The Fable of the Bee and the Spider
Of the five incidents discrenible in the narrative the battle, the most brilliantly handled and most significant is the fable or episode of The Bee and The Spider. Though it is not directly connected with the main narrative, it is an essential part of the book. It is an imaginative, allegorical representation of the respective merits of the moderns and ancients. The art symbolism and the neatly summed up arguments add to the interest of the Fable. Beyond doubt, swift establishes the identity of interest and nature between the moderns and the spider on the one hand and the ancients and the bee on the other.
The bee and the spider episode is introduced immediately after having introduced the controversy going on between the two literary fashions. Already, we have been made aware of the inavailing nature of the efforts of the moderns to overthrow the ancients and to put themselves in a superior position and swift competes his satiric commentary by contrasting, the sweet and noble nature of the bee, symbolising the ancients, with the spiders love of dirt and his vaying lorious nature.
The episode is introduced as a material accident which sparks off the battle. In a corner of the library, there lived a spider, swollen up to the first magnitude by the destruction of infinite number of files, whose spoils lay scattered before the gets of his palace like human boners before the cave of some giant. Onto his web a bee happened to enter by mistake, which event resulted in severe damage being caused to the place of the spider. terrified and much amazed by sudden disaster, the spider issued forth, beheld his web in a ruined condition and saw the bee sitting at some distance with the remnants of the coweb still sticking to his wings. A torrent of curses flowed from the spider. And if "we may judge of the liquor in the vessel, by what issues out, you possess a good plentiful store of doit and poison in your breast". The bee dose not spin out from his dirty entrails, on the contrary he uses his knowledge and discrimination to select proper flowers and gathers honey from his own efforts. So, in short the question is:
...Whether is the nobles being of the two, that which by a lary contemplation of four inches round, by an overweaving pride, which feeding and engendering on itself, turns all into venom, producing nothing at all, but flybane and a cobweb or that whch by an universal range, with long search much study, true judgement and distinction of things bring home honey and wax.Swift is here commenting on the method of the moderns who claimed admiration for their laboured ingenuity and who showed contempt for the classical qualities of ancients books.
The allegorical significance be lost upon any reader, swift should take on chance and make the issue explicit by introducing aesop as an interpreter. He listens to the arguments of both the parties and at once notices a close parallel between the spider and moderns. For pray gentlemen was ever anything so modern as the spider in his air, his self sufficiency and scorns assistance from without. The bee does not pretend to be self-sufficiency, he depends upon the bounty of nature to build his hive and tells it with honey thorugh hard labour of nature to search. The difference is that while the spider produces poison, the bee provides the humanity with honey and wax.
The episode has been widely admired for its brilliant effect and artistic economy. Ricardo Quintana says " Throughout this incident the artistic economy is something to marvel at, there is not a superfluous pharse, from line to line the meaning is drawn out with a logical inevitability that makes of words the exact symbol of thought".
The satiric purpose of the fable is to show pretentious nature of thye moderns. The first blow is struck when the spider is established as a representative of the latter day men of letters. In his method and substances, the spider is seen as a modrns. The spider despires the bee's fruitful search among the flowers and terms his act as an act of plunder, likewise the moderns show an unthinking disregard for the classical rules and values. So studiously acquired and practised by the ancients.
The real sting lies in the application of image sof physical disgust to the spider and through him to the moderns. The point is driven home when aesop says yet if the materials be nothing but dirt, spin out of your entraits the edifice will conclude, at last in a cobweb. For recollect unless it be a large rein of wrangling and satire, much of anature and substance with the spider's poison.
The fable, as some critics have rightly pointed out is swift's real contribution to the ancient modern controversy.
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