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 religion or literature, Chesterton and Lewis can be seen to provoke much dysfunctional sympathy. 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 autobiographically expressed indebtedness to Chesterton regarding his religious conversion (Surprised by Joy 213, 223, 235). Much 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 literature connect with the varieties of religious experience can be quite problematic for scholars as well as for more general readers, as when Lewis alludes to “that whole tragic farce we call the Reformation” (Sixteenth Century 37); 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 classes for the prose works of Thomas More; they are “first those of a ‘pure’ or comparatively ‘pure’ literature, secondly the controversies, and thirdly the moral and devotional treatises” (165). Lewis is a literary theorist rather than a denominational apologist in acclaiming the “sense of tragedy, and a sense of humour” in a Catholic saint, with special praise for the Utopia specifically as 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 Erewhon Butler. For most of Lewis's variously Protestant and Catholic readers, religion and satire do not have a ubiquitous equipoise. His penchant for literary theory aside, Lewis does not have denominational allegiances that are ascertainable in his own satire, either, as when, for example, in The Screwtape Letters, he takes his epigraphs from both Martin Luther and Thomas More, identifying Luther and More equally as advocates of religious vituperation, specifically on the value of jeering, flouting, scorning, and mocking the Devil.

I do think that Lewis provides important means 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 after they jostle into one another. Religion and satire both, individually and discretely, can be said to explore important realities not always translatable into 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 appreciated literary genre. 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 apparently religious, 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 affiliations were 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 ecclesiastic affiliations in whatever century, might be said to live in an age of reformation. They describe their reformatory age in verbal configurations demonstrating a shared sense of humor. I suggested that insofar as Lewis's generic 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's legacy from GKC. I am developing further my contention that Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Ball 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 heretics and Fancies Versus Fads, Orthodoxy being the first of a long line of devotional works, the best of them The Everlasting Man.

I

The cacophonous world of journalism regarded Chesterton's Orthodoxy 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 hearing of his religious conversion, that he had not always been a church member. It was not until fourteen years after its publication, when in 1922 he formally entered the church, he says, that “the full horror of the truth burst upon them; the disgraceful truth that I really thought the thing was true” (Autobiography 180). Such surprise and then horrible and disgraceful truth 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 readers with a more secular bent, 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. Whether Chesterton's satires are identifiably for 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 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 “the Importance of Orthodoxy” as an ecclesiastic and even theological concept, with the redefinition of orthodoxy as “an enormous 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 rhetorical persuasion or poetic indirection, as though he believed that—here I paraphrase Patrick Dalroy in The Flying Inn—even a saint sometimes has to fight the world in the same way as a rascal. “Blasphemy is an artistic effect,” writes GKC, “because blasphemy 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 deplores unbelief insofar as it has particular and practical consequences. Thus, Rudyard Kipling is “a 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 spread over 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 particular examples of heretical—that is, partial—good derived from the crash of brass bands and other vulgar “mummery and flummery,” though his insistent point is that these are enduring heresies. His larger purpose is to excoriate all “undenominational religions” (92).

Such undisguised and inclusive derision, as Chesterton practices it, seems to me a little mollified only by his careful aesthetic theorizing: “Wherever you have belief you will have hilarity, wherever you have hilarity you 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 literary sleight-of-hand” (220). In amplification, Chesterton bothers to identify “three distinct classes of great satirists who are also great men—that is to say, three classes of men who can laugh at something without losing their souls”: First, one who, like Rabelais, can enjoy one's enemies; “his curse is as human as a benediction.” Second, “the satirist whose passions are released and let go by some intolerable sense of wrong,” like Swift, whose “saeva indignatio was 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 superiority can 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's three genre classes, his articulation of these “three classes” is incontrovertible with regard to religious satirists and their art.

