Dulce est desipere in loco
Horace, Odes

1Perhaps we have never been in a better position to understand the eighteenth century than at present. A new generation of scholars has emerged which shows a new obsession with "facts" and a keen preoccupation with "evidence", such as biographical and bibliographical data, details of genesis and structure, intellectual ancestors and generic matrices, not to mention the authenticity of texts and the accuracy of attributions.1 Indeed, one critic recently went so far as to speak of "the extraordinary explosion of literary criticism and scholarship that either is, or claims to be, 'historicist'."2 At the same time, the new generation is alleged to have profited from the hermeneutical and methodological "paradigm change," "the theoretical advances" which invaded the universities during, and after, the late 1960s. For one thing, "[new historians] know that all methods are implicated in the ideologies within which they first developed." For another, they no longer refuse to recognize their own "prejudices," the interpretative biases which are built into their own approaches:

[New historians] have also encouraged us to understand the historicity of all interpretation, to arouse our suspicions, for instance, toward the way we read contemporary concerns into earlier Works and periods as well as toward the way we have unwittingly allowed elements of past interpretations to persist within later contexts.3

2Even if this insight demands "a transformed attitude" toward historical investigation, to what used to be called "scientific positivism," and even if this insight "involves a steady acknowledgement that the past is not transparent and that the pursuit of history is neither objective nor disinterested,"4 it does seem reassuring to learn that we are determined to be retrieved from the hermeneutical débâcle which the unenlightened past had to endure. For aficionados of Swift (like myself), it is splendid news indeed that the Dean of St Patrick's, that foul-mouthed scoundrel of old, now has nowhere to go but up.

3Without mentioning a rationale of literary annotation for eighteenth-century authors,5 the most immediate practical consequence this assessment necessitates is a more acute awareness of the significance of "whole" —of "whole" in general and of "genre" in particular, of "comprehensive formula," which will allow critics to make unified sense of an otherwise chaotic mass of data, as well as of "pivotai centre," which makes the world of a literary microcosm cohere.6 To me, this postulate is all the more imperative if, as we keep being assured, the new historical criticism of the 1990s will be situated in territories (contexts) that seem well-nigh boundless. In Swift studies, we have seen enough of the "scissors-and-paste way," of the quotation-mongering and wrenching of passages from their contexts; we have seen enough of the amassing of interpretative snippets and explanatory quodlibetica, of readings, in short, which present too many texts too fast to produce a sense of what any individual work is actually like.7

4If this précis is essentially correct, as it no doubt is, what "comprehensive formula(e)," what "pivotal centre(s)" are germane to Swift? While the sheer variety, as well as diversity, of his modes and forms—mock-pastoral, mock-georgic, and mock-epic; satire, libel, and diatribe; ode, prophecy, fable, epigram, birthday poem, and elegy; pamphlet, essay, epistle, both verse and prose, travel-book and classical oration, to name but a few—seems to defy the very notion of the perspective that holds (such) heterogeneity together, there is at least one unifying angle which has surfaced in recent years: "paradox"—here not in the modem meaning of "unacceptable conclusion derived by apparently acceptable reasoning from apparently acceptable premises,"8 but in the seventeenth-century sense of coincidentia oppositorum, "contradiction of the opinion of most men," as Charles Estienne explained, "the direct confrontation of two counterposed truths being the essence of paradox."9

5Paradoxy had, of course, been "épidemic" in English literature since the Renaissance.10 In any of their variations—rhetorical, logical, ontological, epistemological, theriophilic—paradoxes were probably legion by Swift’s time.11 Not coincidentally, in his imagination, as well as in that of his spiritus rectores, the far-flung craze for paradoxy was closely associated with the rise of "modernity." "I never affected to be the Author of Paradoxes and strange Tenets," Meric Casaubon, whose Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme Swift probably read, wrote in 1655. "This age, I know, gives liberty enough and encouragement to any that is so minded; when nothing almost is accounted true but what is new, and in opposition to antiquity"12—a verdict Swift was to echo in 1708 when he ironically labelled his own age as "wise and paradoxical" in An Argument against Abolishing Christianity,13 which is itself a dazzling exercise in paradoxy. In addition to philosopher-humanists like Thomas More, Montaigne, and Erasmus, satirists like Rabelais, Wycherley, and Prior (not counting Lucian, Agrippa, Heinsius, Dedekind, and Justus Lipsius), all of whom figure prominently in Swift's intellectual and emotional ancestry,14 were inveterate propounders of paradoxes, as becomes evident, for example, in the logical paradox of the eutopia which is "nowhere," in the paradoxical encomia of things commonly regarded as unpraiseworthy, like death, debt, and folly, like gout, poverty, and baldness, like ignorance, madness, and nothing, not to forget drunkenness, asses, and lice,15 as well as in the epistemological impasse that marks the knowledge of knowing nothing as in Prior's "Truth Told at Last." Here, for once, is the sardonic voice of Swift's closest and most trusted friend:

SAYS PONTIUS in rage
contradicting his Wife,
"You never yet told me
one Truth in your life":
Vext PONTIA no way
could this Thesis allow,
"You’re a Cuckold say’s she,
"do I tell you Truth now?16"

