The key concept for understanding Swift’s satire is not a rhetorical precept about persona, but a deeply held principle about what it means, in Swift’s view, to be a person. For Swift, language, religion, and politics are not strictly divisible, but are all inextricably linked as integral parts of human endeavor. The serious business of Swiftian satire is that it invites (or provokes) the reader to be critical: that is, to judge. Most often, the judgments that Swift’s satires ask us to make go well beyond straightforward condemnation of the work’s obvious target; rather, we are led to form a series of deeper judgments about language, religion, and politics, and about the operations of human vice and virtue that govern these activities in others and in ourselves.1 The comic exuberance and imaginative plentitude that often characterize Swift’s satirical writings should not blind us to the fact that Swift, though never moralistic, is a relentlessly moral writer. Even when being self-denigrating about its aesthetic qualities, Swift himself is adamant about the purpose of his work: “I have been only a Man of Rhimes, and that upon Trifles,” he writes, “yet never any without a moral View” (C IV: 52). This “moral view” pervading Swift’s writings in both poetry and prose is not about adherence to a set of pious ordinances, but is deeply concerned with how people act as linguistic, religious, and political beings.
This chapter is divided into five parts. The first identifies wisdom and critical discernment as the allied goals of Swift’s satires, and reflects on the potentially problematic nature of the author’s own pronouncements about his role as a satirist. The second section identifies two kinds of parody – what Swift calls “transplanting” and “personation” – and considers both as integral parts of his satirical program. Continuing this theme, part three demonstrates how Swift employs negative examples – often by means of parody – rather than positive precepts, as his principal didactic method. Part four is an extended discussion of a single satire, highlighting the importance of language and the relationship between satiric parody and the fictions he creates. Finally, a brief coda returns to the moral purpose of Swiftian satire as equipping its readers to see through the world’s deceits.
“There are two Ends that Men propose in writing Satyr,” observes Swift in The Intelligencer (1728), “private Satisfaction” and “a publick Spirit, prompting Men of Genius and Virtue, to mend the World as far as they are able.” Taking up the first of these two motives for satire, he ironically defends the satirist’s right to censure corruption: “I demand whether I have not as good a Title to Laugh, as Men have to be Ridiculous, and to expose Vice, as another hath to be Vicious.” Moving to the second of the “two Ends,” he comments, “But if my Design be to make Mankind better, then I think it is my Duty” (PW XII: 34). Writing four years later, Swift advocates a similarly two-fold purpose of satirical writing in his correspondence: “You see Pope, Gay, and I use all our Endeavours to make folks Merry and wise” (C IV: 53). Although Swift’s formula is a commonplace of his day, it is nevertheless not amiss to ask ourselves, what is this wisdom that is the fruit of Swiftian satire? Does it not go beyond assenting to Swift’s particular identifications of viciousness and folly? Does it not mean learning to read the world so that one knows how properly to discriminate, how to judge what is worthy of praise and what is deserving of blame?
A particularly instructive example of Swift’s pedagogical ambitions may be found in An Epistle to a Lady (1733, also sometimes known simply as To a Lady). Much of this long poem is Swift’s version of the classical recusatio (or “refusal”), a Hellenistic trope – enthusiastically adopted by Horace, Propertius, Virgil, and other Roman authors – in which the poet declines to commemorate a patron or public figure in a lofty manner. Swift’s persona questions the “Lady” who has asked him for a panegyric, “Would you have me change my style?” and mockingly suggests that he could “Quote you texts from Plutarch’s Morals; / Or from Solomon produce / Maxims teaching wisdom’s use” (Poems 521). Instead, satire – even the gentle kind reserved for friends (what he called “raillery”) – is Swift’s true métier.2 At the end of the poem – after sharply satirizing Walpole, the court, and even the king – he explains to the woman (Lady Acheson) that he would like his art to
Make you able upon sightTo decide of wrong and right;Talk with sense whate’er you please on;Learn to relish truth and reason.
If she would only allow the critique of his satire to enter and warm the torpor of her “frigid brain,” then “we both should gain our prize: / I to laugh, and you grow wise” (Poems 521–52).
Wisdom, fostered by satire’s stimulation of critical awareness, is the gift that Swift would most wish his readers to receive. Such wisdom includes the ready discrimination of bad from good, the ability to think and to use language well, and the intellectual maturity that delights in genuine understanding. As the poet himself indicates, this gift must come from the dynamic of satire, rather than from maxims, no matter how sagacious the authors who formulated them. His art will, he hopes, “Give your head some gentle raps; / Only [to] make it smart a while” (Poems 521). It certainly seems probable that Swift, an inveterate lover of puns (PW IV: 205–10, 231–39, 257–66, 271–75; E I: 40–41; E II: 189–91, 447; E III: 125), was playing on two senses of “smart” that were current in his day, signifying both “hurt” and “intelligent” or “adept.” By means of this word-play, he underscores the notion that satire, for all its comic laughter, must lead us to the painful knowledge of the world’s falsity and of our own shortcomings.
