Jonathan Swift: To Vex The World

 To place Jonathan Swift and the Marquis de Sade next to each other looks at first like setting up hero and antihero. Jonathan Swift is the fierce but righteous satirist; the Marquis de Sade is, as Henry James put it, the “unnameable” pornographer. Swift was the consummate Church of England man who had no shortage of invective to lob against libertine freethinkers like the Earl of Wharton and advocated for theater censorship to stave off vice. Sade was reported to the police by a prostitute for masturbating on a crucifix.

 Their characters may never have been clearer than at the end of their lives. Swift’s self-penned Latin epitaph for his burial site at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, where he was a dean, translates as “Fierce indignation can no longer injure the heart. Go forth, voyager, and copy, if you can, this vigorous (to the best of his ability) champion of liberty.” Sade, who died in prison sixty-nine years after Swift, struck a more defiant and grandiose tone in an oft-cited passage said to be from his will: “Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the likes of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.”

 Their parting words left an imposing, almost abstract, impression of these authors on subsequent generations. They had become monuments, examples, ghosts. Whether they were benevolent or malevolent depended on what those conjuring chose to see. At times Swift’s writings were obviously the work of a lunatic, while Sade’s writing was capable of driving people to lunacy and even fits of epilepsy. At other times Swift was lionized by the likes of Irish president Eamon de Valera as “one of the [Anglo-Irish] pioneers…who realized that they ought not to permit themselves to be governed by ministers from England.” William Butler Yeats offered a more grandiloquent, un-Swiftian translation of Swift’s epitaph, claiming that “he served liberty.” In 2014, on the bicentennial of Sade’s death, the scroll manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom Sade had spent thirty-seven days in the Bastille writing was put on public display in Paris; in 2017 it was declared a national treasure by the French government, which ordered it to be withdrawn from private auction.

 Treating the manuscript as an object of admiration was likely preferable to trying to actually finish it. Neither author made for easy reading. Sade’s best-known novels are huge bricks alternating between philosophical digressions and sexual depravity that are both comically grotesque and repetitively vulgar. “One of the most fascinating things about Sade’s writing,” Maggie Nelson writes, “is its immense capacity to shock, and its equally immense capacity to bore.” The challenges of Swift are more temporal. His writings are filled with conflicts, controversies, and people long abandoned by posterity. Much of the potency of his language is flattened and the sharpness of his irony dulled because the subjects being ridiculed proved so ephemeral. “He has written miscellaneously,” John Boyle, the fifth earl of Orrery, fairly assessed in his otherwise unfair account of Swift, “and has chosen rather to appear a wondering comet than a fixed star.”

 Reading them, we see why Swift biographer John Stubbs calls his subject Sade’s “satirical cousin” with a “technique…classified above all as the art of upsetting people” and whose “determination to vex…prevents any political group from conscripting him.” We see why Swift and Sade are the first two entries in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor. And we follow why, in Simone de Beauvoir’s words, Sade rejected the idea of submission as “hypocritical resignation which is adorned in the name of virtue” that aims “to destroy the individual by imposing upon him a stupid conformism.” All dissidents would admire such attributes, especially at the height of the twentieth-century obscenity trials, when both Sade and Swift could be cast as patron saints of extremism in the pursuit of liberty. Whatever their pursuits, they were extremists who created literature that wasn’t so much great as it was relentless. Even now they make passive reading impossible.

 Jonathan Swift produced enough prose to fill as many as nineteen printed volumes. For him writing was less a vocation than a means for a narrow set of ends. Professionally he was a clergyman, yet he never produced any notable theological work, much to the disappointment of his church superiors. He had strong opinions about the quality of sermons but looked upon his own with indifference; only twelve survive. He was not as innovative a journalist as his rival Daniel Defoe, nor was he as sagacious as his critic Samuel Johnson. Unlike Johnson, who believed that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Swift saw payment for his writing as an affront to his pride. Swift’s aims were loftier than mere cash could provide. He wanted prestige and thought his pen the surest route to achieving it. “Swift was outside the shrewd discipline of talent,” critic Carl Van Doren wrote. “He could not sit down and write prose and verse as if they were sufficient ends…He used them in his tragic role, in his war of ambition, not because he valued them but because they were the only weapons he had.”

 Swift was born in Dublin to English parents and spent his entire life moving from colony to empire and back again. His writing settled down between those two worlds. In England from 1710 to 1714, during the later reign of Queen Anne, he lived the life of a public intellectual. He engaged in coffeehouse banter and court politics. He helped forge opinion journalism as a propagandist for the Tory party and an advocate for the Church of England before the fall of the Tory ministry sent him back to Ireland. His writing thereafter was closer to that of a dissident, though one who was careful to avoid prosecution. Yet Swift looked at Ireland as something foisted on him. “Irishness,” Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote, “is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it. On that definition Swift is more Irish than Goldsmith or Sheridan, although by the usual tests they are Irish and he is pure English.”

