Right from the gate, Swift emerged as an original. He shocked, amused, perplexed, and outraged his first readers just as he has three centuries of readers since. Swift desired the lasting fame that even his earliest writings secured, but he originally addressed these works to specific people in specific historical circumstances that they might change. Although Swift often despaired of satire’s efficacy, no satirist more forcefully provokes in his audience an embarrassed discomfort with the world as it is. The sharp aggression in Swift’s writing speaks of the writer’s deeply held beliefs about the true and the good and his outrage at their violation. And yet even in this conviction Swift betrays an equally deep vein of skepticism. From this volatile mixture of faith and distrust, Swift’s early writing usually confronts us not with clear affirmation but with irony and unsettling contradiction – a particularly dangerous tack for a reformer to take. Swift’s perilous strategy effectively puts his readers off balance, and that is precisely where the satirist wants us.
Swift’s earliest prose works were not of course all satires. His first foray into the world of publishing was the opportunity between 1700 and 1709 to edit the memoirs and essays of the English statesman and man of letters, Sir William Temple. In 1701, Swift made his solo entry into published prose with A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome. This work contributed to an ongoing propaganda war over the impeachment of several Whig Lords. Though Swift’s Discourse won the admiration of Whig leaders, it is finally less a defense of the impeached Whigs than an argument for balance of power in government – between king, lords, and commons. Swift’s Discourse here echoes his mentor, Temple’s, views of politics and government. In the wake of the seventeenth-century English revolutions, Swift most fears what he terms the “Tyranny of the Many,” the commons’ seizing excessive power (PW I: 209). This recalls Temple’s warnings that popular dissension naturally contracts itself “till it ends in a point or single person” – a tyrant.1 Swift blames the “Tyranny of the Many” for the Puritans’ “bloody revolution” of the previous century which had placed too much power in the hands of one man, Oliver Cromwell. Dark assumptions about human nature, deepened by the shadow of that violent recent past, underlie both Swift’s and Temple’s political views and lead them to conclude that the body politic requires careful vigilance to avoid the same slide into brutality and despotism. Like Temple, Swift also condemns the new party politics for producing social discord.
Though the Discourse owes much to Temple, Swift’s inventive use of historical authority sets him apart. Some commentators call the Discourse a “parallel history” which shows Swift’s genius in linking the classical past with present events. But the parallels often prove to be far from historical. In the work, Swift appeals to the moral authority of a presumably knowable, classical past. When necessary, however, he alters both classical examples and contemporary events to suit satiric purposes.2 Even if Swift’s Discourse does not always accurately portray the ancient past, it relies for its rhetorical force upon a profound respect for that past. Swift like Temple often attaches great moral consequence to the superiority of former ways. From his earliest writings, Swift rails against a world in decline. Although he is skeptical about our ability to get in touch with that past, Swift holds it up as a model for present emulation.
Such faith in ancient models of taste and morality is a feature that defined the Ancients’ camp in what was known as the “Ancients and Moderns” controversy of the day. Swift’s Battle of the Books and A Tale of A Tub, published together in 1704, take the side of Sir William Temple and the Ancients, though not unequivocally. Temple’s 1690 essay, Upon Ancient and Modern Learning, had inflamed a controversy brewing for some time. To the twenty-first century reader, the Ancients and Moderns debate might look like petty squabbling between privileged men with nothing better to do; but for the participants, the course of civilization was at stake. The argument raged on in Swift’s time with the same intensity of feeling as the so-called culture wars of our day; indeed, our wars and theirs have much in common.
By “Ancients” and “Moderns” we do not refer simply to old authors and new, nor to those who prefer one or the other, but most importantly to two groups advancing two different concepts of knowledge. Swift’s free treatment of history in the Contests and Dissentions might reflect the Ancients’ sensibility, since for them the purpose of history was not so much to recover the facts of the past as it was to improve the reader through eloquence and moral example. “Ancients” were generalists who stressed the relationship between learning and the welfare of the people. Statesmen, they argued, should be schooled in letters to enable them to govern justly. The proper end of learning is a good, moral life, and the study of ancient authors best achieved that end.
