Swift, Joyce, and the Flight from Home

Quests of Transcendence and the Sin of Separation

G. Atkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137399816
• eBook ISBN: 9781137399823
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In a fresh reading of Gulliver's Travels and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Atkins draws parallels between the protagonists: both Lemuel Gulliver and Stephen Dedalus flee from the burdens of life, seeking a transcendent existence. The study sheds important new light on both novels as essential critiques of modern misunderstandings.

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Satire, Reading, and Forms of Separation and Union

Abstract: Swift’s complex satire A Tale of a Tub (1704) treats of both writing and reading, responding to the rise of the personal essay and pretending to be about nothing, and at the same time dramatically analyzing both the will-fulness of readers and the will-ingness of texts. It thus has much to teach us about reading, which always involves at least two, both a reader and the text. Reading appears, in fact, as a triune activity, consisting of text, reader and reading, and response (or action, beyond the act of reading). Swift’s great satire also shows us something important about bringing-together, rather than separating (for example, reason and imagination).

Atkins, G. Douglas. Swift, Joyce, and the Flight from Home: Quests of Transcendence and the Sin of Separation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137399823.0003.

It were much to be wished, and I do here humbly propose for an experiment, that every prince in Christendom will take seven of the deepest scholars in his dominions, and shut them up close for seven years in seven chambers, with a command to write seven ample commentaries on this comprehensive discourse. I shall venture to affirm, that whatever difference may be found in their several conjectures, they will be all, without the least distortion, manifestly deducible from the text.

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub

Swift’s first great satire, A Tale of a Tub, puts critic and reader alike on the spot. Published in 1704, 22 years before Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, familiarly known as Gulliver’s Travels, this perplexing, often nearly maddening satire treats the will-fulness of readers in face of the will-ing nature of texts; the result is a bewildering series of chapters of religious allegory alternating (generally) with so-called digressions on critics and criticism that for many readers defies their best attempts at comprehension, let alone mastery. The Tale’s (modern) self-reflexiveness draws the reader in, implicating him or her in the critique of textual manipulation and perversion. The book appears to hang together by the merest thread.

Critics come in for much of the opprobrium: both their will-ful misuse of texts and their writing in a form owing much to the personal essay that, ultimately, amounts to what the hack-narrator shamelessly embraces as “writ[ing] upon Nothing.”¹ “Invention” names the problem, as moderns forsake established forms and traditions; it is a sort of pernicious “enthusiasm”:

when a man’s fancy gets astride on his reason, when imagination is at cuffs with the senses, and common understanding, as well as common sense, is kicked out of doors, the first proselyte he makes is himself; and when that is once compassed, the difficulty is not so great in bringing over others; a strong delusion always operating from without as vigorously as from within.²

Thus occur, says the satire, all the revolutions that have disastrously occurred in government, philosophy, and religion. As well as in literary forms and critical theory, one might add.

Implicit in the lengthy quotation above is the problem, unbeknownst to the (satirized) narrator, of course: imagination is not so much the matter as its separation from reason, from the senses, from “common understanding.” When the latter is “kicked out of doors,” then imagination reigns without the guidance that Swift’s friend Alexander Pope insisted is necessary. Contrary, therefore, to the frequent assumption, Swift does not posit an either/or between reason or the senses and imagination; instead, and desirably, they come together, or not.

The structure revealed above, an essential both/and rather than either/or, is apparent in satire itself, albeit in complex fashion. First of all, satire functions—and can only succeed—when both “thesis” and “antithesis” are available to a reader: that is, the satirist’s object(s) of opprobrium and his answer, alternative, or solution. If no such “positive” appears to the “negative” that occupies the center and brunt of attention, the reader flounders, as happened in the instance of Swift’s contemporary Daniel Defoe and his Shortest Way with Dissenters, which offers no evident place to stand and render judgment and reproach. Defoe, we might say, fails to establish or at least to make sufficiently clear to a responsible reader a “still point” that governs and directs the “movement” that the author wants to denigrate.

Movement, then, needs pattern, and pattern emerges out of and from movement; as Eliot puts it in “Burnt Norton,” first of Four Quartets, “Only by the form, the pattern,/ Can words or music reach/ The stillness”; at the same time, he adds, “The detail of the pattern is movement.”³ In a rather different though related way, satirical “antithesis” requires a “thesis,” just as the latter does the former (even if, in satire, opposition is set up between “them” and “us”). Although engaged in opposing, that is, often vituperative, angry, and even savage in that opposition, the writer, no doubt unwillingly at times, reveals through his or her mode or form—that of satire—that positive and negative are locked in ineluctable and structurally definable relation: one may exist without the other, but cannot function properly or expect to succeed. It is a rather humbling recognition.