 His sharpest weapon was a shapeshifting “I,” by which Swift could effortlessly attract an audience and voice a person’s prejudices. He ridiculed the outgoing Whig party as sore losers and corrupt miscreants in his Examiner papers. His pamphlet Conduct of the Allies helped shift public opinion on the War of Spanish Succession toward peace after a decade of fighting. He could rally another to a cause of his choosing, most successfully with the Drapier letters, inveighing against a coinage-debasing scheme meant to be foisted on Ireland. Yet it is Swift’s more playful ventriloquism that has made a deeper cultural impression. An ear for mimicry, combined with what F.R. Leavis called an “emotional intensity,” enabled savage, inventive, and even delightful attacks on the “enthusiasms” of religious heterodoxy, intellectual frivolity, and political extremism that so provoked Swift. In this mode he became the unstable hack who exemplified the fashionableness and pretensions of “modern” writing in A Tale of a Tub and the arrogant astrologer Isaac Bickerstaff, one of Swift’s funniest creations, predicting the death of a rival.

  Aside from Lemuel Gulliver, no Swiftian creation is more significant than the unnamed speaker of his 1729 pamphlet A Modest Proposal. The three-thousand-word monologue has often been ranked the greatest English prose satire ever written. It is an efficient showcase for Swift’s greatest strengths: his sharp irony, his perverse imagination, and his polished style. It has spurred many imitations but has never been bettered. Yet when it was published it seemed strangely minor compared to Swift’s “Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture” and the Drapier letters. Rather than a rousing piece of writing defying the English colonial behemoth, A Modest Proposal—with its ironical endorsements of child murder, body harvesting, and cannibalism—seemed more provocative than persuasive, “a cry of despair,” in the words of Swift biographer Leo Damrosch. And it was wider in its targets. A Modest Proposal is “unusual,” Swift scholar Claude Rawson writes, “in being a satire aimed not at the English oppressor but at the Irish victim”—that is, the Anglo-Irish “settler class failing to look after its own interest” and disregarding Swift’s earlier, more reasonable appeals.

 Swift wrote his Proposal as a last resort, after several more straightforward tracts about the generally appalling conditions of Ireland’s poor failed to have much impact on the public. The opening sentence, “It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms,” has echoes of the beginning of his 1715 sermon “On the Causes of the Wretched Condition of Ireland”: “It is a very melancholy reflection that such a country as ours, which is capable of producing all things necessary, and most things convenient for life, sufficient for the support of four times the number of its inhabitants, should yet lie under the heaviest load of misery and want our streets crowded with beggars, so many of our lower sort of tradesmen, laborers, and artificers, not able to find clothes and food for their families.” But the sermon and his other tracts had little effect. The Irish, Swift told Alexander Pope, “are all inevitably undone; which I have been telling them in print these ten years to as little purpose as if it came from the pulpit.”

 The “projection” or “project”—a pitch made to the public for the improvement of their welfare—was a popular way of getting noticed in a burgeoning media environment of cheap, fast printing. Projects could be written by anyone and ranged widely in quality from outright scams to substantial, pathbreaking policy proposals. Defoe gained notoriety with an entire book of projects for the reform of mental health care, bankruptcy, the education of women, and other ideas. Not all projects were humanist, of course; Swift also wrote pamphlets in support of suppressing the opposition press and flogging beggars. With his satire exposing the condition of Ireland’s poor and the negligence of their imperial managers, Swift turned the projection on its head. The result is an authorial voice who, in the words of Swift biographer David Nokes, tilts between “nervous” reticence and “lip-smacking relish” over his one neat trick. The first eight hundred words of the Proposal are innocuously grandiloquent:

 “I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance; and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.”

The invocation of “sound, useful members” is perhaps the first red flag. Without further warning, the proposer gets to his point: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.” The selling of Ireland’s poor children for food will ensure a reduction of the noxious Catholics, he argues, and poor tenants will have children as currency to pay rent. “Constant breeders” will make “eight shillings sterling per annum by the sale of their children” and will be relieved from caring for them after a year. The author then makes the famous declaration of his own charitable disinterest: “I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny.”
 
Like Swift’s previous efforts, however, A Modest Proposal had little practical effect. Ireland would continue to be seen as a burden to its neighbor. A famine came in 1740 that killed at least 300,000 people. One million died in the Great Famine a century later. Instead his proposal took on greater relevance the further it drifted from its intended context and came to indict humanity at large. Philosopher John Gray writes: “The final effect of the Modest Proposal is to leave the human story a dark and senseless farce.” This effect is best demonstrated by the reading Peter O’Toole gave in Dublin in 1984. He began by noting that the essay had “a little something to offend everybody,” and his appropriately lackadaisical reading did just that. O’Toole was heckled, people walked out, and the reading, broadcast live on Irish public broadcast station RTÉ, was cut short, setting forth a flock of ironies that would have delighted the dean in his nearby resting place.
 
Swift did succeed in his desire to “vex” his readers—some say far too much. Edward Said noted a “discomfort” in all of Swift’s work, “that we have before us a show of freaks and horrors: a mad writer, an astrologer being murdered, an absurd and impossible war…a gallery of raving freethinkers, men burrowing in dung, and so on.” Leavis went further, contrasting Swift’s cruel irony against what he saw as the less abrasive variety practiced by Edward Gibbon. “Gibbonian prose insinuates solidarity with the reader,” whereas the “ironical” solidarity of Swift is a “betrayal.” To Leavis, Swift’s irony “is a matter of surprise and negation,” as he implies that “this is the only argument that appeals to you. Here are your actual faith and morals. How, on consideration, do you like the smell of them?” It is a small blessing that Leavis lived only one year into punk.
 
