Gulliver’s Travelswas unique in its day; it was
not written to woo or entertain. It was an indictment, and it was most popular among those who were indicted that is, politicians, scientists, philosophers, and Englishmen in general. Swift was roasting people, and they were eager for the banquet.
Swift himself admitted to wanting to “vex” the world with his satire, and it is certainly in his tone, more than anything else, that one most feels his intentions. Besides the coarse language and bawdy scenes, probably the most important element that Dr. Bowdler deleted from the originalGulliver’s Travelswas this satiric tone. The tone of the original varies from mild wit to outright derision, but always present is a certain strata of ridicule. Dr. Bowdler gelded it of its satire and transformed it into a children’s book.
After that literary operation, the original version was largely lost to the common reader. TheTravelsthat proper Victorians bought for the family library was Bowdler’s version, not Swift’s. What irony that Bowdler would have laundered theTravelsin order to get a version that he believed to be best for public consumption because, originally, the book was bought so avidly by the public that booksellers were raising the price of the volume, sure of making a few extra shillings on this bestseller. And not only did the educated buy and read the book so also did the largely uneducated.
However, lest one think that Swift’s satire is merely the weapon of exaggeration, it is important to note that exaggeration is only one facet of his satiric method. Swift uses mock seriousness and understatement; he parodies and burlesques; he presents a virtue and then turns it into a vice. He takes pot-shots at all sorts of sacred cows. Besides science, Swift debunks the whole sentimental attitude surrounding children. At birth, for instance, Lilliputian children were “wisely” taken from their parents and given to the State to rear. In an earlier satire (A Modest Proposal),he had proposed that the very poor in Ireland sell their children to the English as gourmet food.
Swift is also a name-caller. Mankind, as he has a Brobdingnagian remark, is “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Swift also inserted subtly hidden puns into some of his name-calling techniques. The island of Laputa, the island of pseudo-science, is literally (in Spanish) the land of “the whore.” Science, which learned people of his generation were venerating as a goddess, Swift labeled a whore, and devoted a whole hook to illustrating the ridiculous behavior of her converts.
In addition, Swift mocks blind devotion. Gulliver, leaving the Houyhnhnms, says that he “took a second leave of my master, but as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he did me the honor to raise it gently to my mouth.” Swift was indeed so thorough a satirist that many of his early readers misread the section on the Houyhnhnms. They were so enamored of reason that they did not realize that Swift was metamorphosing a virtue into a vice. In Book IV, Gulliver has come to idealize the horses. They embody pure reason, but they are not human. Literally, of course, we know they are not, but figuratively they seem an ideal for humans until Swift exposes them as dull, unfeeling creatures, thoroughly unhuman. They take no pleasure in sex, nor do they ever overflow with either joy or melancholy. They are bloodless.
Gulliver’s Travelswas the work of a writer who had been using satire as his medium for over a quarter of a century. His life was one of continual disappointment, and satire was his complaint and his defense against his enemies and against humankind. People, he believed, were generally ridiculous and petty, greedy and proud; they were blind to the “ideal of the mean.” This ideal of the mean was present in one of Swift’s first major satires,The Battle of the Books(1697). There, Swift took the side of the Ancients, but he showed their views to be ultimately as distorted as those of their adversaries, the Moderns. In Gulliver’s last adventure, Swift again pointed to the ideal of the mean by positioning Gulliver between symbols of sterile reason and symbols of gross sensuality. To Swift, Man is a mixture of sense and nonsense; he had accomplished much but had fallen far short of what he could have been and what he could have done.
Swift was certainly not one of the optimists typical of his century. He did not believe that the Age of Science was the triumph that a great majority of his countrymen believed it to be. Science and reason needed limits, and they needed a good measure of humanism. They did not require absolute devotion.
Swift was a highly moral man and was shocked by his contemporaries’ easy conversion to reason as the be-all and end-all of philosophy. To be so gullible amounted to non-reason in Swift’s thinking. He therefore offered up the impractical scientists of Laputa and the impersonal, but absolutely reasonable, Houyhnhnms as embodiments of science and reason carried to ridiculous limits. Swift, in fact, created the whole ofGulliver’s Travelsin order to give the public a new moral lens. Through this lens, Swift hoped to “vex” his readers by offering them new insights into the game of politics and into the social follies of humans.
The satirical technique Swift uses “Gulliver’s Travels” is to attack modernity. He is concerned about the increasing power of Europe throughout the world, the pettiness of the elite, and the growing focus on money for fulfillment in life.
Swift makes the reader consider these problems by just the things you mention in your note: reductionism, absurdism, and defamiliarization. Reductionism takes large problems and reduces them to small ones. For example, we see how foolish and petty the Lilliputions act as they battle with the neighboring country over nothing at all. Their squabbling is reflective, reducing the problems of European colonization of the world in this microcosm.
Absurdism in found everywhere in this book, from beginning to end, whether it is the relatively giant Gulliver being tied up by the diminutive Lilliputians and subdued by their annoying arrows, Gulliver being transported in a doll house in Brobdingnag, talking horses or men reduced to apes.
The absurdism is used to defamiliarize the reader and make him/her see the real situations with new eyes. Like all satire, the parallels to the real world will be more powerful when realization that “this is us” finally hits.
