Core Course: English Literature

Target population: 1st year students, 2nd semester

Specialization: Romanian/French-English
Tutor: Dr Elena Butoescu
UNIT 6
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL (II)
JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745)
The greatest prose-writer of the first part of the century is Jonathan Swift. A great humorist
and a savage satirist, he is capable of pure fun -as in some of his poems - and even schoolboy
jokes, but there is a core of bitterness in him which revealed itself finally as a mad hatred of
mankind. He hated the animal, Man, yet he strove to do good for his fellow men, especially
the poor of Dublin, where he was Dean of St. Patrick's. In his Modest Proposal he ironically
suggested that famine in Ireland could be eased by cannibalism, and that the starving children
should be used as food.
Swift was born in Ireland of English parents. He lived most of his life there and he
also died in Ireland, but he always thought of himself as an Englishman. His father died
before he was born. But he received good education at Trinity College, Oxford. In 1695 he
was ordained and presented a parish in Ireland. In 1703 he took to England the manuscripts of
A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books.
A Tale of a Tub is a satire on the two main non-conformist religions - Catholicism and
Presbyterianism. The story is farcical and it ridicules all religion. It shocked Queen Anne so
much that she would not allow Swift to be made a bishop, and this contributed to his inner
frustration and bitterness.
Swift's view of mankind as being full of faults was an ancient view of man, a
traditional Christian one. He seems never to have doubted that reason, common decency and
an attention to the moral precepts of the moral Christianity could produce a better man.
Swift's characters are varied in degree of intelligence or good will, but they share a simplicity
which is employed to cast a new light on familiar and accepted things, which is exactly what
the satirist is after. The writer's concern was not to construct a true-to-life-character, but to
satirize situations.
Gulliver's Travels hides much of its satire so cleverly that children still read it as a
fairy story. It starts off by making fun of mankind (and Especially England and English

politics) in a quite gentle way: Gulliver sees in Lilliput a shrunken human race, and its
concerns - so important to Lilliput - become shrunken accordingly. This happens in the first
part, A Voyage to Lilliput. But in the second part, A Voyage to Brobdingnag, in the land of the
giants, where tiny Gulliver sees human deformities magnified to a feverous pitch, we have
something of this mad horror of the human body which obsesses Swift. (According to Dr,
Johnson, Swift washed himself excessively - 'with Oriental scrupulosity' - but his terror of dirt
and shame at the body's functions never disappeared.) The third part of the book, A Voyage to
Laputa, is occupied with a voyage to imaginary countries in the South Far East. In the fourth
part of the book, A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, where the Houyhnhnms horses with rational souls and the highest moral instincts - are contrasted with the filthy,
depraved Yahoos, who are really human beings, Swift's hatred of man reaches its climax.
Nothing is more powerful or horrible than the moment when Gulliver reaches home and
cannot bear the touch of his wife - her smell is the smell of a Yahoo and makes him want to
vomit.
In Gulliver's Travels Swift uses a popular form, that of travel literature, parodied and
adapted to his own satiric and moral purposes. This is a book about human nature, its
capacities and limitations. In the first voyage, Gulliver is a giant among tiny creatures and this
shows the pettiness of these small men. They put the survival of their tiny state above
everything else. They can be characterized as "political animals" and their physical smallness
is a symbol of the moral smallness of man. Lilliput is a miniature example of a commercial
state in which there is much stress on the money and goods. In the second voyage, the Voyage
to Brobdingnag, satire depends on looking at familiar things from a different point of view.
Gulliver himself is a different man according to his status of a giant in a land of pygmies or a
pygmy in a land of giants. Brobdingnag is no perfect state; it has exploitation, but the king
proves a generous one, who is repelled at the idea of buying the secret of gun powder. He
loves his people and he is interested in their welfare.
In the third part, the satiric effect is less concentrated and coherent. The visit to the
flying island Laputa and the fixed land of Balnibarbi beneath has political reference to the
relation of the English king to his subjects. The men in Laputa are normal in size, but
physically deformed. The Laputans have one eye turned on upon their own mental
calculations and one turned to the sky, for the main subjects of interest are maths, music and
astronomy. The people live in a world of fantasy. In Balnibarbi, Gulliver is taken to visit the
Academy in Lagado, their capital, which is a satiric version of the royal society.

