It is a commonplace that an observer's context limits his or her perception of another's situation, sometimes to the point of total blindness. This kind of contextual limiting, though not blindness, seems to have played a part in modern accounts of Swift. Most of his commentators live in liberal democracies, where politics takes place at a distance and where the extent of the responsible citizen's responsibility is to come to a conclusion about what are often called 'the issues'. Such an experience informs different kinds of academic reading of Swift. One group of scholars, the historically minded, is concerned with his beliefs, and produces interpretations which range from the baldly party political to those which recognise the importance to him of the personal. ¹ But even the latter tend to concentrate on ideas. When J. A. Downie, for example, characterises Swift's Old Whiggery 'not so much as a political dogma as a view of the way life should be lived', it is a position, 'a world view', rather than an anxious experience of threatening power that he describes. ² A second, and larger, group of critics ignores politics altogether, so that the most recent MLA CD-ROM bibliography, astonishingly, does not record a single match either for 'Swift' and 'politics' or for 'Gulliver's Travels' and 'politics'. But although these groups appear different, the distinction between them is actually rather small, since each shares a common conception of the nature of politics as fundamentally a matter of issues and positions on issues. It is simply that the historically minded like to follow up Swifts 'political points', while others find them 'either too dated or familiar to be of interest'. ³ The groups' common conception remains more striking than their distinctive interests, and that conception is a result of their common political context.

Swift's context was different, since for him the presence of organised power was close to home and threatening. As is well known, at different times he had his mail opened, was confronted with the prospect of an enquiry into his loyalty and was subtly quizzed on that score by his ecclesiastical superior. And though the threat of lost liberty or place should not be underestimated by those of us with safe livings, it was perhaps not the greatest he faced. More powerful still was the threat which Swift experienced during his period with the Tory ministry and which I discuss more fully below, the threat to the personality of a close corrupt power. Because of this kind of context, politics engaged Swift more intimately than it tends to engage us, and it demanded from him a different kind of response. For Swift decisions on the issues of the day were often less important than personal decisions about his own attitude and behaviour towards power. This is clear from his 1721 political testament set out in a pamphlet letter to Pope. The presentation of his views in the form of a letter to a friend is itself significant since it implies that politics belongs as much in the private as the public sphere, and the contents of the pamphlet are equally revealing. Swift relegates political opinion to the end of the letter, reserving the first three-quarters for justification of his conduct and character. In particular, he tries to define his own relation to power, insisting that he always had friends in both parties, that the current royal family were unknown to him and that he was never under 'necessity of being a slave to men in power' ( Corr., II, 370). ⁴ This final protestation is very familiar from Swift. Politics for him involved not just issues, not even just issues and personalities, but a struggle to retain independence and integrity in the face of encroaching, and potentially enslaving power.

Swift's experience of politics as a personal wrestle with power has a central place in his writing after 1714. It appears at its most obvious in the Irish tracts where he is intent on opposing the 'slavery' threatened to Ireland by England. But it is also important in Gulliver's Travels, both in terms of the themes of the book and in terms of its irony. Critics have long recognised a peculiar shiftiness as characteristic of Swift's 'narrative signature', most markedly in Gulliver's Travels. ⁵ In the irony of that book, relations between narrator and reader have been described as 'purposely unpredictable', and his authorial presence as that of 'predicateless man'. ⁶ My interest is in the motivation and function for the ironist, rather than the rhetorical effect, of this kind of indeterminate irony. ⁷ Denis Donoghue has recently described Swift's irony as 'the counterforce to brainwashing', something that 'holds out against the system's blandishments'. ⁸ I see it in similar terms as the counterforce to corruption, arising from Swift's experience of political power, most crucially in his period as a government propagandist between 1710 and 1714, exemplifying one way of surviving in an invasive and corrupt political system.

