| Title | : | A Tale of a Tub and Other Works |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0192835939 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780192835932 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1704 |
A Tale of a Tub and Other Works Reviews
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"A Tale of a Tub" is a strange work, and certainly not to everyone's taste. The heart of it is a satirical religious allegory demonstrating that, of the three sons of the Father (God), Martin (the representative of the mainstream protestant Lutheran/Anglican tradition) is by far the most reasonable. His attempt to carry out his Father's Will (the message of scripture) by pruning the absurdly lavish alterations his older brother Peter (Roman Catholicism) has made to the Coat his Father gave him (the liturgy and customs of the church) while nevertheless avoiding the wholesale ripping and tearing of fabric that his enthusiasm-possessed younger brother John (Calvinism and Wesleyanism) is guilty of, shows Martin to be the true conservative, the one who preserves what is best in tradition while using his common sense to prune and modify the burdensome encrustrations of time.
What makes "Tub" so interesting, though, is that this sober conservative religious position is supported by a baroquely self-indulgent work that often seems to be a postmodernist precursor, a work filled with numerous digressions (each one a parody in a slightly different voice), a deliberately obscure Latinate vocabulary, and allegorical details that are often extravagant and occasionally obscene. It can be heavy-going at times, but it is as intellectually dense and allusive as the best passages of Joyce, and should be read by anyone who is interested in the development of English fiction.
"The Battle of the Books" is almost as good, and--in its championing of the "ancients" against the "moderns"--supports much the same conservative position as "Tub" does, but this time in the realm of classical and literary studies. (If you don't wish to read all of "The Battle," be sure at least to check out Swift's wonderful version of The Parable of the Spider and the Bee). -
The Tub itself: a challenging 5*
Battle of the Books: 3*
Mechanical OPeration of The Spirits: 2*
Appendices: Negative 666*
Four Months Earlier:
Pausing at halfway through the book, but (at the risk of giving all of my selves about three heart attacks apiece) I somehow finished the Tub proper, which at only 103pp somehow still manages to make Tristram Shandy seem like Raymond Carver-style minimalism by comparison...
I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells – a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there: and often when there is nothing in the world at the bottom besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and a-half under-ground, it shall pass, however, for wondrous deep, upon no wiser a reason than because it is wondrous dark.
I am now trying an experiment very frequent among modern authors, which is to write upon nothing...
Yikes, the holding of the breath whilst underwater during my overlong bath in this Tub pretty darn near did me in! It's certainly a work of monstrous genius, ostensibly about religion but really about sweet FA, yet to avoid being trapped in these deep underwater caverms measureless to man you gotta be prepared to risk the bends going repeatedly back to the surface and thence to the Endnotes after you catch your breath, cos the allusions get poured on pretty relentlessly, amounting to a case of reader's rights violating water-board/bored-ing, I'm sure.
In short, this five-fathoms-deep watery tomb/tome is something greatly to admire, sure, but enjoy? The GR 5* enjoyment-meter does not even remotely apply, I'm afraid. Too much laughing leads to crying, sonny-boy, as my Scots Presbyterian great-grandmother is as likely to have said with as much veracity as anything Swift's crazy narrator utters within the confines of these damp, damnèd pages....
So: gonna open the drain here and enter the comparatively convivial hot tub time machine of Gulliver's Travels for a spell before returning to finish these spiritual ablutions with Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirits
To Be Continued... -
I'd say Gulliver's Travels is Swift's second-best book, behind Battle of the Books and a Tale of a Tub ( I think they were published together, but do not recall.) These are brilliant and learned--two qualities he did his best to suppress as he invented the novel, along with Defoe and Fielding. Tale contains a series of parodies, which of course I admired fifty years ago though I only published my own Parodies Lost recently, a biography of my brilliant parodist friend who especially parodied academic prose, as does Swift along with religious prose. His Tale is divided into three, the principal currents of Christianity in England in the late 17C, Peter (R.C.), Jack (for Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbytereans, and Quakers) and Martin for the author's own Anglicans. His satire here was seriously misconstrued, especially by the Queen, so that Swift's own advancement in his church was thwarted.
