Three Faces of Joan: Shakespeare's, Twain's and Dreyer's Depictions of the Maid of Orléans

Few historical figures are as represented in cultural products as Joan of Arc.  And when one gets down to it, it makes perfect sense why: a teenage girl, claiming to be directed by God, fights to liberate her nation from a foreign invader without actually killing anyone, and is subsequently arrested, put on trial and martyred.  Her story is the plot to the perfect action movie, or religious document, or anti-establishment screed, or whatever it is you want.  There's reason why everyone from Voltaire to Tchaikovsky to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark have produced works based on Joan's life.

Yet while the general story of her life is well known, the multitudes of artists who have tackled her as a subject have produced startlingly different pieces.  Despite the common source, the faces of Joan that the audience encounters are often contradictory.  Even her basic morality is up in the air for artists; while she is usually cast as an unambiguous hero, sometimes, as we shall see, Joan of Arc is in fact the villain of the story.  It's these differences amongst interpretations that lead me to write an article on Joan of Arc in cultural products.

This post will begin with a quick overview of Joan of Arc's life, drawing on two of the myriad biographies about her.  This history will by no means be definitive, but it will serve explain why the figure has been so open to interpretation.  What will follow are brief looks at three different depictions of Joan of Arc from varying mediums and eras.  The first is an early play by William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1, followed by a late period Mark Twain novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, and concluding with the film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc.

A Brief History of Joan of Arc



Not surprisingly for a 15th century peasant girl, it has been difficult for historians to come to a definitive conclusion regarding the life of Joan of Arc.  Even when evidence is sufficiently plentiful, its utility may be questionable.  For instance, the record of her heresy trial is rather thorough and could be a gold mine for researchers.  However, in his biography of Joan of Arc, the aptly named Anatole France (winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature) presents a case for skepticism:

Jeanne, who never regarded either the bishop or the promoter as her judge, was not so simple as to tell them the whole truth.  It was very frank of her to warn them that they would not know all.  That her memory was curiously defective must also be admitted.  I am aware that the clerk of the court was astonished that after a fortnight she should remember exactly the answers she had given in her cross-examination.  That may be possible, although she did not always say the same thing.  It is none the less certain that after the lapse of a year she retained but an indistinct recollection of some of the important acts of her life.  Finally, her constant hallucinations generally rendered her incapable of distinguishing between the true and the false.

That said, we may construct at least a vague outline of events in her life.  According to Ronald Sutherland Gower, Joan of Arc was most likely born in 1412 to a relatively well-off family of farmers in the French village of Domrémy; although frequently depicted as a shepherdess, Gower insists that role was only an occasional occupation.  However, his description of Joan of Arc's early life reaffirms the image of the devout teenager; she was a girl who "passed many an hour in a kind of rapt trance before the crucifixes and saintly images".

Central to the narrative are Joan of Arc's visions and voices.  France's biography holds that Joan first heard the voice of the angel Michael when she was about thirteen (roughly 1425).  Gower seems to be in agreement, and highlights a particularly important vision from 1427.  In one vision, Joan "was told to seek this knight [Robert de Baudricourt, commander at Vaucouleurs] that through his help she might be brought to the French Court; for the voices had told her she might find the King and tell him her message, by which she would deliver the land from the English, and restore him to his throne".

Now is a good time for some political grounding.  Joan was born in the context of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453). The causes and background to the war are beyond the scope of this article. What is important is that, by the time Joan was ten, a large portion of France was under English control. Gower notes the dire mood which had the French in its grip:

Never perhaps in modern times had a country sunk so low as France, when, in the year 1420, the Treaty of Troyes was signed. Henry V. of England had made himself master of nearly the whole kingdom; and although the treaty only conferred the title of Regent of France on the English sovereign during the lifetime of the imbecile Charles VI., Henry was assured in the near future of the full possession of the French throne, to the exclusion of the Dauphin.

It is for this reason that Joan of Arc is such a prominent hero of French history; she was a righteous force against foreign invaders, something the country has dealt with many times throughout its history.

