Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago

“GULLIVER’S TRAVELS” by Jonathan Swift (first published in 1726)

Or to give it its full title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon and then a Captain of several ships.

Has there ever been a canonical work of literature that has suffered such a curious after-life as this masterpiece by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)? Accepted on its first appearance as the hard and savage satire it is, and immediately popular in the eighteenth century, being both lauded and reviled, Gulliver’s Travels gradually became demoted to the status of a children’s book, bowdlerised and sanitised. Mention the title now, and most people who have heard of it will immediately think of colourful illustrated kiddie versions, most of which limited themselves to a playful retelling of the Lilliput section. It was in this version that I first encountered it as a child, also seeing two film versions [see Footnote below] which did something similar. Only as a teenager did I get to read the complete, unabridged version, and I encountered it again as an undergraduate when it was part of a course on Augustan and other 18^th century Eng. Lit.

Some months back, I decided to read Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver yet again, because I had just read and reviewed (for the New Zealand Listener) Lauren Chater’s novel Gulliver’s Wife, which uses Swift’s book merely as a pretext to deal with other matters. And it all came back to me – the parody, the savage satire, and in the end the reasoned misanthropy.

I will not teach you to suck eggs by giving you a detailed “plot summary”. You probably already know that Gulliver’s Travels is in four parts as Lemuel Gulliver narrates his four fantastical voyages, sometimes being ironical and sometimes being credulous, putting the Gullible into Gulliver. Giving a quick and totally subjective reaction, I would judge its four parts thus:

Part One is the most whimsical section, even if it does have jabs of satire. True, it begins with Gulliver tied up and constrained by Lilliputians, but the Lilliput section allows us to see, in effect, a human being playing with toys and being in charge of little mannikins. Charming, and therefore easily kiddified. Most children would be delighted by the account of Gulliver capturing the whole of the Blufuscan fleet by dragging it off course. Which children have not played with toys in the way Gulliver plays with the enemy fleet?

Part Two, in Brobdingnag, is a much more unified and compelling work than the first part. The land of Brobdingnag is less pleasant, as a human being is now controlled by giants. Gulliver is found in a [gigantic] farmer’s field and is put in the care of his [gigantic] daughter, who looks after Gulliver as a privileged pet. The farmer exploits Gulliver for profit as a freak to display at fairs. Gulliver has civil conversations with Brobdingnagians only when the [gigantic] king takes possession of him and interrogates him – at which point very sharp satire is released, most of it topical and very political.

For me Part Three, the journey to the flying island of Laputa and other places, is the most unsatisfactory and hardest part to read. It is essentially a grab-bag of satire on many subjects with barbs shot in many directions – not political so much as cultural and existential. Its loose scatter-shot narrative makes it jarring.

But there is a great return to style in Part Four, the journey to the land of the Houyhnhnms, where Gulliver relates to these civilized, reasoning horses and is duly disgusted by his human counterparts, the barbarous Yahoos. Giving another purely subjective reaction, I think this is the greatest section of the book and I suggest it comes closest to Swift’s essential theme – the innate imperfection of human beings.

If that is a neat summary of the narrative as narrative, it of course does not examine the book in a more thematic manner. As I now see it from my most recent reading, I believe there are three major ideas and narrative styles in Gulliver’s Travels. There is parody of other works, there is satire, (political, cultural and existential), and there is what I can only describe as “bodily-ness” – an awarenes of and consideration of the human body, and its strangeness.