I have found my paperback from decades ago to quote a bit of Swift's brilliant parodies, a word he himself uses in introducing them. Of critics, he mentions Rymer and Dennis as well as Dryden's translation of Vergil, saying he himself was "plentifully instructed ...by a long course of useful study in prefaces and prologues"(331). Since my doctoral thesis was "This Critical Age," on criticism in verse, predominantly before Dryden, I find Swift very astute and amusing. On Lord Peter (Catholicism) he writes, "if Peter sent them abroad,...they would roar, spit and belch, and piss, and fart...till you flung them a bit of gold"; also, Peter would pardon Newgate prisoners for some coin, "whether he stand condemned for murder, sodomy, rape, incest, treason..." signed Emperor Peter (340). Note the priority of sodomy, pederasty, a centuries-old accusation of the Roman priesthood, though other religious, like modern American TV Southern Baptist preachers (say, Jimmy Swaggart or Jerry Folwell Jr.) are comparably hypocritical.
In Swift's ceremonious Conclusion to his Tale of (standing on) a Tub, he reflects on the "current relish of courteous readers" by observing "that a fly, driven from a honey-pot, will immediately, with very good appetite alight and finish his meal on excrement."(392) So much for good writing, as I have advised elsewhere on this site, "Avoid writing well. Too much work, and no-one notices."
Battle of the Books casts wonderful aspersions on Criticism (who is a goddess, daughter of Ignorance and Pride), in the battle of the Ancients and Moderns--Wotton, a modern, as is D'Avenant's modern epic Gondibert, which I read for my Ph. D. in 17C lit. but he also includes a grand three pages on the Spider and the Bee, Aesop- derived. "Upon the highest corner of a certain window, there dwelt a certain spider, swollen up to the first magnitude by the destruction of infinite numbers of flies, whose spoils lay scattered before the gates of his palace, like human bones before the cave of some giant"(404).
In the usu edition of Gulliver, Swift's elegy on himself witty and self-assessing, "Verses on the Death of Dr Swift" which starts with how we can stand enemies' success better than friends' (LaRouchefoucault, adversity of friends). Swift, "In Pope, I cannot read a line,/ But with a sigh, I wish it mine.../ It gives me such jealous fit, / I cry, pox take him, and his wit." Pox take puns on Pax tecum, the Latin mass, since Pope was a Roman Catholic, had to live ten miles from London. Later Swift's self-elegy, "My female friends, whose tender hearts,/ Have better learned to act their parts,/ Receive the news in doleful dumps,/ The Dean is dead, (And what is trumps?)/ Then Lord have mercy on his soul./ (Ladies, I'll venture for the vole [all the tricks].)/ Six deans they say must bear the pall./ (I wish I knew what king to call.)"
"On Poetry: A Rhapsody" records Swift against Dryden's Prefaces (which I thought superior), Rhymer, Dennis, and weak poets. "Say, Britain, could you ever boast,/ Three poets in an Age at most" (age= century?). "Remains a diffculty still,/ To purchase fame by writing ill." Many weak poets became lords, like Sir Richard Blackmore and Viscount William Grimston. "For, though in Nature depth and height / Are equally held infinite,/ In Potry the height we know;/ 'Tis only infinite below." -
Holy Satire
16 February 2020 - Wallaroo
All I can say is that this publication certainly caused a lot of stir, to the point that Swift was denied a bishopric due to having upset the monarch at the time. Yet, a part of me wonders why this was the case, especially since he clearly points out that the preferred church in his mind was the Church of England. Then again, as Swift is prone to do, he does write in a way that requires a lot of digging, and understanding of the events at the time, though I do have to admit that
Gulliver’s Travels is quite a lot easier to follow than this particular work, even if a lot of the political commentary in said book will be lost to us modern readers.
The story is about three boys, Peter, Martin, and Jack. These three boys represent the founders of three of the branches of the churches in England – Peter is the Roman Catholic church (or as was referred to at the time, the Popish church), Martin being Martin Luther, who represents the church of England as established by Henry VIII, and finally, Jack, who represents John Calvin, and in turn represents the dissenting church, or the ones that didn’t think that the Church of England went far enough, so rebelled against its rule and set up their own congregations.
Now, Swift happened to be a pastor of the Church of England, so you could say that he happens to have a bit of a bias here, but then again you probably also need to understand that Swift was never afraid to criticise any of the institutions of the day, including his employer, however from what this work suggests, there are problems that he sees as being the extremes of Christianity, namely with the Roman Catholic church being steeped in tradition, whereas the dissenters going so far in the other direction that if one were to look at them then they would be considered, well, insane. What Swift saw was that the Church of England threw off all the trappings that the Roman church took on board, but was not willing to move as far as the dissenters were.
