From the Womb of Things to Their Grave: Madness and Memory in Swift

MICHAEL DEPORTE From the Womb of Things to Their Grave: Madness and Memory in Swift In his 'Digression on Madness,' the narrator of A Tale ofa Tub insists that the quarrel between fiction and truth is really only a debate between 'Things past' and 'Things conceived.' The question, he says, comes down to this: 'Whether Things that have Place in the Imagination, may not as properly be said to Exist, as those that are seated in the Memory; which may be justly held in the Affirmative, and very much to the Advantage of the former, since This is acknowledged to be the Womb ofThings, and the other allowed to be no more than the Grave.'1 Swift's crazy narrator is exploiting, of course, that ancient axiom of psychology according to which memory and imagination are differing aspects ofthe mind's power to picture things not present - the pictures of memory being limited by past experience, those of imagination only by a person's conjectural resources. Why confine ourselves to the circumscribed, usually distasteful realities retailed by memory, he asks, when imagination opens every door to wishful thinking? Since both memory and imagination deal in images, why not choose the ware we like best? We should not, surely, let fear of delusion affect our choice. So what if imagination leads us into madness? The whole point of the 'Digression on Madness' is to promote its 'Use and Improvement,' to show what wonderful prospects await the man whose 'Fancy gets astride of his Reason' (171). Only madness will carry us to the provinces of greatness, for when a 'man gives the Spur and Bridle to his Thoughts' his mind 'doth never stop, but naturally sallies out into both extremes of High and Low, Good and Evil' (157)' On these journeys one may make extraordinary discoveries - that one is 'God Almighty' (115), say, or has unravelled the secrets of nature, or should take armies on the march to devastate neighbouring kingdoms. Swift invokes memory in the Tale mainly as an impediment to such demented ventures of imagination. Sanity requires a sense of limits. By providing a line of access to the 'Pattern of Human Learning,' memory encourages the sort of caution madmen despise. They want to cut loose from patterns and sew things up their own way, through force of arms or force of argument. No wonder the narrator and his brother moderns hold memory in contempt: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1989 MADNESS AND MEMORY IN SWIFT 377 Memory being an Employment of the Mind upon things past, is a Faculty, for which the Learned, in our Illustrious Age, have no manner of Occasion, who deal entirely with Invention, and strike all Things out of themselves ... Upon which Account we think it highly Reasonable to produce our great Forgetfulness , as an Argument unanswerable for our great Wit. (1)5) Poor memory keeps madness aloft not only by cutting ties to cultural history but by severing links with personal history as well. Peter forgets that he and his brothers were enjoined by their father's will to live as equals, and he demands their obedience in everything. A simple tailor lets slip his past, embarks on an imaginative career of fanaticism and rebellion, and proclaims himself King John of Leyden. The narrator himself, fresh out of Bedlam, announces that the 'Grandees of Church and State' (39) have engaged him to defend the Commonwealth. Not long thereafter he styles himself 'Secretary' to the universe (123). Poor memory also occasions varieties of lesser nuttiness: the Tale's lack of an ending - 'the Particulars ... slid out of my Memory' (205); the narrator's stunning inconsistencies - he champions surfaces, but complains of superficial readers, professes himself 'entirely satisfied with the whole present Procedure of human Things' (53) in one place, praises fault-finding critics in another, says moderns have no need for memory while insisting that modern works deserve to be remembered. The Tale affords extensive and ingenious negative support for the view, elaborated in the dozens of treatises on memory written since Aristotle's De memoria et reminiscentia, that civilization itself depends on memory. 'There can be neither Knowledg( neither Arts...