Jonathan Swift

Although Jonathan Swift can not be remembered as having been a " monstrum
eruditionis" (which is exactly what George Călinescu asserted in his " The History
of Romanian Literature from Its Origins up to the Present Day" about a well-
known Romanian writer,dramatist,historian of language,theatrician,man of science
and not only,namely Bogdan Petriceicu Hașdeu,due to the fact that he was
conversant with twelve languages and he was a man of huge culture and bearer of
stately knowledge),he is,as Hippolyte Taine himself stated ," the master inventor of
irony".
Jonathan Swift was one of the greatest satirists of the early 18th century.He was
born and educated in Ireland,but he spent his early life in England.As a young man
he felt resentment and bitterness towards the state of things in the English
society.He managed to take a degree of Master of Arts when he was in England,a
degree that qualified him for the church.But being dissatisfied with his
employment,he returned to Ireland.There he began his career as a writer with A
Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books.These were followed by other grimly
ironical publications,pamphlets and essays on religion and war,on the political
situation in England and Ireland.(Swift was born in Dublin from English parents
and he was educated in Ireland and England.While he was a student at Trinity
College in Dublin,he was more interested in poetry than in other subjects and he
distinguished himself by failing two or three subjects taken up for his degree of
Bachelor of Arts.Eventually,he managed to obtain it,only by a humiliating " special
grace".Swift worked near London at Moor Park,however,the bitterness he felt
because of his subordinate position (he was the private secretary of Sir William
Temple for a long period of time),drove him back to Ireland.Unable to find a job
there,he returned to England and during the four years of staying at Moor Park,he
met many political men.After taking his degree at Oxford,Swift did not do much
for his personal advancement.He returned to Ireland only to go back again to Moor
Park.His going back and forth,meeting many people and dealing with all kinds of
uncanny situations,stood for the source of most of his books.This period is a period
of great importance,for it is now that Swift began to publish,at first poems,although
of not remarkable quality.However,his vein suddenly changed and he published A
Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books).
A Tale of a Tub is perhaps the most flawless satire ever written in English
literature.It is directed against religion,as represented in England,by the Roman
Catholic Church,the English Church and the Puritan Dissenting Church,and it was
written in the form of an allegorical tale.The story says that there was a man who
had three sons.He left each of them a new coat and advised them to take great care
and preserve them unaltered.These three sons,Peter,Martin and Jack,standing
respectively for the Roman Catholic,the Anglican and the Puritan Dissenting
Churches,went to town to seek their fortunes and they fell in love with three
ladies:Duchess d'Argent(covetousness),Madam de Grand Titres(ambition) and
Countess d'Orgueil(pride).The three sons began to violate their father's will,by
covering their coats with shoulderknots.They locked up their father's will in a box
and refused to know about it any longer.And with every change of fashion,they
added new ornaments to their coats: bars of gold lace,flamed-coloured satin
ornaments(the fire of Purgatory),silver fringes(habits of grandeur),figured
embroidery-saints.Some time later,Peter began to insist on being addressed to by
his brothers as Mr.Peter,then Father Peter and finally My Lord Peter.Martin and
Jack revolted themselves and broke with him,taking away a copy of their father's
will.When they opened and read the will,they understood that they had committed
the sin of not listening to their father.They began to reform their coats by giving up
the embellishments.The purpose of this story is mostly to ridicule Popery and
Dissent.Swift was in the clergy,after all.He had entered the Church and he was the
Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, and so,he could not rise openly against
religion,however, the irony and disdain with which Swift speaks about the rites,the
doctrine and the corruption and hypocrisy of the priests,leave no doubts as to his
real attitude towards religion.The satire upon dress and fashion was mainly aimed
at the aristocracy.The satire is supported by a brilliant allegory of the idol-(the
tailor)-and its worship-(fashion).This introduces a witty theory of the universe
being a large suit of clothes that invests everything.It is a comparison of man with a
microcoat and a bitter reflection upon what his moral makeup was.Swift speaks
unequivocally about religion as a vision which man builds up in his mind" when
fancy gets astride on his reason,when common sense is kicked out". A Tale of a
Tub reveals the peculiar position occupied by Swift in the early 18th century
English literature,in which a conforming tendency prevailed.Swift presented his
ideas as those not deceived by the optimistic picture of reality,which the
philosophers and moralists of the age were trying to substantiate.Swift stripped
man of the halo with which he had been invested and presented him to the world in
all his nakedness.To Swift,the state of happiness had nothing to do with the state of
being virtuous.Happiness was to him" a perpetual possession of being well
deceived",which means that,it was an illusion.To Swift,man had to be blind to
reality in order that he might be happy.Swift lays bare with clarity,the close
connection between religion,church and politics,when he describes the history of
the three churches,laying emphasis on their being used as efficient instruments by
the ruling classes for the consolidation of their power.Swift was moved by a
profound hostility against feudalism,which rested as much on the church, as on the
aristocracy.Swift saw in the religious enthusiasm and zeal,a violation of reason and
common sense.Like any other allegory, A Tale of a Tub is based on
personification,that is, on the embodiment of ideas in human beings.The story is
told in matter-of-fact terms of everyday life.The setting is laid in London and the
tale abounds in all sorts of references to town life.A Tale of a Tub shows Swift as
the greatest ironist of the English literature.Sometimes bitter,but more than often
biting and lashing,irony is the chief form assumed to his humour,and, at the same
time,a stylistic device widely used throughout the book.The style of this book
already possesses all the qualities by which it will be distinguished in his major
book,Gulliver's Travels.