Reading, as it happens, participates in the same essential structure. Consider the “actors” involved in every instance of the “drama”:

Text

Reader

Swift’s great modern biographer, Irvin Ehrenpreis, has made the point simply but eloquently, a point that, for some reason, we have grave and persistent trouble grasping and accepting:

[A]ll literary works, whether by Swift or anyone else, depend for their life on a relationship between author and audience. What the reader may see does not exist in the work unless it can be imputed to the author (known or unknown) in his capacity as artist. Conversely, what the author may intend has no literary reality unless it can be discovered in his work by a proper reader. Each man exists in art only as an object for the other’s contemplation, defined by those aspects of himself which can be interested or embodied in the public, literary terms of the work as read or heard. (Italics added)⁴

The point of view of Ehrenpreis’s Virginia colleague E.D. Hirsch, Jr., may be heard in these words.⁵ Although I have some doubts about the above remarks (e.g., the notion of a “proper” reader), I believe Ehrenpreis’s statement concerning the binary character of the act of reading is suggestive and valuable, perhaps even more than he realized, especially in the words that I have italicized. The statement points to the same ineluctable both/and relation noticed above in satire.

As important as the above realizations are regarding reading, they by no means tell the whole story. Reading is more complicated, a more complex act, than we have yet glimpsed. We may, in fact, supplement the binary character of reading in the following manner, surely a more nearly complete rendering of the essential and intricate act:

Text

Reader/ Reading

(Later) response, or Action

I have again preferred “Text” to “Author,” being more uncomfortable with Hirsch’s insistence on the primacy of authorial intention than Ehrenpreis. I have, furthermore, made the act of reading triune, rather than binary, in order to account for the likelihood that, as Geoffrey Hartman has put it, the difference that reading makes is, “most generally, writing”⁶ as well as for the very real possibility that the affected reader engages in activity inspired or prompted by his reading that takes place after the book, poem, novel, or essay is put down. Finally, in this triune structure, I have divided the second part in two, effectively turning three into four.

Another way of saying it, influenced by Hartman’s account of reading in relation to William Butler Yeats’s great poem “Leda and the Swan,” itself a sort of allegory of reading:⁷ The text visits, intersects with, and impregnates its respondent, who, as receiver, is in the position of possibly conceiving a “new birth” that, as it were, acts beyond the text. The reader must, in this formulation, be open and responsive to, in other words, fertile and ready for, insemination. But two things quickly expand into more. The reader does not function as such apart from the act of reading, which, likewise, does not exist without a reader; reader and reading cannot, then, be separated.

As well, in coming together, reader and text (obviously) intersecting, they may not be said to lose their identities, or to become absorbed in and by the other. There is, to put it otherwise, no transcendence of either reader or text. There is, instead, an “association,” a “concorde” (to use Eliot’s words), apparent and functional in this “daunsinge.” Reader is no more in charge, at this point, this “intersection,” than text is—the problems of will-fulness that Swift emphasized in A Tale of a Tub amicably resolved. Thus formulated, it sounds simple. It is, of course, far from being so.

Typically, we half-understand, privileging either text (or author) or reader. In literary studies, the result has been the establishment of rival camps of (Hirschian) intentionalists and reader-response critics (ranging from Stanley Fish to Wolfgang Iser and even some structuralists and poststructuralists). We humans appear to gravitate towards either/or alternatives and solutions, avoiding the complex and intricate—especially the tensional—whenever and wherever possible and conceivable. Insisting that texts speak, and bear authority, is tantamount to placing responsibility on the reader-receiver for trying to understand what is actually being said to him or her (complete assurance never being quite possible, no matter the effort). Insisting, at the same time, that the reader comes to the act as no blank slate or tabula rasa but as a fully functional human being, made of flesh and blood, with desires, experience, and will, a creature of reason and imagination, of body and soul, of sense and sensibility (as well as pride and prejudice, I dare add), means the burden of response is great, indeed. He or she needs taste and judgment, which must be developed over time and invoked in every attempt to read (and respond to) what the text is offering, its gift.

In the quotation from Swift’s A Tale of a Tub that I have adduced as my epigraph above, the word “commentary” appears twice, referring to an approach to literary criticism, absent so many negatives, that stems from the medieval tradition treating sacred and secular texts alike that includes Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The word itself suggests, not a relativism, but the presence of the commentator often obscured in the efforts known as, if not apparent in our familiar term, “criticism.” More i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Satire, Reading, and Forms of Separation and Union
• 2  The Gift Half Understood
• 3  The Flight of Man, the Fall of Icarus and Phaeton
• 4  The Flying or Floating Island: Lemuel Gulliver and Ideas Disembodied
• 5  Aesthetics as Asceticism: Stephen Dedaluss Quest of Transcendence
• 6  Its All about Caring and Not-Caring at the Same Time: Or, Home Is Where You Start From
• Bibliography
• Index