SWIFT'S WORK is a persisting miracle of how much commentary an author's writing can accommodate and still remain problematic. The efforts on his behalf have been mainly restorative, since few major authors in English have presented themselves so resolutely as a long series of occasional pieces that defy easy classification. One way of checking this intransigeance is to note how much more certainly we can use the adjective "Swiftian" than we can identify, locate, and see "Swift". The latter seems often to be little more than an adjunct to the former, even as "Swift" somehow projects and energetically covers thirteen volumes of prose, three of poetry, seven of correspondence, and innumerable pages of strange jottings. Thus Swift is restored by editors to a definitive text, by biographers to a chronology of events, by psychological critics to a set of characteristics, by historians to an age, by literary critics to a genre, a technique, a rhetoric, or a tradition, and by moralists to the norms he is said to have defended. His identity has been very much in the shadow of claims made on his work, and if this is always true with major authors it doesn't, in Swift's case, make it seem any less of what Norman 0. Brown has called a housebreaking and domestication of the tiger of English literature. Yet despite their differences each of these restorations, consciously or not, is also taking Swift as a resistance to the order in which he will come to be placed. In no author do the regulations of order and the challenging anarchy of dispersion cohabit with such integrity. R. P. Blackmur's remark that "true anarchy of spirit should always show (or always has showed) a tory flavor" 1 is, I think, best applied to Swift. My essay then is a preliminary investigation of how Swift's work can be approached and characterised as the highly dramatic encounter between the anarchy of resistance (agraphia) to the written page, and the abiding tory order of the page. This is the most literally basic form of the encounter: it