SOURCE: "Gulliver's Travels and the Novel," in The Genres of "Gulliver's Travels," edited by Frederik N. Smith, University of Delaware Press, 1990, pp. 56-74.

Gulliver's Travels is not a novel in any meaningful sense of that slippery term that I know, yet its generic status would be difficult to establish without having the novel in mind. Swift's masterpiece is, in fact, so conceptually dependent upon the novel that it is almost impossible to imagine the existence of the Travels outside the context of the developing novelistic tradition. The relationship of Gulliver's Travels to the novel has been obscured, however, by two contextual matters, one historical, the other generic. The historical issue involves the fact that the Travels appears when the English novel had barely begun, and it is difficult for us to think of it as involved in the tradition. With only Defoe, among major English novelists, having yet tried the waters, with the issue of definition still two decades away from even being broached, and with the great craze for novel-reading and novel-writing also still well in the future, how can it be meaningful to think of there yet being a tradition of the novel even though there are some few discernible examples? Unless one regards the Travels as a kind of paradigm—positive or negative—for the tradition, how can one think of it as involved in a tradition-to-be? The second issue, although generic, does not involve the genre of the novel; rather it involves parody and the assumptions we make about its strategy of working from, imitating, and trying to tease or embarrass a particular writer or work. Because of the way we define parody, we do not usually think of Swift as a parodist, and I think we miss something about both Swift and the possibilities of parody by the standard definition. I shall, then, first try to suggest in what sense Swift is a parodist and show how some of his parody works; second, I shall try to suggest how his particular type of parody enables him to associate himself with the developing tradition of the novel; finally, and more briefly, I shall try to suggest how the Travels works as a kind of parodie answer to the early novel and as a satire of the novelistic consciousness.

The many faces of Jonathan Swift often remind us of his contemporaries, and there is seldom a moment in his best satires when he is not helping some fool or knave to stand forth and profess a muddled—but nevertheless distinctive and definable—set of values and opinions. Snoop that he is, Swift spends a lot of time in other people's consciousnesses, trying to organize in some memorable way what he finds there. Whether as tale-teller or voyager, modest economist or befuddled Christian apologist, panegyricist of the world and the number three or putative satirist disappointed that all human folly has not been extirpated in six months, Swift is ever the impersonator, borrowing his voice from someone else. We recognize his antagonists clearly—clearly, that is, until we try to be specific, and then we often discover how very little we know about whom he has personated. About some few, everyone can agree: in A Tale of a Tub, William Wotton, Richard Bentley, John Dryden, and Sir Roger L'Estrange, for example, or in Meditation upon a Broomstick, Robert Boyle. But agreement is possible only because Swift himself names the originals. How good, then, is Swift as a parodist, or (to put the issue more aptly for my argument) is he the kind of parodist through whom one hears the voice of the original: I wish to examine Swift's strategy of personation in a very simplified form, hoping to sort out how his attention to particular writers blends into a broader concern for style and the implication of style. Two of Swift's short minor works offer interesting test cases of Swift's skill and method, for they are "pure" examples of Swift as a parodist in the sense that both the works—The Last Speech and Dying Words of Ebenezor Elliston and A Meditation upon a Broomstick—pretend to be real works by a real person.

In The Last Speech and Dying Words, Swift alludes to a popular subgenre of an important paraliterary form, the "dying confessional" of a criminal about to be executed. Such confessionals, obviously prepared well in advance of the occasion by prison ordinaries, hacks, and booksellers, were hawked about at the execution itself, and their conventional pieties, tearful abjuration of past crimes, and invocation of God's mercy evidently ministered to the audience's need to feel the public usefulness of the occasion. Swift cuts through the easy pieties and has Elliston forego repentance and dispense with the usual rhetoric. Instead, he substitutes a vivid account of knaves driven by baser motives than poverty or ill luck:

If any Thing in this World be like Hell … the truest Picture of it must be in the Back-Room of one of our Alehouses at Midnight; where a Crew of Robbers and their Whores are met together after a Booty, and are beginning to grow drunk; from which Time, until they are past their Senses, is such a continued horrible Noise of Cursing, Blasphemy, Lewdness, Scurrility, and brutish Behaviour; such Roaring and Confusion, such a Clatter of Mugs and Pots at each other's Heads; that Bedlam, in Comparison, is a sober and orderly Place: At last they all tumble from their Stools and Benches, … and generally the Landlord or his Wife, or some other Whore …, picks their Pockets before they wake.¹

And Swift's Elliston offers a particular incentive to reform, one very different from the high-minded hopes in the usual confessionals.

