The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jonathan Swift · a satire in prose, a tale of three brothers interleaved with digressions inside the apparatus of a modern book · eleven sections and a Conclusion, with an Apology, two dedications, a bookseller’s address and a Preface · John Nutt, London, 1704, anonymously; scored on the fifth edition of 1710, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Menippean satire spoken wholly in the voice of its target, an author of the modern party, with no frame and no corrector
Mythos
A father’s will and three heirs, the pattern of Boccaccio’s three rings; the universe as a suit of clothes; wind as the first cause; Bedlam as the source of conquests, systems and sects
Phase
Written in the main at Moor Park in 1696 and 1697, in the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns; printed 1704; defended and annotated in the fifth edition of 1710
Presentation
Prose; the Apology, the Bookseller’s Dedication to Lord Somers, the Bookseller to the Reader, the Epistle Dedicatory to Prince Posterity and the Preface; eleven sections in which five of the tale alternate with digressions; a Conclusion; gaps in the supposed manuscript set into the text
Register
One voice, the modern author’s, swollen where he swells and flat where the flatness kills, every sentence his and the satirist’s at once
Scale
A book about books: the history of the church in parable, the learning of an age, the trade in print, and the madness behind conquests and new religions
Governing Proposition
A nameless modern author, writing for the universal improvement of mankind, presents his book: prefaces stacked four deep, a tale of a father’s will and three sons who alter the coats it left them, and between the parts of the tale digressions on critics, on modern learning, on digression itself and on the usefulness of madness in a commonwealth. Every page is in his voice and nothing corrects him. The wager of the book is that the corruptions of religion and of learning are one corruption, the mind’s preference for the surface over the substance and for wind over spirit, and that a satire spoken wholly from inside that mind can show it working and catch its reader in it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The title page promises everything: A Tale of a Tub. Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind. John Nutt published it in London in 1704 without an author’s name, and Swift never acknowledged it. It had been written in the main some seven years before, in 1696 and 1697 at Moor Park, where Swift was secretary to Sir William Temple, in the years of the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns: Temple’s essay of 1690, William Wotton’s Reflections of 1694, Richard Bentley’s dissertation on the letters of Phalaris of 1697. The Epistle Dedicatory is dated December 1697. Temple’s side was the Ancients’, and in the matter of Phalaris it was wrong on the facts.
In 1705 Wotton answered with Observations upon The Tale of a Tub, which read the book as an attack on religion itself. The fifth edition of 1710 answered him back. It adds “An Apology for the, &c.”, dated 3 June 1709, in which the author says his targets were the corruptions in religion and learning, the first shown in the allegory and the second in the digressions; and it adds explanatory notes, some Swift’s own and some taken over from Wotton, with ironic intent, so that the enemy’s glosses stand at the foot of the page as the book’s own apparatus. The desk scores that edition.
The unit is the Tale with all of it: the list of treatises by the same author, the Apology, the Bookseller’s Dedication to Lord Somers, the Bookseller to the Reader, the Epistle Dedicatory to Prince Posterity, the Preface, eleven sections and the Conclusion. The Battle of the Books and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, printed in the same volume, are context and are not scored. The apparatus is not a porch to the book. It is the first of the book’s jokes, and it makes the reader do what the hack has done to the printed book: wade through it.
Movement II
The Epistle to Prince Posterity complains that the moderns’ books are destroyed before the Prince can see them, Time mowing them down with his scythe; the comedy is grave, since it is true. The Preface explains the title. Seamen who meet a whale throw out an empty tub to divert it from the ship; the whale is Hobbes’s Leviathan and the ship the commonwealth, and the book in hand is offered as such a tub, a thing to keep the wits of the age busy. The Introduction, Section I, then describes the three wooden machines of oratory, the pulpit, the ladder and the stage-itinerant, and the hack is fully under way.
Section II begins the tale. A father dies and leaves his three sons a coat each, with a will: the coats will last them their lives if they are kept as given. The sons are Peter, Martin and Jack, and the tale is the history of Christianity, from the primitive church through Rome to the Reformation. It is the old pattern of the three heirs, with Boccaccio’s three rings behind it, and it is built, not alluded to: everything that happens to the coats is something done to the church and its scripture.
Around the parable Section II builds a philosophy of clothes. The sons go into a society that holds the universe to be a suit of clothes and man “a micro-coat”. Surface is substance in this creed, and the sons, wanting to be fashionable, begin to look for warrant in the will for what the fashion asks. The joke is a cosmology, and the whole book will obey it.