Actually, we probably get a lot of them running around today, and in that direction I feel that the church has drifted way too far over into the insane spectrum. These guys pretty much reject anything and everything for fear that to add anything to the gospel will condemn them to the fires of hell. In fact, doing anything that is not explicitly allowed by scripture is considered sinful, though a lot of these people shun alcohol as well, despite the fact that it is actually allowed.
What Swift is attempting to advocate here is attempting to move the church back to the middle of the road, where we aren’t running around condemning people because they don’t do things the way we want them to, nor forcing people to accept our specific religion because we believe that the way we do things is the only correct way of doing things. In fact, baptism is one of those really controversial topics that a number of these churches have taken on board, particularly rejecting infant baptism.
The concern I have these days (or one of the many concerns that I have) is a lot of these people are attempting to create a theocratic state. We can actually see the beginnings of that here in Australia where non-citizens who have criminal records are being kicked out of the country. Sure, I can fully understand where they are coming from, but we are ending up in the position where people who have only ever lived in Australia, but don’t have citizenship, are being kicked out, retrospectively, because of something they did years ago.
However, it is the religious discrimination laws that are a concern as what that seems to be doing is legalising hate speech. In fact, hearing some of the rhetoric blasted against the LGBTI community is quite concerning. It isn’t just in that direction as well but against single mothers. In fact, some of the things I have heard people say about single mothers, without actually knowing their background, is horrifying. Yet, the scary thing is that many Christians are slowly drifting over to these extremes because, well, they are being convinced, from scripture, that they will be going to hell otherwise – yeah, it is amazing how a little bit of fire and brimstone really gets people moving.
Anyway, moving back to the story, which I have to admit becomes weirder and weirder as we move through it, we have the three brothers who are given coats that represent the practice of Christianity, and are also given a will, which represents the Bible. Peter then starts adding things to the robe, and ignoring the will, and pressuring his brothers to do the same. However, this sort of gets to a head when the concept of the indulgences come to light, that is where people pay money to the church to either escape from purgatory themselves, or get somebody who they want released (though interestingly, people don’t seem to go to hell, though the possibility certainly did exist).
Yeah, it is all the problem with adding stuff to the scriptures, and even arguments over how the scriptures are interpreted. Ironically, it just always seems to happen – as if things continue to evolve. Yet, there are also movements that arise every so often that want to move back to the culture of the primitive church, namely because they consider what the church has become to be unacceptable. Sure, I do accept that at the time the Catholic Church had pretty much become an empire in and of itself that dominated Western Europe, but the Reformation, otherwise known as the Great Schism, has resulted in such a fractured landscape, that while it works well, they still, unfortunately, wield way too much power.
Anyway, I could probably go on and on for quite a while more, though I think I will leave it here, except for one minor point – the tub is actually a reference to the pulpit that dissenters would use to speak from, though of course Swift also makes reference to it being a lifeboat as well. -
This Cambridge edition edited by Marcus Walsh is the critical edition of A Tale of the Tub recommended by Steven Moore. The Cambridge edition of Swift’s work is in 18 volumes. Moore discusses The Tub in
The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800, pages 634-642. “The most inventive, profound, and mindblowing novel of this time.”
In keeping with my Moore-lists of generation ::
The Tub’s predecessors ;;
Petronius
Rabelais
Cervantes
Dunton [ie, Voyage round the World]
Following in the wake of The Tub ;;
Thomas D’Urfe’s Essay Towards the Theory of the Intelligible World
Bordelon’s Monsieur Oufle
definitely Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
Melville’s Moby-Dick
Nabokov’s Pale Fire
Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew
any number of formally inventive novels published over the last 75 years ;;
Finnegans Wake -- Joyce “clearly modeled the description of Shem the Penman (182-85) on the idea of Swift’s ink-stained narrator in his garret spinning out the digression on madness.”
Beckett’s Watt
Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse
The Tale is “The locus classicus of the novel of learned wit” [let’s add Darconville’s Cat at this juncture] ;
a metafiction ;
a critifiction [let’s add Raymond Federman at this juncture]. -
A dazzling display of wit, but so dry as to stick in the throat a bit, despite occasional flights of whimsy. Having been removed from its immediate context by the passage of centuries, its ironies are to be appreciated rather than enjoyed.
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Eh ? If I hadn't picked a copy with explanatory notes I wouldn't have understood this at all.
I can see what Swift is getting at and I'm sure it was hilarious at the time.
Clever but not for me. -
a religious satrical allegory. very hard to follow.
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Enjoying catching the literary and religious allusions this time - definitely missed most of them 20+ years ago! Also began to wonder if Kierkegaard was familiar with Swift. The way they both satirize modernity, progress, and optimism in search for the absolute strike me as kindred spirits...
