Swif & Joyce & Scatalogicals

[Terrance]

Terrance schrieb:

>  Swift was not mad, was not in love with death
> or 
> excrement.



    james joyce was "in love with excrement"; does this
damage his art? 

 kfl





I guess we can't talk, but have to resort to this. When I
mentioned that Swift was not in love with Death and shit,
Kai turned my post against me, a tricj he seems to picking
up from jbor, so here is a bit of what I post about Swift: 

The rest is in the archives, be sure to search under Swift
and not shit, Swift will return only 62 posts, most of them
mine, shit will return a few thousand, most of them shit. 

Why should I bother? Why should Dave Monroe bother? We know
why jbor bothers, he likes to bother. 



I've mentioned the strange case of Mr. Swift several times.
For shits and grins, here is a portion of Louis A. Landa's
Introduction to Gulliver's Travels. 

Biography and criticism have reciprocal influences; and the 
conception of Swift as a man has been greatly influenced by
the criticism of Gulliver's Travels. The masterpiece became
the man. The book became an ethical or psychological case
history, or both, of its author in which the presumed
intolerable misanthropy of Part IV, its debasement of
humankind, showed -as Swift's first biographer maintained
that Swift himself was the degenerate Yahoo he had so
infamously depicted as representative of man. Other
commentators of the later eighteenth century took a similar
high moral line. 

A man who could thus libel human nature must be reflecting,
it seemed, his own moral deformity and defiled imagination.
Inevitably, and unconsciously, the degraded nature of the
author had a subtle influence on literary judgment. The
ethical culpability of the writer lent strength to the view
that the Fourth Voyage is an artistic failure, as though a
Buddhist should deny the literary worth of Dante's Divine
Comedy or Milton's Paradise Lost because they are
doctrinally unsound. Yet it
ought to be said to the honor of the eighteenth-century
commentators
that they paid the author of Gulliver's Travels the
compliment of
believing him a sane man. It remained for the
nineteenth-century critics
to take a new tack and elaborate a less defensible charge.
Though
they readily accepted the view that Part IV could be
explained in terms of a depraved author, they added that it
might well be explained
in terms of a mad one. Early in the century Sir Walter
Scott,
repelled by "this horrible outline of mankind degraded to a
bestial state," thought it must be the result of "of the
first impressions of...incipient mental disease." The"
theory of malignancy was supplemented by the theory of
lunacy. It was then only a step to Thackeray's advice to his
audience, when he was lecturing on the eighteenth century
humorists, that Part IV should not be read. Pass over it, he
counseled
his hearers and hoot its author for -this portion of the
book -"filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging,
obscene." Similarly Edmund Gosse, a product of the second
half of the nineteenth century, whose prolific criticism
spanned the Victorian period and the first three
decades of the twentieth century, found evidence of a
diseased brain in the Fourth Voyage, which banished it from
decent
households. It is not surprising that in our century the
psychoanalysts
have seized on so attractive a subject as Swift and now we
find Gulliver
explained in terms of neuroses and complexes. Witness these
words from
The Psychoanalytic Review ( 1942) : Gulliver's Travels "may
be
viewed as a neurotic fantasy with coprophilia as its main
content." 

" It furnishes abundant evidence of the neurotic make up of
its author and discloses in him a  number of perverse trends
indicative of
fixation at the anal sadistic stage of libidinal
development. Most
conspicuous among those perverse trends is that of
coprophilia,
although the work furnishes evidence of numerous other
related neurotic characteristics accompanying the general
picture of
psychosexual infantilism and emotional immaturity."


By a diligent search the psychoanalyst was able to discover
"evidence" that the author was afflicted with a formidable
variety of
neurotic tendencies, including misogyny, mysophilia,
mysophobia,
voyeurism, exhibitionism, and compensatory potency
reactions. This
indeed is helpful! And it carries conviction in direct
proportion to
its help fulness. If the psychoanalytic approach seems to
have in it
an element of absurdity, we should recognize that it is only
a logical
extension of the disordered-intellect theory of the
nineteenth
century, the chief difference being that the terminology has
changed and that
the psychoanalyst frankly sees Gulliver's Travels as a case
history , whereas many earlier critics were presumably
making a literary
appraisal. Perhaps these crude and amateur attempts deserve
little
attention, yet they are a phenomenon that the serious reader
of Swift
can hardly ignore in the light of their recurrence and their
effectiveness in perpetuating myths. And they sometimes come
with persuasiveness and literary flavor, as in Aldoux
Huxley's essay on Swift in Do
What You Will ( 1929) where Huxley arrives at an amazingly
over-simplified explanation of Swift's genius: "Swift's
greatness," he
writes, "lies in the intensity, the almost insane violence,
of that 'hatred
of bowels' which is the essence of his misanthropy and which
underlies
the whole of his work." The critics who have relied on a
theory of
insanity or disordered intellect to explain Swift have
vitiated their
case by resorting to ex post facto reasoning. The failure of
Swift's
faculties towards the end of his life, some fifteen or
sixteen years
after the publication of Gulliver's Travels, has been seized
upon to
explain something the critics neither liked nor understood.
It
seemed to them valid to push his "insanity" back in time, to
look
retrospectively at the intolerable Fourth Voyage of
Gulliver, and to infer
that he must have been at least incipiently mad when he
wrote it.
Yet the same commentators who observe manifestations of a
disordered
intellect in Part IV have not thought to question the
intellect behind the Third Voyage, which we now know was
composed in point of
time after the Fourth. These same commentators have nothing
but praise for the vigor, the keenness, the sanity, and the
humanity of the mind that produced the Drapier's Letters,
the first of which
Swift was writing only a month after completing a draft of
Part IV of
Gulliver. This is not to deny that a central fact in Swift's
life and
his works is his pessimism. If we reject the extreme view
that his
life was compounded of bitter malignity, raging madness, and
black
misanthropy, or even the more moderate tradition that misery
and gloom
were pervasive in his daily existence, we still must grant
that
his pessimism was real and ample.



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