Returning to the historical narrative: Joan, citing her visions as divinely inspired, promises to deliver the city of Orléans to the French.  She succeeds, and soon manages to get Charles VII crowned King of France.  However, a later series of military setbacks results in her capture by the English-allied Duke of Burgundy, and put on trial for heresy.  The resulting trial, one of the most well-known and well-documented in history, is seen as politically motivated and unfairly rigged against Joan.  That said, France notes her strength and resolve during the trial, including the famous "grace" exchange:

Maître Beaupère asked: "Do you know whether you stand in God's grace?"

This was an extremely insidious question; it place Jeanne in the dilemma of having to avow herself sinful or of appearing unpardonably bold.  One of the assessors, Maître Jean Lefèvre of the Order of the Hermit Friars, observed that she was not bound to reply.  There was murmuring throughout the chamber.

But Jeanne said: "If I be not, then may God bring me into it; if I be, then may God keep me in it."

Once all is said and done, however, the trial finds grounds to execute Joan.  However, the verdict would be revoked and Joan fully exonerated in 1456, allowing her legend to grow both in France and throughout the world in the centuries to come.

From that point on, Joan of Arc has been a popular figure in cultural products.  Not only does the outline of her life--lower class girl who saves the country and is wrongfully executed--lend itself to dramatic representation, but also, the historical distance and necessary skepticism toward the historical record lend themselves to an open interpretation of Joan as a figure.  Let us, then, take a quick look at three different portrayals, starting with none other than the Bard.

Shakespeare: Henry VI, Part 1

Ah, the Bard; it's always a good time to talk about Shakespeare's work.  This particular play is among his earliest; it was the Henry VI trilogy which first made Shakespeare's name in the 1590s.  Today, the Henry VI plays are often held as some of Shakespeare's weakest work, and there is good reason to believe that Shakespeare only wrote part of Henry VI, Part 1.  Still, I feel the trilogy has some merits to it, such as the convincing passivity and indecision of the title monarch during a long period of crisis.  However, the most memorable part of all three plays is easily the Bard's take on Joan of Arc.

As an Englishman not two centuries removed from the time of Joan of Arc, it is not surprising that William Shakespeare's portrayal of the maid is less than flattering.  To French, Joan is a godsend--but to the English, she's a witch and scourge.  Frederick S. Boas, in an essay observing different portrayals of the maid, notes this dichotomy in his reading Shakespeare's Joan: "She is courageous, shrewd, and convinced of her divine mission to save France.  On the other hand she is represented as unchaste, coarse of tongue, and in league with the powers of evil" (39).

Of possible significance is how Joan is referred to.  Rather than being called "Joan of Arc", both the characters in Henry VI, Part 1 and the dramatis personae refer to her as "Joan la Pucelle".  Shakespeare may be going for a play on words with this.  In French, the word "pucelle" means "virgin" or "maid", which is an established part of Joan of Arc as a figure.  However, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, an archaic but period meaning of "pucelle" in English was "harlot" ("Pucelle").  This is indicative of how the French and English forces in the play view Joan.

Shakespeare has the characters in Henry VI, Part 1 make up their minds about Joan before she ever meets them on-stage.  For instance, during the English siege of the city, the Bastard of Orléans introduces la Pucelle in the most glowing terms:

Be not dimay'd, for succour is at hand:
A holy maid hither with me I bring,
Which by a vision sent to her from heaven
Ordained is to raise this tedious siege
And drive the English forth the bounds of France.
The spirit of deep prophecy she hath,
Exceeding the nine sybils of old Rome:
What's past and what's to come she can descry. (1.2.50-57)

The English, on the other hand, see la Pucelle not merely as the enemy but as pure evil.  At the end of Act I, Scene 4, when Lord Talbot first hears of Joan's aid to the Dauphin, he declares his intent to ravage the both them: "Your hearts I'll stamp out with my horse's heels, / And make a quagmire of your mingled brains" (1.4.108-109).  When he finally encounters her in the following scene, he has his introduction all prepared:

                          I'll have a bout with thee;
Devil or devil's dam, I'll conjure thee:
Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch,
And straightway give thy soul to him thou servest. (1.5.4-7).

