Not long ago, I read an article about Swift and his satires. The author was wondering why the satires of Swift, a humoristic genre remain so popular today. The answers that he gave are the following, and I shall elaborate with examples from Modest Proposal that I know well because I translated it to Hebrew. Modest Proposal is an article suggesting that Irish children will be sold to be eaten when they are a year old. What made him special is:
1) His parodist technique that imitates acceptable styles of his days. The most famous example isn’t Modest Proposal but A Meditation Upon a Broom-stick that was written as an additional episode to Robert Boyle’s book.
2) The use of personas that is rooted in Swift’s personal history and his debating abilities that enable him to invent solid arguments that he doesn’t agree with. In Modest Proposal he pretended to be a British economist.
3) The exaggerated analogical thought is being dragged ad absurdum. When you try to follow his logic, you find it is ironclad and all his arguments are solid.
4) The use of a serious pose of the persona. In some publications of his satires, he was smart enough not to use his real name, in fact, sometimes no name is used at all. I believe that this is why he was almost crucified for Modest Proposal but was never caught.
5) His use of sexual and misogyny themes in his satires. The women figures that are mentioned in Modest Proposal are portrayed as weak and extremely poor. One girl corpse is even sold to be eaten.
6) The fact that you never know when is he serious and when is he joking.
7) His despair with the rational persuasions of his time. In Modest Proposal he says that no solution can be offered before trying it, (but one can understand that he is tired of solutions).
His use of ‘dishonest’ ways to protect the right path. In Modest Proposal the crazy and cruel solution to kill infants who are one-year-old was given in order to point out the need for humane solutions. I guess that in the 21st century we look at his dark satire with different eyes, especially after the Holocaust. But the truth is that unlike some accusations, Swift does, in the end, provide hope and rational solutions for the problems he is facing.
These are the basic principals found in most good satires that have been written since, but I shall demonstrate it further with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series.