The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (review)

The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift is an excellent introduction to Swift and Swift studies that not only offers reliable information about the man, his life, and his works, but also deftly reveals the enduring issues that continue to preoccupy Swift's readers. Christopher Fox's editorial introduction, for example, succinctly identifies the most long-lived of posterity's obsessions with Swift, including resentment at his alleged political apostasy, his reputed misanthropy, his "madness," and the tension between perceptions of him as the Irish patriot and the English colonist. This useful opening chapter is followed by impressive essays on Swift's life, and on his concerns as a political writer, by Joseph McMinn and David Oakleaf respectively, although neither succeeds in accurately describing the political context of A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and Commons in Athens and Rome.

Judith C. Mueller's essay on "A Tale of a Tub and the Early Prose" also opens with Swift's earliest political pamphlet. While Mueller notes correctly that the Discourse "contributed to an ongoing propaganda war over the impeachment of several Whig lords," I am not persuaded that Swift's purpose was "less a defense of the impeached Whig lords than an argument for balance of power in government" (202). Such a reading, it seems to me, confuses polemical strategy with polemical objective. Mueller's brief comments on Swift's Discourse are, however, really only a means of introducing the "Ancients and Moderns" controversy that, in turn, allows her to move on through The Battle of the Books to A Tale of a Tub itself. Concentrating on Swift's suspicion of "everything modern, including modern writing and modern philosophy" (207), Mueller regards the Tale as basically a "mock-book,"and she succeeds in exposing the ambiguity at the heart of Swift's concern with the very acts of reading and interpretation.

Accurate and informative on Swift's satire on "the numerous and gross Corruptions in Religion and Learning" as it is, Mueller's essay has comparatively little to say about the Tale as prose fiction. It is, however, one of only two chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift to focus specifically on Swift as a fiction writer. Like Mueller's, J. Paul Hunter's essay on "Gulliver's Travels and the later writings" draws attention to issues concerning reading and interpretation, and to Swift's acute awareness of the literary and cultural contexts of this, his "most ambitious, most accessible, and most enduring literary work" (216). Hunter's treatment of Gulliver's Travels as "a very bookish book, highly self-conscious of its relationship to other texts both old and new" (222), is perceptive. The late Michael Treadwell remarked that books and the book trade were involved in all of Swift's greatest hoaxes, and Gulliver is part hoax, part commentary on the vogue for "History and Travels" that originated a few years earlier with The Strange, Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

Although he knows that hackles will rise, Hunter argues that there are "good reasons, though somewhat contrary ones, for thinking about Gulliver's Travels in relation to the novel" (224). He is particularly good on Gulliver's unreliability as a narrator. While previous critics have noted the ludicrousness of his attempting "to vindicate the Reputation of an excellent Lady"— Flimnap's wife—"from the Malice of some evil Tongues, who informed him that her Grace had taken a violent Affection for [his] Person," I do not recall anyone remarking on the amount of baggage that Gulliver "lugs with him as he struggle against the waves" (227). Simply by enumerating these items, Hunter succeeds in adding to the various considerations about perspective in Gulliver's Travels to which other critics have drawn attention.

Hunter's contention, however, that "Swift undercuts novelistic practices and assumptions repeatedly and systematically" (225) is what I find of most interest as far as Gulliver's Travels and the...