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Men would be more cautious of losing their time in such an undertaking, if they did but consider that to answer a book effectually requires more pains and skill, more wit, learning and judgment than were employed in the writing it.
-Jonathan Swift on critics
This is one of the books assigned to me during my English undergrad, back when I thought that the best way to develop my intellectual soul was to get drunk in the afternoon, skip all my lectures and read only the texts that suited me. I regret not reading this then, but considering my general lack-of-control over my own being alive and the creeping dread that overshadowed that period, I don't think I would've had the patience to read it. Swift is very funny, and not in that detached, historically-situated droll way where one can figure out the author is joking without really being amused. I was chuckling to myself throughout, and laughed aloud alone in my room. His subject might be firmly situated in his own time, but comic timing resonates regardless of the era. If you've ever thought yourself funny for some reason, or worse still, consider yourself a 'comedy fan', I recommend Swift, if you're willing to put in a bit of work looking up his weird archaisms and subvocalise in a snooty RP English accent (which is fun anyway).
I've heard it said that Comedy (well, American comedy but to most people that's just 'Comedy', isn't it? Disgusting.) has become more about being preachy and moralistic than being funny. Swift is interesting because he is kind of being preachy and moralistic, attacking the corruption of Catholicism and any non-Lutheran Protestant branch, but he does so in such a way that seems to satirise that very intent. Some critics of his time thought his writing was downright atheistic, and I can honestly see that in the text. Despite whimsical elements involving fart jokes, A Tale of a Tub is a searing critique of Swift's England. There's a brutal anger to his style, yet he ironizes his own self-righteousness. When the book opens with a lengthy preface on how people that didn't like his writing just don't get it, and thirty pages into the book there's a digression on how too many writers put prefaces into their books, the didactic aspect of satire takes a backseat to the comic mischief of it all, as it likely should. A short, dense and wonderfully weird book. -
"A Tale of a Tub" is so much better the second time around.
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I read these at university and enjoyed them. Most of the stuff I read at university was to be worked thru and appreciated, but not enjoyed. Thsee tales I enjoyed.
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3.5/5
Some bits were genuinely very interesting and funny despite my lack of context, others...I could feel myself zoning out (especially the last of Swift's pieces, I had no idea what was going on). I'm sure studying some bits of Tale will help with that a bit. -
What I'll say about this one.. veeeery allegorical. I think I'll understand it more once I discuss it with other people, but generally I found it interesting, so that'll be my commentary for now.
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Funny, instructive, and stylistically commanding: this Augustan had good reason to show his mettle. It puzzles me, in a good way, where and how his fellow champions of sound sense, detractors of shallow learning drew the lines between scholarship and pedantry, self-reflection and egocentrism, integrity and pride, frailty and meanness, universality and populism – true wit and false wit, at bottom – because, for one, they disavow some of their own concepts or tactics and, furthermore, I think they notice the actual proximity between opposite terms. What happens with antithetical or heterogeneous categories in the Augustan frame of mind (provided that even exists/ed for documentation), if a work like A Tale of a Tub performs the motions it would seem to denounce? That’s called satire, one might reasonably contend: sure, but that fails to account entirely for some of Swift’s decisions here. The Tale is a satire of religion by half, its other portion being an intermittent critique of contemporaneous publication and knowledge production, and so plausibly a commentary on the text itself (or just that other half of it). In “Mechanical Operations,” Swift could have ventured something preposterous for “the whole scheme of spiritual mechanism” – he certainly proved his pluck in the oratorical machines segment of the Tale – “but it was thought neither safe nor convenient to print it” – which I realize is the punchline of the piece, and it’s great, but it’s like satire with a vengeance given that Swift had alternatives. And why is allegory, for that matter, so apparently suited to Swiftian satire, from the exquisite “Battle of the Books” to Gulliver’s Travels? Is there a reason for this, maybe related to the nature of the symbolic relationship posited under the allegorical mode? Open questions for now.
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Jonathan Swift is a brilliant satirist and if I was a contemporary of Swift's or aware of the issues he was mocking, then I might have enjoyed this book. Instead, this short book is filled with long digressions mocking organized religion or possibly government. I have to admit that about half way through I was completely lost and really not following his mockery.
