Tale of a Tub: Study Questions
1. When A Tale of a Tub was published, many felt it to be anti-religious (a reaction that was one of the reasons why Swift never quite admitted he wrote it), but Swift himself argued that it was truly religious because it attacked false religiosity. If it is religious, what is the nature of its religious position? (The answer should be more detailed than saying that the Anglicans win.)2. A Tale of a Tub is rich in the detail of its allegory and the intertwining of allegory with satire on interpretation. What are the details of Swift's allegory, and what is the relationship between our interpretation of the allegory and the brothers' interpretation of the will? This question arises again in considering the relation of the allegorical sections to the digressions (see question 8).
3. After working our way through a list of treatises, an apology, a dedication, a letter from the bookseller, another dedication, and a preface, we finally make our way to the body of the book, which begins, of course, with an introduction. (If "study questions" had been a genre of the late 17th century, Swift surely would have added some.) Some of prefatory materials are ostensible written by different people. Who are they? In what respects and to what ends are they ironic? Is this endless prefatory material in fact a genuine introduction to the book? That is, does it provide useful information about Swift's topic, his genre, and his way of approach?
4. The movement from the "Preface" to the "Introduction" suggests an overlap between the prefatory material and the body of the work (if it can be said to have any body at all). Therefore it implies an overlap between the previous question and this one. Who is the speaker of A Tale of a Tub proper? This is not an easy question: it has consumed the energies and haunted the sleep of tougher critics than I. Four theories emerge from the miasma of text and commentary thereon: (1) the speaker is Swift, and he is having one hell of a good time; (2) the speaker is a characterized figure (a.k.a. "the Hack" or "the Modern") who represents Swift's major satiric target--moderns (see question 5); (3) the speaker is a poltergeist of Johannes Gutenberg, the spirit of print--the medium is not only the message but the messenger; (4) what speaker? there is no speaker (or at least no reasonably consistent one) but primarily the projection of the text itself, different in different passages. Don't just draw straws or throw the I Ching. The real question is, what difference does the way in which we identify the speaker make to the way in which we interpret the text?
5. If there is a speaker at all, he is, or sometimes pretends to be, a modern (as distinct from an ancient). What is a modern? What are modern beliefs or modern methods of authorship, and why are they important satiric targets for Swift? (By way of completion, one might ask what an ancient is?) See, especially "A Digression in the Modern Kind."
6. In addition to attacking moderns, openly and (mainly) ironically, in various passages, Swift appends a panoply of notes, typographical oddities, allusions, and references to actual scholars (some of whom had attacked earlier editions of A Tale of a Tub). What is the significance of this panoply of devices? Who are Bentley and Wotton, and such critics? What is their function in Swift's text, and what is their relationship to such later moderns as you and me?
7. The crux of A Tale of a Tub (which might itself be described as cruciform in structure) is "A Digression Concerning Madness," and we will want to look at it very closely, with particular attention to its shifting voices, its yoking of disparities, and its role in the structure of Swift's work. It is a particularly apt section for considering the nature of the putative author. To what degree does Swift (or do we) agree with the author's contentions? For starters, is happiness "the Possession of being well deceived"?
8. What is the relationship between madness and aeolism? Does that relationship provide a bridge between the religious allegory and the modernist digressions? What other important connections between the religious allegory and the digressions derive from the connections between madness and aeolism?
9. Like much of Swift's other work, A Tale a Tub contains a great deal of, shall we say, organic material, and one of the persistent elements is its return to a usually reductionistic bodily imagery. Pay attention to such images as they occur. What generalizations can you make about their function? (Are they, as Swift would say, fundamental to the text?) Or is their importance merely local? What is the relationship between the physical body and thought in Swift's satiric discourse?
10. The nature of Swift's imagery and the various ways in which he extends figurative language to its logical conclusions are only part of his general assault on language in A Tale of a Tub. Another weapon is punning. To what extent and in what ways is language itself a subject of A Tale of a Tub? Is it an object as well as vehicle of satire? (Are the Houyhnhnms well off in not having writing?)
11. The author ultimately admits that he must conclude the story because he forgets how it ends. What do you make of the various conclusions of A Tale of a Tub?
12. A Tale of a Tub is one of those works (like those of Rabelais, like Byron's Don Juan, and like Gulliver's Travels) that seems to set up a powerful structure that allows the most general satiric scrutiny of a whole culture. What is the nature of the structure, and what does it allow us to perceive?