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The year is 1729. The beauty from 281 years ago. Keep this in mind if you read this brief text.
He is Jonathan Swift, the brilliant Irish writer best known for "Gulliver's Travels".
A sophisticated author, a sharp polemicist, a fervent critic of the English conquerors, he reaches one of the peaks of "politically incorrect" ever in history, proposing to solve both the overpopulation problem in Ireland and the hunger that plagued the country in those years in one fell swoop. The original title of the work is: "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public"
Are you getting closer? Have you merged the two statements into one concept?
Yes, that’s it. Eating children. Cooked and seasoned properly, of course.
The treatise explains in detail the virtues of infant flesh and the benefits of consuming it, both nutritional and political. Almost unbearable (and highly contested) in an era when parental love for children wasn't as taken for granted, the message of the "modest proposal" is today, at first glance, even more despicable.
It shouldn't be necessary to specify the nature of absolute provocation of the libel that only in the end reveals itself as a violent anti-English accusation, suggesting that the Irish have given so much to the invaders that, in the future, they might think about offering their children as a dish. This is probably the main interpretation of the text, without considering the fierce irony.
But this is just the second level: what makes the work perfect is the fact that, at first reading, it doesn't seem like a joke at all. The pleading is heartfelt, convincing, and well-argued.
The description of the flavor of such a dish is almost (my God...) inviting.
In the end, it seems completely reasonable to consider the problem, even if just for a single, absurd, fleeting moment.
The "modest proposal" is a small major development of an impossible theme, remarkably successful. The great Greek philosopher Gorgias, who claimed he could explain both the existence of God and its opposite in an equally convincing way, would have been proud of Swift... and I with him.
The great traveler of the world of Lilliput primarily demonstrates the great, immense power of words, while also placing himself among those
brave authors who did not stop, in the name of art, in front of any type of mental self-censorship. A master of lateral thinking and the most bitter humor, whose level of conceptual violence places him close to people fairly near his era, like De Sade or the sublime Lautréamont, or very distant people like the Monty Python of "The Meaning of Life" (epochal the sketch on the removal of live organs...).
I highly recommend this acerbic pamphlet to lovers of beautiful writing, the most cruel sense of humor, logical inversion, and outright literary madness. And don't blame me if after reading all this you feel a certain craving...
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