The Melancholy of Anatomy: Voice and Theme in "A Tale of a Tub"

Author(s): Frank Kinahan

Source: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Apr., 1970), pp.
278-291
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27705852
Accessed: 15-11-2017 06:05 UTC

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 THE MELANCHOLY OF ANATOMY: VOICE AND
THEME IN A TALE OF A TUB

Frank Kinahan, Harvard University

I have been deeply moved by what I have heard. This is my con

tribution to show that I am satisfied, completely satisfied. . . .

I do not think you can explain him in that way.

?W. B. Yeats, The Words upon the Window-Pane

Jonathan Swift, who is always wiser than his critics, commented in the
Preface to A Tale of a Tub that "how to analyze the Tub, was a
Matter of difficulty" (p. 40).1 A prophetic remark: it was not until
1951 that Robert Elliott's essay on the Tale, with its concept of the
"central fictive character" of the ing?nu as the unifying force of the
work, pointed at last toward an underlying order in the Tale's seeming
chaos.2
The bulk of criticism since Elliott has accepted his insightful ob
servation, and at least some criticism has concerned itself with
sharpening what he said. Ronald Paulson, for instance, pinpoints
Elliott's ing?nu as "the Hack," a voice distinct from Swift's and dis
tinct, for that matter, from the voice of the author of the Author's
Apology.3 Such isolating of personae is instructive, certainly; yet I
wonder whether both Elliott and Paulson do not labor to some extent
under the same sort of delusion that preoccupies the Hack: the notion
that by naming or labeling a given thing or event you automatically
compass it, make it manageable, arrive defacto at an understanding of
the thing or event in question. Consider as an example the joy of the
1 This essay is based upon the Oxford edition of the Tale, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and
D. Nichol Smith. I have treated the Tale, the Battle, and the Discourse as one work
rather than three; the designation "Tale" is thus used to refer to any of the three sec
tions, rather than just to the first.
2 See Robert Elliott, "Swift's Tale of a Tub: An Essay in Problems of Structure,"
PMLA, Lxvi (1951), 441-55.
3 See Ronald Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift's "Tale of a Tub" (New Haven,
i960). I have used Paulson's term, "the Hack," to refer in general to the voice behind
each of the three sections; but I do not mean to give the impression that the voices of
the several sections are precisely the same. The "author" of the Discourse seems a
slightly different person from the author of the Tale, and the author of the Battle seems
very different from both of them. The reasons why I have not distinguished between
the various voices will I hope be clear from the opening pages of the paper.

278

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 The Melancholy of Anatomy 279

Hack when he finally manages to reduce the number of "oratorial

machines" to three. He does so, he says,
in imitation of that prudent Method observed by many other Philosophers
and great Clerks, whose chief Art in Division has been to grow fond of some
proper mystical Number, which their Imaginations have rendered Sacred, to a
Degree, that they force common Reason to find room for it in every part of
Nature; reducing, including, and adjusting every Genus and Species within
that Compass, by coupling some against their Wills, and banishing others at
any Rate. (p. 57)
Paulson's attempt to isolate the voices of the Tale suffers, I think,
from the same sort of reductionism, rather like trying to describe the
rapid unreeling of a cinematic collage by isolating a few of its frames.
It is in fact impossible to reduce the number of voices in the Tale to
three or four or fourteen, simply because to do so is to isolate them;
and the whole technique of the Tale revolves around the fact that its
several voices do not exist in isolation, that the lines between them
cannot be clearly delineated. Indeed, the voices exist only in terms of
their relation to each other: the voice of "Swift" reverberates off that
of "the Hack," the voice of the Hack reverberates off that of the
"historian" of the Battle, and so on, and on, and on. What we have to
deal with, in short, is a series of echoes which in itself constitutes a
whole new set of "voices." Perhaps the clearest example is that of the
reverberations between the voice of Swift and that of his Hack.
It is clear that only an intelligence as great as Swift's could create a
stupidity as ingenious as that of the Hack. Let me put it otherwise and
say that the Hack says very stupid things in a very intelligent way.
This is the Digression on Madness:
what Man in the natural State; or Course of Thinking, did ever conceive it in
his Power, to reduce the Notions of all Mankind, exactly to the same Length,
and Breadth, and Heighth of his own? Yet this is the first humble and civil
Design of all Innovators in the Empire of Reason, (pp. 166-67)

