Gulliver's Travel and Other Writings [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION i Of satire in general and of Jonathan Swift in particular, this may safely be prognosticated—that they will endure. Satire seems to require categorically only two conditions: a subject and a satirist. Given our post-lapsarian state, frailty and fallibility are sufficient subjects, and the details aboxmd. But of the shaping hand of the satirist, qualifications are to be made. For satire is a strict art, despite all the difficulties we may encounter in defining that a^ neatly. We are all often indignant, and sometimes witty about our indignations, but we do not thereby turn satirists. For it is not only the anger and the involvement, the idealism and the wit, but the manipulations of them, how they are turned to form-ful, organic use that constitute the satiric art. Among the genres of literature, satire exerts a perennial fascination, the fascination of the forbidden. Often hostile, shocking, or destructive, satire tends to approach the thin end of cynicism and misanthropy, to frighten or disgust. But the positive purpose that impels the satirist neutralizes, justifies, and heals by his intention to correct and reform, by bis essential moralism. Thus the nature of satire is ambivalent, complex, and elusive. Rhetorically, satire challenges from the beginning, for, strictly speaking, it cannot be defined; it is not accurately a genre, though we often call it so; yet it seems to usurp otiier genres and function as though it were one. A satirical novel, a satirical sonnet, for example, become primarily satire, and the novel or sonnet characteristics more often than not become subsidiary to the satiric intention. Yet if satire is only a mode, a tone, a manner of speaking, does it thereby function as a kind of pervasive metaphor, so crucial that it determines the characteristics of the genre within which it is operating? For operate satire does within almost any genre, in all kinds of lyric poetry from epic to song, in tragedy as well as comedy, in prose as well as in poetry. But satire flourishes just as comfortably in the non-formal areas of composition in prose and poetry—in sermon, tract, broadside, in the most occasional rhymed squib. Historically, then, any rhetorical system, whether clearly enunciated or tacit, seems to have allowed satire ample