If I had been reading this book in print, I would have saved my place with a bookmark and put it back on the shelf to revisit later, maybe after I learned more about the times. But this was a book that I had subscribed to through Daily Lit, which sends installments every day via email. This is the 2nd book that I've tried this way and I have to say that I don't think this format of reading works for me. The installments are all the same length so sometimes I found myself wanting to read more, or wanting to walk away and then return to the book. But once I was half way through a LONG email, I felt like I had to finish it and it was more like slogging through required reading vs. reading for pleasure. -
A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift is quite possibily some of the best satirical work I've read. An easy historical index at the beginning helps those who may not be as familiar with Irish and European history as others. Indeed the entire introduction gives the reader an informative set up for the anthology.
Only a passerby to Swift's work, Tale of a Tub was delightful. Tongue in cheek satire directed mostly toward the noble and royal classes with direct insights to daily life. But Swift was not above some fun at everyone's expense. He often directs biting sarcasm toward what he seems to consider the willingly undereducated and willfully ignorant, emphasizing what seems to be his most valued attribute - intelligence.
A worthy read, although one I may not opt to pick up a re-read for some time, A Tale of a Tub should be on anyone's list who enjoys satire and comedy - both dark and light - and intelligent insights into the actions of man. -
Jonathan Swift is disappointing. But for the fame he rightly deserved for Gulliver's Travels, he comes across as a verbose blowhard. Riddled with witticisms, this work’s objective seems to be not only to hide meaning within convoluted imagery but to hide the author’s identity as well. This is an ignorant screed against Catholicism, demeaning tradition without any effort to understand it. He appears to be one of those religious dogmatist whose bible magically descended from on high in King James English and embossed in gilt. Councils and creeds are jettisoned if their pronouncements are not found within the pages of Scripture. Whose Scripture? He rejects what he calls the Apocrypha despite these books being part of the ancient Septuagint Bible. Instead, he embraces the truncated Mesoretic text established 1000 years later by Jewish rabbis! And, despite being an Anglican cleric, he appears not to know of the existence of either!
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În 1710, trimis de episcopatul anglican irlandez să îi reprezinte interesele la Londra – aflăm din introducerea lui Andrei Brezianu –, Jonathan Swift începe un jurnal sub forma unor scrisori adresate confidentei sale „Stella”, rămasă în Irlanda. Am pus Stella în ghilimele pentru că numele nu a fost niciodată folosit de Swift, ci e o invenție a editorilor săi postumi. Neinfluențat de intenții de publicare, acest jurnal epistolar este terenul pe care se desfășoară dezinvolt talentul literar al autorului. A rezultat o frescă nefinisată, dar expresivă a societății londoneze a momentului și o descriere intimă și nostimă a relației scriitorului cu prietena sa, absentă fizic, Esther Johnson. Sejurul londonez se încheie însă cu o decepție, Swift nefiind recompensat corespunzător pentru serviciile prestate pe lîngă guvernul majestății sale.
Mai mult:
https://dilemaveche.ro/sectiune/carte... -
A satire within a satire, this is book that would most likely bloom within the context of a class discussion. While a sufficient amount of the satire translated across the centuries, I'm sure that some knowledge of events taking place during the writing of this tale would have revealed more depth to the text than I was aware of.
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". . . reason is certainly in the right , and that in most corporeal beings which have fallen under my cognizance, the outside hath been infinitely preferable to the in; wherof I have been further convinced from some late experiments. Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse" (84).
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Read for my English Religious Authors seminar at Baylor with Dr. Kevin Gardner (Summer 2014). Includes "The Battle of the Books" and "The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit."
2: defense of satire (cf. Bunyan, Hawthorne, and Wilson?)
18: Hobbes's Leviathan
23: satire needs to be direct
35: church chases after pop culture
72: memory and commonplace books
111: stealing -
The cute religious allegory is a red herring. The main attraction is in the ingenious meta sections, which now read mostly as nonsense. Too much Grub Street insider shit. His friends probably liked it a lot more than you will. For God’s sake, more notes, and better.
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Swift slays me (and not in a good way most of the time. Unless he's talking about vapours - that's good stuff). This is wonderfully post-modern-ish (though obviously 18th century) and digressive, if that's what you're into - I'm not today, sadly.
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Dit is één van de twee boeken die ik in mijn hele leven níét uitgelezen heb. En het ligt deels aan mij. Ik snapte 'm gewoon niet. Maar omdat ik niet dom ben (al zeg ik het zelf) ligt het toch ook voor een deel aan Jonathan Swift. Vandaar de rating van twee sterren.
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I'm now started reading a 21st century book and have read half of it in a afternoon. Hurray!
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more fun than "Gulliver" in a lot of ways.