Diaries are often the best record both of experience of political life and of responses to it. The Journal to Stella is a peculiar diary in that it had an immediate and particular audience rather than a general and later one, but it remains valuable. It is most striking how little Swift writes in it about the issues of the day. There are entries in which he discusses the vulnerability of the Tory ministry or the success and arguments of his pamphlets, but far more typical is his response to his correspondents' request for more politics: 'faith, I can't think of any' (I, 187). Instead of political discussion, the Journal exposes Swift's running concern with his relations to powerful men, and a double impulse to boast about his intimacy with them and anxiously to insist on his independence. No doubt, Swift valued the intimacy in part for the opportunity it gave of offering good advice, 'as much as I dare' (I, 159), but he also shamelessly and notoriously bragged about his faring 'ten times better than ever I did with the old', and about compliments and dinners and poems read out at table (I, 59 & 60). Such pleasures, though, were not unmixed, and Swift seems to have lived with the constant fear that his friendships might suck him in and corrupt him. The most vengeful passage in the Journal is probably the account of the 'squeeze extraordinary' to be given to a 'rogue' of a journalist who had called Swift an 'ambitious Tantivy', and had referred to his failed 'hopes of preferment in Ireland' (II, 381). Clearly the 'rogue' had scored a hit with his suggestion that Swift, actuated by ambition, had become the creature of the ministry. His own fear of such a metamorphosis echoes through the Journal in his accounts of distancing quarrels with ministers, rejected dinners, the repeated would-be insouciant 'there's an end to that' or 'what care I?', and the outright refusal to allow St. John to be cold to him or treat him 'like a school-boy' (I, 230).

This fear was, and remained, at the heart of Swift's political consciousness. Eighteen years later, he wrote 'A Panegyric on the Reverend Dean Swift' in the voice of his friend Patrick Delany. The poem shares with other late autobiographical pieces the possibly excessive protest that Swift had always retained his independence from the great. Just as 'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift' insists that he 'never courted Men in Station' nor was ever afraid of any man's 'Greatness' (ll. 32527), so the 'Panegyric' implies he had once treated his 'Betters' as his 'Slaves' (l. 5), and refers to his refusal of a 'Patron's Call to dine', and to his assumption of 'a Dignitary's Airs' (ll. 6870). But the fear which is implicit in these denials of obligation, obedience and sycophantic manner also has a more explicit presence. The poem is Swift's reply to his own earlier 'A Libel on Dr. Delany', in which he warns Delany of the possible dangers of friendship with Lord Carteret. In the first poem, 'A Libel', Swift cites Pope as the exemplary independent poet whose heart was too great to allow him to 'lick a Rascal Statesman's Spittle' (l. 82). If the implication is that Delany might well stoop so low, Swift uses the 'Panegyric' to suggest that he himself would go even lower. He has Delany accuse him of not merely licking spit but of enjoying

A Composition more absurd,
Bob's Spittle mix'd with Harry's Turd.

(ll. 62-63)

It might be argued that Swift's willingness to make the charge in some peculiar way annuls it, but the revolting vividness of the image ensures that it is not so easily shaken off, and the poem remains a record of considerable unease about his relations to power. Near the beginning he has Delany ask whether it is true

That Men of Wit can be no more
Than Pimps to Wickedness in Pow'r?

(ll.25-26)

This question and the anxiety behind it are central to Swift's experience of politics from the years with the Tory ministry onwards.

The anxiety is founded in the threat posed by familiarity with power to the integrity of the self. In 'Thoughts on Various Subjects', Swift remarked that 'politicks, as the Word is commonly understood, are nothing but Corruptions' ( Prose, IV, 246). What they corrupt is the self, as is perhaps most clearly seen in the 1710 attacks on the Earl of Wharton, A Short Character and the Examiner essay known as 'The Art of Political Lying'. Wharton, at least the man Swift describes, was the corrupted politician par excellence, a man famed for the 'Management of nice Affairs' ( Prose, III, 11), whose whole thought was divided between 'Vice and Politics' ( Prose, III, 180). He achieved a special position in Swift's writing of the period by virtue of the peculiar intensity of loathing evident in the passages about him. Swift himself in 1713 made his key political opinion his hating Wharton 'like a Toad', ⁹ and this hatred is clear in earlier attacks even when it is disclaimed:

Whoever, for the Sake of others, were to describe the Nature of a Serpent, a Wolf, a Crocodile or a Fox, must be understood to do it without any personal Love or Hatred for the Animals themselves.

( Prose, III, 178)

In the writings of these years Swift often affected, and with some success, what Herbert Davis calls 'the rôle of impartial examiner' ( Prose, VI, xvii), but here the unnecessary disclaimer for the Sake of others') and the over-lengthy list of animals give the game away. The tone is not distanced or aloof, and Swift is bothered by the spectacle of a man who had given in to the temptation that he himself struggled against, the temptation of being drawn in to party and politics.

