Review: Clint Margrave’s “Lying Bastard”

“Lying Bastard is a work of the zeitgeist. Disgruntled intellectuals. Returning war veterans just beginning their higher education. A school shooting. The fraud of academicians. Societal exploitation.”

Satire is not the same as comedy, though it is easy, especially in our deracinated world, to conflate the two. Teaching and explaining satire, however, is exhilarating. For satire, I think, tells us much about the intellectual culture and current we live in.

It is not the norm that satire appears at the birth of literary and intellectual culture. On the contrary, it is often at the end—during the nadir—of an intellectual current that satire emerges and manifests the final bang of the dying star. The great satirists of antiquity, Aristophanes and Apuleius, are a case in point. Aristophanes arrived on the scene at the end of the pathological cosmos of Greek literature. The pathos of Hesiod, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides reached its final desecration at the hands of Aristophanes; and, at the same time, the emergence of a new intellectual current—Socratic philosophy—was bubbling up.

What was true for Aristophanes is also true for Apuleius. The Golden Ass is satirical gold, but it represented the manifestation of the end of Roman mythology; the imperial mythos that so moved the Augustan poets finds no salvation in Apuleius, who brutally mocks the Roman myths. Apuleius also wrote when the pagan mythology of Rome was cracking and an upstart religion from Palestine was making headway across the Mediterranean.

Likewise, Miguel de Cervantes and his brilliant novel Don Quixote satirize the end of the end of the medieval world of chivalry and knightly heroism. The modern world has now come in full force. We should not forget that the world of heroic literature that is the bleeding heart of medieval literature—from Beowulf, the Song of Roland, to Jerusalem Delivered—reached its final gloriously inglorious end in Don Quixote. And we should also remember that a new movement was romping around with even greater force and fervor than before: the Protestant Reformation.