Movement III
The fashion requires shoulder-knots, and the brothers search the will for warrant. They look for it “totidem verbis”, then “totidem syllabis”, and at last “totidem literis”, letter by letter, until the text yields what its writer never meant. Interpretation is shown as appetite. Section IV gives Peter his projects and his tyranny: he argues a brown loaf into mutton, issues bulls, and turns his brothers out of doors. The comedy is farce, and the farce is the history of a church reading its book.
Between the parts of the tale the digressions run, and they are about learning. Section III traces the genealogy of the modern critic; Section V claims for the modern author a universal knowledge; Section VII praises digression itself, and index learning, which enters knowledge by the back door. Each digression mirrors the tale beside it: the critics and the index-learners do to the books of the past what Peter does to the will. That is the Apology’s division made into structure, and it is why the two corruptions read as one.
In Section VI Martin and Jack strip the ornaments from their coats. Martin works with care; Jack tears. The Reformation has two ways, and the book’s sympathy is plain. Here and there the text breaks off: “Hiatus in MS.”, “Hic multa desiderantur”. The supposed manuscript has gaps, placed to break off a promise, and the book becomes an instance of the decay it describes.
Movement IV
Section VIII describes the Aeolists, who hold wind to be the first cause of all things and worship it with belching. They are the enthusiasts of the sects, and the clothes philosophy has found its second article: if surface is substance, inflation is spirit. Then comes Section IX, the Digression on Madness, the book’s furthest reach. Its argument is that madness, a vapour rising to the brain, is the source of conquests, of systems of philosophy and of new religions; it traces the conquests of Henri IV to such a vapour, and proposes an Academy of Bedlam from which the offices of the commonwealth could be staffed.
The trouble begins, the speaker says, “when a man’s fancy gets astride on his reason”, and he speaks for the fancy. Credulity is the happier state: “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse”. Twenty-one plain words of report carry a horror the voice does not register. He has a beau’s carcass stripped in his presence to show what lies beneath, and concludes for the surface. Happiness is “the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves”.
There the reader is caught. The choice offered is between the fool and the knave, and the voice offering it is the madman the digression describes. To follow the argument the reader must decide where the irony stops, and cannot; the satirist does not stand clear of what he satirises. Whether any ground is left to stand on has been argued since Wotton, and the passage keeps the question open.
Movement V
Section X, a digression on authors and readers, offers the author’s gratitude and adds little the Introduction and Section VII had not shown. Section XI returns to Jack, whose enthusiasm brings him at last to resemble Peter, the torn coat come round to the knotted one. The section runs his grotesqueries well past the point its argument is made, and its coarseness is repetition more than force. Martin barely appears. The book’s weakest pages are here, and the excess the book parodies is, by now, partly its own.
The Conclusion closes the book on its own principle: “I am now trying an experiment very frequent among modern authors; which is, to write upon nothing”. The hack goes on writing after his matter is spent, and the book ends as the modern book it imitates would end, without an end. Every part of the apparatus has been made to mean, and the last joke is that the book can stop only when its author has run out of wind.
The book showed that satire could be spoken from inside its object, with no frame to correct it, and that a book’s whole apparatus could carry the satire. Pope’s Dunciad Variorum took the mock notes, Sterne took the digressions, the misplaced dedications and the gaps into Tristram Shandy (8.8), and Carlyle rebuilt the clothes philosophy in Sartor Resartus. It is read now mainly in the academy and with notes. Beside its author’s posted Gulliver’s Travels (9.0) it stands lower: Gulliver built its myths into the common stock where the Tale’s brothers stay counters, and reached a general readership the Tale has not. The madness digression and the will have outlived their occasion entirely.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets a book whose subject is excess, and the case for its bulk is real. A parody of the swollen modern book must swell, and the prefaces stacked four deep before the first section are required: the reader must wade through apparatus to feel what the hack has done to the book as an object. The alternation is required too. Remove the digressions and the tale is a pamphlet allegory; remove the tale and the digressions lose the history of scripture abused that they mirror. What the test finds is inside the parts. Section X, on authors and readers, adds little the Introduction and Section VII have not shown; Section XI runs Jack’s grotesqueries well past the point its argument is made; and several mock-learned passages repeat a joke at the length of the thing they mock. Imitative excess has a diminishing return, and the book pays it.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the mind prefers the surface to the substance and is happier deceived, and what passes for inspiration, system and conquest is often the same vapour that fills Bedlam. The Digression on Madness puts it at full stretch: happiness is “the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves”, and the trouble begins “when a man’s fancy gets astride on his reason”. The tale states a second disclosure in action: a text can be interpreted until it commands its opposite, and interpretation is shown as appetite. A third holds too: the satirist cannot stand clear of what he satirises, since the voice that diagnoses madness is the mad modern. Held off the top because Martin’s middle way is asserted more than shown, and because in learning the book’s side was wrong on the facts, as Bentley proved on Phalaris.