P-102 Assignment

Jonathan Swift and 'A Tale of a Tub'

Name-Daya Vaghani

Paper-Literature of the Neo-classical Periods

Roll no-07

Enrollment no-3069206420200017

Email id- dayavaghani2969@gmail.com

Batch-2020-22 (MA Sem-1)

Submitted to- S. B. Gardi Department of English,

                Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

 

 Jonathan Swift and “A Tale of a Tub”

Introduction:

Jonathan Swift's Tale of the Tubis a brilliant failure. It is a prose satire intended as a defense of the Anglican church, but it was widely interpreted by contemporary readers as an attack on all religion. At the time of writing it, Swift was a junior Anglican clergyman hoping for substantial preferment in the Church. The appearance of the Tale, and its assumed message, was a serious obstacle to his promotion.

The Title and Structure

The first thing that's puzzling about A Tale of a Tub is its title. The preface explains that it is the practice of seamen when they meet a whale to throw out an empty tub to divert it from attacking their ship. The whale that this tub is thrown out for most obviously represents Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Swift's tub is intended to distract Hobbes and other critics of the church and government from picking holes in their weak points.

A Tale of a Tub, he also seems to have been extraordinarily proud of his satire. The one comment that we have on record from Swift about the Tale comes from a letter transcribed for the Earl of Orrery:

'There is no doubt but that he was Author of the Tale of the Tub. He never

owned it: but as he one day made his Relation Mrs Whiteway read it to him,

he made use of This expression. 'Good God! What a flow of imagination had

I, when I wrote this.'

There is a strange paradox here: Swift wanted to disavow his connection with the work, yet at the same time he wanted the genius evident in the satire to be recognised as his.

Religious Orthodoxy

Swift says in the 'Apology' that was added to the 1710 edition that A Tale of a Tub was partly intended to attack the religious groups that he saw as threatening the hegemony of the Anglican church. In the Tale, Swift uses the analogy of the three brothers - Martin, Peter and Jack - to represent, respectively, the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, and the Low Church, or Dissenters. In doing so, he is trying to demonstrate that the spiritual practices of the Catholic Church and dissenting sects were based on a false interpretation of the true Word, the Bible. However, the sweep of Swift's irony in the book, and, the destabilising and confusing nature of its changes in satiric personae meant that many of his contemporaries read the Tale as an attack all religion.

“I do here make bold to present your Highness with a faithful abstract drawn from the universal body of all arts and sciences, intended wholly for your service and instruction.”

(Chapter 4, Page 19)

Originality:

The idea of originality is vexed by A Tale of a Tub. As we've seen here, Swift both dismisses the importance of authorship and fiercely defends it. These ambiguous and contradictory concerns are is mirrored within the text, which in some ways it seems to push the boundaries of what can be called an original. A Tale of a Tub is profoundly postmodern in its intertextuality, its play with literary forms, and its changes in speaker and genre and that constantly undermine readerly expectations of the text. It parodies bookseller's catalogues, scholarly treatises, scientific works, effusive dedicatory prose, and it borrows, magpie-like, from a wide and disparate range of sources. A Tale of a Tub is a patchwork of unattributed quotations to Dryden, Marvell, Richard Bentley, Thomas Browne, and Joseph Addison.

After the Tale appeared in 1704, William Wotton, an Anglican clergyman incensed by what he saw as Swift's impropriety, published a critique of the work. It was entitled Defense of the Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, With Observations upon The Tale of a Tub(1705). In the critique, Wotton offered an explication of the story of the three brothers, attempting to demonstrate that the Tale was a work of radical impiety. When Swift brought out his revised 5th edition in 1710, he cheekily copied the explanatory material of Wotton's attack and had them printed as notes to the new edition his own text. Thus, from 1710, part of the Tale was made up chunks of Wotton's attack on it, cut and pasted in as the Tale's textual apparatus. So in one sense, since it derived so many bits and pieces from other authors, none of the Tale is original. Yet on the other hand, Swift used these other works to compose a wholly new text, one he asserted roundly in the apology was 'an Original, whatever its Faults might have been' and which he later declared was the product of a magnificent 'flow of the Imagination'.

The Ancients and Moderns

How do Swift's concerns about originality and authorship reflect on contemporary cultural debate? 'The Battle of the Books' along with the Tale, was perhaps the most impressive English contribution to the so-called quarrel of the Ancients and the moderns. The history of this quarrel can be traced back to the Renaissance. Rediscovery and publication of the philosophers and poets of ancient Greece and Rome generated a huge sense of intellectual and cultural liberation for many sixteenth century writers. But with this revival came a questioning of assumptions about the value of the classical texts.

In literary terms, the debate polarized around the question of whether present civilizations could hope to outdo the achievements of the ancient world in the arts, and in science and technology. Some contemporaries, 'the Moderns', were excited by this possibility. There were moderns who were classical scholars, like Richard Bentley (who is satirized in 'Battle of the Books'), who believed that there was nothing sacred about classical texts. He believed that the classical past should be seen as a body of material that could be dated and analyzed, and above all historicized. The classics were not a body of transcendent truths for all time, but an historical source about a much less advanced classical past. So he produced editions of classical texts with endless footnotes and appendices re-contextualizing and analyzing the poetry in terms of this historical past, not unlike modern critical editions of the works of Shakespeare.