In his Preface to Orthodoxy, Chesterton says, “This book is meant to be a companion to ‘Heretics,’ and to put the positive side in addition to the negative.” This means, I think, that if heretics is a literary attack in which the defense of Christianity is incidental, then Orthodoxy is a statement of personal belief rather than institutional dogma: “No one can think my case more ludicrous than 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's vulnerability, he says he wrote “not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography” (13). Chesterton's definition of Christianity is not the answer to everyone's arguments, but to his own dilemma and needs. Many of Chesterton's utterances in Orthodoxy as well as in Heretics carry with them not only 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, “Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard. … And the curious disappearance of 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 spiritual certainty” (142). Chesterton's satiric fantasies, by his own account, 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's appreciative review of it suggested, thirty years ago, that Chesterton's life is a suitable model for people who would aspire to be Catholic intellectuals. Baker's delight with Wills was that “in unmasking 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 worship of progress, with boorish modernism, with impertinent depreciation of classical learning, and with reductive views of religious culture. Still, what Wills's concluding chapter celebrates is Chesterton's play of reality. Michael Ffinch's more recent biography rightly receives cautionary appraisals (“Three Views”). It sustains an equally commonplace and unpraising charge—an especially time-worn and customary one, regarding satirists—that Chesterton and his times are idiosyncratic and paradoxical; a review by Hugh Kenner rightly concludes that Chesterton “awaits definition,” that “there's still a book to be written” about him; and it recalls attention to Chesterton's old but still new article on “Humour” (in the 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 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 reference to 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 careful readers, 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 legacy in the real world, in relation to his sense of 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.” This other “Ideal Pair” also is variously appraised, even as it is a fact that “Dickens criticism has covered a lot of new ground since Chesterton's death, in 1936” (Brookhiser). Numerous other literary studies have also emphasized the substantive focuses of Chesterton's early novels: the imprecise identity of madness and sanity in human consciousness, the legitimate because deserved distrust of the state in all political parts 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's many transatlantic admirers seem to him to dislike one another with a disconcerting and violent idolatry, alas, there being a “Great Schism” among Lewis's “devotees,” perceiving, as they do, “two totally different Lewises” 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” (Biography 5, 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 Nicholson's biographical drama Shadowlands, which opened on Broadway in November 1990, following a year's run in London, and televised PBS and A&E versions. These several renderings are variously appraised as “Shady Doings” (Mimi Kramer); the play “dramatizes the romance that may have eclipsed Narnia” even as it depicts “a love that challenged faith” (Finkle), and is valued not only because its literary strength and religious commitments are solid but also because “a good 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 Book 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 authorship without having any more apparent purpose than its own existence (see below, the popular acceptance/rejection accorded Salman Rushdie's Haroun, and Satanic Verses for Christmas).

Wilson also remarks on Chesterton's “great influence” on Lewis (55), which was both early and lasting: “Chesterton, always a favourite author, was a Christian; … Lewis read The Everlasting Man, and it made a profound impression on him” (108). Wilson here is referring to one of the brief GKC passages in Surprised by Joy that seems to have caught everyone's eye. Chesterton, though “comparable with Lewis,” Wilson says, enjoyed a literary tone of voice and productivity that came earlier; it was only after Lewis's “full conversion to Christianity” that, according to Wilson, “works of scholarship, fantasy, literary appreciation, and apologetics poured from his fertile brain” (133). Wilson briefly mentions Lewis's lifelong proclivities as a parodist and critic (17, 168, 208), a partial explanation of why, Wilson says about Lewis, “one must 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's apologetics keeps religious satire out of focus. It is in The Everlasting Man—I think it is important to note—that Chesterton slips in this little piece of literary theory: “The modern world is madder than any satires on it” (81).

