Form, Myth, and Satire-- Related?

I.

I have the good fortune to be teaching an Intro to Fiction course this summer.

Last week, we talked about FORMS in fiction, about borrowing the structures of things-that-include-text-but-are-not-often-read-as-texts (grocery lists, baseball tickets, brochures, nutrition information, etc.). How can we use these models to shape a work of fiction?

We read two stories from PANK Magazine-- "______" by Travis Hessman (a Mad-Lib style story with wonderfully specific requests for words-- my favorite is "bouncy verb") and "Letters to My First Love" by Rachel Yoder (dream-like, poetic, and post-scripty love letters). We also read "Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood (not exactly choose-your-own-adventure, but kind of like a flow chart).

We talked about how the "artifice" of these pieces-- the attention they draw to their forms-- can sometimes, particularly in the Hessman and Atwood pieces, be read as an indictment of fiction that claims to be "realistic"-- how all fiction is illusion and artifice, how the only "authentic ending" is death, and how the immediate acceptance or questioning of form is partially a matter of what fictional conventions are currently accepted by our culture.

Is "realism" arguably an umbrella-form, in and of itself? We discussed this.


II.

Here's my understanding of satire: it so exaggerates the presentation of its subject that you, the reader, laugh; then, nearly simultaneously (though sometimes after), you realize that the exaggeration is not *really* exaggeration-- that the exaggeration accurately reflects actual attitudes towards the subject.

The exaggeration, in other words, is revealed to be no exaggeration.

This shock of recognition allows the reader to (as corny as it sounds) feel the truth.

III.

Satire's non-exaggeration exaggeration initially defamiliarizes the subject-- it takes what is familiar, and, by slightly adjusting its presentation, shows us how strange it actually is.


IV.

A few days ago, my students and I discussed legends, myth, folktales, and parables. We read "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. LeGuin (a folktale structured like a persuasive argument that challenges our culture's notions about happiness and simplicity, among other things), "Before the Law" by Franz Kafka (a mysterious parable that stubbornly resists allegory), and "Mario's Three Lives" by Matt Bell (a myth/legend that artfully resists straight parody and gracefully expresses Mario Mario's existential concerns).

None of these are satires, per se; but it seems to me that they operate how satire operates. That is, they defamiliarize a subject through exaggeration that is not exaggeration.

I'm certainly not saying anything new, here. "Artificial" forms, myth, and satire-- they share techniques. But is there a glue that holds them all together? And if so, what is that glue?

Is it irony?