  
If Jonathan Swift were a wandering comet, then the Marquis de Sade was the fixed star—or the black hole. He never moved very far, with the second half of his life spent shuffling around the French penal system for various sex scandals and blasphemies. Sade’s writing, begun in earnest once he reached middle age, was not a tool for raising his social station, as with Swift, but a by-product of his decline. Restricted from pursuing his orgiastic and blasphemous hobbies, Sade undertook several writing projects across different forms: philosophical dialogues, short stories, a Candide-esque novel of morals, and drama. In 1783 he wrote his wife from the Château de Vincennes that he had begun a “great novelistic labor” requiring six hundred pages of manuscript paper thin enough to be rolled. The result was, in his words, “the most impure tale ever written since the world began.” Few have been inclined to disagree.
 
 As with A Modest Proposal, The 120 Days of Sodom describes the utmost lengths of human depravity. In Sade’s case, the audience (predominantly four libertine men of eminent rank but grotesquely low character) is an active part of the sprawling narrative. It is an unfinished tale, written after he was incarcerated in the Bastille, then abandoned when Sade was transferred elsewhere for yelling that prisoners were being murdered, and seemingly lost when the prison was stormed just days later. The manuscript was discovered by a man named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, who sold it to the Marquis de Villeneuve-Trans. Villeneuve-Trans’ family kept it until the early twentieth century, when it was sold first to a German collector, and then to Sade’s descendants in 1929. Of the four parts, only the first is near completion; the remaining three are in outline form, some largely just telegrammic lists of obscene acts. Sade replicated the novel’s tone in his subsequent works Justine, Juliette, and Philosophy in the Bedroom, but 120 Days remains the quintessential and most criticized and cited of Sade’s works.
 
“Any decent pleasures, or any prescribed by that beast…that you call Nature…shall be expressly excluded from this collection,” Sade wrote in his introduction, “and should you stumble across them by chance it shall only be in cases where they shall be accompanied by some crime, or tainted by some infamy.” The narrative, such as there is one, is double-layered. Inside a castle in the Black Forest four prostitutes regale the four noblemen with stories of past exploits. The men, eager to explore the “six hundred passions,” then imitate the remembered debauchery with the adolescent boys and girls they have kidnapped and brought to the castle for sexual exploitation along with older male studs, or “fuckers.”
 
Sade’s most salacious novels lead the reader to question how much of it is meant to be read as a litany of straightforward sexual fantasies. He rejected the speculative “wizardry” of the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, but he had a gift for black comedy that won the appreciation of the surrealists. He described one of the storytellers as “the very image of crime incarnate. Her withered arse resembles marbled paper.” One of the libertines, in a test of his strength, “wagered he could suffocate a horse between his legs, and the beast breathed its last at the very moment he had predicted.”
 
“Written down, shit does not smell,” Roland Barthes wrote of Sade with a reassurance similar to a parent telling a frightened child that no monster hides under the bed. One salient criticism of pornography is that it glosses over the less pleasant physical rigors and secretions that accompany the acts depicted: sweat, stench, intrusions of the digestive process, exhaustion, vomit (when applicable), etc. Sade, quite famously, invites and revels in these by-products, which appear with such frequency, and are recounted in such detail, that the pungency of his prose is difficult to tolerate. The reader is ceaselessly confronted with the scents and sounds of Sade’s players and their playthings. Sade lacks the willingness or the ability to keep up the pornographic pretense of serving the reader’s pleasure. Instead the reader is beset with examples of pleasure he is certain they have never thought possible, performed with a sprightly energy that is almost more discomfiting than the acts themselves. One storyteller recalls:
 
“The first, whom I frigged as we stood naked, wanted floods of nearly boiling water to stream over our bodies through a hole in the ceiling as long as our session lasted…One cannot imagine the pleasure he felt as it washed over him; as for me…I screamed out like a scalded tomcat—my skin peeled from this, and I firmly promised myself never to return to that man’s house.”

“Oh my God,” said the Duc. “I feel the urge to scald the love Aline like that.” “My lord,” the latter humbly replied, “I am not a pig.” At once everyone laughed at the innocent candor of her childish response.

 That is probably the most representative Sadean exchange that one can respectably reprint, wherein “pleasure” is a top-down decree. “The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure,” Sade wrote, “reduces one to an equality which spoils the unutterable charms that comes from despotism.” If there is any cogent idea to extract from Sade’s filth, it is the lure of anarcho-tyranny. That was given full expression in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, the equally infamous 1975 film adaptation of 120 Days, set in Fascist Italy. “We Fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we’re masters of the state,” the duke declares in the film. “In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power.” Sade’s worldview combined hostile atheism, might-makes-right determinism, and madcap nihilism, cutting against the humanist and deist grain of the Enlightenment philosophes: when God is absent, man will sooner re-create hell in His stead, not heaven.

 As much as he tried to instill his work with philosophical heft and authorial ambition, Sade was not a writer of ideas—he was a writer of sensory overload. Even in his more thematically and compositionally complete novels, he could not stop pushing beyond the bounds of good taste or sense. Sade remained preoccupied with release at the expense of tension. The only option that leaves for a reader is simply to endure. Those who do endure likely get by on the faint traces of better, more concise narratives that Sade could have wrung out of his excesses.

 If there is an irony in Sade, it is that, rather than scandalize and draw the reader into his morass, he incites them to flee as far away as possible—anything to escape Sade’s tedious and putrid garden of damnation.