The central feature, if such a firm word is appropriate, of the Wharton Swift describes, or creates, is a fluidity of personality that defies definition. It is true that the character has a certain recognisable energy and appetite:

Whether he walketh or whistleth, or sweareth, or talketh Bawdy, or calleth Names, he acquitteth himself in each beyond a Templar of three Years standing.

( Prose, III, 179)

But if the verbs here reflect a constant bustling activity, that does not constitute a personality, and the chief motif running through the portraits is one of a changeable and inconsistent nature that cannot be pinned down:

He sweareth solemnly he loveth, and will serve you; and your Back is no sooner turned, but he tells those about him you are a Dog and a Rascal . . . He is a Presbyterian in Politics, and an Atheist in Religion; but he chuseth at present to whore with a Papist.

( Prose, III, 179)

Wharton's capacity to shift in a moment and be neither one thing nor another is connected with the lying that is represented as so compulsive and so frequent a part of his behaviour as to destroy any real self:

He never yet considered whether any Proposition were True or False, but whether it were convenient for the present Minute or Company to affirm or deny it; so that if you think to refine upon him, by interpreting every Thing he says, as we do Dreams by the contrary, you are still to seek, and you will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or no: The only Remedy is to suppose that you have heard some inarticulate Sounds, without any Meaning at all.

( Prose, III, 11)

In Swift's potted accounts of the histories of different languages in A Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue, language is regarded as reflecting the character and integrity of a people ( Prose, IV, 8-10), and the reduction of Wharton's language to 'some inarticulate Sounds' suggests the dissolution of his personality. But perhaps the most telling phrase here is the last, 'without any Meaning at all'. Wharton changes so readily and so often that he has no meaning, and if you wish to find his meaning, or indeed the man himself, you are, in the phrase of the passage, 'still to seek'.

For Swift the construction of the personality, and conversely its destruction, was in part social. He did not conceive of the self in the manner of Locke as an 'identity of consciousness', ¹⁰ but as something that exists among other people, and is perceived, influenced, partially formed, by other people. It is no accident in this respect that of all political diarists Swift chose to write a journal with an immediate audience. His repeated accounts of his rebuffs of the powerful betray the fact that for him it mattered not simply that he distance himself but that he was seen to distance himself. The reverse of such public, or semi-public self-defence, ¹¹ is public exposure, and again, the portraits of Wharton are important. Swift's Wharton is a man without the Sense of Shame or Glory, as some Men are without the Sense of Smelling', and one who happily tells gross lies among enemies, though sure 'they will discover them the Moment they leave him' ( Prose, III, 178-79). Others' perceptions of his shifts and his own lack of care for a firm public persona contribute towards his essential slipperiness. In the passage quoted above, Swift puts Wharton's loss of meaning in the context of another's search for it: 'if you think . . . you are still to seek . . . you will find yourself . . . whether you believe or no . . . you have heard'. It seems from this that the personality ceases to be in part because others cease to perceive it as being.

If Swift's Wharton is a corrupted politician, he is the product of a corrupt political system, and his fate shows the kind of danger that such a system poses. It threatens to engage an individual to the extent that he becomes nothing. The two principal ways of avoiding this, of surviving in that context, can be represented by Horatio and Hamlet: the play's political dilemma of how to be at once involved in a corrupt system and untainted by it was also Swift's. Horatio's way is that of detachment, to be a man 'who takes with equal thanks' both 'Fortune's buffets and rewards' (III. ii. 67-68). ¹² This steady indifference represents an attitude of mind that Swift admired. In 'A Libel on Dr. Delany', Swift praises Pope for possessing sufficient psychological detachment, a sufficiently 'gen'rous Mind', to contemn courts and refuse 'the Visits of a Queen' (ll. 71-75). An earlier work, 'To his Grace the Arch-Bishop of Dublin: A Poem', conceived the possibility of retaining that kind of detachment while in the thick of the fray against Wood and his halfpence. Archbishop King is described as possessing a 'Breast unshaken' and a nobility of manner before which power falls down (l. 9 & ll. 13-16). But neither Pope's detachment in his garden at Twickenham nor King's in his firm purpose was a possibility for Swift. In July 1714, he wrote to Arbuthnot wondering 'how you can have a Mind so degagé in a Court where there is so many Million of things to vex you' ( Corr., II, 47). The letter was written from the Berkshire village of Letcombe Bassett to which Swift had retired to escape the cares and business of politics. It is characteristic that none of the letters from there bears any trace of a retired mind, and Bolingbroke showed a keen sense of both Swift and his situation when he wrote:

I never laugh'd my Dear Dean, att your leaving the Town . . . But I confess I laugh'd, and very heartily too, when I heard you affected to find within the village of Letcombe all your heart desir'd.