To deal first with parody, it may be a relatively minor aspect of Gulliver’s Travels, but it is important nevertheless. Remember Swift was writing at a time when there were published many narratives of voyages to distant countries, some of them authentic, but many of them either exaggerated or completely fictitious. Only six years before Gulliver’s Travels was published, for example, that inspired liar Daniel Defoe had produced his Captain Singleton which purported (as so many of Defoe’s fictions did) to be the true memoirs of an adventurer who had, among other things, crossed the sub-Saharan African continent. In reality, this feat was not achieved by any European until more than a century after Defoe wrote. Jonathan Swift plays with this sort of fraud. Gulliver’s Travels was published with maps of the non-existent lands Gulliver visited. Throughout the book, the narrating Gulliver has the ironical habit of ridiculing lies in other travel books and swearing the truth of his own. The very last chapter of the book is a long defence of his veracity (Book 4, Chpter 12). Read the first three pages of the voyage to Brobdingnag (Part 2, Chapter 1) and you will see how Swift piles on sailing terms as if he were an old sea dog, like the narrators of so many travel books then. In Gulliver’s voyage to Laputa, the long and detailed “scientific” account of  how the island flies ridicules such precise descriptions in traveller’s tales (Part 3, Chapter 3). Not that anybody ever took Gulliver’s Travels to be a true tale, but they did understand the parody.

Far more important, however, is the satire. The dominant satire is political satire and political commentary. It is relatively mild in the Lilliput section.  The Emperor of Lilliput makes any minister looking for preferment dance on a rope (Part I, Chapter 3), ridiculing both court etiquette and the irrelevant reasons for men of little talent or ability to be given responsible positions in government. Lilliput’s war with the kingdom of Blefuscu (separated from it by the sea) resembles wars between England and France. After Gulliver has defeated the Blufuscan fleet, there is in Lilliput a conspracy against him, led by a Lilliputian admiral who thinks he has been cheated out of winning a victory himself. Thus court intrigues and cabals are satirised. There is a foolish confllict between Big-Enders (those who believe a boiled egg should be cut open at the big end) and Small-Enders (those who believe a boiled egg should be cut open at the small end). This ridicules both party factions in England’s parliament and the trivial reasons that are sometimes given as justification for war between nations. Again, we recall that Swift was writing at a time when political parties were only beginning to be formed, and political tendencies were more in the nature of loose factions. Swift himself was Tory as opposed to Whig. His satire here is still relevant, although there are doubtless some topical references that would now be unnoticed by most readers (including me).

When Gulliver reaches the land of Brobdingnag, the political satire is revved up considerably and becomes more shrill. Introduced to the Queen of Brobdingnag, Gulliver flatters her by using the most elaborate and obsequious forms of address and titles  – clearly parodying court etiquette in England (Part 2, Chapter 3). After Gulliver praises what he sees as the greatest achievements of England, the King of Brobdingnag turns to his first minister and says, as Gulliver reports, “how contemptible a thing was human grandeur which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I” (Part 2, Chapter 3). The climax of direct political satire comes when Gulliver gives an encomium on how wonderful the English constitution and system of government are – but when the king quizzes him, he has to admit that in England there is corruption, cronyism, faction, back-stabbing, unjust laws, routine violence and the like, leading to the giant king’s well-known and oft-quoted riposte “By what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pain extorted from you; I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of odious little vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth” (Part 2, Chapter 6). Gulliver makes it even worse in the next chapter when he dares to say how gloriously war is waged in Europe, and how often victory has been won by firearms, cannon and bombardment, all of which merely appals the king (Part 2, Chapter 7). Anti-war satire emerges again in Part Four, where the intelligent Houyhnhnms are strictly pacifistic with regard to their own species. It is Gulliver himself who explains to his Houyhnhnm “Master” all the derisory reasons for going to war and concludes “A soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can” (Part 4, Chapter 5). And of course in Part 4, Gulliver, now converted to the Houyhnhnms’ way of reasoning, attacks government and profiteering first ministers; lawyers who speak gobbledegook and spin out cases to increase their fees; barbarous medicine; the ruination of the country by the importation of luxury goods; aristocrats who are indemnified against prosecution for crime and many other corruptions.

