Text, "Text", and Swift's "A Tale of a Tub" Author(s): Marcus Walsh Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Apr., 1990), pp. 290-303 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3731810 . Accessed: 23/12/2014 16:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Modern Humanities Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Modern Language Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Tue, 23 Dec 2014 16:56:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TEXT, 'TEXT', AND SWIFT'S A TALE OF A TUB Few printed texts make so apparent, or are so ingenious about, their textual nature and status as Swift's A Taleofa Tub,and few have given rise to so much interpretative controversy. The Tale has been a focus of some of the key disagreements in modern critical theory. It has been possible to think of the Taleas embodying, as the Apology of I 7 0 so repeatedly suggests, 'the Author's Intention', its satiric purpose being 'to expose the Abuses and Corruptions in Learning and Religion'.1 Readings of the Tale which explain that Swift uses the personaof a mad modern writer to exemplify and satirize scholastic and modern incoherence in learning and belief, and readings of the Tale (notably Ehrenpreis's) which deny the use of a persona and invite us to seek 'the direct sense implied by the irony',2 have this in common: that they insist the Talehas an originating author, that this author's meaning intention is there to be found, and that, despite all of the Tale'sevident complexity, a valid interpretation of its essential message can be offered. In particular such readings tend to argue that Swift sets up standards of plain, comprehensible expression, against which the vacancy and chaos of the Modern's own writing, and interpretative principles, are found wanting. More recently, however, the discussion ofA Taleofa Tubhas been dominated by a very different argument: that, far from satirizing expressive and interpretative incoherence, the Taleis a narrative without an authoritative voice, which sets out to exemplify the inevitable polysemy of writing, and, more especially, of print. In this view, it would be deluded to see A Tale of a Tub as even potentially stable, authoritative, bounded. The Tale is, in Barthesian terms, not a 'work' but a 'text', which 'goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, readability, etc.)'.3 Textualizing studies have explored a number of the implications of this. In a recent essay Clive Probyn argues that, far from implicitly confirmingby its satiric negatives a confident humanist belief in the comprehensibility and permanence of good writing and good printing, the Tale,as well as Gulliver'sTravels, reveals and explores Swift's most fundamental fears about the transience of all printed texts: 'a fear of supersession, the prospect of literary obsolescence, the anxiety of loss, the horror of obscurity, and the cancellation of history'.4 Nigel Wood has claimed that a key problem for the 'Modern' narrator of the Tale is 'how to maintain one's authority over the printedword .... The mediation of the printing-press did not necessarily ensure clarity or even a desirable measure of survival for one's thoughts'.5 Other textualist critics suggest that Swift himself experienced and viewed this dilemma much as his modern persona did. Thomas Docherty takes the hack's invitation to 'every Prince in Christendom' to appoint commentators on his Taleas evidence that 1A Tale of a Tub, edited by A.C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford, 1958), pp. 7, 2. All from the Tale are from this edition. quotations2 Irvin Ehrenpreis, LiteraryMeaning and AugustanValues (Charlottesville, Virginia, I974), pp. 49-60 (P- 54). Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', in RolandBarthes: Image, Music, Text, selected and translated by Heath p. Stephen4 (London, 1977), 157. 'Haranguing upon Texts: Swift and the Idea of the Book', in Proceedingsofthe First Munster Symposium on JonathanSwift, edited by HermanJ. Real and HeinzJ. Vienken (Munich, 1985), pp. 187-97 (p. I88). 