The Battle of the Books is the name of a short satire and published as part of the
prolegomena to his A Tale of a Tub in 1704. It depicts a literal battle between
books in the King's Library (housed in St. James's Palace at the time of the
writing), as ideas and authors struggle for supremacy. Because of the satire, "The
Battle of the Books" has become a term for the Quarrel of the Ancients and the
Moderns.
In France, at the end of the seventeenth century, a minor furor arose over the
question of whether contemporary learning had surpassed what was known by
those in Classical Greece and Rome. The "moderns" (epitomized by Fontenelle)
took the position that the modern age of science and reason was superior to the
superstitious and limited world of Greece and Rome. In his opinion, modern man
saw farther than the ancients ever could. The "ancients," for their part, argued that
all that is necessary to be known was still to be found in Virgil, Cicero, Homer, and
especially Aristotle.
This literary contest was re-enacted in miniature in England when Sir William
Temple published an answer to Fontenelle entitled Of Ancient and Modern
Learning in 1690. His essay introduced two metaphors to the debate that would be
reused by later authors. First, he proposed that modern man was just a dwarf
standing upon the "shoulders of giants" (that modern man saw farther because he
begins with the observations and learning of the ancients). He also saw modern
man as a reflected light, while the ancients were sources of light: they possessed a
clear view of nature, and modern man only reflected/refined their vision. These
metaphors, of the dwarf versus giant and the reflecting versus emanative light,
would show up in Swift's satire and others. Temple's essay was answered by
Richard Bentley the classicist and William Wotton, the critic. Temple's
friends/clients, sometimes known as the "Christ Church Wits," referring to their
association with Christ Church, Oxford and the guidance of Francis Atterbury, then
attacked the "moderns" (and Wotton in particular). The debate in England lasted
only for a few years.
William Temple was by that point a retired minister, the Secretary of State for
Charles II, who had conducted peace negotiations with France. As a minister, it
was beneath his station to answer common and professional (known then as "hack")
authors, so most of the battle took place between Temple's enemies and Temple's
proxies. Notably, Jonathan Swift was not among the participants, though he was
working as Temple's secretary. Therefore, it is likely that the quarrel was more of a
spur to Swift's imagination than a debate that he felt inclined to enter.
