Irony is essentially, and even in a unique manner, an intellectual fact (I use the term intelligence in its strict sense). And in a manner it stands for the bankruptcy of the intellect which, unable to pass beyond its own limitations and thrust back on nothingness, scoffs at its own and every other effort, and ridicules life, whose veritable and mystic essence it has been unable to penetrate. Irony is, in truth, the vitality of impotence. It is also, if one wishes, the triumph of pride over death, in the sense that the individual, refusing to perish, denies death as well as life, exalting himself in negation. For Irony is negation.

And since it is purely intellectual, it is, owing to this very fact, rigorously individualistic, for it is the intelligence which has shaped the idea of the individual. It is a negative and contemptuous attitude on the part of the individual toward life; a pose, be it brutal - as when it takes the form of sarcasm - be it elegant - when in the shape of delicate irony pure and simple - yet always, speaking in strictly human terms, unnatural and artificial.

For those to whom the individual is a godhead; those who regard existence as a defiance to nature, who are perpetually crying “No!” to Destiny, and who flatter themselves with the vain and arrogant illusion that they control her; for those who hold that the intellect is supreme, the enemy of instinct, disdainfully qualified as an animal trait; for those who drape themselves in their human, their purely human intellectuality, and as far as possible ignore that which lies beyond it, who renounce and mock it; for them irony is fitting, they may laugh their fill, and pride themselves in truth on the pride which is their idol, in that they are the only beings who may laugh, and glory in the very fact that they laugh at their own cosmic revolt.

- Rudhyar Chenneviére, excerpt from Erik Satie and the Music of Irony

Socrate is a difficult work; and its many beauties can seldom be appreciated on first hearing, except under particularly favorable conditions. The difficulty is not due to the extreme gravity or to the unusual harmonies of the music, which has been described by some of Satie’s enemies as being simple to the point of indulgence. Rather, its difficulty stems from its uniqueness. Nowhere at any time has anything comparable with Socrate been composed. But if originality in itself is not beauty, neither is tradition. Jean Cocteau said of Satie: “To please or displease on purpose were to him incomprehensible attitudes. From the very beginning he adopted an untenable position.” Thus, he was precisely taking on an untenable position when he composed a work that has no relation whatever with the music to which we are accustomed.

Satie created a new universe for himself into which it is impossible to penetrate without a period of apprenticeship. So we must forgive those who understood nothing: like Alcibiades, they reasoned by analogy or by comparison. With his usual penetration, Satie had foreseen this and had published in the program notes for the premiere a warning couched in terms that appeared aggressive: “I request those who do not understand to maintain an attitude of complete submission, of complete inferiority.”

- Pierre-Daniel Templier, excerpt from Erik Satie

It has been said of men like Degas and Lautrec that they lived in the decade before it became necessary for the artist to be a part of the absurdity he described. The statement applies to most impressionists and symbolists. Mallarmé may have envisioned a “shipwrecked” universe, but his outward life moved on an even keel. The Banquet Years [1885-WWI], however, brought on stage a set of artists whose waggishness was not intended to serve as an interlude of comic relief. Their lives matched their art in a fashion that does not even now seem natural.

It comes to this: toward the middle of the nineteenth century a few artists began to “live up to” their art, to live on a level with it. Rimbaud spoke of flattening the barriers between art and life; Oscar Wilde maintained that he devoted his talent to writing and his true genius to living. Alfred Jarry took the final step and fused his life and his art through literary mimesis: he adopted in “real” life the fictional role of Ubu, his most horrendous creation. Satie’s cult of youth and Apollinaire’s alternate embracing and rejection of all humanity - all these different poses strive to manipulate the nature of individual identity, to enlarge it or abdicate it. If one pursues the tendency, one finally confronts the disturbing content of such statements as Max Jacob’s Art poétique: “Personality is only a persistent error”; and Jarry’s, at the very edge of the precipice: “The soul is a tic.”

Conventionally, a work of art is considered to be the product of a different self from the one displayed in habitual action and ordinary living. A few courageous members of the avant-garde set out to extend the artistic, creative self until it displaced all guises of habit, social behavior, virtue, and vice. When our entire life stems from our one deepest self, the resulting personality is usually so startling and abnormal as to appear a mask or a pose. It is the ultimate paradox of human character. This was very much the case with Satie, as well as Jarry; in each of their lives one feels a deep-seated force such as possesses a lunatic or a saint. Unity of personality is the most admired and the most victimized of all conditions, for it defies judgment.

- Roger Shattuck, introduction to The Banquet Years