Biography and literary theory do not always, of course, come close together, side by side, at least not clearly, as when they both employ old, comfortable academic saws. Whereas Wilson identifies Lewis as a “self-confessed follower of the Romantic movement in literature” and a “Romantic egoist” (38, 210), Peter J. Schakel, a more unabashedly enthusiastic and partisan biographer than Wilson, makes the claim that because Lewis is thought to be a romantic fantasist, Lewis's success as a satirist has been largely neglected. Schakel posits one of the most ordinary generalizations in literary criticism—the Classic and Romantic opposition of satire and fantasy—in his explanation of how Lewis's imagination works and why his satire is even now insufficiently appreciated. 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 imagination. Referring to Chesterton's Autobiography and Lewis's Surprised by Joy, and leaving other evidence aside, James E. Barcus makes an argument that is similarly brisk in its antitheses, namely, that “although Lewis learned from Chesterton and freely acknowledged his indebtedness, significant differences exist between the minds of the two men.” Barcus's conclusion is conditional, but intransigent too: “Perhaps, if Chesterton is correct in saying that all differences are essentially religious differences, Lewis, the Anglican protestant, 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 autobiography or apologetics, neither devotional nor controversial in its design, but rather the expression of practical wisdom and satiric humor (“Philosophic Fictions”). 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 transatlantic celebration of the shared achievement of Chesterton and 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 necessarily spiritual) delights caused by, and existing within, the confines of literary controversy. Awareness of that fact can mollify the special enthusiasm for Chesterton, and Lewis too, specifically as Christian apologists.⁴ Religion and satire are often rewound and reworked to do a double duty in literary theory, in opposition or united. Keith Fort differentiates between the respectively literary and religious meanings of satire and gnosticism, while simultaneously discussing 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 “gnosticism is 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 arguments for Fort's claim that some satirists are defenders of 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 world is madder than any satires on it, his evaluation of that modern world is, as I want to show in special detail, based on his appreciative 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 “satiric element” in Jean de Meun's medieval world: “Whatever claims 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 Furioso in English terms, saying what Dryden said of Chaucer, and paraphrasing what 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 anachronistic claim for Ariosto, Lewis's identification of Ariosto's relevant qualities is expressed in unique terms of high praise for Chesterton: “There is only one English critic who could do justice to this gallant, satiric, chivalrous, farcical, flamboyant poem: Mr. Chesterton should write a book on the Italian epic.” For Lewis, the genres of satire and epic, like the talents of Chesterton and Ariosto, are close: “if you abandon ‘high seriousness’, if brilliance and harmony and sheer technical supremacy are enough, in your eyes, to constitute greatness, then The Madness of Roland ranks with the Iliad and The Divine Comedy” (The Allegory of 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 imponderable and comparatively neglected in scholarly inquiry.⁶

One disposition shared by Lewis and Chesterton is simplicity's need 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 Studies in 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) perception by sight, hearing, taste, smell or touch.” Lewis calls this second meaning of sense aesthesis, though the first or ordinary sense (to “have sense”) is antithetical to its “late, bookish, and abstract” meaning, which does so much to define the professional goal (sometimes merely the pretense) of literary scholars. 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): “I love and hate. You ask me how? I don't know; but I feel it happening (sentio) and it is torture.” 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 “dangerous sense.” Unlike humility, the kind of thing which saints might be proud of, simplicity imputes 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 young girl who prattles, with laughter and tears, forth comes l'anima semplicetta.’” Here simplicity, revealing itself in the union of laughter and tears, is a gift from God.

Lewis's allusion 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: “Humility disarms us, and we seldom acknowledge a man's moral superiority to 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's Father Brown stories depends on the continual pricking of this bubble)” (178). Of course, Chesterton and Lewis are no more identical than 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 humor is a cultural legacy that is legendary in the indignatio of satirists and the furor poeticus running through Western literature. Satiric indignation and furor can perhaps be expressed in Shakespearian paraphrase: Some are born humble, some achieve humility, and others have humility thrust upon them.

