Swifts Allegory: The Yahoo and the Man-of-mode

Abstract

As Defoe and Swift, so different, are so strangely paired by history—modern party propagandists both, the one at the First Minister's back door, cap in hand, the other in his parlour, teaching high-born friends not to offer him bribes—so are they forever and as strangely paired by literary history. The two great unromantic writers of the eighteenth century, masters of circumstantial realism, they know nothing of glory or honour or the high quest. A fistula in Louis XIV's anus, Swift called la gloire. Defoe could not afford honour. But a less exalted variety ofthe romantic, that of the great tradition of the English novel, that of Richardson and George Eliot, is equally alien to Defoe and Swift. The very predication of "personality" as coherent, organic, and morally self-conscious—an object, like a Victorian velour chair, prudently covered with antimacassars—is for the twentieth-century novelist only a quaint aspect of bourgeois romanticism. It is a predication incomprehensible to Defoe and unacceptable to Swift. Moll Flanders cannot remember on one page what she did on the last, though she does much the same thing on every page; in Lockean terms, having no self-consciousness, she has no identity at all. For Swift, "personality" is a bad dream of idiot egotism. Both represented, though with wholly different implications, the reality of meaningless solitude. "All of life is only solitude," Defoe writes, and represents that solitude without sympathy or disgust but with flat realism; Swift was terrified by a Hobbesian beast, solipsistic and senselessly egotistic; his violent realism in representing it has been an offence to the romantic mind ever since. Thackeray contrasts in Henry Esmond a bestial Swift to a "human" Dick Steele. But unromantic realism serves such different meanings in the writing of Defoe and of Swift that we can defme Swift's notion of reality by contrasting his realism with Defoe's.