<p> The core of Swift's Tale of a Tub is an allegorical narrative that recounts in miniature the history of the Christian Church. ln the tailorworship and Aeolist sections of his account, however, Swift temporarily suspends the narrative and describes a comprehensive systems of belief founded in each case on a single, all-important but absurd principle: the tailor-worshippers venerate clothes and the Aeolists, wind. This shift in technique is an important indication of Swift's aim in the Tale. Despite
their essentially digressive nature, these two sections haves a close relation
to the narrative and are obviously intended to comment on it. The most useful approach to an understanding of this shift of technique is by reference to the genre known as the padoxical enconium which was ideally suited for a satirical treatment of the philosophical issues that Swift was dealing with in the Tale. </p> <p> Swift's main target in the Tale is generally acknowledged to be 'modernism.' The combined evidence of the Tale, The Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit shows that Swift visualized the ancients-moderns controversy less as a contest between the merits of the learning of two different epochs far removed in time than as an eternally recurring struggle between a philosophic casr of thought (modernism) that would more accurately be called 'progressive rationalism' and the traditional Christian humanism to which Swift himself gave allegiance. Swift's main objection to modernism was that it tended to promote fashionable ideas to an importance far above their worth merely on grounds of novelty, to the detriment of what is of permanent value in human affairs. The typical modern reduction of experience to a naively simple scheme is the central is the central preoccupation of the 'Digression of Madness'. </p> <p> In order to refute not just individual modern thinkers but modernism in general, Swift turned the paradoxical econium into a brilliant burlesque device. Because it characteristically elevates to a position of importance something generally considered base or insignificant, the paradoxical enconium is a humorous, far-fetched counterpart to the kind of reductive logic that modernism attempts in all seriousness. The tailor-worship system is at once a paradoxical enconium of clothes and a modern philosophical system. At the same time, since it has no direct historical equivalent, the tailor-worship stands outside time as a permanent diagnosis of all such kinds of thinking. Both the Aoelist and tailor-worship systems are timeless paradigms of reductive thought that transcend the historical limitations of the examples they parody. For purpose of constructing such paradigms the paradoxical encomium was ideally adapted in a way that the allegorical narrative, with its point-forpoint correspondence with historical events, was not. </p> <p> Swift makes further use of the paradoxical encomium in the 'Digression on Madness', in which he humourously places the most reductive thinkers of history within a reductive framework of his own devising. At the centre of this digression, however, he presents a more engaging paradox: in the most famous passage of the Tale he contrives to prove the superiority of credulity to both reason and the abuse of reason. The terms in which he does so are more than just a practical example of the dangers of rhetoric: they are an inverted restatement of the terms of the ancients-moderns controversy, a warning that modernism at its most extreme is truly insane, and an implicit vindiciation of the values of Christian humanism. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/15614 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Howley, Martin J.S. |
| Contributors | Vichert, G.S., English |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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