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Gulliver the Preacher

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Everett Zimmerman
Everett Zimmerman*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

In his expository writings about religion, Swift suggests that moral fervor is often a disguise for immoral motives. He advises the preacher to avoid any pronounced display of personal qualities in his sermons and to try to eliminate the almost inevitable distortions caused by self-display. In his satires, Swift often has his persona say true things for reprehensible reasons. The satire then becomes primarily a study of the moral implications of the relationship of the speaker to his proposals, rather than primarily an incitement to practical action. In Gulliver's Travels the persona presents a view of man's evil that is generally in accord with the traditions of Christianity and of satire. But Swift shows us the immoral intentions of Gulliver; although Gulliver pretends that he wants to reform us, his pretense is a strategy for disguising his own evil from us and from himself. The satiric attack in the book then becomes double; Gulliver satirizes man, and Swift satirizes the motives for Gulliver's satire.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 5 , October 1974 , pp. 1024 - 1032
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 1031 Swift to Pope, 27 Nov. 1726. In The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), in, 189. Hereafter cited as Correspondence.

Note 2 in page 1031 Denis Donoghue, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), p. 162. I choose Donoghue's words to represent a conception of Gulliver; Donoghue is more persuasive than many who hold his view.

Note 3 in page 1031 In Lives of the English Poets, Everyman's Library Ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1925), H, 268.

Note 4 in page 1031 Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939–68), ix, 261. All references to Swift's prose, unless otherwise indicated, are to this edition and are noted parenthetically by volume and page.

Note 5 in page 1031 The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945), p. 233.

Note 6 in page 1032 See Herbert Davis, The Satire of Jonathan Swift (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 108–09, for a fine discussion of Swift's self-parody in this satire.

Note 7 in page 1032 Swift to Ford, 14 Aug. 1725. Correspondence, in, 87.

Note 8 in page 1032 “Swift's Yahoo and the Christian Symbols for Sin,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 15 (1954), 201–17.

Note 9 in page 1032 From A Critical and Philosophic Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles, rpt. in Swift: The Critical Heritage, ed. Kathleen Williams (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), p. 72.

Note 10 in page 1032 From Remarks on the Life and Writing of Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, rpt. in Swift: The Critical Heritage, p. 127.

Note 11 in page 1032 “Errors concerning the Houyhnhnms,” Modern Philology, 56 (1958), 93.

Note 12 in page 1032 William Bragg Ewald, Jr., The Masks of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 132–37, gives a detailed account of Gulliver's deviations from truth throughout the Travels.

Note 13 in page 1032 Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 165, comments on Gulliver's “automatic reactions as a correct modern—collecting specimens in Lilliput and weighing hailstones, keeping a cabinet of curiosities, and wishing to dissect a louse in Brobdingnag; showing his pride in England as well as in the latest ‘modern’ inventions for improving warfare.”

Note 14 in page 1032 For an extended study related to this point, see Maurice J. Quinlan, “Swift's Use of lateralization as a Rhetorical Device,” PMLA, 82 (1967), 516–21.

Note 15 in page 1032 Martin Price, Swift's Rhetorical Art: A Study in Structure and Meaning (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953), deals with Gulliver's limitations throughout the Travels: “Thoroughly literal, he can respond to images, but not to their metaphorical significance” (p. 100).

Note 16 in page 1032 Kathleen Williams, Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1958), p. 183, notes that clothes are a sign of sinfulness: “The signification was an old one among Christian moralists, who inferred from Genesis that the urge to clothe ourselves is an urge to cover our nakedness both of body and of mind, and a direct consequence of the Fall.” Price comments on Swift's use of clothes throughout his works: “Clothes in general show man's acceptance of his place in the natural order, neither beast nor angel, and man's particular dress signifies his rational acceptance of his proper place in a social order” (p. 105).

Note 17 in page 1032 Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968). pp. 119–42, deals with Gulliver's Travels as a variation on Turing's game, the object of which is to distinguish a man from a machine. Here perhaps the game is to distinguish Gulliver from an authentic satirist.

Note 18 in page 1032 The Cankered Muse (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 14–30.

Note 19 in page 1032 Raymond Bentman, “Satiric Structure and Tone in the Conclusion of Gulliver's Travels,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 11 (1971), 535–48, deals with the alternations of tone in the last book.

Note 20 in page 1032 “The Conciseness of Swift,” Essays on the Eighteenth Century Presented to David Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945), pp. 15–32.

Note 21 in page 1032 For a differing view of Gulliver's development, one more sympathetic to Gulliver's final attempts at self-reform, see Donald Greene's introd. to Gulliver's Travels, ed. Clauston Jenkins (New York: Bantam, 1971).