- “The Battle of the Books” is the name of a short satire written by Jonathan Swift and published as 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 (housed in St James’s Palace at the time of the writing), as ideas and authors 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 of his earliest well-known works.
- Plot:
- The combat in the “Battle” is interrupted by the interpolated allegory of the spider and the bee. A spider, “swollen up to the first Magnitude, by the Destruction of infinite Numbers of Flies” resides like a castle holder above a top shelf, and a bee, flying from the natural world and drawn by curiosity, wrecks the spider’s web. The spider curses the bee for clumsiness and for wrecking the work of one who is his better. The spider says that his web is his home, a stately manor, while the bee is a vagrant who goes anywhere in nature without any concern for reputation. The bee answers that he is doing the bidding of nature, aiding in the fields, while the spider’s castle is merely what was drawn from its own body, which has “a good plentiful Store of Dirt and Poison.” This allegory was already somewhat old before Swift employed it, and it is a digression within the Battle proper. However, it also illustrates the theme of the whole work. The bee is like the ancients and like authors: it gathers its materials from nature and sings its drone song in the fields. The spider is like the moderns and like critics: it kills the weak and then spins its web (books of criticism) from the taint of its own body digesting the viscera.
- In one sense, the Battle of the Books illustrates one of the great themes that Swift would explore in A Tale of a Tub: the madness of pride involved in believing one’s own age to be supreme and the inferiority of derivative works. One of the attacks in the Tale was on those who believe that being readers of works makes them the equals of the creators of works. The other satire Swift affixed to the Tale, “The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” illustrates the other theme: an inversion of the figurative and literal as a part of madness
The Battle of Books (1704) – Jonathan Swift
About the Author: Abirlal Mukherjee
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