ABSTRACT

An enduring preoccupation of Jonathan Swift's writing is the attempt to find an acceptable relationship between words and their objects. Scriblerian satire was a harder-hitting and more muscular attempt to distinguish the chaff from the bran of contemporary learning. This perhaps underestimates the extent of Scriblerian equivocation over allegory and pun. Scriblerian satire foregrounds instances of writing where sub-literary effusions are directly exchanged for bread. Such writings call attention to their own materiality because they can be reduced, without residue, to the paper they are printed on. Scriblerian writing reinscribes the Cartesian dualism by giving to some writers a monopoly over spirituality, taste, moral worth, politeness, and refinement, whereas the productions of others are condemned to the realm of the material. Study of Scriblerian texts helps us to understand the gradually forming ideology of authorship that made poetic autobiography an imperative by the 1730s. Swift's poetic autobiography owes less to Scriblerian writing for its precise lineaments.