Swift and Orwell: comrades in satire
In his essay “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels” (1946), Orwell emphasised how much Jonathan Swift’s satirical masterpiece meant to him: “It is a book which seems impossible for me to grow tired of. I read it first when I was eight—one day short of eight, to be exact, for I stole and furtively read the copy which was to be given me next day on my eighth birthday—and I have certainly not read it less than half a dozen times since.” (The children’s version probably deleted the obscene passages about the Yahoos.)
Two centuries apart but close in thought and techniques, Swift and Orwell had personal as well as literary affinities. Terminally ill and desperate to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four (hereafter NEF), Orwell identified with Swift and eagerly took whatever interested him. Swift used wit and imagination to mock the politics and culture of his time, and in NEF Orwell developed Swift’s ideas. What begins in Swift as a satiric and bitterly comic voyage of exploration and misadventure becomes in Orwell’s hands a dark vision of the future.
When Orwell writes about himself in his essay on Swift, the parallels between the two authors leap out. Both men championed the poor and had a pessimistic outlook. Swift defended impoverished people in “A Modest Proposal” and his other essays on Ireland. Orwell was compassionate about maltreated hospital patients in “How the Poor Die” and about oppressed and exploited coal miners in The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell defined both Swift and himself as a “Tory anarchist”: a conservative in feeling and radical in politics, a revolutionary in love with the past. In NEF he named Winston Smith after an aristocrat and an ordinary man.
Like Swift, Orwell expressed his profound disgust with contemporary society by emphasising dirt. Misjudging a leap, Gulliver is “filthily bemired” when he falls into a heap of cow dung, and the ape-like, arboreal Yahoos discharge their excrement on his head. In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell described the filth in an expensive French restaurant where he worked as a dishwasher. The cooks show their class resentment by spitefully spitting into the customers’ soup. As Orwell sardonically remarks, “the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it”. Orwell’s dirty, smelly lodging house in Wigan Pier swarms with blackbeetles and serves vile food, with a “full chamber-pot under the breakfast table”. Like Swift, Orwell was disgusted by offensive smells. Swift was revolted by the mephitic Brobdingnagian nurses, the Maids of Honour and the Yahoos. Many of Orwell’s works are malodorous, and in his essay on Dickens he makes odours represent oppressive doctrines. He condemns “all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls”. John Sutherland wrote a whole book, Orwell’s Nose, on this subject.
Swift “belonged to the unsuccessful [Tory] party”, supplanted by the Whigs when George I became king in 1714. Orwell belonged to the anti-Stalinist POUM party during the Spanish Civil War when the Communists, his supposed anti-fascist allies, tried to kill him. For Swift in Ireland and for Orwell in Spain, there was a close “connection between his political loyalties and his ultimate defeat and despair.” The Anglican Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Swift scandalised Queen Anne with sacrilegious passages in A Tale of a Tub and thereby ruined his chances of becoming a bishop. Orwell aroused the wrath of the pro-Communist press in England, which refused to publish his revelations of the Communist betrayal in “Eye-Witness in Barcelona” and “Spilling the Spanish Beans.”
NEF, like Gulliver’s Travels, was a rancorous and gloomy book, propelled by savage indignation. Orwell characterised Swift as “an enemy of tyranny and a champion of the free intelligence”. He saw Swift in terms of contemporary politics, arguing that he attacked “what would now be called totalitarianism”. After the fall of the Tories, Swift was self-exiled to Dublin; Orwell, when ill, exiled himself to the remote Hebridean island of Jura. Both men suffered chronic illness for most of their adult lives: Swift from the vertigo, dizziness and deafness of Ménière’s disease, an infection of the inner ear; Orwell from the tuberculosis that finally killed him at the age of 46.
Swift thought that “the human body is repulsive and ridiculous”. Gulliver’s body is always disproportionate and awkward among both the tiny and the gigantic people, while Swift portrayed the Yahoos as depraved and subhuman. Orwell’s description of himself after suffering the terrible effects of streptomycin, which he hoped would cure his disease, was close to his grim portrayal of Winston Smith after his torture in the novel: “The truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of his ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. . . . The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull. . . . He was aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness.” W.B.C. Watkins’ conclusion in his brilliant book Perilous Balance applies with equal force to Orwell: “Swift’s life was a long disease, with its disappointments, its self-torture, its morbid recriminations.”