Swift’s surviving remarks about the nature and purpose of satire are unsystematic, fragmentary, and frequently subject to misinterpretation because articulated by a persona or taken out of context.3 Readers have often failed to notice, for example, that in many of his statements on satire Swift closely follows Horace, who always made it a point to show that he did not take either himself or his vocation too seriously. For example, Horace dismissively claims that his satirical versifying is merely an avocation akin to the way other men take up boxing, or riding horses, or even heavy drinking.4 In addition, students of Swift would do well to consider that the Dean’s observations about the satirist’s intentions, frustrations, and the apparent futility of his endeavors come from a sworn enemy of positivism and pride (PW I: 1, 6, 10, 29–32, [140], 151; PW III: 141; PW IV: 243; PW XI: 5–8, 339, 342; PW XII: 23–25, 33–35; C III: 102–03, 117–18; Poems 419, 493, 497, 518–21). His comment to Charles Ford, “I have finished my Travells . . . they are admirable Things, and will wonderfully mend the World,” exhibits an appropriate sense of accomplishment tempered by the ironic pragmatism so characteristic of his world-view (C III: 87).
Similarly, Gulliver’s ironic indignation in his letter to his cousin Sympson, “instead of seeing a full Stop put to all Abuses and Corruptions . . . Behold, after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions,” not only manifests the protagonist’s false perceptions and distorted self-regard, but also reflects Swift’s realistic understanding of satire’s limits (PW XI: xxxiv). Moreover, his repeated strategy of predicting that even the lash of satire will not effect desperately necessary reforms is not only a humility topos to be expected from the satirist (e.g. Persius, Juvenal), it is also an ultimate indictment, implying that one’s adversaries are so depraved as to be incapable of amendment. We are indeed fortunate that Swift persisted as a satirical writer, even as his declarations about the satirist’s calling and the effectiveness of his works were much less optimistic and self-important than those of Dryden, Pope, and many of his other contemporaries.5
In Swift’s satirical writings, there is a dual movement which is at once destructive and constructive. Much attention has been paid to the destructive element, to attacks on the “targets” of the satires – Grub Street hacks, Whig politicians, absentee landlords, greedy projectors, malevolent clerics, etc. – but not enough thinking has been done about the constructive elements that are present even in the darkest Swiftian satires. Often, the positive dimension of a satirical work is rather simplistically treated as the intended reform of the person or persons being ridiculed, but Swift, ever the moral realist, does not appear to have entertained serious expectations of producing genuine amendment in those whom he directly assailed in his satirical writings. (The Drapier’s Letters [1724–25], in contrast, is a result-oriented polemic intermittently employing satirical stratagems, rather than a sustained work of satire.) Writing in The Examiner for April 26, 1711 (No. 38), Swift suggests that the idea of satire shaming the guilty into reform “may be little regarded by such hardened and abandoned Natures as I have to deal with.” Accordingly, he directs his attention to those who could be harmed by the reprobate: “but, next to taming or binding a Savage-Animal,” he continues, “the best Service you can do the Neighborhood, is to give them warning, either to arm themselves, or not come in its Way” (PW III: 141). The purpose of satire for Swift, then, is less the reformation of the target, who is typically too foregone or ill-disposed for amendment, and more about the moral education of the reader.
The satirical program of A Tale of a Tub (published in 1704), for example, extends far beyond the rather simple tasks of ridiculing Wotton or exploiting simplistic notions about the follies of modernity. The Tale is a deliberately complex and nuanced document that makes considerable demands upon its readers, inviting them to a process of discovery – both in the ordinary meaning of the word and in its forensic sense of a sifting through the evidence provided by one’s adversary. The relationships of the individual parts to the whole must be carefully weighed, the various arguments analyzed, and the parodies examined. In the midst of much laughter, the work must be deciphered by means of the careful scrutiny of textual particulars. The Tale enacts the complexities of the reader’s confrontation with modernity in order to foster the very kinds of discernment that such an encounter demands. For all the negativity of Swiftian satire, these works require a positive act of critical perception, a genuine discovery, if they are to be adequately understood.
