by Steven Moore
He fails for two reasons (apart from the madness thing): although widely if not deeply read, the narrator does not know how to interpret texts, taking some too literally, others too symbolically, and others out of context. He’s immune to irony, deaf to nuance, and uncritical in his selection of supporting materials. The vital importance of intelligent, discriminating interpretation emerges as the main theme of the Tale; it’s not merely an attack on Grub Street hacks like the narrator—“Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” as Swift’s friend Alexander Pope would later ask—but on the interpretive acts of the critics he admires and emulates (like Richard Bentley and William Wotton). The narrator is a conduit for Swift’s contempt for a whole range of scholars and commentators of his time—in science, philosophy, politics, and religion as well as in literature—all reductively and indiscriminately represented by a crazed hack.
Secondly, the narrator can’t control his language; he has magpie tendency to make nests of incongruous materials that generate implications and innuendos he never intended. A good example (and a good example why the Tale is fun to read) is his praise for the moderns’ discovery of
a shorter and more prudent method to become scholars and wits without the fatigue of reading or of thinking. The most accomplished way of using books at present is twofold: Either first, to serve them as some men do lords, learn their titles exactly, and then brag of their acquaintance. Or secondly, which is indeed the choicer, the profounder, and politer method, to get a thorough insight into the index, by which the whole book is governed and turned, like fishes by the tail. For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms; therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back door. For the arts are all in a flying march [retreat] and therefore more easily subdued by attacking them in the rear. Thus physicians discover the state of the whole body by consulting only what comes from behind. Thus men catch knowledge by throwing their wit on the posteriors of a book, as boys do sparrows with flinging salt upon their tails. Thus human life is best understood by the wise man’s rule of Regarding the end. Thus are the sciences found like Hercules’s oxen, by tracing them backwards. Thus are old sciences unravelled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot. (96)
In this jumble of mixed metaphors and silly similes, the narrator unwittingly associates this scholarly method with cowardice (attacking the rear), excrement, and buggery, which in turn taints the theological focus on the end of life.
The narrator’s lack of control over language extends to his lack of control over the physical text. Not only is it published without his knowledge, but there are several gaps in the manuscript that the publisher indicates with rows of asterisks and Latin notes, such as “Hic multa desiderantur” (110: here much is lacking). The publisher also took the liberty of adding explanatory footnotes, even though in some cases he admits “I do not well understand what the author aims at here . . .” (103n). On the other hand, if the narrator were still alive in 1710, he would have been been chuffed to see that sections from Wotton’s pamphlet Observations upon the [sic] Tale of a Tub (1705) were added to the footnotes of the fifth edition, giving it the look of a scholarly edition of a classic.
Interestingly enough, Swift is often guilty of the same kind of loss of verbal control, and likewise raises implications he never intended. In his “Apology” and in the footnotes he added to the 1710 edition, Swift often complains that commentators on the 1704 edition “force interpretations which the author never meant” (120n), which they sometimes do, but he forced their hand in many instances. Although he insists, twice, in the “Apology” that he intended only “to expose the abuses and corruptions in learning and religion” (10; cf. 5), his Anglicanism is tarred by the same brush with which he blackens Catholicism and Puritanism, and his Tory conservatism is exposed as smugly reactionary and embarrassingly antiintellectual. As Levine says, “Swift exploits the outlook and methods of perverted subjectivity for the sake of an implied defense of traditional, objective, universalized, values” (226), but some of those values are neither objective nor universal, and are based on traditions that are either outright wrong (deism), prejudicial (to women and the lower classes), or outdated (monarchy). How seriously can we take his political ideology when his narrator provides examples of one king (Henri IV of France) who “raised a mighty army, filled his coffers with infinite treasures [at the people’s expense], provided an invincible fleet,” and threw Europe into an uproar, all because of “an absent female [14-year-old Charlotte de Montmorency] whose eyes had raised a protuberancy, and before emission she was removed into an enemy’s country” (106), and of another “mighty king” (Louis XIV) “who for the space of above thirty years amused himself to take and lose towns; beat armies and be beaten; drive princes out of their dominions; fright children from their bread and butter; burn, lay waste, plunder, dragoon, massacre subject and stranger, friend and foe, male and female,” all because he was suffering from an anal fistula (107)? The narrator gives these anecdotes in support of his thesis that “vapors, ascending from the lower faculties” (105), affect the brain, which can easily be dismissed as ludicrous, but it’s harder to dismiss Swift’s complacent support for a form of government that enables monarchs like these.106