What were the targets of Swift’s satire in Gulliver’sTravels?Apolitical satire by Johnathan Swift
InGulliver’s Travels, Swift manages to satirize politicians, religion, science, society, and even the king in 18th-century England, using the framework of what is, on one level, a child’s fantasy tale, and on a deeper level, a very astute commentary on serious problems Swift saw in England.
During the first voyage, for example, while Dr. Gulliver is in the land of Lilliput, he discovers that the king chooses his ministers not on the basis of their political skills or desire to rule for the common good but on their ability to dance on a tightrope, a not-so implicit criticism of how King George’s ministers obtain their positions. Swift also targets the prevailing political parties in England when he comments on the Lilliputians’ religious divisions between those who wear low-heeled and high-heeled shoes and those how open their eggs from the small and large ends first, satirizing the relatively insignificant differences between the Low Church and High Church, and the constant struggle between the Catholics and Protestants.
When he gets to the land of the Brobdingnags, which has a peaceful society, Gulliver describes contemporary English politics and society to the king, whose response is that Gulliver’s society must be filled with “the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin” This is basically double-barreled satire: Swift’s readers, who would have considered themselves to be the greatest of European socieites, are presented with a unflattering view of themselves from an ostensibly neutral observer, the King of Brobdingnag.
Swift’s most culturally sensitive satire comes in the fourth voyage–the Land of the Houyhnhnms–where he meets a race of rational horses whose servants are basically non-rational human beings called theYahoos, a word that has ever since been used to describe uncivilized, uncultured people. The difference between the rational horses and the Yahoos allows Swift to criticize the nature of man more closely than in the other voyages, and his view is that man, who should be controlled by the higher elements of his nature, is instead a victim of the baser elements.
All is not lost, however, because the aim of satire is to improve what is being satirized, and Swift has made a mightyattempt to improve his society.
What is an example of satire of Gulliver’s Travels?
Swift’s original impulse in writing Gulliver’s Travels was certainly to create a general satire on the follies of European civilization as a whole. . . . (F. P. Lock, The Politics of Gulliver’s Travels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. p. 69)
In Part I, Swift uses the Emperor of Lilliput, whose mind is as limited as his body is small, to satirize the greed, corruption, and war-mongering of England’s King George I and Queen Anne. In Part II, the satire rests on the contrast between the Brobdingnagian king, who is the essence of a benign and moral leader, and George I, who looks even worse by this contrast than the Emperor of Lilliput. Perhaps Swift’s most biting element of satire in Part II lies in the interchange between Gulliver and the king about the use of gunpowder and cannons as a tool of political power.
Gulliver introduces the King to one of the most powerful tools of warfare, which has the additional benefit of enabling a king to control his own people:
“I told him of an invention, discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder, into a heap of which, the smallest spark of fire falling, would kindle the whole in a moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in the air together, with a noise and agitation greater than thunder”
As one would expect from a morally just leader, the King is not horrified by the concept of such a weapon but is also surprised that such small creatures (Europeans) would harbor such horrendous thoughts, especially without any apparent thoughts of remorse about the terror and bloodshed of such weapons. He is, in short, utterly mystified that Gulliver’s fellow Europeans could regard such destructive power without any moral reservations.
Gulliver’s astonishment highlights Swift’s condemnation of European savagery and its callous disregard of human rights:
A strange effect of narrow principles and views! that a prince . . . of strong parts, great wisdom, and profound learning . . . should, from a nice, unnecessary scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no conception, let slip an opportunity put into his hands that would have made him absolute master of the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of his people!
By setting up the King of Brobdingnag as the fool who fails to recognize the powerful tool Gulliver is willing to put into his hands, Swift creates the dramatic contrast between the just ruler of this exotic land and the current King of England who, by implication, would embrace such a weapon in a heartbeat. To characterize the Brobdingnagian response as the “effect of narrow principles and view” points up the perversity of Gulliver’s and, by reference, the European attitude toward such power.
Swift, through the voice of Gulliver, then, has managed to condemn the European ruler’s lust for power and acceptance of mass destruction by merely creating its opposite, a humane, morally just leader who is shocked that anyone could think the destructive power represented by gunpowder could possibly be a beneficial thing.
Homework Help;Gulliver’s Travels
One good example of satire in Brobdingnag is the status of laws. Instead of the overwritten, obscure laws of most governments, Brobdingnagian laws are limited and plainly written, with only one possible interpretation:
No law in that country must exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet, which consists only of two and twenty… They are expressed in the most plain and simple terms, wherein those people are not mercurial enough to discover above one interpretation: and to write a comment upon any law, is a capital crime.(Swift,Gulliver’s Travels, eNotes eText)
By limiting the laws to a short length and one interpretation, there is no structure for a court and lawyers to tie up public funds and time with long legal battles. This removes the possibility of corruption, since no one can be bribed or threatened to interpret the laws any other way. Also, the simplicity of the laws means that anyone can understand and apply them, instead of limiting the legal audience to those verse in dense legalese. Here, Swift satirizes the law structure of England and the United States, where laws are long and difficult to understand in their language and interpretation.