The constructive content of the satires, therefore, is not directed towards Swift’s “villains,” but towards his audience. (As we have observed in An Epistle to a Lady, however, Swift’s use of “raillery,” a form of mild satirical exhortation through playful ridicule, comic banter, and friendly teasing, is an important exception to this truth.) A Modest Proposal (1729), for example, could hardly be an attempt to reform either projectors or landlords; rather, Swift is boldly striving to expose a pervasive and dehumanizing instrumentality, to change the way his readers think about Ireland and its people. Yet, readers of the satires will readily perceive that the positive content in the form of moral precepts, sagacious adages, or even urgent admonitions is almost completely absent from these works. Instead, the constructive element in Swift’s satirical writings is the active fostering of moral discernment, leading readers to develop their critical acumen about the workings of vice and folly – venality, ignorance, vanity, pride, dereliction of duty – in others as well as in ourselves. Swift refuses to offer any overarching textual authority in his satires because such a presence would forestall the kind of moral discrimination that these writings are meant to set in motion. A persistent goal of the satires, then, is to educate our capacity for critical reflection on the human condition and, hence, to enlarge our capacity for humanity.
Swift is commonly recognized as one of the greatest writers of Menippean satire, a form named after Menippus of Gadara (3rd century BC), which emphasizes combining parody with satire and mixing together several different kinds of discourse in a single work. True to the inheritance he received from Menippus and his successors (among them: Varo, Seneca, Lucian, Petronius, More, Erasmus, and Rabelais), Swift’s satires are typically vigorous literary hybrids produced by juxtaposing and combining multiple discursive forms.6 Satiric parody, the appropriation of another’s discourse to generate ridicule, usually works in one of two ways: either by transposition of the source-text into the new work to alter its original meaning, or by close imitation which exaggerates those features of the source-text most worthy of censure.7 Swift himself regularly employs these two parodic techniques; not surprisingly, he calls the reader’s attention to both methods in A Tale of a Tub. Writing in the persona of a literary hack, Swift satirizes the alleged cleverness of his ideological enemies by observing the transience of their wit and its susceptibility to parody. The hack writer notes how easy it is to “injure . . . Authors by transplanting.” He asserts that “nothing is so very tender as a Modern piece of Wit . . . which is apt to suffer so much in the Carriage” and “which, by the smallest Transposal or Misapplication, is utterly annihilated” (PW I: 26). Swift’s satires are replete with parodic “transplantings,” “carriages,” and “transposals” which recontextualize their source-texts in order to expose them to ridicule. Although the Tale and Gulliver furnish the richest fund of this kind of parody, Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift provides a remarkable example which we will examine below in some detail.
Swift also calls attention to his most common form of parody: close imitation to expose aspects of the text and its maker to ridicule. In the “Apology” he added to the fifth edition of a Tale in 1710, he offers the following observation: “There is one Thing which the judicious Reader cannot but have observed, that some of those Passages in this Discourse, which appear most liable to Objection are what they call Parodies, where the Author personates the Style and Manner of other Writers, whom he has a mind to expose.” (PW I: 3). Later in the same work, Swift also adds a footnote: “Here the Author seems to personate L’Estrange, Dryden, and some others, who after having past their Lives in Vices, Faction, and Falsehood, have the Impudence to talk of Merit and Innocence and Sufferings” (PW I: 42). Emphasizing that parody is akin to mimicry or impersonation, Swift acknowledges that “Style and Manner” are vital aspects of his art. Yet, as the second passage clearly shows, Swift’s agenda of satiric exposure is by no means restricted to superficial blemishes or stylistic eccentricities, but rather is directed at what he regards as substantial shortcomings in the authors’ characters and in the substance of their thought.
Parody and emulation, highly characteristic modes of eighteenth-century writing, are both forms of evaluative appropriation: emulation is an act of homage, and satiric parody, as its reverse is a strategy of disparagement. In both cases, the transformed source-text is exhibited as an example for the reader’s aesthetic and ethical consideration, but in parody this display provides a negative example, a making explicit of what is defective in the original work. Thus, parody functions as a form of demonstration that is not refutable by ordinary kinds of argument, an exhibition or conspicuous display, a parading of what is degenerate or inane. Emulation communicates the strength, worth, virtue, and power (in Latin, virtus) of the text. Conversely, parody flaunts the work’s deformity, faultiness, corruption, and defectiveness (in Latin, vitium). Of course, these terms are not merely linguistic, stylistic, or literary; they are also inescapably ethical because the social exchanges that reading and writing necessarily entail are vital to the responsible conduct both of our interior and of our public lives. In Swift’s world-view, “virtue” and “vice” can never be exclusively textual or solely aesthetic.
Parody exposes habits both of language and of mind; it is almost never merely about style, but rather seeks to reveal the underlying errors and defects in what is seemingly sensible. Accordingly, in Swift’s parody, rhetorical, literary, political, religious, and philosophical conventions and presuppositions are laid bare; this anatomizing strips the parodied work and the mind that created it of any claims to being worthy of approbation. Swift’s parodies typically lead the reader to perceive the prideful systematizing, the dangerous absolutism, the logical flaws, and the damaging misperceptions of his adversaries. Thus, parody acts not merely as a criticism of particular forms of discourse, but as a critique of the attitudes and subject positions that generate and relish such discursive forms.