“Moderns,” by contrast, saw knowledge as part of a progress toward ever greater degrees of understanding about experience. Impressed by the remarkable recent achievements of the new science, most Moderns assumed humanity could progress in other areas of learning as well. Often equally as learned in the classical world as the so-called Ancients, Moderns like Richard Bentley tended to look at the past as scientists rather than moralists. They assumed that they could know more than their predecessors simply because they had the advantage of building upon previous work. The French writer, Fontenelle, went beyond touting the excellencies of the new science and modern philosophy to suggest that Moderns even may surpass the Ancients in arts and letters, the most important areas of learning to Temple’s mind. In his 1690 response to Fontenelle, Temple had argued that modern learning had added nothing significant to the accomplishments of the ancient Greeks and Romans. He believed that in the works of classical Greece and Rome humankind had already achieved the highest possible understanding of morality and governance, the most worthy ends of learning.
Responding to Temple’s essay, William Wotton published his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694). Wotton was an enormously gifted classical scholar, famous for facility in languages. Temple’s and Wotton’s differences may seem small to us now; in fact, Wotton agreed with Temple that modern orators and poets fell short of the Ancients, but reasoned that in time they could equal and perhaps even surpass them. Further, Wotton held that the tools of modern scholarship yielded more accurate knowledge of the whole of the ancient world than any particular writer of ancient Greece or Rome could have achieved. Thus a modern scholar might know the ancient world in its entirety better than any single Ancient could have. The controversy reached its height in 1697 when Wotton appended to the second edition of his Reflections an essay by his friend Richard Bentley, the greatest philologist of the age. Bentley used modern scholarly tools to expose embarrassing mistakes in Temple’s essay on Ancient and Modern Learning. Temple had extolled the fables of Æsop and the Epistles of Phalaris as examples of ancient eloquence, assuming they had come down from ancient Greek. In his Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, Bentley proved that both the fables and the Epistles had been written much more recently than Temple realized. Neither work turned out to be ancient. After these assertions, attacks and counter-attacks followed from both sides. The Ancients’ defense of Temple relied often more on defamation than on careful scholarship, since Wotton and Bentley were largely right. To Temple’s allies, Wotton and Bentley appeared unmannerly, even barbarous, in attacking a respected nobleman.
In Swift’s contribution to the fray, The Battle of the Books, the books themselves do the fighting. Although Swift’s attitude toward the controversy remains ambiguous, he apparently defends Temple and sides with the Ancients. Swift never questions the accuracy of Bentley’s analysis. Instead, throughout the Battle, Swift emphasizes aesthetics and morality, placing the weight of both on the Ancients’ side. Indeed, for Swift’s Ancients, beauty and virtue – sweetness and light – are what the fight is all about. From the Ancients’ perspective, the Moderns threaten to empty the world of both.
Just as the battle begins, the combatants are interrupted by an argument between a spider and a bee. Observing the quarrel, Æsop shows why he belongs to the Ancients, regardless of when his fables were written. He argues that like the bee who ranges abroad, gathering nectar from distant flowers to produce honey and wax, honorary Ancients such as Temple realize their dependence on the flowers of ancient learning and nature itself for their work – work that endures. The Moderns, by contrast, resemble the spider who, proudly convinced of his self-sufficiency, spins filth from his own entrails – a web that soon disintegrates. Pride, in both Christian and classical traditions, is a moral menace that threatens to unravel social and spiritual order. Destructive, divisive pride marks the Moderns in the Battle, who quarrel from the start over who will lead them. Despite the dangers the Moderns pose, they finally appear impotent in the Battle’s allegory. Swift suggests the insignificance of Bentley’s analysis when the portly Modern can only run around Æsop and Phalaris “trampling and kicking and dunging in their Faces.” Even after he steals their armor, they remain unscathed (PW I: 162). Similarly, Temple does not even feel the strike from Wotton’s lance. Though the battle is left incomplete, the heroic Ancients seem destined to prevail.
