Week 9 Harkins

Illustrate Stanley Fish’s principles of satiric style as exemplified in Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”

Principles of satiric style as given by Stanley Fish in his book How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One can be properly observed in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Satire, by definition, is “human vice or folly attacked through irony, derision or wit.” Expounding on this, Mr. Fish states that satire is “somewhere between direct brutal invective and mild sarcasm. [It] is less direct than the former and more cutting than the latter. It doesn’t quite come out and say what it is saying, and what it is saying is often devastating,” and that “[masters] of satire and satiric wit write sentences that deliver their sting in stages; just when the reader thinks he knows that point has been made at whose expense, the thing opens up to claim its victim or victims more intensely,” (90). This is the basis of all satiric style, this hiding of the harsh criticism that is one is truly saying through creative means. No good satirist will directly come out and say what they think is wrong with something. Rather, they will go about it in a way that, at first, seems almost docile until they reach the end and their bitter reproach is fully realized.

Jonathan Swift uses the satiric style deftly in his work “A Modest Proposal,” which recommends the eating of infant flesh as a way in which to keep poor children from inhabiting the streets and becoming grown vagabonds, thus being weights upon the state. He suggests that children “may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table.” So, by the selling of infants as delicacies, the amount of possible beggars is greatly depleted and the child’s poor parents are given money on which to begin their ascent from poverty.

Though, at a later time, he does give seemingly good reasons for this proposal, Swift is not truly serious about sacrificing thousands of innocent lives to cannibalism in order to feed the economy. No, he is speaking to a deeper issue within the society that has refused to make alterations in order to keep such people from living such wretched lives. Swift lists various ways in which the society could change and become a better place overall for the poor, even to the point of having no poor, but he says, “Let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, 'till he hath at least some glympse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.” Why, asks Swift, would I want to hear about actual ways society could change if no one will actually practice them? In this line of logic, if the reasonable road remains un-walked, why not offer the absurd, since it is just as absurd to eat infant flesh as it is to ignore what can is easily seen to be done.

So, using these ideas of Swift as an example, one is easily able to see and understand Mr. Fish’s principles of satiric style. The first principle, being somewhere between invective and sarcasm, “A Modest Proposal” excels in its suggestion of eating infant flesh to decrease the poor population, which is to be totally understood as ludicrous. The second principle, not stating simply what he is trying to convey, is covered by the fact that Swift does not come out and say that society has lost its love for humanity but comes about it from the angle of adopting complete barbarity as a social norm. The third principle, delivering the sting in stages, extends over the entire course of the discourse. The initial fantasticalness of accepting cannibalism draws the reader in to laugh at such absurdity and it gradually becomes more and more absurd until it climaxes with Swift asking not be countered by any measure of reasonable change. There comes the sting; there is the truth that he is trying to tell. Thus, Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” passes the Fish test of satire.