Remarkably, Swift uses parody not only to assail others, but also to implicate himself in his satires.8 Perhaps the most well-known example is the self-mockery found in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift when the persona claims about the Dean, “But what he writ was all his own” (Poems 493, line 318). Swift stole this line almost verbatim from Sir John Denham’s poem, On Mr. Abraham Cowley (1667); “what [Swift] writ” was therefore most certainly not “all his own.” Recontextualizing Denham’s tribute by inserting it into his own writing and, thus, radically altering its meaning is a miniature and magnificent instance of Swiftian parody. Swift’s ploy is both comic and clever, but it is much more. His parodic “transplanting” of Denham’s line (“Yet what he wrote was all his own”) also calls into question the authority and the reliability both of the persona and of the poet himself as he self-consciously stages his own death and ironically orchestrates the varying fortunes of his posthumous reputation. The appropriation of a line about originality and its transposition into this context ingeniously parodies the very idea that any author could write what was “all his own,” and thus may be understood as ridiculing Denham.
Sir John had appeared earlier in Swift’s career as a character in the culture wars he satirically depicted in The Battle of the Books (comp. 1697; pub. 1704); “a stout Modern,” Denham was slain by a spear-wielding Homer, the venerable general of the Ancients’ cavalry (PW I: 157). Swift, who hated the “Modern” notion that an author’s productions need not benefit from the great writings of the “Antients,” insisted that broad humanistic learning was essential for a writer; his own satires, with their multiple parodies, are masterworks of intertextuality and testify to the extent of his reading. In addition, Swift’s satiric parody may also be aimed at Dryden, whom Swift seems to have held in perpetual contempt. The second book of Dryden’s famous translation of the Aeneid includes a line that he took word-for-word from Denham (2.763). Swift’s theft from Denham thus recalls Dryden’s act of blatant arrogation, ironically aligning Swift and Dryden as fellow “thieves” and confirming the absurdity of Denham’s notions about originality and literary invention. Moreover, the issues that Swift’s parody ingeniously raises about the possibility of writing what is entirely one’s own are delightfully complicated still further by a darker aspect of Sir John’s literary career. Because Denham’s writings were so uneven in quality, several of his contemporaries accused the wealthy poet of having bought his most famous works from other authors, a charge that Swift maliciously refers to in a footnote he wrote for the Battle (PW I: 157).9
Swift’s seemingly simple parodic gesture in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift clearly operates on a variety of levels: he uses parody to cast doubt upon the several layers of discourse in his valedictory poem, to ridicule ideas of authorial independence and “pure” originality, and to mock one of his own most characteristic practices as a writer – the miniature parody itself parodies Swift’s parodic genius. In addition, because Denham’s poem is an elegy for a great poet, Swift’s creative theft calls attention to his elegiac enterprise and mischievously raises the possibility that the poet’s authorship of his own death song invalidates whatever claims he makes for himself. Because the author uses his textual authority to call into question his own trustworthiness, the reader of the line, “what he writ was all his own,” is presented with a dilemma not unlike that of the person who is told by another, “everything I say is a lie.” Even in Swift’s stanzas on his own demise, then, satiric parody is a source of comic playfulness, forceful irony, and cunning ridicule (directed at others and at himself) – all of which contribute to the effectiveness and the artful appeal of his satire. As this one example may suggest, Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, with its multiple ironies and complex satirical inflections, makes considerable demands upon the critical faculties of its readers. Once again, what Swift’s parody requires from its audience is not the mere recognition of a source-text, but a thoroughgoing re-cognition, or re-thinking, of the issues that his parodic appropriation of another’s discourse so skillfully raises for our consideration.
Hints towards an Essay on Conversation, which Swift probably composed while working for the Tory ministry in London (1710–14), though not a satire, provides the attentive reader with an important insight into the workings of his mind. “Most Things, pursued by Men for the Happiness of publick or private Life,” he explains, “our Wit or Folly have so refined, that they seldom exist but in Idea,” and have become so complicated in the minds of those who think seriously about them, “that for some thousands of Years Men have despaired of reducing their Schemes to Perfection.” Cutting through such lofty and unserviceable abstractions, Swift proposes a practical method instead: “it seemeth to me, that the truest Way to understand Conversation, is to know the Faults and Errors to which it is subject, and from thence, every Man to form Maxims to himself whereby it may be regulated” (PW IV: 87). Rather than supply a ready-made system of precepts to be observed, he makes the reader mindful of what should be avoided. “[I]t will be necessary,” Swift continues, “to note those Errors that are obvious, as well as others which are seldomer observed, since there are few so obvious or acknowledged, into which most Men, some Time or other, are not apt to run” (PW IV: 88). Once readers have these negative examples before them, Swift affirms, they will be well able to make their own determinations as to how they should conduct themselves. Perceiving what not to do, they will have the understanding necessary to know what they should do without the help of positive rules formulated by an external authority.