Now, as I am a dying Man, something I have done which may be of good Use to the Publick. I have left with an honest Man (and indeed the only honest Man I was ever acquainted with) the Names of all my wicked Brethren, the present Places of their Abode, with a short Account of the chief Crimes they have committed; in many of which I have been their Accomplice, and heard the rest from their own Mouths: I have likewise set down the Names of those we call our Setters, of the wicked Houses we frequent, and of those who receive and buy our stolen Goods. I have solemnly charged this honest Man … that whenever he hears of any Rogue to be tryed for robbing, or House-breaking, he will look into his List, and if he finds the Name there of the Thief concerned, to send the whole Paper to the Government. Of this I here give my Companions fair and publick Warning, and hope they will take it. (p. 39)

Prince Posterity has luckily preserved for us the "authentic" last words of Ebenezor Elliston, which, of course, are utterly conventional and predictable. Elliston repents his life of crime, claims he was framed in the fatal instance, and hopes others will learn from his bad example. At least one critic has suggested that Swift's style is "an almost perfect parody" of Elliston's own.² But I find no stylistic resemblance whatever. Unlike the hard, clear syntax that Swift's Elliston uses to express his smug toughness, the real Elliston speaks like this:

… the Roberies which I was concerned in from October 1719 to January 1720 were so many that I cannot give a true account of them all, but leave them aside, and come to acquaint you of my last misfortunes some small time before Christmas last for some reasons best known to my self, not for any Roberies that I committed, I left my House and Familly, and took a private Lodging, in which time there was a Roberey committed on the Gravel Walk on a Captain, which robbery, one Elizabeth Gorden I believe by the perswasions of a Man in power in this City went before the Lord-Mayor and as I am informed swore that I and two or three other Persons in my Company committed the said robbery, which I now declare that Neither they or I had any Hand whatsoever in it, for which Mr. H——s made it his Business to haunt Night and Day for me, and also informed several Persons, that there was Twenty Pounds Reward for any one who would Apprehend me, so that I might be brought to Justice, for which Several People as well as himself made it their Business to look for me, but God knows how Innocent I was at that Time of Committing any Manner of Robbery whatsoever, but to avoid Dangers, I made my Case known to several of my Friends, who advised me to leave this Town, whose advice I took, but Unfortunately I was concerned with another person in taking Counsellor Sweeny's Mare.³

It is not really surprising that Swift does not closely imitate Elliston's prose style, for his audience would not have known Ebenezor Elliston's style even if there had been one. We need not suppose he would even have cared to see this particular "real" confession; it was enough for his audience to know what kind of thing it was likely to be. The Last Speech and Dying Words of Ebenezor Elliston plainly is not an attack upon an individual person or an individual style but rather upon custom, a particular subspecies of literature that grew out of that custom, and a cheap and self-congratulatory morality that was both a cause and result of such "confessions." There must be some idea in the audience's mind of what the "last speech and dying words" tradition is like, but Elliston himself is irrelevant, ultimately, and so is his flaccid, rambling (and possibly genuine) prose.⁴

We might, on the other hand, expect a close verbal imitation in Swift's Meditation upon a Broomstick, for there he personates a writer whose style was distinctive and well known to his audience. Thomas Sheridan's anecdote about the occasion of Swift's Meditation is well known.⁵ Swift, as a guest of Lord and Lady Berkeley in London, was often asked to attend Lady Berkeley's private devotions, and Lady Berkeley's excessive fondness for Boyle's meditations led her to ask Swift to read repeatedly from them. Swift's careful insertion of his own manuscript imitation in the volume, his solemn reading of it, Lady Berkeley's effusive praise of it first in private and then among company who knew Boyle's meditations well enough to know that there was no such meditation—knowledge of these carefully planned steps of the hoax may add to our appreciation of Swift's finely tuned absurdities:

This single Stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected Corner, I once knew in a flourishing State in a Forest: It was full of Sap, full of Leaves, and full of Boughs: But now, in vain does the busy Art of Man pretend to vye with Nature, by tying that withered Bundle of Twigs to its sapless Trunk: It is now at best but the Reverse of what it was; a Tree turned upside down, the Branches on the Earth, and the Root in the Air: It is now handled by every dirty Wench, condemned to do her Drugery; and by a capricious Kind of Fate, destined to make other things clean and be nasty it self.

But a Broom-stick, perhaps you will say, is an Emblem of a Tree standing on its Head; and pray what is Man but a topsy-turvy Creature?⁶

The "parody" is brilliant, but it is hard to say exactly how it works because it is hard to say exactly what is parodied. A quick reading makes Swift's Meditation seem quite like Boyle, except for the distortion crucial to parody, but on detailed comparison the similarities become hard to find. No single Boyle meditation has ever been regarded as the model for Swift's parody, and for a very good reason. None of Boyle's meditations is much like Swift's version, either in subject matter or style. The first meditation in Boyle's 1665 volume is perhaps the closest to Swift:

Upon his manner of giving meat to his dog.

