Gulliver’s Travels: Satire, Society, and Swift
In Gulliver’s Travels, humanity is attacked, or criticized, from at least three different angles, and the implied character of Gulliver himself necessarily changes somewhat in the process. In Part IV, he conceives a horror of the human race which is not apparent, or only intermittently apparent, in the earlier books, and changes into a sort of unreligious anchorite whose one desire is to live in some desolate spot where he can devote himself to meditating on the goodness of the Houyhnhnms. However, these inconsistencies are forced upon Swift by the fact that Gulliver is there chiefly to provide a contrast. It is necessary, for instance, that he should appear sensible in Part I and at least intermittently silly in Part II because in both books the essential maneuver is the same, i.e. to make the human being look ridiculous by imagining him as a creature six inches high.
Whenever Gulliver is not acting as a stooge there is a sort of continuity in his character, which comes out especially in his resourcefulness and his observation of physical detail. He is much the same kind of person, with the same prose style, when he bears off the warships of Blefuscu, when he rips open the belly of the monstrous rat, and when he sails away upon the ocean in his frail coracle made from the skins of Yahoos. Moreover, it is difficult not to feel that in his shrewder moments Gulliver is simply Swift himself, and there is at least one incident in which Swift seems to be venting his private grievance against contemporary Society.
It will be remembered that when the Emperor of Lilliput’s palace catches fire, Gulliver puts it out by urinating on it. Instead of being congratulated on his presence of mind, he finds that he has committed a capital offense by making water in the precincts of the palace.
Swift’s Personal Grievances and Political Views
According to Professor G. M. Trevelyan (England under Queen Anne), part of the reason for Swift’s failure to get preferment was that the Queen was scandalized by the Tale of a Tub — a pamphlet in which Swift probably felt that he had done a great service to the English Crown, since it scarifies the Dissenters and still more the Catholics while leaving the Established Church alone. In any case, no one would deny that Gulliver’s Travels is a rancorous as well as a pessimistic book, and that especially in Parts I and III it often descends into political partisanship of a narrow kind.
Pettiness and magnanimity, republicanism and authoritarianism, love of reason and lack of curiosity, are all mixed up in it. The hatred of the human body with which Swift is especially associated is only dominant in Part IV, but somehow this new preoccupation does not come as a surprise. One feels that all these adventures, and all these changes of mood, could have happened to the same person, and the inter-connection between Swift’s political loyalties and his ultimate despair is one of the most interesting features of the book.
The Houyhnhnms and Technological Backwardness
The Houyhnhnms, Swift’s ideal beings, are backward even in a mechanical sense. They are unacquainted with metals, have never heard of boats, do not, properly speaking, practice agriculture (we are told that the oats which they live upon ‘grow naturally’), and appear not to have invented wheels. They have no alphabet, and evidently have not much curiosity about the physical world.
They do not believe that any inhabited country exists beside their own, and though they understand the motions of the sun and moon, and the nature of eclipses, ‘this is the utmost progress of their Astronomy‘.
Contrast with Laputa’s Philosophers
By contrast, the philosophers of the flying island of Laputa are so continuously absorbed in mathematical speculations that before speaking to them one has to attract their attention by napping them on the ear with a bladder. They have cataloged ten thousand fixed stars, have settled the periods of ninety-three comets, and have discovered, in advance of the astronomers of Europe, that Mars has two moons — all of which information Swift evidently regards as ridiculous, useless, and uninteresting. As one might expect, he believes that the scientist’s place, if he has a place, is in the laboratory, and that scientific knowledge has no bearing on political matters: