similar sentiment inspires A Tale of a Tub  and The Battle of the  
Books  by Dean Swift. But it is to The Dunciad  that we must 
turn for the epic of the printed word and its benefits to 
mankind. For here is the explicit study of plunging of the human 
mind into the sludge of an unconscious engendered by the 
book. It has been obscured to posterity, in keeping with the 
prophecy at the end of Book IV, just why literature should be 
charged with stupefying mankind, and mesmerically ushering 
the polite world back into primitivism, the Africa within, and 
above all, the unconscious. The simple key to this operation is 
that which we have had in hand throughout this book—the 
increasing separation of the visual faculty from the interplay 
with the other senses leads to the rejection from 
consciousness of most of our experience, and the consequent 
hypertrophy of the unconscious. This ever-enlarging domain 
Pope calls the world “of Chaos and old Night.” It is the tribal,