The very incompleteness of the Battle, however, with its missing passages, like those found in old damaged manuscripts, tends to undermine the Ancients’ position. Swift’s asterisks indicate missing passages in seven places in the text, including its end. So we do not actually have, as Swift’s longer title advertises, A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought last Friday in England. Swift leaves us wondering how we can trust in the completeness of ancient learning and its transmission over far greater reaches of time and geography. Swift’s work seems to subvert the Ancient position in other ways, as well. The narrator suggests that both sides – Ancients and Moderns – have their share of ugly rancor when he insists before the battle that “the Champions of each side should be coupled together” so that “like the blending of contrary Poysons, their Malignity might be employ’d among themselves”(PW I: 140). The unruly mix of genres in the Battle – epic, animal fable, philosophic and political treatise, history – has been read as an imitation of bad modern writing that only affirms the Ancients’ superiority because of its very confusion. But perhaps in all this fuss about spiders, bees and warring books in a dusty library on a Friday afternoon, Swift would suggest the absurdity of the controversy. Although the Ancients fare better than the Moderns in the Battle of the Books, Swift’s precise position remains unclear. Even greater uncertainties mark the reader’s experience of A Tale of a Tub, Swift’s most dazzling satiric achievement, so wild and ingenious that it surprised Swift himself as an older man. Probably written over a seven-or eight-year period, the Tale was published anonymously in 1704 with the Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, and created a stir, provoking commentaries, keys, imitations, and spurious attributions. Though the author was also accused of blasphemy and plagiarism, the work was admired by many. The Tale may have contributed to Swift’s never receiving the bishopric he desired; but it also established his fame.
In 1710, he added an “Apology” to defend his work. Ironically, Swift’s seemingly straightforward “Apology” for a text that examines corruptions in writing, reading, and knowing is itself riddled with ambiguities. The apologist assumes a posture of innocent shock that the Tale has offended anyone, but his misdirections actually let Swift’s reader in on a secret – he is not sorry or shocked at all that he has offended. Furthermore, the “Apology” highlights a few of the Tale’s best structural jokes: he claims no knowledge of the footnotes added to the 1710 edition, but since the bulk of them are lifted verbatim from an unsympathetic commentary on the Tale written by his and Temple’s adversary, Wotton, Swift’s hand in the jest seems unmistakable. He blames gaps in the text on his having lost control of the manuscript before its publication, but the gaps appear located by design, often when the work’s mad narrator has written himself into a corner.
Like the Battle of the Books, the Tale parodies bad modern writing. It begins with an absurdly bloated train of prefatory matter, including a list of fictitious “Treatises wrote by the Same Author,” two letters of dedication (one to Prince Posterity), a letter from “The Bookseller to the Reader,” a Preface and an Introduction. The “Apology” only lengthens this list. The tale proper – a story about three brothers and the coats their father wills them – begins in section II, but not for long. The remainder of the text alternates between sections devoted to this story and digressions with such titles as “A Digression in the Modern Kind” and “A Digression in Praise of Digressions.” Finally the tale proper disappears altogether and the text ends with a conclusion in which the narrator resolves to “write upon nothing” (PW I: 133).
The structure of A Tale of a Tub – its copious prefatory matter and its digressiveness – seems determined to keep the reader from the heart of the matter. In fact, the Tale’s egomaniacal narrator, not to be confused with Swift, claims in the Preface that the purpose of his work is not so much to say something as to divert the attention of those who would attack religion and government: just as “Sea-men have a Custom when they meet a Whale, to fling him out an empty Tub, by way of Amusement, to divert him from laying violent Hands upon the Ship” (PW I: 24). The monstrous whale threatening the ship of state, according to the narrator, is Thomas Hobbes’ influential Leviathan (1651) and the imitations it inspired; the empty tub is the Tale itself (PW I: 1). We should not trust the purpose implied in this metaphor, however; the tub is hardly empty, and the Tale’s narrator proves no great champion of his stated cause.
