essaysoflittleconsequence

This is a work in progress. Be gentle. Or don’t.

In A Tale of a Tub, a self-consciously mad narrator, whose shifting opinions may imply that he is more than one narrator, and certainly not a narrator of any authorial authority, tells a story that attempts to be an allegory, but that is intermittently waylaid by lengthy and self-referentially inconsistent digressions, and that concludes in digression. The choppy narrative sea in which A Tale of a Tub appears to toss is characterised by relentless waves of ideas, references and flights of fancy. As a concept pops up for discussion it is enthusiastically advocated and then ironically dismantled. If we are to try to intuit what Swift’s position on any of this actually is, there are so many layers of irony and inconsistency that the task might seem impossible.

Satire, in its classical form, has a target. There are many identifiable targets in A Tale of a Tub, in the form of individuals, religions, political systems, philosophies and ideas. In satire, it should be possible to expose an authorial moral position from what is satirised, but here there are too many targets, and it is often unclear where one begins and another ends. While the allegorical targets of the Catholic and Calvinist traditions are clear, the Digressions undermine this clarity by breaking off the narrative and offering an infinitely broader satirical context, eventually to the extent that there is no discernible allegorical meaning to the Conclusion.

In the Digression Concerning the Original, the Use, and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth, revolutions in public discourses of thought are linked to internal revolutions in the mind of their protagonists, provoked by “their diet, their education, the prevalency of some certain temper, together with the particular influence of air and climate.” This early indication of a Great Man theory is soon undermined with an account of the “vapours” of madness taking over, “when a man’s fancy gets astride his reason; when imagination is at cuffs with the senses.” In the grip of madness, the imagination generates whole illusory worlds:

And first, with relation to the mind or understanding, it is manifest what mighty advantages fiction has over truth; and the reason is just at our elbow, because imagination can build nobler scenes, and produce more wonderful revolutions, than fortune or nature will be at expense to furnish. (94)

The imagination is an engine of newness, and the relentless “wonderful revolutions” of the imagination make it hard to take any singular account of the world seriously, since it is bound to be supplanted with another and revealed as a delusion soon enough. At a time when the sole authorities of church or state had given way to endlessly fragmenting alternatives, all still attempting to espouse their own singular moral truth, the outcome of “wonderful revolutions” is a morass of competing ideologies that might feel something like madness.

Swift invokes the relativistic crisis he finds himself in as a direct attack on a rival, Wotton. “It is a fatal miscarriage, so ill to order affairs, as to pass for a fool in one company, when in another you might be treated as a philosopher (91).” While this is aimed with a target in mind, it bears a broader significance. Swift’s modern predicament, and the central problem of A Tale of a Tub, lies in this new multiplicity of religious, philosophical and scientific discourses that make it hard to discern a fool from a philosopher, for there are too many competing accounts of the world to be certain. There are too many competing accounts of the world to be certain of anything at all.

Swift’s solution to this, as Phillip Harth identifies in Swift and Anglican Rationalism, is to pursue an Anglican via media. Swift’s Anglicanism is relational: it is triangulated between, and against, Catholicism and Calvinism. It attempts to be rational, but is against scientific reductionism. It has no single or coherent doctrine. If Catholicism and the various Protestant factions and their Enthusiasts each possess their own singular metaphysical Truth, the via media Truth is, at best, fuzzy.

Swift is at his most ferocious when attacking proponents of certainty. In the religious allegory, Peter, the Catholic and Jack, the Calvinist, are subjected to blasphemous ridicule; in the Digressions, attempts at systems of thought attract the bulk of his ire:

Let us next examine the great introducers of new schemes in philosophy, and search till we can find from what faculty of the soul the disposition arises in mortal man of taking it into his head to advance new systems, with such an eager zeal, in things agreed on all hands [to be] impossible to be known: from what seeds this disposition springs, and to what quality of human nature these grand innovators have been indebted for their number of disciples. Because it is plain that several of the chief among them, both ancient and modern, were usually mistaken by their adversaries, and indeed by all except their own followers, to have been persons crazed, or out of their wits… (89)

There is rarely agreement in A Tale of a Tub, but “things agreed on all hands impossible to be known” contextualises Enlightenment positivist projects as futile from the outset. Although the narrator at this point is a madman, he circumvents his own subjectivity by presenting opposition to the “new schemes” as a universally held viewpoint. Therefore, even in the soup of relativism, where the narrator is mad and anyone attempting to offer a coherent account of the world is mad, Swift can make the people attempting to offer a coherent account of the world appear to be madder.

