SOURCE: Orr, Mary. “The Space of Satire: Le Planétarium by Nathalie Sarraute.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 30, no. 4 (October 1994): 365-73.

In the following essay, Orr uses Sarraute's Le Planétarium to examine the role of satire and its interrogative role in literature.

French literature abounds with examples of satire as a form of biting social comment and literary lampooning—the works of Voltaire, Diderot and Flaubert spring to mind. As a genre, satire has irked literary critics for its hybrid form—satire means a mixture—and, in its permissive contents, evaded censors who husband the “bienséant” and edifying against such assaults on public taste. Why satire nonetheless always overrides moral and literary boundaries and their regulatory machinery is less easy to explain. Is satire a derivative, conservative, retrospective species say, of comedy, or a genus in its own right which stimulates, empowers and generates new forms...