Jonathan Swift: The Brave Desponder

by Patrick Reilly

Jonathan Swift, argues Reilly, is a writer of crucial significance to the human beings of this century, a man who simultaneously looks “back to the crises of the seventeenth century and forward, with uncanny pre­science, to the problems of the twentieth.”

 

Reilly presents Swift as a “dauntingly modern writer of the fiercest urgency, not merely relevant but indispensable to an un­derstanding of our present predicament.” His approach is organic, “with the initial def­inition of Swift’s religious-political position leading naturally to an examination of the satire against corresponding Puritan aberra­tions in Chapter Three. Similarly, the dislike of Puritan messianism shapes Swift’s pes­simistic view of history revealed in Chap­ter Four and makes fully intelligible those crucially contentious creatures, the Houyhn­hnms. Chapter Five deals with his abortive attempt to found a viable social order on the ‘realistic’ appraisal of man he shared with Hobbes. Chapters Six and Seven, using Gulliver’s Travels as chief exhibit, concentrate on the major themes of forbidden knowledge and displacement, Swift’s sense of alienation in a fearful world. Chapter Eight attempts to synthesize the individual findings of each preceding chapter in examining the cen­tral paradoxes of his faith, his attitude to language in general and to satire in particular, and his intolerable divided consciousness.”

296 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1982