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To what extent do the texts you’ve read depend upon or problematize an understanding of narrative as “progress”?The problem of progress is, more precisely, the problem of its discontinuity. Progress is not a linear and unvarying process, it is an idea deployed in order to further certain ways of thinking and organising social relations. In this essay, I will explore the ways in which the ideology of progress is historically specific and can be contested, and the ways in which we can read those contestations.First, this essay will look at Kant’s definition of enlightenment, and ways in which we might seek to contextualise ‘progress’ within the eighteenth century as an active concept and discourse. Secondly, it will describe the ways in which the epistemological claims of that definition of progress are challenged by Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travels. The essay will then explore the differences between the way they challenge progress and, finally, argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature opens up a way of understanding this difference which should be further explored. In the short article “What is Enlightenment?” Kant offers us a motto which, for him, sums up the enlightenment: “Have the courage to use your own understanding”. This reflexive examination comes late in the decade (1784), after both Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Tristram Shandy (1759), but it does well to sum up a current of thought which we can roughly describe as beginning in the science of the 17th century and culminates in the French Revolution of 1789. As a result, we can take Kant as indicating, in retrospect, much of the tradition which forms both texts. Enlightenment is a process which moves from freedom to knowledge through the individual’s process of reason and thought, freed from constraining structures. The process of enlightenment has a clear final goal, a new form of objective knowledge and a rational understanding of the world. This proposition that we can start from a point of dark and move towards light by a binary form of progress is, at its most basic, an epistemological one. This binary form of movement (dark/light) means that essentially there is one trajectory established, the dominant form of thought which has to lead this transition. This is how enlightenment contributes to the creation of a single monolithic form of progress: a grand hegemonic movement of thought moving inexorably along that binary line from dark to light. Defining progress in this way, primarily through a discussion of enlightenment, allows us to locate it alongside a specific historical concept, rather than using progress as an ahistorical constant. The epistemology of progress has a specific formation, and it is this formation which the texts challenge – not a vague sense of modernity but a concrete pattern of claims about knowledge and knowing. The major challenge presented to narrative as a form of progress in both Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travels takes place via questions of knowledge. The enlightenment project, as understood via Kant, enshrines a number of major claims about knowledge, and by making these claims problematic both novels challenge the overall project. Firstly, Kant assumes that there is objective reality which can validate a truth, be understood through knowledge, and can be reached by rational a free thought. Second, it is claimed that there is a monadic individual subject who is capable of undergoing that process of enlightenment. These two underlying ideas are both contested by both texts. Gulliver’s Travels undermines the narrative structure which is meant to convey a form of knowledge, calling into question the forms and dominant organisations which guarantee and ensure progress through satire and mistrust. The idea of a rational approach of the objective is totally undermined by what Novak calls a breaking of the “fictional contract”CITATION Nov96 \p 74 \n \t \l 2057 (74). The expectation that Gulliver mediates the relationship between the reader and the text is undermined by his manifest unreliability, meaning that the supposedly straightforward referential purpose of language is made more complicated. Gulliver does not communicate the objective situation of the text to the reader, and the existence of an objective text beyond Gulliver’s own narration comes into question. Narration, rather than being the precondition of communication between text and reader, is made unreliable by Swift – to the point that narration seems to be the sum of the text itself. The mechanics of satire, as observed by Sullivan, deny Gulliver any consistency.At any given moment, Gulliver's "meaning" depends upon Swift's particular satiric target or intention. Gulliver, in other words, is not a novelistically consistent and developing character. To read him as such is to turn a blind eye to Swift's technique and to many of the satiric meanings Swift is striving to convey. CITATION Sul84 \p 500 \n \l 2057 (Houyhnhnms and Yahoos: From Technique to Meaning 500)The generic requirements of satire seem to problematize the idea of a narrator functioning to communicate and refer between reader and text. When the structure of narration itself begins to fall apart, the idea of attaining an objective reality through representational language becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Novak can argue that Gulliver never leaves home, and it is almost impossible to present a strong counter-argument, because there is no objective knowledge to reference the argument to. Swift uses Gulliver, at times quite overtly, to satirise a credulous reader: “some of them are so bold as to