Food for Thought: Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and Other Writings

I hope you've brought your appetite, because today we're looking at some of Dr. Swift's shorter prose satires (along with a couple of poems) and he certainly gives us plenty to chew on.

"A Description of the Morning": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45266/a-description-of-the-morning

"A Description of a City Shower": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50578/a-description-of-a-city-shower

"The Battle of the Books": https://www.gutenberg.org/files/623/623-h/623-h.htm

"A Tale of a Tub": https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4737

"A Modest Proposal": https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm

Transcript

Oh, hello!  So glad you could make it.  Please, do take a seat.  Would you care for an aperitif?  I’ve already taken the liberty of ordering the wine.  Pairing is always so hard with new cuisine, but the sommelier assures me a nice beaujolais will be most satisfactory.

I’ve invited you all here to this lovely restaurant because today’s episode of The Classic English Literature Podcast offers a great deal of food for thought.  Our special guest this evening is one of the leading figures of 18th century English letters: a poet, essayist, and novelist, he is best remembered for his scathing satirical style.  Born in Dublin, he became a priest in the Church of Ireland and, in his final years, rose to the deanery of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  He’s no stranger to us – we met him briefly in episode 96 on the Battle of the Boyne.  He is, of course, Jonathan Swift.

The average man or woman on the street, if they know of Dean Swift, probably do so on the fame of his great novel, Gulliver’s Travels, and can conjure up images of a man tied down to a beach by dozens of tiny, curious people.  That novel, however, is not the subject of today’s episode.  We’ll set sail with Mr. Gulliver next time.  Today, I’d like to look at a few of Swift’s shorter prose works, with an especial focus on his notorious 1729 essay “A Modest Proposal.”  

So, everyone, may I ask that you charge your glasses.  Here’s to posting a 5-star review of the podcast on your favorite streaming service.  Here’s to making a modest financial contribution by clicking the “Support the Show” button, and here’s to Dr. Jonathan Swift!

The editors of an anthology of British literature note that Swift’s early poems, such as the one he wrote in celebration of William's victory at the Boyne, “do not presage the literary acclaim that was to come.”  Which is perhaps the most politic way to admit that the apprentice work of a later master is not all that it should be.  But there is some quite charming poetry in Swift’s early-ish  work.  I’m not going to dwell upon him as a versifier here as that is not the source of his indispensibility, but I heartily recommend a couple of his poems published originally in Richard Steele’s Tatler.  The first, called “A Description of the Morning”, is kind of an urban pastoral – what they called a “town eclogue” at the time.  It’s written in closed heroic couplets and includes a number of mock-epic touches as it describes the sunrise over the city: “Now hardly here and there a hackney-coach / Appearing, show’d the ruddy morn’s approach.”  The sun god Phoebus in a hackney, that’s good.  The rest of the poem shows servants preparing for the day or scurrying from their master’s bed, jailers returning the prisoners to their cells after a night of profitable petty theft, and schoolboys heading to class.  Just a bit of light satire in a vibrant little mise en scene.

Another Tatler poem is “A Description of a City Shower” from 1710, a year later.  It, too, offers a tongue-in-cheek rendering of London street life using bathetic classical allusion, such as when he compares the timid dandy hiding in his coach against the rain to the tale of the Trojan Horse, “Pregnant with Greeks impatient to be freed.”  It might be called a mock-georgic poem.  Now, we’ve not spoken of georgics here on the poddy, but it’s another classical poetic form – the most famous are Virgil’s Georgics – that concentrate upon rustic and rural themes.  However, unlike the pastoral, which emphasizes the leisure and pleasure of the countryside, the georgic stresses the labor and practical side of rural life.  

The reason I bring up these poems – apart from the fact that they are pleasurable to read and are keen examples of some minor genres – is the larger project they represent, and that is Swift’s participation – strangely belatedly, as it happens – in a great continental contest called Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, or the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns.  The battle pitted those who believed the classical world produced the best writers and scientists and thinkers against those who saw the modern world as surpassing in knowledge and power those of the olden days.  It led to rioting in the streets, manned barricades, and extrajudicial killings.  Tear gas, petrol bombs, and, most damaging of all, rhythmic chanting.

No, not at all, of course.  It’s one of those debates only important to people with an entirely warped sense of perspective.  But, those are the horses to which podcasts like this one have harnessed their wagons.  So, we’ll pretend it matters.  It had been going on in France since the late 1630s and had pretty much petered out by the 1690s.  But, young Swift was, at that time, secretary to one Sir William Temple, who had strong pro-Ancient sympathies, which were shared by the amanuensis.

