Eighteenth-Century Fiction

REVIEWS 113 Robert Phiddian. Swift's Parody. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xii + 221pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-521- 47437-X. Put simply, the enterprise of Swift's Parody is to employ a Barthesian conception of the irreducible intertextuality of all textual meaning and a Derridean conception of its provisionality (meaning "under erasure") to construct a theory of parody capable of accounting for the unique texture of Swift's early writing. Phiddian pumps this European fuel into Wayne Booth's North American distinction, made in The Rhetoric ofIrony, between "stable" and "unstable" forms of irony, so that he can draw a line between works such as Mr. Collins's Discourse of Free-Thinking, from which it is possible, finally, to educe a determinate position ("allegiances towards a common faith, obedience, intellectual and moral order—the central precepts of Tory loyalism" p. 70), and tiiose such as the Argument against Abolishing Christianity and A Tale ofa Tub from which it is not: "The more deeply a parody engages in the errors it affects to expose, the more it becomes the thing it mocks, and A Tale is a pre-eminent example of this. Inscribing and subverting so many conflicting stories of origin and authority, made up of the casually collected scraps of other ridiculous books, spawning multiple allusions, confusions, and misunderstandings, A Tale is the archetype of the illegitimate text" (p. 195). Despite the "converting Imaginations" of generations of readers who have tried to make Swift's early imaginative prose fiction yield determinate meanings, even moral wisdom, there is simply no way to do this. In addition to a theory of textuality and in-depth analysis of Swift's early works of imaginative prose fiction, Phiddian relates his account of the authorless Swift to a historicist reading of the immediate post-Restoration era. This, in his view, is characterized by thought patterns, practices, and discourses that are not, as is often argued in "Whig" historiography , progressive; rather they are drawn towards restoration and reform, towards the search for lost origins and primitive forms of purity. This period in the aftermath of the Civil War is an orphaned age of imperfect filiation, where wise men do not recognize their own fathers; and Phiddian sees A Tale ofa Tub, preoccupied as it is with the search for unrecoverable origins and absent authority, as the emblematic text of the time. That he does not push this too far is doubtless because doing so would seduce him along the path of determinate meaning; but die cost is that his history is not closely enough tied to his textual reading. He takes, in any case, a less dialectical, more one-sided approach to history than he recommends us to take to textuality: and there is a tension here not fully resolved in the book. Although to describe the scope and intention of Swift's Parody is perhaps to give the impression of a narrow and limited endeavour (it does not cover Swift's writing after 1710 or any of his poetry), that is emphatically not the abiding impression the reader takes from the book. A Tale ofa Tub always threatens to consign to the ranks of mere "modem Criticks" those who have the temerity to write about it. Phiddian writes with unusual elegance and wit, and with a self-deprecating humour that serves to spare him so sudden a demotion. His special idiolect ("feral discourses," "swerves," "filiation") does its job effectively and the close textual encounters are very rewarding. "Robert Phiddian" is no absent author, however he might try to persuade us that "Jonathan Swift" is so! This is a strenuous and scrupulous attempt to describe and analyse the impression most readers of Swift's early prose writing gain, that there is something behind these works—a set of attitudes, opinions, beliefs—that proves impossibly difficult to formulate. The book's title begs one massive question. Are any of the works that Phiddian considers actually parodies? In the case of A Tale, Phiddian reads the text against other texts 114 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:1 by Locke, Vaughan, Dryden, and Marvell, but in no instance is he able to say with certainty...