 Considering these texts sometimes leads me to wonder about a literary history where things turned out differently for their authors. What if Sade had somehow evaded prison? Doubtless he’d have kept on with his libertine extracurricular activities. His writing might have been a more gentlemanly or remunerative pursuit, producing bawdy but harmless stories and pedestrian infidel tracts. What he channeled into his novels might have been redirected into his letters—indeed, he might have become, as Gore Vidal thought him to be, one of the great letter writers of his age. What if Swift had managed to stay in England, never returning to Ireland—and even managed to attain a much-desired bishopric? More pamphlets and polemics, to be sure, and more banter in coffeehouses with his equals. But also likely a deepening involvement in sectarian issues, leading him to become a more rigid Tory and a more committed High Churchman. He might even have followed his colleagues Bolingbroke and Francis Atterbury into Jacobitism, and hence into exile in France. Something like Gulliver’s Travels would still have been possible, but one that had more in common with the bloody-minded Hobbes than with the anarchic Rabelais.

 What is more certain is that The 120 Days of Sodom and A Modest Proposal have no place in these alternate histories, so wedded as they are to the circumstances their authors encountered at the time of writing.

 The extremes of Sade’s novel would have been less possible if he had been free from the contradictory extremes of prolonged incarceration. The social and sensory deprivation, the regimentation of time and the elasticity of the experience of time, the total absence of freedom and the fluid morality of mere survival, the myopia of living with your own thoughts—all were necessary elements for the creation of The 120 Days. Sade obsessively kept track of the patterns and frequency of letters and visits to make sense of how long he’d been in prison and how long he’d have until he was released. By the time he wrote The 120 Days, Sade had been in prison for seven years; he remained imprisoned for five more before the Revolution freed him, if only for a time. “Prison is bad,” Sade wrote to his wife, “because solitude gives added strength only to ideas, and the disturbance that results therefrom becomes all the greater and ever more urgent.”

 Similarly, Swift’s tract would never have been written if he had remained on the other side of St. George’s Channel, remote from the toll British policy exacted on its nearest colony. Gone would be the vision of a consumer economy taken to its most literal conclusion and of industrialism taken to its logical extreme. Swift makes several references to the overly fecund Catholics, the shameful waste of babies who are aborted, and the equally if not more shameful waste of resources by those babies who are not. At its heart, A Modest Proposal is a coldly concise plan for bodily control, rendered with the greatest simplicity, that comes with the dehumanization of one population by another. Swift never had a perfectly benevolent attitude toward the Irish as a mass, but he found them redeemable enough to conjure the great Swiftian image of a baby leaving an Irish womb only to enter an English mouth.

 Both Swift and Sade created works with tenacious wills to survive. Their legacies now seem to cast them as more beast than ghost at first. Subsequent artists have tried to leash the anger of Swift or the depravity of Sade, taming them for their own transgressive ends. But in truth they are more like warnings. Swift’s and Sade’s literature was neither the literature of majestic vision nor of pure shock. They are not examples of a certain method of execution but of conditions that made other methods impossible. In considering the heirs of this kind of art, we move away from the provocative fantasies of Salò or Naked Lunch and toward the nightmare reportage of Elem Klimov’s film Come and See and Curzio Malaparte’s novel Kaputt. The result is a double-edged critique of humanism, which dredges the enduring capacity for cruelty out from beneath an enlightened, noble surface and shows the mind not as a parent to an idea but under the dictatorship of an idea.

 The Art of Upsetting People : Jonathan Swift and the Marquis de Sade, patron saints of extremism.  By Chris R. Morgan.  Lapham’s Quarterly, August  24, 2020.

Swift: “A Good Fat Child Will Make Four Dishes Of Excellent Nutritive Meat”

 
When Donald the Lyin’ King proposed that COVID-19 might be able to be controlled by injecting bleach, Lysol, sanitizers and other disinfectants into the body, the very idea was so nut-crazy I thought of two satiric works of Jonathan Swift that attacked the policies of English and Irish politicians in the 18th Century. Born in Dublin in 1667, he trained to be a priest at Trinity College and spent much of his life writing satires about the English and Irish. I always enjoyed his work, and so did my senior English students at Fargo Central shared this joy, by reading and analyzing his two most entertaining works: A Modest Proposal for Preventingthe Children of Poor People in Ireland Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick and Gulliver’s Travels: Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World.
 
I was reminded of both by the treatment of the poor by the Trump administration. The Trumplicans and the American Tea Party have always tried to cut food stamps, health, education, and other safety-net programs just as the English “nobility” and landowners treated Irish families 300 years ago.
 
A few lines from A Modest Proposal, as Nixon would say, makes Swift’s position “perfectly clear”: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether served, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragout. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper, or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter. I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar’s child…to be about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat. Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay (skin) the carcass; the skin of which artificially dressed will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.”
 
The paragraph is a sample of the finest satire ever produced in the English language. This one sentence makes it “perfectly clear” why he was so concerned about his fellow Irish: “It is a melancholy object to walk through this great town (Dublin), or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and all importuning every passenger for an alms.”
 
From Lilliput To Brobdingnag To Laputa To The Houyhnhnms
 
Swift was an observer and critic of English and Irish politicians all of his adult life and used satire to ridicule their positions. Dr. Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain, serves as his lead character in his adventures in four foreign lands. As the only survivor of a ship wreck, Gulliver awakens on the shore of Lilliput tied to the beach by people who are only six inches high (equal to many of our politicians). He is taken to the capital city and observes that Lilliputians have ridiculous customs and very petty debates. Lilliput has two political parties, the Tories who wear high-heeled shoes and the Whigs who wear low heels. The court and cabinet positions are held by those who are best at rope-dancing. Lilliput is at war with the empire of Blefusco over which end of an egg should be broken. This represents religious doctrine. Gulliver becomes a hero by capturing Blefusco’s naval fleet. He adds to his reputation by putting out a fire in the royal palace by urinating on it. But he eventually loses favor and is sentenced to be blinded and starved. He escapes by finding a boat.
 