If we wish to say that the voice in those lines is that of Swift, then
we must contradict?at least, greatly qualify?our notion that the
voice of the Tale is that of the Hack. And if we wish to say that it is
the Hack speaking here, we can do so only by ignoring what the lines
themselves say. Were the Hack himself to analyze them, he would say
that they defined the eclectic and all-encompassing kind of genius that
he himself possessed; he says of his own work that "the Judicious
Reader shall find nothing neglected here, that can be of Use upon any
Emergency of Life" (p. 129). But the lines are too clearly not a d?fini

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28o Kinahan

tion of genius. The answer to the rhetorical question is too plainly that
no man in his natural state would claim to have systematized the
universe, that it is madness to try to do so. The lines define genius for
the Hack; but for Swift the same lines define madness. It would seem a
thankless task to try to determine which of the two is actually speak
ing, for in fact they are both speaking at the same time. The voices
bounce off each other and back, and their interaction produces an echo
which is a voice in its own right. And a voice which will not lend itself
to labels; we can isolate the voice of "Swift" and we can isolate the
voice of the "Hack," but we cannot expect simply to add them up and
hope that the sum is exactly equivalent to the tension between the two
of them. An echo may depend for its existence upon the voices that
called it forth; but it does not, in the last analysis, sound the way those
voices sounded.
Let me take one other example. The voice of the Author's Apology
is generally assumed to be that of Swift himself; at least, that of some
one "other" than the Hack. And the voice does seem sincere; it speaks
of the author of the Tale as having written it when he was still
young, his Invention at the Height, and his Reading fresh in his Head. By the
assistance of some Thinking, and much Conversation, he had endeavor'd to
Strip himself of as many real Prejudices as he could; I say real ones, because
under the Notion of Prejudices, he knew to what dangerous Heights some
Men have proceeded, (p. 4)
Well and good. We then begin the Tale, and are having our fun at the
Hack's expense. At least, it seems like the Hack; and yet, slowly, as
we read, there begins to dawn the disquieting impression that some
how we have heard it all before. This is the voice of the Hack at the
end of Section VIII:
For, I think it one of the greatest, and best of human Actions, to remove
Prejudices, and place Things in their truest and fairest Light; which I there
fore boldly undertake without any Regards of my own, beside the Conscience,
the Honour, and the Thanks, (p. 161)

It seems to me oversimple to dismiss the second statement as merely

another instance of the Hack's wrong-headedness. Clearly, one would
say, the first voice is that of Swift, and he is speaking of "real" preju
dices and a "real" attempt to rid himself of them; and clearly, the
second voice is that of the Hack, and he is making a fool of himself by
claiming to strip away prejudices when in fact he is piling them on.
But it is not really all that clear; again, because the two statements
exist in a state of interaction rather than isolation. The fact that the

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 The Melancholy of Anatomy 281

