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University Microfilms, a Xerqkcompany, Ann Arbor, Michigan THE TWO EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES: THE IMPACT OF DESCARTES ON THE SATIRE OF SWIFT'S 'TALE OF A TUB' Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Vallier, Robert Jean, 1928- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 09/10/2021 09:58:36 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/290246 70-22,015 Vallier, Robert Jean, 1928- THE TWO EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES: THE IMPACT OF DESCARTES ON THE SATIRE OF SWIFT1S TALE OF A TUB. [Portions of Text in French]. University of Arizona, Ph.D., 1970 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, A XERQKCompany, Ann Arbor, Michigan THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED THE TWO EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES: THE IMPACT OF DESCARTES ON THE SATIRE OF SWIFT'S TALE OF A TUB by Robert Jean Vallier A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 19 7 0 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE 1 hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my direction by Robert Jean Vallier entitled -^e Two Eighteenth Centuries: The Impact of Descartes on the Satire of Swift's Tale of £ Tub be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy _2_ fcsrjAA C I V ><J Dissertation VDirector Date After inspection of the dissertation, the following members of the Final Examination Committee concur in its approval and recommend its acceptance:* •AmMAA 7 ? ^J I 77° 4 G/i 'i, ^ L < i *'^y ? Q-LU 1970 1 fiuu/ /(7o *This approval and acceptance is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense of this dissertation at the final oral examination. The inclusion of this sheet bound into the library copy of the dissertation is evidence of satisfactory performance at the final examination. STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended, quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head, of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained, from the autho r. SIGNED: PREFACE I extend my thanks to the faculty members of The University of Arizona for their instruction and direction, to the Department of English for the assistance that made my graduate work possible, and to the Graduate College for the pre-doctoral fellowship that facilitated the completion of this study. I am especially indebted, to Professor Oliver F. Sigworth who is an unfailingly patient mentor to his students and has been my firm-handed guide in our adopted, country, the literature of the eighteenth century. Professor Harry F. Robins has my sincere thanks for his « encouragement and valuable counsel. I express my gratitude also to Professors Charlene Taylor, Charles Scruggs, and Gene Koppel, for their help, corrections, and suggestions. I also want to thank Professor Charles F. Wallraff for his example as a philosopher; Cecil Wellborn of the University Library for his friendship and help in research; and my scholar-wife for her criticism and endurance. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT vii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 "Reason" as the Standard of World. View in the History of Ideas 2 The Three Traditions of Reason in the Medieval-Renaissance Age 10 Overview of the Argument and Evidence of the Dissertation 16 II. THE FOUNDATION OF THE NORMATIVE WORLD OF THE TALE IN THE HUMANIST RHETORICAL TRADITION 27 The Workshop of Swift's Mind 36 The "Renaissance" as an Imaginary World 42 The Continuity of Humanism 47 The Foundation of a Rhetorical Epistemology 52 The Formula of the "Signum Translatum": Aenigma and Mystery 61 Essential Augustinianism 72 The Humanist Classicism of Erasmus 78 Nascent Modernism and the Overthrow of Rhetoric 95 III. ANTI-RHETORIC AS COSMOLOGY 102 A Survey of Descartes* Influence in England 113 The Alternative Traditions of Reason 125 The Fundamental Subjectivism of Descartes 130 The Four-Fold. Method of Descartes 139 Descartes• Search for a Clear and Distinct Figurism 148 iv V TABLE OF CONTENTS—Continued CHAPTER Page The Inherent Caricature of Traditional Systems in Cartesianism 162 From Metaphor to Myth: Descartes' Mythic Mode of Discourse 171 Descartes and the Dismantling of Rhetoric .. ..... 