Samuel Butler: Ironic Abdication and the Way to the Unconscious

366 SAMUEL BUTLER: IRONIC ABDICATION AND THE WAY TO THE UNCONSCIOUS By Margaret Ganz (CUNY, Brooklyn College) Samuel Butler's playful request that, in the unwelcome possibility of being memorialized, he be described as "born of rich but dishonest parents" (Jones I: viii) may be familiar whimsy to readers of The Way of A¿¿ Flesh. After all, they should be accustomed to such verbal double somersaults as Alethea Pontifex's yoking of the wisdom of the dove to the harmlessness of the serpent or such juggling of connotation and context as releases the mischief in a pious or sentimental phrase. In Butler's mental world Tennyson's "more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of" reads comically as more catastrophic than uplifting while catastrophe itself reassures in the teasing revision: "'Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have lost at all" (The Way 34, 297).1 Why certain contentions incite an ironist to subvert meaning as a linguistic and psychological strategy remains elusive. But that such entertaining and troubling acrobatics promote a diagnosis of reality and a mode of juggling its perils is inescapable. As irony releases alternate meanings, its very disfigurations allow an enlightening abrogation of familiar assurances. Tracing this "progress" of abrogation in Butler--this pilgrimage of sorts — reveals the extent to which this questing writer anticipates our modern perception of uncertainty and contradiction at the heart of experience. That Butler's ironic enterprise assumes the primacy of the unconscious2 clarifies his particular destiny and also suggests that the wisest human adjustment is an abdication of certainty that entails listening to the unconscious. Addressing questions of religion, science, psychology, literature, and art, Butler's ironic voice consistently speaks of such an abdication, as our references to his discursive writings and his fiction, with a special emphasis on the fascinating "Memoir" to The Fair Haven will attempt to show. Yet his revisions of structure and meaning favoring the rejection of traditional modes of success and transcendence are not easily decoded. The hermetic truth of any comic form is often underestimated but especially that of irony, whose complex reweavings, so often disruptive of familiar assumptions, tend to elude interpretation. Our conclusion will suggest in The Way of Al 1 Flesh the culmination of an elaborate strategy— conveyed by irony—not only to disengage the self from surface conventions (a critical commonplace by now) but to assume the promptings of the unconscious as a style of life. 367 Thus Butler's quip about his "rich but dishonest parents " might seem merely a predictable upending of the notion that poverty makes honesty unlikely. Yet it is a witty verdict on his own psychological, if not spiritual, situation , since the paradoxical connections between money, love, and integrity3 are central to his development, and tracking down the protean forms of dishonesty is his vocation. In that near patricidal pursuit4 antithetical verbal constructs and shifting verbal contexts play subtle roles, effecting a complicated mood and tone. Even those jaunty cross-grained readings of Tennyson imperfectly hide a sober if not tragic conviction that spiritual enterprises, not least prayer, are potentially treacherous, and that abnegation and loss play a strategic role in achieving wholeness. "Cantabit vacuus" (The Way 260), we are reminded in conjunction with the morally and spiritually dispossessed hero, Ernest Pontifex. To view Butler's irony as an exploration of the unconscious is to engage in a probing enterprise not dissimilar in effect to his own ambiguous journeys to enlightenment, which boldly draw analogies between apparently disparate experiences , as when referring to "cannibalism or infanticide, or even habitual untruthfulness of mind" (The Way 246). Though his upbringing and the temper of his time suggest how irony might be a congenial choice for Butler, his philosophical bent and his intricate nature complicate matters. Like Ernest he is "an Ishmael by instinct as much as by an accident of circumstances" (The Way 336). We can recognize in him a paradoxical blend of rue and amusement as pervasive as the scope and stubbornness of his rebellion against mystification , "his genius," as Shaw says, "always breaking through to the truth ("New Life Reviewed" 56). Yet the form that Butler's complaint assumes...