Jonathan Swift, by, Charles Jervas
For a website devoted to whether and how literature can change lives, satire presents a special case. That’s because satire seems to have changing lives as its goal. Because of this apparent agenda, it fell out of favor with the high culture crowd in the heyday of the New Criticism. The New Critics, who dominated English literary studies in the 1950’s and 1960’s, felt that literature should carry us beyond life, not dirty its hands with the mundane. Most literary scholars now believe that literature dirties its hands in all kinds of ways. But can it effect substantive change in the world?
Jonathan Swift has a very witty follow-up to Gulliver’s Travels where he addresses this question. Gulliver (not to be confused with Swift) writes a prefatory letter for a new edition of Gulliver’s Travels in which he regrets having published the work. He says that the publisher claims that the book would do some good but that, unfortunately, the yahoos have proved to be “a species of animal utterly incapable of amendment by precepts or examples.” Here is Gulliver’s proof that Gulliver’s Travels hasn’t had any effect:
…for instead of seeing a full stop put to all abuses and corruptions, at least in this little island [England], as I had reason to expect, behold after above six months warning, I cannot learn that my book hath produced one single effect according to mine intentions; I desired you would let me know by a letter, when party and faction were extinguished; judges learned and upright; pleaders honest and modest, with some tincture of common sense; and Smithfield [the law district] blazing with pyramids of law books [abstract law being useless]; the young nobility’s education entirely changed; the physicians banished [for being incompetent]; the female Yahoos abounding in virtue, honor, truth, and good sense; courts and levees of great ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; wit, merit, and learning rewarded; all disgracers of the press in prose and verse, condemned to eat nothing but their own cotton [paper] and quench their thirst with their own ink. These, and a thousand other reformations, I firmly counted upon by your encouragement; as indeed they were plainly deducible from the precepts delivered in my book. And, it must be owned that seven months were a sufficient time to correct every vice and folly to which Yahoos are subject; if their natures had been capable of the least disposition to virtue or wisdom . . .
Swift is doing a couple of things here. First of all, he is satirizing those satirists who have an inflated sense of their own importance and effectiveness. Perhaps he is satirizing the grandiose hopes he himself had for Gulliver’s Travels. The idea that someone will become more virtuous by reading a book is mocked here. But his mockery doesn’t keep Swift from hoping his satire will do some good. Even as Gulliver laments his book’s lack of impact, Swift uses his words to get in some more satiric shots.
This is not the only place where Swift talks about the ineffectiveness of satire. He writes elsewhere that satire is a mirror “wherein every man will commonly discern every face but his own.” We may have fun laughing at others when we recognize them in a satiric work, but Swift believes that our pride keeps us from seeing ourselves.
So why, if satire is ineffective, should a social activist like Swift keep returning to it?Perhaps because some part of him believed that it would do some good somehow.If we are not so far gone as Swift’s yahoos are—and most of us are not—then we will use satire to check and correct ourselves.Satire nudges us towards self-transformation, even though it has no illusions that the transformation process will ever be complete.Or at least Swift’s satire doesn’t have that illusion.It is Gulliver, not Swift, who thinks in absolutist terms, believing humans to be irredeemable and satire to be useless if it doesn’t effect total change.
Indeed, Swift may be using his satire of satirists to check and correct himself. All humans, including he himself, are susceptible to puffing themselves up and looking down on others. Satire helps keeps us humble. Or does so if we apply its words to ourselves.
I began this discussion of Swift last week addressing the issue of idealism. Barack Obama promised “yes, we can,” inspiring millions of voters to believe in substantive change—change in energy policy, health care, education, economy and high finance, our handling of terrorism, middle east policy, European relations, Muslim relations, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other areas. It doesn’t take Nostradamus to foresee that we will fall short in a number of these areas. Swift’s satire can help us understand and handle the threatened disillusion. Disillusion, disgust and disengagement stem from the pride of thinking that all is lost if we don’t get our way. The self knowledge that Swift’s satire offers will actually help us keep our ideals alive while providing the perspective we need to keep on working towards them, even when the dream gets muddied. Satire can be strong and unpleasant medicine—especially in the hands of someone like Swift—but that’s what makes it effective. Luckily, in Swiftian satire there is humor and wit to help the medicine go down.