AUGUSTAN SATIRE:

ALEXANDER POPE
& JONATHAN SWIFT
Lecture 3
First Year | English Minor
Alexander Pope
(1688-1744)
 Born in 1688, the year of the Glorious
Revolution that sees the Protestant Queen Mary
and King William of Orange on the English throne

 Pope’s marginality
I. religious-political: Catholic & Tory [brought
up in a Catholic family & great admirer of the
Tory ministry under Queen Anne]
II. physical-social: diminutive stature and
deformed spine [tuberculosis of the spine
known today as ‘Pott’s disease’]

 Despite all this, highly-esteemed professional

poet:

An Essay on Criticism (1711)

The Rape of the Lock (1712)
Windsor Forest (1713)
Translation of the Illiad (by 1720)
The Dunciad (1728)
Essay on Man (1733-1734)
Alexander Pope
(1688-1744)
 self-taught in the classics [models drawn from
classical poetics & reliance on mock-heroic]:

i. Horace & Juvenal [classical satire]

ii. Homer & Virgil [epic poetry]
iii. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden
[established English verse]

London literary society:

 The Scriblerus Club [founded in 1714]:

Jonathan Swift, Thomas Parnell, John Gay,
John Arbuthnot, Henry St. John, 1st Viscount
Bolingbroke [tories] (cf. the Whig ‘Kit-Cat
Club’)
 Contributed to The Guardian & The Spectator:
Joseph Addison & Richard Steele [whigs]
 also: William Congreve, Samuel Garth, William
Trumbull, etc.
 Pope admired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
 Pope’s Essay on Man:
an overview
 see Arthur O. Lovejoy [historian of ideas]: i. the principle of
plenitude, ii. the principle of hierarchy, iii. the principle of continuity
 man as the middle link in the great chain of being: a paradoxical
position
 Pope’s Essay on Man purports to ‘to vindicate the ways of God to
man’

Premise: God has misplaced man in the great chain.

Pope’s answer: human pride (and ignorance)
i. man’s relative lack of importance: all links in the chain exist for
their own sake and are dependent upon one another, man is closer
to insects than he is to God
ii. the three principles combined: by necessity, the great chain of
being must include creatures such as human beings (‘Then, in the
scale of reas'ning life, 'tis plain/ There must be somewhere, such a
rank as man’)
iii. God’s design: the universe is the harmonious creation of a
benevolent God (‘Whatever is, is right’)

 Deism
God as clockmaker or architect, mechanistic worldview, rational-natural
religion, the argument by design, free-thinking
 Theodicy and philosophical optimism
Evil understood as part of the harmonious design of the world (cf.
Christian myth of the Fall) (‘All partial evil, universal good’)
JONATHAN SWIFT
1667-1745
Today

On our agenda for today:

 Jonathan Swift as anti-modern:

a key figure in the Enlightenment debate
between ancients and moderns in which he
clearly emerges on the side of the former (yet
this position is complicated by a pervasive
use of irony and play of perspectives)

 Gulliver’s Travels as allegorical satire

(directed in various ways at the modern
European world)
I. satire and parodic treatment of modern
writing (travel books, novels, rising
popularity of deeply personal
autobiographical writings and memoirs)
II. satire of human nature (pessimistic-
Swiftian strain of anthropology)
III. Swiftian dominant use of unstable
narrative irony
Swift as anti-modern
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

 key interlocutor in the larger

Enlightenment intellectual quarrel
between ancients and moderns (A Tale of
a Tub and The Battle of the Books,
published in 1704)

 personal secretary to Sir William Temple

(another significant English figure in the
querelle)

 an Anglo-Irish cleric (became Dean of

St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin) and
political pamphleteer on the side of the
Tories

 published Gulliver’s Travels in 1726,

followed by a revised version in 1735

 reputation as an eccentric and

misanthropist
Gulliver’s Travels
as allegorical satire
 satire directed mainly at travel books (and other related
writings) and their rising popularity and circulation in
Swift’s own day

I. Lemuel Gulliver as ship-doctor and then ship-

captain who reveals a specifically modern zest for
exploration and discovery as well as for scientific
invention/projection – ref. to the voyages of William
Dampier (yet Gulliver is an unwitting ‘explorer’
who makes accidental ‘voyages’ and ‘discoveries’)