( Corr., II, 61)

Bolingbroke's laughter destroys the pose of rural retreat, and boldly underlines that a removed impassivity was not for Swift.

His method of dealing with power was closer to that of Hamlet than Horatio. Instead of disengaging his mind, he put an antic disposition on, mixed seriousness and mirth, and kept constantly shifting his attitude, voice, degree of familiarity, so that he could not be defined by others, made in their image, changed into their creature. Swift's veering between pride at his closeness to ministers and insistence on his distance from them is evident in the Journal, and it is perhaps even plainer in a letter to the Earl of Oxford of, again, the summer of 1714 ( Corr., II, 44-45). This crucial document in understanding Swift's attitude towards the great was written at the moment when he believed he had withdrawn from politics, and it attempts to define his relation to his patron. There are a number of kinds of movement in the letter. It moves in attitude from plain compliment in references to 'your Candor and Justice' to flirtations with insult in the declaration that 'I always loved you just so much the worse for your Station'. It moves in intention since Swifts professed hope that he has given no offence belies the parting image of leave-taking, and the sentiment expressed ten days later to Arbuthnot that Oxford 'will be hanged before he will answer me' ( Corr., II, 63). Finally, the letter moves in tone or degree of formality. It slips from the tenderly private ('now absent and forgotten'), to the deliberately dignified ('I have nothing to ask'), to the slightly grandiloquent ('Posterity shall know') to the frankly theatrical. Swift hangs the various attributes he would like Oxford to see in him from a series of 'as one who . . .'clauses, a device which not only elevates the tone by parallelism but also by recalling Othello's repeated 'of one . . .' in his final speech. Moreover, the theatricality is continued into the closing image, almost a tableau, of Swift taking a bow and retiring back into the crowd. Tone signals a writer's distance from a text's 'voice', and here Swift seems to be moving towards and away from the voice as he becomes by turns intimate, dignified, pompous or melodramatic.

There are, of course, dangers in all this volatility. For Swift, as for Hamlet, the struggle to preserve himself in the face of corruption sometimes involves such complex and contradictory manoeuvres that identity seems to be lost, or to remain only as a question. In the letter to Oxford, the movement is at times so fast that two positions are taken simultaneously:

For in your publick Capacity you have often angred me to the Heart, but, as a private man, never once.

( Corr., II, 44)

Here Swift is both angry and affectionate, both rude to a powerful superior and warm to a powerful friend. The balance is typical. It reflects the desires to draw back from the great and to approach them, to be at once in and out of the vortex of power. But a balance of this kind and contradictions of this kind raise questions and create doubts about his position. A Horatio presents a firm, defined figure to the world, and part of the definition is in the presentation, but Swift is wary of being perceived and pinned down by others, and of thus becoming their thing. The result is that the reader who tries to find Swift in his shifting pronouncements, in the manner we are encouraged to look for Wharton in his, is likely to be puzzled and discover that he or she has 'still to seek'.

Swift was, then, afraid of power as well as attracted to it, afraid of its capacity not simply to harm but to corrupt, and through corruption to annihilate. His response resembles his mature irony, in its veering between distance and closeness, its comprehension of two opposing attitudes at once, and the question it leaves as the trace of their author. There is also a resemblance between a cautious political animal like Swift, who shifts to preserve himself, and a committed one like Wharton, who shifts to achieve his ends. As Linda Hutcheon has argued, 'saying one thing and meaning something different . . . defines lying as much as it does irony'. ¹³ The ironical Swift and the mendacious Wharton are brothers, even if brothers of very different inclinations.