Despite its complications, the “Apology” offers a more reliable account of the purpose and structure of the Tale. Swift explains that he had intended to satirize “the numerous and gross Corruptions in Religion and Learning.” He would expose “abuses in Religion” in the tale of the three brothers. “Those in Learning he chose to introduce by way of Digressions” (PW I: 1). His satire on abuses in religion targets both Catholicism and Puritanism. Satire on the latter focuses particularly on enthusiastic sects who emphasized the gifts of the spirit: miraculous phenomena such as speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy. Believing that a nation without a state religion risks chaos and disintegration, Swift viewed non-Anglican religious belief (at least belief publicly stated) as a serious threat to the established government. He consistently defended the Test Act, a controversial law that made taking communion in the Anglican church a requirement for government service. The isolation and poor working conditions Swift endured in 1695 during his first ecclesiastical appointment as prebend in the largely Presbyterian parish of Kilroot in the north of Ireland only confirmed his hostility toward non-conformists and his belief in the dangers of dissent.
Swift’s satire on abuses in learning in the Tale has multiple targets, all of which he considered dangerous to the nation. He blasts everything modern, including modern writing and modern philosophy. Swift parodies modern book titles and provides a list of “Treatises wrote by the . . . Author” of the Tale, including “A General History of Ears” and “A Panegyrick upon the World,” titles that reflect the banal and reductive thinking Swift derides throughout the Tale. The two targets of Swift’s satire, abuses in religion and learning, converge on key issues, including the power of print. Swift writes the Tale after the lapse of the Licensing Act, at a time when printed materials had begun to proliferate as never before and literacy rates were rising among all social classes. As print culture accelerated, Swift and his contemporaries experienced a marked tension between two perceptions of the book: as a source of authority on the one hand, and of subversion, on the other.3 The appearance of words in print somehow invested them with authority, and this worried Swift. He feared the subversive effects of bad books on undiscerning readers. A Tale of a Tub is a mock-book that seeks to awaken its readers’ discernment. In its extravagant textual apparatus, its lengthy prefatory matter, and ample footnotes, Swift’s mock-book works to deflate the mystique of the book, demanding we question its authority and recognize its dangers. Swift does not reject textual authority altogether but insists that it be vested in the proper places and that subversive texts be condemned or, better, censored. Throughout his career, Swift advocated censorship of writing he considered harmful to the public peace, including works that questioned the existence of God or that challenged the established church. If Swift lacked the power to control what was printed, he could write a mock-book to make readers less comfortable in their consumption of bad books.
Swift’s satire against bad books, however, always threatens to backfire. He fears modern writing because of its subversive content as well as its stylistic flaws. Like other Ancients, Swift believed that bad ideas and bad writing weaken a civilization. The Tale parodies the bad writing he fears. But parody itself is intrinsically unstable and subversive. In imitating the sort of writing Swift finds objectionable, A Tale of a Tub risked being objectionable itself, as its initial reception showed. Though Swift often mistrusts readers’ abilities, his writing requires much of them. In the Tale proper – the story of the three brothers – Swift’s reader must identify the terms of the religious allegory. More demandingly, in the digressions, the reader must shift reading styles and tease out Swift’s position in the mad, multi-layered irony. Swift’s irony is not the simple sort that means the opposite of what it says, although it sometimes does. Like many speakers in Swift’s satires, the Tale’s narrator is not a consistent persona but rather the shifting expression of a mélange of perspectives, some of them Swift’s, some of them targets of derision. His readers face the daunting task of distinguishing between them.
