Gulliver's Travel

I want to outline in this essay some of the ways in which Swift's texts - in particular the shorter prose works and the poetry concerned with the female body - take up and make explicit contradictory philosophical positions. Much time and critical effort has been spent attempting to trace some unifying philosophical thread through the maze created by these and other of Swift's writings, when such a thread may be elusive to the point of vanishing altogether.1 It seems possible that one cause of this critical need to establish consistency in Swift is the influence of Postmodernist thought, which tends to cause a conditioned response to eighteenth century literary works in which the instinctive move is to look for that which totalizes, compartmentalizes, reveals a master narrative or supplies a clearly defined linear teleology. If, however, this kind of pre-imagined consistency proves unavailable, the critic is left with the notion of a multi-vocal, polychromatic Swift which should not, perhaps, be so surprising as there seems nothing alien to the intellectual trends of early-eighteenth century England in Swift's assumption of positions that appear radically opposed to one another. Periods of transition necessarily involve the existence of contradictory positions in constellation often within the work of a single writer or thinker. Even Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest of all icons of Enlightenment rationality, can be represented in such a way: "Newton was a Janus figure, emblematic of the new, rationalist, scientific and secular future, yet also using his mathematical skills for abstruse astrological and biblical calculations." (Corfield, 11).

Clearly any attempt to attribute a definitive philosophical position to Swift is fraught with difficulty.2 Not only must the reader attempt to penetrate multiple levels of irony at a micro-level, but at a macro-level the fact that Swift was an Anglican clergyman complicates any philosophical interpretation. The origins of the debates on this issue are contemporaneous with the publication of the texts themselves (William Wotton's observations, for example), and criticism up to the end of the nineteenth century continued, predominately, to insist on an irreligious Swift an approach that survived into the twentieth century: "no defence of Swift's fundamental religious orthodoxy can stand the test of such writings. He is a sceptical humanist who again and again tilts at Christian belief". (Wilson Knight, on "The Tale of a Tub",124). This strain of criticism has been long overtaken, however, by the notion that throughout Swift's texts there is an obvious tendency towards a defense of, and apology for, the Anglican Church: for Swift "the world can only be properly interpreted in a context of moral truth enforced by divine authority". (Williams, 137). Or: "That Swift inherited, and loyally struggled for, a traditional Anglican solution...can be seen demonstrably in his life." (Hall, 43).

As an illustration of the complications attending any study of Swift, it would be possible to make the case that the time has now arrived for an analysis that seeks to resurrect Swift as "a sceptical humanist". Such an approach put here in a very reductive form might begin from the position that critics baffled by the heterogeneous nature and multiplicity of works like "The Tale of a Tub" have a tendency to return to the sermons, and the other works of Swift-the-churchman, and finding there only Anglican orthodoxy proclaim Swift a pillar of the church. The fact remains, however, that the richness, variety, and multiplicity of meanings contained in works like Gulliver's Travels or "The Tale of a Tub" continue to indicate, at the very least, a lack of absolute conviction in the teachings of the Anglican Church. Such arguments begin to uncover the potential complexities and paradoxes in which an analysis of Swift's writings can enmesh the critic seeking to "smoak out" (Norton, 446) a biographically consistent interpretation, and are precisely the kind of hermeneutics I wish to avoid. Attempts, therefore, to ascertain what Swift "actually thought" are set aside here; what matters for my purposes in this essay is the philosophical positions Swift's texts assume and the resulting explicitation and unraveling of complex epistemological positions.

An example of such a position, easily overlooked in Swift, is empiricism used nearly always in the texts in juxtaposition with epistemologies antagonistic to it. The fable of the bee and the spider in "The Battel of the Books" offers a particularly strong instance, in which the text uses an empirical epistemology to attack individual human reason: 3

Whether is the nobler Being of the two, That which by a lazy Contemplation of four Inches round; by an over-weening Pride, which feeding and engendering on it self, turns all into Excrement and Venom; producing nothing at last, but Fly-bane and a Cobweb: Or That, which, by an universal Range, with long Search, much Study, true Judgment, and Distinction of Things, brings home Honey and Wax. (Norton, 383).

Or, in a similar vein, concerned only for that which is within, the spider is represented as "furnisht with a Native Stock within my self. This large Castle (to shew my Improvements in the Mathematicks) is all built with my own Hands, and the Materials extracted altogether out of my own person." (Norton, 383). And, perhaps most barbed of all, the spider is portrayed as "wisely gathering Causes from Events, (for they knew each other by Sight)". (Norton, 382). Similarly the textually privileged "ancient", Aesop, is given the empirical position: "was ever any thing so Modern as the Spider in his Air, his turns, and his Paradoxes?", "nothing but Dirt spun out of your own Entrails (the guts of Modern Brains)", and, "whatever we have got, has been by infinite Labor, and search, and ranging thro' every Corner of Nature". (Norton, 384). The text uses a sophisticated empirical position to challenge individual human reason with apparent disregard for empiricism's potential to undermine metaphysics generally. By appearing to embrace an essentially empirical epistemology it is at least arguable that "The Battel of the Books" opens a space for further critiques along lines philosophically similar to its own. The unraveling of previously implicit positions thus becomes a real possibility.

There are, of course, differing opinions on the philosophical positioning in "The Battel of the Books". An example is the view of Warren Montag who seeks to isolate the reasons why thinkers like Hobbes, Gassendi, and, most notably, Descartes,4 should be targets