Thursday 28 July 2016

Mini-Review: Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub

Swift re-read this book years later and sighed that he was ‘a genius then’. Samuel Johnson thought it so good that he didn’t believe Swift had written it - but the thing has not aged very well.

Part allegory of religion, part satire on modern forms and attitudes to writing and criticism, it delves deeply into hot topics and comic goldmines which do not run very true for me as a modern reader.


While I could enjoy Smart’s satirical writing because of it’s silliness, Fielding’s controlled use of tone, even Tom Brown’s eye for specific language and detail - there is nothing in the very dense Swiftian writing that really gave me nuggets of pleasure to pull me through.


That said, there were some brilliant ideas in it that might work well now, the essential pitch - a self satisfied modern writer laden with all the new fashionable concepts tries to sum up all of modern learning, might work very well for a book now. Maybe one laughing at all the divides and isms, that gets ludicrously tied up in post-post-post-modernism, and does it all in a baroque manner - could still pull in the punters. 


Swift puts it best, ‘If we look into primitive records we shall find that no revolutions have been so great, or so frequent, as those of human ears’. My ears, though fairly well attuned to eighteenth century registers, did not pick up the tune Swift sang.