the protagonist had not progressed beyond a yearning look of desire for the young maiden (maiden is a big if in this day and age). If I remember right the protagonist runs around gathering information as to said maiden’s goals and desires, he then approaches you and solicits advice—he has not even achieved a first date! Yet, we are to assume the protagonist can achieve marriage when he has not achieved a first date–that is big jump for a story which was really a hypothetical situation. I too read books and I too read slowly; your hypothetical situation was not proper satire in the style of “Swift.” There were no bizarre creatures such as Lilliputians, giants, yahoos and talking, noble horses in your little hypothetical situation. I call it an unfair test! 🤯
When I am editing a colleague’s writing or when one my colleagues is editing my writing, I have a simple rule: if the reader finds something difficult to comprehend, it is the fault of the writer, not the reader.
A good rule in journalism, and I would happily apply it to most of my own writing, but it doesn’t always apply to satire or serious speculative philosophy, i.e., the non-literal use of language or intrinsically difficult subject matter.
What if the writer is smart, and the reader stupid? Everything must be geared to the lowest? I suppose that approach would be best when used to convey orders in a warehouse, or to your delivery or janitorial personnel …
I find these implications uncharitable, and I agree with Lee Perry.
Mr. Devlin is a smart writer. Counter-Currents readers who were baffled by this failed experiment in satire aren’t “stupid”.
I found the original piece underwhelming and slightly irritating. Apparently I wasn’t alone.
I am glad some readers understood Mr. Devlin’s piece and found its thesis enlightening. I will continue to enjoy Mr. Devlin’s essays.
Personally, I dislike fiction on Counter-Currents.
Ten up votes!
Reading books – and I mean physical books, not ebooks – is by far the best way to garner and cement knowledge, especially if one engages critically and even aggressively with texts, as I usually do: highlighting and underlining passages; writing argumentative marginalia; circling unfamiliar words, and then looking up their definitions, followed by writing out the most apposite meaning if several are offered (this active approach to reading – simply, studying – is certainly the best, if not only, way to ‘grow’ one’s intellect). Obviously, I greatly prefer purchasing paperbacks that I can really “tear into” and not feel guilty about it, as I sometimes do with elegantly produced hardbacks (forget those beautiful “coffee table” books, of which I inherited well over a hundred from my late parents: many of them, like The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity or The New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, though penned by top scholars and thus very worth reading, are way too beautifully produced to deserve any defacement, however honorably ‘critical’).
I do the same with my learned periodicals. I have decades’ worth of Chronicles, First Things, The New York Review of Books, The Occidental Quarterly, and a shifting array of similar others, all heavily underlined. Carefully though I read ebooks and learned websites like CC, I just don’t retain as much as I do from physical texts.
Serious leisure is not only, as has been noted, the basis of culture, but almost certainly also a necessity for the preservation of liberty. Our society of ever-worsening spectacle and distraction produces untutored and immature intellects, even among adults. Such persons are easily manipulable by the clever and malign. Those who study the Bible are indeed at least somewhat inoculated from modern ideological follies, in part due to the Bible’s wisdom and salutary content, but also because the very act of immersing oneself in a great and timeless work matures and armors the mind.
Just because a Christian reads their bible daily, it does not sharpen their critical thinking skills or increase their intuition (deep knowledge), rather it locks their mind into a groove in which they become anal and self-righteous. These Christians are prone to quoting and applying proverbs totally out of context to contemporary incidents or situations. If one wishes to become a discerning, advanced reader, with strong critical thinking skills, they should read as widely as possible in those fields and genres which interest them and sometimes in fields and genres which do not interest them. 😉
Like a skillful magician who directs the audience’s attention where he chooses while carrying out the trick elsewhere, I put the solution to the riddle right there in the piece itself.
Any writer who has to pat himself on the back by referring to himself as “a skillful magician” instead of simply allowing his readers to come to that conclusion on their own probably isn’t that thing they are claiming to be. What made Swift’s Modest Proposal essay so memorable was the explicit delineation of a major societal problem followed by an extreme and absurd “solution” to that problem. The very absurdity of the solution is, I would guess, what tipped off most intelligent readers to its satirical intent. The “Puzzling Situation” essay had none of those things. In fact, it’s rather vague as to what events are even actually occurring. Any satire is sort of lost in the prose.
While I’m sure there are exceptions, I doubt the average CC reader is so dim-witted and insensitive that they would fail to recognize a good piece of satire when it’s presented to them. I think this is much more of a “magician” issue than an audience one.
“Any writer who has to pat himself on the back by referring to himself as ‘a skillful magician’ instead of simply allowing his readers to come to that conclusion on their own probably isn’t that thing they are claiming to be.”
You are correct, of course, but it’s hard to be humble when one is Roger Devlin!
More seriously: this is the first time I’ve ever explained what I was doing as a writer in this way, and I did so only because of the apparently widespread incomprehension that greeted “A Puzzling Case.” I hope some readers may have learned something about satire from this little series, whatever they conclude about the merit (or lack of merit) of my original piece.
Mr. Chance – Exactly, thank you. You articulated my thoughts much better than I could’ve. (“In fact, it’s rather vague as to what events are even actually occurring.”)
It was like a girlfriend dropping way-too-subtle hints instead of just coming out an saying “Did you notice my new earrings?”.
I found this to be quite an enjoyable set of articles. Obviously one could sense that something was not quite right with the story, but I did not come to the “correct” conclusion. But that’s ok. Thank you for the entertainment.
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