The fourth voyage takes us into the country of the rational horses that live a pastoral
life with other creatures subject to them. These are hairer, dirtier versions of men and are
called the Yahoos. They are all bodily passions, with no reason to control them. Gulliver
loathes the Yahoos for their appearance and habits, which are cruder versions of our own
passions for gold, jewels, our own avarice and jealousy. In Christian terms, the Yahoos are
what are corrupt and fallen in man. In his voyage back to England he seems incapable of
coming to terms with basic human goodness. Mind and body, reason and passion, seems to be
angrily and disastruously disjointed. Gulliver's Travels draws upon at least five traditions of
world literature: the literal travel account, realistic fiction, Utopian fiction, symbolism and the
fantastic voyage.
Swift: A Master of Style and of Satire
"Swifts style is very near perfection. Clear, pointed, precise, he seems to have no difficulty in
finding words to express exactly the impression which he wishes to convey. The sentences are
not always grammatically correct, but they come home to the reader, like the words of a great
orator or advocate, with convincing force. He realises so clearly what he is describing that the
reader is, of necessity, interested and impressed. There are no tricks of style, no recurring
phrases; no ornaments, no studied effects; the object is attained without apparent effort, with
an outward gravity marking the underlying satire or cynicism, and an apparent calmness
concealing bitter invective. There is never any doubt of his earnestness, whatever may be the
mockery on the surface. For the metaphysical and the speculative, he had no sympathy.
Swift was a master satirist, and his irony was deadly. He was the greatest among the
writers of his time, if we judge them by the standard of sheer power of mind; yet, with some
few exceptions, his works are now little read. Order, rule, sobrietythese are the principles
he set before him when he wrote, and they form the basis of his views on life, politics and
religion. Sincerity is never wanting, however much it is cloaked with humour; but we look in
vain for lofty ideals or for the prophetic touch which has marked the bearers of the greatest
names in our literature. That which is spiritual was strangely absent in Swift. He inveighs
against folly and evil; but he seems to have no hope for the world. He is too often found
scorning the pettiness of his fellow-creatures, as in Lilliput, or describing with loathing the
coarseness of human nature, as in Brobdingnag. Satire and denunciation alone are
unsatisfying, and the satirist must, in the end, take a lower place than the creative writer."
(The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (190721).

Satire: "Satire is the art of ridiculing a subject through laughter or scorn. Satire may be
directed at an individual, or a type of person, a social class, an institution, a political ideology,
a nation, or even the entire human race. Satirists try to diminish their subject by evoking
amusement, contempt, or indignation towards it [] Satire has been written in every period
since the Middle Ages but the golden age of satire is generally considered the century and a
half after the Restoration (1660) when Swift, Pope, Addison, Fielding and Goldsmith
produced some of the finest satirical work in the English language." (Fields of Vision XII).
"Satire is an artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices,
follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision,
burlesque, irony, parody, caricature, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to inspire
social reform. The terminological difficulty is pointed up by a phrase of the Roman
rhetorician Quintilian: satire is wholly our own (satura tota nostra est). Quintilian seems
to be claiming satire as a Roman phenomenon, although he had read the Greek dramatist
Aristophanes and was familiar with a number of Greek forms that one would call satiric. But
the Greeks had no specific word for satire; and by satura (which meant originally something
like medley or miscellany and from which comes the English satire) Quintilian intended
to specify that kind of poem invented by Lucilius, written in hexameters on certain
appropriate themes, and characterized by a Lucilian-Horatian tone. Satura referred, in short,
to a poetic form, established and fixed by Roman practice. (Quintilian mentions also an even
older kind of satire written in prose by Marcus Terentius Varro and, one might add, by
Menippus and his followers Lucian and Petronius.) After Quintilians day, satura began to be
used metaphorically to designate works that were satirical in tone but not in form. As soon as
a noun enters the domain of metaphor, as one modern scholar has pointed out, it clamours for
extension; and satura (which had no verbal, adverbial, or adjectival forms) was immediately
broadened by appropriation from the Greek satyros and its derivatives. The odd result is that
the English satire comes from the Latin satura; but satirize, satiric, etc., are of Greek origin.
By about the 4th century ad the writer of satires came to be known as satyricus; St. Jerome,
for example, was called by one of his enemies a satirist in prose (satyricus scriptor in
prosa). Subsequent orthographic modifications obscured the Latin origin of the word satire:
satura becomes satyra, and in England by the 16th century it was written satyre.
Elizabethan writers, anxious to follow Classical models but misled by a false
etymology, believed that satyre derived from the Greek satyr play: satyrs being notoriously
rude, unmannerly creatures, it seemed to follow that the word satyre should indicate
something harsh, coarse, rough. The false etymology that derives satire from satyrs was
finally exposed in the 17th century by the Classical scholar Isaac Casaubon; but the old
tradition has aesthetic if not etymological appropriateness and has remained strong."
(Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Tasks:
1. Define satire by giving some of its well-known features.
2. What are the main historical definitions of satire?
3. What does Swift mock at in his literary writings?