In his next adventure he lands on the island of Brobdingnag, a land of giants. Discovered by a farmer, he exhibits the tiny Gulliver for money while the farmer’s daughter Glumdalclitch falls in love with him. The queen then buys him from the farmer and he becomes a favorite at court. Gulliver describes English customs and governance to the king. The king responds: “The English must be a race of odious vermin.” Gulliver offers to make cannon and gunpowder for the country, but the king is horrified by the proposition. Gulliver is then rescued by a huge eagle.
 
He then lands on the island of Laputa where the people have one eye facing inward and the other facing upward. He is taken to the capital city of Balnibarbri where he sees farm fields in ruins and the people living in squalor. The city has mathematicians and scientists but they are busy trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers instead or working on the problems of Laputa. He meets other strange people and decides to go to another country.
 
He visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, a very intelligent group of horses who are rational, communal, and benevolent. In fact the horses have taken the power away from a degenerate human race called Yahoos. The horses are surprised that, although Gulliver looks like a Yahoo, they register that he is rather civilized. When Gulliver describes England, the horses realize that the English people are as degenerate as Yahoos. The horses decide that Gulliver must leave their country. He returns to England and is so disgusted with humanity that he avoids his family, buys some horses, and converses with them instead.

 
We Seem To Be Living Through A Modest Proposal and the Four Islands of Gulliver
 
I can’t seem to keep Swift and his satires out of my mind as I view the disasters and machinations of Donald the Lyin’ King’s administration. The Trump White House is dominated by Lilliputian men and women who all wear high-heeled shoes but are of low IQ. Their main job is to trample the humans wearing low-heeled shoes. There are horses in the cabinet, but they use only the Southern part of the horse that’s going North. They don’t use the Houyhnhnm head.
 
When I see the Trumplican protesters of scientific state COVID-19 quarantine and stay-home policies shaking hands, violating the six-foot rule and crowding together on the steps of capitals, no face masks, carrying Confederate battle flags, wearing MAGA caps, signs yelling “FREEDOM,” and a few strutting around with AR-15s in battle gear and camos, I can see why the Yahoos of America have lost power to the more intelligent horses. When Gulliver put out the palace fire by pissing on it, I immediately think of the “trickle-down” economic policies of the Lyin’ King and Larry Kudlow, Art Laffer, and the Ronald Reagan true-believers.
 
When I think of the Lilliputian war over which end of the egg should be broken, I recall the number of Southern churches and the ministers who have decided not to observe stay-at-home polices. Pastor Landon Spradlin and his wife went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras to minister to attendees. At a motorcycle rally in 2016 at Daytona Beach he had earned plaudits and national attention with this statement: “I don’t believe there are incurable diseases. God can heal anything. There are documented cases of God healing AIDS. God can cause limbs to grow out where they have been chopped off. God can raise the dead.”

On the way home from New Orleans he posted this on Facebook: “The media is trying to manipulate your life by creating mass hysteria.” We will get a chance to see him raised from the dead. Pastor Spradlin died of the virus in his pickup on the way home from Mardi Gras. His wife thought he had fallen asleep while she was driving. She stopped at a gas station to go to the bathroom and opened the passenger door. He fell out on the pavement dead.
 

The Fight For Income Equality Goes On And On And On…….

More than 300 years ago Swift was fighting for income equality as he watched English noblemen buy up good land in Ireland and turn the owners into sharecroppers. Income equality does not mean that each human end up with the same amount of assets. President Franklin Roosevelt defined it best during the Great Depression: “Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standards of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.”
 
Swift attacked the rich Protestant English landlords who charged exorbitant rents and often reduced their renters to beggary. If the renters couldn’t pay, the landlords seized their property and goods. Historians have studied Swift’s satires and have often identified the exact political moves he was attacking. And Swift did not save the Roman Catholic Church from his scrutiny. I’m going to use the words of David Morrison, an expert of the times, who has analyzed Swift’s attitudes towards English Protestants and the Irish Catholic Church: “The author of the Modest Proposal tries to sell his big idea by suggesting that it would be a useful way of reducing the number of Roman Catholics in Ireland. If poor Catholics can breed children for meat, then that will mean far fewer Catholics in the country. Not only will this save money, it will greatly improve the stability of the realm, as there will not be as many traitors around to stir up rebellion against the established Protestant order. The vast majority of the Irish population then (as now) were Catholics, though their country was run by a Protestant elite. Swift is satirizing the enormous contempt this elite harbored for Irish Catholics, both for their poverty and for their religion. In paragraph 22, the author argues that breeding children for meat will also give poor Irish Catholics something valuable, a highly-prized commodity they can sell on the open market. In turn, this will benefit their Protestant landlords, because their tenants will now be able to pay the rent, their corn and cattle already have been seized.” I’m sure many readers have heard about “The Troubles” in Ireland over the years.