If the Tale requires great interpretative acumen, it also expresses a fundamental mistrust of interpretation itself. In the Tale proper, an allegory of the reading of the scriptures throughout Christian history, interpretation usually results in corruption. A father (God) leaves his three sons coats (the Christian faith) and directions for the proper care of their coats in a will (the scriptures). If the sons abide by the will, their coats will last and fit them properly through all changes. The will “consisted wholly of certain plain, easy Directions about the management and wearing of their Coats” (PW I: 121). Swift found the notion of a “plain text,” whose meaning is perfectly clear, deeply appealing, as did many of his contemporaries.4 He affirmed this in suggesting that the father’s will really requires no interpretation. Its meaning and incontestable authority lie on its surface, self-evident, plain. Swift derided readers like the three brothers who disregarded the authority of their father’s will. Their rebellion takes the form, first and foremost, of interpretation.
Swift suggests then that the interpretation of sacred texts is typically motivated by something other than the desire to know God’s will. In order to pursue their pleasures and to follow the latest fashions, the brothers twist and wring unintended meanings from the will. Brother Peter (Catholicism) distinguishes himself early as a shrewd interpreter. The father’s will, we are told, “was very precise.” The sons were “not to add to, or diminish from their Coats, one Thread, without a positive Command in the Will” (PW I: 49). Through perverse interpretations of the will itself, nonetheless, Peter justifies adding forbidden adornments (PW I: 49). The ultimate motive for scriptural interpretation becomes evident as Peter uses it for power, first over his brothers and then over the world. Peter’s attempts to force the text shows a pride that knows no bounds. By his final appearance in the Tale, he is calling himself “God Almighty and sometimes Monarch of the Universe” (PW I: 71). The father’s authoritative, plain text finally proves a troublesome obstacle to Peter’s desire; with fitting irony, Peter, the consummate interpreter, eventually stops reading altogether and locks up the will in a strong-box. Within the religious allegory, this represents the Catholic church’s early history of denying the laity access to the scriptures. The locked box also represents the practical fate of any text subject to a corrupt reader’s will. Captive to a self-serving interpretation, the written word finally has no say.
In the allegory’s depiction of the Protestant Reformation, Peter’s two brothers – Martin and Jack – eventually break from him and retrieve the will. Although they resolve to “reduce all their future Measures to the strictest Obedience prescribed therein” (PW I: 83), corrupt interpretation soon returns. The figure of Jack represents Protestant dissenters and various fundamentalist sects who were subject to what was then negatively called religious “enthusiasm.” For Swift’s first readers, Jack would have brought to mind not only John Calvin but an array of figures Swift would dub “Fanaticks”: Puritans and Presbyterians, Methodists and Quakers, Baptists and Independents. Though Jack’s style of interpreting differs greatly, he abuses the will as shamelessly as Peter. While Peter hunts for arcane signs and allegorizes, Jack literalizes in ways that prove equally distorting. If the will expressly forbids additions to their coats, then Jack will tear and rend frantically until all additions are removed, heedless of the damage he does to the fabric of the coat itself. Jack’s behavior here reflects the actions of violent Protestant sects; not only does his tearing recall their vandalizing of Catholic churches and monuments during the Reformation, it also suggests the damage Swift believes their divisiveness has done to the Christian faith itself. In his interpretative passion, Jack rips his coat to shreds. Again, Swift stresses the motives for interpretation, in this case, malice toward the Catholic Church: “the memory of Lord Peter’s Injuries, produced a Degree of Hatred and Spight which had a much greater share of inciting [Jack] than any Regards after his Father’s Commands” (PW I: 86). Like Peter, Jack is deluded. Unconscious of his own base motives, he believes his fanaticism to be righteousness. Passion and pride propel both brothers’ styles of interpretation, and Jack finally resembles Peter.
The third brother, Martin, probably named after Martin Luther but generally thought to represent the Anglican Church, offers an altogether different style of reading. Martin resolves to keep some additions to his coat when their removal would damage the fabric of the coat itself, “which he thought the best Method for serving the true Intent and Meaning of his Father’s Will” (PW I: 85). Swift stresses the plainness of the will, but even Martin must interpret beyond its simple terms; in order to honor its spirit, he compromises and thus violates its strict precepts. As much as Swift would like to suggest otherwise, interpretation seems inevitable. Of course, most texts, including the actual scriptures, are not as plain and simple as the father’s will. Texts are typically read in complex circumstances like Martin’s, in which he must determine how to obey laws that have already been violated.
