In Genesis 6 God said: 'I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth.' He was behaving like a certain kind of satirist, and an untutored reader might even suppose that a satirical author was speaking through Him. The Houyhnhnm Assembly in Gulliver's Travels was similarly given to debating 'Whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth' (a type of proposition Swift entertained in his own name from time to time), or whether they should merely be castrated, a more humanely gradualist project that would achieve the same result in a generation. The gist of these texts is that mankind deserves extermination, and they are wholesale extensions of what may once have been the satirist's principal urge and perhaps his magical power: to kill his enemies or, in the sublimated version, to punish the world's malefactors.

LRB 18 November 1982 | PDF Download