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Situational Satire: A Commentary on the Method of Swift

1948; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/utq.17.2.130

1712-5278

Ricardo Quintana,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

Much depends on the readiness with which we acknowledge the element of impersonality in literary art. The impersonality of drama we perceive and accept instinctively, since our normal responses to a play are grounded in this very acceptance. We do not confuse the dramatist with his characters; unless we are Romantic critics writing on Shakespeare, we do not take the play as direct expression of the writer's personality. The play stands forth as an artifice; we are willing to think of it and discuss it in terms of structural form. How different in this respect our reactions are to most non-dramatic forms of literary art can be measured by the degree to which we confound the writer and the written work. When we see the work and its author as interchangeable, when we take the work to be an act at the level of every-day behaviour, we have pretty well lost sight of the impersonal element and the presence of anything in the nature of deliberate method and form. For such reasons we often find it hard to come to terms with the lyric poem as a poem, as a construct, with the result that much of our commentary on poetry turns out to be either description of our impressions or reconstruction—largely imaginary—of a precise moment in the poet's emotional history with which we have chosen to equate the poem. Perhaps we find it hardest of all to admit of any distinction between a satirist and his satiric composition—and this despite the fact that satire is much more obviously a form of rhetoric than is lyric poetry. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that Swift's satiric method, which everywhere stares us in the face, is only dimly recognized to be a method. We praise Swift's style; we speak of his use of allegory and his mastery of disgust; but we do not follow through with conviction. Sooner or later we allow the personality of Swift to take over and in consequence to obscure the artist, the craftsman, who after all is only Jonathan Swift's distant relative.