Intriguingly, this pattern of enumerating negatives is found in Swift’s own guidelines for himself. In a list of resolutions headed “When I come to be old” that the thirty-two-year-old Swift made to direct his future behavior, no fewer than sixteen begin “Not to. . . .” The sole positive provision is, “To desire some good Friends to inform me wch of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, & wherein; and reform accordingly” (PW I: [xxxxix]). Not surprisingly, Swift’s satires repeatedly employ a similar method, using a potent mixture of irony, parody, and comedy to exhibit and ridicule things that are bad as if they were good. False encomiums, spurious rules, mock panegyrics, ignorance masquerading as learning, vanity wearing the false colors of humility, debased particulars displayed as noble universal truths – these are the typical means by which Swift parades a series of “Faults and Errors” before his readers. Almost nowhere in his satires, however, does he establish positive maxims as guides to correct behavior, preferring instead to leave such formulations to his audience. Directions to Servants in General (published in 1745), for instance, is full of false counsels which are really instances of what should not be done. The footman, for example, is instructed, “In order to learn the Secrets of other Families, tell your Brethren those of your Master’s; thus you will grow a favourite both at home and abroad, and [be] regarded as a Person of Importance” (PW XIII: 34). Polite Conversation, a work discussed at some length in the fourth part of this chapter, similarly exhibits a series of gross conversational faults and fatuous patterns of mind as the epitome of refinement. Again and again in Swift’s writings, the egregious is ironically exhibited as the exemplary.
“Directions for a Birth-day Song” (1729), a satire on the royal birthday odes of the poet laureate, Laurence Eusden, repeats this pattern: Swift enumerates as “the laws of song” those qualities that make the birthday poems at once empty and cloying:
Thus your encomiums, to be strong,Must be applied directly wrong:A tyrant for his mercy praise,And crown a royal dunce with bays:A squinting monkey load with charms;And paint a coward fierce in arms.(Poems 388, 391)
The satire in Advice to a Parson (1732) follows much the same pattern; the persona claims that ignorance, insolence, immorality, and flattery are requisite for advancement in the church. Similarly, On Poetry: A Rapsody (1733) chronicles the art’s debasement and modern impoverishment.
Even in his non-satirical works, Swift typically proceeds by parading negative examples. In Maxims Controlled [that is, contradicted] in Ireland,” Swift sought to lay out “certain Maxims of State, founded upon long observation and experience, [and] drawn from the constant practice of the wisest nations,” only to demonstrate that they did not apply to contemporary Ireland because of its particular political, social, and economic circumstances (PW XII: 131). Arguing for the importance of attending to the specific conditions that operate in any given situation, he wrote derisively of the “innumerable errors, committed by crude and short thinkers, who reason upon general topics, without the least allowance for the most important circumstances, which quite alter the nature of the case” (PW XII: 131). Although Swift decided, after he had written some 2,000 words, not to publish Maxims Controlled, its argument not only underscores his general distrust of aphorisms and precepts, but also highlights his intellectual commitment to the necessity of bringing to the fore and scrutinizing the specific details that have a bearing on “the nature of the case.” Obviously, these two aspects of his thought are strongly interrelated and have no small bearing on his practices as a satirical writer.
Spurning generalities, Swift’s satire dwells richly in a carefully constructed world of particulars which have two principal imaginative sources: the fictions he creates – most often, a persona writing from a specific perspective and situation – and the parodic treatment of his adversaries’ language, practices, and ideas.10 Working in synergy, Swift’s fictions and parodies construct a network of details leading readers to the repeated exercise of their critical judgment. Parody is a central means by which Swift foregrounds the relevant aspects of his adversaries’ attitudes and beliefs. It is, moreover, the primary tool he uses to diagnose and display their defectiveness. Recall once again what Swift envisioned would take place in the reader of his catalogue of conversational transgressions: each reader “is to know the Faults and Errors to which [conversation] is subject, and from thence, every Man to form Maxims to himself whereby it may be regulated” (PW IV: 87).
Parody is one of the chief means by which Swift sets out his store of carefully chosen negatives so that the reader may, first, identify the errors of mind and morals that produced them and, second, devise his or her own response to what has been anatomized and exposed to ridicule. Occasionally, however, Swift’s parodies, like his satiric fictions, take on a life of their own as the exuberance of his inventiveness predominates and vivifies the satire by means of an excess which serves no clear instrumental purpose. It is not only in these extreme cases, however, that we should be reminded of a primary function of parody in his writings: it allows Swift – a lover of language who could hear books talking to him (PW IV: 253) – to revel in his gift for “personation,” to laugh, and to have fun. Readers of Swift’s satires should gratefully do the same.
