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Reason in Madness: A Tale of a Tub
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
To judge from most criticism of Swift's Tale of a Tub, the work is a skillful and powerful failure, because the faults Swift parodies have distilled into his own pen. For though the Tale is clearly meant to be an exposé of the literary sins of formless, ephemeral, and subjective writing, critics find that the brilliance of the book results from Swift's being guilty of just those sins. One critic finds in the Tale both confusion and the intrusion of Swift's “insane egotism” and his “sense of insecurity,” while other critics find order but at the expense of the other qualities. Mrs. Miriam K. Starkman examines the intellectual background of the book thoroughly and concludes that the confusion is the reader's rather than Swift's but that the Tale is a learned work of merely biographical and historical interest, a “meaningful and prodigiously skillful espousal of a lost cause.” Ricardo Quintana and Robert C. Elliott find that the Tale has unity but only because Swift's point of view, that man is essentially irrational, informs all sections of the book. Most of the critics, then, find Swift expressing his subjective attitudes and lacking a subject upon which he could comment with any objectivity and universality. “So diverse is this subject matter,” says Elliott, “that one can not possibly find in it alone a principle of organization.”
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 F. R. Leavis, “The Irony of Swift,” in Determinations (London, 1934), pp. 79-108.
2 Starkman, Swift's Satire on Learning in A Tale of a Tub (Princeton, 1950); Quintana, The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift (Oxford, 1936), pp. 85-96; Elliott, “Swift's Tale of a Tub: An Essay in Problems of Structure,” PMLA, lxvi (1951), 441-455.
3 “Methods in Books about Swift,” SP, xxxv (Oct. 1938), 650.
4 Swift is obviously following the tradition of Erasmus, Lucian, and others, and writing a mock panegyric (see the Introduction to Hoyt Hudson's edition of Erasmus' Praise of Folly for a discussion of this tradition). The case for Swift's adherence to the conventional form of an oration is seemingly weakened by the fact that instead of a summary and moving peroration we are given the flat Conclusion. But if we accept James L. Clifford's illuminating analysis (“Swift's Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” in Pope and his Contemporaries, Essays presented to George Sherburn, pp. 135-146), the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit is the real conclusion and the peroration of the Tale. In it, as Clifford shows, Swift's basic themes are made unforgettable; it is the most “moving,” i.e., the most revolting section of the Tale of a Tub volume. It is, even more than the rest of the volume, clearly concerned with rhetoric, with the questions, “by what methods this teacher arrives at his gifts, or spirit, or light; and by what intercourse between him and his assembly, it is cultivated and supported.” The first section deals with the audience and the second with the orator, particularly with delivery in the discussion of the Art of Canting. A rhetorical vocabulary— example, disposition, gesture, motion, argument—is used more frequently than in the Tale. It seems probable that Swift is not only following the conventional structure of an oration in the Tale, writing the Mechanical Operation as the peroration, but is making the fact that rhetoric is his subject clearest in the peroration.
5 Swift's distrust of rigid allegory has the same basis as his objection to metaphors or similes which ignore the differences between the things compared. When, e.g., Tindal writes, “And the body-politic, whether ecclesiastical or civil, must be dealt with after the same manner as the body-natural,” Swift comments, “What, because it is called a body, and is a simile, must it hold in all circumstances?” (Prose Works, ed. T. Scott, iii, 110).
6 I am dealing with only a very few of the Anglican preachers of the seventeenth century and I am looking for similarities rather than differences, since my purpose is merely to elucidate the meaning of “reason” and to amplify the positive rhetorical theory of the Tale. The Anglican preachers are considered in some detail and the origin of their rhetorical theories is discussed in W. F. Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson (London, 1932).
7 South, Sermons (Oxford, 1823), ii, 123; iii, 36.
8 A Friendly Debate Between a Conformist and a Non-Conformist, 5th ed. (London, 1669), p. 35.
9 (London, 1669), p. 108.
10 Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. i, Ch. vii, 6 n. (Works, Oxford, 1874, p. 222).
11 “A Letter to an Honourable Person, concerning the Weapon-Salve,” in Golden Remains of the Ever Memorable Mr. John Hales (London, 1688), p. 361.
12 The phrases “reason and experience” or “common sense and experience” are extremely frequent in the writings of the Anglicans (and in Swift). A particularly clear example of the use of reason and experience as synonyms occurs in South, iii, 171.
13 Barrow, Works, ed. A. Napier (Cambridge, Engl., 1859), ii, 218; The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy Enquired into (London, 1670) (in E. Arber, An English Garner, vii, 274); Burnet, A Discourse of the Pastoral Care (London, 1692), p. 219.