Page 145 - Gullivers

testimony. The easy urbanity of his mentor Sir William Temple is aped
in the surface smoothness of the writing. This is then undercut and sabotaged by the extremes of the examples offered and ultimately by the absurdity of the conclusions that are allowed to follow. A Tale of a Tub includes this strategy with Swist’s de-bunking of both the ancient Herodotus and of his contemporaries’ rhetoric. The Battle of the Books is another example of Swist having fun at the expense of newspapers and journalists and
their attempts to engage with contemporary history. Here he mocks the inadequacies of inappropriate ancient models of analysis as well as contemporary thinking.
In order to invoke the moral dimension of contemporary historical and political debates Swist takes, as his starting point, one of the multiplicity of maxims that his education and his contemporary intellectual climate offered. Through this use of maxims Swist highlighted the moral shortcomings of contemporary historical arguments. Current political concerns could be taken back to a supposedly innocent, underlying maxim, part of the repertoire of formulæ of political and moral philosophy. Other starting points were contemporary political pronouncements or the ideological assumptions that underpinned contemporary attitudes. For example, the basic premise of equality of all subjects of the realm of the United Kingdom involved in the Act of Union is employed successfully as the basis for the dissent encoded by Swist in
The Drapier’s Letters.
These are invoked only to be satirised. Swist’s writing can devour any
maxim in a wave of details, false trails and earnest argument that gradually gives way to chaos. Beginning with a seeming embrace, his writing eventually subverts the very orthodoxies he allegedly champions. The end result is osten a degree of clarity and a new conviction of the distance between a current political situation and its alleged moral justification. A Modest Proposal, Swist’s most outspoken and most audacious political work, (wherein he suggests that the hungry Irish
VII. The Influence of Jonathan Swist on Anglo-Irish Writing 139