The Dean was famous in his Time
And had a Kind of Knack at Rhyme:
His way of Writing now is past;
The Town hath got a better Taste:
Swift, it seems, focused less on the popularity and the reputation of the author himself, as the critics of Dafoe seemed to do, and instead shifts his attention to preserving the ideal of canonical works, works that will be read and studied by the educated long after the author's death. In addition Swift seemed to focus on was the reception of oratorical and rhetorical “masters” despite their clear immorality:
He doth an Honour to his Gown,
By bravely running Priest-craft down:
He shews, as sure as God's in Gloc'ster,
That Jesus was a Grand Impostor:
It seemed then to Swift that the merits of a literary work and the things that seemed to make a work ‘worthy’ in Swift’s eyes were becoming more obscure and less valued by the public as a whole, making Swift have to retreat to his own circle of educated, well read and well versed circle of literary figures. However, simultaneously, the ‘impartial narrator’ who clarifies the views on Swift, post-death, complicates this notion of ‘proper’ versus public literature:
Had he but spar'd his Tongue and Pen,
He might have rose like other Men:
But, Power was never in his Thought;
And, Wealth he valu'd not a Groat
This speaker claims that Swift sought neither popularity nor power and wealth but claims Swift could have had them, had he spared his actual views on morality, women, literature, etc. This in turn antiquates great literature with the status of being obscure and un-widely read. However, something that is ‘lasting and immortal’ does not have to be and in many cases is not enjoyed by exclusively academic elitists. In fact, Shakespeare was enjoyed by royalty, academics and the public masses alike. I think Swift’s argument is divided very black and white, the battle is between holding onto to existing traditions or giving way to the shifting realities in the face of the rise of the literary marketplace. He seems to see no compromise when it comes to the status of literature and condemns those who write without the essence of ‘truth and morality’ but can flourish their argument to heights incomprehensible by the uneducated masses. However, it seems that some of his works were even doomed to this fate, as is the case with the cultural popularity of Gulliver’s Travels. It seems that this is the turning point in the debate of what is now known as canonization and the emergence and designation of authors on to or off of the cannon. These are just some preliminary observations from our text and class discussion, but I thought this would be a good jumping off point to perhaps spark some other perceptions of Swift’s satire of the state of the literary world.
I'm glad we were able to discuss this in class yesterday. As with Defoe, it's difficult to separate Swift being serious from Swift being satiric or ironic--especially in the second half of the poem where the tone changes--and this is complicated by the more modern readings we tend to bring to texts.
ReplyDeleteSwift, like Johnson with his Dictionary (at least at the start of the project) has anxiety about taste. As a modern reader, I appreciate Swift, Pope, and Johnson, but as a feminist reader, I don't like the way they seek to define and limit literature in a way that excludes female writers. As a student of the novel, I don't like the way they and others seek to dismiss it or limit it as a genre (we'll be reading Johnson's take on novels next week).
Why was it so important that literature have a purpose (usually didactic) anyway? Were eighteenth-century Brits so anxious about spending their time doing productive things that reading for pleasure didn't have a place?
Which is sort of funny, because in the big picture, the novel wins, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, the arguments about the novel as dangerous or not instructive have mostly gone away.
I think that your question about the importance of the literature having a purpose (specifically a didactic one) is really interesting. It seems that with periodicals, novels and poetry, which were the prevailing forms, social and moral instruction were key. Even with Dafoe, where Moll gets off easily with no actual sentence and instead is sent to live in America, she does become convicted for the crime of which she was guilty. However, despite the didactic nature of 18th century literature and focus on 'correct' morality, the poetry and periodicals heavily advocate for societal, religious and social change so it seems that the instructive nature of literature was already shifting, even within the beginning of the 18th century.
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