prejudiced "Hack" could say such a thing begins to revamp our

earlier image of the unprejudiced "Author"; the fact that a man of the
Author's intelligence could say such a thing calls into doubt our idea
that the Hack is someone of obvious stupidity. The lines between the
two begin to blur. Labels no longer suffice. The Hack is not merely a
Hack, the Author not merely an Author; there is a middle ground on
which they meet, an echo that twines their voices together. This echo
is not a "voice" in its own right, if only because it has no existence
which is properly and independently its own; but it is eloquent all the
same. It is telling us that we can no more draw a hard and fast dis
tinction between voice and voice than we can between those in Bedlam
and those on the outside, that the assigning of labels is a work more
proper to the Hack and most responsible for his madness. It tells us
this quietly, working as does a silence in the midst of music, the sort of
silence that comprises a music all its own.
The voices, then, shade off into each other. So do the themes they
announce. In general, those themes amount to Swift's indictment on
several counts of the age in which he lived; and the most significant of
his charges is solipsism.
The moderns that Swift describes and takes to task have cut them
selves off from the wisdom of any age but their own. The hacks hired
by the bookseller to write the dedication to Lord Sommers purport to
have a knowledge of antiquity; but they return to him a group of
panegyrics which seem to have been simply "stolefn] and transcribed
. . . from the universal Report of Mankind" (p. 25). The Hack himself
demonstrates a genuinely encyclopedic knowledge of the classics, but
it is purely quantitative; his hilarious exegeses make it clear that his
knowledge of the texts he handles is in direct inverse proportion to his
understanding of them. Richard Bentley becomes the type of the
typical modern in the Battle, his greatest error stemming from his
feeling that a liking for the moderns can only be demonstrated by a
disregard of the classics. Bentley as librarian:
The Guardian of the Regal Library, a Person of great Valor, but chiefly
reknowned for his Humanity, had been a fierce Champion for the Modems,
and in an Engagement upon Parnassus, had vowed, with his own Hands, to
knock down two of the Antient chiefs, who guarded a small Pass on the su
perior Rock; but endeavouring to climb up, was cruelly obstructed by his own
unhappy Weight, and tendency towards his Center. . . . (pp. 224-25)

Such self-inflicted severing of themselves from the great works of

the past necessarily marks the moderns with certain unsavory charac

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282 Kinahan

ter traits. Perhaps the least forgivable of these is that the sense of self
importance that derives from being the only wits that ever existed
renders them a singularly humorless lot. The Hack writes "without
one grain of Satyr intermixt" (p. 48), a statement true enough from the
point of view of his persona. The Spider, symbolic of the moderns,
identifies with dirt and poison rather than sweetness and light. And we
might borrow a page from Swift's own book and observe that the de
scription of Bentley cited above makes it plain that he fell by the
Force of Gravity.
Of greater importance than their lack of humor is the fact that
their solipsism forces the moderns into a sort of intellectual incest, a
state in which they find themselves feeding off and subsisting on either
their fellows or themselves; indeed, the shortness of the modern
memory, "a Deficiency to which a true Modern cannot but of Neces
sity be a little subject" (pp. 134-35), makes any other way of life
impossible. On the level of religion, we find Peter generating his theol
ogy and liturgy entirely out of his own invention; and, as expected, his
system has no reference to anything outside the isolated madness of his
own mind. Jack walks around town with his eyes closed and blames
his consequent stumblings on predestination rather than on the fact
that he has closed himself off from the rest of the world and the world
is paying him back in kind. And the "Spiritual Mechanists" described
in the Discourse conduct their services
as follows. They violently strain their Eye balls inward, half closing the Lids;
Then as they sit, they are in a perpetual Motion of See-Saw, making long
Hums at proper Periods, and continuing the Sound at equal Height, chusing
their Time in those Intermissions, while the Preacher is at Ebb. (p. 271)

Their situation is almost exactly parallel to that of Peter and of Jack;

and there is a remarkable bit of anticipation on Swift's part in his
description of their see-saw motion, which only within the past few
years has been conjectured by psychologists to be symptomatic of a
wish to shelter from the world by retreating to the womb.4
On the level of learning, the second target of the Tale's satire, we
find the moderns similarly cut off from any knowledge other than their
own or that of their contemporaries. Swift hints at the same quality of
incest I mentioned earlier in his description of the goddess Criticism,
who "dwelt on the Top of a snowy Mountain in Nova Zembla. ... At
her right Hand sat Ignorance, her Father and Husband, blind with

4 See, for instance, Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (New York, 1967).

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 The Melancholy of Anatomy 283