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The height is the cold kind, and it comes in a few concentrated places. The ceiling is in Section IX: “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse”, and then the carcass of a beau stripped in the speaker’s presence to show what lies beneath. That is satire reaching dread, the comic voice going flat over a horror it will not register. The Epistle to Prince Posterity has a grave comedy of its own, Time mowing the moderns’ books before they can be shown; the Preface’s tub thrown to the whale has grandeur in small. Between these heights the register is wit, often brilliant and rarely elevated. Much of the tale runs at the level of farce, the brown loaf proved to be mutton, and Section XI descends to the excremental without lift.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, at two levels. The tale is a load-bearing parable: a father’s will, three sons and three coats that will last a lifetime if kept as given, the old pattern of the three heirs, with Boccaccio’s three rings behind it, built into a history of Christianity from the primitive church through Rome to the Reformation. Around it the book builds a cosmology of its own: the clothes philosophy of Section II, in which the universe is a suit of clothes and man “a micro-coat”, and the Aeolists’ wind as first cause, which together make surface and inflation a creation myth for the modern mind. What holds it below the gate is the persons. The brothers are counters; the allegory is decoded rather than lived, the particular never becomes particular enough to carry the archetype, and Martin barely exists.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is Menippean satire and the learned wit: Lucian, Rabelais, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, whose own digression on madness is near, Butler’s Hudibras against the enthusiasts, Marvell’s controversial prose, and the Grub Street hack as a figure of contempt. The turn is to give the whole book to its target. The speaker is the modern author himself, with no frame and no corrector; his prefaces, dedications, digressions and manuscript gaps are the satire, and the book becomes a parody of the printed book as an object. In 1710 Swift took the swerve further, printing his enemy’s glosses as the book’s own notes. The stake was real: anonymity kept for life, and a charge of irreligion that the Apology had to answer. Held below the top because the parody of pedantry had predecessors and the allegory is a conventional instrument.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told as a plain essay against enthusiasm and the moderns, the book would argue that the modern mind is mad; told in the hack’s voice, through his apparatus, it shows the madness working and catches the reader in it, since to follow Section IX the reader must decide where the irony stops, and cannot. The alternation of tale and digression is the Apology’s division made structure: the corruptions of religion and of learning are shown as one by being made to interleave, Peter’s glosses on the will answering the critics and the index-learners. The gaps marked “Hiatus in MS.” make the book an instance of the decay it describes. Held off the top because the tale sections, taken alone, are allegory in a container any pamphleteer could have used: the form’s knowledge lives in the frame more than in the tale.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence, not promise: three centuries of argument about who speaks and where the irony stops. Wotton read the book in 1705 as an attack on religion itself, and the question has not closed. Does Section IX’s choice between the fool and the knave leave any ground to stand on? Does the satire of enthusiasm reach faith as such? Is Martin a position or an absence? Formal depth yields too: the apparatus repays rereading as a set of voices in conflict, the hack’s, the bookseller’s, the annotator’s and, in the Apology, an author’s who will not give his name. Held a step down because much of the return is annotation, the recovery of topical targets, Dryden, L’Estrange, Bentley, Wotton and the sects, which is study rather than depth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is English prose of the eighteenth century and, through it, European satire. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the satirist’s means, not an accent: the book showed that satire could be conducted from inside its object, in an impersonated voice with no correcting frame, and that a book’s whole apparatus could be made to mean. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Scriblerian line runs from it, Pope’s Dunciad Variorum (1729) with its mock notes most plainly; Sterne took its digressions, its misplaced dedications and its gaps into Tristram Shandy; Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833 to 1834) rebuilt its clothes philosophy; and the line of self-conscious, annotated fiction descends partly from it. Held below the top because its reach runs through learned readers and later writers more than through a general readership, and Swift’s own Gulliver carried the wider redirection.