Everett Zimmerman considers some of the philosophical implications of Swift’s unreliable narrator/s in Swift’s Narrative Satires:Author and Authority. Zimmerman sees narratorial inconsistency as a way of inviting the reader to query the narrative voice: if the voice is inconsistent it alerts the reader to its construction, and undermines the authority – and certainty – of the text. The mad idiosyncrasies of the narrator are intended to “activate the unstable elements (Zimmerman, 114)” as a sort of epistemological challenge.

These “unstable elements” are drivers of relativism. The lack of narratorial integrity in the Digressions can then be seen as a further philosophical strategy: it prevents Swift from holding any fixed, singular position. In not holding a position that can be described, Swift arms himself, elusively, from attack. But, more importantly, it occupies a similarly – and conveniently – shifting ground to his religious and philosophical viewpoint. Just as Swift’s Anglicanism exists in response to the fallacious single ideologies of Catholicism, Calvinism and scientism, and, in offering an alternative to them, cannot itself espouse any singular dogma, his authorial persona exists only in contrast to the narrators that it inhabits, temporarily, and then discards.

If the Digressions operate as a destabilising force, the Digression in Praise of Digressions does so with a further layer of self-reference. It begins tangentially, opening with a lengthy metaphor in which the stolid and “ill-bred (70)” reject gastronomic novelties as a perversion of taste. Swift sets out an imagined puritanical enmity to the “depraved and debauched” modern appetite for the intellectual amuse-bouche:

They tell us that the fashion of jumbling fifty things together in a dish was at first introduced, in compliance to a depraved and debauched appetite, as well as to a crazy constitution: and to see a man hunting through an olio, after the head and brains of a goose, a widgeon, or a woodcock, is a sign he wants a stomach and digestion for more substantial victuals. Farther, they affirm that digressions in a book are like foreign troops in a state, which argue the nation to want a heart and hands of its own, and often either subdue the natives, or drive them into the most unfruitful corners. (71)

In presenting the digression as a colonising power, it is unclear what the book’s “natives” might be or where they are to be located. On this level, it is a deliberately and comically unconvincing metaphor. As a description of the book as institution, whose integrity – its reality – is undermined by the invasion of newness, it works slightly better. Both possibilities are held together in uneasy opposition.

There are moments in which the digression is condoned, if only by implication, in contrast to the “fatal confinement of delivering nothing beyond what is to the purpose. (71)” Later on, Swift sets up a hubristic “incontestable argument that our modern wits are not to reckon upon the infinity of matter for a constant supply (74)” which then parodies the authority of institutionally mediated knowledge:

What remains, therefore, but that our last recourse must be had to large indexes and little compendiums? Quotations must be plentifully gathered, and booked in alphabet; to this end, although authors need be little consulted, yet critics, and commentators, and lexicons, carefully must. (74-5)

Swift’s Digressions methodically “reckon upon the infinity of matter for a constant supply” – that is part of their function in the text. If it is a heresy to find knowledge outside the accepted boundaries of existing knowledge, it is a heresy that the Digressions exuberantly undertake. Their self-conscious silliness allows Swift to maintain a position in which modernity, and the multiplicity of modern discourses, is ridiculous, while simultaneously participating in it.

The self-reference of a digression on digressions opens up a paradox in which there are digressions, and digressions on digressions, and these are digressions on digression within a text whose title and preface indicate that it, too, is merely a digression. There are so many layers to this series of digressions that any attempt to hold one of them as real is easily undermined.

