Issue No. 597
Culture
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1 - 7 August 2002 Issue No. 597 Culture |
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Plain Talk
It is often said that once something is published the writer no longer owns it. The play, the novel or the poem becomes the property of the reader who is free to interpret it in whatever way he likes. Mood, education and cultural background all have a part to play in the interpretation which, moreover, changes over time as political and social transformations lend it an ever newer edge. George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four, both of which I first read in the 1950s -- the former being a critique of the Bolshevik Revolution, the latter a vision of totalitarianism -- read completely differently now that the Soviet Union has fallen. Both books have since acquired new and interesting dimensions.
The same is true when one thinks about older writers: Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe are two good examples. Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe were among my favourite books as a child; children everywhere, at all times, have enjoyed reading them, and they have been made into singularly enjoyable films. Yet a more closely historical reading -- based, in my case, on biographies of the two writers -- reveals that the two classics were never intended as entertainment, let alone children's reading. The writers in question, in fact, would probably be amazed to discover that their political satires would become popular reading among children. Swift (1667-1745) was born in Dublin; Defoe (1666-1731) in London. And their two classics were first published, in 1726 and 1724 respectively.
Swift lived in real poverty, according to his biographer, in shabby lodgings and not without "a humiliating eagerness to get a free dinner." He is described as "the foremost satirist in the English language", and though he produced novels, political books and verse, he is best known for Gulliver's Travels. Like Defoe he had an adventurous political career, editing and writing in the Tory journal The Examiner. When Tory fortunes were at their lowest ebb in 1714, Swift's political career came to an abrupt end and he withdrew back to Ireland where he would pass the rest of his days. And it was in Ireland that he produced Gulliver's Travels, in which he displays a remarkable contempt for human things, as he called them -- a contempt most evident, perhaps, in his account of the ape-like Yahoos. He is often described as a cold, passionless writer, a cynical, harsh humourist deriding pride and ambition, a scorner who himself turned from an object of abuse into an honoured icon over the years. Born poor, he died poor, but throughout remained the very picture of determination.
Defoe, by contrast, came from a wealthy family: starting out as a merchant, his financial ups and downs were immortalised in two lines of verse: "No man has tasted differing fortunes more,/ And thirteen times I have been rich and poor."
Defoe, the author of a number of political treatises, played a minor role in politics, moreover. His dissidence forced him out of the country and he fled to France; on his return he was prosecuted and sentenced to stand three times in the pillory. In later years he turned to prose fiction, producing what has been called "a world book", a term justified "not only by the enormous number of translations, imitations and adaptations that have appeared but by the almost mythic power with which Defoe creates a hero and a situation with which every reader can in some sense identify."
Swift is buried in St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. His epitaph, written by himself in Latin, applies equally to himself and Defoe: "The body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Theology, dean of this Cathedral Church, is buried here, where fierce indignation can no more lacerate his heart. Go traveller, and imitate, if you can, one who strove with all his strength to champion liberty."
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