The corrupting, potentially destructive, effect of closeness to power is an important force in the narrative of at least three of the four voyages of Gulliver's Travels. In the first, second and fourth voyages, Gulliver begins by being physically subject, for even in the fourth where he is not tied down or held between thumb and finger he finds it 'prudent to comply' with the first grey horse he meets ( Prose, XI, 227). Such physical subjection soon develops into what Margaret Anne Doody has called 'mental bondage'. ¹⁴ Naming is crucial in this respect. A glance at Swift's private writings confirms how acutely he was aware of the power of giving names, and as Gulliver's successive hosts dub him Quinbus Flestrin, Grildrig and a Yahoo, it is clear that calling him by his given names makes him their creature. The possession of Gulliver by others and loss of himself to himself are also evident in the way in which he famously adopts the outlook of each country he visits. Unlike Swift in the years 1710-14 with his anxious obsessive distancing, Gulliver is ready to consider himself a criminal as the Lilliputians do ( Prose, XI, 73), and after his sojourn with the Houyhnhmns he takes as a great compliment the observation from his friends that he trots 'like a Horse' ( Prose, XI, 279). But the image which conveys most powerfully the sense of dissolution implied in this kind of conformity to others' ways of thinking is that of his proposed punishment in Lilliput. He is to be blinded and starved, and when dead, to have his flesh cut from his bones and taken away 'by Cart-loads' to be buried in 'distant Parts' ( Prose, XI, 71). The proposal grotesquely shadows the process that Gulliver goes through on each voyage as he allows himself to be seized, reduced and scattered by the people he meets.

If Gulliver's various but similar fates on his different voyages represent the potentially corrosive effect of proximity to power, and reflect a fear of that, Swift's late irony constitutes a way of containing or dodging the threat. It is impossible to identify authorial motivation with complete confidence, but the most striking feature of Swift's irony is the varying distance between the author's voice (in other words, himself) and the ironic voice. In this, it resembles in its shiftiness the variations in attitude, intention and tone of the letter to Oxford, and its effect, again like the letter, is to defy attempts at interpretation and definition. Both point back to a desire, however dimly realised, to avoid Gulliver's fate, the very fate Swift himself resisted in the Tory ministry years.

The kind of movement I mean can be seen in texts as diverse as the various Drapier's Letters and A Modest Proposal. M. B. Drapier is not a fully fledged ironic persona since he shares the same views as Swift, although possessing a different background and character. But once Swift has established his modest concerned tradesman he flirts with that identity, by approaching it and withdrawing from it. In the second letter, To Mr. Harding, for example, the not 'inconsiderable Shopkeeper' sounds intermittently like the considerable Dean when he picks Wood up on his 'dubious' expressions, calls him a 'little impudent Hard-ware-Man', and declares it dishonourable for anyone with the 'Figure of a Man' to contemplate 'being devoured alive by a Rat' ( Prose, X, 18-20). Something similar is going on with the very different ironic persona of A Modest Proposal, for here too ironic distance constantly changes. It is Swift and not a psychopathic projector who remarks that landlords are the properest people to eat babies since they 'have already devoured most of the Parents', who jokes about the 'prolifick Dyet' of Catholics during Lent, and who castigates the young Dublin women 'who, without one single Groat to their Fortunes, cannot stir Abroad without a Chair, and appear at the Play-house, and the Assemblies in foreign Fineries' ( Prose, XII, 112 & 114). A particularly striking example of this kind of movement comes towards the end of the tract after the 'other Expedients' passage. The speaker forbids any man from mentioning solutions other than cannibalism 'till he hath, at least, a Glimpse of Hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere Attempt to put them in Practice', before returning once again to his own proposal ( Prose XII, 117). Swift is moving so rapidly in and out of role at this point that the passage is a complex, simultaneous mixture of the projector's monstrous rationality and his own anger and despair.

Such mobile irony is generally absent from Swift's early works. To suggest that is to be at odds with Claude Rawson'sinfluential account, since he has written of the way that the 'momentary intensities' of A Tale of a Tub 'spill over', taking us 'into a surprising and "cruel" domain of the fantasy'. ¹⁵ Although this reading is persuasive, Swift's position in the irony of A Tale is more stable than it suggests, and far more stable than that in many later texts. The passage Rawson refers to occurs in the 'A Digression Concerning Madness', and contains the well-known images (which he cites) of a woman being flayed and a beau's carcass being stripped. The passage begins:

In the Proportion that Credulity is a more peaceable Possession of the Mind, than Curiosity, so far preferable is that Wisdom, which converses about the Surface, to that pretended Philosophy which enters into the Depth of Things, and then comes gravely back with Informations and Discoveries, that in the inside they are good for nothing.