In these poems, Swift uses classical forms and tropes to point out the debased culture of modern Europe.  They are subtle volleys in the querelle.  Things are less subtle in the first of Swift’s major prose satires: “The Battle of the Books,” written in 1697, but not published till 1704.  Its a fantastical allegory in which personified books in St. James's Library do battle over the merits of Ancient vs. Modern literature.  Figures like Homer, Pindar, and Virgil square off against Dryden and William Wotton.  

Given the mock-classical tone of his pseudo-eclogues and georgics, one should not be surprised that Swift took the side of the Ancients.  In the prologue to “Battle of the Books,” the speaker postulates that “The most ancient and natural grounds of quarrels are lust and avarice; which, though we may allow to be brethren, or collateral branches of pride, are certainly the issues of want.”  This, together with a metaphor about a group of hungry dogs, indicates the envy that modern authors have of their progenitors, and of the resentment it causes.  He then proceeds to relate how the quarrel started – at least this is what he was told:

This quarrel first began, as I have heard it affirmed by an old dweller in the neighbourhood, about a small spot of ground, lying and being upon one of the two tops of the hill Parnassus; the highest and largest of which had, it seems, been time out of mind in quiet possession of certain tenants, called the Ancients; and the other was held by the Moderns. But these disliking their present station, sent certain ambassadors to the Ancients, complaining of a great nuisance; how the height of that part of Parnassus quite spoiled the prospect of theirs, especially towards the east; and therefore, to avoid a war, offered them the choice of this alternative, either that the Ancients would please to remove themselves and their effects down to the lower summit, which the Moderns would graciously surrender to them, and advance into their place; or else the said Ancients will give leave to the Moderns to come with shovels and mattocks, and level the said hill as low as they shall think it convenient. To which the Ancients made answer, how little they expected such a message as this from a colony whom they had admitted, out of their own free grace, to so near a neighbourhood. That, as to their own seat, they were aborigines of it, and therefore to talk with them of a removal or surrender was a language they did not understand. 

Though Swift himself was a great supporter of classical learning, he leaves the result of the battle ambiguous.  Seven times in the pamphlet he pretends the manuscript has broken off or been damaged – including the work’s very last line: “And now . . . desunt cetera” – which means “the rest is missing.”  One might read this, in fact, as a sign of the intellectual humility for which the allegory argues – he does not presume to know the answer.  And he pictures the Ancients in that manner, as seekers of knowledge from the study and contemplation of history and nature, rather than the often dismissive attitude toward the past shown by arrogant Moderns.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the episode of the spider and the bee, a famous interlude which neatly encapsulates the argument.  The industrious bee represents the Ancients, flying from flower to flower, seeking knowledge and beauty wherever it may be found.  The spider, on the other hand, stays in a flimsy web of its own making.  The spider traps flies – insignificant creatures standing in for the trivial conquests and discoveries of modern thinkers.  In this fable, the bee creates wax and honey: illumination (like candles, yeah) and pleasure.  The bee provides beauty and moral guidance while the spider wallows in its own poisonous arrogance.

You must have heard the expression “standing on the shoulders of giants”?  That’s what Swift is talking about here.  We know the phrase from a letter Sir Isaac Newton wrote to Robert Hooke in 1675.  Indicating that his own contributions to natural philosophy only seem greater because he was able to use the work of previous scientists, like Galileo and Kepler, he writes: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”  The notion goes back well before Newton, of course, at least to the 12th century Bernard of Chartres.  Anyway, what we’re talking about here is that intellectual humility which Swift sees as lacking in much modern culture.

“The Battle of the Books” is often paired and published with another significant early satire called “A Tale of a Tub.”  Also from 1704.  Vanity and arrogance are once again the targets of the satire, but the venue here is religion, especially of the institutional variety.  In a preface, Swift explains his title – the tub bit, really.  Sailors would sometimes throw a tub overboard to distract a whale (how or why this worked I haven’t the foggiest, but I shall trust the good dean), and so his tale is like a tub to distract rabble-rousers, thus protecting social institutions.  Now, “tub” was also a colloquialism for the pulpit of a Dissenting preacher, so that’s cool.  And, a clever listener would also have sussed that the distractible whale is a nod to Hobbes’ Leviathan, which we covered in episode 90.

“A Tale of a Tub” follows the allegorical adventures of three brothers, each of whom is an avatar for a religious sect: brother Peter stands for Roman Catholicism, Martin the Church of England, and Jack, the Dissenters.  Now, these three receive identical coats (which symbolize Christian faith and practice) from their father (you know, God).  Now, Dad says to never, ever change anything about these coats.

