Jonathan Swift

Nigel Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317893141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of critical thinking situates the satire of Jonathan Swift within both its eighteenth-century contexts and our modern anxieties about personal identity and communication. Augustan satire at its most provocative is not simply concerned with the public matters of politics or religion, but also offers a precise medium in which to express the paradox of ironic detachment amidst deep conviction. The critics chosen for this volume demonstrate the complexity of Swift's work. Its four sections explore matters of authorial identity, the relation between Swift's writing and its historical context, the full range of his comments on gender, and his deployment of metaphor and irony to engage the reader. Swift has often been regarded as a writer who anticipated many twentieth-century cultural preoccupations, and this volume provides an opportunity to test just how modern he actually was. It also provides an answer to those who would wish to simplify his writing as that of Tory and misogynist. The theoretical perspectives of the contributors are lucidly explained and their critical terms located in the wider contexts of contemporary theory in the introduction and headnotes. The volume places Swift historically within the philosophical and religious traditions of eighteenth-century thought.

Part One
Reading and Identity

In the four essays in this section the main topic under consideration, for both Swift as satirist and his readers, is the search for the particular degree of identity between his texts and some external referent. How can writing best incapsulate and then communicate an intention? In Swift’s case, this perennial question of interpretation is more urgent as, following Roland Barthes’s distinction, here repeated by Edward Said, between an écrivant and an écrivain, there is an unstable duality about the satirist’s relationship with the context of both the reader (‘How am I to register the precise tone and implied meaning of the writing?’) and the indicated objects of his invective (Ts Swift’s meaning, derived, for example, from his William Wood / Modest Proposer / Modern Writer, always a public one?’). For Barthes (see Barthes, ‘To Write: an intransitive verb?’, in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. RICHARD MACKSEY and EUGENIO DONATO [Baltimore, MD, 1970], pp. 134–56, and ‘Écrivains and Écrivant’s – in Essais Critiques [Paris, 1964], pp. 147–54) there was a significant difference between an author and a writer, for the former (an écrivain) tends to regard the verb, ‘to write’, as an intransitive activity, where the aesthetic qualities outweigh the referential, and the latter (an écrivant) tends to write only as a means to a non-literary end, where the aesthetic or formal impact of the writing is inevitably just a part of the rhetoric. In the case of Swift, the boundaries between these two sorts of literary activity are interestingly interdependent, as he frequently finds writing an event, but an event that often gestures to intensely-felt personal as well as ‘worldly’ loss. This essay is taken from a collection entitled, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1984), a wide-ranging set of explorations around the interpretational challenges posed whenever a text is viewed in the world, that is, not so much creating its own parenthetical comment so much as joining more directly the main discourses of History. For Said, Swift is a fascinating case study: never a vocational writer, always alert to the particular constraints of context, and thereby an ironic manipulator of readerly response. In the essay immediately following this one, Said makes a persuasive claim for ‘Swift as Intellectual’ (pp. 72–89), and thus attempts to exclude him for critical consideration from the ranks of merely a Tory satirist. He is then a writer caught up in ideas and ethical choices, reacting to historical and cultural events in the process of attempting to mould them.

For Richard H. Rodino, the emphasis is rather more on the variety of ways readers travel with Gulliver and Swift in reading the Travels. Rodino, who died tragically early in his life in 1990, had just completed his Swift Studies, 1965–1980: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1984) and, with Hermann J. Real, edited Reading Swift (Munich, 1993), and this essay is part of an assessment of the patterns of response to Swift’s work that he promised (here, p. 47) would dwell less on some teleological critical progress towards a ‘correct’ reading than a focus on how each generation of readers projects prior assumptions on to the text just as they apparently receive messages only from 1726. This situation is part of what has been variously termed intertextuality, the original literary text (once written into existence by Swift) actually encounters quite different patterns of understanding, ‘text’s contemporaneous with the reader. It is therefore entirely probable that the most important factor in our present interest in any text lies in how it intersects with our deepest contemporary assumptions. In Hans Robert Jauss’s seminal collection of essays Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (trans. TIMOTHY BAHTI; Minneapolis, 1982), he expounds a theory as to why interpretations differ about works as complex as Gulliver’s Travels: it is an historical document, not a monument, and as such accrues significance through time. The hope is that history can be united with aesthetics:

The aesthetic implication lies in the fact that the first reception of a work by the reader includes a test of its aesthetic value in comparison with works already read. The obvious historical implication of this is that the understanding of the first reader will be sustained and enriched in a chain of receptions from generation to generation; in this way the historical significance of a work will be decided and its aesthetic value made evident.

(p. 20)

As we now read Swift’s work, as Rodino painstakingly uncovers, we encounter a series of apparently distracting textual signalsjwhich gradually add up to a central statement about the printed book and literary fictions.

It is appropriate at this juncture to mention those critics who identify ‘reader entrapment’ in many of Swift’s ironic works. Although Rodino is interested (though not exclusively) in the role of the implied reader in the projection of an author’s meaning, there are several suggestive readings that find Swift’s meaning bound up, sometimes exclusively, with the experience of the reader. In his recent collection of essays on such themes, Reader Entrapment in Eighteenth-Century Literature (New York, 1992), Carl R. Kropf has defined ‘reader entrapment’ as occurring ‘when an author seems to force his reader into choosing among unacceptable readings, forces him into an unacceptable role, arouses expectations he does not fulfill, or otherwise causes the reader significant discomfort’ (p. xiv). This fits Swift’s tactics closely, and in the earlier work of David M. Vieth and W. B. Camochan (see VIETH, ‘Entrapment in Restoration and early Eighteenth-Century English Literature’, Papers in Language and Literature, 18 [1982], 227–33 and CARNOCHAN, Confinement and Flight: An Essay on English Literature of the Eighteenth Century [Berkeley, CA, 1977]), there are demonstrations of how this claustrophobic impression actually provokes an opposite reaction from the reader: the depiction of disorder similarly calls forth such disorientation on the reader’s behalf that the end result is an embracing of purity and straightforwardness. This may suggest that Rodino is interested only in the proliferation of alternative readings – for variety’s sake. He concludes, though, with reflections on Paul De Man’s recurrent theme throughout the essays in his Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT, 1979) that different readings cannot peacefully co-exist, but rather have to contest each other as a necessary condition of their ‘proof’.