Age" (p. 240). Criticism, in fact, is incapable of even existing on its

own; it survives only by a sort of symbiosis with the work of others,
so much so that it becomes almost interchangeable with that work: as
the Hack has it,
the Idea's of the Authors have been altogether conversant, and taken up with
the Faults and Blemishes, and Oversights, and Mistakes of other Writers; and
let the subject treated on be whatever it will, their Imaginations are so
entirely possess'd and replete with the Defects of other Pens, that the very
Quintessence of what is bad, does of necessity distill into their own. (p. 95)

"Original" writing does not fare much better. Even the Hack acknowl
edges the freeloading tendencies of his fellow scribblers, though he
apparently fails to recognize the lack of creativity that such borrowing
is symptomatic of:
There is in this famous Island of Britain a certain paultry Scribbler, very
voluminous, whose Character the Reader cannot wholly be a Stranger to. He
deals in a pernicious Kind of Writings, called Second Parts, and usually passes
under the Name of The Author of the First. I easily foresee, that as soon as I
lay down my Pen, this nimble Operator will have stole it. (p. 183)

Nor is the Scribbler alone. The whole age is concerned with writing
books that continue other books, or are like other books (the author of
the Discourse prowls bookstores for three days to find a fashionable
form to express his fancy) ; or books that are about other books, as the
Hack explains it:
This will stand as an uncontestable Argument, that our Modern Wits are not
to reckon upon the Infinity of Matter, for a constant Supply. What remains
therefore, but that our last Recourse must be had to large Indexes, and little
Compendiums; Quotations must be plentifully gathered, and bookt in Al
phabet; To this End, tho' Authors need be little consulted, yet Crilicks, and
Commentators, and Lexicons carefully must. (pp. 147-48)

Such devotion to literature rather than life takes its necessary toll.
While the Hack is off "perusing some hundreds of Prefaces" (p. 45),
whatever reference points his sickening mind might still have found in
the real world are slowly slipping away. And his fellow writers share
his fate. Even an original work of literature places life at a certain
remove, holds up an intellect other than our own between ourselves
and whatever aspects of reality the work takes as theme. An imitation
of literature places the world still further away. And the curious milieu
of the Hack, with its imitations of imitations, its books about books, is
part of a process of involution so extreme that whatever "reality" its
inhabitants apprehend is not merely distanced but inverted. The

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 284 Kinahan
moderns become the fathers of the ancients. Jack closes his eyes so
that he may see better. The lines between Bedlam and the "sane"
world break down.
The inhabitants of Bedlam, in fact, possess all the most striking
characteristics of the moderns. The madman who is "eternally talking,
sputtering, gaping, bawling, in a Sound without Period or Article"
(p. 176) makes the same sort of sound-without-sense as the Aeolists,
for whom words are but wind and a belch is the sign of inspiration; and
the same sort of sound as the Spiritual Mechanists, who order their
words in whatever way they want so long as they preserve the proper
cadence. The description of "One that has forgot the common Meaning
of Words, but [is] an admirable Retainer of the Sound" (p. 178) applies
not to the Aeolists, as we might expect, but to another of the lunatics.
There is another madman, "a surley, gloomy, nasty, slovenly Mortal,
raking in his own Dung, and dabling in his Urine. The best Part of his
Diet, is the Reversion of his own Ordure, which exspiring into Steams,
whirls perpetually about, and at last reinfunds" (p. 178). But those
lines might also apply to the Spider, who lives in filth, who acknowl
edges nothing but what he spins out of himself, who "turns all into
Excrement and Venom" (p. 232). They might also apply to the "In
novators in the Empire of Reason," who acquire their imaginations by
the uPhaenomenon of Vapours, ascending from the lower Faculties to
over-shadow the Brain, and thence distilling into Conceptions" (p.
167). And they might also apply to the modern writers, content to
survive on the strength of their own literary ordure, involuted, solip
sistic.
That solipsism has one last consequence, the most significant and
most terrifying of all. It should be plain by now that all the moderns,
the "sane" and "insane" alike, live in their own little worlds, and it is
precisely the smallness of those worlds that terrifies: for if the universe
exists only and entirely in the mind of the individual, then the indivi
dual may indeed be tempted to think that he can arrive at a total
knowledge and understanding of the universe. G. K. Chesterton put it
well, albeit in a slightly different context:
Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much
madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who
tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only
some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And
though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he
saw no creature as wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is
simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to

