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  • Swift’s AllegoryThe Yahoo and the Man-of-mode
  • John Traugott (bio)
John Traugott

Associate Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley; author of Tristram Shandy’s World (1952) and Discussions of Swift (1961)

notes

1. “When the Council of Trent affirmed the true doctrine to be derived from tradition as well as Scripture, and that Scripture itself is to be accepted in the sense in which the Church interprets it, the meaning is that these medieval authors have given the true exposition of the Bible. Allegory, therefore, is not only authorized, but we may say enjoined.” (Henry Preserved Smith, Essays in Biblical Interpretation, 69.)

2. Though occasionally in A Tale of a Tub Swift will neglect his vital allegory of Peter and Jack and of clothes and wind to lapse into mere “personification,” such as a bull for a papal bull or a worm remedy for the doctrine of penance. Emile Pons in his study, Swift: Les années de jeunesse et le Come du tonneau, rightly points to these mere “personifications” as Swift’s lapse from his true genius, perhaps to be accounted for as the residue of an earlier draft. To M. Pons’ work and to Martin Price’s Swift’s Rhetorical Art, I am much indebted in this argument.

3. As many critics have noted, this satire is marked by a sceptical virulence whose implications could well be brought to bear upon the contemporary Anglican doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. And if personality and reason are as dubious as Swift implies, what but the grace of God is to preserve Martin? But on the surface at least the satire only reflects the attitude of Anglican churchmen, that in the Council of Trent Scripture had been made subject forever to the ingenuities of Romanist allegory. The Eucharist as interpreted by allegorical tradition became equally true with the Word, the letter of the Testament. “Yet the letter alone, the literal interpretation, cannot of itself nourish the soul; it is according to St. Bernard, the outside crust of the bread, dry and indigestable,” writes Conrad Pepler in “The Faith of the Middle Ages” (in Interpretation of the Bible, 1946), The similarity of Swift’s figure to St. Bernard’s is striking, for Swift likewise understood the propensity of the human mind towards allegory.

By incorporating the parody of transubstantiation into the clothes philosophy, Swift appropriates to his own purpose the scholastic distinction between substance and accident. Aquinas had rationalized the doctrine of transubstantiation by distinguishing the accidental properties of the bread, which remain after consecration, from its substance, which is wholly replaced by the substance of Christ’s body and blood. By a metaphysical quick change (in the Protestant view), a literal event (the breaking of the bread) had been turned into an allegory of another reality. I will use the metaphysics of substance and accident, says Swift, to turn Romanist tradition into an allegory of the destruction of the Scripture, of the will, and of the soul and their replacement by the clothes religion, fashion, and the mechanical operation of the spirit.

4. A discussion of the critical problem of Gulliver’s final posture is contained in my essay, “A Voyage to Nowhere, with Thomas More and Jonathan Swift” (Sewanee Review, Autumn 1961).

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