Same with religion: though Swift meant only to attack “the abuses and corruptions” of religion, not religion itself, he mocks so many aspects of it that nothing is left standing, nothing intellectually defensible, that is. “In Swift’s day,” Traugott notes (as in ours), “religion was not a matter of theology but of church-going and moral guidance” (125n5), but Swift was too smart to ignore the implications of the serious biblical criticism that was underway in the 17th century, which threatened to pull the rug from under Christianity. So while his narrator diverts our attention with the more harebrained examples of biblical exegesis of his day, Swift shouldn’t have been surprised that many intelligent readers regarded his book as an attack on religion itself (which it is, and one of the best). Swift may have assumed “men of taste” would understand that he was mocking only Puritans when he gives smutty examples of women who confuse sexual arousal with religious enthusiasm (pp. 102, 130), or only Catholics when describing their magic tricks and financial scams, but he was as clueless as his narrator if he failed to realize how these and all the other religious practices he skewers with such demonic glee undermine the authority of the Church of England. Whether he was in denial, hypocritical, or an ancient by day, a modern by night “dreaming terrible truths, radical and destructive, about out culture, our reason, and the will of God” (Traugott, 87), Swift has more in common with his narrator than he thinks. Then again, the Tale is such a maze of irony, parody, and paradox that it’s impossible to say where Swift stands.
Swift exerted better control over the structure. Convinced that modern critics were more interested in tooting their own horns than in making a humble contribution to scholarship, Swift so orders the prelims that the first thing we read by the narrator is his grandiose “Epistle Dedicatory” to posterity, in which he trumpets the “immortal productions” he and other Grubæan sages have written. This is followed by a preface that focuses not on the topic of the book but on the dire circumstances under which he wrote it, and on his difficulty finding something new to say. (Which is to say, the Tale has all the markings of metafiction.) Even the introduction further postpones the topic as the narrator weighs the best platform from which to air his views, gives further praise to his fellow moderns, and indulges in some self-pitying remarks about his rough life. No sooner does he finally begin his tale of the three brothers than he interrupts it for a digression, shuttling back and forth between the tale and other digressions for six sections until he reaches section 10, which is not a continuation of the parable, as the preceding structure would suggest, but yet another digression, which concludes with a shameless invitation to critics to write about this “miraculous treatise,” even going so far as to supply “a few innuendos tha
t may be of great assistance to those sublime spirits who shall be appointed to labor in a universal comment upon this wonderful discourse” (120). It has been suggested Swift intended to continue the story of Martin here; see his “Abstract of What Follows after Sect. IX. in the Manuscript” (pp. 262–67), which first appeared in Swift’s Miscellaneous Works (1720). On the other hand, and more aesthetically appealing, is Levine’s suggestion that the structure “breaks down under the pressure of the disordered personality that, as the Tale proceeds, escapes from the confinement of the digressions and captures the entire work” (209). The self-absorbed narrator returns to the parable briefly, but has lost interest in it by that point—he’s more interested in touting his forthcoming General History of Ears—and lamely claims to have lost or mislaid the rest of the parable of the three brothers. In the conclusion, he returns to the true subject of the book, himself, and confesses that during the writing process he was “often under a temptation of being witty upon occasions where I could be neither wise nor sound nor, nor anything to the matter at hand” (136). The form brilliantly suits the matter, which is an exposé of modern learning as neither wise nor sound, merely a platform for hacks to strut their wit—full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. Also in the conclusion, the narrator informs us, appropriately enough, “I am now trying an experiment very frequent among modern authors, which is to write about nothing” (135, his italics).107
The disturbing result is not merely a nettling satire on “the abuses and corruptions in learning and religion” but a bitter indictment of the human race. In the climactic digression on madness, the narrator argues that history is the record of madmen, for if you look at those responsible for “the establishment of new empires by conquest, the advance and progress of new schemes in philosophy, and the contriving as well as the propagating of new religions,” each one possessed a “distemper” called “madness or frenzy” (105), which the narrator praises as the key to success.108 Swift goes beyond his announced intention of satirizing “modern” trends in the 17th century to portray a world that has always operated from the basest motives (greed, egotism, lust, power), and always will. The alleged purpose of satire is to correct faults by ridiculing them, but the despairing view of history that emerges from these frenzied pages suggests that the faults are too deeply ingrained in human nature ever to be corrected, and that humans are immune to satire. “’Tis but a ball bandied to and fro, and every man carries a racket about him to strike it from himself among the rest of the company” (32). In each generation there is a minority with hard-earned knowledge and discernment who can only stand aside and watch the rest of mankind play the fool, at best pursuing “the sublime and refined point of felicity called the possession of being well deceived” (112), at worst imposing their distempered visions on others. The members of that even-tempered minority are like the visitors to Bedlam in the digression on madness, viewing with amusement and disgust the world according to Swift.