190 Cartesian Imagination as the Interior Theatre of Reality 203 The Displacement of Mimesis by Imaginative "Creation" 213 Importance of Analogy to Artistic Discourse in the Humanist Tradition 220 Cartesian Univocality and the Hack's Metaphor 230 IV. SWIFT'S IRONIC SYMBOLISM IN PLACE: A RHETORIC OF MYSTERY AND AN ANTI- RHETORIC OF PARADOX 240 Etymological Myth as a Technique for Reducing Symbolism 241 Examples of Swift's Use of Etymological Myth 254 Tale as Mock-Scripture 260 The Relation of Mock-Romance to Quest and. of Mock-Scripture to Bible 271 The Hack's New Testament 283 Examples of the Systematic Reduction of Metaphor to Myth in the Mock- Scripture 289 Swift's Use of French as a "Sacred Language" 302 The Etymological Mythologizing of Sacramentum 306 Mythologization of "Spirit" 313 The Metaphor Myth of Cloaths 318 Section IX as Mock-Scripture 332 The Central Paradox of the Tale and the Ultimate Mystery of the Norm 349 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS—Continued CHAPTER Page ' V. CONCLUSION . 363 The Radical Subjectivism of Modernism . 363 Historical Triumph of Subjectivism 365 The Cult of Sentiment in the Tale 368 Discordia Concors in the Tale 374 LIST OF WORKS CITED 376 ABSTRACT Swift's Tale of a^ Tub becomes more meaningful if a clear distinction is made between "Two Eighteenth Centuries" existing concurrently, each a consistent world hypothesis predicated of a distinctive signification of the term "reason." One of these two worlds is the last age of Medieval-Renaissance culture and the other the first age of the Modern world. My thesis is that structure and theme in the Tale manifest a contradiction between worlds that is at bottom epistemological and. that the one error satirized throughout the work is the underlying formula of modernism, Cartesian epistemology, which Swift pushes to its logical conclusion in an imaginary world artificed from degraded rhetoric, in which style is metaphysics and the fabric of which is characterized, by opacity of symbolism. Proceeding according to classical techniques of parody and irony as species of allegory, Swift exhibits in his microcosm-out-of-rhetoric his comment on the diminish- ment in the concept of "reason" and. the falsification in the resultant image of man in the New Philosophy defined, by Descartes, whose influence is primary in the modernism of the period. Swift focuses upon the image of man implicit in such a truncated concept of reason; this exposure is accomplished by references, buried in his rhetoric and vii viii figurative locutions, to the image of man in the tradition of exemplarism positing the Incarnation of the Word. The Hack's imagery and discourse—the very mechanics of his imaginary world—are presented as sustained brutalization of the rhetorical norms deriving from this tradition. The principal doctrines of the New Philosophy figuratively parodied in the Tale are Cartesian: (1) radical subjec­ tivism, (2) mechanicism, (3) dualism, (4) the tertium quid of the imagination-passion as link between body and soul, and. (5) the "representative theory of ideas." Evidence is presented of Swift's use of conceits unmistakably Cartesian. It is Swift's masterstroke that the same rhetorical locutions serve to represent the modernist imaginary world, when Cartesian criteria are imposed, and to represent the Renaissance rhetorical imaginary world. when Christian humanist criteria are imposed silently by an auditor presumably adhering to a norm that can be extrapolated from the verbal apparatus of the Tale. Thus, the norm is located in the text, although suspended in rhetoric, and the reader need not go outside the text for Swift's intention nor resort to the hypothesis of a separate "satirist-persona" who occasionally intrudes to speak directly to the reader. The genre of the Tale is presented as that of mock- scripture, consistent, sustained, and in the Augustan sense of a mock genre, but following the Hack's distorted Cartesian epistemology—both in his mode of discovery and. that of statement. My explication employs two species of exegesis: (1) the "new criticism" inspired by Descartes* method at the hack's level of competence in the surface fabric of the Tale. and (2) Patristic, or traditional, exegesis at the level of competence appropriate to what we may call the "anti-persona" of the normative world. The two levels of meaning, according to two epistemologies, correspond, to the world, views of the "Two Eighteenth Centuries," both shown forth in one figurative structure, one related to the other according to the protean medium of irony which Swift employs in its fullest capacity for symbolism. The thesis presented, identifies a common theme in the "Digressions" and the "Allegory" and integrates the evidence presented, by other scholars on Rosicrucian lore, Gnostics, Projectors, Enthusiasts, modern poets and. critics, as that of so many emblems representing an under­ lying error in epistemology.
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