Page 158 - Gullivers

hovel with their animals and even registering a litter of piglets as children of the household. In line with Gulliver and his descent into madness in his reverence for horses over humans, this community cannot distinguish between humans and animals, mistaking the old, stinking pig, Ambrose, for an elder of their tribe. There is much hilarity in the tale but behind its moments of high farce O’Brien, like Swist, offers a true tragedy. He exposes the truth behind the rhetoric of rural glamorisation but also in this focus on animals he takes the first principle of
the former imposed English identity for the Irish and demonstrates its aptness now in the impoverished conditions Ireland’s own government and self-serving image-makers impose.
Throughout the novel O’Brien operates to the Swistian formula again taking the English metaphor for the Irish peasant – the common image of the Irish with their pigs and later with simian connections – he takes these insulting metaphors, adds now the attributes of the more recent stage Gæl, and in the novel he raises the inevitable question of the Irish person’s humanity. One of his characters, Sitric (named aster the Viking hero, again echoing the aspirations
of the community that seem absurd in their conditions) eventually prefers
to live as an animal and departs for a life underwater as a seal. Depicting the Irish as compelled to live in the material and spiritual poverty that he outlines O’Brien equals the satiric quality of Swist’s A Modest Proposal in the bleakness of the vision he offers. Through Swist’s methods he offers powerful insights into the tragic situation that again the Irish were facing, proving himself a worthy successor to Swist in his capacity for hard-hitting satire.
Without Swist’s example and his talent as a precursor of literary strategies
for accurate and insightful exposure the literary encoding of the continuing travails of Irish society would not have been possible. Swist gave to subsequent generations of writers a sophisticated model for political satire that was inventive, insightful and above all effective and the Anglo-Irish literary tradition remains in the debt of this unlikely if not heroic exemplar.
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