Swift would have laughed if someone had congratulated him on writing a brilliant, nihilistic avant-garde novel, but only because those terms were not yet used in the modern sense; avant-garde applied only to an army, and the novel was still regarded as trifling entertainment, like the slim book his friend William Congreve wrote while they were both at Trinity College in Dublin.109 But he conscientiously worked in the novelistic tradition of Petronius, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Dunton, and A Tale of a Tub influenced other avant-garde novels, beginning almost immediately with Thomas D’Urfey’s Essay Towards the Theory of the Intelligible World (which we’ll essay shortly), possibly Bordelon’s Monsieur Oufle, definitely Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (which adapts the tailor motif), Melville’s Moby-Dick, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, and it resembles (if not directly influenced) any number of formally inventive novels published over the last 75 years: Joyce often refers to the Tale in Finnegans Wake, and clearly modeled the description of Shem the Penman (182–85) on the idea of Swift’s ink-stained narrator in his garret spinning out the digression on madness. Frederik Smith calls it “in effect an antinovel” comparable to Beckett’s Watt or Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (125). The locus classicus of the novel of learned wit, the Tale is also a metafiction (dramatizing its own composition) and a critifiction (criticizing criticism via fiction), especially the mock-variorum 1710 version. As ludicrous as the narrator’s claim may have sounded in 1704 that he was writing a great work that would be embraced by posterity and by “sublime spirits” who would write commentaries upon “this wonderful discourse,” he was right, for the critical commentary on A Tale of a Tub is now as big as a whale. I have, however, made a momentous discovery about the text that will overturn all previous Tubbian criticism, and establish it as the most typical novel in world literature, for there is a certain * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Hic multa * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * desiderantur. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * And this I take to be a clear solution of the matter.
A new century, a new attitude: “we hated form and slavish observations of old customs,” declares the eponymous heroine of the anonymous Adventures of Lindamira (1702), “and what our inclination led us to, that we generally gratified ourselves in.”110 Writing to an old friend about her debutante days, Lindamira begins when she turned 16 and started to attract unwanted suitors; she playfully names herself after a princess in Scudéry’s Clelia and tells the story of her romantic adventures over the course of 25 letters. (The resemblance to Trotter’s Adventures is obvious.) In the same sassy spirit, Lindamira calls the first fop to approach her “Philander” because he expresses himself in “abominable, far-fetched metaphors, with incoherent fragments out of plays, novels, and romances” (2). She knights one paralytic beau “Sir Formal Trifle” after a character (she reminds her correspondent) in Thomas Shadwell’s 1676 play The Virtuoso. “Silvanus” is her nickname for the husband of her BFF Valeria. While 17th-century romanciers and their heroines regarded marriage as the holy grail, the mother of this thoroughly modern girl breezily informs Sir Formal that “few men loved their wives so well as their mistresses, and that marriage quite altered the constitution of their souls, and as saintlike, complaisant, and obliging as they appeared during their courtship, they became tyrants instead of husbands, and did so ill-use their power that they treated their wives like slaves, and had not that tenderness and affection for ’em as might be justly expected” (3). Lindamira occasionally parodies the diction of 17th-century romances for tongue-in-cheek effect, all in an effort, her original editor Thomas Brown suggests, to transport their French tropes to British soil. In his brief preface to the novel, Brown—another of the Grubby “sons of art” thumped in A Tale of a Tub—proposes with shaky grammar, “If the histories of foreign amours and scenes laid beyond the seas, where unknown customs bear the greatest figure, have met with the approbation of English readers, ’tis presumed that domestic intrigues, managed according to the humours of the town and the natural temper of the inhabitants of this our island, will be at least equally grateful.” Like a teenage girl creating a fashionably retro outfit from her grandmother’s ball gown, the presumably female author appropriates the formalities of the French romance for a more relaxed look at modern love.