II. modern concern for the new – novelties, marvels,

curiosities (journalistic impulse)

III. consistent reliance on an entire host of textual and

paratextual strategies for attaining
verisimilitude/probability and demonstrating
authenticity, such as map-making (ref. to Herman
Moll), precise anchoring in space (and time), use of
circumstantial detail (from the domains of
mathematics-geometry)

= all while describing strange and improbable worlds,

together with absurd or ridiculous extremes of humanity
Gulliver’s Travels as
allegorical satire
 satire and parodic treatment of the novel (as an emerging
genre in Swift’s own day)

A) allegorical satire, NOT novel:

I. often relies on a coherent system of allegorical

correspondences, which displaces the use of
concrete/particular details as anchors into the
contemporary 18th-century world
II. constant shift between or play with perspectives,
voices, discourses, which rejects a modern (hence,
novelistic) sense of unitary and coherent selfhood (yet
still manages to construct a moral centre through the
very use of irony)
III. Gulliver is a textual device, not an individual

A) critique of the novel:

I. parodies the novel’s reliance on minute circumstantial
detail that is often taken to absurd extremes
II. parodies the claim to historicity (from naïve empiricism
to extreme skepticism – see McKeon)
III. critiques the modern sense of self and individual
subjectivity as vain and egotistical, lacking a clear moral
centre (often through lack of narrative distance)
Gulliver’s Travels as
allegorical satire
‘I walked with the utmost Circumspection, to avoid
treading on any Stragglers, who might remain in the Streets,
although the Orders were very strict, that all People should
keep in their Houses, at their own Peril. The Garret
Windows and Tops of Houses were so crowded with
Spectators, that I thought in all my Travels I had not seen a
more populous Place. The City is an exact Square, each
Side of the Wall being five Hundred Foot long. The two
great Streets which run cross and divide it into four
Quarters, are five Foot wide. The Lanes and Alleys which I
could not enter, but only viewed them as I passed, are from
Twelve to Eighteen Inches. The Town is capable of holding
five Hundred Thousand Souls. The Houses are from three
to five Stories. The Shops and Markets well provided.’
Gulliver’s Travels as
allegorical satire
‘Thus, gentle Reader, I have given thee a faithful History* of my Travels for
Sixteen Years, and above Seven Months; wherein I have not been so studious
of Ornament as of Truth. I could perhaps like others have astonished thee
with strange improbable Tales; but I rather chose to relate plain Matter of
Fact in the simplest Manner and Style; because my principal Design was to
inform, and not to amuse thee.
It is easy for us who travel into remote Countries, which are seldom visited
by Englishmen or other Europeans, to form Descriptions of wonderful
Animals both at Sea and Land. Whereas, a Traveller’s chief Aim should be to
make Men wiser and better, and to improve their Minds by the bad, as well as
good Example of what they deliver concerning foreign Places.*
I could heartily wish a Law was enacted, that every Traveller, before he were
permitted to publish his Voyages, should be obliged to make Oath before the
Lord High Chancellor, that all he intended to print was absolutely true to the
best of his Knowledge; for then the World would no longer be deceived as it
usually is, while some Writers, to make their Works pass the better upon the
Publick, impose the grossest Falsities on the unwary Reader.’
Gulliver’s Travels
as allegorical satire
 What about Gulliver as a character?

I. unreliable narrator – naïve and grandiose

anti-hero and modern man (distance between
Gulliver as narrator and what we call the
‘implied author’ of the text or its moral centre)

II. no character development in time throughout

the text (the episodic, formless, and
fragmentary nature of early novels is here
potentially taken to an extreme) – failure of the
didactic impulse

III. Gulliver’s is a constantly shifting and unstable

voice – lack of complex internal subjectivity
and yet excessive subjectivity and concern with
the self, constantly shifting between distinct
and even opposing views/voices
Swift on human nature
 various letters from Swift to Pope written
in 1725, defending himself against charges
of misanthropy:

‘principally I hate and detest that animal

called man, although I heartily love John,
Peter, Thomas and so forth’ (29 September
1725)

