DOI: / Swift s Satires on Modernism

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1 Swift s Satires on Modernism

2 Also by G. Douglas Atkins THE FAITH OF JOHN DRYDEN: Change and Continuity READING DECONSTRUCTION/DECONSTRUCTIVE READING WRITING AND READING DIFFERENTLY: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (co-edited with Michael L. Johnson) QUESTS OF DIFFERENCE: Reading Pope s Poems SHAKESPEARE AND DECONSTRUCTION (co-edited with David M. Bergeron) CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY (co-edited with Laura Morrow) GEOFFREY HARTMAN: Criticism as Answerable Style ESTRANGING THE FAMILIAR: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing TRACING THE ESSAY: Through Experience to Truth READING ESSAYS: An Invitation ON THE FAMILIAR ESSAY: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies LITERARY PATHS TO RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White T.S. ELIOT AND THE ESSAY: From The Sacred Wood to Four Quartets READING T.S. ELIOT: Four Quartets and the Journey toward Understanding E.B. WHITE: The Essayist as First-Class Writer T.S. ELIOT MATERIALIZED: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth

3 Swift s Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing G. Douglas Atkins

4 swift s satires on modernism Copyright G. Douglas Atkins, Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 ISBN All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN DOI Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. First edition: ISBN (ebook)

5 Contents Preface vi Introduction The Spider and the Bee: Ancients vs. Moderns and The Battle of the Books 1 1 The World Swift Saw Aborning 8 2 The Priesthood of All Readers: This Good Had Full as Bad a Consequence 22 3 Swift and the Modern Personal Essay: A Tale of a Tub and A Modest Proposal 45 4 Tripping and Troping, Inside and Out: Surface, Depth, and the Converting Imagination in A Tale of a Tub 68 5 The Physical Act of Worship, Not the Mental Act of Belief or Assent : Reading An Argument against Abolishing Christianity 82 Bibliography 96 Index 100 v

6 Preface This book revisits, from fresh perspectives, the late seventeenth-century version of the perennial warfare between Ancients and Moderns, then often instanced as the battle of the books. Swift effectively represented the controversy, and the issues to this day at stake, in his allegory of the spider and the bee (in The Battle of the Books [1704]), which juxtaposes the bee s excursions outside himself with the spider s total reliance on his own filth. This crucial distinction becomes the basis for reading anew some of Swift s major prose satires, notably including the enigmatic and vexing A Tale of a Tub (1704). With close attention to the context opened up by John Dryden s essay-poem Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith (1682), which posits reading as the fundamental site of Ancient and Modern differences, I place Swift s important and complex satires on the Ancients and Moderns in the context of the post-reformation priesthood of all readers. These texts include A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, published together in 1704, as well as The Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1708). The readings offered here derive from new contexts, not just reading as site and the post-reformation priesthood of all readers, but also the rise and development of the essay as form, all of which share the Modern premium on inwardness and personality that characterizes the issues at stake between Swift s (Ancient) bee and (Modern) spider. Reading emerges, in fact, as the hinge that holds the two parts of the Tale together (the religious allegory and the vi

7 Preface vii digressions ). The incredible richness of the Tale appears, further, in the new context revealed of the essay as form, which Swift s work satirizes even while proceeding from within it. Indeed, this study establishes the complex relation that governs Swift s nuanced position vis-à-vis new forms and Modern ideas. Via extended attention to the reading and interpretation of Scriptural texts, the Tale thus also contemplates the willing nature of texts as it dramatizes the will-fulness of (Modern) readers, given to the authority of the spirit and inner light, and considers the relation of commentary and primary text. A fresh look at the controversial Argument against Abolishing Christianity reveals Swift s central concerns about the private spirit and the ascendancy of inwardness at the expense of public worship. I do not conceive of the readings here offered as exhaustive. My approach is essayistic rather than encyclopedic. The book is, accordingly, neither quite linear in direction nor argumentative in mode and tone (although at times I do express differences with scholars, particularly those who have misread Swift as an Anglican rationalist ). My fondest hope is to attract academic and non-specialist readers (alike). This little book grows out of my decades-long teaching of a Freshman- Sophomore Honors course at the University of Kansas in the Ancients, Moderns, and Modernists, and I dedicate it to the thousands of students from whom it has been my privilege to learn during forty-plus years of making available, and trying to elucidate, an alternative understanding to that that most of them have inherited or imbibed, this via some of the great works of Western literature from Homer to Geoffrey Hill. A note on texts As my notes indicate, I have relied upon and cited readily available editions of Swift, wherever possible. I have, though, consulted the respected scholarly edition of the Tale edited by Guthkelch and Nichol Smith, as well as my own copy of the 1710 Tale, with Swift s additions there to the first edition.