As Swift is drawn so much to pseudonymous projections of the ‘author’ in his writing, there is a constant temptation in any reading to search for a ‘real’ set of characteristics that may underlie the fallible narrator. For Deborah Baker Wyrick, this is no consistent tactic, but rather permits an array of dramatic incongruities where the reader can never for long accustom her/himself to a patterned response. Perhaps all name-calling or -assuming inevitably involves fiction. In Jacques Lacan’s theory of the specular image, he traces what happens when a child first becomes aware of the self. On looking into a mirror an impression of unity is given the child that s/he cannot feel. Forever after, there is an inexorable quest for the ‘proper’ name that will heal the fractured sense of self that one senses, and yet the very nature of language means that this is doomed to failure, as stable meaning can never exist in language. What we actually join when we both register meaning in language and try to express it is a chain of signifiers with no final act of exact definition, no matter how much we may desire such a union. We travel ‘in the rails of metonymy’, and are actually ‘eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else’ (Écrits: A Selection, trans. ALAN SHERIDAN [New York, 1971], p. 167). When Swift selects a persona, he is attempting an affirmation of an authorial self. M. B. Drapier or Gulliver, because they exist only in literature, cannot exhibit any of that startling lifelike unpredictability that the real presents every day.

1
Swift’s Tory Anarchy^*

EDWARD SAID

* Reprinted from The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Faber and Faber, 1983), pp. 54–71.

Swift’s work is a persisting miracle of how much commentary an author’s writing can accommodate and still remain problematic. The efforts on his behalf have been mainly restorative, since few major authors in English have presented themselves so resolutely in a long series of occasional pieces that defy easy classification. One way of checking this intransigence is to note how much more certainly we can use the adjective ‘Swiftian’ than we can identify, locate, and see ‘Swift’. The latter seems often to be little more than an adjunct to the former, even as ‘Swift’ somehow energetically covers thirteen volumes of prose, three of poetry, seven of correspondence, and innumerable pages of strange jottings. Thus Swift is restored by editors to a definitive text, by biographers to a chronology of events from birth in 1667 to death in 1745, by psychological critics to a set of characteristics, by historians to an age, by literary critics to a genre, a technique, a rhetoric, a tradition, and by moralists to the norms he is said to have defended. His identity has been very much in the shadow of claims made on his work, and if this is always true with major authors it doesn’t, in Swift’s case, make it seem any less of what Norman O. Brown has called a housebreaking and domestication of the tiger of English literature.

Yet despite their differences each of these restorations, consciously or not, is also taking Swift as a resistance to the order in which he will come to be placed. In no author do the regulations of order and the challenging anarchy of dispersion cohabit with such integrity. R. P. Blackmur’s remark that ‘true anarchy of spirit should always show (or always has showed) a tory flavor’ is, I think, best applied to Swift.¹ His work can be approached and characterized as the highly dramatic encounter between the anarchy of resistance to the written page and the abiding tory order of the page. This is the most literally basic form of encounter: it is capable of great multiplication, going from the difference between waste and conservation, absence and presence, obscenity and decorum, to the negative and positive dimensions of language, imagination, unity, and identity. The life of such an encounter is, so to speak, the active content of Swift’s mind as we are able to grasp it in its essential resistance to any fixed boundaries. Nevertheless, the limits of that mind’s play seem to have been set by the exclusion of everything but highly specialized and obsessive work – I am recalling Swift’s own reference to his conjured spirit. So constant an experience of force and pressure warrants Yeats’s granting to Swift the discovery of the intellect’s madness.

The tension between an individual author, as an irreducible existence, and the tory institutions of literature to which the writing contributes is, of course, an implicit one, always to be taken into account by the critic. This tension is exploited, rather than tolerated, by critical methods whose bias stresses the anterior privileges of the writer’s experience to his finished product. Whether as phenomenology, Lebensphilosophie, or psychoanalysis, such methods investigate dimensions of privacy, what we may call literal pretexts, whose mastery of the text is asserted either from within (see Ortega’s essay Pidiendo un Goethe desde dentro), from all sides (Jean-Pierre Richard’s L’Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé), or from without (Bernard Meyer’s Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography). What results is an often impressive totality and the achievement of an intimate partnership between critic and writer, in which each in a sense is part of the other.

A number of important preconditions inform these critical enterprises. The texts examined are problematic in every way except as texts. That is, the critic is concerned with interpretations of a text, but not with asking if the text is a text or with ascertaining the discursive conditions by which a so-called text may, or may not, have become a text. Clearly, for example, a work like Swift’s ‘Some Considerations upon the Consequences Hoped and Feared from the Death of the Queen’ (1714) does not occupy the same place in the canon as Gulliver’s Travels (1726); yet in any integral account of Swift’s oeuvre it would be very hard to say what place the Travels ought to stand in without considering its relation to ‘Some Consideration’s. Is one work more of a text than the other? The uncomplicated facts of either completion or publication cannot so easily determine whether one piece of writing is a text and another not. Furthermore,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• PART ONE: READING AND IDENTITY
• PART TWO: TEXT AND CONTEXT
• PART THREE: THE FEMALE MONSTER
• PART FOUR: WRITING AND MEANING
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index