The Grotesque Body in the Hollow Tub:Swift's Tale William Freedman The absence of definable truth or meaning in A Tale of a Tub is as pervasive and central to its purpose as it is famously explored and overdetermined. My purpose in this paper will be to show that truth in this chaotic text is not merely playfully evaded or pedagogically obscured, but hesitantly approached and anxiously avoided. Also, I will argue that the female or feminine, while less often corporeally figured as the repugnant woman than in the scatological poems or Gulliver's Travels, is an influential presence. In her more familiar form, she is the woman flayed alive, whose full recognition is gaudily obscured behind our ironic, entertained "surprise" at her altered appearance. In her diffuse (but not defused) identity as the incorporative and unboundaried "body" of the text, she is at once an unappetizing embodiment of the "truth" of both the author-narrator and his narrative and, therefore, a cause as well as means of its avoidance. As in the poems, she is the dark feminine aspect of the ostensible truth-seeker, the vaguely sensed but ultimately unacknowledgeable woman within. The history of A Tale of a Tub criticism has replicated the movement of a scatological poem. As the poems begin in a seemingly orderly and coherent manner and fall into contradiction and chaos, the criticism has edged from the triumphant discovery of disciplined meaning in the Tale's bedlamic mayhem toward a recognition of the abyss as its intended destination. Ronald Paulson, more than forty years ago, found beneath the surface mayhem of the Tale "a strikingly periodic order of parallel and balanced sections, subjects, and characters: a logically arranged encyclopedia of Gnostic insufficiency";1 Martin Price argued that the Tale points throughout to "a middle way that lies between opposed forms of corruption";2 and most agreed that the Tale was, beneath the seeming chaos, a unified and coherent assault on abuses of learning and religion.3 The center, however, never firmly established, would not hold. In the 1970s and 1980s the consensus unraveled, and the anarchy loosed by the speaker seemed now an expression of Swift's more calculated disorder or rebellion. Doubts about the coherence of the Tale had begun at least as far [End Page 294] back as 1934 when F. R. Leavis labeled the "unpredictable movement of the attack," with its rapid shifts of source and target, an "irony of negation" whose principal function is to intimidate, demoralize, and betray the reader. And all, wrote Leavis, for the "insolent pleasure of the author" who, in his complacent detachment, takes strange delight in this savage game.4 It was not until half a century later, however, that the conflicting voices resounding in and around the Tub struck a fine harmonic chord. Much recent criticism, rejecting the view that A Tale of a Tub satirizes authorial incoherence and offers in its place a rational, middle, or other discernible way, reads the Tale as a calculated illustration of the inability of language—particularly in its printed form—to speak meaningfully about the world.5 The flourishing popularity of this view of Swift's Tale amply justifies Nigel Woods's summarizing observation that most textual critics, himself among them, have concluded that "the main point of the Tale is to demonstrate the extreme difficulty of interpreting anything without a divine yardstick."6 But we should, I think, be uneasy with exclusively teleological or intentionalist readings of literary texts, particularly confused, contradictory, and confusing texts like those Swift quite habitually produced. With a writer like Swift, wriggling in the amber of his own writing, satire cannot be separated from personality. The contradictory, unresolved, and ambivalent nature of the Tale and other of his fictions is, I believe, more persuasively explained as an expression of Swift's own unresolved apprehensions, vacillations, and ambivalences than as a calculated endeavor to generate textual replicas of the cosmic, graphic, or linguistic void. The contradictory identity of woman in "The Lady's Dressing Room" as ordure and order, dung and tulip, emerges from a process of alternating fascination and revulsion more psychological than rhetorical. The dynamics of the poem—the...
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Jun 12, 2012
J R Brink 
Open Access