Or so it seems for the first half-dozen letters. But then Lindamira meets a man she calls “Cleomidon” and her life begins to resemble a 17th-century romance. Visiting her grandmother in the country, she encounters a “rural scene” that “equaled the best descriptions I had ever read on” (7)—in novels, that is—and though she is urged to read Seneca by her grandmother’s confidante (whom Lindamira cattily calls Xantippe after Socrates’ captious wife), one da
y
she found me reading a romance, which I was very intent upon, and being deeply engaged in the unfortunate adventures of a disconsolate lover, I minded her not when she came in but continued my reading, and she, perceiving what my study was, assumed a supercilious look and a contracted brow. “So, Lindamira,” said she, “how much you value my advice, that prefers the reading of an idle romance before the precepts of the wise and learned Seneca! Take my word,” continued she, raising the tone of her voice: “nothing so much corrupts the minds of young people as the reading of these foolish books that treat of fulsome love and fills their heads full of chimeras.” I could not help laughing at my friend for the wrong notions she had taken of the books that so pleasantly had spun out my time, and I very ignorantly began to defend the wit of the ingenious author. (8)
Under the spell of fiction, Lindamira now defends (“ignorantly”) the kind of fiction she had mocked back in London, and metafictionally does so in a novel that Xantippe would have dismissed as an “idle romance.” The Adventures of Lindamira dramatizes the contested status of fiction that novelists, critics, and readers still argued over at the beginning of the 18th century, and for the rest of the century English novelists would continue to juggle older forms and newer ideas as they sought to legitimize this “idle” genre.
As Lindamira continues, it backslides further into those older forms. At one point, Lindamira is in a valley “when at a distance I discovered a creature make toward me, who rather flew than went on feet, but so far off I could not well distinguish what it was, that I concluded it was some hobgoblin or some winged monster of the night” (10); “this furioso” turns out to be only Xantippe, but for a moment we feel like we’re back in Orlando furioso. The epistolary form of the novel gives way to the heroic romance after she meets a young lady from France, and devotes letters 14–17 to “The Adventures of Doralisa and the Pleasant Young Ovid,” which reads like an interpolated histoire in one of Madame de Scudéry’s novels, though mercifully shorter: as Boyce puts it in his introduction, the author scales it down “one inch to Scudéry’s yard” (vii). Letter 19 adopts a subplot from her Cyrus the Great, and by this point there are so many characters with names such as Alcander, Cleodora, Volusius, Hermilia, and Lyndaraxa we feel we have left England for the 17th-century French version of ancient Persia. But after various complications the novel concludes in a recognizable London with the genre-requisite wedding. The Adventures of Lindamira is a clever, book-smart novel, and “a remarkable demonstration,” as Boyce says, “of how something of situation, motivation, and sentiment could be abstracted from the now rather démodé French heroic romance and adapted to English middle-class life” (v–vi). “Chronologically, and otherwise,” adds McDermott, “Lindamira can be regarded as a ‘half-way house’ between the heroic romance of the seventeenth, and the realistic novel of the eighteenth century” (133).