Routledge Revivals: Gulliver and the Gentle Reader (1991)

Studies in Swift and Our Time

C J Rawson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138558847
• eBook ISBN: 9781351364607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1991, Gulliver and the Gentle Reader critically examines the writing of Jonathan Swift. The book is predominately concerned with what Rawson coins 'the "unofficial" energies' which work below the surface of Swift's conscious themes. Alongside this discussion, Rawson provides detailed studies on historical, cultural and psychological relationships, and the connections that exist between these areas and more extreme writers of the later period such as Breton, Mailer, and Yeats, as well as the connections with the writers such as his contemporary Pope, and those that followed such as Johnson, and Sterne. This book will be of interest to students of literature, as well as those researching in the area of literature.

NOTES

CHAPTER I GULLIVER AND THE GENTLE READER

1. Works, I.29. See also I.32.

2. Herbert Read, Selected Writings (London, 1963), p. 127.

3. Works, I.42n.

4. See Edward W. Rosenheim, Jr, Swift and the Satirist’s Art (Chicago and London, 1963), p.62.

5. Tristram Shandy, IV.x; IX.viii.

6. For a most useful survey of this ‘self-conscious’ mode of writing, see Wayne C. Booth, ‘The self-conscious narrator in comic fiction before Tristram Shandy’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, LXVII (1952), 163–85. There is a good deal of this kind of writing shortly before Sterne, not necessarily derived from Swift, and my point does not primarily concern an ‘influence’. See also Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago and London, 1965), p.229.

7. Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (London [Panther Books], 1970), p.7.

8. See pp.140 ff., and chapter v, passim.

9. It is noteworthy that in some of his private correspondence with Stella, Swift frequendy used what we now recognize as Shandean mannerisms: coy spontaneities of self-reference, playfully affectionate bits of private nonsense and of intimate double-entendre, broken sentences and even the sort of non-verbal and sub-verbal communication (‘little language’, grunts and cries) which is part of the everyday world of Tristram and Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby, but which Swift was quick to satirize in its more public manifestations (e.g. the sub-verbal communion, through looks and sighs and belches, of the worshippers in the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, Works, I. 183, etc.). See the examples from the Journal to Stella cited in Herbert Davis, Jonathan Swift: Essays on his Satire, and Other Studies (New York, 1964), pp.82 ff., and Davis’s pertinent comment on p.93 ‘that the letters of Swift from which I have been quoting, were first published at various times between 1745 and 1767, that the account of the life and character of Stella first appeared in 1765, and the Journal to Stella partly in 1766, and partly in 1768; they were all therefore first read by those who had delighted in the novels of Richardson and Sterne, and who were enjoying the sentimental comedies of Kelly and Cumberland.’

10. Works, I.22. Here again Swift is prepared privately to practise the things whose public manifestation he reproves. A. B. England has recendy shown how in the private Journal to Stella Swift is concerned that his writing should suggest ‘that nothing which comes into his consciousness is irrelevant’, and that the moment by moment reporting of facts and feelings, even if they turn out to be erroneous, must stand as the true record of ‘the incoherent, discontinuous movement of his experience and his thoughts’, citing comments like ‘I must say every sorry thing that comes into my head’, ‘Mr. Lewis’s man came in before I could finish that word beginning with a W …’, etc. (‘Private and public rhetoric in the Journal to Stella’, Essays in Criticism, XXII (1972), 133; Journal to Stella, II.568, 371). Like other critics, Mr England rightly argues that the spontaneities and discontinuities are themselves part of a deliberate rhetoric. So, of course, were Sterne’s. The points of interest in the present context are that Swift was both drawn to a proto-Shandean style and at the same time reserved his non-satiric uses of it for his private writings.

Compare Swift’s narrator’s claim that his statements are ‘literally true this Minute I am writing’, whatever the next moment may bring, with the Mailerian hipster’s doctrine that ‘there are no truths other than the isolated truths of what each observer feels at each instant of his existence … the truth is not what one has felt yesterday or what one expects to feel tomorrow but rather truth is no more nor less than what one feels at each instant in the perpetual climax of the present’ (Advertisements for Myself, pp.285–6; see also above, pp.69, 133 f.).

11. Richardson, Preface to Sir Charles Grandison.

12. Works, I.27.

13. Tristram Shandy, I.vi.

14. Works, I.131, 133.

15. F. R. Leavis, ‘The irony of Swift’, The Common Pursuit (Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 80.

16. H. W. Sams, ‘Swift’s satire of the Second Person’, ELH. A Journal of English Literary History, XXVI (1959), 36–44.

17. C. S. Lewis, ‘Addison’, in Essays on the Eighteenth Century Presented to David Nichol Smith (Oxford, 1945), p.1; Irvin Ehrenpreis, The Personality of Jonathan Swift (London, 1958), p.39, on A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed. Ehrenpreis also lists parallels from other writers. See also Roland M. Frye, ‘Swift’s Yahoo and the Christian symbols for sin’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xv (1954), 201–17, and Deane Swift’s Essay (1755), pp. 221 ff.

18. This notation gives the book and chapter reference to Gulliver’s Travels and the page in Works, XI. It is used in this chapter, where quotations from Gulliver’s Travels are particularly frequent. In the rest of this book, I shall revert to the convention I have adopted for all other works by Swift throughout, of giving references to volume and page of Works in the notes, leaving references to chapters, sections or lines, where convenient, in brackets in the text.

19. For an amusing passage about indoor as against outdoor defecation, see ‘A Panegyrick on the D—n’, ll.229 ff. (Poems, III.894 ff.).

20. William King, Some Remarks on The Tale of a Tub (1704) cited by Ricardo Quintana, The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift (New York and London, 1936), p.75; William Wotton, A Defense of the Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning … With Observations upon The Tale of a Tub (1705), in A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1958), pp.322, 323, 326; Works, I.5. Swift was not at first known to be the author.

21. The tartness of these jokes in Gulliver may be contrasted with the protracted and elaborate geniality with which Norman Mailer describes ‘an overwhelming urge to micturate’ in Armies of the Night (New York, 1968), pp.42–4, with its vacuous mock-concern about what people would think of his ‘pissing on the floor’ if the attendant reported it to the police or the press got hold of the news (p.43), and with its fussily se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
• PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTE ON TEXTS AND ABBREVIATIONS
• I GULLIVER AND THE GENTLE READER
• II ORDER AND CRUELTY
• III ’TIS ONLY INFINITE BELOW
• IV CIRCLES, CATALOGUES AND CONVERSATIONS
• V CATALOGUES, CORPSES AND CANNIBALS
• NOTES
• INDEX