Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

*contains spoilers*

What to say…what to say…what to say. There’s just so much – I suppose it’s more a case of what to leave out. Let’s begin with the basics: so our protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, is a surgeon who loves the idea of travelling, and so he decides to set sail under a captain and his crew, and along the way always seems to find himself shipwrecked. After each expedition, he manages to get home to England, but cannot help but set out on new adventures, leaving his wife and children back home to worry about him. These new lands Gulliver finds himself waking up to, however, are not what you’d quite expect…

Now, Swift has established a wonderfully inventive conceit here, one that allows him to flex and fold his keen social, natural, political, theological muscles. As Gulliver finds himself in the miniscule Lilliput, a place where the inhabitants are comparatively small – six inches to Gulliver’s guessing eye – Swift gives Gulliver and the reader a perspective that is far-reaching, broad and on a macro-scale, and this is reflected in Gulliver’s observations of Lilliput’s fight with the also tiny, neighbouring metropolis of Blefuscu. As an allegory for the schisms existing within the Christian church, Swift has Gulliver note how the conflict between the towns means that “it is computed, that eleven thousand persons have, at several times, suffered death, rather than submit to break eggs at the smaller end.”  That the conflict is caused by the incidental matter over which part of the egg should be broken to make breakfast is telling, and parallels can clearly be delineated with how certain sects within Christianity come to blows over what outsiders could plausibly infer to be piffling trifles, though they end up causing the deaths of untold numbers over the course of modern history. As Gulliver himself notes from the neutral position of a giant looking down from above; “This [interpretation]…is thought to be a meer strain upon the text: for the words are these; ‘That all true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end.’” The problem is obvious, and Swift tells it: various interpretations of religious texts are a result of the ambiguities within the texts themselves, along with the willing credulity of the religion’s adherents and their propensity to take their arguments too far – to the point of war, murder and destruction. Gulliver, with his godlike neutrality, implores the emperor of Lilliput not to enslave the neighbouring Blefuscans after he has helped wipe out their navy, but to sue for peace and tolerance instead.

In the land of Brobdingnag, Gulliver is conversely the smaller – his size is relative to the Brobdingnagians as the Lilliputians were to himself – and Gulliver is thus given a view of life on the micro-scale, in precise detail, as the Brobdingnagians are focused in the up-close-and-personal. Swift continues his scatological escapades also, as he destroys the Romantic notion that humans are divine and elevated individuals; in Lilliput Gulliver could shit mountains and piss on the palaces, but in Brobdingnag Gulliver sees the imperfections of the human form of others, smelling their bad odours in sensory magnification; “…they would strip themselves to their skin…Their skins appeared so coarse and uneven…with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than packthreads…The handsomest among these maids of honour…would sometimes set me astride one of her nipples…” Swift can get quite gruesome, and it’s plain that he intends to destroy these notions of universal beauty within the Romantic genre, particularly as he zeroes in on nature, the cornerstone of any piece of Romantic art; “ I could see distinctly the limbs of these vermin with my naked eye…and their snouts with which they rooted like swine…the sight was so nauseous, that it perfectly turned my stomach.” In these new lands, Gulliver’s perceptions are continuously reshaped – most notably at the end after he leaves the Houyhnhnms – and in Brobdingnag, Gulliver reassesses his place in the world; “…if I had then beheld a company of English lords and ladies in their finery…acting their several parts…strutting, and bowing, and prating…I should have been strongly tempted to laugh as much at them, as this [gigantic] king and his grandees did at me.” Gulliver now possesses a new sense of irreverence, but only for those with the pretentiousness enough to consider themselves better than anyone else.

Swift goes further in his own irreverence for positions of royalty and state, attacking the powers at the heart of the British political system, as he bemoans the fact that lords and peers are afforded their positions because of bloodlines, or because certain parties want that little bit extra leverage on votes, how religious members are even bought out by noblemen, and how “Commoners” only come to power because men with a “stronger purse” see an advantage in controlling whole communities and constituencies. The Brobdingnagian king, in his naivety, wonders to whose advantage such corruption would ultimately come; “…whoever could make two ears of corn…to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before; would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.” Indeed, Gulliver, in his own naivety, considers this virtuous supposition “defective”, especially when the king is repulsed by the notion of gunpowder and cannons, and puts this unwillingness to use firearms as a reason for the Brobdingnagians’ underdeveloped literature and linguistics.

I’ve already said too much, and yet not enough. I haven’t even talked about the Laputans on their floating island, pondering over their abstract ideas, and Balnibarbi below. If you haven’t read this text yet, do invest your time and money in it. If you have read it, let’s have a chat about it! Speak soon.