Ignorantly thankful creature, thou beggest in such a way, that by way would appear an antedated gratitude, if it were not a designless action, the manner of thy petitioning before-hand, rewards the grant of thy request; thy addresses and recompence being so made and ordered, that the meat I cast thee may very well feed religion in me. For, but observe this dog, I hold him out meat, and my inviting voice loudly encourages and invites him to take it: it is held indeed higher than he can leap; and yet, if he leap not at it, I do not give it him; but if he do….⁷

But there is not much phraseological or syntactic similarity, and the argument is developed in a very different way. Boyle has favorite words and devices that distinguish him from other meditators (he likes the word "divers" so much, for example, that he once uses it four times in a single paragraph, and many of his meditations are actually dialogues), but Swift pays no attention to these distinctive and easy-to-parody strategies. It is as if he cared not at all for distinctive stylistic devices or even for obvious structural principles. What then makes it a parody of Boyle and not of someone else? The answer, I am afraid, is that one would have a very hard time proving that it is a parody of Boyle if it were not for a published subtitle that asserts such a parody and for the fact of Thomas Sheridan's anecdote.⁸ If we were to put it beside the meditative effusions of, say John Flavell, we could just as easily think it parodied him. Here is a typical beginning of one of Flavell's meditations in Husbandry Spiritualized, or The Heavenly Use of Earthly Things (1669):

Upon the sight of a fair spreading Oak.

What a lofty flourishing Tree is here? It seems rather to be a little Wood, than a single Tree; every limb thereof having the dimensions and branches of a Tree in it; and yet as great as it is, it was once but a little slip, which one might pull up with two fingers; this vast body was contained virtually, and potentially in a small Acorn. Well, then, I will never despise the day of small things, nor despair of arriving to an eminency of grace, though at present it be but as a bruised reed, and the things that are in me, be ready to dye. As things in nature, so the things of the Spirit, grow up to their fulness and perfection, by slow and insensible degrees. The famous and heroical acts of the most renowned believers, were such as themselves could not once perform, or it may be think they ever should. Great things both in nature and grace, come from small and contemptible beginnings.⁹

There is not much to choose between Boyle and Flavell as meditators, although each has individual stylistic features. That Swift chooses not to imitate individual stylistic features suggests that the specifics of style are not his consuming interest. A bright undergraduate with a modestly good ear could come much closer to Boyle than Swift does; unless we judge Swift a thoroughly incompetent personator, we must assume that his interests here lie beyond parody that is individual and personal.

But the objects of laughter in Swift's Meditation suggest a cogent and coherent satiric target that would explain Swift's parodic aims and at the same time answer the recurrent charges that it was at least uncharitable, if not downright impious, to attack a man of Boyle's righteousness in the first place. Four things call undue attention to themselves in Swift's version of meditation. First is the strained analogy set up between the broomstick and a human being, based on an inversion of the traditional topos comparing man to a tree. Second is the subtly self-congratulatory, egocentric, even solipsistic, manner in which the analogy is asserted:

When I beheld this, I sighed, and said within myself Surely Mortal Man is a Broomstick….

Third is the fact that the broomstick is a chance object for meditation. It is simply something at hand—"this broomstick in that neglected corner"—and seems to the speaker as good as any other as a possible object of meditation, rather like Donne's flea or Marvell's dewdrop, which also take their cue from the homiletic tradition of concrete exempla: "Mark but this flea …" and "This single stick…. " The fourth feature is what gives Swift's Meditation away as a parody rather than a failed serious effort. The object in question is not a natural object but a man-made one, and this distortion of a meditationist's procedure calls quick attention to the fact that the meditator was stretching the rules, as observed by the likes of Boyle and serious imitators like Flavell, for they had usually concentrated on human activities and observation of objects or patterns in the natural world. Boyle, for example, had meditated "Upon the Sight of some variously-coloured clouds," "Upon the sight of a fair milk-maid singing to her cow," and "Upon one's talking to an echo," and Flavell upon such inspired subjects as "Upon the Sudden Withering of a Rose" or "Upon the Pulling up of a Leek."

But Boyle and Flavell were stretching the rules too; they seriously distort the earlier meditative tradition. The tradition of Christian meditation had regularly devoted itself to biblical events, especially highlights in the life of Christ, or to set contemplations that produced a proper state of serene devotion in the meditator.¹⁰ Meditations were not random, nor did they concentrate on trival objects or observations. The distortion of the new meditators was conscious as well as contrived. Boyle's explanatory perface and a long and tedious introduction to his meditations claim the invention of a new kind of exercise, which Boyle calls "Meleteticks":

There is scarce any thing, that may not prove the subject of an occasional meditation; … natural propensity … unperceivably ingages us to pry into the several attributes and relations of the things we consider, to obtain the greater plenty of particulars, for the making up of the more full and compleat parallel betwixt the things whose resemblances we would set forth. By which means a man often comes to discover a multitude of particulars, even in obvious things, which … common beholders take no notice of.¹¹

