Typically, we become aware of a strange interplay of astringency and exuberance, in which it is not always easy to distinguish between narrator and real author. We have not yet reached the sudden violences, and the more radical underminings, of the religious allegory or the Digression on Madness, but we are made curiously insecure as to how, exactly, to take the joke.Ģ Nor can we comfortably separate, in our minds, the silly geniality of the putative ‘author’ from Swift’s own more astringent presence. In such a context, the posturing denial of satiric intention draws a provoking and almost unsettling attention to itself. The seven prefatory items followed by an Introduction, the signposted chapters of digression (one of them in praise of digressions), the pseudo-scholarly annotation (with the ‘commentator’ sometimes at odds with the ‘author’), the triumphant assimilation into the notes of Wotton’s hostile exegesis, the asterisks and gaps in the MS., the promise of such forthcoming publications as A Panegyrick upon the World and A General History of Ears, have an exuberance which transcends mere parody and mere playfulness. That ‘provocative display of indirectness’ which Herbert Read (in a fine though somewhat unfriendly phrase) saw in Gulliver governs also the mad parodic world of the Tale. This, from the Preface to A Tale of a Tub, outdoes even Gulliver’s claims to veracity in its cheeky outrageousness.

1 This essay is a revised version of the title essay of a book of the same name first published by Ro (.)ġ ‘’Tis a great Ease to my Conscience that I have writ so elaborate and useful a Discourse without one grain of Satyr intermixt’ 2.

Ceci relève de ce que Swift voulait dire quand il a expliqué à Pope que l’histoire était destinée à tourmenter le monde plutôt qu’à le divertir.

Le lecteur se retrouve donc dépourvu du confort et de la position avantageuse d’une dénonciation extrême qui pourrait être rejetée en se désarmant elle-même, précisément parce que la voix du satiriste implicite est détachée du personnage. Tout en sachant que les détails des diatribes furieuses de Gulliver sont nourris par les éléments factuels du récit, la nature déséquilibrée de la voix du narrateur doit être écartée, dans la mesure où elle s’inscrit dans le style de Timon, que Swift a explicitement désavoué dans une lettre célèbre adressée à son ami Pope. Mais le lecteur est laissé dans l’incertitude quant au degré et au ton exacts de cette distinction. L’éloge de l’humanité énoncé par le naïf Gulliver, tout comme sa condamnation démente dans le dernier livre, sont tous deux distincts de la voix implicite du satiriste, qui se laisse constamment percevoir. Dès le début, le lecteur est pris à contrepied par l’intimité étonnamment querelleuse que manifeste le récit, et une instabilité dans le registre de l’ironie qui évolue en permanence. Dans les trois premiers livres, elle attaque de manière conventionnelle les humains pour ce qu’ils font, mais à la fin du livre III et tout au long du livre IV, les humains sont attaqués pour ce qu’ils sont. This is part of what Swift meant when he told Pope that the story was designed to vex the world rather than divert it.ĭans cette anatomie de l’animal humain que constituent les Voyages de Gulliver, la satire est particulièrement radicale, générale et violente. The reader is thus left without the comfort and foothold of an extreme denunciation which could be dismissed as self-disarming precisely because the implied satirist’s voice is disengaged from the character.

While knowing that the details of Gulliver’s enraged diatribes are substantiated by the facts of the narrative, the unhinged nature of the speaker’s voice must be discounted as being in Timon’s manner which Swift explicitly disavowed in a famous letter to his friend Pope. But the reader is left uncertain as to the exact degree and tone of this separation. The naïve Gulliver’s praise of humanity, as well as his deranged condemnation of it in the final book, are both separate from the implied voice of the satirist, which always makes itself felt. From the beginning, the reader is wrongfooted by an unusually quarrelsome intimacy on the part of the narrative, and a constantly shifting instability in the register of the irony. In the first three books it conventionally attacks humans for what they do, but at the end of book III and throughout book IV humans are attacked for what they are. The satire in Swift’s anatomy of the human animal in Gulliver’s Travels is unusually radical, comprehensive and aggressive.

Gentle reader meaning