Swift’s Angers by Claude Rawson (review)

Having read and reread Jonathan Swift for nearly half a century, Claude Rawson has an intimate knowledge of the Anglo-Irish satirist’s bad moods. Rawson appreciates not only the objects and qualities of Swift’s animosity but also a second order of Swift’s feelings, his feelings about his own animosity. These layered emotions are the fascinating focus of Swift’s Angers.

Although critics have long held that Swift wrote in a state of wild fury, Rawson finds rich evidence of the control he exerted over his rage: “The interplay between what are sometimes called Swift’s ‘intensities’, and the edgily playful guardedness which undercuts without neutralising them, is the pervasive, and indeed defining, feature of Swift’s style” (3). Swift, “one of the most egocentric writers in the language . . . who always took special care to avoid seeming so” (147), was wary of both the vulnerability and the self-importance entailed in forthright self-expression. Instead, and fortunately for us, he chose what Rawson likes to call obliquity: compulsive experiments with ironic indirection allowed Swift at once to vent and temper his least moderate feelings.

A rereading of Swift’s self-composed epitaph in the first and last chapters anchors the book’s argument. In William Butler Yeats’s famous translation of the original Latin, death at last frees the satirist from a life of sublime suffering: “Swift has sailed into his rest / Savage indignation there / Cannot lacerate his breast.” Swift had surely realized that his use of the phrase saeva indignatio would call to mind the ancient Roman satirist Juvenal, whose flamboyant anger John Dryden had opposed to Horace’s lighter comedy in the Discourse on Satire. But Rawson stresses that Swift had allowed himself only posthumously to strike this grandiose pose, which Yeats later reified.

Swift generally had tried to play his anger in a much lower key. Two private quips encapsulate for Rawson the satirist’s ongoing efforts to nurture a core of unflustered misanthropy. When one of his mentors seemed to be withdrawing support for his pursuit of court patronage in London, Swift denied being upset about it, writing to a friend: “I never expect Sincerity from any man; and am no more angry at the Breach of it, than at the colour of his Hair” (qtd. in Rawson, 13). In a later letter, he disavows concern over Robert Walpole’s greed in a similar way: “I am no more angry with him than I was with the Kite that last week flew away with one of my Chickins” (qtd. in Rawson, 3). Rawson points out that Swift also attributes this hyperlogical formulation to the Houyhnhnm Master in Gulliver’s Travels who “no more blamed [the Yahoos] for their odious Qualities, than he did a Gnnayh (a bird of Prey) for its Cruelty, or a sharp Stone for cutting his Hoof” (qtd. in Rawson, 125). Human instincts resembled, and indeed were potentially worse than, those of our animal kin. Such a bleak view of nature made avid forms of anger look trite, like missing the point. Swift understood that he could never achieve perfect indifference, but nevertheless aspired to it.

On the one hand, Swift thought that the recognition of our fallen state should not be confused with transcendence. On the other hand, clinging to delusion was wrong. Whereas a more hopeful satirist like Pope expects to bond with some readers over a shared sense of moral superiority, Swift needles and vexes us all, forcing us to confront, alongside him, our own weakness and corruption. Our expectation of a snug, smug textual relation itself becomes a primary target. The three central sections of Swift’s Angers flesh out this emotional logic, showing how Swift’s most insidious attacks are directed at fixed and polarizing attitudes; even when such attitudes accompany ideas or projects that he might otherwise be inclined to support, his soul revolts. Rawson is thus even more troubled by the recent tendency among critics to cast Swift as a politically correct ideologue...