" A Tale of a Tub " - Jonathan Swift's

 " A Tale of a Tub " - Jonathan Swift's 

The Battle

 of the Books     

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Introduction: 

      " The Battle of the Books "  is a satire written by Jonathan Swift and published as a part of the prolegomena to his  ' A Tale of a Tub ' in 1704 . It depicts a literal battle between books. In the King's Library , as an idea and author's struggle for supremacy . Because of the satire , ' The Battle of the Books' ' has become a term for the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns . It is one his earliest well - known works .

Ancients vs. Moderns 

    In France at the end of the seventeenth century , a minor furore arose over the questions of whether contemporary learning had surpassed what was known by those in classical Greece and Rome . The " Moderns " took the position that the modern age of science and reason was superior to the superstition And limited word of Greece and Rome. In his opinion , modern man saw farther than the ancients ever could . The " ancients, " for their part, argued that all that is necessary to be known was to be found in Virgil , Cicero , Homer and especially Aristotle .

    The literary content was re-enacted miniature in England when Sir William Temple published an answer to fontenelle entities  of Ancient and Modern  Learning in 1690. His essay introduced two metaphors to the debate that would be reused by later. Authors . First he proposed that modern man was just a dwarf standing upon the " shoulders of giants ". 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 education of the works of Shakespeare .

    But ' the Ancients ' among whose number swift counted himself ,realized with horror that aspiration of kind threatened the educational and cultural  structures that Europian elite had shared ever since the Renaissance rediscovery classical past. Educated in a humanist tradition  of scholarship ' The Ancients '. Believed that the values derived from Greek and roman literature continued to provided authoritative standards of virtue , rationality , and asthetic taste . The classics weren't remnants of a past and primitive culture :  They were culture , and were cornerstones by which all human endeavor could be measured . They were not to be questioned or dissected by scholarship in the way Bentley attempted.

   Swift was tied into this debate heavily because his patron at the time of writing the Tale , Sir William Temple , was a key figure among the group of Ancients . Swift's ' Battle of the Books' engages fully on the side of the Ancients : through the figure of scaliger , swift attacks Bentley for his  lack of grace , observing the irony that the classics have failed to infuse their decorum and civilizing influence on the scholar . Swift writes, " All Art of civilising others , render thee rude and intractable ." The social and cultural superiority of the Ancients is reflected in their imperviousness to the assaults of the moderns and this is illustrated in the mock- epic passage near the end of the 'Battle of the Books ' where the Anglican churchman and modern defender of Bentley , william wotton , hurls a lance at william Temple but we are told that Temple " neither felt the weapon touch him , nor heard it fall."

   The debate about  ancient and modern learning is clearly intimately bound up with the interrogation of authority and authorial status that we see in A Tale of a Tub . The Ancient and moderns debate was in essence about a question of  origins , and of textual authority . It was about how far the authority of the classical poets extended . If you took Ancients argument to its logical conclusion , no truly newgreat literature could ever be produced , because the summit had already been achieved . The best that was left was initiation . And so you could read the tissue  of allusions and borrowings that constitutes the Tale as trope for the indebtedness of modern literature , for its dependence upon earlier texts that render the idea of modern originality meaningless. And in formulating a brilliant work out Of a collage of older ones the tale , swift gestures toward the way in which the ancient can continue to generate new imaginative literature : the habits of  allusion and imitation that were at the centre of the neoclassicism of the Ancient could also be generative. 

     The Tale is self-consciously digressive and attacks the modern writers unmindful of the past and obsessed with the idea of being up to the moment . The narrator of the Tale is fatuolsy scrupulous in recording this contemporaneity by recording the most trivial domestic circumstances and everything that entres his head at the moment of writing , including his thoughts on the writing of his thoughts. In drwaning attention to its newness, A Tale of a Tub parodies the novelty  associated with the romance and early novel , always presenting new scense and " surprising adventures ."

     Swift also satirses contemporary development in the book trade : the expanding  commercialism of the literary marketplace and the hybrid forms of scholarship , history and pamphlet that is was spawing . The Tale is just such a hybrid . And it makes nonsense of typographical innovation , the random and pointless use of asterisks , hyphens and parentheses gesture towards an over excited print culture whose sense of literary merit has got lost in new and various forms of textual egotism.

Conclusion

Paralleling this obsession with textual modernity comes a corresponding collective cultural amnesia. The modern are so obsessed with being new , that they have forgotten their past . This is made explicit in section six of Tale of a Tub : 

     

' Memory being an employment of mind upon things past , is a fculty for which the learned in our illustrious age have no manner of occasion , who deal entirely with invention , and strike all things out of  themselves.' 

 The invention that is being satisfied here is both scientific and literary .