Boyle's meletetics is a distinctively "modern"—that is, eighteenth-century modern—version of meditation; its use of material meditative objects, its adaptation to the individual experiences of common men, its emphasis on the power of any individual to interpret adequately, its quiet allegiance to the methods and assumptions of empirical science, its assertion that great truths can be revealed through sense experience: these methods and attitudes and the assumptions that sponsor them seem more crucial to Swift's righteous ire than any particulars of style. Boyle's panegyric on modern writing and his ubiquitous progressivist assumptions might well have irritated or angered Swift, and certainly his confidence in human discovery and interpretative ability seem, when put beside Swift's beliefs, easy and radically optimistic. Here is a taste of Boyle's explanation of why he feels free to depart from classical decorum in language: rules-makers disagree with each other, he says, and

I see no great reason to confine my self to the magisterial dictates of either ancient or scholastick, writers. For, living in this age, and in this part of the world, where we are not like to have those for readers that died before we were born, I see not why one may not judge of decorum by the examples and practices of those authors of our own times and countries….¹²

Boyle's meletetics, widely influential and limitated, especially among dissenters, carry the every-man-hisown-priest idea to an extreme, and, like many other modern epistemologies and writings attacked by Swift, stressed the validity of individual experience as a means to eternal truth. Boyle and his followers democratized revelation to an incredible degree, turning the Book of Nature into a kind of cosmic book of associations with as many meanings as there are perceivers or even moods. That attitude was not likely to win Swift's approval. Swift does not mention Boyle in his letters (or at least in those that have survived) or elsewhere in his published works, except for a late marginal manuscript note in his copy of Burnet's History of his own Time in which he calls him a "a very silly writer."¹³ However great a scientist, Boyle was a mannered writer, pedestrian theologian, and sometimes flatulent reasoner, and he had other characteristics likely to infuriate someone of Swift's sensibilities.

He had, for example, made much of his religious conversion at the age of fourteen, and he had repeatedly refused to take holy orders on the grounds that he had not had an inner call. Thus, although a faithful Anglican, Boyle in his personal life as well as in his writing acts more like Swift's dissenting contemporaries than like Swift the High Churchman, and Boyle's lifelong attempts to harmonize religion with empirical science, his fondness for scientific jargon, his scarcely disguised self-praise in The Christian Virtuoso, and his founding of the Boyle lectures on physico-theological subjects (Bentley was the first lecturer) all represent commitments that Swift regarded as at best misguided, at worst downright perverse.

We need not wonder, then, why Swift would feel free to attack "so great and pious a man as Mr. Boyle" (it is Sheridan's phrase) or whether his Broomstick hoax had any force of philosophical belief behind it.¹⁴ In fact, the thrust of Swift's hoax aims far more broadly than at the single figure of Boyle. Rather than stylistic parody in the usual sense, A Meditation upon a Broomstick is generic or class parody—that is, parody of a kind of writing and the assumptions it is based on, and crucial to its working power is the recognition of the philosophical assumptions that underlie it rather than simple identification of the writer. In A Tale of a Tub Swift hints at his characteristic procedure:

Some of those Passages in this Discourse, which appear most liable to Objection are what they call Parodies, where the Author personates the Style and Manner of other Writers, whom he has a mind to expose. I shall produce one Instance, it is in the 51st page. Dryden, L'Estrange, and some others I shall not name, are here levelled at, who having spent their Lives in Faction, and Apostacies, and all manner of Vice, pretended to be Sufferers for Loyalty and Religion. So Dryden tells us in one of his Prefaces of his Merits and Suffering, thanks God that he possesses his Soul in Patience: In other Places he talks at the same Rate, and L'Estrange often uses the like Style, and I believe the Reader may find more Persons to give that Passage an Application.¹⁵

Personating more than one writer at a time is at least as difficult as imitating the individual traits of a single writer, and this kind of class parody—personating writers who share a disagreeable trait of some sort—is rampant in Swift. This is one reason why parody in Swift is so hard to pin down and why so many critics, in despair of being precise, have turned to denial of parody instead. I agree with Edward W. Rosenheim's definition of satire as an attack upon "discernible historic particulars,"¹⁶ but that definition is easy to pervert in studying Swift, for the particular may be a group of writers or a class of thinkers or a category of believers just as easily as an individual. To insist that Swift aims at a single writer in his personations is not only to deprive his prose of much of the larger force that he demonstrably exerts but also to make him more of a lampoonist than thinker. Artist and marksman that he was, Swift could hit several antagonists and their foibles with a single shot, and we need not blame him for our own "either/or" instances, which, if I am right about Swift's Broomstick, Swift refused to honor even when it would have been easiest. Swift can, of course, be very particular when he wants to be, and there are times when he singles out a particular knave or fool instead of providing a family portrait. What is surprising is how seldom this occurs as a matter of style, for even in many particularized passages the focus is still on generic or class parody; when, for example, Swift inserts in Gulliver's Travels almost verbatim passages in seaman's jargon from Sturmy's Mariner's Magazine or when his scientific language is taken directly from the Transactions of the Royal Society, his parodic object is the broad and mindless use of these jargons, not Sturmy or the Transactions as such.

