A Tale of a Tub as Satire

 A Tale of a Tub : 

A Tale of a Tub was the book that launched Jonathan Swift on his career as a satirist, paving the way for better-known works such as Gulliver's Travels (1726) and "A Modest Proposal" (1729). In satire, authors critique social issues using literary strategies:

• Sarcasm communicates contempt for the subject at hand. As a result, readers must often reverse the author's words to determine meaning. In A Tale of a Tub, the narrator expresses great admiration for the brothers' ingenuity in getting around their father's wishes. This admiration is insincere, however. The narrator sarcastically mocks their foolishness in trying to find loopholes to God's revealed will.

• Hyperbole radically exaggerates existing situations to show innate ridiculousness or weakness. The narrator uses hyperbole throughout his tale, describing preachers so fiery that they can light their own way home at night and so full of wind that they puff up like balloons.

• Extended analogies indirectly draw attention to flawed situations. The narrator uses this technique when he likens the Bible to the will of a father who knows what is best for his children but who is overruled or ignored by his selfish heirs.

• Symbolism indirectly represents social, religious, and political issues. This strategy allows satirists to protect themselves with indirection from backlash, especially if they are criticizing powerful institutions. It may also make their critiques more universal. The narrator uses the overarching symbol of a set of coats to describe Christianity and show the many "alterations" it has undergone. Although his critique applies specifically to the extremes of Catholicism and Dissent, the symbolism in A Tale of a Tub is general enough to apply to any deeply entrenched institution and any (over)zealous group of reformers.

• Humor criticizes society to stimulate thought and action. The narrator's caricatures of Peter and Jack (Catholicism and Dissent, respectively) are broadly comical, and the effect is heightened by the characters' self-righteousness. Peter proclaims himself emperor and does not realize that most people are mocking his title and not respecting it. Jack's belligerent preaching and disheveled appearance lead listeners to think he has gone mad.

Because satirists don't write literally, audience misunderstanding is often an unintended effect. Swift experienced this firsthand with A Tale of a Tub, which stirred controversy among its first readers. Some influential critics of the work, including Queen Anne (1665–1714), thought Swift was taking aim at religion in general and not just at sectarian differences. This misunderstanding arguably cost Swift a prestigious career in the Church.

The Enlightenment

Swift was arguably both a participant in and a critic of the Enlightenment, a Western intellectual movement of the late 17th through the 18th centuries. Some leading Enlightenment thinkers, including English philosopher and economist Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), French philosopher and man of letters Denis Diderot (1713–84), French philosopher and political theorist Montesquieu (1689–1755), U.S. president Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), and British American author Thomas Paine (1737–1809), thought societies ideally should be democracies based on natural rights. Swift, a monarchist, vigorously protested the mistreatment of the poor in his native Ireland but stopped short of calling for any democracy in a republican type of self-rule as a solution to the Irish crisis. He found much in general to ridicule in the Enlightenment optimism concerning advances in technology and culture—several of the digressions in A Tale of a Tub mock the "moderns" for their claimed superiority over the "ancients." In a well-known French and English literary debate that began during the 17th century, the "ancients" argued that Greek and Roman classical literature provided the only existing literary models of distinction. In contrast, the "moderns" argued that other such examples outside of the classics existed. According to Swift, the fascination with systems that characterized the Enlightenment led to rigid and pedantic thinking and, even worse, to rigid and pedantic writing.

Nonetheless, Swift—in A Tale of a Tub and elsewhere—recognizes that his society is confronting a special kind of transformation as it comes to grips with increasingly specialized forms of knowledge. He mocks the concept of an encyclopedia, which, as a genre of writing, is one of the most enduring legacies of the Enlightenment. Yet he recognizes the existence of the problem that preoccupied many of his fellow "moderns:" too much information and too little time. The days when one could be an expert in everything—a "Renaissance" scholar—were gone, if such a time ever existed. (Swift noted that Homer (c. 9th or 8th century BCE), the great Greek poet, was ignorant on a huge range of subjects that had since come to seem essential to European culture.) If encyclopedists such as British writer Ephraim Chambers (c. 1680–1740) and French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–84) captured the optimism of this era, Swift served as a kind of counterweight. There is something inherently ridiculous, he suggests, in the drive to compile, distill, and organize all that can be known.