However, satire is aimed at quite a different set of targets in Part Three, where we get what I have called cultural and existential satire. The main targets of satire in the account of the flying island of Laputa are intellectuals who are so attached to abstract ideas (mainly mathematical and astronomical) that they do not understand concrete realities. Therefore they are so far removed from the common people, dwelling in the land of Balnibarbi beneath them, that they do not hesitate to rule them by fear. Jonathan Swift is the conservative Tory satirist when Gulliver visits the Academy of Balnibarbi and meets all the “Projectors” – that is, the theorists who insist they have rational plans to improve the world, but whose strange innovations are merely fantastical (extracting sunlight from cucumbers etc.). Swift’s satire here, like Alexander Pope’s, is that of a man looking back to the Renaissance where all knowledge could [reputedly] be held by one well-informed man. In contrast, the “Projectors” herald the world of specialists, whose interests are divorced from the world in the sense that they focus on only one small part of reality, and ignore other equally important contingencies. In some ways, this satire foreshadows one of the major ideas in John Ralston Saul’s 1992 intellectual bestseller Voltaire’s Bastards – that specialisation and the misuse of reason create an elite divorced from the common good.

There is further conservative satire when Gulliver visits the land of Glubbdubdrib, and sorcerers summon up the spirits of the past. Gulliver, upon seeing them, concludes that we have degenerated greatly from the time of the celebrated people of classical antiquity (Part 3, Chapter 8).

Even if some of Swift’s satire belongs to his own age, I was, in my most recent reading of Gulliver’s Travels, shaken by Swift’s account of a “project” to reduce all language to a few essential words and to have books written mechanically (Part 3, Chapter 5). To me this anticipates such projects as mid-twentieth century “Basic English” and in our own times the diminution of real literacy, even in the educated part of the population.

Much more could be said about the novel’s satire, but what I have said so far will do to make the point.

It is what I have identified as the third element in the novel’s conception that most struck and startled me in my recent reading. This is what I have called the “bodily-ness” of it – the way Gulliver’s Travels works as a reflection on the human body and its strangeness

Obviously Gulliver encounters smallness in Lilliput and hugeness in Brobdingnag. He is seen as a giant in Lilliput and seen as a mannikin to be displayed in fairs in Brobdingnag. In the land of the Houyhnhnms, his body is equated with those of brutish, unreasoning creatures (the Yahoos). In each of these cases, the human body is conceived in a different way. Large and important in the universe; then tiny in the universe; then disgusting in the universe. When in Brobdingnag, Gulliver at once understands how vulnerable he is: “I apprehended every moment that he [the first giant he sees] would dash me against the ground, as we usually do any little hateful animal which we have a mind to destroy.” (Part 2, Chapter 1) The (relatively) tiny Gulliver is menaced and threatened at different times by [giant] rats, a puppy dog, a frog, a disgusting monkey and a vindctive dwarf. The Brobdingnagians make for him a sort of doll’s house in which he can be safe – a situation which reminds me irresistibly of a sequence in the old science-fiction movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, which also posited the idea of a human being tiny in the vastness of the universe.

Few canonical novels have been as concerned with bodily functions, as soaked in urine and as befouled by excrement, as Gulliver’s Travels. In Lilliput, Gulliver has difficulties in finding a place to piss and poo, and tiny Lilliputians have to carry away his ordure in a wheelbarrow (Part I, Chapter 2). The Lilliputian army marches between Gulliver’s legs, and some of the tiny soldiers look slyly up through his ragged and torn trousers to see his huge dangling member (Part I, Chapter 3). Gulliver puts out a fire in the Lilliputian royal palace by urinating on it (Part I, Chapter 6). In Brobdingnag he hides discreetly from gigantic women when he has to piss. Also in Brobdingnag, huge flies excrete on food – their droppings unseen by the giants who devour the food anyway (reminding us that we too must sometimes eat fly-blown food). The huge flies also excrete on Gulliver. In Balnibarbi, Gulliver encounters a  “projector” who is attempting to reconstitute food from excrement and who is himself covered in excrement, causing an unholy stench (Part 3, Chapter 5). In the land of Luggnagg, he has to lick the floor when obsequiously approaching the king (Part 3, Chapter 9). On his first day in the land of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver is surrounded by shitting Yahoos, some of whom climb up the tree against which Gulliver is leaning, and shit on his head (Part 4, Chapter 1).