‘I do not hate Mankind, it is vous autres who

hate them because you would have them
reasonable Animals, and are Angry for being
disappointed’ (26 November 1725)

 a pessimistic, Augustinian and Hobbesian-

Mandevillian strain of anthropology
(contrasted against Enlightenment views of
inherent human benevolence and
sensibility)
 minimizes human rationality or
denounces it as folly or absurdity
(inverting the chain of being)
Swift on human nature

 the book is permeated by allegorical images and

examples of human vice, folly, vanity, absurdity,
egoism, mediocrity, and violence with their
corollaries in various European societies and forms
of government
(e.g. the meanness of the Liliputians upon being
helped by Gulliver, the absurdity of their ongoing war
with Blefuscu, the King of Brobdingnag’s qualification
of the English as the most ‘odious vermin’ imaginable
against Gulliver’s Whig patriotism, the unprofitable
modern inventions created by the Academy of Lagado,
etc.)

Book IV:
 Houyhnhnms and Yahoos: allegorical images of the
two main parts and propensities of the human soul,
i.e. reason and self-love
 Gulliver (as representative of the European race of
‘Yahoos’) emerges at the same time as 1) standing
midway between the two as he possesses a
modicum of rationality and 2) a further-degenerated
‘Yahoo’
 the great chain of being is inverted and man is
placed on the lowest position
 Swift on human nature
‘When I had answered all his Questions, and his Curiosity seemed to
be fully satisfied; he sent for me one Morning early, and commanding
me to sit down at some Distance, (an Honour which he had never
before conferred upon me) He said, he had been very seriously
considering my whole Story, as far as it related both to my self and my
Country: That, he looked upon us as a Sort of Animals to whose Share,
by what Accident he could not conjecture, some small Pittance of
Reason had fallen, whereof we made no other Use than by its
Assistance to aggravate our natural Corruptions, and to acquire new
ones which Nature had not given us. That, we disarmed our selves of
the few Abilities she had bestowed; had been very successful in
multiplying our original Wants, and seemed to spend our whole Lives
in vain Endeavours to supply them by our own Inventions. That, as to
my self, it was manifest I had neither the Strength or Agility of a
common Yahoo; that I walked infirmly on my hinder Feet; had found
out a Contrivance to make my Claws of no Use or Defence, and to
remove the Hair from my Chin, which was intended as a Shelter from
the Sun and the Weather. Lastly, that I could neither run with Speed,
nor climb Trees like my Brethren (as he called them) the Yahoos in
this Country.
That, our Institutions of Government and Law were plainly owing to
our gross Defects in Reason, and by consequence, in Virtue; because
Reason alone is sufficient to govern a Rational Creature; which was
therefore a Character we had no Pretence to challenge,* even from the
Account I had given of my own People; although he manifestly
perceived, that in order to favour them, I had concealed many
Particulars, and often said the Thing whichwas not.’
 Swiftian Irony

 narrative irony = the playful dynamics between

the unreliable narrator (Gulliver) and implied
author (Swift?!) which constantly shift between
distance and rapprochement and may even be
said to overlap at times

 the voice of rationality and moral ideal of the

good life and proper government remains
unstable

 the book ends with Gulliver’s descent into

madness and misanthropy as he tries to emulate
the apparently perfectly virtuous and wise horses
 Swift on human nature

‘As soon as I entered the House, my Wife took me in

her Arms, and kissed me; at which, having not been
used to the Touch of that odious Animal for so many
Years, I fell in a Swoon for almost an Hour.* At the
Time I am writing, it is five Years since my last Return
to England: During the first Year I could not endure
my Wife or Children in my Presence, the very Smell
of them was intolerable; much less could I suffer them
to eat in the same Room. To this Hour they dare not
presume to touch my Bread, or drink out of the same
Cup; neither was I ever able to let one of them take me
by the Hand.* The first Money I laid out was to buy
two young Stone-Horses,* which I keep in a good
Stable, and next to them the Groom is my greatest
Favourite; for I feel my Spirits revived by the Smell
he contracts in the Stable. My Horses understand me
tolerably well; I converse with them at least four
Hours every Day. They are Strangers to Bridle or
Saddle; they live in great Amity with me, and
Friendship to each other.’