think my book of travels a mere fiction out of mine own brain, and have gone so far as to drop hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia.” Using fiction’s intermediate status as a puzzle with no objective reference (perhaps we could say literature as referring to utopia), Swift disrupts the claims of realism to create a text in parallel to reality, accessible through narration. The satirical elements of this disruption are inevitable, and best seen as Gulliver moves from a privileged position within literary realism to being the object of total ridicule.Several of this cursed brood getting hold of the branches behind, leaped up into the tree; from whence they began to discharge their excrements on my head: however, I escaped pretty well, by sticking close to the stem of the tree, but was almost stifled with the filth; which fell about me on every side.(169) By part 4 the narrative position is no longer a trusted intermediary, but an object of ridicule who is huddled under a tree whilst supernaturally athletic horses defecate on him from above. This spectacle of debasement leads into questions of subjectivity. Evidently the text is not only a satire on the representational demands paced on language, it is also a satire of the subject. As Novak argues, Gulliver becomes “a satiric imagine of the inflated status of the subject in modern fiction”. As an inflated subject, however, the question of Gulliver’s humanity or Yahoo-ity come to the fore. For Kant, humans given freedom of public reason become positive political actors, who contribute to a public sphere and the formation of politics through reason. The possibility of this form of humanity, however, is not a foregone conclusion within Gulliver’s Travels. Here the debates of the hard and soft school are particularly relevant: if humanity are, at best, debased Yahoos then the enlightenment fixation on the individual subject seems to be satirised, but if a positive image of humanity can be rescued from the text then it might yet be validated. But there is perhaps common ground to be found. After all, the enlightenment subject is judged by their ability to reason and participate in progress rather than overt moral worth. In this sense the quality of the human – as argued by either hard or soft school – comes second to Gulliver’s unreliability. If he cannot even sustain a narrative contract then how is he to be relied upon to think rationally? The fallibility of the human, however it is morally inflected, is what condemns enlightenment subject. In Tristram Shandy, the problems of knowledge are not exposed through a satire of narrative structure, but through the entire text itself. The creation and formation of structures, of works of art is actually all a way of proving the inability to attain knowledge. Soud’s argument about labyrinths in Tristram Shandy is a useful way into discussions of epistemology, particularly through his discussion of fortification. His understanding of fortification as a desire to impose order which results in the construction of immense complexity as a way of representing and codifying knowledge. Toby’s bowling green labyrinth is the artistic expression of a desire for order, what Melvyn New might see as the multitude organising the muddle:The world that Sterne represents may be a muddle as has been suggested, but it is peopled by multitudes (inside the book and holding the book) with brooms and pens, petites canulles and swords, diagrams and models and paradigms, all intent on tidying up the place, making it neat and clear.CITATION New92 \p 320 \n \l 2057 (Sterne and the Narrative of Determinatedness 320)However, the vital point New misses here, and which Sound identifies, is that the construction of labyrinths which attempt to simplify the muddle only causes the muddle to begin all over again. New’s attempt to move from an “epistemology of indeterminacy” to an “ontology of the human urge to speak the truth” (329) fails to understand that the attempts of elements within the fiction to produce coherence does not guarantee that the tendency of the text is towards determination. Attempts at determination can lead directly to indetermination. It is this dynamic which stops Toby reaching Namur, and that condemn him to be lost within the machinery of determination he has created. “His attempts to cut the knot become labyrinthine knots themselves” (Sound 406) and in this circular process the farce of enlightenment knowledge is made clear. The dominant challenge to progress, is that the act of progress cancels itself out. If Kant talks about enlightenment as jumping a ditch, Sterne suggests that every jump creates another ditch to be jumped, and as such the encounter with objective knowledge is forever suspended by the process of thought, organisation and fortification. Reason only seems to frustrate itself. the many perplexities he was in, arose out of the almost insurmountable difficulties he found in telling his story intelligibly, and giving such clear ideas of the differences and distinctions between the scarp and counterscarp,—the glacis and covered-way,—the half-moon and ravelin,—as to make his company fully comprehend where and what he was about.