The Tale of a Tub and Other Works [Paperback]

 

 

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Swift was that rarity, a true conservative. In our day the term has been hijacked by apologists for the market economy who have contrived to reverse its original meaning. With their narrow emphasis on preventing "liberal" interference with the legal and economic basis of the market society, the new conservatives no longer have much to do with conserving. Their mission is focused instead on change: the endless drive toward new markets, new technologies, new values and "visions". In short, whatever it takes to keep the engine of economic growth lurching crazily ahead in pursuit of profit. What gives the game away is the perpetual grin of complacent self-satisfaction on the face of the modern-day "conservative". He knows (or thinks he knows) that God, history and sound economic theory are all on his side.

The true conservative by contrast is anguished by his awareness that the hard-won fruit of experience may be trodden underfoot in the rush to novelty. Civilization is a tender plant. Even a glimpse of the upstart innovator sniffing around the accumulated acquirements of human effort to see what he can trim down or throw onto the compost heap is apt to drive the conservative to uncontrollable fury. And that's where Swift is coming from. True, in A Tale of a Tub his manic energy, his youthful love of mischief and his obvious enjoyment of his own literary powers express themselves in a dazzling display of intellectual fireworks that is (for the most part) irresistibly funny. But the fun shouldn't mislead us as to his serious purpose. We find a clue to this in the following sentence: "Let us next examine the great introducers of new schemes in philosophy, and search till we can find from what faculty of the soul the disposition arises in mortal man, of taking it into his head to advance new systems with such an eager zeal, in things agreed on all hands to be impossible to be known." This is what pushes Swifts's buttons: the vulgar itch to "know", the arrogance in thinking that our puny human understanding can penetrate the innermost secrets of Creation. But since this was the very aim of the emerging new science, which has since achieved so many triumphs, Swift was clearly fighting a losing battle. There is perhaps a reflection of this in the hard edge he gave to the critique of human nature that we find in Gulliver's Travels. Humanity is deeply flawed and its chances of improvement are slim.

For now though, Swift could still find amusement in puncturing a variety of contemporary targets, among them the "enthusiasm" of individualistic religion (which he saw as an expression of displaced sexuality), the pretensions of smart-alecky scholarship and the cloudy theories of modern metaphysics. Was he fair in his ridicule of these tendencies? Not at all. Nevertheless his satiric spirit produced a marvel of vigourous and sparkling English prose.

"But when a man's fancy gets astride on his reason, when imagination is at cuffs with the senses, and common understanding as well as common sense is kicked out of doors; the first proselyte he makes is himself, and when that is once compassed the difficulty is not so great in bringing over others, a strong delusion operating from without as vigourously as from within."

In this edition the "other works" are those usually associated with A Tale of a Tub, namely The Battle of the Books, The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit and the additions to the Tale. As well as a glossary and explanatory notes the editors have included a useful selection of texts illustrating the intellectual and political background. Highly recommended.

A Tale of a Tub is certainly Swift's least classifiable work. He's best known, of course, for Gulliver's Travels. This work was mostly written at the very start of his career, when he hadn't yet totally hardened into his later misanthropy, and it has all the demented exuberance of a great writer in his mid-20s finding a voice.

It defies description. The kernel of it is a satire on religious controversies, but that makes up about a third of the actual text. The rest is a series of prologues, forewords, dedications, prefaces, afterwords, epilogues and appendices, the sheer profusion of which suggest very much that Swift is poking dire fun at the idea of writing itself. In that respect, it goes further than any 20th century French golden boy of artistic revolt; Artaud looks like a stamped-in-tin romantic poet when set against Swift's manic nihilism. A Tale of a Tub is the closest anyone has ever got to writing a book that tackles head-on the futility of writing books, but that's only one interpretation of it. It exhausts interpretation by being as near as possible about nothing at all - and hence about everything. Plus it's not even 200 pages long. Swift never wrote as irresponsibly ever again, although the Travels, 'A Modest Proposal', the Bickerstaffe Papers, the 'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift' and the Drapier's Letters are all admirable enough. A Tale of a Tub is as comprehensive a piece of literary terrorism as was ever attempted.

Swift, the greatest English satirist, is of course best known for Gulliver's Travels, but the Tale of a Tub is more complex, more vicious, and funnier. In some of the best prose of the 18th century, he ridicules all sorts of conventions, religious, literary, rhetorical, and otherwise. He makes full use of the capacity that prose has for being deliriously irrelevant and digressive. It is similar in some ways to Tristram Shandy and the novels of postmodernism. It'll give you fits.

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