A central reason why parody plays such an important role in Swift’s satires is his conviction that both the manner in which we use language and our ability to judge the words of others are vitally important aspects of the moral life. Swift’s longstanding commitment to reforming abuses in popular discourse is reflected in a series of publications spanning most of his active years. In his Tatler essay for September 28, 1710 (No. 230), Swift assails “the continual Corruption of our English Tongue” resulting from “Ignorance” and “false Refinements,” pleading instead for “that Simplicity which is the best and truest Ornament of most Things in human Life” (PW II: 174, 177). He continues his campaign in Hints toward an Essay on Conversation (composed around 1710 and published in 1763), A Proposal for Correcting . . . the English Tongue (1712), and a Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d into Holy Orders (1720). His greatest labor in this regard, however, is A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation . . ., commonly known as Polite Conversation. Swift began this satire on the abuse of language and the senselessness of the gentry in 1704 and worked on it intermittently over the course of more than thirty years. Finally published in 1738, it was among the last of his satirical works to appear in print.
Parody is the principal device that drives Swift’s satire in the three dialogues on display. Swift’s antithetical persona, Simon Wagstaff, has compiled the dialogues to represent his view of all that characterizes truly polite conversation. The reader might therefore reasonably expect to encounter shining examples of wit, tact, restraint, eloquence, and learning, but none of these qualities is present. Instead, each dialogue is a tissue of proverbs, colloquialisms, clichés, and catch-phrases that manifest the superficiality, ignorance, vanity, selfishness, and pride of the interlocutors. The following exchange is typical:
LADY SMART Miss, I hear that you and Lady Couplers, are as great as Cup, and Can.
MISS NOTABLE Ay, as great as the Devil, and the Earl of Kent.
LADY SM. Nay, I am told you meet together with as much Love, as there is between the old Cow and the Hay-Stack.
MISS. I own, I love her very well; but there’s Difference betwixt staring and stark mad.
(PW IV: 196)
Swift’s parody is remarkable not only for the sheer number of banalities he has managed to string together, but also for the effectiveness of the social satire that it produces. The characters in the dialogues – two lords, two ladies, a knight, a colonel, and a younger unmarried couple – routinely use fashionable slang, mispronounce ordinary words, and proudly report inane remarks that they have made in previous conversations as outstanding instances of wit. At times, Swift’s text reveals the speakers to be vulgar and crass. Sir John, for example, explains the custom of hospitality at his estate: “Why, Faith, at Christmas we have many Comers and Goers; and they must not be sent away without a Cup of good Christmas Ale, for fear they should p[i]ss behind the Door.” Lady Smart replies, “I hear, Sir John has the nicest Garden in England; they say, ’tis kept so clean, that you can’t find a place where to spit” (PW IV: 185). Decorum and propriety are nowhere in evidence. When offered some cheese, Lady Answerall exclaims, “Lord, Madam, I have fed like a Farmer; I shall grow fat as a Porpoise: I swear, my Jaws are weary with chawing” (PW IV: 187).
Such parodic exaggeration highlights the stupidity of talking without thinking, of speaking without having anything to say. By a procession of negative examples, the work comically forces the reader to consider the relationships between language, thought, and manners. The ruling class should provide examples of duty, rectitude, and cultivated civility (for example, Sir William Temple or Lord Cateret), but the dialogues dramatically expose their absence as lords and ladies pass the time in idle chatter and stay up until three o’clock in the morning playing cards. Their lives, like their speech, are a sequence of meaningless clichés. As before, Swift provides no precepts for his readers, but leads them to the truth by displaying its opposite. The conversations, though genial, are the fruit of vanity, selfishness, ignorance, and pride rather than of that humane urbanity and consideration which constitute genuine politeness in the upper classes. Like actors on a stage, the characters’ pat responses and mindless banter suggest that they live in a simulacrum of reality, a farce in which they are driven by the scripted lines they deliver. Both their speech and their lives are overdetermined by feckless convention. Intellectually and morally vapid, the interlocutors’ insistent preoccupation with the superficial gradually reveals them to be people of no substance. Despite their wealth, the linguistic deformity they exhibit manifests the impoverishment of their lives. They are made to look ridiculous because they neither say what they mean nor mean what they say.