In the general grossness of all this, the human body itself is presented as particularly gross in Brobdingnag, where Gulliver can, in effect, see human bodies in minute detail. This leads to such sights as occur when he watches a Brobdingnagian nurse suckling a baby: “I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the reader an idea of its bulk, shape and colour. It stood prominent six foot, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and hue both of that and the dug so varified with spots, pimples and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous… This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifiying glass…” (Part 2, Chapter 1)

Later, he says it is a “nauseous sight” when he sees the huge queen eat so much (Part 2, Chapter 3). He sees among beggars “a woman with a cancer in her breast swelled to a monstrous size, full of holes, in two or three of which I could easily have crept, and covered my whole body. There was a fellow with a wen in his neck, larger than five woolpacks…” accompanied with monstrous lice crawling on them (Part 2, Chapter 4). He is disgusted by the huge ladies-in-waiting who play with him by stripping him naked and laying him upon their breasts, where he is almost overcome by their smell and once again repelled by the huge grossness of their bodies (Part 2, Chapter 5).

In all this, we cannot help noticing that there is a strong strain of misogyny in Gulliver’s observations, as all the most disgusting people he describes are women. (Some ingenious critics have attempted to argue that men are similarly caricatured, and besides, these are the observations of the narrator but not of Jonathan Swift. I’m not sure that I agree with this).

Apart from inspiring disgust, the human body has another limitation. In Luggnagg, Gulliver sees “Struldbrugs”, who can live to extreme old age – but this is no blessing as extreme old age means living through years and years of pain and suffering as the body decays but death does not come. Death is a release. (Part 3, Chapter 10). (Incidentally this theme, of the disadvantages of [apparent] physical immortality, is one of the main ideas of Tennyson’s poem Tithonus and of Aldous Huxley’s novel After Many a Summer.]

The concepts of the grossness and physical limitations of the human body reach their fullest expression when Gulliver encounters the Yahoos: “My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed, in this abominable animal, a perfect human figure.” (Part 4, Chapter 2) By implication, WE are disgusting Yahoos. The noble reasoning horses, the Houyhnhnms, see things this way. The calm reason and pacifism of the  Houyhnhnms contrasts with the barbarism, filth and brutality of the Yahoos, of whom Gulliver is assumed to be one. Houyhnhnms have no conception of lying or deceit, as if they are in some sense in a prelapsarian state. They believe they act in accordance with nature. They are amazed that Gulliver wears clothes, which they have never seen before. When Gulliver explains that modesty requires clothes, the Houyhnhnms say that nature would not require such a thing.

Human beings, as the Houyhnhnms see them, are basically thinking, but corrupt, animals  - “Master” Houyhnhnm’s view, which he expresses to Gulliver, is “that, he looked upon us as a sort of animals to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use than by its assistance to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones which nature had not given us.” (Part 4, Chapter 7) Gulliver comes to agree, and comes to see himself as a Yahoo – a fallen and disgusting being. He lives willingly with the Houyhnhnms for three years and when he eventually returns home to England he is as disgusted by all human beings, including his own family, as he would be by any Yahoo.

Although it was not Swift’s intention, I admit that I find something repellent in the pure and perfectly reasoning Houyhnhnms. For all the narrator’s assurance that their whole outlook is based on Friendship and Benevolence they, to this reader, sound like a bad nightmare born of Plato’s Republic. These wonderful horses mate rationally and have only two offspring each to stabilise the population. Their offspring are not raised by their parents, but from infancy are nurtured and taught by the whole of Houyhnhnm society. They do not fear death and they do not lament it, as it is part of the cycle of life – so no tears at funerals for them. What a sterile Utopia this sounds. Indeed, how inhuman. But then, that may have been Swift’s point. Humanity does not admit of such perfection.