Some readers have doubted whether Martin offers an attractive alternative to Peter and Jack. On one hand, Swift stresses Martin’s radical differences from his crazed brothers. When Jack tells Martin, “Tear, Pull, Rent, Flay off all, that we may appear as unlike the Rogue Peter, as it is possible,” Martin responds calmly, “Peter was still their Brother . . . [I]t was true, the Testament of their good Father was very exact in what related to the wearing of their Coats; yet was it no less penal and strict in prescribing Agreement, and Friendship and Affection between them” (PW I: 87). Love for his brothers and respect for his father seems to enable Martin to know his father’s will. Nonetheless, many readers have wondered at Swift’s flat portrayal of Martin, whom the narrator describes as “extremely flegmatic [that is, passionless] and sedate” (PW I: 87). The narrator claims that Martin’s “gravely” delivered “Lecture on Morality,” from which Jack flies, would contribute to the “Reader’s Repose, both of Body and Mind” (PW I: 87). Many find Martin ponderous and dull, not to mention largely absent. Perhaps his supposed dullness reflects badly on the moralizing spirit. Some readers even think that in Martin we see a more subtle form of pride. But Swift’s treatment of Martin might actually incriminate the narrator, Jack, and the sort of readers who find morality boring. In the end, it remains unclear whether Swift finally offers a satisfying model for honest reading. With two clearly bad models in Peter and Jack, and one ambiguous one in Martin, Swift does not seem to offer a genuinely clear guide for avoiding the corruptions of interpretation or for knowing the father’s will. Similarly, in the digressions in the Tale that satirize abuses in learning, Swift is more apt to present corruptions and raise questions than to offer clear, positive models for knowing. The narrator himself often serves to illustrate intellectual and moral corruption. In Swift’s day, writing and printing frequently served as metaphors for human thinking, and the chaotic text before us surely reflects a mind in disarray. Swift’s narrator boasts that he once belonged to “that honourable Society” of Bedlam, the London mental hospital (PW I: 111). Like Peter and Jack, the narrator often betrays a pride that has lost hold on reality. In his delusion, he expects universal approbation for this “Divine Treatise,” which he assumes will be translated into languages across the globe “for the universal Benefit of Mankind” (PW I: 66, 117). Corruptions throughout the Tale often prove inseparable from the sort of mental and moral degeneracy portrayed in the narrator’s pride.
The narrator complains that “a superficial Vein among Readers of the present age” has hindered the reception of fine modern writing such as his. He laments that readers “will by no means be persuaded to inspect beyond the Surface and the Rind of things” (PW I: 40). Here as elsewhere in A Tale of a Tub, Swift raises important questions about knowledge and interpretation in the opposition between surface and depth. The sorts of “Wisdom” that the narrator claims the superficial reader misses confirm the impression that Swift attacks self-styled “deep” writers and readers. The narrator implies that readers must “dig out” the modern text’s “Wisdom,” which he compares to “a Cheese, which by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homelier and the coarser Coat; and whereof to a judicious Palate, the Maggots are the best” (PW I: 40). Claims to deep wisdom seek only to justify thick, ugly, and coarse writing whose buried treasures finally prove to be as repugnant as maggots. The good text – the plain text – requires no digging. A Tale of a Tub would appear, therefore, to be a very bad text indeed. As a parody of bad writing, the Tale’s badness of course makes good satiric sense. Much that makes the Tale truly great depends paradoxically on having the very qualities Swift ridicules. The narrator, for example, explains that modern writers “have always chosen to convey their Precepts and their Arts, shut up within Vehicles of Types and Fables” (PW I: 40). The Tale’s ingenious allegories, types, and fables have kept readers busy digging deeply for centuries, forcing them to interpret in ways it seems to condemn.
