Paper-2 Neo-Classical Literature
Jonathan
Swift life and works
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19
October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then
for the Tories), poet
and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. He is remembered for works such as Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. Swift originally published all of his works under pseudonyms – such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, MB Drapier – or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire: the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.
Youth
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. He was the second child and only son of
Jonathan Swift (1640–1667) and his wife Abigail Erick (or Herrick), of Frisby on the Wreake. His
father, a native of Goodrich, Herefordshire, accompanied his brothers to Ireland to seek their
fortunes in law after their Royalist father's estate was brought to ruin during the English Civil War.
Swift's father died in Dublin before he was born, and his mother returned to England.
He was left in the care of his influential uncle, Godwin, a close friend and
confidant of Sir John Temple,
whose son later employed Swift as his secretary.
Swift's family had several interesting literary
connections: His grandmother, Elizabeth (Dryden) Swift, was the niece of Sir Erasmus Dryden, grandfather of the poet John
Dryden. The same grandmother's aunt,
Katherine (Throckmorton) Dryden, was a first cousin of Elizabeth, wife of Sir Walter
Raleigh. His great-great grandmother,
Margaret (Godwin) Swift, was the sister of Francis
Godwin, author of The Man in the Moone which influenced parts of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. His
uncle, Thomas Swift, married a daughter of the poet and playwright Sir William Davenant, a
godson of William Shakespeare.
His uncle Godwin Swift (1628–1695) a benefactor, took
primary responsibility for the young Jonathan, sending him with one of his
cousins to Kilkenny
College (also attended by the philosopher George Berkeley). In
1682, financed by Godwin's son, Willoughby, he attended Dublin University (Trinity College, Dublin), from where he received his BA in 1686, and developed
his friendship with William
Congreve. Swift was studying for his
Master's degree when political troubles in Ireland surrounding the Glorious Revolution
forced him to leave for England in 1688, where his mother helped him get a
position as secretary and personal assistant of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Farnham.
Temple was an English diplomat who, having arranged the Triple Alliance of 1668, retired from public service to his country estate to
tend his gardens and write his memoirs. Gaining the confidence of his employer,
Swift "was often trusted with matters of great importance." Within
three years of their acquaintance, Temple had introduced his secretary to William III, and
sent him to London to urge the King to consent to a bill for triennial
Parliaments.
When Swift took up his residence at Moor Park, he met Esther Johnson, then
eight years old, the daughter of an impoverished widow who acted as companion
to Temple's sister, Lady Giffard. Swift acted as her tutor and mentor, giving
her the nickname "Stella", and the two maintained a close but
ambiguous relationship for the rest of Esther's life.
In 1690, Swift left Temple for Ireland because of his
health, but returned to Moor Park the following year. The illness, fits of
vertigo or giddiness – now known to be Ménière's disease—would
continue to plague Swift throughout his life. During this second stay with
Temple, Swift received his M.A. from Hart Hall, Oxford in
1692. Then, apparently despairing of gaining a better position through Temple's
patronage, Swift left Moor Park to become an ordained priest in the Established
Church of Ireland and
in 1694 he was appointed to the prebend of Kilroot in the Diocese of Connor, with his parish located at Kilroot, near Carrickfergus in County
Antrim.
Life and Work
Swift
was a prolific writer, notable for his satires. The most recent collection of
his prose works (Herbert Davis, ed. Basil Blackwell, 1965–) comprises fourteen volumes.
A recent edition of his complete poetry (Pat Rodges, ed. Penguin, 1983) is 953
pages long. One edition of his correspondence (David Woolley, ed. P. Lang,
1999) fills three volumes.
Gulliver‘s Travels
Part I: A Voyage to
Lilliput (4 May 1699 – 13 April 1702)
Mural depicting Gulliver surrounded by citizens of
Lilliput.
The book begins with a short preamble in which Lemuel Gulliver, in
the style of books of the time, gives a brief outline of his life and history
before his voyages. He enjoys travelling, although it is that love of travel
that is his downfall.
During his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after
a shipwreck and finds himself a prisoner of a race of tiny people, less than 6
inches tall, who are inhabitants of the island country of Lilliput.
