“Watery mushrooms” had me laughing. Well done on the entire piece.
When irony is sufficiently straightfaced, it frequently takes in its readers. Two famous literary examples are Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Daniel DeFoe’s The Shortest Way with Dissenters, both of which have been taken straight and both of which would have been off-puttingly heave-handed if they had tipped their hands too clearly. I think this is the “problem” with this piece and I don’t really think it is a problem. Being honest with readers is the price of entry only in genres (legal arguments, for example)where the effectiveness depends on the honesty.
Interesting. My take was this was was poorly conceived, badly written, and laced with sophomoric humor. Otherwise a really good analysis.
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Aesthetic taste is always a matter of taste.
LOL, yeah, I am not seeing any parallels to Swift or DeFoe (and the author hasn’t claimed the article was satire).
The author has claimed that he was taking an absurd position about aged wines as a way of satirizing critiques about natural wine. And the first readers on this thread assumed he was actually a taste for aged wine just as many of Swift’s first readers thought he was actually proposing killing and eating Irish infants as a form of population control and many of DeFoe’s first readers thought he was actually suporting harsh suppression of Dissenting religion. I’d say the parallels are pretty good. And, as with Swift, at least, there’s a giveaway line at the end that is meant to tip the reader off but didn’t.
That is why it was badly conceived and written. Only when Mr. Styles decided to tell us it was satire, did we even think of it as such. It certainly wasn’t obvious from the content.
Exactly the criticism made of both Swift and DeFoe. Well, DeFoe was actually charged with sedition, as well.
Defoe and Swift?!
It’s like comparing a 17% alcohol Zinfandel (with I may add lots of fruit) to Haut Brion.
The point of the comparison was not aesthetic quality but form, as I keep on saying. Moreover, your problem with this piece, per your own earlier comment, is that the author’s hand is too light for you to see the satire, not that it’s too heavy. So you need a better analogy.
I did not say it was light. I did say the writing was not good, and it was actually very heavy handed plus the humor was just plain silly, so he wasn’t even much good at satirizing.
All the backtracking came afterwards, and nothing in the writing suggests the subtlety required for good satire.
I said it was light because the irony was so light-handed, that numbers of people missed it. You are even contesting that the irony actually exists in the above post. But you insist on an argument over whether it was any good, which is not one I am having. I was merely arguing (with Neil) originally that irony that deceives its readers is actually a known form. Whether this is a good version or not is another question. Feel free to think it isn’t. But, really, if the satire were heavy-handed, a) you wouldn’t have missed it and b) you wouldn’t now be denying that it ever was a satire. A better argument would be that the irony was insufficintly clear to be readable and, even once once one has the target explained, doesn’t seem particularly clear. I don’t agree with that, but it is at least a coherent evaluation, I think.
Jonathan,
I take your point, but it is not a question of whether it was too light handed or heavy handed, but more that the article itself, so poorly thought out and executed that it makes a mockery of his intentions, as it couldn’t possibly be satire.
Just because I say it is satire does not mean it is. If I were to decide this post was satire does not make it so.