Clearly, then, the English and French have irreconcilable views of Joan.  The question is: which view does Shakespeare endorse?

The obvious (and correct) answer is the English perspective.  However, the play does keep the audience in some doubt as to which perspective on Joan is accurate (ignoring, of course, the prejudices of a 16th century English theater-going audience which would lead to a certain conclusion).  For example, Joan initial appearance in Act I, Scene 2 and the combat skills she displays make her out to be the real deal.  When la Pucelle proclaims, "Christ's mother helps me, else I were too weak," there is reason to believe that her divine claims are legitimate (1.2.107).

But Joan's success in Henry VI, Part 1 is inconsistent, and her allies are quick to doubt her when the French suffer a defeat.  When Lord Talbot proves triumphant in battle in Act II, Scene 1, Charles is quick to chew out his savior:

Is this thy cunning, thou deceitful dame?
Didst thou at first, to flatter us withal,
Make us partakers of a little gain,
That now our loss might be ten times so much? (2.1.50-53)

Even though la Pucelle maintains composure and Charles backs down from his condemnation, one gets the sense that Joan's powers are limited or nonexistent when the defeat so quickly follows the French victory at Orléans.

La Pucelle's portrayal for most of the play, then, seems intentionally muddled.  That is, until Act V, when she becomes an unambiguous force of evil.  We witness Joan communing with evil spirits, termed in the stage directions as "fiends", who she reveals to be under her command:

This speedy and quick appearance argues proof
Of your accustom'd diligence to me.
Now, ye familiar spirits, that are cull'd
Out of the powerful regions under earth,
Help me this once, that France may take the field. (5.3.8-12)

Further, that the spirits abandon Joan without a word renders her completely powerless, and she is captured by York immediately after.  It is during her time in captivity that Shakespeare takes the greatest liberty with the Joan of Arc story.  There is no extensive trial and Joan is not resolute and pious in her imprisonment.  Instead, she is executed after a brief interrogation in Anjou and reveals herself to be both heartless and dishonest.

First, at the start of Act V, Scene 4, she pridefully rejects her father, who had travelled the country in search of her and offers to die alongside her:

Decrepit miser! base ignoble wretch!
I am descended of a gentler blood:
You art no father nor no friend of mine. (5.4.7-9)

In addition, Joan's attempts to save her skin by claiming she is a holy virgin, then a pregnant woman (a story which changes between two speeches) paint her as deceitful, and incompetently deceitful at that.  The audience can only feel satisfaction in seeing this girl brought to justice, even if the tone of the English in Act V seems a bit too satisfied with their accomplishment.  La Pucelle, far from the accepted portrait of the Maid of Orléans, is a monstrous villain. 

It's so far removed from the historical Joan of Arc that I find it difficult to even accept the character named Joan in Henry VI, Part 1 as a representation of Joan of Arc.  I can't be too surprised that Shakespeare, living in the time and place he did, would cast a national hero of hate France in so unfavorable a light, but Joan la Pucelle might be better understood as a representation of historical English antipathy towards the French.  There are darker portrayals of characters, and then there's this.

Twain: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

 



Shakespeare may cast Joan of Arc as a villain, but the equally acerbic Mark Twain takes a completely different approach.  Going into Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, I expected Twain to give the French peasant girl the usual treatment.  Based on the rest of his oeuvre, I figured that a humorous barrage of satire and stealthy insults was in order.  After all, from his depictions of white Southerners in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the of medieval Englishmen in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court to almost everyone in The Innocents Abroad, Twain's pen is laced with venom.

I could not possibly have been further from the truth.  Sure, Twain pokes fun at some side characters in the novel, but when it comes to Joan of Arc, the gloves are off.  Twain is not just kind to Joan: he is all but in love with her.  His tone throughout is so lofty and proper, so reverential, that I would never guess that Samuel Clemens was the author.  Instead of setting her up at the subject of ridicule or derision, Twain places her on a pedestal.  Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, then, is the sort of thing that I thought Mark Twain incapable of writing: a work of hagiography.