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 The Melancholy of Anatomy 285

cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. ... To accept everything is an
exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation
and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his
head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his
head. And it is his head that splits.5

The last lines in particular come very close to an exact description of

the Hack's own statement of intent. He tells us that his work is one
"wherein I have now altogether circumscribed my Thoughts and my
Studies" (p. 69), that his "Resolutions are, to circumscribe within
this Discourse the whole Stock of Matter I have been so many Years
providing" (p. 184). And we have already noted his identification of
himself with the great reasoners who "reduce the Notions of all
Mankind, exactly to the same Length, and Breadth, and Heighth of
[their] own." The words "reduce" and "compass" are the motifs to
the Hack's theme. He has been wandering "so wide a Compass"
(p. 188) in his work; he will describe things "as graphically as it is
possible, and as far as Notions of that Height and Latitude can be
brought within the Compass of a Pen" (p. 189). Peter and Jack are
identified with the same sort of reductionism. Jack arrives at some of
his most ridiculous conclusions precisely because "his common Talk
and Conversation, ran wholly in the Phrase of his Will, and he cir
cumscribed the utmost of his Eloquence within that Compass, not
daring to let slip a Syllable without Authority from thence" (p. 191).
And since the "Phrenzy and the Spleen" of both Jack and Peter have
"the same Foundation, we may look upon them as two Pair of Com
passes, equally extended, and the fixed Foot of each, remaining in the
same Center; which, tho' moving contrary Ways at first, will be sure
to encounter somewhere or other in the Circumference" (p. 199) ?
an especially nice bit of irony, since Donne's lovers stay happily
together in spite of distance, whereas Swift's theologians meet often
and sadly in spite of themselves.
Were the belief that the universe is reducible confined to Peter,
Jack, and the Hack, we might still find room for sanity in the world
that Swift describes. But the belief is common property. W. B. Yeats
went so far as to say that it was not Swift, but the intellect itself that
was mad;6 and the fact that virtually every character in the Tale

5 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York, ioioj, pp. 28-29.

6 Spoken by John Corbet in W. B. Yeats's The Words upon the Window-Pane. A
late Yeatsian play (1934), it deals with a seance held in a house that, according to
legend, once belonged to Swift's Stella. The participants in the seance attempt to con

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 286 Kinahan

considers the very reducible universe of his own mind the only universe
that exists seems to bear out his observation. Since each character feels
this way, the general conclusion of all the characters is that knowledge
has become a closed set:
Now the Method of growing Wise, Learned, and Sublime, having become so
regular an Affair, and so established in all its Forms; the Number of Writers
must needs have encreased accordingly, and to a Pitch that has made it of
absolute Necessity for them to interfere continually with each other. Besides,
it is reckoned, that there is not at this present, a sufficient Quantity of new
Matter left in Nature, to furnish and adorn any one particular Subject to the
Extent of a Volume. This I am told by a very skillful Computer, who hath
given a full Demonstration of it from Rules of Arithmetick. (p. 146)

Their view, then, is that both the world and our concepts of it are
givens, brought to final flowering and frozen there, incontrovertible
once and for all. Since nothing can be added to the world's body of
knowledge, there is no sense in looking at "Nature," the world; in
deed, the only thing left to examine is the body of knowledge itself;
the only work that remains to the mind is the breakdown and analysis
of what we already know.
And the moderns set about the task with a vengeance. Their
method of analysis is, to use a bad pun, a posteriori. Since everything
is known, nothing remains "but that our last Recourse must be had to
large Indexes, and little Compendiums" (p. 147). The "Army of the
Sciences" in particular has been reduced to a series of "Systems and
Abstracts, in which the Modern Fathers of Learning, like prudent
Usurers, spent their Sweat for the Ease of Us their Children" (pp.
145-46). And this process of systematization does not apply merely to
knowledge; the cast of the modern mind is such that it will not be
content until everything has been broken down into manageable
entities. Spoken words become "Bodies of much Weight and Gravity,"
an idea which itself fragments what should be the flow of speech into
a simple rapid succession of objects to be divided up among the
audience: "every one carries home a Share, and little or nothing is
jure up the spirits of Swift, Stella, and Vanessa. Corbet's statement is in accord with
Yeats's belief that Swift's "savage indignation" was the exact antithesis of the insane
ratiocinations of the early eighteenth-century intellect. Yeats elsewhere (in his poem
"The Seven Sages," 1932; characterizes that intellect as
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard's eye . . .
?to my mind a brilliantly accurate description of the intellect of the Hack.