Both Gulliver and NEF erupt in violence. Gulliver is almost “squashed to Death” under a giant’s foot, and the rational but surprisingly warlike Houyhnhnm-horses batter their enemies’ “faces into Mummy [pulp], by terrible Yerks from their hinder Hoofs.” Orwell’s most famous image of the future political system in NEF, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” derives from Swift. Orwell treats Swift as if he were his ideological contemporary and says he “has an extraordinarily clear pre-vision of the spy-haunted ‘police-State,’ with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials”. Lilliput is constantly at war with Blefuscu, and Gulliver tells the Houyhnhnms about England’s long war with France. Orwell adopts this pattern in NEF. Oceania is always fighting wars, in which the enemies suddenly change, against either Eastasia or Eurasia.
Orwell discovered, when he returned from the toilet during a political meeting, that the Party line had suddenly changed. Swift’s destructive Floating Island foreshadows Orwell’s well-armed Floating Fortress, and both aeronautical weapons are used to reduce rebellious subjects to obedience.
Rats inspire terror and disgust in both works. Gulliver confronts them on sea and on land: “Rats on board carried away one of my Sheep; I found her Bones in a Hole, picked clean from the Flesh. . . . Two Rats crept up the Curtains, and ran smelling backwards and forewords on the Bed. One of them came up almost to my Face; whereupon I rose in a Fright.” In Orwell’s torture scene, O’Brien threatens Winston and shatters his resistance by telling him that rats “will strip [an infant] to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing [like O’Brien] when a human being is helpless. . . . They will leap onto your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first.” The rats force Winston to betray his lover and scream: “Do it to Julia! Not me!”
Swift satirises what he saw as the ludicrous scientific experiments of the Royal Society. At the Grand Academy of Lagado, members try to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, reduce human excrement to its original food, change ice into gunpowder, build houses from the roof down and have blind men mix colours for painters. Orwell’s examples of perverse modern science, described in Emmanuel Goldstein’s tract, are equally absurd and more destructive: “focusing the sun’s rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth’s centre.” Swift’s Engine in the Academy of Lagado is “so contrived, that the Words shifted into new Places, as the square Bits of Wood moved upside down.” This mechanical printing device (complete with diagram) inspired Julia’s job in the Fiction Department, where she operates an automatic writing machine that cranks out cheap pornography for the proles.
Swift brilliantly satirises control of education by the state. His Lilliputians believe that “Parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the Education of their own Children,” who are brought up in public nurseries to avoid emotional connections with their families. Orwell puts a bitterly ironic twist on this when his colleague Parsons praises his little daughter, indoctrinated by the State, for spying on him and then denouncing him after he’d impulsively shouted “Down with Big Brother!”: “She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?”
Orwell’s preoccupation with clear language and the moral dimensions of writing began with his reading of Swift. In his Letter to a Young Gentleman, Swift defined clear style as “Proper words in proper places”. In “Why I Write”, Orwell agreed that “Good prose should be transparent, like a window-pane.” In his prefatory Letter, Captain Gulliver remarks that volatile words “change every Year . . . and are so altered, that [he] could hardly understand the new” words when he returned from his long voyages. The malign Projectors in Lagado try to obscure the meaning of words and phrases, and “to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles”. Another even more radical scheme is meant to extinguish language by “entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever.” Orwell noted that the Houyhnhnms, with limited concepts and mindless agreement on all subjects, have “no word for ‘opinion’ in their Language”, and “no word to express Lying or Falsehood” — or evil. The Houyhnhnms denounce the practice of lying in which they are “led to believe a Thing Black when it is White, and Short when it is Long.” The brainwashed people in NEF are taught to accept these lies, and O’Brien finally persuades the mind-blown Winston to believe that 2+2=5.
Swift’s linguistic obliteration leads directly to Newspeak in NEF. The defiant slogan Big Brother is ungood “could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available.” Newspeak is specifically designed to diminish the range of thought by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth is to destroy the antiquated words in Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning, and to invent new and more stringent replacements.
State control of emotions as well as thoughts, its destruction of personal choice in love, sex and marriage, is similar in Houyhnhnmland and Orwell’s Oceania. Love is deliberately excluded from marriage, which is solely intended for propagation. It is arranged by the State on a pragmatic basis, and adultery and fornication are either forbidden or unknown. This precise comparison reveals why Gulliver’s Travels meant so much to Orwell and explains how Swift’s satire powerfully influenced him. If one were to subtract everything Orwell took from Swift, NEF would be a very different and far less effective novel.
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell , Orwell: The Critical Heritage , Orwell: Wintry Conscience of His Generation and Orwell: Life and Art .
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