6Even if it is true that Swift resented paradox "as a species of modem vulgarity,"17 it is also true that (paradoxically) he turned it to good (satirical) account. The explanation for this is rather simple. Ever since his early poetic trifles (1698), Swift reverted, again and again, to a satirical strategy by which the defendant, the satirical victim, is convicted on the basis of his own testimony. In implementing it, Swift does not measure his victims with his own yardstick; he does not, as it were, club them with his own "ideological" bludgeon. Instead, the victims take themselves to court; they stage their own trial, and they bring upon themselves a verdict of guilty. In a sense, it is not the satirist who annihilates the evil, physically, morally, or intellectually; it is the evil which destroys itself. Paradox, the modem vulgarity, ties in neatly with this strategy of self-exposure. In utilizing its satiric potential, the Dean merely indulges in a favourite pastime, that of matching folly with folly. It (almost) goes without saying that, like all famous practitioners of paradoxes since the Renaissance, he perfected the fallacious argument not in order to deceive, "but by a show of deceit to force the reader to uncover the truth."18

7A few (brief) examples must suffice. Of course, the theriophilic paradox of Gulliver's Travels springs to mind most readily, even if theriophily, "the belief that animal life provides man with an exemplary pattern of conduct,"19 seems further removed from the centre of Gulliver's Travels than the mendacious soothsayer Gulliver,20 l’homme moyen moderne and allegorical representative of mankind, who, at the end of his travels, continues to be "mad" for reason, the very ideal which, during his travels, he could have learnt was incommensurate with the nature of man.21 In the figure of Gulliver, Swift epitomized his antirationalism in a rationalist assault. With Gulliver, illumination results in darkness; knowledge becomes synonymous with (social) death.

8The theriophilic and epistemological genres of paradox never ceased to fascinate Swift in the late 1720s and early 1730s. He returned to le mythe animal, albeit on a different level and in a different form, in the most controversial satire of all, the Modest Proposal of 1729, in which "death," the great absurdity, [masquerades as] the servant of life."22 In the paradoxical volte-face concluding The Beasts' Confession to the Priest (1732), the gentle reader is invited to find philosophical consolation in the thought that among all the "animals" in Creation man is not alone in his imperfection. "The common saying," the most recent reader of the poem puts it, "that a man may behave like a beast is reversed: a beast may behave like a man." As the imperious interlocutor, an advocate of the beasts, rather grudgingly admits in the final lines, there are also some "black sheep" among the beasts: "For, here he owns, that now and then/Beasts may degenerate into men."23 Paradoxy also spills over into the clump of "vexatious" poems which originated at the same time. In The Lady's Dressing Room (1732), the sole poem in the history of English poetry known to have cost a lady her dinner, Strephon, the enamoured swain, eats from the tree of knowledge. He "recognizes" Celia, the not-so-divine nymph, and is blinded by what he sees. Like Gulliver, Strephon "is set on a fool's course" after the epiphany.24 In Cassinus and Peter, Cassy, the promising "college soph of Cambridge grow,"25 follows suit. Like Gulliver and Strephon, Cassinus, ass in a cassock that he is,26 ends his quest for truth in darkness, and as a consequence, he resolves to bid the cruel world adieu (11.95-116). Apparently, epiphanies are not only hard to come by; they are also hard to live with.27 There are even cases, like the subversive scrawl "(On) the Day of Judgement," which also originated in the 1730s, in which epiphanies might well prove impossible to live with. In "(On) the Day of Judgement," Jove, the tantrum-loving satirist-judge, presents himself not only as a god who "sells" all ignoramuses in the "science" of eschatology, cheating the fools who make a show of being in the know about God’s final plan; he also appears as a god who rules by indifference, and who turns out to be a judge whose utter dispassionateness is more wounding than savage indignation, contempt, or even hatred. Paradoxically, no punishment is worse than indifference.28

