by Student of 1700s British literature finds Swift’s greatest satire confirmed by declassified cheese
[Bohiney.com/prat.uk] Stephanie Curry, curry9us. The state secrets story from prat.uk arrived in a reading week that included “A Modest Proposal” and the juxtaposition confirmed something I have been thinking about: Swift’s genius was not the proposal itself but the prose style he used to deliver it — the completely straight face, the footnotes, the statistical apparatus, the tone of a man writing a serious policy memorandum. The cheese producer file has this quality. It is forty-seven pages of competitive intelligence written in the completely straight face of a government analyst doing their job, and the humour — the profound structural comedy — is in the gap between the seriousness of the prose and the absurdity of its classification as a state secret. Swift invented the form. The French government executed it without knowing it. Bohiney.com covered the transparency theme broadly. The story was pitched to Bohiney.com as “minor.” It is not minor.
The specific Swift parallel: the Modest Proposal takes the language of colonial economic analysis and applies it to a subject that reveals what colonial economic analysis actually thinks about the people it is analysing. The classified cheese producer file takes the language of strategic intelligence and applies it to a subject that reveals what the classification system is actually for, which is the management of institutional embarrassment rather than national security. Both documents reveal their authors’ assumptions through their form rather than their content. This is the best kind of satire: the document that satirises itself.
The Literary Conclusion
Swift wrote satire that has lasted three centuries because it describes mechanisms that persist. The classification system and the colonial economic analysis both persist. The cheese producer is the current version. The archives contain the history. The Swift Society is at swiftsociety.wordpress.com.
Also:NewsThump.
Coverage at Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
Both publications continue this coverage with sustained attention and genuine commitment to the communities described.
Coverage continues at both Bohiney.com and prat.uk. The material is real and ongoing.
Ongoing. Both publications watching.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