Parody and Allegory

In addition to the 'digressions' that form a satire on modern learning and print culture, A Tale of a Tub's more obvious satire is that on abuses in religion. The satire works through the allegory of the three brothers: Martin, Peter, and Jack. Martin symbolizes the Anglican Church (from Martin Luther); Peter symbolizes the Roman Catholic Church; and Jack (from John Calvin) symbolizes the Dissenters. Their father leaves each brother a coat as a legacy, with strict orders that the coats are on no account to be altered. The sons gradually disobey his injunction, finding excuses for adding shoulder knots or gold lace, according to the prevailing fashion. Martin and Jack quarrel with the arrogant Peter (the Reformation), and then with each other (the split between Anglicanism and Puritanism), and then separate. As we might expect, Martin is by far the most moderate of the three, and his speech in section six is by the sanest thing anyone has to say in the Tale.

Both parody and allegory work by implicitly, or explicitly, comparing one sort of book with another. As a broad generalization, they are concerned with intertextual relationships, and how you can use one text to invoke or critique another. But the distinction is that allegory teaches its readers to see beyond appearance to recognize truth, while parody teaches its readers to see beyond appearance to recognize error.

In the case of the allegorical story of the three brothers, the ultimate pre-text is the Bible: the father's last recorded words take the form of a will, a dead letter, defining and confining the ways in which the sons are to live their lives:

'You will find in my Will (here it is) full Instructions in every Particular

concerning the Wearing and Management of your Coats; wherein you must be

very exact, to avoid the Penalties I have appointed for every transgression

or Neglect, upon which your future Fortunes will entirely depend'.

The later subversion of the will provides us with an allegory of misreading. The abuse of the living coats (the Church) provides an allegory of desire and corruption. The brothers abuse and misinterpret the will as a way of figuring misuse and misinterpretation of the Bible. The attack on Jack, representing Dissenters, is particularly biting: it targets the sectarian groups who exalted the individual worshipper or small congregation with their claims to inner light and private conscience, unchecked by tradition and institutional authority.

In the case of the satire on writing and scholarship, as we have seen in the first half of this lecture, texts like Dryden's Virgil and scholarship of Bentley that are being undermined. They are working whose claim to authority is spurious, and whose authors fail to pay homage to the only true originals of classical civilization.

In this reading of The Tale of a Tub, then, there seem to be clear distinctions between parody of lesser forms and allegory of higher forms, which roughly corresponds to the twin foci of Swift's work. Both the parody and the allegory are concerned with discerning true and false models of textual authority.

But perhaps there is more overlap between parody and allegory than there seems at first glance. If we think about the brothers and their coats as an allegory of misreading, we can see that the notion of the Bible as sacred pre-text is complicated by the fact that what the brothers can so misread and misconduct the words of the will that they are able get it to justify whatever they want it to do. We slip out of allegory and into parody, as Swift mocks as his ludicrous pretext false exegetical analyses of the Scripture. Initially, the Will has the power to protect the brothers from their fallen nature, but slowly and insidiously, the relationship of masterful text to obedient interpreter is turned around. Led by Peter, the Catholic, the brothers subvert the terms of the Will by means of willfully self-seeking interpretation. The simple, explicit dictates of the Will are twisted to serve as a canonical sanction to justify shoulder knots on the cloaks. Flame-coloured satin is said to be 'found' in a codicil of the will, a dangerous supplement, which corresponds to apocryphal additions to the Bible. Embroidered images are forbidden, so they are excused by the sophistry that the new fashion in images is different from that which existed in the father's time, and is therefore acceptable.

By the time the brothers have finished, the Will, or the Word that they are authorizing their actions with is no longer the true, original, sacred word, but their corrupt and self -serving version of it. The pre-text underwriting the allegory of the coats is no longer the Bible, but a distorted misreading of it, a fallen text that must be discredited. Thus, we have moved across into parody. The impact of an allegory is to reveal the privileged status of the pretext, while a parody aims at undermining the value of the pretext.

One of the implications of the shifting and unstable nature of the satiric forms employed in the Tale is that it makes it difficult to establish what Swift does take to be his ideal point, the true perspective against which the follies satirized can be measured and found wanting. Because we're not sure of the interpretative framework we're working within, allegory or parody, it's hard to be confident about the moral thrust of the work. It is no wonder that contemporary readers so frequently misinterpreted Swift's intentions, to Swift's professional detriment.

Conclusion :

In nutshell we can say A Tale of a Tub is the greatest  satire by Swift. 

References

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• Ross, Angus and David Wooley, eds. A Tale of a Tub and Other Works: Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-283593-2

•Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of a Tub and Other Works. Marcus Walsh, editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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• William, Abigail. “Jonathan Swift and ‘a Tale of a Tub.’” Great Writers Inspire, 4 May 2010.

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