Nil points for guessing what happens next.  The oldest brother Peter starts decorating his coat with ornaments like papal authority and transubstantiation (both of which are making a revival splash on the runways this season) and becomes a tyrant.  The brothers rebel.  The youngest, Jack, enraged, insists that the brothers follow the very letter of their instructions, but becomes so overwrought that he tries to purify his coat by removing anything that may smack of decoration and so rends it into tatters.  Martin, the middle brother, only removes the ornaments that would not damage the garment.  The brothers become estranged.  Peter's delusions of grandeur are mirrored by Jack’s fanatical madness.

OK – kind of government-issue allegorical satire.  But really, the most interesting bit of “A Tale of a Tub” – the most interesting character by far – is the narrator.  The guy’s intellectual arrogance and utter lack of common sense add another dimension to the piece.  The narrator interrupts the allegory from time to time to pontificate on various topics – one being digressions and interruptions.  The best of these is “A Digression Concerning the Original, the Use, and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth.”  The narrator speaks of a sect called the Aeolists, named for the Greek god of the winds, who “maintain the original cause of all things to be wind.”  From this develops the narrator’s doctrine of madness, which he asserts results from vapors rising up the body into the brain: “so human understanding, seated in the brain, must be troubled and overspread by vapors ascending from the lower faculties.”  Right, so gas – or wind – rises from the bowels to derange the mind.  In addition to opening the way for some fart jokes, Swift’s phony theory satirizes the rising materialism developing from thinkers like Descartes and Bacon, the belief that all mental, spiritual, and emotional states arise from physical causes.  The narrator then produces two examples of such madness: Henry IV and Louis XIV of France.  Henry launched an expedition into the Spanish Netherlands after being blue-balled and Louis’s famous fistula was the result of his overweening awesomeness.

A bit of scatalogical wagging is always a hit, but we must remember that, with Swift, the dirty joke is not its own point.  In looking at brothers Peter and Jack’s madness, and digressing upon the vapor theory, Swift really asks us to question the nature of sanity itself.  If madness is

a disturbance or transposition of the brain, by force of certain vapours issuing up from the lower faculties, then has this madness been the parent of all those mighty revolutions that have happened in empire, in philosophy, and in religion. . . . But when a man's fancy gets astride on his reason, when imagination is at cuffs with the senses, and common understanding, as well as common sense, is kicked out of doors, the first proselyte he makes is himself; and when that is once compassed, the difficulty is not so great in bringing over others; a strong delusion always operating from without as vigorously as from within.

In matters of Church and State, the institutions that circumscribe the lives of ordinary people, the insane demagogue is greatly to be feared.  For we can be duped so easily:

For, cant and vision are to the ear and the eye, the same that tickling is to the touch. Those entertainments and pleasures we most value in life, are such as dupe and play the wag with the senses. For, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. 

Happiness and pleasure are illusions: “what mighty advantages fiction has over truth.”  The narrator then begins to speculate on deceptions, illusions, things of the imagination, and wonders why they are less worthy of being said to exist than our memories are.  He then proposes that without imagination or illusion, reality is diminished.  I found myself a bit at sea here – the narrator’s sanity itself is not to be trusted, but his indictment of pure, cold reason and analysis appeals to the romantic in me.  He admits that “even I myself, the author of these momentous truths, am a person, whose imaginations are hard-mouthed, and exceedingly disposed to run away with his reason, which I have observed from long experience to be a very light rider, and easily shook off.”  So then, which is it?  Madness or reason?  And who gets to decide?

Well, of course, Swift is more subtle than that.  Because the mannequins of reason and emotion and imagination and sanity often change their clothes, and it can be hard to recognize them even in their everyday costumes.  

We should also remember that Swift is writing during a period of intellectual history called the Enlightenment, or just before it, depending on which historians you ask.  There is no doubt, however, that it is a period in which Renaissance humanism has been jacked up by the Scientific Revolution and the so-called classical values of reason, rationality, symmetry, and balance secure their primacy over supposedly gothic values of faith, intuition, and emotion.  We’ve seen it in the form of poetry itself – the nearly default use, by the late 1600s, of the heroic couplet.  It is a meter stately, measured, symmetrical, self-contained.