The persona who presents these dialogues to us as the epitome of politeness is one “Simon Wagstaff”: dissolute, vain, uneducated, profane, interested in fashion and the card table, a self-professed “Modern,” and a Whig. Swift’s antithesis, Wagstaff speaks approvingly of swearing and gambling, of free-thinking and atheism, of King William III and Bishop Burnet, and of Moderns and Maids of Honour at court. Taking a cue from Pope, Swift has his persona praise such “dunces” as Charles Gildon, Ned Ward, John Dennis, Colly Cibber, and Lewis “Tibbalds,” while criticizing Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, and Edward Young, all of whom were Swift’s friends. Wagstaff’s smug and self-serving “Introduction to the following Treatise,” which is half the length of the “Treatise” itself, repeatedly reveals his lack of judgment about language, politics, religion, and the proper conduct of private and public life. Typically for Swift, these interrelated failings culminate in Wagstaff’s revelation of his colossal ignorance about the value of his work and his personal worthiness. Incapable of forming a judicious understanding of himself, he cannot judge the world correctly. In one particularly masterful passage, Wagstaff informs the reader about the honors he presently expects to receive and the prospect of his future glory:
If my favourable and gentle Readers could possibly conceive the perpetual Watchings, the numberless Toyls, the frequent Risings in the Night, to set down several ingenious Sentences . . . which, without my utmost Vigilance, had been irrevocably lost for ever: If they would consider, with what incredible Diligence, I daily, and nightly attended, at those Houses where persons . . . of the most distinguished Merit used to meet, and display their Talents: With what Attention I listened to all their Discourses . . . I say, if all this were known to the World, I think it would be no great Presumption in me to expect at a proper Juncture, the publick Thanks of both Houses of Paliament, for the Service and Honour I have done to the whole Nation, by my single Pen.
ALTHOUGH I have never once been charged with the least tincture of Vanity . . . I will venture to say, without Breach of Modesty, that I, who have alone, with this Right Hand, subdued Barbarism, Rudeness, and Rusticity; who have established, and fixed for ever, the whole System of all true Politeness, and Refinement in Conversation; should think my self most inhumanely treated by my countrymen, and would accordingly resent it as the highest Indignity, to be put on the Level, in Point of Fame, in after Ages, with Charles XII. late King of Sweden.
AND yet, so incurable is the Love of Detraction . . . that I have been assured . . . how some of my Enemies have industriously whispered about, that one Isaac Newton, an Instrument-Maker . . . and afterwards a Workman in the Mint . . . might possibly pretend to vye with me for Fame in future Times.
(PW IV: 121–22)
Highly reminiscent of the prefatory matter to A Tale of a Tub, written some forty years earlier, Swift’s parody of the self-congratulatory authorial introduction reminds the reader that hubris is the epidemic disease of modernity.
As with most of Swift’s satires, we must ask ourselves how the fiction of Polite Conversation (Wagstaff and his project) is related to the parody or parodies (the dialogues), if we are to take the full measure of its meaning. Wagstaff’s failure is one of judgment. His absurdly fulsome self-appraisal reveals not only his presumption and vanity, but also his lack of perspective. Like the interlocutors in the dialogues he records, he is too self-absorbed to perceive the truth about himself or his world. Wagstaff’s injudicious appraisal of what is genuinely polite in matters of discourse is of a piece with his approval of atheism, his moral laxity, and his unreflective preoccupation with modern convention. Judgments about language, about religion and politics, and about the worth of one’s endeavors cannot be partitioned, Swift’s satire insists, because forms of language are inextricably linked to forms of life, and the words one chooses for oneself and approves of in others are necessarily an integral aspect of how one elects to live. The coherence of linguistic parody and social satire in both Wagstaff’s “Introduction” and the dialogues together demonstrate that, for Swift, discursive acts – Wagstaff’s writing, the gentry’s speaking, and our reading – are not merely adjuncts of thought, but rather are themselves essential critical performances among the many judgments that constitute our lives as moral beings.
Parody almost always engenders in the reader a heightened consciousness of language and of the conventions governing its deployment. When, as in the dialogues, the parody is expressly about the everyday forms of language that govern common social interactions – the morning visit, the dinner conversation, and talk over tea – then the effect on the reader’s awareness is further intensified. Again using parody to parade the execrable as if it were excellence, Swift raises questions about contemporary notions of politeness, challenges the alleged superiority of the ruling class, and ridicules conversation manuals and other “how-to” books offering shortcuts to genuine cultural attainments. Crucially, he demonstrates not only the close connection between style and manners, but between language and morals.
