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In the Review’s June 25 issue, Fintan O’Toole celebrates the three-hundredth anniversary of Gulliver’s Travels (first published on October 28, 1726) by revisiting the novel’s “excoriation of the rapacity and brutality of empires” in the light of a new age of rapacious and brutal imperialists. In particular, given the deathless contemporary refrain about making things great, O’Toole focuses on Jonathan Swift’s “vivid exploration of the idea of magnitude: What does it mean to be great, and what does it mean to be small?”
Swift, writing at a moment when “both European colonialism and the slave trade were expanding rapidly,” used the dizzying shift in perspective from the puny Lilliputians to the giant Brobdingnagians to elucidate how “greatness thus depends on there being a wretched of the earth.” And so it is that Donald Trump—a Yahoo if there ever was one—comes to sow wretchedness. As O’Toole observes, “Greatness promises fulfillment and security, but it is always radically insecure.”
Below, alongside O’Toole’s essay, are six articles from our archives about political satirists.
Fintan O’Toole
Gulliver’s Warning
Like Gulliver in Lilliput, “greatness” in the political realm depends on the existence of a group deemed puny or weak.
Fintan O’Toole
The Genius of Creative Destruction
“Jonathan Swift is almost unique among great prose writers in that, as well as being admired by the literate, he was also loved by the illiterate. There is a Swift contained and explored in thousands of books; there is another Swift remembered and celebrated in Irish oral traditions that were alive up to the 1930s. The Swift of this oral tradition is not a high Tory with a bitter disposition and a streak of misanthropy. He is funny, quick-witted, humane, and human.”
—December 19, 2013
Derek Jarrett
Rogue Genius
“Henry Fielding had always been excessively fond of eating and drinking, so that in his more penitent moments he feared he was being “visited for his sins.” Indeed, the best known and most popular of his compositions during his lifetime was neither a novel nor a political satire but a song called “The Roast Beef of Old England,” which it soon became customary for theater audiences to sing before and after and even during performances.”
—November 22, 1990
Gabriel Josipovici
A Modern Master
“To refer to Pantagruel as a Menippean satire, to relate it, as scholars have done, to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly or Brant’s Ship of Fools, is to miss the central point. Those works do indeed exist in a particular tradition, a distinctive genre. To write in that tradition is to make a pact with your reader beforehand: this is the kind of work it’s going to be. With Pantagruel the only sign to the reader is a warning: hold on tight.”
—October 13, 1977
Stephen Spender
The Truth about Orwell
“Eric Blair was a man who (while following secretly or openly his vocation as a writer) always nonchalantly chose for himself the least pleasant job, not exactly to punish himself, but because he instinctively knew that unpleasant tasks were those which plunged him deepest into the grim realities of living.”
—November 16, 1972
George Orwell
‘Animal Farm’: What Orwell Really Meant
Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.
—December 1946; published in the July 11, 2013, issue
V.S. Pritchett
Formidable Miniature
“[Eighteenth-century England] was becoming above all an age of builders and rebuilders in mind and brick—never have English houses and towns been so fine—but the accomplishments of this deeply sociable century were achieved at a haunting cost and Alexander Pope’s venom, his life theme (in Lytton Strachey’s words ‘civilization illumined by animosity’), suggests that the cost was madness.”
—February 27, 1969
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