We can see such a fetishization of reason and logic in many of the pamphlets and essays produced in the period aiming at the improvement of society through disinterested rational projects.  One of the most famous comes from the pen of William Petty, a member of the Royal Society who held huge tracts of land in Ireland after its forced forfeiture by Roman Catholics.  In 1691, he presented a pamphlet entitled Political Arithmetick, a plan to turn the whole of Ireland into a farm by dispossessing its people, and using the produce to supply England.  The language he uses is dispassionately mathematical:

Now if a million of people be worth 70 pounds per head one with another, the whole are worth 70 millions; then the said people, reckoned as money at 5 per-cent interest, will yield 3 millions and a half per annum. 3. And if Ireland send into England 1 million and a half worth of effects (receiving nothing back), then England will be enriched from Ireland, and otherwise, 5 millions per annum more than now, which, at 20 year's purchase, is worth one hundred millions of pounds sterling, as was propounded.

Here, Petty assigns a cash value to each Irish person and then speculates on their increase in value over the years at 5% interest.  The ROI is one hundred million pounds, which ain’t chump change, sister.  So, it seems a very rational idea to depopulate Ireland, invest the labor elsewhere, and turn the land into a huge market garden and cattle ranch.  All very reasonable.

But it also seems quite mad, doesn’t it?  As a mocking rejoinder to such brutal social improvement proposals, Swift wrote one of his own in 1729.  It is called – in the dog-leg style of the times – “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.”  The Projector – this is the name we’ve given to Swift’s persona here – begins by lamenting having to see so many poor children begging in the Dublin streets (whether he laments their poverty or being confronted with it is somewhat ambiguous).  He then asserts that 

whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the publick, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.

Of course, he has just such a solution, the benefits of which are these: the cost of child-rearing will be greatly decreased; the number of Catholics, too, will dwindle; poor people will be able to own property of value; the hospitality industry will expand; the institution of marriage will become more popular; domestic violence will all but disappear; and abortions will cease.  What is this miracle cure for all these social ills?

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragout.

Yes, you heard that right.  The Projector proposes that poor Irish raise their children for food, to be slaughtered and fed to the aristocracy.  Thus, they will cease to be a burden and instead become a benefit.  In language every bit as dispassionate as Petty’s – well, no, actually.  The Projectors motives are disinterested (in that he has nothing personally to gain by this scheme, as he has “no children, by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing”).  But his tone certainly seems earnest and philanthropic.  It is very funny to me that a savage “American” first recommends the practice.

I have taught this essay for years, and always in the context of this fetish for reason that dominated European culture at the time.  Once students understand that it’s a satire (most don’t – even college-level students.  The past is so much a foreign country to many that cannibalism, though shocking, only seems part of its foreignness), I ask them: “Is this a reasonable proposal?”  They almost all say no – how could it be?  He’s saying we should eat kids?  That’s cruel, or gross, or “I’m vegan,” or whatever.  They all take my question as a version of “Is it a good idea” and thus produce emotionally reactive answers.  But I keep stressing the question: is it reasonable?  Finally, one kid gets it and says: “Yes, it’s reasonable.  It solves the problems of poverty, overpopulation, and starvation.  But that doesn’t make it right.”

Clever little grasshopper.  See, our revulsion at the not-at-all modest proposal has little to do with a detached, cool appraisal of efficacious social improvement schemes and more to do with emotional disgust.  Yes, the end might solve the problem before us, but the means turn our stomachs – as it were.  This gastro-intestinal turbulence is not a “reason”able reaction, it’s an emotional one.  And because it disgusts us emotionally, we forbid it morally.  Right, that’s where morality comes from – trying to control disgust.  Swift thus mocks ways of thinking in which raising, slaughtering, and feasting upon children elicit no revulsion, a society that fetishizes the rational, the measurable, and the quantifiable to such an extent that it has forsaken human emotion and compassionate ethics.

But then I push the issue further.  If we’re so outraged at the Projector’s monstrous inhumanity, then why do things like that happen all the time?  Wherefore slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide?  Why the Trail of Tears, the Holocaust, and the Killing Fields?  How is it we so often get past our moral repulsion to “cannibalize” each other? (Do imagine air quotes there.)

Well, I wonder if it has to do with language.  See, language is a very slippery thing.  It’s responsible for, depending on your views of neuroscience and epistemology, just about everything we know, or at least everything that has meaning for us.  But words are tricky things.  They only work because we all agree, at any given point in time, that they do.  If I say “dog” and you know that I’m referring to the little brown furry thing peeing on your carpet, it’s just because we agree that the sound “dog” refers to hairy, incontinent members of the canine family.  But does it always have to?