II

The case has yet to be made for GKC's body of poetry, for the definition of its genres and the determination of their aesthetic qualities. For example, “Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom: An Ode” appeared without other generic classification in his Collected Poems in 1915, is reprinted often as an ode, and is included in the Faber Book of Comic Verse, where I think it does not belong, and in The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse, 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” (“Different Worlds” 233) and that it reveals what she more than once calls Chesterton's “complexity of attitude,” that is, his “appreciation of absurdity with an equally amused awareness of a human frailty from which no one is exempt” (“True Words” 17, 24). But, no question, his four large satiric fantasies are superb.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 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 prehistory of current news reports. Quite within the long tradition of Menippean satire, Chesterton's narrator-persona “I” locates himself sub specie aeternitatis, after and “above” the false prophets in his narrative.⁷ 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 (persona-Chesterton says parenthetically) may be derived from Nutting Hill, an allusion to the rich woods which no longer cover it, or may be a corruption of Nothing-Ill, referring to its reputation among 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's Britannica essay on “Humour” is a fine theoretical statement, Notting Hill is a practical demonstration of it. Auberon Quin 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 imaginative comparison of real London with a better if also imaginary place. Auberon sees the social reformation in laughter, the purgative and individual value of jokes “received in silence, like a benediction.” For him, “true humour 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 “play the fool” in this “Paradise of 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 Notting Hill, is “the new Adam,” whom Auberon regards as the only other sane man, even though—or, more accurately, because—he sees deification as 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 respectable old Apostle upside down? What could be more in the style 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 “Two Voices,” the title of the last chapter, the issue is not only metaphysical and 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 … because we 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 modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more 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-brain and right-brain idioms 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 meanings of sense are physiological, but theologically employed as well: “gumption,” and sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, revealed in 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 conclusions it 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 emphasizing the nature of “Chesterton's concerns, persona and style,” John Coates applauds his “voice of sanity sadly needed in the battle against the mythopoeic currents of thought in the new twentieth century” (Culture Crisis 1). Employing persuasively daulistic literary idioms, Coates perceives “the value of the dichotomy in his nature,” arguing that “Chesterton had 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 The Man Who Was Thursday in 1908, the same year as Orthodoxy, is the character of the “real anarchist” called Sunday, who, Chesterton himself says, “in one sense not untruly, … was meant for a blasphemous version of the Creator” (Autobiography 98). When Thursday was adapted for the stage almost twenty years later, Chesterton tried to offer up this clarification: “There is 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” (quoted from Ward's Chesterton 136). In Thursday, seven anarchists are, in a confusing and ambivalent story-line, detectives in disguise; these anarchist-detectives are led by the foreboding Sunday. 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-match at Saffron Park, a suburb with a “social atmosphere” like “written comedy.” Lucian, the satirist-anarchist, “seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape” (207). Gabriel, the story's hero 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 reviewers have called the story irreverent is that it is about Nature and God, real and unreal, natural and supernatural, this-worldly and 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 Fancies versus Fads, “The ordinary orthodox person is he to whom the heresies can appear as fantasies” (vi). A reader who finds the myth of Orthodoxy unacceptable or muddled may also regard Thursday as confused in its sense of grotesquerie, or as irreverent in its object of attack. However, in neither case would such an effect in the reader necessarily mean that the book itself lacks clarity.

In The Ball and the Cross, Professor Lucifer and a holy man, a monk “one of whose names was Michael” (10), are typical introductory protagonists, with quasi-biblical names, as different and as functional as the symbols in the title of this satiric fantasy. Swooping down over fogenshrouded London in a flying ship, Lucifer and Michael barely miss smashing the ball and cross atop St. Paul's Cathedral, Lucifer arguing his case against Christian humbug:

“What could 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 irreconcilable direction. 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 frustrated by 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 religious and satiric symbolism of “cross-purposes” seems clear enough: the world and the other world, the natural and the supernatural, Nature and God, the objects of rational analysis and of acceptance by faith.

Evan MacIan and James Turnbull are a second pair of protagonists, more terrestrial and down-to-earth than either Lucifer or Michael; MacIan is a simple Catholic lad from the Scottish Highlands, and Turnbull a sincere atheist. Like Notting Hill's Auberon and Adam, they are “Two Voices,” in effect not two men but one man, “two lobes of the same brain.” The brain is in some literal sense Chesterton's, though it is at any rate their story that forms the bulk of the fantasy. MacIan 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. MacIan is the only man to regard Turnbull's secularist newspaper with serious respect, 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 MacIan smashes Turnbull's shop window upon seeing an atheistic insult to Our Lady, Turnbull is overjoyed about their differences on 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 garden is the world gone mad. … The world has gone mad,” said MacIan, “and it has gone mad about Us.”

(380-81)

Just as Lucifer and Michael appraise two worlds, MacIan 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 them is complicated, in the Miltonic sense that it occurs in both “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” or in the postmodern companionate sense of the “You and I” in T.S. Eliot's Prufrock.

