Swift, Jonathan

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) represents in its most acute form the polarity between the rational and the physical. Regarded as the greatest satirist and exponent of irony in English literature, he was born and bred in Ireland and rose to the position of dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, becoming a great champion of Irish liberty and a national hero. Yet he was intermittently very much part of the London literary and social scene. Although the dominant literary tenor of the Augustan period was that of rationality, politeness, and classic elegance, Swift was a rebellious and eccentric counter-example, together with Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett. His exploitation of differing registers is as astonishing and unrivaled as are the different literary modes in which he wrote. His huge output contains many insights into swearing and foul language. One can detect three distinct modes in his work: the correct style of the authority figure; the complex ironic uses of the satirist; and the strange regression into childishness and obscenity. Swift was, however, ingenious in the creation of personae or authorial masks, so that the facile identification of narrator with author is not valid.

Ostensibly a conservative in language matters, Swift wrote in 1712 A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue , criticizing the poor and declining state of the language down from the court, condemned as “the worst school in England,” to common usage. His disturbing masterpiece Gulliver’s Travels (1727) is model of rational clarity in prose, which he read to his servants to ensure that he had achieved the proper degree of simplicity. Part of the irony of the work is the narrator’s determination to tell in a sober, detailed fashion “the whole truth” of his bizarre adventures. Thus in Lilliput, where Gulliver is held prisoner by a race of midgets, his first action is commonplace, but a violation of literary decorum. By using all the standard euphemisms for the necessities of nature, Swift allows the gross truth to dawn on the reader only slowly:

I had been for some hours extremely pressed by the necessities of nature; which was no wonder, it being almost two days since I had last disburthened myself. I was under great difficulties between urgency and shame…. I went as far as the length of my chain would allow and discharged myself of that uneasy load. (Book I, chapter ii).

Later, when the royal palace catches fire, Gulliver becomes a hero in an equally unexpected fashion through “urine, which I voided in such a quantity and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished” (Book I, chapter v). Throughout Gulliver’s Travels , Swift maintains this ironic disjunction, between “indecent” actions and polite vocabulary.

In the surreal fantasy of the last book, Swift even goes so far as to have idiomatic expressions physically enacted. Thus one of the Yahoos literally “licks his master’s feet and posteriors,” and worse, “the cursed broad” climb up a tree and “began to discharge their excrements on my head.” (Back IV, chaptri)

The same technique is used in his Directions to Servants (1745), which solemnly advocates the filthiest and most dishonest habits, and in his famous and outrageous “A Modest Proposal” (1714), in which huge social problems of starvation and overpopulation invite a simple, rational but obscene solution: cannibalism.

In his verse, however, Swift discards the façade of decency, becoming the studied violator of Augustan decorum, spectacularly and rudely resuscitating the silenced four-letter words. Thus, “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1730) is an obsessive tour of the less decent intimacies of female life, culminating in the absurd but shocking exclamation:

O, Celia Celia, Celia shits! (l. 118)

This climactic line is repeated in “Cassinus and Peter” (1734). A similar poem, “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” describes the hideous striptease of “Corinna, pride of Drury Lane” (notorious for its prostitutes), grimly cataloguing her artificial hair, crystal eye, “flabby dugs” (breasts), “shankers” (chancres, or sores from venereal disease), who awakes to find that “Puss had on her plumpers pissed” (ll. 22, 30, 61). Similarly the wedding night of Strephon and Chloe oscillates between epic romance and crude “carminative and diuretic” details:

Twelve cups of tea (with grief I speak)
Had now constrained the nymph to leak.

Upon hearing the “foaming rill” in the “vessel” (chamber pot) Strephon

Cried out, "Ye gods, what sound is this?
Can Chloe, heavenly Chloe piss?
(ll. 163-64; 179-80)

This “excremental” aspect of Swift has provoked considerable psychological and literary controversy, some participants seeing him as a satirist ruthlessly exposing the hypocrisy of literary preciousness of his time, others regarding him as the victim of an unhealthy obsession with “dirt,” technically termed copromania or coprophilia . The association of these Greek psychological terms with Swift dates from academic articles dated 1900 and 1934 respectively.