Jonathan Swift worked for William Temple during the time of the controversy, and
Swift's A Tale of a Tub (1703/1705) takes part in the debate. From its first
publication, Swift added a short satire entitled "The Battle of the Books" to the A
Tale of a Tub. In this piece, there is an epic battle fought in a library when various
books come alive and attempt to settle the arguments between moderns and
ancients. In Swift's satire, he skillfully manages to avoid saying which way victory
fell. He portrays the manuscript as having been damaged in places, thus leaving the
end of the battle up to the reader.The battle is told with great detail to particular
authors jousting with their replacements and critics. The battle is not just between
Classical authors and modern authors, but also between authors and critics. The
prose is a parody of heroic poetry along the lines of Samuel Butler's parody of
battle in Hudibras.The combat in the "Battle" is interrupted by the interpolated
allegory of the spider and the bee. A spider, "swollen up to the first Magnitude, by
the Destruction of infinite Numbers of Flies" resides like a castle holder above a
top shelf, and a bee, flying from the natural world and drawn by curiosity, wrecks
the spider's web. The spider curses the bee for clumsiness and for wrecking the
work of one who is his better. The spider says that his web is his home, a stately
manor, while the bee is a vagrant who goes anywhere in nature without any
concern for reputation. The bee answers that he is doing the bidding of nature,
aiding in the fields, while the spider's castle is merely what was drawn from its own
body, which has "a good plentiful Store of Dirt and Poison." This allegory was
already somewhat old before Swift employed it, and it is a digression within the
Battle proper. However, it also illustrates the theme of the whole work. The bee is
like the ancients and like authors: it gathers its materials from nature and sings its
drone song in the fields. The spider is like the moderns and like critics: it kills the
weak and then spins its web (books of criticism) from the taint of its own body
digesting the viscera.In one sense, the "Battle of the Books" illustrates one of the
great themes that Swift would explore in A Tale of a Tub: the madness of pride
involved in believing one's own age to be supreme and the inferiority of derivative
works. One of the attacks in the Tale was on those who believe that being readers
of works makes them the equals of the creators of works. The other satire Swift
affixed to the Tale, "The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," illustrates the
other theme: an inversion of the figurative and literal as a part of madness.Swift's
Battle owed a great deal to Boileau's Le Lutrin, although it was not a translation.
Instead, it was an English work based on the same premise. However, John Ozell
attempted to answer Swift with his translation of Le Lutrin, where the battle sees
Tory authors skewered by Whigs. This prompted a satire of Ozell by Swift and by
Alexander Pope. Further, other "battles of the books" appeared after Swift's. Often,
these were merely political attacks, as in the later Battel of the Poets (1729, by
Edward Cooke), which was an attack on Alexander Pope. As a set piece or topos of
the 18th century satire, the "Battle of the Books" was a standard, short-hand for both
the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns and the era,the age of Swift's battle with
William Wotton.
Swift was indebted for the form of his masterpiece,Gulliver's Travels, to two
sources: 1.the same travel books that had been assimilated by Daniel Defoe and
2.the fantastic fiction of a realistic character that had long existed in the world of
literature: Rabelais's Gargantua et Pantagruel,Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyage a la
Lune and Histoire comique des Etatsempires du Soleil,etc.
The peoples and the countries described by Swift in Gulliver's Travels,however
imaginary they may seem,are as many magic mirrors that the author held to the
English society of his time.This book is without doubt one of the most powerful
attacks ever made against man's wickedness and stupidity and pride.
The first voyage in the book is the one that Gulliver makes to Lilliput,in the first
part of the book.Gulliver takes the reader to the land of dwarfs,a land that bears a
striking resemblance to Swift's contemporary England.
Lilliput is a miniature empire,with a little monarch who entitles himself as "the
delight and terror of the universe".Swift describes the life and customs of the
Lilliputian court,highly remindful of the picture he had seen in London.For
instance,the reader can recognize the intrigues at the Royal court by means of
which favours and promotions were obtained at Queen Anne's court.This,says
Swift,"when a great office is vacant, either by death or disgrace(which often
happens),five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his
Majesty and the Court, with a dance on the rope,and whoever jumps the highest
without falling,succeeds in the office.Very often,the chief Ministers themselves are
commanded to show their skill and to convince the Emperor that they have not lost
their faculty ".The blue,red and green silken threads which the Emperor awards as a
peculiar mark of his favour(the Orders of the Thistle,of the Bath and of the
Garter),are won by leaping over a stick which he holds with both ends parallel to
the horizon or by creeping under it backward and forward several times.Swift no
longer cherished any illusions concerning the Whig and the Tory Parties,which are
so thinly disguised in his satirical characterization of the two Lilliputian
factions,the Tramecksan and the Slamecksan.He had become fully aware that there
was no essential difference between them, and that actually,both of them were
driven by the same selfish interests.Swift ridicules the religious conflict over
matters of rites and doctrine,between the Protestants and the Roman
Catholics,which had caused so many wars.This is illustrated when Gulliver learns
about the obstinate war which Lilliput and Blefuscu(France) have started for a great
number of years.There are many other allusions to the social and political life of
England. For instance,the ministers of the Emperor of Lilliput are satirical portraits
of the politicians of Swift's time.Thus,Flimnap,the Lord High Treasure,is meant for
Robert Walpole(who was a leader of the Whig party and a minister of war in
between 1708-1710,and after being imprisoned for embezzlement in the Tower of
London,was appointed Minister of Finances).Gulliver himself might be
identified(to a certain extent)with the author.The description of the Emperor,the
Court and the Ministers of Lilliput,give a realistic picture of the English political
life under George I,a picture which,although seen through a telescope,loses none of
its essential features: the corruption of the ministers,the intrigues at the Court and
the favoritisms,the fight between the Whigs and the Tories over trifling differences
in policy,the demagogy of the religious slogans,etc.
