A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift

A Tale of a Tub (1704) is Swift's first important prose work, a satirical allegory on the abuses of religion and the excesses of the print revolution.

The preface explains the title: "seamen have a custom when they meet a Whale to fling him out an empty Tub... to divert him from laying violent hands upon the Ship. This parable was immediately mythologized; the Whale was interpreted to be Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” which tosses and plays with all other schemes of religion and government, whereof a great many are hollow, and dry, and empty.... The Ship in danger is easily understood to be its old antitype the commonwealth."

The titular "tale" stars three brothers--Martin, Peter, and Jack--representing distinct religious schools, respectively: the Anglican Church (i.e., Martin Luther), the Catholic Church (i.e., Saint Peter), and the Dissenters (i.e., John Calvin). To each brother is bequeathed a coat (metaphorically, the word of God) with strict orders for care and preservation. But the brothers find excuses to modify their coats, patching or adorning them according to the prevailing fashion, eventually leading to dissention and strife.

Swift had written the tale to defend the Anglican church against corrupting influences. However, the book's sweeping irony, and the destabilizing and confusing nature of its satiric personae caused many to misconstrue it as an attack on all religion.

Swift also parodies scholarly pretensions: making nonsensical use of asterisks, hyphens, parentheses, and long digressions that eventually grow to overwhelm the narrative--mocking the "conspicuous learning" and growth of "fake news" during the period. What unites both the "tale" and its "digressions" is their satirization of textual misinterpretation, whether over-figurative or over-literal, and whether of the Bible, poetry, or prose.

Lawrence Thompson suggests "the coat images in Swift's Tale of a Tub" may have been covertly leveraged by Melville in White-Jacket: "the making and wearing and discarding of the white jacket" thus represents Melville's "autobiographical attempt to patch up or find a substitute for his inherited Calvinistic theological beliefs in Platonic philosophical concepts and his final decision to discard all, to strip himself down to the 'natural man,' in the tradition of Rousseau and Tom Paine."

In 1856, Thomas Powell claimed Melville had "formed the idea of becoming a Psychological Cerberus, and consequently set to work to stuff himself with Swift, Rabelais and Browne," whose three-headed influence he detected in Mardi.

A Tale of a Tub:

• Kindle
• Google books
• Gutenberg
• Librivox 4h23m

Supplemental:

• The Lady's Dressing Room poem by Jonathan Swift

Extracts:

• "And here it may be mentioned, that to prevent the strain upon the boat when suspended to the ship's side, the heavy whale-line, over two hundred fathoms in length, and something more than an inch in diameter, when not in use is kept on ship-board, coiled away like an endless snake in its tub. But this tub is always in readiness to be launched into the boat. Now, having no use for the line belonging to our craft, we had purposely left it behind." (Mardi, 1.10)

This meetup is part of a series on Fig Leaves and Fancy Pants.