There have been many attempts to account for Swift’s radical misanthropy (and misogyny) in this novel, most of them centring on the personality of Swift himself. The Anglican clergyman (Dean of St Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin) has been depicted as a neurotic bachelor who never married, but who had odd relationships with two woman who were both much younger than he - Esther Johnson whom he called “Stella” in his correspondence; and Esther Vanhomrigh, for whom he invented the name “Vanessa”. There used to be rumours that he secretly married “Stella” – in his lectures The English Humourists of the 18^th Century, Thackeray assumed Swift’s marriage was an established fact -  but there is no proof of this, and the likelihood is that Swift lived and died a virgin, never knowing women intimately and perhaps even fearing the sexual side of women. Yet to explain the novel’s misanthropy in these biographical terms seems to me very glib. Rather, I would place Gulliver’s Travels among those works that really force us to ask what a human body is and how it works – including the puzzle that we know our minds and bodies are connected, but somehow persist in thinking that our reasoning minds are separate from our decaying bodies. In this respect I would pair Gulliver’s Travels with Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis before I would pair it with the satires of Voltaire.

And yet the satire is there and it is more savage than anything since Juvenal. Like Juvenal, Swift recklessly and brilliantly smashes everything that is wrong with the society that he knew, without suggesting a remedy. Though he lived to a good age, the anger and effort that went into such condemnations must have been exahausting. The monument to him in St Patrick’s cathedral was earned, saying in his death he had gone “Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit”; “Where fierce indignation can no longer rend his heart”.

Literary Footnote: After my most recent reading of Gulliver’s Travels, I went back and read again George Orwell’s 20-page essay “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels” (published in 1946). Basically Orwell spends most of his essay picking apart the topical political satire in Gulliver’s Travels, and then damning Swift as a cranky, reactionary Tory who was opposed to “progress” and who can therefore be equated with all the political ideas in the modern world that Orwell detests. While – as he always does – Orwell scores some valid points, and while nobody can deny Swift’s conservatism, much of this essay appears to me wrong-headed, over-stated, and missing the real point of much of Swift’s satire. After spending about 17 pages attacking Swift’s world-view, Orwell suddenly backtracks in his last two or three pages, and says that, in spite of everything, he still admires Swift as a great satirist. His reason for doing this is a valid one – we should be able to admire the style and force of a work of literature, even if we disagree with its ideas. I agree.

Cinematic Footnote: The first two film adaptations I saw of Gulliver’s Travels were both very entertaining examples of the kiddification of Jonathan Swift’s work. 

The British live-action film The Three Worlds of Gulliver, made in 1960, dealt only with Lilliput and Brobdingnag, added romantic love interest, and made it a wholesome adventure story by bowdlerising furiously. Gulliver puts out the fire in the Lilliputian palace by spitting a mouthful of wine on it, not by urinating on it.

Some years later I saw on television Max Fleischer’s cartoon version of Gulliver’s Travels, made in 1939 and dealing only with a sanitised version of the  Lilliput section. Its sentimental story centred on Gulliver bringing peace to Lilliput and Blefuscu by brokering a marriage between the prince of one kingdom and the princess of the other, whereupon they combine their national anthems and sing the rousing ditty “Faithful Forever”. Apparently it was a box-office success in its day.

The only version I have seen that was more-or-less faithful to Swift’s original conception was the 1996 television mini-series Gulliver’s Travels starring Ted Danson and an all-star cast and covering all four of Gulliver’s journeys. It was not nearly as savage as Swift, but it included some of the novel’s satire, even if its ending had the “out” that Gulliver is mentally affected. In this version, Gulliver is finally reconciled with his family. In Swift’s novel, Gulliver remains disgusted with, and alienated from, the whole human race.

And finally there is the truly odd one which, amazingly, I was able to find, in full and subtitled, on Youtube as I was researching this “Something Old”. The New Gulliver was made in 1935 in Stalin’s Soviet Union. After marching along with his young friends in a Komsomol (Young Pioneers) troop, singing a song in praise of Lenin, a boy is rewarded for being the most productive in the group by being given a copy of his favourite book – Gulliver’s Travels. He falls asleep and imagines himself as Gulliver, helping the oppressed proletarians of Lilliput to overthrow the tyrannical royal government. Of course the stop-action animation of the tiny Lilliputians was primitive by our standards, but in an odd sort of way the film was quite charming, even if one was aware of its propagandistic purpose.

In 2010 there was an updated, Americanised Gulliver’s Travels starring Jack Black and again confining itself to the Lilliput part of the story. I have not seen this, but the consensus of critics was that it relied on a very juvenile series of gags.