Page 144 - Gullivers

whom many readers retain an ambivalent attitude, admiring his passion and his power of language while despairing of his misogyny and his class prejudices. None, however, doubt his power as a satirist, nor his important influence on his successors.
What Swist bequeathed to future generations of Irish writers was not the concern to centralise the plight of Ireland itself, as this would prove an inevitable preoccupation as the country suffered continually throughout the following centuries, but his legacy is most pronounced in the continued employment of
a literary strategy which allowed Anglo-Irish writers to articulate their ongoing predicaments in powerful and innovative ways. Swist emerged from his long apprenticeship with Sir William Temple sharing two central beliefs with his former master. The first is the conviction that human nature, over space and time, is fundamentally the same imperfect entity and, secondly, that the true
end point of the study of history and the true examination of historical episodes is a form of moral philosophy. Swist shared Temple’s belief that all historical enquiry reverts to questions of moral philosophy. History here is not factual
lists of dates, events and personages, related dryly in academic treatises. It must be ‘alive and breathing’ Swist demanded, imbued with insight and passion.
But most importantly, historical events have a moral dimension that needs
to be examined and contemporary historical moments deserve to be subjected
to moral questioning.
Swist’s experience of imperfect humanity and his immediate experience
of history in the making in the disputes and debates raging around him led him to adopt a literary strategy in line with his beliefs. This strategy depended on a literary doubleness in Swist’s writing where the surface narrative is always shadowed by a playful, satirical, sometimes devious, osten anarchic double. This is not just an undertow of biting, witty irreverence, at once comic and serious, sometimes tinged with horror, but a powerful tool that undermines, and in many cases eventually yields, an overwhelming assault on the original
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