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 The Melancholy of Anatomy 287

lost" (pp. 60-61). The written word is drawn and quartered ? la

Lancelot Andrewes; the brothers divide the words of the will into
syllables, then into letters; and then they divide the letters into
"ancient" letters and "modern" letters. Crowds are reduced to in
dividuals; harmony, says the Discourse, is "so far from being found
between any two Conventicles among Us, that it is in vain to expect it
between any two Heads in the same" (p. 270). The human brain is
only "a Crowd of little Animals," and "all Invention is formed by the
Morsure of two or more of these Animals, upon certain capillary
Nerves" (p. 277); thought, in short, is happenstance, random, frag
mented whether we wish it or not. In light of this it was perhaps in
evitable that the Tale took on the form that it did, alternating between
narrative and digression, yielding on all but the thematic level the
impression that its principle of order is simple happenstance, ran
domness, fragmentation.
Finally, time itself is broken down, converted from constant flow
to a number of more or less isolated moments. The moderns do not
merely lack a sense of what went before; they lack a sense of what goes
either before or after. Speaking of wit, the Hack says that "the
Moderns have artfully fixed this Mercury, and reduced it to the
Circumstances of Time, Place and Person. Such a jest there is, that
will not pass out of Covent-Garden; and such a one, that is no where
intelligible but at Hide-Park Corner" (p. 43). It requires talent to keep
one's personality flexible, and "it is therefore a Point of the nicest
Conduct to distinguish and adapt this noble Talent, with respect to
the Differences of Persons and of Times" (p. 168). The Bookseller tells
the Hack that his work "would never take, but after a long Vacation,
and then only, in case it should happen to be a hard Year for Turnips"
(p. 206-207). And the Hack in turn tells "Prince Posterity" that "I
profess to Your Highness, in the Integrity of my Heart, that what I am
going to say is literally true this Minute I am writing" (p. 36).
Much of this is pure play, of course, as in the case of the hard year
for turnips; and some of it is meant to drive home the same solipsism
I mentioned earlier?the treatment of time, for instance. But to root
up the real intent behind all this imagery of fragmentation I think we
must go back to the notion of the moderns that the corpus of learning
is already complete. In such a situation, again, they have no choice
but to break down what is already known, to systematize; and they
do so primarily with the hope of establishing a sort of order. Their
motives are largely mercenary, to be sure; they break down the will