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Three centuries, weighed on form, presence and surface. Form: survival of the text is complete. Printed in 1704 and revised in 1710, it has been in print in Swift’s works and singly since, and has a standard scholarly edition by Guthkelch and Nichol Smith (Oxford, 1920, revised 1958). The form is whole and legible; nothing of the work is lost but the gaps it put there itself. Presence is continuous and narrow: taught in every survey of the period and read by writers, but read mainly in the academy and with notes. The surface the axis penalises is here, a topical satire on a quarrel of the 1690s and on the dissenting sects of the century before, which a modern reader cannot follow unaided. The charge is lightened because the madness digression and the will have outlived their occasion entirely.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on Swift’s English, with no translation between. The command is Swift’s plain style turned against itself: the modern hack’s voice sustained over a whole book, every sentence doing double duty as his and as the satirist’s, swollen where he swells and flat where the flatness kills. The flayed woman is the proof: twenty-one plain words of reportage carrying a moral horror the speaker does not feel. The Preface’s tub, the Introduction’s three wooden machines, Peter’s bread argued into mutton, the Aeolists’ belching liturgy: each conceit is built out exactly and turned at the right moment. The apparatus is made with the same care, the mock dates, the list of treatises by the same author, the gaps placed to break off a promise. Charged: the unevenness the impersonation licenses, the longueurs of Sections X and XI, jokes resting on knowledge the book cannot carry for its reader, and a coarseness in the Jack chapters that is repetition more than force.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs the book: the modern mind takes surface for substance and wind for spirit, and calls the result progress. Take two of the most distant elements, Peter’s papal bulls and the critic descended from Momus, or the clothes philosophy and the conquests of Henri IV that Section IX traces to a vapour: they obey the same law, and the range is wide, from church history to Grub Street to the psychology of delusion. Charged: the speaker’s law wavers. The hack narrates a tale whose sympathies, Martin’s care with his coat, are Swift’s own, so that in the tale sections the voice is often simply the author’s, and the reader is asked to trust a speaker the digressions have taught him to distrust. The Apology admits the seam when it divides the targets between the two kinds of section.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what the book holds, as a satire of moderate length. Religion: the history of the church in parable, from the primitive coats to Rome’s accretions and the Reformation’s two ways of stripping them. Learning: criticism, the moderns’ encyclopedism, index learning, the book trade. The state: madness as the root of conquest and of the founding of systems and sects, with a scheme to staff the offices of the commonwealth from Bedlam. Consciousness: the psychology of credulity and curiosity. The body: wind, vapour, the flayed skin. What holds the axis is the family, present only as allegorical frame, labour and the natural order, hardly present at all, and the joining of the orders by a single argument rather than through lived persons. They are held, not listed; but held as a thesis holds them.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Made at 8.8. A satire given wholly to its target, its prefaces, dedications, digressions and gaps made into the satire, and its enemy’s glosses printed as its own notes; a text whole since 1710, in print since, its topical surface outlived by the will and the madness digression; and the plain style turned against itself, every sentence the hack’s and the satirist’s at once.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.0: a bulk the parody requires, the prefaces and the alternation both necessary, with Section X adding little, Section XI running past its point and the mock-learned passages repeating a joke at the length of what they mock. Next above it, The Sublime and The Encompassed at 8.2: a cold height reached in a few places, the flayed woman its ceiling, with the tale mostly farce; and the orders of religion, learning, the state and the body held as a thesis holds them, not through persons.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.8, The Living Form at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 8.9, The Imperishable at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls two tenths short, its brothers counters rather than persons. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The aggregate stands at 8.5, from a sum of 102.3, in the band of Tier IV, and the book would stand there even at 9.0, since one gate axis stops below 8.5.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind, published anonymously by John Nutt, London, in 1704, and scored on the fifth edition of 1710, which adds “An Apology for the, &c.” (dated 3 June 1709) and explanatory notes, some Swift’s and some taken over, with ironic intent, from William Wotton’s Observations upon The Tale of a Tub (1705). The unit is the Tale with all its apparatus: the list of treatises by the same author, the Apology, the Bookseller’s Dedication to Lord Somers, the Bookseller to the Reader, the Epistle Dedicatory to Prince Posterity, the Preface, eleven sections and the Conclusion. The Battle of the Books and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, printed in the same volume, are context and are not scored. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Swift’s English, with no translation between. English is quoted only where its words are certain; events and the Preface’s figure of the tub are paraphrased, and sections are cited only where they are certain. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the length of the book in words, the edition in which its engraved plates first appeared, the later scholarly editions beyond Guthkelch and Nichol Smith, the cost of the book to Swift’s preferment, one modern critical reading and its type, and one eighteenth-century judgement of it.