If you think I exaggerate, let's look at some excerpts.  Unlike Henry VI, Part 1, which focuses entirely on Joan of Arc's military accomplishments, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc begins during her childhood.  Twain casts the youthful Joan as a paragon of virtue, as close to angelic as a human could possibly be.  She is a defender of the defenseless and stands up to authority despite her class, gender and age.  For instance, she argues with a local clergyman who expelled the fairies (roll with it) who delighted the children of Domrémy:

"Then the fairies committed no sin, for there was no intention to commit one, they not knowing that any one was by; and because they were little creatures and could not speak for themselves and say the law was against the intention, not against the innocent act, and because they had no friend to think that simple thing for them and say it, they have been sent away from their home forever, and it was wrong, wrong to do it!" (12; bk. 1, ch. 2)

Young Joan is able to take on her elders in intellectual combat and always comes down on the morally correct side of the equation.  That she does so without much proper education to speak of and draws clear inspiration from her own brand of Christianity is indicative of her holiness in the narrator's eyes.  This adoration continues through her childhood and into her military career.  By this point two particular devices which Twain uses to cast Joan as the image of perfection are solidified. The first revolves around Joan's physical beauty.  As Joan dresses for battle, she is described thusly:

The sight of soldiers always set her blood to leaping, and lit the fires in her eyes and brought the warm rich color to her cheeks; it was then that you saw that she was too beautiful to be of the earth, or at any rate that there was a subtle something somewhere about her beauty that differed it from the human types of your experience and exalted it above them. (156-157; bk. 2, ch. 15)

Being too beautiful/good for this earth is one of the classic traits of the Mary Sue construction, and rarely is it more apparent than it that particular excerpt.  Not long after that description, the second frequently used device appears: Joan's ability to bring people to her side with the utmost devotion.  There is something appropriately yet frustratingly messianic.  This is more straightforwardly conveyed in her conversation with a man known as the Dwarf, who deserted the army out of misery over a lost love.  Joan, god-on-earth that she is, inspires him to the point where he says this:

"I will give all my heart to you--and all my soul, if I have one--and all my strength, which is great--for I was dead and am alive again; I had nothing to live for, but now I have!  You are France for me.  You are my France, and I will have no other." (160; bk. 2, ch. 15)

The depiction of Joan of Arc as a perfect specimen of mankind is so over-the-top that my gut instinct is to write it off as a parody.  I still haven't ruled that out because of how the novel is presented.  The book was originally credited not to Twain, but to a pseudonym, Jean François Alden, who is taken as the translator of a period account of Joan.  The full title of the work is Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte.  De Conte is Joan of Arc's page and secretary; it is he who narrates the story and who lays down all the superlatives regarding his friend and boss.

This means that there is great potential in viewing the speaker in the story as totally distinct from Mark Twain.  After all, Twain is presenting himself as a French translator who is reinterpreting the writings of a 15th century Frenchman who is profiling an historical figure.  Just who is in control of the narrative (Twain, "Alden", "de Conte" or Joan) is not entirely clear.  It would not be too far-fetched to say that Twain, via the character of de Conte, is subtly skewering the reverence we give to historical figures.  Having written a whole post on the subject of ambiguous satire, it was certainly in my mind while reading it.

There are, however, two problems with this view.  The first is that, unlike in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or The Innocents Abroad, the text in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc never gives the reader reason to suspect that the narrator is less than noble or the ultimate subject of satire; both de Conte and Joan remain in the angelic light throughout the novel.  The second, more salient reason to doubt the ambiguously satirical reading is that, by all accounts, Mark Twain genuinely had a soft spot for Joan of Arc, or at least the stories surrounding her.  As C. M. Newman reports:

[Twain] had always reveled in chronicles about Joan, and to him writing an historical romance with her as its central character was a real labor of love.  Yet a labor it was; he himself says in one of his letters, "I have never done any work before that cost so much thinking and weighing and measuring and planning and cramming, or so much cautious and painstaking execution." (434)

Twain's take on Joan of Arc is, of course, more in line with the fact that she is in fact a patron saint of France, and so would naturally be portrayed as an unambiguous good gal.  But Twain takes things too far: saint or no, Joan of Arc was still a flesh-and-blood human, and Twain's depiction of her glosses over that obvious fact.  It strips Joan of her basic humanity, rendering her a character more fit for a morality tale than an epic novel.  In the end, Twain's demigod Joan is just as insulting, and many times duller, than Shakespeare's demonic take.  What's missing here is the human being named Joan of Arc.

