Aaron Matz. Satire in an Age of Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-521-19738-0. Price: US$85.00/£50.00

Aaron Matz’s engaging, elegantly written, often counterintuitively insightful, study of the late nineteenth-century British novel begins by distinguishing between the two literary modes that preoccupy him: This passage not only concisely expresses Matz’s basic claim—that in a handful of novels (most prominently, Jude the Obscure [1895], New Grub Street [1891], and The Secret Agent [1907]), the high realism of the mid-Victorian period, depleted of its wish-fulfilling powers, collapses into what he calls “satirical realism”—but it also gives a fine sense of his argumentative style, his historical perspective, his formalist interests and ethical investments (ix). Matz aims to persuade his reader that epistemologically, aesthetically, and ethically—though, significantly, not affectively—these novels are essentially satires, being the logical outcome of an unflinchingly realistic perspective on the sociopolitical conditions of the time. But unlike satire, which castigates its victims with scornful laughter in the belief that such shaming and disciplining may have a corrective effect, satirical realism maintains no such confidence in its rehabilitative capacity. Indeed, satirical realism takes a view of mankind so bleak and caustic as to make many of those who trade in it literally sick: Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Gustave Flaubert (“the most instinctive practitioner” [170] of satiric realism, in Matz’s view), all complain variously of “affliction,” “depression,” “nausea,” and “disgust” provoked by the “troop of swine” that “populate their stories” (154-55). Because realism induces us to empathize with its characters, when those characters are despicable or degraded, queasiness may result. Although satirical realism only achieved full generic status at the fin de siècle, Matz traces its origins back to Menippean satire. In contrast to Aristophanes’s comedies, which targeted known persons (Socrates, for example, with famously fatal consequences), Menippean satire sets its sights on character types and, while drawing variously from epic, tragedy, allegory, and satiric comedy, appears itself in prose form. According to Matz’s genealogy, Menippean or Juvenalian satire (Juvenal having been the first major exponent of the type) fell into disuse for centuries, rarely surfacing until Jonathan Swift took it up with such force in A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) as to have given his name to the type in the modern period: Swiftian satire, that is, essentially rebrands the Juvenalian strain. But then came the rise of the realist novel, with its particular insistence on sympathetic engagement, so contrary to the affective distancing of satire. Satire as a genre was overshadowed in consequence for most of the nineteenth century, until—and this is Matz’s highly original argument—it “fused” with the novel in what we might call a late stage of advanced realism, producing hybrid texts in which the DNA of realism and satire have so combined as to yield a literary product that is satiric in looks, but not in temperament, satiric in structure, but not in feeling (3). Thomas Hardy’s rendering of Father Time’s murder-suicide at the end of Jude the Obscure is perhaps the most arresting example of what Matz means by satirical realism. The idea that Jude is a satire of any sort, however, is likely to arouse resistance. That Matz manages to persuade his reader to his point of view owes much to his resourcefulness as both a researcher and a writer. Throughout his study, but especially in his chapter on Hardy, Matz makes inventive use of biographical evidence—not only letters, but also reading records at the time of composition—to show, for example, that Jude emerged from a mind steeped in satire (Hardy reports having read more than a dozen satirists from Horace to William Makepeace Thackeray in the months before commencing Jude). For each …