The Swearer’s Bank was published in 1720, the year when many fantastic financial schemes collapsed in the great stock exchange crash known as the South Sea Bubble. With his characteristically cool irony Swift sets out a perfectly viable financial prospectus. The bank’s income will be continuous, deriving from the one-shilling fine exactable by Act of Parliament for profane swearing. Allowing for five thousand gentlemen to swear one oath a day, thus generating £91,250 per annum, and ten thousand farmers to produce £25,000, the rest of the population earning a similar amount, the army would be the greatest source of revenue, generating at least £100,000. Indeed the army might even bankrupt itself, “the militia swearing themselves out of their guns and swords” (1945, 45). After the defrayment of expenses, the profits would be devoted to the erection and maintenance of charity schools.

As these observations indicate, Swift was very aware of the relation between swearing, class, and occupation. The Introduction to Polite Conversation , or as it was originally titled, A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (1737), treats oaths with an ironic earnestness. Swift rejects the supposition that “mean and vulgar people” (“low and common folk”) will learn to ape their betters: “A footman can swear; but he cannot swear like a Lord. He can swear as often; but can he swear with equal deliberation, propriety and judgement? No certainly” (1963, 572). Surprisingly, he rejects the traditional view that it is a breach of manners to swear in front of a lady (1963, 570), a point taken up in the entry on swearing in women.

There is also the issue of fashion in swearing. Quoting “an antient poet”:

For, now-a-days, men change their oaths
As often as they change their cloaths.

He concludes that “Oaths are the children of fashion…. I can myself recall about forty different sets. The old stock-oaths, I am confident, do not amount to above forty-five, or fifty at most…. But infinitely the greater number hath been so frequently changed and dislocated, that if their inventors were now alive, they could hardly understand them” (1963, 571). Recognizing that “a just collection of oaths, repeated as often as the fashion requires, must have enlarged this volume at least to double the bulk,” and that “if I should include all the oaths as are now current, my book would be out of vogue with the first change of fashion … I therefore determined with myself to leave out the whole system of swearing” (1963, 571).

Swift nevertheless included in Polite Conversation some provocative idioms, such as “Why, Miss you shine this morning like a sh?[shitten] barn-door,” according to Eric Partridge “a proverbial saying of the 17th-mid-19th century” (1963, 85). Among the 1074 “flowers of Wit, Fancy, Wisdom, Humour and Politeness, scattered in this volume” are the following: “She rises with her?[arse] upwards” (167); “you hit yourself a devilish box of the ear” (64); “Od so, I have cut my thumb on this cursed knife” (66); and “out upon you for a filthy creater” (66). (This last form shows an interesting link between British creature and American crittur .)

His Journal to Stella (1710–1713, but not published until 1768) is like a transcript of intimate telephone conversations in its affectionate and childish “little language” or baby talk and code names. The nature of Swift’s relationship with “Stella” (Hesther Johnson), while clearly intimate, has never been authoritatively defined, but the journal is littered with mild fashionable oaths and demotic idioms: “the dean be poxt” (“damned,” letter 4); “slidikins” (“God’s little eyelids”); “Agad, agad, agad, agad, agad, agad” (“By God,” letter 6); “What the pox!” (“What the hell!”), “What do you mean sirrah? Slids” ( sirrah was an insulting diminutive of sir , while “slids” was a minced version of “God’s eyelids”); “a pox on your spelling” (“blast your spelling”); “Who the Devil cares what they think?… Rot ’em for ungrateful dogs” (letter 8); “what the D?ailed him” (letter 19); “?Pox take the boats! Amen,” (letter 24). He often castigates Stella and her friend, a Miss Dingley, as “rogues,” “saucy sluts,” and “sirrahs.” His comment, “It was bloody hot walking today” (May 8, 1711, letter 22) is one of the earliest instances of bloody as an intensive.

While these extracts show the extraordinary diversity of Swift’s knowledge, attitude toward, and replication of the oaths and vulgar idioms of both high society and the street, his mastery of the plain register is devastating, never more so than in the condemnation of human society by the civilized King of Brobdingnag: “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth” ( Gulliver’s Travels , Book II, chapter 6).