The tale in a tub concluded

A tub

I have now completed my second reading of the three parts of this tale from the close of the seventeenth century (reference 1). That is to say the tale proper, an allegory about three coats, each coat standing for a branch of the Christian church; the battle of the books, an allegory about the battle for supremacy between the learning lifted from the Romans and Greeks of antiquity and the new learning then getting under way; and, a fragment about the working of the spirit.

Earlier comments are to be found at references 4 and 5.

The tale comes in an elaborate package of advertisements, prefaces, introductions, digressions, side headings, several layers of footnotes, appendices and indices. A tale which was very popular in its day and which seems to have spawned a regular industry of learned comment and criticism.

I associate to the side headings which were once an important feature of important documents from the Treasury, such as the Autumn Statement. We had a fine old time one autumn trying to get one of the leading word processing packages to do side headings, to replicate what a proper printer had no particular trouble with. For the nerds among us, a problem of seriality. A side note did not fit in with the essentially serial, text model of such packages, according to which a document was no more than a long series of words, one after the other. A problem which is more or less cracked, amid much complication and complexity, by the HTML and the XML used in today’s Internet.

The tub, amongst other allusions, draws on the pulpits used by parsons, in particular dissenting parsons, as snapped above, one of the illustrations to an early, if not the first edition. Also on the tubs, that is to say barrels, said to be thrown out of the ships of the day when threatened by whales – also known as leviathans, for which see reference 10 – the idea being to provide diversion for said whales.

Elaborated to the point where it is quite unclear where the words of Swift stop and the words of his various helpers, followers and commentators start. If indeed, this Swift was the author at all.

A tale rooted in the controversies of the end of the seventeenth century, the tail end of Stuart dynasty in general and the Restoration in particular. The squashing, not to say the squelching, of the Roundheads. A tale as much about the manner of those controversies as about their matter, with Swift using the tale as a vehicle to have a pop at all sort of things. So while there are some very funny parts, one misses a great deal by not being part of these controversies, by not knowing the controversialists. One also misses a great deal by not being well versed, well grounded in classical Latin literature – Horace, Lucretius, Ovid, Virgil and their friends. The sort of people that people of my generation who did Latin and Greek A-levels got to know about. And reference 8, while helpful, is not a substitute for actually being there. The sort of stuff that our fat leader may well have imbibed during his time at Eton and Oxford. Perhaps this tale is his bedtime reading? Much better than 1,000 pages of expensive lawyer-speak about Brexit, this being my understanding of the length of the draft non-agreement.

A writer who is fascinated by the literary possibilities of asses (that is to say entire donkeys rather than the hind quarters of the female) and of bodily functions of one sort or another. A fascination which has largely vanished from the English scene, but lives on in films from the US, where they still seem to like that sort of thing.

For some reason, I associate to James Joyce, another literary Irishman, another writer who produced some very elaborate prose, a couple of centuries later. 

For me, I think a book which one might with pleasure take a look at from time to time. Just to take in a few pages, more or less at random. But I doubt whether I will work up the energy need to grapple with all the derivative material, for example that at reference 7. 

References

Reference 1: A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift - 1704. With my second edition from Oxford being from 1958, a substantially revised and reset version of the first edition of 1920.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_a_Tub. A useful introduction, more useful than that provided by the Oxford people.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_a_Tub_(play).  A play by Ben Johnson which came more than fifty years before the present tale.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/another-proper-book.html. My first notice.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/mechanical-operation-of-spirit.html. My second notice.

Reference 6: https://dp.la/. Turns up lots of stuff on the key ‘tale tub swift’. Including the reference following.

Reference 7: Some remarks on The tale of a tub. To which are annexed Mully of Mountown, and Orpheus and Euridice. By the author of the Journey to London – seemingly attributed to King William IV – 1704. I now have the pdf so maybe I will get to the bottom of this attribution.

Reference 8: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/. A bit old-speak now, but which may be of help to those who are up for ploughing through all the bits and pieces of Latin included in the tale.

Reference 9: four more learned editions of the epistolary and other works by Swift are advertised on the back of the present tale. For example, the Drapier’s letters to the people of Ireland of 1724. Letters regarding the corruption in high places regarding the introduction of additional (and superfluous) copper coinage to Ireland.

Reference 10: Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil – Thomas Hobbes – 1651. The Penguin edition of which I may have read if not absorbed as a child. LSC (long since culled).