Punching Satire, discussing The Cautioner's Tale

Punching Satire

By Jamie Harper

In doing a little Googling after finishing R.M. Wilburn’s short novel The Cautioner’s Tale, I was surprised to see it listed under the genre of mystery, rather than that of satire. I disagree with the classification of this work as a mystery, as the story possesses low tension, and therefore a lower point of revelation. In reading this story from the lens of an American citizen, especially one who is a member of several minorities, there was no shock or surprise to the revealing of “The Rump” being a crook running a crooked game. It also came as no surprise when bodies stacked and unstacked themselves, as death, banishment, and falsifications seem almost the norm. There was little for readers to unravel in terms of a mystery or a “Who-dunnit,” but there was a great deal of threads to pick up that led to subversive and subliminal themes. These threads come in the form of an abundance of puns, turns of phrase, hyperboles, and symbolism, all which easily remind us of our own reality as it ridicules it.

Satire is a genre of media that utilizes vices, follies, and irony to examine, and often shame, individuals, corporations, governments, or our society at large. To me, The Cautioner’s Tale does a brilliant job of not only skillfully crafting its satire, but also in “punching up” with its pointed views. Far too often, many forms of media attempting to become “popular” satire will “punch down,” making fun of minorities in harmful ways meant to belittle and demean, or even dehumanize. Some obvious examples of this include just about anything involving black face from the 1930s, or the more modern transphobic jokes of Ricky Gervais is his show “Humanity”. “Punching up” however, is the practice of making jokes at the expense of those of higher privilege, such as corporations or, as in The Cautioner’s Tale, political or entertainment figures such as Donald Trump.

Much of the Satire in Wilburn’s work comes in the form of the visual, rather than the literary, although they do also include plenty of jokes in the body of the narrative as well. The choices Wilburn made in the design of formatting and layout are comparable to the subliminal visual communication found in advertisements that are layered with symbolism, in-group codeswitching, and general aesthetics to bring the viewer into the desired norm of thinking. Some examples of this that leap to mind are the gendering of pink razors, the blue liquid poured into menstrual pads, or the use of the color green in many yoga studios or probiotic yogurt commercials. Wilburn, however, in true satirical style, turns the knob to eleven on visual communication.

Rather than showing us the events of the narrative, Wilburn elects to tell us the plot, showing the tone, setting, and emotional response, creating an emotional “on-ramp” into the work that we may not even be aware we are taking. Perhaps the most noticeable of this nonverbal communication is the way Wilburn chose to structure the page layouts. Using a scrapbook or collage style formatting of notes, photos, scraps, and article cuttings, Wilburn gives us a very jumbled and hodgepodge aesthetic, reflective of the state of the society the main character finds herself in, and of the society we find ourselves in. Highlights, circles, and underlining draws attention, while the use of Photoshop’s blurring tool and short focal points are used to obscure. Tucked within this scattering of background and backstory, Wilburn inserts nods to the current American government and society, both obvious and oblique, such as labeling “The Rump” as a “scrillionare launderer”, journalists being called “leakers” as their official job positions, referring to “The Rump” as “Herr” to call Hitler and Nazi Germany to mind, the newspaper clipping entitled “The (I failed) Times”, or the incredibly prominent buttons, symbolic not so much of “buttoning your lip” but of bringing things together, a fastener, a way to mend something. Further, there is the wanted poster for Scandalous Duplicity, which, true to his name, seems to visually represent the duality of man, both as a whole, and on the individual level. The “Jekyll and Hyde” effect that can seem present in beastly gentlemen and gentlemanly beasts. I also can’t help but notice the page where a rainbow gradient fills the center of the plate with the phrase “Rise up” emblazoned within, imagery commonly associated with the LGBTQA2 movements, as a sort of call to arms both within and without of the book.

The classification of genre can be incredibly influential in both the construction and the reception of a work, as genre not only gives us a common shorthand of tropes and norms to expect when reading, but different tools and possibilities when constructing the story arcs as we write. The likely arcs of a piece can change with each genre, as the “usual” arc of a romance is going to be very different from a thriller or a bizzaro work, and cross genre works can both widen and narrow the arc possibilities, depending on the genres being crossed and how subversive the author wishes to go. As such, I feel presenting The Cautioner’s Tale as a mystery belies and undersells the choices Wilburn made in its construction and presentation.