Augustan Literature

Swift and his writings are usually considered a part of the Augustan era of British literature. The name hearkens back to the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus (b. 63 BCE; r. 27 BCE–14 CE), under whom many of the great classics of Latin literature were written. In the British context, the term Augustan sometimes strictly refers to the reign of Queen Anne (r. 1702–14), but it often extends to include earlier and later writers. Major Augustan figures include the poet and critic Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and The Beggar's Opera (1728) librettist John Gay (1685–1732), both friends of Swift's. The famed poet John Dryden (1631–1700), who was Swift's distant cousin, is sometimes regarded as an early Augustan.

Considered as a whole, Augustan literature sets a high value on wit and stylishness, in addition to classical forms and conventions. In A Tale of a Tub, Swift complains that many writers are known only through such works, not through their more original endeavors. Many of the best-known Augustan poems and essays treat their subjects mock-heroically, poking fun at those segments of society that take themselves too seriously. Swift, who loves carrying a joke just a little too far, exemplifies the prose side of this tradition in A Tale of a Tub and other works. In poetry, the most famous examples of Augustan mock-heroic style are two works by Pope: The Dunciad (1728; 1743) and The Rape of the Lock (1712; 1714). Swift's prose satire "The Battle of the Books" (1704) is a mock-heroic take on the theme of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.

What made this era Augustan—that is, what prompted the comparison to Emperor Augustus—was an intense interest in the literary heritage of the classical world. The epic poem, in both serious and satirical forms, was embraced as an ideal by such writers as Dryden and Pope. Satire of all kinds—at which Swift excelled—was also based on classical literature of Greece and Rome. Satirical works were divided into two distinct types: gentle, universal Horatian satire ("laughing with, not at") and sharply specific Juvenalian satire. Swift has been hailed as a practitioner of both styles, but A Tale of a Tub and A Modest Proposalpredominantly reflect the sharp Juvenalian variety. Juvenalian satire, named after Latin satirist Juvenal (c. 55 CE–c. 127), is characterized by bitterness, anger, and pessimism. Horatian satire, named after Roman poet Horace (65 BCE–8 BCE), is characterized by indulgence, amusement, and wit.

Augustan literary criticism can also be traced back to classical ideals. The ancient Greeks and Romans had their own body of prescriptive literature that defined genres and proposed rules of good taste: Greek philosopher Aristotle's (384–322 BCE) DePoetica (c. 350 BCE) is one example; Roman poet Horace's (65–8 BCE) Ars Poetica ("Art of Poetry," c. 19 BCE) is another. The clearest Augustan successor to these is Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711), which like Horace's work is formally a poem but functionally a manual on literary style. Swift's "A Digression Concerning Critics," which appears as Chapter 3 of A Tale of a Tub, suggests that Augustan critics could be not only detail-oriented, but petty and trivial in judging a work—faults hardly unique to their era.

A Tale of a Tub, prose satire by Jonathan Swift, written between 1696 and 1699, published anonymously in 1704, and expanded in 1710. Regarded as his first major work, it comprises three related sketches: the “Tale” itself, an energetic defense of literature and religion against zealous pedantry; “The Battle of the Books,” a witty addition to the scholarly debate about the relative merits of ancient versus modern literature and culture; and “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” a satire of religious fanaticism. In the preface Swift explains the title: sailors toss a tub overboard to distract a whale that might attack their ship; in the same way, Swift suggests, his work may act as a decoy to deflect destructive criticism from the state and established religion.

The 11-part “A Tale of a Tub” is the most impressive of the three compositions for its imaginative wit and command of stylistic effects, notably parody. The sections of the “Tale” alternate between the main allegory about Christian history and ironic digressions on modern scholarship.

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 symbolises the Anglican Church (from Martin Luther); Peter symbolizes the Roman Catholic Church; and Jack (from John Calvin) symbolises 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 generalisation, 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 recognise truth, while parody teaches its readers to see beyond appearance to recognise 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.

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 works whose claim to authority is spurious, and whose authors fail to pay homage to the only true originals of classical civilisation.

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