 
Income inequality has never been corrected in Ireland. The “Great potato” famines in the 19th Century forced many to leave the country. There are now 33 million people of Irish descent in the U.S.—while Ireland’s population is presently only 4.7 million. The Irish have accomplished one task. For forty years the Protestants and Catholics murdered about 3,500 over religious ideology called “The Troubles.” Read about the Magdalene Laundries. Because of a dark history, the Vatican has lost control of Ireland. The Irish have pulled their ambassador from Rome while approving abortion and even electing a married gay prime minister. Swift would appreciate that.
 
A Swift Proposal. By Ed Raymond. High Plains Reader ,  May 3, 2020.
 

Pick up Gulliver’s Travels expecting a children’s book or a novel and you will be unpleasantly surprised. Originally published as “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts … By Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships”, it is one of the great satires in world literature.

 First published in London in 1726, the Travels was a sensational bestseller and immediately recognised as a literary classic. The author of the pseudonymous Travels was the Church-of-Ireland Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, Jonathan Swift. Swift wrote that his satiric project in the Travels was built upon a “great foundation of Misanthropy” and that his intention was “to vex the world”, not entertain it.

 The work’s inventive narrative, exuberant fantasy (little people, giants, a flying island, spirits of the dead, senile immortals, talking horses and odious humanoids), and hilarious humour certainly made the work entertaining. In its abridged and reader-friendly form, sanitised of sarcasm and black humour, Gulliver’s Travels has become a children’s classic. In its unabridged form, however, it still has the power to vex readers.

 What’s it all about?

 In Part 1 of this four-part satire, Gulliver is shipwrecked among the tiny Lilliputians. He finds a society that has fallen into corruption from admirable original institutions through “the degenerate Nature of Man”. Lilliput is a satiric diminution of Gulliver’s Britain in its corrupt court, contemptible party politics, and absurd wars.

 In Part II Gulliver is abandoned in Brobdingnag, a land of giants. The scale is now reversed. Gulliver is a Lilliputian among giants, displayed as a freak of nature and kept as a pet. Gulliver’s account of his country and its history to the King of Brobdingnag leads the wise giant to denounce Gulliver’s countrymen and women as “the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth”.

 In Part III Gulliver is the victim of piracy and cast away. He is taken up to the flying island of Laputa. Its monarch and court are literally aloof from the people it rules on the continent below, and absorbed in pure science and abstraction.

 Technological changes originating in this volatile “Airy Region” result in the economic ruin of the people below and of traditional ways of life. The satire recommends the example of the disaffected Lord Munodi, who is “not of an enterprising Spirit”, and is “content to go on in the old Forms” and live “without Innovation”. Part III is episodic and miscellaneous in character as Swift satirises various intellectual follies and corruptions. It offers a mortifying image of human degeneration in the immortal Struldbruggs. Gulliver’s desire for long life abates after he witnesses the endless decrepitude of these people.

 Part IV is a disturbing fable. After a conspiracy of his crew against him, Gulliver is abandoned on an island inhabited by rational civilised horses, the Houyhnhnms, and unruly brutal humanoids, the Yahoos. Gulliver and humankind are identified with the Yahoos. The horses debate “Whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth”. As in the story of the flood in the Bible, the Yahoos deserve their fate.

The horses, on the other hand, are the satire’s ideal of a rational society. Houyhnhnmland is a caste society practicing eugenics. Swift’s equine utopians have a flourishing oral culture but there are no books. There is education of both sexes. They have no money and little technology (they do not have the wheel). They are authoritarian (there is no dissent or difference of opinion). The Houyhnhnms are pacifist, communistic, agrarian and self-sufficient, civil, vegetarian and nudist. They are austere but do have passions. They hate the Yahoos.

 Convinced that he has found the enlightened good life, free of all the human turpitude recorded in the Travels, Gulliver becomes a Houyhnhnm acolyte and proselyte. But this utopian place is emphatically not for humans. Gulliver is deported as an alien Yahoo and a security risk.

 Wearing clothes and sailing in a canoe made from the skins of the humanoid Yahoos, Gulliver arrives in Western Australia, where he is attacked by Aboriginal people and eventually, unwillingly, rescued and returned home to live, alienated, among English Yahoos. (Swift’s knowledge of the Aboriginal people derives from the voyager William Dampier, whom Gulliver claimed was his “Cousin”.)

 Politics and misanthropy

When it was published, the Travels’ uncompromising, misanthropic satiric anatomy of the human condition seemed to border on blasphemy. The political satire was scandalous, venting what Swift called his “principle of hatred to all succeeding Measures and Ministryes” in Britain and Ireland since the collapse, in 1714, of Queen Anne’s Tory government, which he had served as propagandist.

 In its politics the work is pacifist, condemns “Party and Faction” in the body politic, and denounces colonialism as plunder, lust, enslavement, and murder on a global scale. It satirises monarchical despotism yet displays little faith in parliaments. In Part III we get a short view of a representative modern parliament: “a Knot of Pedlars, Pickpockets, Highwaymen and Bullies”.

 Gulliver’s Travels belongs to a tradition of satiric and utopian imaginary voyages that includes works by Lucian, Rabelais, and Thomas More. Swift hijacked the form of the popular contemporary voyage book as the vehicle for his satire, though the work combines genres, containing utopian and dystopian fiction, satire, history, science fiction, dialogues of the dead, fable, as well as parody of the travel book and the Robinson Crusoe-style novel.

