Comments on THE DIARIES OF FORTUNE: A delight; wistfully and deftly told, by Richard Powers, winner 2006 National Book Award.
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The Master of Invective
When Jonathan Swift published "A Modest Proposal" in October of 1789, he had determined to alleviate what he saw as the unnecessary plight of the starving poor of Ireland. For centuries the Irish had lived under the often harsh thumb of England which placed very many hardships on them. The English Parliament tended to view the Irish as a conquered people who existed only for the benefit of the mother country. Restrictive financial laws guaranteed that most of the revenue produced in Ireland would find its way into the coffers of the English treasury. Restrictive trade laws ensured that goods manufactured in one part of Ireland could not be transported and sold to another. And most egregious of all was the prevailing tendency of wealthy English landowners to hire landlords to run estates, villages, and apartments of all squalid sorts in Ireland while all the while charging exorbitant rents to those who could ill afford those rents. It is against the totality of what Swift saw as a massive wave of a lack of basic human care and sympathy for the downtrodden Irish that convinced him to write a tract that he hoped would draw attention to the inhuman conditions under which the Irish had to live. To accomplish this goal, Swift chose to write in a style with which he had a long familiarity--a mixing of bitter satire with biting irony. In essence, "A Modest Proposal" is an extended use of this mixture to present what would have otherwise been seen as an appalling use of cannibalism under the guise of a misplaced socially acceptable benevolence.
The structure of the essay is more than slightly reminiscent of the tracts that were then current. Authors of such tracts were fond of critiquing what they saw as the sociological issues of the day. Swift must have seen an opportunity to reveal his proposal to feed the starving masses of Ireland in a forum with which readers could instantly identify. However, where the vast majority of these other pamphlets were utterly serious in tone, Swift chose to mask his thesis using tones which range from stark realism to the outrageously ironic. The irony begins with his narrator, one who is at first portrayed as a man of benevolence, intelligence, and in possession of a strong moral conscience. The narrator commences with a grim description of Ireland's poverty-stricken female beggars who have with them numerous bedraggled ragamuffins. This opening leaves the reader to assume that the narrator's sympathies rest unerringly with these unfortunates. Almost immediately, however, Swift undercuts this incipient benevolence with the suggestion that his sympathy is mixed with other and contrasting emotions. His acknowledgment that these beggar children will eventually turn highwaymen or war with England is the first in a long line of hints, modest or otherwise, that his true purpose is an ill-defined series of pokes and retorts at England and surprisingly enough at Ireland itself. As Swift quickly enough gets to his central thesis that the babies of Ireland are to be fattened and slaughtered as food, the reader begins to wonder what he is supposed to make of Swift's narrator. As the narrator uses the soothing and disarming language of sociological rhetoric to advance his proposal to reduce Ireland's excess population by eating its youngest members, there is the initial tendency for the reader to view the narrator as the villain. However, Swift had far more in mind than merely to ridicule one man. Rather, it was his purpose to use the narrator as a sounding board by which he could assail his true targets: the wealthy of England who profit from the collective misery of Ireland and the Irish themselves who could so willingly even eagerly participate in their own degradation and ruination.
Swift's first target are the landlords "who as they have already devoured most of the Parents, seem to have the best Title to the Children." These landlords are symbolic of their masters, the landed English gentry who act like financial vacuum cleaners, sucking up the wealth of Ireland and placing it in the pockets of gentry. His second target is the entire Irish population whom he pictures as willing collaborators to their own moral and spiritual dissolution. It is by no means easy to distinguish which group holds Swift's greatest contempt. If it is true that the English are the original destroyers of the Irish social fabric, then it is probably equally true that the native Irish do not resist with any force the allure that money holds as the means to fatten the tables of the wealthy. Swift makes it clear that his view of the foibles of human weakness is based solely on the monetary. The interest of the English with reference to Ireland is based entirely on the number of pounds and shillings that can be safely extorted to the coffers in London. The only offer that the English make to the Irish is similarly based on the assumption that the Irish are a race with no sense of integrity or shame and can be manipulated by the Almighty Buck.
Toward the end of the essay, Swift's irony drifts into the truly morbid. His narrator is exasperated by the failure of anyone to come up with an alternative that is less bloody. He groans that he has no desire to entertain "other expedients," all of which are the non-ironic commonsense proposals that if given a chance might actually serve to help the Irish without resort to cannibalism. But of course, these proposals were never given the chance. By the end of the essay, the reader realizes that there was nothing "modest" about either the proposal or the narrator. The narrator's closing claim to impartiality is an ironic afterthought that a claim for benevolence does not equate to its actuality. And this may be Swift's ultimate comment on satire.
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