Swift’s treatment of interpretation appears inconsistent in the Tale, and it remains unclear precisely what he would approve and what condemn. When he gives the opposition between depth and surface a more distinctly moral turn in the Tale’s “Digression on Madness,” the narrator seems to contradict earlier claims. Elsewhere, the narrator praises modern writing for its depth and darkness; here, he extols “that Wisdom which converses about the Surface” (PW I: 109). To illustrate, he offers two examples: “Last week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her Person for the worse. Yesterday I ordered the Carcass of a Beau to be stript in my Presence; when we were all amazed to find so many unsuspected Faults under one Suit of Clothes” (PW I: 109). Rather than making a compelling case for surface wisdom, these examples expose the moral vacuity of our narrator whose concern with appearances blinds him to the far more significant realities of suffering and death. Neither surface wisdom nor depth proves to be a completely acceptable means of knowing. Surface wisdom, nonetheless, says the narrator, affords us “the sublime and refined point of felicity, called, the Possession of being well deceived; The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves” (PW I: 110). He leaves us with an untenable choice between being happy fools, whose minds dwell upon “the Superficies of Things” or knaves with a more penetrating understanding. If there is a third alternative, Swift never makes it clear.
Along with satirizing deep reading, Swift also ridicules a kind of surface wisdom in his attack on materialism and Hobbes’ philosophy, in particular. Although Swift shares Hobbes’ dark vision of human nature and his healthy mistrust of interpretation, Swift considers the materialism underlying Leviathan a serious threat to religion and the state. In satirizing the Taylor worship in section II of the Tale, Swift attacks reductive “Systems” that deny spiritual reality. Like the materialist who reduces all to physical matter, the Taylor worshipers believe “the Universe to be a large Suit of Clothes” and “man . . . a Micro-Coat” (PW I: 46–7). In a striking inversion, the Taylor worshipers believe that “the outward Dress must needs be the Soul” (PW I: 48). Swift’s satire here has multiple targets, including materialism in the more ordinary sense of the term: in a society where citizens are more preoccupied with surface appearances than with matters of the spirit or mind, philosophies that deny the spirit easily take hold.
Various materialisms pervade the Tale and a work published with it, A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. Both satirize the unwitting materialism underpinning Christian sects that emphasize outward signs of things spiritual. For the enthusiastic fundamentalist, the scriptures themselves are mired in the material. Jack debases the father’s word in using pieces of the will to wrap a sore toe. In the Mechanical Operation, if the fundamentalist steps safely over an open sewer, “some Angel, unseen, descended on purpose to help him by the Hand” (PW I: 180). Although the enthusiast thinks his religious rapture signals the presence of the Holy Spirit, both the Tale and the Mechanical Operation suggest a much less exalted origin, the body. Here, the “fanatick” fit can be induced “by frequently moving your Body up and down . . . till you are perfectly dosed and flustred like one who drinks too much in a Morning” (PW I: 178). Inducing such fits is a “trade” practiced by “workmen,” or dissenting preachers.
Swift brings together various targets in the Tale – including religious enthusiasm and secular, philosophical system building – in the extraordinary “Digression on Madness,” which develops his own materialist theory and possibly undermines much of what he claims the work defends. The narrator hails madness as the source of “the greatest Actions that have been performed in the World, under the influence of Single Men; which are, The Establishment of New Empires by Conquest: The Advance and Progress of New Schemes in Philosophy; and the . . . propagating of New Religions” (PW I: 102). Only madness, the prideful delusion of the sort we see in Peter and Jack, the narrator concludes, can explain such conquests and systems. Such delusion has a bodily, usually sexual, source: “Vapours,” which ascend “from the lower Faculties to over-shadow the Brain” (PW I: 105). Of the military offensive launched by a “Great Prince,” he asks “what hidden Spring could put into Motion so wonderful an Engine?” The answer: “an absent Female, whose Eyes had raised a Protuberancy, and before Emission, she was removed into an Enemy’s Country” (PW I: 103). A painful case of flatulence motivates another king’s invasion of a neighboring country. The raptures of religious fanaticism have similar origins. Swift uses unmistakably sexual language to describe the ecstasy of both the “fanatick” preacher and his congregation in the Mechanical Operation and the Tale.
