50 greatest books
Gulliver's Travels
VICTORIA GLENDINNING
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
April 19, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT
Gulliver's Travels is one of the best and most important books in the world. First published in London, anonymously, in 1726, it was a howling success, passed from hand to hand among the political class and general readers, and immediately translated into French and German. Voltaire thought it was wonderful.
By the 20th century, heavily expurgated and abbreviated, Gulliver's Travels had survived, but chiefly as a story for children. There is a double irony in this. The first is that it is a savage adult satire on hypocrisy, corruption in politics, the insanity of war and the barbarism that underlies so-called civilization. Swift also exploited ? uncomfortably, for the reader ? his obsessional disgust with the gross animality of human nature.
The second irony is that some of the bits which were commonly cut out are precisely those which would delight children, who find lavatory humour the funniest thing in the world, and would enjoy the Yahoos discharging their excrement onto Gulliver's head from the trees. And in Lilliput, the land of the little people, Gulliver puts out a great fire in the Emperor's palace in three minutes with his torrential stream of urine.
The humour of scale is not, however, always exploited benignly. In Brobdingnag, where the people are huge and Gulliver a Tom Thumb, a woman's "monstrous breast," 16 feet in circumference with a nipple the size of Gulliver's head, is so spattered with giant spots, pimples and freckles "that nothing could be more nauseous."
Gulliver's Travels
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From the archives
* Martin Levin: Introducing the 50 greatest books series
* First entry: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
* Second entry: In Search of Lost Time
* Third entry: On the Origin of Species
* Fourth entry: The Divine Comedy
* Fifth entry: The Republic
* Sixth entry: Don Quixote
* Seventh entry: Ulysses
* Eighth entry: Das Kapital
* Ninth entry: The Confessions of St. Augustine
* 10th entry: Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince
* 11th entry: The Great Gatsby
* 12th entry: Middlemarch
* 13th entry: The Wealth of Nations
* 14th entry: The Interpretation of Dreams
* Submit your thoughts: Which would you pick?
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The Yahoos, too, are nauseating: crude, aggressive, stinking, gibbering creatures who recognize Gulliver at once as one of their species, even if he is a "clean, civilized, reasoning Yahoo." This sort of thing made Victorian critics, not surprisingly, loathe Gulliver's Travels. Thackeray, to take just one example, wrote that Swift was "filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene." And indeed, if it were just a matter of scatology, and of Gulliver among the little people and then the big people, and even if Gulliver (and each one of us) is a Yahoo under the surface, the work would be little more than a Rabelais-inspired curiosity. But there is more in it than that.
The Houyhnhnms, who are innocent, kindly, talking horses, have no word for "lying." They gather from Gulliver that it means "saying the thing that was not," and cannot imagine the point of it. The Houyhnhnms have no idea what "war" means, until Gulliver describes in unforgettably ghastly terms how people make their young men cut to pieces other young men whom they do not even know. Why ever would they do this, ask the Houyhnhnms. So Gulliver must explain "differences of opinion, especially if it be of things indifferent," and the passions of wanting, and having.
It's a first-person narrative, unpretentious and deadpan. There is no preaching, and no conclusions are drawn, either by Gulliver or by the fantastical peoples and creatures he encounters. Swift, his rage and despair barely controlled by his art, exposes what we humans do, and what we are like. Even though some of the political and doctrinal references were designed to be decoded by his contemporaries, the implications are disturbingly universal. Swift demonstrates the ludicrousness of conflict by substituting everyday issues ? like the bitter dissension in Lilliput between the wearers of high heels and the wearers of low heels, and the war between Lilliput and Blefescu, costing thousands of innocent lives, about whether boiled eggs should be opened at the little end or at the big end.
Swift was prescient. Gulliver predescribes, mockingly, a computer, and sees a system of warfare so terrible that it will destroy its inventors. But most poignant of all, as today we live longer and may lose our marbles before we lose our physical strength, is Gulliver's account of visiting the Struldbruggs on the island of Luggnagg. The Struldbruggs could not die. But they were "dead to all natural affection," peevish, degraded, forgetful of the names of even their dearest relations, incapable of rational speech. They were "the most mortifying sight I ever beheld."
This is just a taster. Please risk reading Gulliver's Travels. As William Hazlitt wrote, "It is an attempt to tear off the mask of imposture from the world; and nothing but imposture has a right to complain of it."
Victoria Glendinning is the author several biographies, including one of Jonathan Swift.
Next week: One Hundred Years of Solitude
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