( Prose, I, 109)

It is the syntax rather than the irony that is complex here. The latter sets up a fairly straightforward opposition between the ironic and real views, so that the speaker regards surface wisdom as preferable to deep wisdom because it is easier, while Swift implies that deep wisdom is actually preferable because it is truer if harder. Although the later images that Rawson comments on are certainly disturbing, they do nothing to upset this opposition. The stripped carcass is hard to stomach, but the speaker's conclusion from what he sees that philosophy should seek an 'Art to sodder and patch up the Flaws and Imperfections of Nature' is the opposite of Swift's ( Prose, I, 110). In other words, despite the wit and the sudden intensities Swift maintains his ironic distance, and allows the reader a reasonable degree of interpretative confidence.

This is not true of Gulliver's Travels. In the irony of that book, the distance between Gulliver and Swift is typically more changeable, even in those narrative passages where the irony is least intense. For much of the first voyage, for example, Swift adopts a more or less anonymous narrative or descriptive voice, as in the account of rope-dancing:

But the Danger is much greater, when the Ministers themselves are commanded to shew their Dexterity: For, by contending to excel themselves and their Fellows, they strain so far, that there is hardly one of them who hath not received a Fall; and some of them two or three.

( Prose, XI, 39)

Beneath the deadpan description, the reader can sense Swift closing in as the passage develops. By the time we reach the ministers' falls, it is as if he has taken over the narrative, and is now himself meting out punishment to those nameless politicians, and adding to it with relish by multiplying their failures. The same kind of closing in is evident in more obviously ironic passages. In the third voyage, Gulliver is 'but ill entertained' in the School of Political Projectors of the Academy of Lagado. It is the madness of the professors' plans that depresses him, their schemes for persuading Monarchs to chuse Favourites upon the Score of their Wisdom, Capacity and Virtue; of teaching Ministers to consult the publick Good; of rewarding Merit, great Abilities, and eminent Services . . . with many other wild impossible Chimæras, that never entered before into the Heart of Man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old Observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some Philosophers have not maintained for Truth.

( Prose, XI, 187)

We might break this quotation down into sections to show the changing relationship between Swift and Gulliver. In the first for' to 'Services'), Gulliver regards as plain mad what Swift regards as mad to expect but natural to desire; in the second ('with' to 'Chimæras') Gulliver and Swift agree about the nature of these projects, though for different reasons; in the third ('that' to 'conceive') Gulliver is ignorant of what Swift knows, that some have actually entertained these political wishes; and in the last ('and' to 'Truth'), Gulliver and Swift are one in thinking there's nothing so mad that people have not believed it. The common critical observation of 'the notoriously discontinuous quality of Gulliver's character' therefore seems slightly off target. ¹⁶ It is not simply Gulliver's character that is uncertain and shifting, but perhaps more importantly, Swift's relation to him.

The kind of movement I have been discussing is at its most obvious and extreme in the latter half of the fourth voyage. In the final chapter Gulliver defends his authorial motives:

I write for the noblest End, to inform and instruct Mankind, over whom I may, without Breach of Modesty, pretend to some Superiority . . . I write without any View towards Profit or Praise. I never suffer a Word to pass that may look like Reflection, or possibly give the least Offence even to those who are most ready to take it. So that, I hope, I may with Justice pronounce myself an Author perfectly blameless; against whom the Tribes of Answerers, Considerers, Observers, Reflecters, Detecters, Remarkers, will never be able to find Matter for exercising their Talents.