Swift’s materialist reading of such “madnesses” may have an unintended consequence; for, as many readers have observed, nothing prevents us from extending the same analysis of madmen involved in “the propagating of New Religions” to Christ himself. Could Swift have failed to recognize this? Although he declared in the “Apology” that he intended to celebrate the Church of England, the Tale’s most powerful and ingenious section leaves its reader wondering about the author’s opinion of any and all religious belief. If “Things Invisible” remain among things “impossible to be known” with any certainty (PW I: 105), Swift’s readers remain unsure of how he imagines we can sanely embrace any faith at all.
Perhaps the only avenue Swift offers out of this uncertainty can be found in his frequent insistence on deference to the authority of established church, moral convention, ancient learning, and social hierarchy. Unlike some of his contemporaries – particularly those he would dub “free-thinkers” – Swift sees in uncertainty no reason to reject or rebel against established authority; indeed, established authority may be the only safeguard against social, moral, and intellectual chaos. Swift’s skepticism only confirms him in his conservatism.
A defense of established authority motivates Swift’s attack on the astrologer John Partridge in the so-called Bickerstaff Papers (1708). Partridge, shoe-maker and quack, wrote popular almanacs full of astrological predictions and also criticized the established church. That a tradesman could find a wide audience provoked Swift and fed his contempt for a print culture that produced, and a reading public that consumed, what he considered rubbish. In Predictions for the Year 1708, Swift posed as one Isaac Bickerstaff, astrologer and apologist for astrology. Bickerstaff criticizes the vagueness of astrological predictions peddled by current practitioners who had given his “Art” a bad name. He insists that authentic astrologers can offer precise predictions. To show the truth of this, he makes a prediction himself, the death of John Partridge “upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at Night, of a raging Fever” (PW II: 145). Soon after, Swift published an anonymous letter by a witness to Partridge’s death. In an ingenious play of identity, Swift uses a fictional author to kill off a real one. When Partridge published a letter insisting he was still alive, Bickerstaff wrote another to refute it.
Although The Bickerstaff Papers jeer at astrology’s unfounded claims to knowledge, Swift’s reasons for singling out Partridge have more to do with poems in his almanac critical of the established church and sympathetic to dissenting sects. Swift wrote The Bickerstaff Papers around the same time he drafted a series of pamphlets and satires defending the Anglican church. In The Bickerstaff Papers, he wished to discredit a dissenting voice that was reaching a wide audience. Though not as pointed as Swift’s religious satire in the Tale of a Tub and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, scattered throughout The Bickerstaff Papers are jabs at religious enthusiasts whom Swift blames for the bloody revolution of the previous century.
Despite Swift’s frequent defense of authority, however, his own relationship to it is vexed and contradictory. He criticizes men like Partridge for “meddling in public concerns” (PW II: 149); but from the moment Swift embarked on his career as a writer, he meddled in public concerns, continually questioning the actions and policies of those he dubbed “the weightiest Men in the weightiest Stations” (PW I: 5). Although deference to authority might answer the problems of skepticism that so concerned Swift, authority itself – whether in persons, texts, or institutions – often proved to be riddled with maddening imperfection. And so Swift wrote and railed, risking damage to the very things he would protect.
1. Sir William Temple, Miscellanea (London, 1680), p. 75.
2. See J. A. Downie, “Swift’s Discourse: Allegorical Satire or Parallel History?” Swift Studies 2 (1987), 25–32.
3. For a discussion of the early modern book, see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
4. On this notion, see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 55–56; and Marcus Walsh, “Text, ‘Text,’ and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub,” in Claude Rawson (ed.) Jonathan Swift: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), pp. 82–98. For a helpful discussion of the various materialisms in the Tale, see Roger D. Lund, “Strange Complicities: Atheism and Conspiracy in A Tale of a Tub,” in Robert DeMaria, Jr. (ed.) British Literature 1640–1789: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 142–68.