In 1916, Ferdinand de Saussure published his Course in General Linguistics, in which he said, basically, that a word (he called it a sign) has two parts: 1) the signifier, which is the written image – the collection of letters – or the sound.  So “d-o-g” or “dog” is the signifier.  The other part is the signified, and that is the concept or object to which the signifier refers.  So I say the signifier “dog,” you understand that it’s attached to the concept of a leaky canine quadruped, and that interaction creates a word or sign.  And then you can get the Lysol and a soft cloth.

But Saussure also points out that the relationship between a signifier and signified is arbitrary.  There’s no inherent bond between the two parts of a sign.  They can be switched out any time.  Now, we often do this on a rather trivial level.  If I presented you an ink-filled writing utensil and asked you for its signifier, you’d say “pen” probably.  But you might also say “ballpoint,” or “biro,” or “bic.”  If we were in Spain, you’d say “boligrafo.”  In France, “stylo.”  In China, “bi.” In Pig Latin America: “en-pay.”  See?  We just busted out eight different signifiers for a writing implement.  Now, if tomorrow, the whole of the Anglophone world decided to call that implement a “buffalo,” in classrooms and offices around the world people would be asking each other to “please hand me that buffalo” and junior bank tellers would be charged with chaining buffaloes to those tiny little ball-chains.

But the contingent nature of words can have greater consequences as well.  To return to Swift’s satire and our question: if this is so morally repulsive, why do we continue to permit similar horrors?  Well, let’s look at how Swift’s Projector refers to the Irish Catholics he proposes to exploit . . . er, save.  If you go through the essay (and I have my students do so) and catalogue the signifiers used to identify impoverished Irish Catholics, you note that they fall into three broad categories.  The first we’ll just call “people” – signifiers used to identify Irish Catholics as human beings like man, woman, child.  The second category is “economic function” – that is, terms that identify the Irish by their function in or effect upon the economy, so worker, breeder, beggar, mouth (as in to be fed), laborer, and so on.  The third category is “commodity” – something that can be bought or sold.  Here, we have terms like flesh, meat, gloves and boots (made from children’s skin), dish, and so on.  When you tally up the occurrences in each of these categories, you see that the Projector hardly ever uses human terms to identify Irish Catholics – overwhelmingly he refers to their economic position or what can be produced by their bodies.  They are things, mere objects.  And we have no moral obligations to property or things.  

That’s how we make our moral peace with emotional revulsion: change the terms we use.  If we think of others as “vermin” or “garbage” or “whores” or “bums”, then we feel they have less of a claim on our moral sympathy.  And if you can change your ethics, you can change your behavior.  “Things” don’t have rights, so you can withhold food and medicine from the poor;  you can tear children from their parents and lock them in cages; you can condemn immigrants to jungle gulags thousands of miles from home.  Swift reveals the very grave consequences of a dispassionate mindset, but we still refuse to look.

Well, that was kind of a heavy note to end on.  Sorry about that.  But it is what Swift’s up to – his jokes often have very disturbing punchlines.  

Before I sign off, though, I do feel obligated to scratch the itch currently tingling in my more linguistics-aware listeners.  My previous exploration of Swift’s use of signifiers in “A Modest Proposal” and how the words we use can affect our moral behavior may smack a little too much of a strong determinist reading of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which argues that the language we speak determines our thoughts and worldview.  Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf were linguists working in the 1920s.  This strong view – that language completely controls our thoughts – has largely been rejected by modern linguists.  However, a more moderate view, called linguistic relativity, retains some purchase since it posits language’s mere influence on cognition among a host of other factors.  Steven Pinker, psychologist and linguist, rejects both premises, arguing that language can only describe pre-existing concepts, not the other way round.  If we change the name of a pen to buffalo, as in my above ridiculous example, Pinker would argue that nothing about the pen has changed and that we’ve only expanded the definition of a buffalo.  Anyway, I thought I should mention that the idea of linguistic determinism is not without its minefields, despite the fact that advocates of inclusive-language, people-first language, and other forms of what loosely be termed “woke” speech (I mean nothing pejorative here, it’s just the term that best communicates at this moment), seem to base their beliefs on a rather contested literal reading of a century-old contested hypothesis.

Thanks for tuning in – I appreciate the time you give.  If I could beg just a little more of it, would you take a second to give the podcast a 5-star rating.  That really helps spread the word.  Click the “Support the Show” button if you’d like to help me with the costs of production; I’d be really grateful.

Next time, we’ll look at Jonathan Swift’s magnificent octopus, the much misapprehended novel, Gulliver’s Travels.  Till then, keep your eyes on the door and your back to the wall.  That means “be safe.”  Talk to you soon.