A London
bookseller may have published Gulliver’s Travels 300 years ago
this month without knowing the identity of its author, but before long English
intellectuals were buzzing that it was the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift.
Growing
up, I read a shortened version of this tale focusing on the six-inch citizens
of Lilliput that was marketed as children’s literature. It wasn’t until
college, when I read all four “books” in the Travels, that I realized it
was far more:
*a satire
of the political scene of Swift’s time;
*a parody
of the “true accounts” of the travel genre so popular in the Age of Discovery;
*an early
example of science fiction;
*a searing
denunciation of what Mark Twain would later call “the damned human race”; and
even
*an
exercise in irony at the expense of narrator Lemuel Gulliver so sustained that
it effectively became a forerunner of modern fiction in undercutting any notion
of objective truth.
The ruse
that Swift concocted in sending his manuscript to Benjamin Motte for
publication paralleled the game he shortly played with readers’
expectations.
The
manuscript arrived with a cover letter from a stranger named Richard Sympson stating
that he had just edited a travel narrative by his cousin Gulliver, a surgeon; that
Sympson could vouch for Gulliver’s truthfulness; that Motte had three days to
decide whether wished to publish it, based on the initial “Satyrical” first two
books; and if the answer was yet, Motte would pay two hundred pounds upfront
the subsequent two parts of Gulliver’s narrative.
Where to
start with all of this?
*The names
“Gulliver” and “Sympson” were pseudonyms;
*A friend,
fellow satirist John Gay, wrote by hand the cover letter to disguise Swift’s
authorship;
*Yet
another friend (still unknown) wrote the manuscript, again with no clue that
Swift was involved;
*Though
the first two books might have been a bit satirical, the last two represented a
political hot potato—but, per the agreement with “Sympson,” Motte would still
have to pay for it.
Once
readers started leafing through the book, they had to make sense of yet another
letter, this time purporting to come from Gulliver to Sympson, in which the
putative explorer scolds the publisher for releasing this “very loose and
uncorrect account of my travels.” At this point, any reader would be bound to
ask what on earth he was reading.
Starting
with the first book, set in Lilliput, Swift upset readers’ notion of security
by playing with notions of size and proportion. Gulliver wakes to find that
six-inch people have strapped him down to the beach. This also begins his
instinct for unconsciously assuming the mental habits of the strange peoples he
visits—in this case, failing to see the ludicrousness of the Lilliputians’
charge that he has engaged in sexual intercourse with the treasurer’s wife in
the land.
Like his
title character, Swift was, to use the modern cliché, a “fish out of water”—the
Anglo-Irish “Dean” of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, an outsider who came to
view English politics and government with the disdain he had once felt for the
Irish Catholic majority in Ireland.
In Book 2,
Gulliver is so self-absorbed, so much the “ugly Englishman” that he is shocked
to hear the king of Brobdingnag call his countrymen “the most pernicious race
of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of
the earth.”
Even in
his narrative, Gulliver’s failure to make the most elementary mental
connections indicates a terrible inability to understand the world—a failure that
will finally prove disastrous to him.
In the
final book, Swift makes horses capable of reason. Gulliver himself manifests
his incredible lack of perception through his ignorance of the significance of
words. Immediately after saying of the first “yahoo” (i.e., a filthy, vicious
human-like creature ruled over by intelligent horses) that he never saw such an
awful animal, he writes that the beast “roared” at him. Later, however, he
himself roars when he’s squeezed and when the female yahoo tries to mount him.
His roaring
means that Gulliver himself is a yahoo, but he glosses over this painful secret
quickly, unaware that he has given a clue to his dread secret already.
Gulliver
may be betrayed as a yahoo, but as the narrow of his own adventure he betrays
his own mindlessness to the reader. Perhaps Swift is suggesting that, insofar
as human beings shy away from and lie about the dirty little secrets
confronting them, they run the risk of joining Gulliver in a circle of
mindlessness.
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