Dreyer: The Passion of Joan of Arc



In crafting this article, I wanted to draw from a variety of sources both in terms of time of productions and artistic medium.  So far, we have looked at an English verse play from the early 1590s and an American prose novel from the end of the 19th century.  So I thought that a 20th century silent film produced in France by a Danish filmmaker would round out the diversity angle rather nicely.  And in terms of works about the Maid of Orléans, few are as respected and acclaimed as The Passion of Joan of Arc, starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti in the title role.

Whereas Henry VI, Part 1 focused almost exclusively on Joan's military exploits and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc spanned her entire life, The Passion of Joan of Arc restricts itself to her trial, torture and execution.  I wrote a review of the film just the other day (which you can view here), so I'll try not to repeat myself with this essay.  The decision to make her trial the entire plot of the film suggests that Dreyer seeks to show Joan in a moment of crisis: her life is at stake, her visions are under question and her devotion to her calling is put to the test.

Now is a good time to briefly discuss the constraints a medium imposes on its subject.  Mark Twain's Joan is only shown through text, without direct visual accompaniment.  Shakespeare's Joan, as a character in stage play, can be directly shown to the audience, but since Henry VI, Part 1 is rarely staged, she is largely restricted to the written word as well.  Carl Theodor Dreyer, then, in some ways works with an inherent advantage because he chooses film as his medium.  We as an audience can see Joan's struggles for ourselves, which can make for a more direct connection.

On the other hand, while Dreyer's film came out during the early sound era, The Passion of Joan of Arc is a silent film.  Unlike Henry VI, Part 1 and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, which feature a great deal of dialogue, The Passion of Joan of Arc is severely limited on this front, despite being drawn directly from the trial record.  While the silent film maker has the ability to use intertitles for dialogue, they must be used sparingly, for they take time away from the visuals--the whole point of using film.  While Shakespeare and Twain sacrifice sight for sound, Dreyer does the reverse.

However, Falconetti's performance more than compensates for the want of dialogue.  Under pressure from her inquisitors, Joan's eye constantly widen and contract, attempting to come to terms with the strain.  Though at many points she looks nearly stoic, she is at equally many points at the point of completely breaking down, with tears a near constant presence on her cheeks.  Falconetti's Joan displays the fullest range of emotions and mental states in her performance, as opposed to the one-dimensional characters that Shakespeare and Twain craft.

At the risk of sounding cliché, Falconetti's portrayal of Joan is so complex and layered that it leaves me at a loss for words.  It would take an actual film scholar, as opposed to a hack blogger such as me, to unpack the nuances in her performance.  Of course, I'm not the only one who finds his voice failing him when describing the picture.  History professor Robert A. Rosenstone is similarly reduced to generalities in discussing the film: "Dreyer's Joan of Arc, according to all commentators, creates a powerful and convincing portrait of the anguish and pain of the maiden on trial at the stake" (74).

What I can say about Falconetti's performance, though, is that it is profoundly human.  I don't mean this merely in terms of the emotions which she brings to the screen, although they certainly play a key role in how the plot points play out.  In The Passion of Joan of Arc, the title character has an inner strength but also visible weaknesses.  For someone who's been canonized this may seem odd to highlight, but watching Joan triumph over her shortcomings is ultimately more inspirational than seeing the image of perfection persecuted.

Two instances in particular stand out.  This first comes from the "grace" exchange mentioned in Anatole France's biography.  The way that the scene plays out, the possibility is raised that Joan may in fact be prideful; her responses to the judges' questions have an air of vanity to them.  When the judges' trap is sprung, can we really rule out the Joan has actually trapped herself.  That we then see Joan in a frenzied state, trying to find the proper response to the question, is vastly different from her perfectly articulate counterpart in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.

