Most of the stylistic techniques used by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels are based on irony and sarcasm, satire in a word. Obviously, the aim of the employment of these devices is a bitter social criticism directed against the well-defined and clear-cut target: the new society and the new values of the old puritan bourgeoisie that have now become the wealthy middle classes represented by the Whigs. The grotesque exaggerations and absurd juxtapositions that we find everywhere in the novel are meant to mock and deride the politicians that control Parliament and the government after the 1688 revolution, especially the Whigs.
Swift, as a good Tory clergyman who even represented the episcopal or ‘Anglican’ Church of Ireland in the British Parliament, is probably too conservative for the new times; and too critical for the new rich, the world of mercantilism, accumulation of wealth, and early capitalism. That new petty bourgeoisie and their petty materialist values, symbolised by the also small Lilliputians, are responsible, for the conservative Tories and for all things evil in the realm. If Swift dislikes the small Lilliputians, he detests the Broabdingnags. Through a discourse loaded with irony and sarcasm, he mocks these giants that present themselves as a model of morality. The target of his criticism is now Deism, the new secular, but not less rigid version of Puritanism to which the Whigs seemed to adhere with the same passion with which their ancestors had embraced Calvinism. With fine irony, Swift tells us that if Reason, and not Revelation is the way to God as the Deists maintained, Deism will be the best way to depravation and immorality. In Book II Swift launches a merciless attack against the rationalism and the cult to the ‘Goddess Reason’ of the eighteenth century.
Probably, the fact that the Whigs seemed to win in most elections led Swift to identify the English with the Whigs, and to believe that the majority of the citizens of the kingdom had lost that common sense that characterised the average man of the past; and probably this fact also led him to praise the horses, the inhabitants of Hoynhnhmn who think clearly, act justly and are capable of distinguishing wrong and right. Those beings, unlike the new society of his own country, are innocent and full of benevolence. If it is true that good satires do not only criticise but also show an ideal against which to measure just how bad current circumstances are; if this is true, it would be easier to understand why, in this novel, to a certain extent, the horses represent the ideal human beings. Swift without any doubt liked animals, but in this case he is using them metaphorically in order to mock and satirise human behaviour, and somehow, although from a deeply different perspective he anticipated Nietzsche: “Seit ich die Menschen kenne, liebe ich die Tiere!”
Works Cited:
Hammond, Brean, and Shaun Regan. Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660-1789. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. Ed. Albert J. Rivero. New York: Norton, 2002.
Clegg, Jeanne. "Swift on False Witness." Studies in English Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 44:3 (Summer 2004), pp. 461 ff.
Excellent post, Luis. You could also add some references to Book III since the futility of some of the scientific endeavors of Swift's time is also one of his targets. Moreover, this connects pretty well with the philosophical background of the time where human mind became the measure of all things.
ReplyDeleteGrade 5