 It’s not a book to be judged by its cover. The frontispiece, title page and table of contents of the original edition gave no hint that this was not a genuine travel account. Swift and his friends reported stories of gullible readers who took this hoax travel book for the real thing.

 It is also not reader friendly. The revised 1735 edition of the Travels opens with a disturbing letter from Gulliver in which the reader is arraigned by an irate and misanthropic author convinced that the “human Species” is too depraved to be saved, as evidenced by the fact that his book has had no reforming effect on the world. The book ends with Gulliver, a proud, ranting recluse, preferring his horses to humans, and warning any English Yahoos with the vice of pride not to “presume to appear in my Sight”.

 Readers might dismiss the unbalanced Gulliver, but he is only saying what Swift’s uncompromising satire insists is the truth about humankind.

 In many ways Jonathan Swift is remote from us, but his satire still matters, and Gulliver’s Travels continues to vex and entertain today.

 Why Jonathan Swift wanted to ‘vex the world’ with Gulliver’s Travels. By Ian Higgins. The Conversation,  May 8, 2018. 

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.” These lines from Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick of 1729 must be among the most startling in the history of literature. Swift aimed to prick an indifferent public into realising the extremity of poverty and suffering in Ireland, while mocking the “political arithmeticians” who treated this misery as a problem that could be solved by applying a mechanical calculus of costs and benefits. But no one – certainly not the suffering Irish people – escapes Swift’s ferocious scorn. At times, possessed by a cold and lucid rage, he seems to indict all of humankind.

 
Swift’s Modest Proposal has been read as a contribution to a genre that goes back to the Roman poet Juvenal, whose satires mocked the mores of his society using a variety of literary techniques extending from sarcasm to parody. There can be little doubt that Swift drew on this tradition. But we get closer to the heart of this strange work if we consider how the “deranged yet icily rational social pragmatist” – John Stubbs’s apt description of the persona that Swift adopts in the pamphlet – relates to Swift himself. What is shocking in the modest proposal is how the speaker can mount a defence of cannibalism on the basis of the most logical arguments. The pursuit of reason, Swift seems to be suggesting, can lead beyond the bounds of humanity and sanity.
 
The 18th century was full of political satirists such as Swift, who criticised prevailing policies in the interests of rational reform. But rather than pointing to any more reasonable way of conducting ourselves, the final effect of the Modest Proposal is to leave the human story a dark and senseless farce. Whatever else it may be, this is not mere satire. At bottom, Swift’s essay may have more in common with the absurdist comedies of Eugène Ionesco than with the familiar and somehow reassuring irony of the Roman poet. But this prompts the question: what kind of person could have produced such an extraordinary work?
 
Stubbs summarises Swift’s relatively modest beginnings with beautiful conciseness. “He was a near-abandoned, half-orphaned child. Although a Dubliner by birth, he would always insist he was English. He had English backing on this point, for Ireland belonged, thought London, to England.” Born in 1667, Swift never knew his father. On occasion he would claim – whether humorously or not is unclear – that he had been abducted in England as a child and spirited off to Ireland. In fact, his father died some months before he was born and his mother returned to England after leaving Swift in the care of an uncle, who had him educated at Kilkenny College and Trinity College, Dublin.
 
In 1688, seeing no prospect of advancement in Ireland, Swift left for England and a position as secretary to Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat. It was while working for Temple that he met Esther Johnson, then a child of eight, the daughter of Temple’s housekeeper; she eventually became “Stella”, his greatest muse. Much of Swift’s life was passed in poor health. From the age of  20 he suffered from periodic attacks of vertigo, nausea, tinnitus and deafness, symptoms that would lead 20th-century physicians to diagnose that he suffered from Ménière’s disease.
 
Swift’s illness did not prevent him from pursuing the political intrigues that were necessary to his advancement, or from having an active social life. He enjoyed the entertainments of city living, including the stage and coffee houses. He was a member of the Scriblerus Club, a prestigious informal association of authors that included the poet Alexander Pope and aimed to deflate quackery in politics and culture. Until his ­final years, he sustained a number of mutually rewarding friendships. It was only when he was embittered by the failure of his ambitions and tortured by gout that he came to shun company. He failed to achieve the object he most coveted in life – an English bishopric – and ended up living in a country he loathed as dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.
 
His last years were made pitiable by the slow loss of his faculties. Eccentric habits, such as scrutinising the servants at dinner in a mirror near the table, hardened into what many of his contemporaries perceived as madness. Dementia almost deprived him of speech, but in 1744 he was still able to murmur, in language reminiscent of one of Samuel Beckett’s forlorn solitaries, “I am what I am, I am what I am.” When he died in October 1745, nearly 78 years old, the cathedral bells were rung muffled for four days.
 
Much of the literary and academic commentary on his life is prurient in tone. Were Swift’s relations with Stella and other women platonic or physical? Did he secretly marry Stella, as gossips of the day claimed? Did he have strange sexual obsessions, as might be suggested by the voyeuristic and scatological poetry he produced at various points in his life? These have not proved terribly productive or interesting lines of inquiry. The evidence regarding his private thoughts is scanty, and posthumous psychoanalysis does not yield reliable results. Stubbs relegates these questions to a minor role in his book. The best way of beginning to understand so dauntingly strange a figure as Swift is to re-create him as he appeared to his contemporaries, and Stubbs does this with panache and verve.