What I am saying does not mean, of course, that Swift does not invite us to find individuals within the family portraits he concentrates on, and, just as in Meditation upon a Broomstick he allows us to think of Boyle while attacking what Boyle stands for, so in many other passages he invites us to think of particular authors that exemplify the qualities embodied in his generic parody. The Tale of a Tub passage that I have alluded to, for example, names Dryden and L'Estrange for us and then suggests that we ourselves can find additional examples: "I believe the Reader may find more Persons to give that Passage an Application." Sometimes he gives names that exemplify, and sometimes he provides other clues. We have, I think, hardly begun to find the authors that, in his words, "he has a mind to expose," because we have looked too exclusively for stylistic parody and paid too little attention to other telltale details that can help to identify targets that are not to be identified stylistically.

2

Gulliver's Travels has generally resisted efforts to consider it parodic, and some Swift critics lurch toward apoplexy when the very idea of parody is broached within reaching distance of Gulliver's Travels.¹⁷ And yet Swift's consciousness of contemporary writing is nearly as apparent there as in A Tale of a Tub, and if passages that specifically echo another writer—such as the plagiarized passage from Sturmy's Mariner's Magazine—are rare, a large awareness of contemporary writing habits and the prevailing tastes of readers is visible at nearly every turn. Swift's awareness of contemporary travel writers—William Dampier, for example—has been often remarked, and much of the fun in the book's first appearance had to do with its solemn title page: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, it advertised, promising something quite other than what is delivered. Swift, in one of his letters, has something of a lark in imagining literal-minded readers who are gulled by such an expectation: he speaks of an Irish bishop who, after reading Gulliver's Travels, concluded that it was "full of improbable lies, and for his part, he hardly believed a word of it."¹⁸

But quite beyond its evocation of travel literature, Gulliver's Travels engages a whole tradition of fiction that was then in the process of developing, and Swift saw that this new kind of writing was beginning to codify a "modern," significantly new way of perceiving the world. Contemporary narratives of personal experience—scandalous memoirs and chronicles of personal and public political intrigue, as well as books that charted personal travel to far-off places or new experiences—were increasingly sought by a public that wanted material, intellectual, and psychological satisfaction in the conquest of space and the accrual of experience. Because of its new popularity, this subjective writing, whether genuine or fictional, seems to offer a personal yet universal key to reality and, like Boyle's Meditations, can only deliver on its promise by exaggerated and distorted emblematicism and by verbal sleight-of-hand. The assumptions, values, and forms that seem to be implicitly attacked in Gulliver's Travels would be easy enough to defend on their own terms, and in fact in our time most of us find it easier to understand them than we do Swift's objections; but the Travels offers us persuasive evidence that Swift perceived the brave new literary world of the 1720s much as Pope did, with the significant difference that Swift merges its personalities and consciousnesses into composite figures who anonymously participate in the creation of a single work that expressed their values and outlook, rather than being named and even individuated by their antagonist.¹⁹ Even in their monotonous sameness, though, some identifiable characteristics emerge, and in the choral voice one can pick out a few distinctive, personalized tones that remind us of a voice insistent on being subjective, authoritative, and modern.

Because Swift's parody works through an accretion and absorption of particulars, it is difficult to illustrate his method without a detailed consideration of the text and its contexts, but here I will be only suggestive through brief attention to one episode and its surrounding circumstances. The suggestive place I want to examine may at first seem a bit unlikely—Lemuel Gulliver's pockets as he empties them for his interrogation in Lilliput. Here is an inventory of what turns up concealed on Gulliver's person:

a handkerchief

a snuffbox

a diary

a comb

a razor

a set of eating utensils

a watch

a set of pistols

a pouch of gunpowder and another pouch of bullets silver and copper money and several pieces of gold

a pair of spectacles

a pocket perspective and "several other little Conveniences."

To appreciate the full effect of this pocketful, we have to remember that Gulliver is supposed to have swum ashore—in dangerous stormy waves—with his pockets jammed like that, and he is also wearing a full set of clothes, a hat, and a large sword.

Because this information is not all presented at once, one might read the Travels several times and not notice Gulliver's rich and varied cargo. Gulliver, being Gulliver, does not tell us that his swimming was impeded by his load, nor does he tell us why he hung onto the material things that connect him to his past when, buffeted by waves that threaten to scuttle him, it would have seemed sensible to discharge himself of some of his burdens. The things are, to be sure, useful to Swift in initiating Gulliver's dialogue with the Lilliputians, but they are not necessary, as subsequent voyages show. Swift pretty clearly is having some fun at Gulliver's expense in making him such a dull-witted freighter, and his point seems crucially connected, on the one hand, to a contemporary joke, and, on the other, to Swift's perceptions about first-person narrative and the mind-numbing absurdities it sometimes offered to readers of contemporary narrative.

