10
PARTISAN REVIEW
tive dramatization, traditional style, taste-all these are channels into
which the writer must let his anguish flow. And the denser
his
literary
situation, the more he is surrounded by a compact and articulate
tradition, the more chances he can take in casting himself adrift. But
whatever Swift's advantages in literary and moral milieu, we cannot
forget that he himself lived to write
his
own epitaph and in
this
final
summing-up had the last word on the once laughter-loving Dean. And
it is just
his
saeva indignatio-the
mad wrath which, as he said to
Delany, did "eat his flesh and consume
his
spirits"-that establishes
the deeper authenticity of
Gulliver
which separates it from any other
production of eighteenth-century wit. He himself as Gulliver towers
over his Lilliputian enemies, and flees from the disgusting humans
into the quiet
stahl~
of the horses. How far his madness had already
taken him, he could scarcely have guessed, for
it
had unconsciously
carried him, an unquestioning Christian, for the moment outside
Christianity: the rational and tranquil Houyhnhnms do not need
a Messiah's blood and an historically revealed religion in order to be
saved, while the Yahoos could not possibly be redeemed by any
savior. Swift might not have gone mad after writing
Gulliver,
but
much of the power of that book comes from the fact that he was
already on the road.
Once a writer imposes his greatness on us he imposes his figure
totally, and we then read every scrap and scribble against the whole,
and we will not find it strange that Joyce should invoke even the
scrawling of the Earwicker twin as part of the image of Everymanthe–
writer. The man who wrote the charming prattle of the
journal to
Stella
is the same who comes to howl at bay before the human race.
In his life he made two bluestockings love him desperately (a signifi–
cant choice this, that they should be bluestockings; but one, to
his
surprise, turned out, as sometimes happens, a very passionate blue–
stocking); and one he loved all his life long. In the simple
Prayers
for Stella,
sublimating, he gropes, touches, fondles her in God. What
happened beyond this we do not know. But we need no very fanciful
imagination to guess the frustration which produces that mingled
disgust and fascination at the biology of the female body. He did
more, however, than release this into a few scatological verses about
milady at and on her toilet; he was able to project his frustration
and rage into the helpless .Irish face about him, the insouciant Saxon
face, churchmen, bishops, Lord Mayors, quacks, and pedants; "the
corruptions and villainies of men in power"; and through these into a
total vision of the human condition.