Chesterton's subsequent satiric fantasy, The Flying Inn, is most usually regarded as a “completely frameless utopian novel” (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, Vegetarianism in 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 The Flying Inn, and those comparatively few who recognize it see also its “seriousness and unity” over against the “lingering notion that Chesterton had produced a mere diversion, a gallimaufry of fun and fantasy,” and against the charge that its “polemic is unfair” (Coates “Religious Background” 303-28). Like Notting Hill and Ball and Cross, Flying Inn has the apparently hodgepodge structure of much Menippean satire, sustained prose 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 Edwardian culture. Its enthusiastic socio-political personae adapt to their own secular uses the cross of Christianity and the crescent of Islam, settling themselves down in numerous pubs at Pebbleswick-on-Sea and other more “fashionable wateringplaces.” The first chapter, “A Sermon on Inns,” describes the sites of many ersatz religious convocations, some of them extended disputes between Patrick 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 lukewarm gospel 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 marks the similarities rather than the contrasts between 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 of malediction”; they derive from a pre-Islamic era which Muslims call the Age of Ignorance, in imitation of the warlock Balaam: “Just as preachers of the fire-and-brimstone variety retain the ability to chill lapsed churchgoers who thought they had put old-style religion behind them, so these latter-day Balaams have a mesmerizing effect even when their listeners do not fully comprehend them” (Ya'ari 25). What Ivywood advocates is an international denominationalism that is precisely undenominational: “Ours is an age when men come more and more to see that the creeds hold treasures for 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's Flying Inn, a furtive, “floating” pub that tends to the “spiritual” needs of all persecuted Englishmen. “‘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, Patrick brings tidings of comfort, and joy.

III

The title of The Flying Inn with regard to its “Chrislam” content seems to me a matter worth pressing even further. Its transporting idiom, like the opening scene in Ball and Cross, 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 whimsical journey 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 performed the act of which all men anciently dream, 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 upwards from history, from memory, from Time” (90-91). This metaphor functions throughout Rushdie's Satanic Verses, where it is explicitly satiric. Gibreel and Saladin are united in air-space in their “endless but also ending angelicdevilish fall” (5), and Abu Simbel “laughs at minstrels singing vicious satires. … And if rivers 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 strangeness or merely spatial distance will realize that idea of otherness which 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” (Other Worlds 13, 15). And in his essay on “Three Ways to Write for Children,” Lewis warns, “The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. … We must meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their equals” (Other Worlds 30, 34). The worlds of spirit and information are frequently confounded, like the worlds of childhood and maturity. Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories is “another dangerous story” even as it is representative of other children's fantasies because they delineate “the shadows of real and often unhappy events in their authors' lives” (Lurie). Rushdie had to be surrounded by 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 The Satanic Verses is one of a baker's dozen titles lauded as Christmas reading for adults (“Editors' Choice”).

Rushdie's binaries, like Chesterton's and many other religious satirists', have provoked both 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 appreciation for the genre. There can be no surprise when Gibreel, with “such a damn fool nickname, angel” (122), is an agitator in most of his reincarnations, or when, “after the repudiation of the Satanic Verses, the Prophet Mahound returns home to find a kind of punishment awaiting him” (124). The Satanic Verses has generated some articulate and insightful commentary on Rushdie (Cunningham, Mortimer), some careful and subtle descriptions too of Rushdie's literary 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 Carré, who admires neither Rushdie nor Satanic Verses, makes a hard 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 literature have a greater right to free speech than those who write pulp?” Shabbir Akhtar, one of Rushdie's most influential critics, rejects Satanic Verses's value as literary art specifically 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 “there are 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 “dangerous sense” built into simplicity, so good and decent in itself but imputing defects as as well as virtues. Like Lewis, Rushdie is dangerous for children's fantasies and dangerous for his ridicule too. 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 expands like a giant accordion. Life-threats to authors aside (see Gelb), the comparative point is this: to the extent that Chesterton's Gabriel or Rushdie's Gibreel are not aesthetically pleasing, much less religiously salvationary, Thursday and Satanic Verses can be said to have suffered the same inter- and intra-cultural fate. 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 something that concerns them, 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 statement concerning the Chrislamic side of the Rushdie Affair: “Evangelicals, of course, tend not to believe in metaphorical truth or allegorical truth in different vocabularies for divinity. They believe (like Dante, like the mullahs who bewilder them now) in the revealed literal 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-in-Christ 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 always undenominational. When, say, Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose shows how a murder in a medieval monastery derives from a lost book containing Aristotle's theory 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 Postscript to the Name of the Rose are representative 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 Notting Hill, Lucian-Gregory and Gabriel Syme in Thursday, Evan MacIan and James Turnbull in Ball and Cross, and Patrick Dalroy and Lord Ivywood in Flying Inn 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 responsibilities to one another.⁹ Chesterton's early nonfiction aroused much animosity in a way that his satiric fantasies sui generis did not. Even before he established his life-long and larger-than-life reputation as a controversial and devotional writer, Chesterton does not always create personae to express his belligerence. Nor is he concerned with metaphysical comforting, in Heretics and Orthodoxy, for example, where, in Lewis's lexicon, he is being controversial and 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 Cross as the “conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable direction.” 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 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.

