Swif & Joyce & Scatalogicals

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 no word from you here about joyce, who not only made nora wear her panties a 
 little longer than recommended in your handbook of modern hygiene, but - & 
 that's of course more important here - put all these scatological references  
 into his (later) texts. some critics, just take another look at nabokov's essay 
 on ulysses, obviously were turned-off by that extensive expression of a 
 personal obsession. i, however, do not agree with those judgements. this shitty 
 shit jj kicks is among the things making his art true. 

kfl



> flaherty 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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