OTHER CRITICISMS WHICH ARE REFERRED TO SWIFT.
Richard Sympson says that, he has carefully persued the travels three times, and then, he protests that the style is very plain and simple. It is due to the fact that Swift read large chunks aloud to his servants, to make sure that every sentence attained his rigorous standard of simplicity.
In addition to this, the only fault Richard Sympson find is, that the author, after the manner of travellers, is a little too circumstantial.
One of the few expressions of protest at the time, heralding what was to follow later, came curiously, from a member of Swift´s intimate circle, Lord Bolingbroke; " he is the person ", continued pope, " who least approves it, blaming it as a design of evil consequence to despreciate human nature".
The american critic, Edward Said, dedicates two chapters of his important book The World, The Text and The Critic, to Swift. The first chapter starts with the following commentary: " The Swift´s work is a permanent miracle because of his writings can be adapted to numerous commentaries and to be still problematic writings".
In the second chapter, Said tries to explain why the contemporary theoristics of the literature are not concerned with Swift. Said attributes this to the fact that Swift is an author that dilocates and annoys, and it is due to his pessimism and his insistence on the moral and physic decadence of the human nature, for his famous " Saeva indignatio ". According to Said, in Swift, we don´t find harmony, peace, and final reconciliation. In addition, his mood is contrasted by the optimism of his ambient.
It was under the influence of such a New Historicist view point that John began to understand the peculiarity of Swift´s position, and that of many Irish writers.
Swift had been raised on Anglican in a Catholic country; he was a member of an economically privileged colonial ruling class who, almost within living memory, had been imposed on Irish society from outside, by military conquest; he´d lived in a middle-class enclave surrounded by the most object kind of poverty, the kind John Clifford and other authors might see now only in a particularly disadvantaged third world country. These things affected Swift and everything he wrote in profound ways.
To read Swift as the Irish outsider this new perspective mode him seem, passionately attacking attitudes and practices whose consequences he knew and had witnessed and suffered, is, it seems to John Clifford, to participate in that conversation in a way that using him as a door to history, or as an example of delicate and perfect ironic patterns, could never do.
From the point of view of John, texts like Gulliver, have not been much considered by literary theorists or played much role in pedagogical thinking or practice.
John considers that Swift is a passionate Irishman, who has things to say to him about the current troubles in Ulster and the Irish heritage of eastern Canada.
Moreover, as Jonh pointed, Swift was a skeptical Anglican rationalist. Before that, he was a profoundly committed political and social conservative and journalist. At the very beginnig he was a child like fantasist who, as Dr. Johnson put it, "thought og big men and little men", and spoke with science liction and various kinds of logical extrapolation.
Accordind to Walter Allan, Irony is implicit in Fielging´s view of life, Walter considers that Swift, who though possessing many of the attributes of a novelist, can not be called one.
Gulliver´s Travels is a work of fiction but not a novel, though in it Swift uses circumstantial detail after the manner of Defoe, in order to persuade us of the truth of his Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians. And great as his genious was, one feels that Swift could never have been a novelist. Satire can only be part of the novelist´s make-up; in Swift it was everything.
According to Grebanier, the satire of Book One is aimed at the littleness of human beings. It is also more particularly concerned with English public affairs. The diplomatic relations of Lilliput and Blefescu mimick those of England and France. The hihg-heels are the Tories; the low-heels the Whigs. But the domestic convulsions of Lilliput form a picture of human failings everywhere.
According to Albert C. Baugh, in some ways Jonathan Swift´s career parallels that of Daniel Defoe. Both were considerably occupied in the dangerouse career of political writer, and both were energetic supporters of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. The contrast between the two has been symbolized by the supposition that Swift was received by the front door, whereas Defoe waited on the back stairs. Defoe was, to be sure, a tradesman, and Swift came of somewhat more genteel stock; but the real difference in the men lies in the fact that Defoe was a dissenter and had a middle-class practical education. Swift was a churman, and speciali gratia a university graduate. An independent neo-classicist, Swift had and knew how to use brillantly a "good classical training". Defoe was hardly conscious of the classics as patterns for writing.
Both men were endowed with a strong common sense; both viewed mankind with curiosity-and suspicion. Defoe possessed a wide factual knowledge of the political, social and economic conditions of England, whereas Swift was content to condemn "conditions" -rashly at times-because he found them abysmally divorced from his ideals.
As Albert thought, the fourth voyage to Houyhnhnmland, where animal man, the Yahoo, is contrasted with the "perfection of nature" seen in the Houyhnhnms-who are figured as horses. Again Swift gives childlike play to surface ingenuity in his depiction of the human habits of these "horses"-their weaving of mats, threading of needles,etc.
Gulliver is not quite identified with loathsome Yahoos, but his Kinship is as unquestionable as is his admiration for Houyhnhnm virtues. Although this voyage is Swift´s most misanthropic writing, yet he makes Gulliver profit in truthfulness, cleanliness, and devotion to the life of reason, from his association with these ideal people. His unsociability upon his return to human society is doubtless misanthropic: it ilustrates Swift´s fundamental horror of the gulf between the actual and the ideal. The fourth voyage, with the third, which was the last to be written, deals with corruptions of theoretical reason, while the first two voyages had dealt with matters of practical reason.
Gulliver´s Houyhnhnm master dreaded less the corruption of "reason" might be worse than brutality itself, and in the third voyage Gulliver met men whose thirst for theory and for nevelty in technical method-whether in the writing of books, in the manufacture of sunbeams, or the making of clothes-made them to him more dreadful than brutes.
Albert believes that the technical knowledge has been disparaged in the first two voyages in brief passages where the educational methods of the nations visited were described.
In this third voyage, technical knowledge is extensively derived: he regards its ingenuity as misplaced, its passion for novelty as unnatural, and its preoccupations in general as unfitting man for society. And the chief function of reason, according to eighteenth-century views, was to fit man for a happy life among his fellows.
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