[…]What rendered the account of this affair the more intricate to my uncle Toby, was this,—that in the attack of the counterscarp, before the gate of St. Nicolas, extending itself from the bank of the Maes, quite up to the great water-stop,—the ground was cut and cross cut with such a multitude of dykes, drains, rivulets, and sluices, on all sides,—and he would get so sadly bewildered, and set fast amongst them, that frequently he could neither get backwards or forwards to save his life; and was oft-times obliged to give up the attack upon that very account only.Every act of explanation is also an act which makes the possibility of progress remote. This isn’t to say that the novel laments this lack – in fact, absolute knowledge is a distraction, removed from the praxis of living and creation which takes priority over it. The story of the attack is not rendered pointless by the fact that Toby has to cut it short due to his own confusion, it becomes more intricate due to its hesitations and incompleteness. There is a shift from the enlightenment focus on using language as an instrument to produce outcomes to valuing the act of storytelling for its inconclusive meanderings. Throughout Tristram Shandy we are told stories, read letters and involved in conversations which never reach a culmination, instead they have no fixed end and begin to merge. This is how languages is treated as autotelic rather than instrumental. If the act of leaping seems to only create another ditch, in a chain where reference never quite reaches its object, how does the enlightenment subject fare? Perhaps predictably, this dimension of progress is just as undermined as objective knowledge. Nietzsche’s comments on the novel are an interesting way into the affective reading experience: “So in the proper reader he arouses a feeling of uncertainty whether he be walking, lying, or standing, a feeling most closely akin to that of floating in the air”CITATION Nie11 \p 113 \n \l 2057 (Human All Too Human 113). This uncertainty is not only the loss of solid referents in the domain of objective knowledge, but also the disorientation of a collective assemblage. “Floating” is part of losing the denial of a singular coherent subjectivity which the novel engages in. Not only does the leap fail to reach the ground of objective knowledge, but the subject that begins the leap loses its coherence in the act of leaping. 'Tis a point settled,—and I mention it for the comfort of Confucius, who is apt to get entangled in telling a plain story—that provided he keeps along the line of his story,—he may go backwards and forwards as he will,—'tis still held to be no digression.This being premised, I take the benefit of the act of going backwards myself.(345)The fluidity of narrative doesn’t only mean that Tristram Shandy can contain narrative reversals, but also that subjects can be shuffled about and broken up almost at will. The playfulness with which Sterne breaks conventions and expectations challenges the notion of a singular subject that come into relationship with the world and with knowledge. The community of the text is a multitude of readers (some allowed to continue, some told to re-read, some addressed as critics) authors (Tristram himself but also the authors of numerous inserted texts) and characters (figures from stories within the text alongside the main characters themselves). They connect and enmesh in a chaotic organisation which ruptures any structure of coherence – be it a fortress, a Tristapedia, an enlightenment subject or a singular critical hermeneutic. This subjectivity approximately describes the Rhizomial structure, as explored by Deleuze and Guattari: “There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and the field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders” CITATION Del13 \p 24 \n \l 2057 (A Thousand Plateaus 24).This similarity is a way into a comparison of the two texts. In particular, it seems useful to bring them into relation with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature in order to further explore their specifics and the differences between them. The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation. We might well say that minor no longer designated any specific literature but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great(or established) literature.CITATION Del86 \p 18 \n \l 2057 (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 18) Gulliver’s Travels promotes no collective position against progress. It is savagely negative about the capacity of the individual to be a reliable and rational literary construct, but it is not interested in creating an alternative community. Therefore whilst it is not an endorsement of the individual, it promotes not collective assemblage in its place. Tristram Shandy, however, does have a reference to collective enunciation through intersubjectivity. It is this division between a satirical major literature and a collective minor literature, allows us to structure an approach that can pay attention to the exact nature of each novel’s opposition to progress. However, before we move on to understanding the ways in which readings of major and minor lit diverge, we need to explore the concept of minority further. The category of minor literature is not created through the expression of identity but through containment. When social space is restricted and the space for representation is limited then minor literatures can be produced. In the eighteenth century context, this means that as the enlightenment and progress sought to form new epistemological organisation it restricted the space available to other forms of knowledge through the spread of realism and the major literary practices of reference and mimesis. Tristram Shandy’s minor response is to contest the restriction of knowledge and open the way towards other epistemological stances or uncertainty, intersubjectivity and confusion. This newly opened space had room for a minority people – a heterodox collective which resists dominant forms of knowledge. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of “the literary machine thus becomes a relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come” (18) is best thought of in terms of an anti-tradition of minor knowledges which are, through the creation of minority space, allowed to co-exist in a collective. Their revolutionary suggestion is an epistemological one, whereby the ground of knowing codified by the majority is undermined in its very legitimacy, not just its current formation. This potential should be contrasted with the politics of satire as formed by Swift. Its challenge to epistemology acts not as a minor subversion but an opposition within the field of the major. Satirical opposition which uses the failure of the narrative contract as a way of making difficult the claims of realism acts as a negative highlighting, which by presenting a ridiculous externality reflects back on the realist novel. It proposes no new schema of knowledge and forms no collective, but instead throws light on the problematic unspoken elements of progress and realism. In doing so it does not contest the legitimacy of the epistemological formation of progress, but rather contexts its exact form and the ways in which it remains unaware of itself. It’s on this basis that we can start to differentiate between Tristram Shandy and Gulliver’s Travels. For example, their relationship to the political is radically divided along the line of major/minor. The Tory/Whig parliamentary structures the field of the political in relation to these novels to such an extent that it can be hard – from the standpoint of much existing criticism - to imagine Tristram Shandy or Gulliver’s Travels having a politics which moves beyond the parliamentary. The identification of Tristram Shandy with a minor literature, however, should make obvious the necessity of moving beyond this restriction in order to explore more peripheral ideas of the politics of minor epistemology and the associated processes of becoming-minoritarian. For Tristram Shandy, the rehabilitation of its minority stance into a plainly contextual political reading is not a sufficient engagement. This is not to say that a close contextual study of the points of reference between the novel and its historical context is illegitimate, but rather to suggest that there are other readings which might open the novel up to new modes of studying the political. The interesting elements of Tristram Shandy are not just referential, they have a value and an autonomy as political agents in their own right. We shouldn’t aim to make the political remote and remove it from the text itself by turning it into a game of reference.The reliance of enlightenment and progress upon the underlying premises of objective knowledge and individual subjects means that the problems thrown up by Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy have a clear focus. In both cases they contest progress in their structure, on a deeper level than just overt content. This leads to a rejection of enlightenment epistemology but, as we’ve seen, this rejection is not identical – and in line with Deleuze and Guattari it seems important to classify these responses as major and minor respectively. This differentiation allows us to read the problems they cause sensitive to the specifics of each text rather than just homogenising both. With Tristram Shandy, the clear imperative is to produce political interpretations which move beyond immediate context. In this sense, we have to treat Tristram Shandy as a truly creative text: one which does not only response and object, but also proposes its own ideas and epistemologies. It is this creativity which contains the real politics of the text. In their rejection of the framework of enlightenment, Swift and Sterne share an approach – but we should be alert to the different styles of critical response which each favours. 2975 wordsBibliography BIBLIOGRAPHY Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.—. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New York: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 1977. Print.—. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. London: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 1986. Print.Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 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Peter de Voogd and David Pierce. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 65-80. Print.Kant, Immanuel. What is Enlightenment? Trans. Mary C. Smith. n.d. Online. <, Carol. Political Constructions. London: Cornell Univeristy press, 1988. Print.Lamb, Jonathon. "Sterne and Irregular Oratory." Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Ed. John Richetti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 153-174. Print.Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition. New York: George W. Stewart, 1950. Online.Lock, F.P. The Politics of Gulliver's Travels. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Print.New, Melvyn. "Sterne and the Narrative of Determinatedness." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4.4 (1992): 315-33. online.Nietzsche, Freidrich. Human All Too Human. Trans. Paul V. Cohn. 24 October 2011. Online. <, Max. "Gulliver's Travels and the Constraints of Fiction." The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Ed. John Richetti. Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1996. 72-89`. Print.Soud, Stephen. ""Weavers, Gardeners and Gladiators": Labyrinths in Tristram Shandy." Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.4 (1995): 397-411. Online.Sterne, Lawrence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. London: Penguin, 1997. Print.Sullivan, E.E. "Houyhnhnms and Yahoos: From Technique to Meaning." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 24.3 (1984): 497-511. Online.Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. London: Worsworth Classics, 2001. Print. ................
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