The second part of the book,which describes Gulliver's travels to Brobdingnag,the
country of Giants,differs greatly in character from the first one.
At the time when it was written,Swift was trying to find a positive way out of the
world of the dwarfs,of the contradictions inherent in the aristocratic world.Yet,he
can not be said to have put forward an actual social ideal in the peaceful patriarchal
state of an an agricultural type,which Gulliver finds in Brobdingnag.Though the
king of this country is a wise,enlightened and good monarch,Swift can not be
considered an adept of the theory of the enlightened absolutism.His attitude
towards monarchs,as demonstrated particularly by the last two parts of the book,is
on the whole negative.Brobdingnag indicates,indeed,certain positive features that
were attractive for Swift in many ways.It is the country of hard working and
prosperous farmers and artisans.The king that rules it, is an enemy of wars,he
shudders at the idea to start using gunpowder as Gulliver suggests to him.Yet,this
country of the giants is not an ideal country,as it is shown by the presence of
beggars in the town.The description of the manners and customs of the
Brobdingnagians occasions less satirical allusions to the English society than that
of Lilliput.However,when Gulliver is asked by the king to give an account of the
state of things in Europe,he draws with caustic irony an idealized picture of the
English social and political institutions,but the king knows what Gulliver will not
admit,namely that human beings are always inclined to distort reality.After
questioning Gulliver,he points this out to him and he concludes his speech with a
metaphor which sums up the insect and animal imagery that has worked through
the first and second yoyages: " ....by what I have gathered from your own Relation
and Answers I have with much Pains wringed and extorted from you,I can not but
conclude the Bulk of your Natives,to be the most pernicious Race of little odious
Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth..."
Earlier,in the third chapter of Part Two,the king has used the same image,
while gently stroking Gulliver,and has drawn from the device of relative
size,precisely the moral which Gulliver(who, in this part of the book, acts with the
self-importance of a Lilliputian),is unable to draw : "... how contemptible a Thing
was human Grandeur,which could be mimicked by such diminutive Insects as I...".
Gulliver changes according to his surroundings(and this fact gives him his
flexibility as a satiric persona,as well as his interest as a character reacting to the
strange things he encounters).Satire depends much for its effect on looking at
familiar things from different points of view,so that the reader sees them from
a new and unaccustomed angle; it is as if he is seeing them for the first
time.Big men and small men provide an excellent pair of new angles from which to
look at men of normal size.But the device of relative size performs a further
function as well: it suggests the partial dependence of human nature on such mere
physical accidents as those of size.
Part three of Gulliver's Travels, that is, A Voyage to
Laputa,Balnibarbi,Luggnagg,Glubbdubdrib and Japan,is without any doubt
directed against the scientists and philosophers of Swift's age.The activities of those
in the Academy of Lagado,which is a caricature of the Royal Society in
London,reminds us of the doubtful value of much of what passes as science.The
men here are normal in size, but distorted in physical appearance and it is they who
are satirized.The Laputans have one eye turned in upon their own mental
calculations, and one turned up to the sky,for their main interests are the abstract
sciences of mathematics,music,astronomy,etc.Not one eye is turned outward upon
the actual world; their distorted human shape is emblematic of the Laputans' loss of
their normal human quality,in their absorption in abstract matters far from the daily
concerns of men.They actually live in a world of fantasy.