Notes

1. Thirty years ago, Kathleen Nott's The Emperor's Clothes achieved considerable 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 Things Vain 132, 141), I did not then, nor do I now, sympathize with the secularity of Nott's literary analysis nor her inflexible rejection of religious subtleties, including “Catholic dogmatism” as enhancement or limit in satirists' art. My “dangerous sense” is Lewis's. Christian and secular humanisms continue their belligerence, between and among themselves.

2. Beginning with Chesterton's awareness that Dickens's “fun was very serious and his seriousness often funny” (1), Kincaid defines “rhetoric of laughter,” in the most literal sense, as the use of laughter to persuade, counting Chesterton among some other well-known explainers of 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's keeping 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 “autobiographic impulses,” whatever those are supposed to be. Like Schakel's “imagination and movement of thought,” Barcus's theoretical “two poles of thought” are not only too numerous but also too nebulous theoretical commonplaces. As this essay goes to press, I am reading Lewisiana in Word and Story, the first half focusing on Lewis's “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” the second half concluding with “Perelandra Revisited …,” an essay on “oppositional relationships or—to use structuralist terminology—‘binary oppositions’ of all kinds” (297).

4. Even after decades of familiarity with Lewis's autobiography, with its title and epigraph from Wordsworth, it seems still possible to be surprised by joy, and to enjoy redefining it. Recent editors of seventeen essays on Chesterton and Lewis give their wide-ranging and occasionally incompatible collection an amalgamated title, The Riddle of Joy, 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 ‘dazzling’ are somehow two faces of the same enigma. The known and the unknowable, reason and rapture, duty and bliss, the lucid and the incomprehensible mysteriously inhere in one another [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 Power of Satire or 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's true 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 Current subject index 1975 onwards, to 1985 cites All Things Vain as the only book on religious satire, so too the MLA Wilson CDROM International Bibliography 1/81 through 7/15/91, browsing religious satire. Wilsonline lists 1676, 1582, and 28 titles of all kinds, Wilsearch 4510, 1582, and 28, respectively, on the three topics.

7. Postmodern literary critics have pretty much abandoned Northrop Frye; nonetheless, I call attention to Frye's serviceable literary 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 characters speak like Chesterton himself testifies, first, to a harmony of his intention and, second, to a functionally consistent use of symbols within a framework of myth, which Frye has established as characteristic of Menippean satirists and their art (224, 308-12). In satire, violent dislocations in the logic of narrative should not be an imposing difficulty. By definition, Menippean satire particularly concerns abstract ideas and theories rather than 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 “as such” than with mental attitudes, yet it does concern real people with real attitudes.

8. Neurology has seemed to me an inevitable and important consideration in the development of modern literary theory, not least in Chesterton's. (See All Things Vain, the indexed references for “Literary theory: neurology.”)

9. The ordinary responsibilities of 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 “Promiscuous Pilferage.” Professional misreading is a cultural commonplace, not only in “the precincts of journalism” but also in the “insouciance of the written word” 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 Religion is required reading for any discussion of religious satire, and I have elsewhere signified Burke's “Epilogue: Prologue to Heaven” (273-316) as especially important to an understanding of unsolvable problems. Here, further, I recommend 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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