( Prose, XI, 293)

This is, of course, the mad Gulliver who likes to chat with horses and who is incapable of self-criticism. On the other hand his phrase 'noblest End' in relation to writing echoes Swift's own later claim to have written with a 'moral View', and so does his denial of personal reflection. ¹⁷ What is more, his dismissal of the 'Tribes of Answerers' strikes a very similar note to the disdain with which Swift, in the 'Apology' for A Tale of a Tub and in his own person, mentions 'the ill-placed Cavils of the Sour, the Envious, the Stupid, and the Tastless' ( Prose, I, 2). So, most of the passage can be read both as mockery of the mad Gulliver and as statement of the sane Swift, indicating a very rapid movement between distance and closeness. Earlier in the voyage towards the end of his stay in Houyhnhnmland, Gulliver lists the English things he lacks there:

Here were no Gibers, Censurers, Backbiters, Pickpockets, Highwaymen, House-breakers, Attorneys, Bawds, Buffoons, Gamesters, Politicians, Wits, Spleneticks, tedious Talkers, Controvertists, Ravishers, Murderers, Robbers, Virtuoso's . . .

( Prose, XI, 276-77)

At this point Swift is almost in and out at once. The effect of the list, to dissolve the distinction between murderers and buffoons, ravishers and tedious talkers, is Gulliver's, but the dislike for all these types and the energy of the prose are Swift's as much as they are his narrator's.

Such rapidity of movement echoes Swift's attitude and behaviour towards power and the powerful between 1710 to 1714. In those years, he seems, as I have argued, constantly to have drawn close to his great patrons in desire to share their friendship and something of their power, and to have withdrawn in fear of being caught and owned. In the late writing and the final chapters of Gulliver's Travels especially we witness something similar at work as Swift draws close to his subject, his persona, his reader, only then to move skittishly away. The impulse in both cases is a kind of defensiveness, a desire to avoid being seen, known, possessed. Kierkegaard's influential account of irony characterises it as 'infinite absolute negativity', and describes the ironic questioner like Socrates as asking 'without any interest in the answer except to suck out the apparent content by means of the question and thereby to leave an emptiness behind'. ¹⁸ Swift's irony operates in a different sphere from Socrates' and performs different functions, but its elusive quality also has the effect of negating and of leaving a kind of 'emptiness behind'. Another, and perhaps apter, comparison might again be to Hamlet. In a famously ironic moment, he asks Guildenstern to play a recorder, only to turn his friend and court informant's failure back on him:

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from the lowest note to the top of my compass.

(III. ii. 354-58)

Hamlet has used irony throughout the first three acts to protect himself from being sounded, that is, to preserve his mystery, and there is something similar at work in Swift's mature irony. Its elusive quality fends off commitment to what might be false self-definition, keeps the dogs of interpretation at bay, and leaves the reader always 'still to seek'.

This is not to say that Swift disappears entirely down an ironic hole of his own making. Allan Reddick has written of the eighteenth century tendency to conflate 'style and mind', ¹⁹ and there always remains in Swift's style a trace of his mind. His description of Brobdingnagian style as 'clear, masculine, and smooth, but not Florid' can apply to his own ( Prose, XI, 137), and in that clear strong style the reader can hear a voice that seems to echo a mind. This returns us to the comparison with Wharton. The consummate liar that Swift creates in the character is left with no meaning except the coarse energy and appetite of one who walks, or whistles, or swears, or talks bawdy, or calls names, acquitting himself in each 'beyond a Templar of three Years standing' ( Prose, XI, 179). The ironical Swift is different. He too eludes meaning, but for different reasons and in different ways, and what remains is not bare energy but a measured, steady, responsible, human voice.

Gulliver's Travels is a profoundly political book, but not quite in the sense that the phrase is generally understood.

Its politics are not, at least most centrally not, concerned with Barrier Treaties, or the death of Queen Anne, or Whig and Tory, or even generalised issues of party and state and just rule. Rather, they have to do with the individual's relations to power when power can tie you down or hold you in its hand or hurry you along with a cry of 'Hhuun, Hhuun'. On the one hand, there is Gulliver who allows himself to be named, inventoried and defined, and who becomes possessed by the ideas and attitudes of his captors. On the other, there is Swift who keeps on the move, and who will let his relation neither to fictionalised rulers nor to real readers settle long enough for him to be trapped. Hamlet rebukes Guildenstern by insisting that 'there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ', and that 'though you fret me, you cannot play upon me' (III. ii. 358-62). The cursed spite of his situation is not simply that he must kill a king, but that he must not be manipulated and tainted in a corrupt court. Swift's concern is similar. Far more than a rhetorical device, his irony operates as a way of avoiding being played upon, and of keeping his own excellent voice intact.

Bishop Grosseteste College, Lincoln