Then, there is her execution.  In Dreyer's film, Joan first opts to cooperate with her judges and signs a confession.  She does so not as part of some grand scheme to bring about justice or further the French cause, but purely out of fear.  Just as Joan faints when she is brought to the torture chamber, she recoils when she is brought to the stake and looks for some way to save herself.  But unlike her counterpart in Henry VI, Part 1, she is both successful and quickly remorseful.  This Joan chooses to die rather than live with the lie she has told, the sin she has committed.

This sequence, I think, is the reason when Dreyer's Joan is not only perhaps the most historically accurate one, but also the easiest to identify with and admire.  While there is nothing in her to vilify, she resembles the common person enough that we may see ourselves in Joan's position.  Yet we may lack the courage to stand by our convictions to the very end, we can at least aspire to be Joan as played by Falconetti: standing with France, with St. Michael, with the mission from God, until the very end.  As Blaise Pascal said, l'homme n'est ni ange ni bête, and this Joan best encapsulates that sentiment.

Works Cited

Boas, Frederick S. "Joan of Arc in Shakespeare, Schiller, and Shaw." Shakespeare
     Quarterly 2.1 (1951): 35-45. JSTOR. Web. 18 Dec. 2012.

France, Anatole. The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2. Trans. Winifred Stephens.
     Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, 7 Oct. 2006. Web. 17 Dec. 2012.

Gower, Ronald Sutherland. Joan of Arc. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, 24
     Oct. 2005. Web. 17 Dec. 2012.

Newman, C. M. "Joan of Arc in English Literature." The Sewanee Review 34.4 (1926):
     431-439. JSTOR. Web. 27 Dec. 2012.

The Passion of Joan of Arc. Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer. Perf. Renée Jeanne
     Falconetti. Turner Classic Movies. 24 Dec. 2012. Television.

"Pucelle." Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed. 2007. Web. 17 Dec. 2012.

Rosenstone, Robert A. "The Reel Joan of Arc: Reflections on the Theory and Practice
     of the Historical Film." The Public Historian 25.3 (2003): 61-77. JSTOR. Web. 31
     Dec. 2012.

Shakespeare, William. Henry VI, Part 1. The Complete Works of William
     Shakespeare. MIT, n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2012.

Twain, Mark. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. 1896. Garden City, NY: Nelson
     Doubleday, 1969. Print.

Ambiguous Satire: "The Onion", Mark Twain and Poe's Law

Recently, the inability of some people to recognize satire has made headlines again.  As reported on The World, FARS, a government-backed news source in Iran, copied an article from The Onion entitled "Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama" and ran it as if it were fact.  That FARS would be attracted to such a headline is not really surprising--anything to glorify the current regime, right?--but all the same, I have got to wonder: how is it that people keep believing what they read in The Onion?

Alas, this just keeps on happening.  No matter how long The Onion has been around, people keep missing the satire.  If anything, the rise of the Internet has made this more common; check out Literally Unbelievable if you need evidence and an afternoon of face-palms.  But it's not just the incredibly credulous on Facebook and foreign media groups who fall victim.  Kevin Fallon of The Daily Beast notes that the recently duped include Rep. John Fleming (R-LA), Stephen A. Smith of ESPN, and even The New York Times.  Not even the paper of record has a fully functioning satire-detector.

What to make of this trend?  After all, aren't we supposed to be living in a world whose culture is dominated by irony and "irony"?  If that's the case, it's sure strange how our abilities to recognize satire so often falters.  It could very well be that the world has gotten so absurd that absolutely nothing would surprise us.  But I'd like to make a modest proposal (sorry, I had to).  Perhaps the issue isn't that we are unable to recognize satire.  Maybe the problem is satire especially in text, itself tends to be ambiguous, to leave its objective and targets unclear.

Poe's Law

First things first: why do so many people mistake things obviously written as satire seriously?