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 288 Kinahan

that they may dress up their coats, create systems and abstracts out
of existing knowledge in hopes of becoming educated without having
to work at it. But they are aiming toward a sort of order all the same;
and the inescapable impression is that they are acting in a way I
mentioned earlier as characteristic of the Hack: trying to rescue things
and events from a flux that their limited intelligences cannot com
prehend, trying to pin things down long enough for them to become
comprehensible, trying to "fix" things by naming them. The body of
knowledge cannot be fully understood by anyone; but the reduction
of that body to indexes and compendiums gives the impression that it
is, after all, manageable, that it can be circumscribed by the individual
intellect. We do not really know what makes the mind work as it does;
but by naming the brain a crowd of little animals we can perhaps
delude ourselves into thinking that we understand. The Hack is
bewildered and frightened by the destructiveness of time, that
"universal Ruin"; but by aiming his writings only at a particular
time and place, at a milieu he thinks he understands, he can make
himself secure that it will be well received by people like him, can fool
himself into thinking that he has rescued his work from the winnow of
time and good taste. In a sense, he has stopped time by naming it,
has rescued himself and his work from flux and placed himself squarely
?and securely?in the month of August 1697. He uses clich? in much
the same way. There would be few books, he says, were it not for
ua rainy Day, a drunken Vigil, a Fit of the Spleen, a Course of Physick"
(p. 183). The clich?s establish his role, "fix" him as a writer; clich?,
moreover, tends of its nature to fix things by imprisoning us in our
preconceptions, by giving us the feeling that this at least we under
stand: one writes because it's a rainy day.
Needless to say, the moderns never really succeed in arriving at
any real understanding by way of imposing their brand of "order" on
the world. And the basic reason why they do not seems to be that a
schema necessarily points toward a partial knowledge, lays bare the
skeleton while ignoring the flesh and insides. There is a delightfully
wacky kind of coherence in the formulation of the philosophy of the
worshippers of clothes:

Others of these Professors, though agreeing in the main System, were yet
more refined upon certain Branches of it; and held that Man was an Animal
compounded of two Dresses, the Natural and the Celestial Suit, which were the
Body and the Soul: That the Soul was the outward, and the Body the inward
Cloathing; that the latter was ex traduce; but the former of daily Creation and

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 The Melancholy of Anatomy 289

Circumfusion. This last they proved by Scripture, because, in Them we Live,

and Move, and have our Being: As likewise by Philosophy, because they are All
in All, and All in every Part. (pp. 79-80)

The professors gain their point, supply their system with the support
of an abstract formulation; but they do so at the expense of our in
sides. If Scripture and philosophy force us to the conclusion that our
souls are on the outside, then plain common sense brings us to the
conclusion that our insides must be empty. The image is reformulated
and reinforced in the Hack's analysis of human nature:
To this End, I have some Time since, with a World of Pains and Art, dis
sected the Carcass of Humane Nature, and read many useful lectures upon the
several Parts, both Containing and Contained; till at last it smelt so strong, I
could preserve it no longer. Upon which, I have been at a great Expence to fit
up all the Bones with exact Contexture, and in due Symmetry; so that I am
ready to shew a very compleat Anatomy thereof to all curious Gentlemen and
others, (p. 123)

The metaphors are moving at this point in a direction that has

echoes throughout the three parts of the Tale. When the Hack praises
the division of knowledge into systems, abstracts, and indexes, what
he is really doing is describing other sorts of skeletons. The moderns
seem to themselves to be moving through ordering toward knowledge;
but what they are in fact doing is rendering knowledge impossible by
emptying out the objects of knowledge. The Hack's preoccupation
with numbers is symptomatic of the same tendency; numbers, as
he uses them, work like small systems, limiting, fixing, yielding cer
tainty. It is hilariously absurd to say that there are 9743 wits in
England; but it gives the Hack a handle, a still point in his turning
world. And mathematical systems, which, however coherent, are but
representations of the real world, are fastened on by the Hack as
though the systems themselves were real and life itself but a mirror of
them: he will not look into nature for knowledge, he says, because
there is no "new Matter" there to examine; "This I am told by a very
skillful Computer, who hath given a full Demonstration of it from
Rules of Arithmetick" (p. 146). The Hack should perhaps not be too
harshly blamed for this particular viewpoint. His error is a thoroughly
human one, part of the quest for certainty that we all share in to an
extent. "When we consider," says Bergson,
the admirable order of mathematics, the perfect agreement of the objects it
deals with, the immanent logic in numbers and figures, our certainty of al
ways getting the same conclusion, however diverse and complex our reasonings

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290 Kinahan
on the same subject, we hesitate to see in properties apparently so positive a
system of negations, the absence rather than the presence of a true reality.7