5 Swift (Brighton, I986), p. 38. This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Tue, 23 Dec 2014 16:56:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MARCUS WALSH 29I Swift believed 'a multiplicity of readings are sanctioned by the words of the text, independently of a supposedly pre-linguistic authorial intention or psychology'.6 In an essay which argues, or assumes, that Swift thought of writing as dangerous supplement, Terry Castle describes the Taleas part of a 'Swiftian critique of Text', which takes in all writing, including the Bible: Every writingis a source of corruption,no matterwhat authority- natural,divine, or archetypal- we may wishfullyinvest in it. Becausethey constitutean earthlytext, the Scripturesthemselves pathetically and paradoxicallymake up part of the fallen world of writing .... Swift does not state ... baldly that God's text itself is corrupt, but ... the possibilityis impliciteverywhere in his satire.7 Such recent readings of the Tale arise not only from the presumed difficulty or impossibility of identifying a securely present voice but also from the difficulties of establishing a context which might validate any voice. As Wood puts it, 'as interpretation of the basic satiric context is problematic (such as, what is being attacked and on what authority), most textual critics have concluded that the main point of the Tale is to demonstrate the extreme difficulty of interpreting anything without a divine yardstick' (p. 47). I would like to offer some qualifications of the textualist position by beginning to set A Tale of a Tub in a context which has been surprisingly little discussed, and which seems to me to have an immediate intellec- tual bearing on Swift's discussion of Scripture, text, and meaning: that is, the argument between the Roman Church and the Anglican Church through much of the seventeenth century concerning Scripture as a rule of faith. This polemic in very large part concerned itself, inevitably, with fundamental problems about the nature, determinacy, stability, and comprehensibility of the printed book. Questions of text and hermeneutics were obsessively debated, notably in William Chillingworth's ReligionofProtestants ( 638), in the Dialogues(1640) of the exiled Romanist William Rushworth (and Chillingworth's Answer),8in John Ser- geant's Sure-Footingin Christianity(1665) and in Tillotson's reply TheRule of Faith (i666),9 in Bossuet's Expositionde la doctrinede l'Eglise Catholique(Paris, 167 ) and its numerous English defenders and opponents, in Pere Richard Simon's magisterial CriticalHistories of the Old and New Testaments ( 678, I689),10 and, most volumi- nously and passionately, in the debate of the I68os between Anglican Churchmen (Tillotson, Sherlock, Stillingfleet, and others) and their Romanist adversariesled by John Gother. This was in no sense a set of peripheral pamphlet skirmishes, but a major war in the history of ideas, in which big guns on both sides were employed. The chief polemicists of the reign ofJames II engaged as officially-sanctioned public representatives rather than private individuals, the works of Gother and many of the other Roman Catholic writers being regularly published by Henry Hills, 'Printer to the King's Most Excellent Majesty', and those of their opponents commonly appearing under the imprimatur of the English Church. The arguments employed in these debates have significant resonances for modern textual and hermeneutic 6 On ModernAuthority (Brighton, I987), pp. 246, 247. 7 'Why the Houyhnhnms Don't Write: Swift, Satire and the Fear of the Text', Essaysin Literature,7 (1980), 3 -44 (p. 37). 8 TheDialogues of WilliamRichworth or the Judgment of CommonSense in theChoise of Religion(Paris, 640); An Answerto Some in Rushworth'sDialogues, in Chillingworth's Works,ninth edition (1719). 9 Passages printed TheRule of Faith; Or,An Answer to the Treatise ofMr.J. S. Entituled,Sure-Footing, &c (i666). All quotations from Tillotson in this article are from the Works,third edition (170 ). 10 Quotations in this article from Pere Simon are from A CriticalHistory of the Old Testament.Written Originallyin Frenchby Father Simon... Translatedinto English by a Personof Quality(London, 1682). This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Tue, 23 Dec 2014 16:56:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 292 Text, 'Text', and 'A Tale of a Tub' theory, and for the assessment of Swift's textual and hermeneutic position in the Tale. In this essay I shall address myself chiefly to issues of textual theory. 'Of Wills', as the Peter of the Tale remarks, 'duosunt genera, Nuncupatory and scriptory' (p. 85). Peter's preference for oral over written tradition is of course distinctly Roman, and as certainly not Swift's. The written Testament consists of 'certain plain, easy Directions' (p. I90) and says nothing about gold lace; but oral tradition will allow, for Peter, a desirable extension of its licence: 'For Brothers, if you remember, we heard a Fellow say when we were Boys, that he heard my Father's Man say, that he heard my Father say, that he would advise his Sons to get GoldLace on their Coats, as soon as ever they could procure Money to buy it' (p.