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Reviewed by:
  • Swift’s Angers by Claude Rawson
  • Andrew Carpenter
Claude Rawson. Swift’s Angers. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2014. Pp. xiv + 305. £55; £19.99 (paper).

Swiftians have long admired Mr. Rawson. From Gulliver and the Gentle Reader of 1973 through dozens of essays, introductions, full-length books and reviews, we have seen him applying a formidable intellect and impressive forensic powers to Swift’s texts and to the work of those who write about or edit them. More recently, of course, he is the presiding spirit behind the new eighteen-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. Acute critical discernment and wide range of reference lie behind everything he has written—which, of course, extends well beyond Swift into Augustan literature and politics as a whole, and into the work of many modern writers. Swift’s Angers is just one in a long line of influential assessments of satirists, novelists, and poets.

Though eight of its eleven chapters are reworked versions of material that has appeared elsewhere, Swift’s Angers is intended to be more than a reprise of Mr. Rawson’s work on Swift and to show a consistency in his thinking on Swift and anger. Thus the book explores not just what made Swift angry at various times in his life but also the rhetorical strategies he employed to manipulate his readers and so make them feel his hate or anger or dislike or contempt—even if these emotions were self-implicating. Mr. Rawson is particularly interested in what we used to call “tone”—that is, the nuances and registers of Swift’s language. We all know Swift was often an angry man, but Mr. Rawson’s emphasis on how he paraded or hid his animosities, on what it means to say his indignation was [End Page 110] “savage,” and on the implications of his vision of man’s depravity is distinctive and illuminating.

Inevitably—in a collection of essays written at different times for different occasions—there are repetitions that not even extensive reworking has removed. The same example is used more than once and phrases recur. But the vision of Swift as a towering intellect and one of the great influences on writing in English—particularly Irish writing in English—remains undimmed and it is good to reencounter many of Mr. Rawson’s most striking insights in this book. He has always been a provocative critic, and there are places that show him at his combative best. In the essays on Swift’s methods of narration, on his poetry, and on Gulliver’s Travels, the reader is often struck by brilliant, pithy phrases and striking comparisons, close readings that reveal new levels of meaning, and confident assertions that open fresh lines of thought.

The new essays, one on Vanessa as a reader of the Travels, another on Swift and Ireland, and a substantial introduction, are less satisfying—at least, two of them are. The chapter on Vanessa as a reader is disappointingly slight and “Swift, Ireland and the paradoxes of ethnicity,” though it floats interesting ideas, is self-indulgent. We do not need to be told that the Irish President De Valera’s aide-de-camp fell asleep at an event Mr. Rawson attended in 1967 or that Swiftians in Dublin have been mistaken for delegates to the All-Ireland Alcoholics Anonymous Convention. Nor do I think Mr. Rawson is right to rely, for his view of the “Anglo-Irish,” so heavily on the late J. C. Beckett’s distinctly biased view of that multifarious and multifaceted tribe.

However, the introduction—with its subtitle “not Timons manner” (no apostrophe in “Timons,” as there is none in the Longleat transcription of the lost holograph)—shows us Mr. Rawson on form, incisive, opinionated, (usually) right, and always stimulating. A lifetime’s reading and thinking about Swift lies behind this chapter: Swift’s anger, Mr. Rawson maintains, besets our thinking about him. The chapter looks at this anger, observing how close Swift’s temperament was to things he attacked; writing was, for Swift, a means of coming to terms with the almost uncontainable pressures that afflict human beings, one of which is the infuriating recognition...

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