In addition, Swift surely satirizes himself in his creation of Wagstaff as such an obvious alter-ego, and parodies his own schemes for linguistic reform – especially as advanced in A Proposal for Correcting . . . the English Tongue – in his production of a spurious exemplar that will fix “for ever, the whole System of all true Politeness, and Refinement in Conversation” (PW IV: 122). Swift was obviously deeply pleased about having finally completed a work he had begun more than thirty years ago. He had struggled over it intermittently and even despaired of ever being able to complete it (C III: 219, 293, 439), but eventually he had produced a masterpiece. One way of understanding the excessive claims of Wagstaff, then, is to see them as a comic displacement of Swift’s own pride. His parody delights in its own excess as he strings together so many proverbs, catch-phrases, and clichés with admirable facility; like Wagstaff, Swift seems to revel in the fact that he has so seduously recorded them all and finally found a way to put his efforts on display. Although he was among the most rhetorically self-conscious and linguistically judicious writers of his generation, Swift does not fail to implicate himself in the satirical program of Polite Conversation. Perhaps he did not let himself escape in the hope that we too might be moved to exercise our capacity for judgment with greater truthfulness – and recognize ourselves in satire’s revealing glass.
“I look upon myself, in the capacity of a clergyman,” explained Swift, “to be one appointed by Providence for defending a post assigned me, and for gaining over as many enemies as I can” (PW IX: 262). Accordingly, Swift wages a satirical campaign against laziness of mind and passive acceptance by repeatedly exposing the implications of his adversaries’ writings, attitudes, pronouncements, and policies. Swift’s satires are in some senses akin to the coney-catching pamphlets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which – even as they delight in felonious energies – expose crime, reveal a vocabulary of deceit, and alert their readers to the snares awaiting them in the wide world. The coney-catching pamphlets, with their professed purpose of “discovering cozenage” (that is, revealing the deceits of common thieves, crooked gamesters, and smooth-tongued confidence men), both entertained readers and ostensibly equipped them to go about more safely in the midst of villainy. Swift’s satires, though they belong to a different rhetorical universe, have an analogous function. One crucial difference, however, is that the coney-catching pamphlets invariably assume that it is always an external force that misleads the victim, whereas Swift’s works inevitably are written with an acute awareness that the dupe is perfectly capable of deceiving himself. Although many of Swift’s satires are occasional productions written to address specific instances of irresponsibility, ignorance, vanity, or vice, the texts suggest that the deeper problem to be addressed is the gullibility of humankind.
Swift did not live long enough to hear the words of John Philpot Curran’s “Speech on the Right of Election of the Lord Mayor of Dublin” (1790), though its most memorable sentence captures the raison d’être of his satirical writings: “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of the crime, and the punishment of his guilt.” Swift’s satires promote a vigilance against the stratagems of those who would abridge the liberty of living in the truth. Again and again, Swift strives in his satirical writings to help his readers “to arm themselves,” to heighten their awareness of the flimflammery that is pandemic in the modern world (PW III: 141). Living in the midst of con-men who would gull the public for their own ends – Marlborough, Wotton, Shaftesbury, Hobbes, Walpole, court ladies, advocates of religious enthusiasm, projectors – Swift uses parody to reveal the workings of their confidence games and to establish in his readers a salutary wariness. This is one clergyman who insists that we not take things on faith. (Revelation, belonging to a different order of truth, would constitute an exception for the doctrinally orthodox Swift.) Even commonly held truths, he recognized, were often rooted in partial knowledge and shared misperceptions. Swiftian satire, with its lack of determinate authority and its often multiple ambiguities, attempts to foster critical discernment and to cultivate in its readers the art of disbelief.
1. On reader implication in Swift’s satires, see Frank Boyle, Swift as Nemesis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
2. For an excellent discussion of this much misunderstood form, see John M. Bullitt, “Swift’s ‘Rules of Raillery,’” in Harry Levin (ed.) Veins of Humor, Harvard English Studies 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 93–108.
3. For a corrective to this last problem, see Philip Harth, “Swift’s Self-Image as a Satirist,” in Hermann Real and Heinz J. Vienken (eds.) Proceedings of the First Munster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985), pp. 113–21, which situate Swift’s famous letters of September 29 and November 26, 1725 (C III: 102–05, 116–19) both as responses to Pope’s remarks and as fulfilling traditional rhetorical roles.
4. Horace, Satires 2.1, lines 24–29.
5. See P. K. Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 71–117 and 185–201.
6. For a useful catalogue of the many kinds of discourse in Swift’s most popular work, see Roger Lund, “Parody in Gulliver’s Travels,” in Edward J. Reilly (ed.) Approaches to Teaching Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (New York: Modern Language Association, 1988), pp. 81–88.
7. For a helpful history and its relation to satire, see Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
8. See, for example, Andrew Varney, “Swift on the Causes of War: An Instance of Self-Parody,” Notes and Queries 35 (233) no. 2 (1988), 181–83.
9. See T. H. Banks, Jr. (ed.) The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1928), p. 49.
10. See Jean-Paul Forster, Jonathan Swift: The Fictions of the Satirist (Berne: Peter Lang, 1998).