Scriblerian Ethics: Encounters in Satiric Metamorphosis by William Pearson Knight Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Srinivas Aravamudan, Supervisor ___________________________ Ian Baucom ___________________________ Mary Poovey ___________________________ Charlotte Sussman ___________________________ James Thompson Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 ABSTRACT Scriblerian Ethics: Encounters in Satiric Metamorphosis by William Pearson Knight Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Srinivas Aravamudan, Supervisor ___________________________ Ian Baucom ___________________________ Mary Poovey ___________________________ Charlotte Sussman ___________________________ James Thompson An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 Copyright by William Pearson Knight 2009 Abstract “Scriblerian Ethics” proposes that the aesthetic and ethical standpoint of the writings of the Scriblerians (Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Oxford, Parnell) can be better understood through an attunement to their orientation towards the Longinian sublime and to the metamorphic poetics of Ovid. The project holds the negative and critical features of the group’s writing in abeyance, as it attempts to account for the positive, phenomenological concepts and features of Scriblerian satiric and non-satiric writing. The intensities and affiliations of Scriblerian writing that emerge from this study gesture aesthetically and ethically beyond historical subjectivity to an opening to alterity and difference. This opening or hope for the achievement ethical dimension of writing is divulged as the intimate motivation of the literary or aesthetic components that accompany the negative, referential, and critical features of Scriblerian writing. Examining closely the major writings of Pope and Swift in conjunction with the collaborative writings of the Scriblerus club, the project describes the concern with temporality that emerges from Longinian and Ovidan influence; the Scriblerian reflexivity that culminates in a highly virtual aesthetics; and the ethical elaboration of an orientation toward hospitality that emerges from this temporal and virtual aesthetic orientation. A “Scriblerian ethics” is an affinity for a hospitality not yet achieved in political, economic, and cultural life. Finally, the project analyzes throughout its readings of Scriblerian writing the violence that nevertheless accompanies Scriblerian iv aesthetics, examining the figures of modernity, criticism, and sexual violence (rape) that permeate Scriblerian texts as barriers or resistances to the achievement of an ethical orientation to alterity. v Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. viii 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Scriblerian Modernity ..................................................................................................... 6 1.2. Outline of Topics ........................................................................................................... 19 2. The Longinian Sublime, Scriblerian Repetition, and the Openness of Writing ............... 1 2.1. Scriblerus, Still-Born ........................................................................................................ 1 2.2. Swift’s Battle and Scriblerian Agon ............................................................................ 11 2.3. The Sublime and Imitative Aesthetics after Boileau ................................................. 31 2.3. Boileau , Scriblerus, and Longinus: Faith as Auspicious Repetition ...................... 51 2.4. Scriblerus, Anti-Poet ..................................................................................................... 69 3. Metamorphosis, Virtuality, Occasion: The Scriblerian Carmen Perpetuum ..................... 85 3.1. Ovid and Scriblerus ....................................................................................................... 94 3.2. Windsor-Forest: Scriblerian Ovid before Scriblerus ............................................... 106 3.3. Metamorphic Imitation: an Anti-Aristotelian Aesthetics ...................................... 115 3.4. The Scriblerian Commodity Fetish ........................................................................... 128 4. Pe(s)ts and Hosts: Gulliver’s Travels and the Satiric Critique of Hospitality ................ 180 4.1. Introduction: The Progress of Satire ......................................................................... 180 4.2. The Lilliputian Puppet Show ..................................................................................... 189 4.3. Satire the Pe(s)t ............................................................................................................ 209 4.4. A Critical Interlude ..................................................................................................... 218 vi 4.5. Inhospitable Moderns ................................................................................................. 226 4.6. On Becoming Critic ..................................................................................................... 231 4.7. Conclusion: Swift as Anglican and Ovidian Divine ............................................... 241 5. Rape, Seduction, and the Fate of the Scriblerian Sublime ............................................... 248 5.1. From the She-Tragedy to Haywood’s Sexual Sublime .......................................... 254 5.2. Parodies of Sexual Violence ....................................................................................... 272 5.3. A Scriblerian Lovelace?............................................................................................... 281 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 295 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 310 vii Acknowledgements My debts are many, and it is beyond the power of a few gestures to serve as even the beginnings of a repayment. There is an infinite obligation at work in every word that I write, and to account for this economy of debt does not indicate that I believe that this obligation might ever be exorcised. I can only chronicle these entanglements here, with no supposition that this is a movement towards transcendence. My committee has been patient and encouraging. I thank deeply Srinivas Aravamudan, Charlotte Sussman, Ian Baucom, James Thompson, and Mary Poovey for their intellectual energies and their willingness to donate themselves to the service of the formation of this project. At times only the mere imitation of their exemplary activity as scholars has been enough to serve to inspire progress or to help to reform my thought or my scholarly method. My other intellectual debts have been numerous. Some of the individuals towards whom I feel an immense gratitude include: Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Margaret Ferguson, Michael Hardt, Trent Hill, Alessa Johns, Neil Larsen, Lee Morrissey, David Simpson, Clifford Siskin, and Blake Stimson. I also owe deep obligation to the camaraderie and engagement of Max Brzezinski, Nathan Hensley, and Tony Jarrells, who read and responded more than generously to drafts of these chapters. I thank my parents, Robert and Lila Knight, for years of patience, kindness, and love. I also thank Linda Lawing for providing the newly unsettling impetus and affection that have underwritten my own most intense self- questioning and engagement with thought for the past three years. My deepest viii expression of inexpressible obligation must be directed to Sarah Lincoln, with whom I have been immeasurably fortunate to have established friendship, love, intellectual conversation, and family life that exceed in every way my expectations and my definitions of the limits of those terms. The transports of our life together have been the inspiration for every element of this project. ix 1. Introduction We need a new vocabulary for literary satire. It is not that the old set of concepts and interpretive frameworks is wrong, or to be dismissed, but that it largely treats one aspect of literary satirical aesthetics—its negativity. The view from this literary via negativa is that satire is primarily a form of critique directed at what it reveals to be shameful objective practices that demand reform, a mode of writing that establishes its own identity and function only in negation. This account of literary satire provides an opening for us to understand its very historical basis, an opportunity for literary historians to trace the origins of and causal relations between the satiric critique’s references to the world. Numerous critics have expressed the ultimate insufficiency of the purely historicist