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9 - Systems satire: Swift.com

from PART II - LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Michael Seidel
Edited by
John Richetti
John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

Swift's satiric vision

It is one of those wonderful quirks of language and history that ‘Yahoo’ is now the name of an Internet search engine, whereas Jonathan Swift invented the word as the degenerate moniker for the most irredeemable creatures on earth ever to sling excrement. Swift approached the early eighteenth century as Luddites today approach the early twenty-first: the new is a source of deep anxiety. Not only did Swift resist experimental science, speculative philosophy, expanded credit-based trade economy, weapons technology and colonisation, but also modern ways of dispensing information – newspapers and journals, self-help literature, mass-culture entertainments, schemes for social improvement and memoir-based narratives. The more modern, progressive, immediate something was, the more Swift's satiric inner voice was suspiciously attuned to it and infuriated by it.

Swift's satire is abundant and various, but several themes and propositions dominate his work, some of which appear in his sermons, essays, and letters as well. One recurrent Swiftian notion holds that the human race is on a degenerative path. Things get worse for Swift; they do not get better: ‘But men degenerate every day, merely by the folly, the perverseness, the avarice, the tyranny, the pride, the treachery, or inhumanity of their own kind.’ Another notion holds that even bad things are made worse by a spirit of opposition that factionalises all institutions, ideas, loyalties. Swift writes to his friend and fellow satirist, Alexander Pope, on 10 January 1721, ‘the spirit of Faction hath so universally possessed the minds of men, that they are not at leisure to attend to any thing else’.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 235 - 258
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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References

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