Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist by Frank Boyle (review)

44 the importance of Fielding’s reading of Shaftesbury in the 1730s and, thus, Fielding’s early affinities with deist thinkers. In attributing this ‘‘tendency’’to Mr. Battestin, however , Mr. Paulson is far from debunking Mr. Battestin’s version of Fielding’s life. As he describes latitudinarianism in The MoralBasisofFielding’sArtorintheIntroduction to his 1962 volume, Mr. Battestin is sensitive to (although he does not label it as such) its euhemeristic impulse: ‘‘the Latitudinarian position was essentially rationalist and mystery dispelling’’; ‘‘He [Hoadly] argued that the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper had no special efficacy, but was instituted merely as a memorial of Christ’s sacrifice and as an occasion for renewing Christian feelings of brotherhood’’; ‘‘Fielding’s morality and his religion are founded upon the benevolist theories inculcated by the Latitudinarians and given additional currency by Shaftesbury.’’ Fielding led a rich and varied life, and his novels frequently conflate ancient and modern, sacred and secular, personal and mythic. While their critical tendencies vary, Messrs. Battestin and Paulson, in 2000 as in 1962, offer powerful redactions of, in RobertAlter’s fine phrase,Fielding’s‘‘partialmagic.’’Since1962,theyhavebeenrivals, frequently disputants, but in the long view, their rivalry has revealed the breadth of their critical acumen and the strengths of their subject. Brian McCrea University of Florida FRANK BOYLE. Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist. Stanford: Stanford, 2000. Pp. xiv ⫹ 242. $45. Mr. Boyle offers readers a collection of essays which make for two quite different books. His main title covers his first two and last chapters and takes in most of what he expressly has to say about Gulliver’s Travels. Three of the remainingfourchapters— all of which either deal directly with or bear upon A Tale of a Tub—instead belong to the study he originally had in mind, Modernity and Its Satirist. It presumably would— and could—have subsumed Mr. Boyle’s now title-featured idea to the proposition that ‘‘Swift deserves Edward Said’s encomium, ‘our best critic,’ . . . because he is able to speak from ‘far outside’ the intellectual assumptions of Modernity.’’ According to an Afterword which purports to be a letter from an anonymous critic, Mr. Boyle abandoned his original conception on groundsof ‘‘therealpolitikofacademic publishing at the turn of the century.’’ But he may also have given up on it because it was too difficultto execute. Thefirst oftwoessayswhereinhetakesontheTaleproper— ‘‘Transubstantiation, Transmutation, and Critical Theory’’—suggests as much. He always intended this chapter to intermediate between his persuasive analysis of Swift’s ode to the Athenian Society as a response to Cowley’s on the Royal Society (and hence as an oblique attack on the New Philosophy) and his case for the Tale as satirizing Newton. But for that given order to be logical, he would have had to show ‘‘that Swift uses transubstantiation and transmutation to lay the groundwork for an assault on the New Philosophy’’—something that he himself recognizes still ‘‘wants demonstration’’ at the end of the chapter in question. Nor, I suspect, has he proved to the satisfaction of anyone who does not already see it that the Tale indeed links transubstantiations of the sort Peter is adept at with the Tubbian transmutations that are ostensibly the patent of alchemists like Thomas Vaughan, let alone how either may be deeply implicated 45 with ‘‘Critical Theory.’’ The following chapter, ‘‘A Critical History of the Air,’’is a somewhat different story. It lives up to its ingeniously resonant title in making a case for the Tale’s parody of certain passages in Bentley’s inaugural Boyle Lectures (1691/1692) and Wotton’s Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning (1694) as expressive of their authors’Newtonianthinking .ThisvaluablediscoveryofyetanotherrespectinwhichtheTaleglobally assaults Modern materialism is not one that every Swiftian will welcome. Yet no one can dismiss the possibility that Swift perused the Reflections; and it is almost equally likely that he looked into Bentley’s lecture-sermons, for three of which Bentley took as his text the passage in Acts (17:28) Swift’s travesty of which in Section II of the Tale contributed to ensuring his book’s unanimous public reception as the work of a blasphemer. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Boyle is not content to argue that Swift is...