Prose text is a wonderful and rich medium, but it's not the best medium to communicate on a non-literal level.  There's a reason I advise people never to be sarcastic on the Internet: without the intonations of speech and the gestures of body language, all the audience has is what is literally said.  There's no real way to determine the intent of the writer just from analyzing what he wrote, so what choice does the reader have but to take what is written at face value?  There's got to be a major tip-off in the text to do otherwise, which leads right into Poe's Law.

Poe's Law is named after an Internet user by the name of Nathan Poe; although the idea stipulated in the law had previously been floating around the Web, Poe's phrasing of the concept is the one that caught on, which is why he's the namesake.  Poe's original formulation was posted to a message board called Christian Forums, and ran thusly:

Without a winking smiley or blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.

Over time, Poe's Law has been expanded to included topics outside of creationism or even religion, and can probably be reformulated like so:

It is impossible to parody anything in such a way that no one will take you at face value.

Whether it's an article about Obama's "long missing son" or a massive leap of creationist logic, there is simply no way to craft a parody so extreme that the satiric intent is plainly visible without explicitly stating it.  After all, both The Onion and creationist parodists, while certainly humorous, play their roles straight.  If you were just given the text of the article or post, how on Earth could you determine whether what you were reading was legitimately stupid or designed to look legitimately stupid to make a larger point?

(Hell, go on and read some of the posts from Literally Unbelievable.  Some of the responses on Facebook are so over-the-top and clueless that I'm tempted to call Poe on them.)

Fuzzy Targets

Furthermore, even if it is clear, absolutely clear that a work is satire, there is still another hurdle to overcome in satire recognition: what is being satirized can be ambiguous.  You know how some conservatives feel that The Colbert Report is a parody of how liberals view right-wing pundits?  Well, especially in text, that could be a valid interpretation.  After all, what is a parodic creationist post poking fun at?  Creationism? creationists? atheists/scientists/the general public's view of creationism/creationism?  Who can be sure?

For the rest of this article, I would like to focus on one particular work of satire as a case study.  Given the author, the tone, and that proving a work to be a satire given Poe's Law would be nigh impossible, I shall grant the satiric intent as self-evident.  Even so, it will become clear that what the satiric target is can only be guessed at. 

Recently, I came across a especially ambiguous satire as an assignment for a class in nonfiction.  In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain details a excursion he paid to partake in, which took him to continental Europe and the Holy Land.  The text drips with Twain's trademark derision and humor, and no one is exempt from it.  His fellow American travelers, the great landmarks of Europe, the clergy and religion: everyone is an acceptable target.  So much so, it raises the question, "What is Twain even satirizing?"

Based on the title and Twain's later works such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one would be tempted to immedaitely respond that he is poking fun at American tourists.  In fact, one could argue that The Innocents Abroad predicts the rise of the "ugly American" archetype that would later emerge.  For instance, Twain spends a great deal of time describing fellow voyager Dan, who insists on speaking to everyone they meet in English, as in this exchange in Italy:

      Dan's voice rose on the air: "Oh, bring some soap, why don't you?"
      The reply was Italian.  Dan resumed: "Soap, you know - soap.  That is what I want - soap.  S-o-a-p, soap; s-o-p-e, soap; s-o-u-p, soap.  Hurry up!  I don't know how you Irish spell it, but I want it.  Spell it to suit yourself, but fetch it.  I'm freezing." (119)

Yet while Twain certainly takes a lot of jabs at the passengers, he also seems to skewer the foreigners as well.  In particular, he portrays many of the French, Italian, etc. commoners as scam artists, preying on tourists looking for tour guides; Twain and others even take to calling all of their guides "Ferguson" after one such guide.  Considering how wide Twain spray is and how light his tone is through most of the book, one could possibly say that he just wants to poke fun at humanity in general.

