Jonathan Swift: The Fictions of the Satirist (review)

78 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:1 Jean-Paul Forster. Jonathan Swift: The Fictions of the Satirist. European University Studies: Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, no. 220. Bern, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Paris: Peter Lang, 1991. 248pp. US$41.80. ISBN 3-26104259 -1. In his introduction, Jean-Paul Forster informs us that he "does not intend to offer the reader of Swift the kind of new-at-all-cost interpretation of his works which seems to be fashionable with some reviewers at present" (p. 19). The problem with Jonathan Swift: The Fictions of the Satirist, however, really has little to do with what is fashionable as opposed to what is not, but rather with the sheer density of Forster's prose, where ideas tend to get lost amidst syntactic complexity and an annoying recursiveness. Is not readability fashionable? Surely it would be worth studying in detail from a structuralist perspective the "fictional patterns" in Swift's satires; it is probably true, as Forster suggests, that they have not received as much attention as they deserve, and one would welcome a thorough discussion of Swift's plot, framing, characterization, dialogue, and use of circumstantial detail as it relates to the emerging novel. But Forster's four chapters—"The Satirical Use of Framing Fictions," "From Framing to Framed Fictions," "The Metamorphoses of the Body," and "Fictional Patterns, Laughter, Meaning"—do not accomplish these things, or at least not in any coherent manner. Without question, Forster's third chapter is his strongest and most clearly written; quite capable of standing alone, this survey of Swift's depiction of the human body is the most thorough I have read, and coupled with Carol H. Flynn's more penetrating discussion in The Body in Swift and Defoe (1990), makes a useful contribution to Swift studies. Nonetheless, I am unsure how this chapter fits into the discussion of "fictional patterns" introduced in the first two chapters. In his first chapter, Forster indeed makes a number of interesting points about Swift's fictions. Perhaps because I agree with him, I applaud his position that in Swift "discourse has priority over persona" (p. 25). I am attracted also to his notion that Swift's framing devices in the Tale, The Mechanical Operation ofthe Spirit, and Gulliver's Travels create a disjunction that draws attention to itself, and that "this is sufficient to trace around the satirical fiction the magical circle that frames it and shows it to be a fake" (p. 42). I am struck as well by the following paradox: "Compared to Robinson Crusoe, the Travels is then formally the more faithful to the conventions of travel literature, and yet it is the more conspicuous lie" (pp. 51-52). Forster also gets my attention when he says that "Swift's satirical fictions suggest that the commonsense world is more properly seen as a continuation of the fictitious" (p. 60). And yet in these instances as well as elsewhere, I come away disappointed, feeling as if the truth of these statements has been asserted rather than demonstrated. There is likewise something original in chapter 2. In particular, Forster in one fifteenpage section focuses on Swift's use of the stuff of folktale, from the "once upon a time" beginning of the Tale to the connections between the Travels and Tom Thumb, and makes the interesting point that "In Gulliver's Travels the world of fairy tales is repeatedly made to belie its traditional nature and optimism" (p. 93). But once again, this idea needs to be developed more fully than it is here. As Forster admits before hurrying on, the indebtedness of Gulliver's Travels to folktales would necessitate an entire chapter. Chapter 4 is a hodge-podge. In this chapter Forster does touch, finally, on the subject his reader has anticipated from the start: "Swift's utilization of fiction is not altogether dissimilar to that of the initiators of the new genre," and yet he "has drawn from a far greater and more varied range of sources," "has a much surer sense of literary structure," REVIEWS 79 and develops framing techniques into "a more subtle means of anchoring a fiction in circumstantial reality" (p. 196). Although...