Designs on Truth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock Epic by Gregory G. Colomb (review)

252Rocky Mountain Review However, even when only approximately paraphrased, Claridge provides very suggestive ideas about the Romantics' attempt to break various boundaries in spite of the way the language given them by society, i.e., their fathers , blocked their struggle to know and express with words the silent transcendence of the opposing forces of the natural and the female. Wordsworth might be startled to find that he compromised with Oedipal pressures and developed strategies for both expressing and countering the powers of women, Shelley that he gave up on the efficacy of desire after all, or Byron that he finally welcomed the "slippage of language" (251), but those who have worked through Claridge's book, however sceptical of her approach, cannot escape the enriching overtones she has found in those poets' utterances and behavior. All may welcome Romantic Potency: The Paradox ofDesire. DALE BOYER Boise State University GREGORY G. COLOMB. Designs on Truth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock Epic. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. 228 p. In Designs on Truth, Gregory Colomb reinvestigates the relationship ofthe particular to the general in eighteenth-century mock-epic by way of formulating "a new, historical poetics" (xv) of the genre. Colomb brings to some long-debated questions the resources of contemporary theory (new historicist analysis and reader response theory, in particular), but in such a way as to reflect the "double vision" of the very genre he examines: his critical practice, like the poetic practice of the mock-epics themselves, unites theoretical generalization with detailed empirical examination. For Colomb, attempts to formulate a poetics of mock-epic have been seriously hindered by the mistaken notion that The Rape of the Lock defines the norms of the genre. Colomb argues, instead, that Samuel Garth's The Dispensary established "the generic model"—one from which Pope "diverged " in The Rape of the Lock , only to return in the various versions of The Dunciad (xiii). It is to The Dispensary and The Dunciad that Colomb looks, accordingly, for the defining characteristics of mock-epic. In his examination, Colomb offers what is perhaps the most extensive critical analysis yet made of Garth's poem, and of Pope's insufficiently recognized indebtedness to it as a model for the satiric handling of particulars. Garth is credited by Colomb for using (and inspiring Pope to use) topological and personal particulars to effect something more than the simple telling of a "low" story in a lofty style—the usual critical account of the poetics of mock-epic. Colomb notes the extensive periphrastic descriptions which replace place-names in The Dispensary, arguing that they serve to guide Book Reviews253 reader-response in an historical context of rapid "language change"— change seen by Garth (and Pope, after him) as "the product of moral and social corruption" (35). At a time in which an increasing competition of self-interests guaranteed that no poet could count upon readers sharing a common understanding of the "accessory ideas of value" (42) communicated by the language of social and ethical discourse, general meanings had, paradoxically , to be fixed through particulars (a reversal of the Lockean process whereby general names come to be created through the subtraction of particulars from empirically based complex ideas). Places are designated periphrastically by Garth so that readers might "recognize them already embedded in a network of associations"—associations that help to direct readers' evaluations "toward the truth the poet would enforce" (41) by throwing readers "back upon their own ethical resources and their own experience of the world" (37). If Garth offers descriptions before he provides the place names that he easily could have provided, however, he also carries into the mock-epic Dryden's more broadly mock-heroic practice of providing specific clues to personal names, often in the form of "single-feature portraiture" (127). The avoidance of such personal particularity was one of the distinctions, in the eighteenth century, between the generality of satire and the specificity of lampoon, but Garth again reverses expectation by making personal particularity an instrument of general social analysis. Pope, of course, would carry personal particularity to an extreme in the apparatus of The Dunciad, but Colomb again sees Garth as...