‘The Reach and Wit of the Inventor’ Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Hamlet

MARJORIE BEAM 'The Reach and Wit of the Inventor': Swift's Tale of a Tub and Hamlet Swift's solemn declaration that A Tale of a Tub is a completely original literary form, 'that through the whole book he has not borrowed one single Hint from any Writer in the World' (13),' invites the reader's attention not only to individual allusions but to generic parody. Swift's tale-teller, obsessed with literary fashion and morbidly self-conscious about the conventions he is making fun of, attempts to undermine the forms he borrows; his satire of epistles dedicatory, subtitles, digressions , prefaces, and allegories becomes an almost frantic attempt to dissociate himself both from the standards of the ancients and from the degenerate parodies which modem writers have made of the old forms. The tale-teller, like Burton's Democritus Junior; feels inundated by the mass of material pouring off the printing-press; its very copiousness goads him into a counter-offensive, a desperate attempt to assert his individuality in a society which, he feels, is ignoring him and threatening to drown him out. His hypersensitivity to the artificialities of debased literary convention is a way of asserting this superiority. Like Hamlet, he can reject traditional genres on the grounds that there are 'no forms, modes, shapes of grief I That can denote me truly' (1.ii.82)3; yet, again like Hamlet, who draws attention to the inkiness of his cloak even as he insists 'tis not that alone which reflects his grief, the tale-teller flaunts his easy mastery of the conventions even as he turns them inside out. Hamlet and the tale-teller reject literary convention out of spiritual arrogance, insisting on the uniqueness of their own experience and perceptions and resisting the suggestion that their peculiar anguish can be reflected in a literary pattern which is the common possession of a society they despise. Hamlet believes that he can exploit artistic conventions to manipulate his inferiors. He thinks he can 'put an antic disposition on' (LV.172) as he would an inky cloak or sagging stockings, only to find that he cannot entirely take it off; he believes he can use an Italianate revenge playas a detective tactic, only to find his own life turn into one. (Is it the literary banality of the revenge which he resists all along?) Life imitates art, Hamlet discovers to his relief; the providence that shapes his ends writes dramatic tragedy, and Hamlet is liberated from the prison of his own mind by the exigencies of literary form. Swift's taleUTQ , Volume XLVI, Number 1, Fall 1976 2 MARJORIE BEAM teller, like Hamlet, is, if not an artist, at least a manipulator of genres. With all thesprezzatura of a pedant, he begins in the prefatory material to explode the literary conventions, only to find by the end of the tale that he is himself exploded by them. For abandoning conventional form means abandoning the traditional ways of making sense of the chaos, entering a world of intellectual relativism in which there are no objective guideposts, a looking-glass world in which language, freed of its restraints , acquires a life of its own. If the tale-teller begins with a very conscious sarcasm at the expense of cabbalistic commentators who pull words apart in order to recombine them into arbitrary patterns, he concludes by falling into their trap. His tale, given its head, runs away with him; its digressions swallow him up; his own metaphors turn on him. He becomes what he deplores, a modern who has freed himself from memory, one of those 'who deal entirely with Invention, and strike all Things out of themselves, or at least, by Collision from each other' (135). The tale ends with a dizzy slide into Lockean associationism which consumes satire and satirist alike. Metamorphosis, which began as the object of the tale, has become its mode,and the tale-teller is unable to stop the process which his virtuosity has unleashed. It is in terms of metamorphosis that the Shakespearean context is first invoked. In the Epistle Dedicatory the tale-teller, attempting to convince 'Prince Posterity' of the merits of contemporary English writers, explains...