After giving assurances of his good behaviour, he is given a residence in
Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the court. From there, the book follows
Gulliver's observations on the Court of Lilliput. He is also given the
permission to roam around the city on a condition that he must not harm their
subjects. Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbours, the
Blefuscudians, by stealing their fleet. However, he refuses to reduce the
island nation of Blefuscu to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and
the court. Gulliver is charged with treason for, among other
"crimes", "making water" in the capital (even though he was
putting out a fire and saving countless lives). He is convicted and sentenced
to be blinded, but with the assistance of a kind friend, he escapes to
Blefuscu. Here he spots and retrieves an abandoned boat and sails out to be
rescued by a passing ship, which safely takes him back home. This book of the Travels
is a topical political satire.
Part II: A Voyage to
Brobdingnag (20 June 1702 – 3 June 1706)
When the sailing ship Adventure is blown off
course by storms and forced to sail for land in search of fresh water, Gulliver
is abandoned by his companions and found by a farmer who is 72 feet (22 m)
tall (the scale of Brobdingnag is about 12:1, compared to Lilliput's 1:12, judging from
Gulliver estimating a man's step being 10 yards (9.1 m)). He brings
Gulliver home and his daughter cares for Gulliver. The farmer treats him as a
curiosity and exhibits him for money. Since Gulliver is too small to use their
huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the queen commissions a small house to be
built for him so that he can be carried around in it; this is referred to as
his 'travelling box'. Between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps and
being carried to the roof by a monkey, he discusses the state of Europe with
the King. The King is not happy with Gulliver's accounts of Europe, especially
upon learning of the use of guns and cannons. On a trip to the seaside, his travelling
box is seized by a giant eagle which drops Gulliver and his box into the sea,
where he is picked up by some sailors, who return him to England.
This book compares the truly moral man to the
representative man; the latter is clearly shown to be the lesser of the two.
Swift, being in Anglican holy orders, was keen to make such comparisons.
Part III: A Voyage to
Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan (5 August 1706 – 16 April 1710 )
After Gulliver's ship was attacked by pirates, he is marooned close to a desolate rocky island near India.
Fortunately, he is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to the arts of music and mathematics
but unable to use them for practical ends. Since Swift was in Anglican holy
orders, he, like so many of them, viewed reason as what Martin Luther had
called "that great whore" and regarded Deism, whose practitioners attacked revealed religions, with
pure horror.
Laputa's custom of throwing rocks down at rebellious
cities on the ground seems the first time that the air strike was conceived as
a method of warfare. Gulliver tours Laputa as the guest of a low-ranking
courtier and sees the ruin brought about by the blind pursuit of science
without practical results, in a satire on bureaucracy and on the Royal Society and
its experiments. At the Grand Academy of Lagado, great resources and manpower
are employed on researching completely preposterous schemes such as extracting
sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble for use in pillows, learning how to
mix paint by smell, and uncovering political conspiracies by examining the
excrement of suspicious persons (see muckraking).
Gulliver is then taken to Balnibarbi to await a trader
who can take him on to Japan. While waiting for a passage, Gulliver takes a
short side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib, where he visits a magician's dwelling and discusses
history with the ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of
the "ancients versus moderns" theme in the book. In Luggnagg he
encounters the struldbrugs, unfortunates who are immortal. They do not have the
gift of eternal youth, but suffer the infirmities of old age and are considered
legally dead at the age of eighty. After reaching Japan, Gulliver asks the
Emperor "to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed upon my countrymen
of trampling upon the crucifix," which the Emperor does. Gulliver returns home,
determined to stay there for the rest of his days.
Part IV: A Voyage to the
Country of the Houyhnhnms (7 September 1710 – 5 December 1715)
Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home,
Gulliver returns to the sea as the captain of a merchantman as he is bored with
his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage he is forced to find new additions
to his crew, whom he believes to have turned the rest of the crew against him.
His crew then mutiny, and after keeping him contained for some time resolve to
leave him on the first piece of land they come across and continue as pirates.
He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes upon a race of hideous, deformed
and savage humanoid creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy.
Shortly afterwards he meets a race of horses who call themselves Houyhnhnms (which in their language means "the perfection of
nature"); they are the rulers, while the deformed creatures called Yahoos are human beings in their base form.
Gulliver becomes a member of a horse's household, and
comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, rejecting
his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which
they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an
Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of
reason, is a danger to their civilisation, and expels him.
He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese
ship, and is surprised to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo, is a wise,
courteous and generous person. He returns to his home in England, but he is
unable to reconcile himself to living among 'Yahoos' and becomes a recluse,
remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending
several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables; in effect becoming
insane.
This book uses coarse metaphors to describe human
depravity, and the Houyhnhms are symbolised as not only perfected nature but
also the emotional barrenness which Swift maintained that devotion to reason
brought.
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