Frank Boyle, writing on the “tub” metaphor of the title in an essay on Swift, discusses a “multiplicity of potential parodic targets” that make identifying a sole point of caricature problematic. Boyle goes on to describe A Tale of a Tub as:

a kind of Derridean parody, by which Swift’s satires collapse identity, so that the satiric target becomes, as in the ultimate classical tragedy, Oedipus, the one thing you are most sure you are not, the one thing you have most defined yourself against. (Boyle, 205)

What is more strikingly Derridean about A Tale of a Tub is the effect of its shifting narratorial position. If deconstruction can be described as the close examination of a text in which the ideas underpinning it fall apart due to their inconsistent or paradoxical use, A Tale of a Tub amounts to a deconstruction. It could be argued that, rather than collapsing identity, Swift’s aim is to collapse any attempt at fixity of meaning. Conventionally, satire narrates a reality and satirises things within it. Swift uses digression, narratorial inconsistency and self-contradiction to satirise the text’s constructed reality, and any meaning that might be found within it.

Swift is well aware of this, satirising his own refusal to supply a meaningful explanation twice in the original publication of A Tale of a Tub. In the Digression on Madness he prepares his reader with mock hubris:

The present argument is the most abstracted that ever I engaged in: it strains my faculties to their highest stretch: and I desire the reader to attend with the utmost propensity; for I now proceed to unravel this knotty point.

There is in mankind a certain . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

Hic multa desiderantur . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

And this I take to be a clear solution of the matter. (92-3)

In The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, a parody of religious revelation published as a mock- “fragment” at the end of early editions of A Tale of A Tub, Swift sets up a description for the Scheme of Spiritual Mechanism, and then leaves a similar hole in the text explaining that it was “thought neither safe nor convenient to print it. (303)” This is as much a practical joke on Swift’s reader, for expecting something more, and a joke on Swift’s refusal or inability to provide it, as it is a joke at the expense of the earnest delusions of the religious pamphleteer.

Attacking meaning is Swift’s narrative via media as a response to a world where metaphysical realist discourses – those that believe in their own claim to truth, and exist in their own delusion – are at best nonsensical and at worst murderous. The development of a new and self-confident scientism comes in for particular derision when Swift makes a parodic claim for the validity of empirical practice, while describing its graphically violent reductio ad absurdum:

Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse. Yesterday I ordered the carcase of a beau to be stripped in my presence; when we were all amazed to find so many unsuspected faults under one suit of clothes. Then I laid open his brain, his heart, and his spleen: but I plainly perceived at every operation, that the farther we proceeded we found the defects increase upon us in number and bulk. (95-6)

To be identifiable as a fixed authorial voice with fixed authorial opinions would not only be satirically dangerous in exposing him to attack, but would also put Swift in the camp of deluded and dangerous realists. If A Tale of a Tub had remained an allegory, it would have had to offer some sort of conclusion in which the reasonable Martin offers a reasonable and coherent take-home ideology. This would not sit well with Swift’s Anglican avoidance of doctrinal fixity. The Digressions deliver Swift from having to supply his own ideological story, and, in undermining the reality of a narrator or a text, obliquely steer the reader into an understanding of why this must be.

Bibliography

Boyle, Frank (2011) Jonathan Swift. In Quintero, Ruben (ed.) A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern, pp. 196-210 Oxford: Blackwell

Derrida, Jacques, trans. Chakravorty, Gayatri (1997) Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP

Keane, Catherine (2011) Defining the Art of Blame: Classical Satire. In Quintero, Ruben (ed.) A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern, pp. 31-51 Oxford: Blackwell

Harth, Phillip (1961) Swift and Anglican Rationalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Swift, Jonathan (2004) A Tale of a Tub. London: Penguin

Swift, Jonathan (1705) A Tale of a Tub, 4^th ed. London: John Nutt

Zimmerman, Everett (1983) Swift’s Narrative Satires: Author and Authority. Ithaca: Cornell UP