It is this same absence of true reality that the Hack fails to see. By
placing a mathematical system between himself and the real world,
he empties the world of its true content by isolating and systematizing
certain elements of reality and then accepting them whole hog as a
true and total picture of things as they actually are.
Images of emptiness become the central metaphors for religion as
well. The complicated theology of the Aeolists, with its central prem
ise that wind is the "ruling element" of the world, leads them into a
liturgy still more complicated and impossibly strange. Like the critics
in Section VII, the Aeolists derive their "inspiration" via "what comes
from Behind" (p. 145). Their priests stand in barrels full of air, which
is pumped into them at one end and emerges as belches at the other:
air into air into air, a kind of continuum of vacuity. In like fashion,
the Spiritual Mechanists are inspired by flatulence, air passing from
the rectum to the head and emerging from the mouth, appropriately
enough, as "Sounds inarticulate" (p. 279). And Jack's "inner light"
is still another substitute for real substance, leaving him emptied out,
making "his Head appear in a dark Night, like the Scull of an Ass,
wherein a roguish Boy hath conveyed a Farthing Candle" (p. 192).
The moderns, then, have placed themselves in a bad situation, in
fact a universal pickle. They have destroyed content by abstracting
it, have caused chaos by attempting to impose order. They are left
in the curious position of having emptied the guts from the body and
then wondering why it rattles when they shake it. Seen in this light, it
is not really surprising that they turn toward externals, outsides, since
they actually have no other way to turn. Peter, Jack, and even Martin
idolize the trappings on their coats, and not the things that they are
emblems of. The various religions and sects replace real spirituality
with a body-oriented liturgy. The tailor deified by the worshippers of
clothing sits "on a Superficies, with his Legs interwoven under him"
(p. 76); the work of a critic is like a mirror made of brass, which,
"when it is skilfully burnished, will cast Reflections from its own
Superficies" (p. 103); the wise man is "He that can with Epicurus
content his Ideas with the Films and Images that fly off upon his
Senses from the Superficies of Things" (p. 174). The Hack puts it
best, in his definition of happiness: "That it is a perpetual Possession of

7 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York, 1911), p. 208.

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 The Melancholy of Anatomy 291

being well Deceived," of living in a fiction; for "if it were not for the
Assistance of Artificial Mediums, false Lights, refracted Angles,
Varnish, and Tinsel; there would be a mighty Level in the Felicity and
Enjoyments of Mortal Men" (p. 172). The Hack is really forced into
his idealization of "superficies," for his own mind and that of his age
have left him only superficies to idealize. "So far preferable," he says,
is that Wisdom, which converses about the Surface, to that pretended
Philosophy which enters into the Depth of Things, and then comes gravely
back with Informations and Discoveries, that in the inside they are good for
nothing, (p. 173)

The Hack's own work bears out his objection to "all such ex
pensive Anatomy" (p. 173); he himself merely skims the surface. He
tells us frequently that he is on the verge of coming to grips with his
topic: "After so wide a Compass as I have wandred, I do now gladly
overtake, and close in with my Subject" (p. 188). But in fact he never
does. The various lacunae in the Tale are funny simply as parody,
but they also point toward a deeper truth: that every time the Hack
confronts the possibility of uncovering a real truth or arriving at a
deeper understanding, every time he has a chance to "dig out the fox"
or "crack the nut," he shies away. The analysis of the nature of good
and evil in the Discourse goes begging to a group of asterisks, and it
could not be otherwise. The Hack has placed himself on a level of
abstraction and fantasy so great that he can no longer recognize
reality, let alone come to terms with it; and his work pays the price.
It is no accident that in the last chapter of his book he begins "to
write upon Nothing" (p. 208) ; for this is actually what he has been
doing all along. His Tale is void of any content other than that of his
own mind; and that mind, as I mentioned above, always?and
only?skims the surface. We are told at the start of the Tale that the
book is a tub because it has been thrown out, as a tub is to whales, to
the wits of the kingdom to divert them from using Hobbes's Leviathan
as a weapon with which they might toss and sport with the Common
wealth. But that is not the only reason: in the last analysis, the Tale
is like a tub because, like a tub, it is void of content, empty.

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