The joke was seven years old in 1726. It had involved a slip of Defoe's pen in Robinson Crusoe—a slip that, when corrected, still exposed a lapse in memory or lack of factual knowledge. When Defoe has Crusoe swim to the shipwreck at one point, he allows him to strip off his clothes to make the journey easier, but a little later we see Crusoe on shipboard stuffing his pockets with biscuits. Defoe later explains that Crusoe had left on his seaman's britches, but as a contemporary, Charles Gildon, pointed out, Defoe didn't thus improve his marks as a purveyor of information about seamen, for seaman's britches usually do not have pockets, and even when they do, the pockets are tiny ones, much too small for biscuits: Defoe's explanation had only pinpointed and elaborated his ignorance. For Gildon, Defoe here makes Crusoe perform unlikely, even absurd actions, and his attack is on the false realism in Defoe, just as in Gulliver's Travels the thrust is to demonstrate what the realism and pseudofactuality of contemporary travel accounts and fictional narratives come to at last.²⁰ Gildon's joke on Defoe was, by the way, well enough known and remembered in 1725—six years after Crusoe and a year before Gulliver—that the London Journal can speak of the pocket episode as "a most notorious Blunder," which had given "Abundances of Pleasure [to] many of his Readers."²¹

Gulliver's pockets, then, work something like this: they remind us of Defoe's mistake and how authors who try to pass off genuine memoirs often are tripped by simple facts. The pockets also remind us of larger points quite beyond the comical allusion—that first-person narrators, in their haste to make a point and glorify themselves, are hopelessly inaccurate, obtuse, and pretentious; that long lists and particular details do not necessarily add up to some larger truth, and that attempts to read the world and its purpose through the recording of sense impressions and the imparting of symbolic qualities to things and events (as done in Robinson Crusoe and in the emblematic tradition represented by meletetic meditators like Robert Boyle) is finally an arrogant, self-serving, even solipsistic way of regarding the world. Robinson Crusoe comes up for examination in Gulliver's Travels quite often various ways: in the opening paragraph in which the particulars of Defoe's life (his career as a hosier, his imprisonment as a debtor, his prudent marriage to a woman with a large dowry) are alluded to; in the preparatory events that preface each voyage proper; in the vague motivation for Gulliver's decisions to go repeatedly to sea because of "rambling Thoughts" and an unaccountable sense of destiny; in the habitual phrases that fall from Gulliver's lips and link him repeatedly but not constantly to the consciousness of Crusoe; in the ending in which Swift provides a sharp contrast to Crusoe's homecoming.²² Defoe, exploring what man can do to achieve salvation and deliverance within a providential pattern, has Crusoe readjust to the company of human beings and society generally with relative ease, giving no hint that lack of conversation, human companionship, sexual relationship, and exile from the familiar for more than a quarter century offer any obtrusive problems in readjustment, and Crusoe returns to find himself remembered, beloved, and provided for by partners and well-wishers who have preserved and improved his property and investments so that he is now a rich plantation owner, soon to be a happy new husband and father. Alexander Selkirk, often said to be the prototype of Crusoe and in any case an island castaway who lived in isolation only a fraction of Crusoe's tenure, found postvoyage life far otherwise, returning to his home a silent misanthrope who avoided all company, living altogether by himself, some say in a cave he himself dug as an emblem of his psychological space. Swift's portrait of Gulliver neighing quietly to himself in his stable, unable to stand the company of his wife and children, his nose stopped with lavender, tobacco, and rue so that he cannot smell human smells, stands in sharp relief to Crusoe's homecoming and tacitly reminds us realistically of historical figures like Selkirk and of civilization and its discontents.

The example of the allusive pockets suggests that Gulliver's Travels is, among many other impressive things, an accreting generic or class parody not only of travel narratives per se but also of a larger developing class of first-person fictional narratives that make extraordinary claims for the importance of the contemporary, the knowableness through personal experience of large cosmic patterns, the significance of the individual, and the imperialistic possibilities of the human mind—a class parody, in short, of what we now see as the novel and the assumptions that enable it.

3

Indulge me in a preposterous claim.A Tale of a Tub is also, among other things, a parody of the emerging novel. But how can there be a parody of something that does not yet exist? you may well ask, and I admit that I do not want to be taken altogether literally. Still, I am serious about the slight dislocative shock that such an unlikely assertion may provide, and I want to make three quick points about it: one historical, one having to do with Swift's powers of cultural analysis, and one relating back to things I have implied about Swift's tendency to collapse and merge parodic targets, accreting a style and structure that is identifiable as generic or class parody.