Swift as Stubbs presents him was essen­tially double-minded: rigidly authoritarian in his commitment to prevailing institutions, especially the Anglican Church, and at the same time recklessly daring in stripping these institutions of any pretension to seriousness; supposedly a pious believer, yet one who could write that religion taught us how to hate but not how to love; a conservative who valued order over justice, but who put an impassioned condemnation of slavery into the mouth of the narrator in Gulliver’s Travels and defended Ireland, for whose people he had little if any affection, against English power. In his literary life he was a serial hoaxer, and in his most fantastical writings an author who prized truth over imagination; an inveterate joker, affectionately known to his closest female companions as “Presto”, who in later life was never known to laugh. Stubbs describes the paradoxical personality of a man who published most of his work anonymously but whose prose shone out, a guarded yet public figure:
 
    “He was unsmiling, while comic; ruthless in print, yet touchingly sincere and sensitive in his personal relationships. He was a keen walker and rider, and strong in body; and he was extremely delicate on the matter of his personal hygiene . . . Meanwhile, you might say what you liked against Dr Swift – if you dared; the rather fearsome figure in his black coat and wig. But you could not escape having your attention caught by Presto, the spirit of play in Swift’s nature; or by his stories and asides at the club or in the drawing room; or by the hilarious touches in his many sorties in print. Those who knew him also knew there was, however, another facet to Swift, which, for all his seeming robustness and indeed belligerence, could render him helpless in the space of minutes. In the trinity of his nature, along with Father Swift and Presto, the joking Son, this third element was a marauding unholy ghost.”
 
There have been many lives of Swift. Most recently, Leo Damrosch’s Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (2013) illuminated many of the man’s contradictions. This savage misanthropist was a stern critic of war and empire-building, and, living during a period of financial revolution that covered the South Sea Bubble, he attacked an economy that was based on easy credit. Stubbs makes clear his debts to Damrosch and other biographers but, to my mind, he goes further than any did previously in re-creating the world in which Swift lived and exploring the dualities of his character.
 
“[W]ith the sad perspicuity of the invalid,” he writes of his subject’s recurring illnesses, “Swift learned to spot the danger signals in his abdomen and temples, the throb in hearing and vision that might spread and confine him within hours to a wheeling bed.” How many of the stodgy academic studies that clutter the shelves of libraries contain such beautifully crafted lines? Another feature of Stubbs’s biography is its vast historical scholarship. As well as giving us a thoroughly credible Swift, this is a riveting account of English and Irish life in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Above all, he tells us more than we previously knew of Swift’s “mercurial second self”: the elusive author of the Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels. If there can be a definitive life of Jonathan Swift, this is it.
 
What Stubbs does not do is to unravel the contradictions of his subject’s singular mentality; most likely no one can do so. But at several points Stubbs points to a possible explanation of these conflicts. As he represents him, Swift was a lover of reason who believed in God as the guarantor of rationality in the world. When he attacked injustice and hypocrisy, he was invoking an order in the mind – divine and human – against the disorder of society. The savagery of his irony came from this certainty. Swift was the opposite of the postmodern liberal ironist, a commonplace figure today, who imagines that intolerance can be overcome by showing the contingency of our beliefs and values.
 
 “For Swift there is no contradiction between irony and what we might now take as pure intolerance. He was not at all a tolerant person. Swift’s irony instead very often expresses the anger of a moral authority who is presented with the standards of a debased majority, and illustrates their corruption by speaking for a moment as if he accepted and shared it.”
 
 Swift’s disgust with humankind, in this view, was not an accident of temperament, but the result of judging fellow human beings by the standard of reason they claimed for themselves and finding them wanting.
 
Swift’s work illustrates an irony of rationalism. Unlike most rationalists, who use reason to prop up their conventional prejudices and opinions, Swift used it to judge the human world. The sceptical David Hume concluded that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”. Suggesting that reason should serve life rather than rule it, this was a wise observation. But reason, for Swift, was a passion in its own right, and one to which he was enslaved. Gulliver’s Travels is full of incidents showing that human standards of size and strength are relative. Yet he was wholly unable to follow the imperturbable Hume in accepting that reason is powerless against nature, convention and the twists of human events.
 
Writing to his friend Alexander Pope about Gulliver’s Travels, Swift described his chief end as being “to vex the world rather than divert it”. He achieved this, he said, by “proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale”, showing instead that man had only a capacity for rationality, which he failed to use. The structure of Gulliver’s Travels was erected on the basis of “this great foundation of misanthropy”, and Swift wrote that he “never [would] have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion”. Yet what reason did he have for believing that he could provoke his readers into being rational? Or for thinking that “honest men” would recognise how irrational they had been? In fact, the book he produced diverted its readers as few others have done, and became a classic story for children.
 
Aside from his belief in a divine order, which he may well have questioned while never wavering in his commitment to the Church, Swift had no reason for believing in reason. It may have been a nagging awareness of reason’s impotence, together with the normal travails of ageing, which made him sadder as he grew older. Writing again to Pope, he noted: “The common saying of life being a farce is true in every sense but the most important one, for it is a ridiculous tragedy, which is the worst kind of composition.” Human life may be absurd, as Swift suggests – but it is tragic only if you think human beings could somehow choose to be more rational than they have ever been.
 
Against all reason, Swift persisted in this faith until his mind failed. If this inveterate joker found life a dark and desolate farce, it was because in the end he took the human comedy too seriously.
 
The irrational rationality of Jonathan Swift. By John Gray.  New Statesman, November 14, 2016.