Jonathan Swift

Swift, Jonathan 

Born Nov. 30, 1667, in Dublin; died there Oct. 19, 1745. English writer.

The son of a steward, Swift studied at Trinity College of the University of Dublin from 1682 to 1688. From 1689 to 1699 he was secretary and librarian to W. Temple, a retired diplomat and prominent essayist. In 1695, Swift became a clergyman, and in 1701, a doctor of theology.

In the early 1680’s, Swift tested his gift for the poetic genres and developed a compressed, parodic prose style. His first work, the pamphlet The Battle of the Books (1697), was a savage mockery of the defenders of the intellectual and cultural innovations of the new bourgeois civilization. Swift’s search for a literary form began with The Battle of the Books and was successfully resolved in A Tale of a Tub (1704), in which the first-person narrator is a hack writer compiling an encyclopedia of future insanity. Through his “author,” Swift expressed the religious, humanistic, and Utopian pretensions of bourgeois progress and exposed their intrinsic hypocrisy. This tale about three brothers, each of whom represents a branch of Christianity (Catholic, Anglican, and Calvinist), was a pretext for endless parodic digressions that used the resources of language to expose the latest intellectual distortions.

From 1701, when he obtained a position as a vicar in Laracor (Ireland), Swift came to London only for brief visits. He had already won fame as a political pamphleteer, and the Whigs considered him their supporter, but he emphasized his ideological and political independence with the pamphlets The Sentiments of a Church-of England Man (1708) and An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1709). During these years Swift created a stir with pamphlets in which, under the guise of Isaac Bicker-staff, a sage prophet and patriot, he used real-life examples to demonstrate the power of printed propaganda, which can arbitrarily invent and excise facts.

From 1710 to 1714, Swift formed close ties with the leaders of the Tory government, which was trying to extricate Great Britain from the War of the Spanish Succession and stabilize the domestic situation. He actively supported and guided government policies with his articles in the Examiner (1710–11), a journai, and with pamphlets, including The Conduct of the Allies (1711) and The Publick Spirit of the Whigs (1714).

The Journal to Stella, which was published posthumously, contains the daily letters and accounts sent by Swift from Laracor to Esther Johnson, his former ward and pupil, between 1710 and 1713.

In 1713, Swift was made dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Residing in Ireland almost uninterruptedly as a political exile, Swift joined the struggle for the violated rights of the Irish people, turning out pamphlets such as A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720) and A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents (1729). In the series A Drapier’s Letters (1723–24), Swift, reproducing the logic and language of the common man, so skillfully linked broad political agitation with concrete events that the British government barely prevented a national uprising in Ireland.

Swift’s work reached its peak with Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Simultaneously parodying and epitomizing travel literature, Swift discovers fantastical countries and comments satirically on the prospects and ideals of the European social structure, the comical, parodie reflection of which is the world of the Lilliputians. Free, sound common sense condemns man’s latest achievements in “The Voyage to Brobdingnag.” The “Voyage to Laputa” mocks the insanity of “pure” scientific progress, and the bankruptcy of bourgeois Enlightenment humanism is demonstrated in the “Voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhnms,” which offers an ironic choice between a utopia based on “horse sense” and an ape society similar to socially perverted human existence. Swift’s book was not a sermon of hopeless pessimism but a farsighted overview of the social and ideological tenets of bourgeois progress. It prompted the prominent artistic and literary theoretician A. V. Lunacharskii to call Swift the “lookout.” The most outstanding of Swift’s last works, which essentially repeat earlier themes and motifs, are the pamphlets Directions to Servants and A Serious and Useful Scheme to Make a Hospital for Incurables.

The chief technique in Swift’s satire was realistic parody. He presented absurdity and monstrosity as social norms, as actual and potential characterizations of the phenomena he described. His dramatic satire records the intellectual panorama of the early British Enlightenment.

WORKS

The Prose Works, vols. 1–14. Oxford, 1939–68.
The Poems, vols. 1–3. Oxford, 1958.
In Russian translation:
Pamflety. Moscow, 1955.
Skazka o bochke. Moscow, 1930.
Puteshestvie v nekotorye otdalennye strany Lemiuelia Gullivera. Moscow, 1967.

REFERENCES

Zabludovskii, M. D. “Satira i realizm Svifta.’ In the collection Realizm XVIII v. na Zapade. Moscow, 1956.
Levidov, N. Iu. Putesheslvie v nekolorye otdalennye strany: Mysli i chuvstva Dzhonatana Svifta. Moscow, 1964.
Murav’ev, V. Dzhonatan Svift. Moscow, 1968.
Craik, H. The Life of Jonathan Swift, vols. 1–2. London, 1894.
Quintana, R. The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift. London-New York, 1936.
Williams, K. Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise. Lawrence, Kan., 1958.
Ehrenpreis, I. Swift…. vols. 1–2. London, 1964–67.
Swift. Edited by C. J. Rawson. London (1971).

V. S. MURAV’EV