First the historical point. Attempts to describe the beginnings of the novel as we know it almost invariably land on a cultural moment and a specific work so that the publication of a particular novel becomes the crucial event; in this view a specific "father" of the novel is usually identified, and a moment of birth can thus be found for the genre, be it 1719, or 1740, or 1749, or whatever—the choice depending ultimately on how one defines the novel and on what sorts of fiction one excludes from the definition. This preoccupation with "firsts" is understandable, given the way an opposite school of literary historians is prone to push origins back, as it were, ab ovo, and ultimately end up with Heliodorus or Homer or Ham as the first modern novelist. And the attraction of biological and organic metaphors is certainly appealing to a humanist tradition that wishes to think of literature as an art form to be privileged above mere material existence. I would, however, hate to have to defend a notion of genre that included in it the necessity of firsts, for it seems quite clear that most genres grow out of the shifting and rearranging of conventions, usually in response to some major cultural change, often involving a technological breakthrough that influences the possibilities of existing art without leading immediately to a full-grown, totally defined form that exemplifies and exhausts possibility. I would certainly agree that the modern English novel as we know it comes to exist sometime around the beginning of the eighteenth century, and I would argue that the exploding amount of narrative fiction then, together with distinctive and definable changes in the nature of extended narrative, mean that we can specify the emergence of a genre even if we cannot pin it down to a particular Friday afternoon. But the context of ferment is somewhat broader, even if it does not stretch back to classical times. And I think we need to consider more fully the fiction written in England in the later years of the seventeenth century, which, if not actually describable as novelistic, points clearly to what is going to happen when the talents of particular writers become more focused on the emerging cultural and technological possibilities. Here, for example, is the kind of self-conscious narrative writing one finds in an extraordinary work of 1691, John Dunton's A Voyage Round the World, or The Life and Travels of Don Kainophilus:

Should I tell you, as the virtuosi do, that I was shaped at first like a Todpole, and that I remember very well, when my Tail Rambled off, and a pair of little Legs sprung out in the Room on't: Nay, shou'd I protest I pulled out my Note-book, and slapdashed it down the very minute after it happen'd,—let me see,—so many Days, Hours, and Seconds after Conception, yet this Infidel World wou'd hardly believe me….²³

Dunton has been suggested as a "source" for A Tale of a Tub, and many passages from his work—in the Voyage and elsewhere—could easily be cited to bloster a claim that Dunton is one of the hacks Swift has in mind as a parodic model for the tubbean author.²⁴ Dunton's life and works could in fact stand for much of what is under attack, in religion as well as in learning in A Tale of a Tub, for Dunton's publishing ventures, religious attitudes and experiences, and his rather volatile personal life make for racy reading that is in many ways symptomatic of the contemporary culture Swift is describing. We are likely to hear more in coming years of Dunton's place in the history of the novel, a place that is far more important than has been recognized.²⁵ But my point here is that Dunton is one of several writers one might cite—another is Francis Kirkman—to show that novelistic tendencies were already highly developed by 1694 when Swift began work on the Tale, even if no full-blown novel of artistic consequence yet existed.

Clearly, Swift saw the handwriting on the wall, a handwriting leading to a new world of print. A Tale of a Tub emphasizes the now, the subjective, the rambling recording of the present moment of an individual consciousness, digressiveness from the basic narrative movement, uncertainty of direction, and the portentousness of every word within a framework of fragmentation, lost passages, metaphors run wild, and syntactic madness; what Swift does with these emphases is to provide almost a catalogue of devices appropriate to the attitudes and values inherent in a new conception of writing and artistry then taking shape. Ultimately, it is too much to say that Swift's performance in A Tale of a Tub amounts to a parody of the novel, but his parodie representation of modern writing suggests how the wind was blowing, and he isolates a number of features that go on to find their proper home in the new narrative form then in the process of emerging. Swift isolates a number of features that became crucial in the new fiction: narrative interests merging with discursive ones only to be interrupted by the vagaries of individual consciousness; a preoccupation with subjectivity for its own sake; a concentration upon an individual of negligible social importance and an elevation of that individual's claims to significance; an almost boundless faith in the potential of particulars to lead to grand patterns of divine or natural order, empiricism vastly extended. In isolating such features, Swift provides an acute cultural analysis of forces deeply at work in English culture, and if he does not exactly prophesy some of the central features in the writing of Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne, he shows himself already aware of the inevitability that the culture's structure will find its appropriate form at the same time that he distills the implications of what is emerging as modernity by giving it a parodic form even before it has fully defined its own paradigm.

Swift's style in A Tale of a Tub, although it bears features of the style of Dunton and Dryden, Roger L'Estrange and Aphra Behn, Wotton, and Bentley and of perhaps scores of other contemporaries, is finally not that of any one hack but instead that of Everyhack. A knowledge of the particulars of writings relevant to the context of the Tale can only enhance our appreciation of what Swift does there, not because we are likely to find any one writer or work toward which Swift directs all of his satiric anger but because he collapses them into a chorus made up of individual voices barely distinguishable from one another and, in any case, contributory to what the Augustans soon heard as a universal hum. From hymn to hum, that is the way the Augustans perceived the breakdown of ritual and tradition and the separation from orality, as traditional values and ideas of order slipped into those of novelty. If the novel goes on to provide a different and less gloomy perspective, the vision of Swift is still a perceptive and prophetic one in its articulation of the emerging world's directions and cultural forms.