9However, paradox, while a hallmark of the Dean’s mature satires, is fully-fledged as early as the young Swift’s Battle of the Books, his defence of Sir William Temple, which originated in the late 1690s (published 1704), and which, in the final analysis, is a paradox "a wise and paradoxical Age," that is to say, a wise and paradox-loving age (like Swift's own) found inconceivable to stomach.29 Similarly, that early stroke of genius, A Tale of a Tub, the Battle's companion piece, is studded with paradox. Indeed, paradoxy seems bound to flourish whenever the traditional contrast between reason and madness is stood on its head: "Outside is inside; dark is light; learned words are but wind; the obscure is the profound; sexual orgy is spiritual heights; to be deep-learned is to be shallow-read; alchemical magic is divine wisdom."30 And, no doubt, multa desiderantur. Preluded by the modem chant, the time-honoured adage Veritas filia temporis, "Truth is the daughter of Time," in "The Epistle Dedicatory to His Royal Highness Prince Posterity," the Tale proves at the end to be a production of modem wit which is about "the nothing beneath our feet, about a past and a future when we were not and will not be."31 Its chief culprit, the modem spirit who always says "no," as embodied in the Grubbean sage, alias Tale-teller, at one point "gobbles cliché and coincidentia oppositorum so greedily that he cannot master the art of exposition, thriving instead upon the non-sequitur and volte-face; "32 at another, in "A Digression Concerning the Original, the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth," he resorts to demonstration, logic, and reason. The essence of madness turns out to be logic, after all: "The modem persona cannot possibly be, in spite of himself, a modem."33 And the conclusion is about nothing in which nothing is concluded (if nothing can be concluded, that is). As a "finished" product, A Tale of a Tub parades as a (Lucretian) microcosm, a creatio ex nihilo, whose creator disappears into the work's empty spaces after a non-book, nothing, that is, has been duly created out of nothing. Swift parries the modem claim to (be able to) write books by the counter-argument that all modem hacks can do is to make books, physical objects, that is, consisting like a Lucretian microcosm of matter (meaningless preliminaries and nonsensical digressions: letters, ink, sounds, paper) and (empty) space (lacunae, hiatus, and conclusions upon nothing). Never again was he to cram their own views down his satirical victims' throats as relentlessly as in this early coup d'éclat.

10The last point may have to be taken with a pinch of salt, though. However great a mood of hoax and play pervades the Bickerstaff papers, Swift's supreme example of hoisting evil with its own petard, it is also a fact that Swift destroyed "the [astrological] vermin with its own poison."34 Partridge's "death" is bound to evoke the popular belief prevalent in the tribal communities of ancient Greece, Arabia, and Ireland that incantations, invectives, imprecations, and satires, for that matter, were magical spells always thought to be fatal, that words, then, could kill, in fact did kill.35 In the light of this tradition, Swift's "Elegy on the Supposed Death of Mr Partridge, the Almanac Maker" is the last case on record in the history of English criminal law of "assassinating" a victim, and with a quill, too. After the war of the words was over, Partridge was effectively "finished." As Swift deadpanned with mad logic in the Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff which completed his caper:

THIRDLY, I will plainly prove him to be dead, out of his own Almanack for this Year, and from the very Passage which he produceth to make us think him alive. He there says, He is not only now alive, but was also alive upon that very 29th of March, which I foretold he should die on: By this, he declares his Opinion, that a Man may be alive now, who was not alive a Twelve-month ago. And, indeed, there lies the Sophistry of his Argument. He dares not assert, he was alive ever since the 29th of March, but that he is now alive, and was so on that Day: I grant the latter, for he did not die till Night, as appears by the printed Account of his Death, in a Letter to a Lord; and whether he be since revived, I leave the World to judge.36

11If Partridge took his own art seriously, he had no reason to complain that he was "finished." Such can be the power of paradox.

12Historically, paradox is nearly always associated with crises of thought and periods of intellectual unrest, with times of "competing value Systems,"37 that is. Consequently, one element common to all types of paradox is the fact that, more often than not, paradoxes kick against the pricks of some orthodoxy; they challenge prevailing assumptions, conventions, and norms. Their sole function is to surprise, to provoke, and to confuse,38 to argue contra opinionem. Above all, however, they are meant, Charles Estienne reminds us, "to stir [their readers] into debate" and thus to make them think (again), paradoxes being, the Dean's friend, Bishop Berkeley, thought, "strange Notions which shock the genuine, uncorrupted Judgment of all Mankind; and [which] being once admitted, embarrass the Mind with endless Doubts and Difficulties."39 Paradoxes never "hold" positions; they never "assert" views; and they never commit themselves to anything As John Aikin was to write in Letters from a Father to a Son later in the eighteenth century, paradoxes "will not bear examination," being "more distinguished for saying lively things than solid ones."40 It is the privilège of "nonsense," Swift already knew, "neither to affirm [nor] to deny."41 Why, then, was he so partial to paradoxy? The answer is to be found in a letter he wrote to Vanessa in 1720: "I am glad my writing puzzles you, for then your time will be employd in finding it out."42

13If all, or some of this, is correct, it is high time we drew one (admittedly disillusioning) conclusion: we must stop deceiving ourselves about Swift the man, the mysterious, enigmatic, elusive genius of the critics and the biographers. We must distinguish the solvable problems from the truly unsolvable mysteries in Swift studies. As there is an "uncertainty principle" in Joyce scholarship, there is an "uncertainty principle," impossible-to-resolve "mysteries," as early as the first poems, which Swift continued to engineer throughout his career. However hard we try, there will always remain a residuum of uncertainty about the Dean. However hard we try, to some extent we shall never know, the paradoxy of his work(s) being the paradox of the man.43 The ultimate paradox of the man is, of course, the dilemma, nay, the impasse of the satirist who, the savage indignation lacerating his heart not withstanding, tried to act reasonably, after all. In a world which he diagnosed as riddled by disorientation, deceit, and disease—intellectual, emotional, and moral—Swift saw himself as one (of the few) who cared even if the anarchy of the world surrounding him continued to demonstrate the sheer futility of the satirist’s endeavours to educate it. While the job was impossible, Swift saw no alternative.