This view, however, would suggest that Twain lacks an agenda.  That's not impossible, but then how does one account for the drastic tonal shift that Twain's voice undergoes while in Florence?  Normally, Twain seems content to make jokes and cast everyone in unflattering lights.  Then, out of nowhere, his words become deathly serious.  Rather than making jokes about the wealth of the church and the poverty of the masses, Twain's prose takes the form of an impassioned plea:

Look at the grand Duomo of Florence - a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet.  Like all other men, I fell down and worshipped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said, "O, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavour, utterly dead within ye?  Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?" (164)

Compared to earlier passages about soap and tour-guides and general annoyance, this passage is downright acidic.  It's as if an episode of The Colbert Report suddenly smash cut to John Stewart at his most outraged.  It ceases to be a satire and transitions into straight polemic.  And most confusing, this change is only temporary.  Once Florence far behind the Quaker City, Twain jumps right back into a lighter, broader comedy.  So is Twain actually satirizing Europe, or the ruling classes, but doing so in the persona of a rural hick?  The Innocents Abroad is far from a straight-forward work.

In Search of a Solution

So how are we to make sense of ambiguous satiric targets?  One proposal comes from David McNeil, who, in an essay on A Confederacy of Dunces, suggests a type of satire which accomodates conflicting or shifting targets.  He refers to it as "reverse satire", which McNeil defines as "the kind of satire in which the satirist-persona or the satirist-character makes his attack and is ironically ridiculed himself" (33).  The term itself does not appear to have caught on, but McNeil contends that this particular satiric form is prevelant throughout American literature.

At first it would appear that the reverse satire may be the key to deciphering Twain's intentions in The Innocents Abroad.  I certainly got that hope reading McNeil's essay, since he draws myriad references to another Twain novel, and my personal favorite of his, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.  In that novel, the satire first appears to be aimed squarely at the chilavric, medieval age, but as the narrative develops and the tone darkens it becomes clear the real target is the industrial age and "Yankee ingenuity", represented by the protagonist Hank Morgan.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court works as a reverse satire because Hank Morgan "makes his attack" on the Arthurian world but later "is ironically ridiculed himself" thanks to the unfolding narrative; industrial progress is really just another form of magic that leaves nobody enlightened.  The joke, in other words, is on the perspective character.  In the case of The Innocents Abroad, however, I don't believe that the text fits the definition.  The issue is the "ironically ridiculed himself" part of the equation.

For this idea to really hold, there ought to be a clear indication that the ultimate target is the perpective character.  So, in The Innocents Abroad, that would mean that by the end we should get the sense that the Twain figure, the chronically unimpressed and dismissive narrator, is the real target.  By the end, however, Twain's character has not changed all that much.  He pretty much has the same tone and outlook that he had at the start; he's just seen the world now.  So the reverse satire approach seems to be a dead end.

What, then, do we call a work such as The Innocents Abroad?  Given the scattershot approach Twain takes, that hard to say.  Perhaps we should just forget the intent of the satire and read whatever meaning we want into it.  That's not a particularly satisfying approach, but given how the author is currently unavailable on account of being dead, it's probably the only approach.  What else can the modern reader do but interpret the satiric intent as the reader sees fit?

In fact, given how we interact with print media, far away from the author and unable to hear his voice, this may explain why satire often goes over our heads.  Because a direct statement of intent is unavailable to the audience, and text yields the fewest clues about intent, initial exposures to satire can be easy to mistake, especially when the satire itself is ambiguous.  This still doesn't excuse people who take Onion articles at face value, but at least now--I think--I can understand what exactly is going on when that happens.  Perhaps.

Works cited:
"Iranian News Agency Apologizes for Reprinting Onion Satire as Fact." The World.
     Host Marco Werman. NPR. WESA, Pittsburgh, 1 Oct. 2012. Radio.

McNeil, David. "A Confederacy of Dunces as Reverse Satire: The American
     Subgenre." The Mississippi Quarterly 38.1 (1984): 33-47. Literature Resource
     Center. Web. 2 Oct. 2012.

Poe, Nathan. "Big contradictions in the evolution theory." Christian Forums. Christian
     Forums, 11 Aug. 2005. Web. 2 Oct. 2012.

Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. 1869. Introduction Stuart Hutchinson. Ware,
     Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2010. Print.