Even the fact that Laputa is a Flying Island leads the readers to the conclusion that
Swift satirizes in this,the relation of the English King to his subjects.In Swift's
humanist tradition,the proper use of the mind is moral and practical.The excessive
intellectualism of the Flying Island of Laputa(which is itself a symbol of its
inhabitants' remoteness from actuality),leads to the separation from the real
world.In Luggnagg,Gulliver is brought face to face with man's final illusion,namely
immortality,but only to have it broken before his eyes.In an intensely
moving,touching passage,Gulliver daydreams about the noble life of increasing
wisdom such people must live,only to find out that immortality is as horrifying as
death is to us,and that endless time may mean endless time to develop our innate
vices,rather than,as Gulliver supposed,to develop our virtues and knowledge.
In Glubbdubdrib, people are able to show Gulliver a picture of the past.They can
call up things that existed centuries before.Among others,Gulliver is curious to
have a talk with the heroes of history.The most important talk is the one in which
Caesar is called, and Gulliver learns that Caesar acknowledges that Brutus was
right in killing him as he was a tyrant and it was Brutus who fought and died for
liberty.Gulliver wants to see a picture of the Roman Senate,to compare it with the
English Parliament.Thus,he is given the possibility of an unfavourable
comparison.He points out that the people of an earlier period of time(simple in
dress and manner),were nobler in thought and feeling,whereas in his contemporary
time,they were mainly corrupt and vicious.In this third part of the book,Swift hints
in fact at the superiority of a simple life,of a natural state,as compared with the
civilization of his contemporary society.But it is part Four of Gulliver's Travels,
namely A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms,that has generally been
acknowledged as a corrective satire on human nature itself.
In the fourth voyage,Gulliver gets to the land of the Houyhnhnms,a highly civilized
race of horses,who keep some savage and filthy domestic animals called
Yahoos,which bear strange resemblances to the human beings.
Undoubtedly,the Houyhnhnms were horrified that a creature pretending to
reason,such as Gulliver did,could be capable of the enormities that he was speaking
about in detail,however,Gulliver continues to describe the glories of the European
civilizations, and to offer help to the astonished Houyhnhnms.
The most interesting thing about the horses is that they are rational beings,their life
is characterised by simplicity and honesty.In contrast with this rational,simple
life,the Yahoos represent degraded human nature and life.The Yahoos are
greedy,mean,envious,they quarrel continuously,fight,and they are very selfish and
each of them seeks to satisfy only his personal desires and to do this at the expense
of others.They love precious stones and gather heaps of them,and their thirst for
gold is practically insatiable.This is one important aspect of the middle class that
Swift took much care to highlight.
The intelligent horses live in a patriarchal society in which their unwritten laws
start from the fundamental law that all the members of society are equal.Their life
is primitive indeed,but they do not know the vices of civilization,they can not lie
and they do not understand how anybody endowed with speech,can use it to tell
lies,because in their opinion,the fundamental aim of speech is to tell what is true.
Gulliver,as an Englishman as he was,felt that it was his duty to colonise the lands
that he had visited"...but, as those countries which I have described ,do not appear
to have any desire of being conquered and enslaved,murdered,or driven out by
colonies;nor bound either in gold,silver,sugar or tobacco;I did humbly conceive
they were by no means proper objects of our zeal,our valour,or our interest".
The last part of Gulliver's Travels is a harsh philosophical satire on man and his
nature.
Gulliver's Travels is one of the most powerful attacks ever made by a
writer,against man's wickedness,stupidity,vanity and foolish pride.However,Swift's
masterpiece is full of personal,literary,social,political and religious allusions.
The modern reader might wonder sometimes about certain references that had a
special meaning during Swift's time.Some of them are explained in the Notes,but
others require comments in case one is not familiar with the situation of the
political life in England and Ireland,during Swift's time.
Conclusions :Swift is the first English writer to make use of the myth of the
foreigner in English fiction,(a myth which will be employed later on,by Oliver
Goldsmith,in his Chinese Letters),and he departs from the writings of the great
Greek satirist ,Lucian of Samosata, and of the Latin poet and satirist,Juvenal,who is
famous for his having written sixteen satires in which he was mocking at the
corruption and foibles of the priviledged classes in Rome.Swift is the creator of the
same type of satire as Juvenal,bitter and biting,which aims at correcting the vices
and follies of society,by pointing with contempt and moral indignation,to the evil
and corruption of men and institutions; satire is referential, and therefore its
purpose is to reform and this was Swift's exact purpose too: to satirize in order to
correct and reform a society that had lost its common sense,its morality and all
sense of moderation.