Like A Tale of A Tub, Gulliver's Travels is a vast many things generically, and the novel is only one of the forms that enables Swift's satiric art. Travel books, philosophical voyages, scientific translations, beast fables, children's fantasies, and a host of other formal and informal "kinds" play their part in Swift's act of imagination, and some of them, like the emerging novel, play a prominent role for readers in their ability to receive and perceive the text. Unlike Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels does not contain both type and antitype, both paradigm and parody. But its negative representation of what was and what was to be involves Swift's shrewd (if ultimately doomed) vision of where western thought and western art would go in his own time, and in its response to the directions and assumptions of first-person, fictional narrative, Gulliver's Travels is a kind of testimony to a new tradition about to be invented, a form almost formed, a genre nearly generated, as well as a credo, call to arms, a solvent against solipsism. In a way it transcends its form, its credo, and its values, but it realizes those things too, against a new tradition rigorously engaged if only partly understood.

Notes

¹ In The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis et al. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939-68), 9:41. Henceforth referred to as Prose Works.

² George P. Mayhew, "Jonathan Swift's Hoax of 1722 upon Ebenezor Elliston," Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 44 (1962): 366.

³ "The last Farewell of Ebenezor Ellison to this Transitory World," reprinted as an appendix in Prose Works, 9:366.

⁴ Most such "confessions" are very much alike, and the conventional wisdom is that someone, often the prison ordinary but sometimes a bookseller's hack, ghostwrote wholesale for the condemned prisoners. Collections of these last words were very popular early in the century; see, for example, The Wonders of Free Grace: or, a compleat history of all the remarkable penitents that have been executed at Tyburn, and elsewhere … (London, 1690). Elliston's last words are unusually rambling and oral, and it may be that we have here an attempt to transcribe something like what he actually said of himself.

⁵ See Herbert Davis's Introduction to vol. 1 of Prose Works, pp. xxxiii-xxxiv.

⁶Prose Works, 1:239-240.

⁷ "Reflection 1," in Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (1665), reprinted in Works (London: 1772), 2: 359-60.

⁸ In the Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1711), p. 231, Swift said his meditation was "According to the Style and Manner of the Honourable Robert Boyl's Meditations."

⁹Husbandry Spiritualized: or, The Heavenly Use of Earthly Things (London: Robert Boulter, 1669), pp. 254-55.

¹⁰ The best description of the meditative tradition is still that of Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954).

¹¹ "A Discourse Touching Occasional Meditations," in Occasional Reflections, reprinted in 1772 Works, 2:343.

¹² "An Introductory Preface," in Occasional Reflections, reprinted in 1772 Works, 2:329.

¹³ See Prose Works, 5:271.

¹⁴ See Thomas Sheridan, Life of Swift (London, 1784), p. 42.

¹⁵ "Apology," in A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 7.

¹⁶ See Swift and the Satirist's Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 31.

¹⁷ A happy exception is C. J. Rawson. See Gulliver and the Gentle Reader (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).

¹⁸ Swift to Pope, 27 November 1726, in Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) 3:189.

¹⁹ Carole Fabricant, Swift's Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 3-4, usefully reminds us that Swift's and Pope's positions need often to be distinguished from one another, but on this issue they seem to have seen eye to eye. For a good discussion of Swift's distrust of overreading natural phenomena, see Martin Price, Swift's Rhetorical Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), pp. 89-90.

²⁰ Gildon's attack, published as The life and strange surprising adventures of Mr. D—DeF—, of London Hosier … With remarks serious and comical upon the life of Crusoe, had two editions in 1719 and another in 1724.

²¹London Journal, 4 September 1725, p. 1.

²² John Robert Moore long ago pointed out that the opening paragraph of Gulliver's Travels reviewed satirically the life and career of DeFoe ("A DeFoe Allusion in Gulliver's Travels," Notes and Queries 178 (1940): 79-80. The whole issue of Defoe's relationship to Swift needs to be studied afresh, John Ross's study of the subject now being sadly outdated.

²³A Voyage Round the World, 3 vols. (London, 1691), 1:30.

²⁴ See J. M. Stedmond, "Another Possible Analogue for Swift's Tale of a Tub," Modern Language Notes 72 (1957): 13-18. Stedmond, among others, has also studied Sterne's debt to Dunton, but the whole subject needs much more detailed analysis.

²⁵ I have discussed some aspects of Dunton's importance in "The Insistent I," Novel 13 (1979): 19-37. See also Stephen Parks, John Dunton and the English Book Trade (New York: Garland, 1976) and Robert Adams Day, "Richard Bentley and John Dunton: Brothers under the Skin," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) 16:125-38.