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Willy Pogany, The Struldbruggs - Robin Blake on Gulliver's Travels

Travelling with Swift

Among quite a few things Gulliver’s Travels has in common with Alice in Wonderland, one in particular would have surprised their authors: each jumped nimbly across the boundary of their assumed readership. But they did so from different sides of the fence. Carroll’s child’s fantasy, spun during a picnic afternoon on the river, generated an entire academic industry for serious-minded adults; Swift, on the other hand, had ground out a bitter, hard-hitting satire on bad government, intellectual pretension and moral hubris, only to have it co-opted by children in their fascination for little people and giants.

This infantilization of one of the world’s great books is an industry in itself. Looking it up in the British Library catalogue, I counted twenty-two child-friendly editions from the past twenty years alone, most of them encompassing only Lilliput and Brobdingnag. The result is that many people think they know Gulliver’s Travels having read it as children – as I first did – in the Illustrated Classics, a Ladybird Book or some similar ‘retelling’. But charming and stimulating though it may be, this is like meeting an inoffensive, pink-cheeked Dr Jekyll in contradistinction to the dark, snarling Mr Hyde of Swift’s imagination.

Dr Johnson started a hare running when he called Gulliver’s Travels ‘a book written in open defiance of truth and regularity’. The novel, and in particular its main character, has often subsequently been criticized for lacking consistency. The quibble plays into Swift’s hands, however, since an important part of his point is that honesty and reliability of character are rarely seen either in human nature or in human experience, and there is no reason why Gulliver himself should be an exception to the rule. George Orwell in his own spark-ling essay on

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Among quite a few things Gulliver’s Travels has in common with Alice in Wonderland, one in particular would have surprised their authors: each jumped nimbly across the boundary of their assumed readership. But they did so from different sides of the fence. Carroll’s child’s fantasy, spun during a picnic afternoon on the river, generated an entire academic industry for serious-minded adults; Swift, on the other hand, had ground out a bitter, hard-hitting satire on bad government, intellectual pretension and moral hubris, only to have it co-opted by children in their fascination for little people and giants.

This infantilization of one of the world’s great books is an industry in itself. Looking it up in the British Library catalogue, I counted twenty-two child-friendly editions from the past twenty years alone, most of them encompassing only Lilliput and Brobdingnag. The result is that many people think they know Gulliver’s Travels having read it as children – as I first did – in the Illustrated Classics, a Ladybird Book or some similar ‘retelling’. But charming and stimulating though it may be, this is like meeting an inoffensive, pink-cheeked Dr Jekyll in contradistinction to the dark, snarling Mr Hyde of Swift’s imagination. Dr Johnson started a hare running when he called Gulliver’s Travels ‘a book written in open defiance of truth and regularity’. The novel, and in particular its main character, has often subsequently been criticized for lacking consistency. The quibble plays into Swift’s hands, however, since an important part of his point is that honesty and reliability of character are rarely seen either in human nature or in human experience, and there is no reason why Gulliver himself should be an exception to the rule. George Orwell in his own spark-ling essay on Gulliver remarks that ‘in his shrewder moments, Gulliver is Swift’. For me, it is not just in his shrewder moments: I am sure that the protagonist and all four of his travels were spun directly and even painfully out of Swift’s own guts. He would have hated to see his masterpiece reduced to a trite children’s fable, with all its hero’s dilemmas resolved into simple moral lessons. The authentic text is no simpler than he was himself – and the Dean of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral was a very complicated person indeed. Outwardly, and among friends, he was scintillating company, but rather oftener he cut a distinctly isolated figure. At times, aware of his own great intellectual and literary gifts, the people around him seemed like Lilliputian pygmies, unable to understand him; at others, dealing with the powers that be, he experienced the world as more of a Brobdingnag in which he was the belittled one – an Irishman among the English, a poor man among the rich, a servant among masters. Again, when he met the projectors and intellectuals of his time he found their claims particularly ludicrous, but he would also fulminate against the whole of humanity. We may trumpet our nobility, reason and altruism, he thought, but we behave like ‘the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth’. The sense of superiority, of being belittled, of absurdity, of misanthropy: if these were all aspects of Swift’s personality, they are also the leitmotifs, in correct sequence, of Gulliver’s predicament in the four sections of the Travels. Swift, then, was using the changing fortunes of Gulliver to look critically, in some way, at himself and his own inconsistencies. But more importantly from a literary point of view the book ranges beyond the self, and sees the same flip-flopping perversities along every line of sight. Swift shoots ferociously at these targets, which range from the conduct of marriage to statecraft, and international relations, with much in between. It is remarkable how these sallies have kept their power to mock, shock or disconcert. Political differences that turn on which end of the egg should be opened at breakfast; a tightrope dance performed to gain government preferment; the scrutiny of a person’s excrement to reveal their secrets; the manipulation of words, for example from private letters, to trap conspirators (‘in which we seem to be positively in the middle of Russian purges’, as Orwell points out). In each case Swift’s quicksilver inventiveness has a powerful feel for both particular injustice and universal insanity. Excessive self-interest drives most of the abuses that Swift notes along the way, but sometimes a capricious reversal takes its place. A small, almost throwaway instance of this occurs during Gulliver’s third journey, to the flying island of Laputa, which zooms around above its impoverished earth-bound empire of Lagado, defeating rebellions by descending and literally crushing them (the relationship between England and Ireland is not far from Swift’s thoughts here). The Laputan ruling class enjoys immeasurable wealth, power and pleasure, so how can one account for the behaviour of the Prime Minister’s wife? Gulliver relates that she

went down to Lagado on the Pretense of health . . . And was found in an obscure Eating House all in Rags, having pawned her Clothes to maintain an old deformed Footman, who beat her every Day, and in whose company she was taken much against her Will. And although her Husband received her with all possible Kindness, and without the least Reproach, she soon after contrived to steal down again with all her Jewels to the same Gallant and hath not been heard of since.

It could be an anecdote heard in the pub, or a news item from the Daily Mail. It is also in Book 3 that Gulliver encounters the Struldbruggs, results of some rare mutation that means they will never die. Happy Struldbruggs! thinks Gulliver, expecting them to have used the time at their disposal to become infinitely wise and supremely cultivated. In fact they are ‘not only Opinionated, Peevish, Covetous, Morose, Vain, Talkative, but uncapable of Friendship, and dead to all natural Affection . . . Envy and impotent Desires are their prevailing Passions . . . The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to Dotage and entirely lose their Understandings.’ A visit to one of today’s homes for the senile and demented would offer merely a hint of this vision of horror. Yet out of the four parts of the book the last, the ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’, is the most challenging and uncomfortable. The island on which Gulliver now arrives – Swift is inventive in finding new ways of marooning his hero – is ruled by a race of stringently rational horses. Consistently honourable, and lacking either guile or malice, they have no word in their language for a lie, and see no reason ever to tell one. All this delights and amazes Gulliver, the representative of Europe’s Age of Reason. He is accordingly horrified when the horses class him as one of the filthy uncivilized humans – the Yahoos ‒ with whom they share their territory. Swift has been accused of allowing his misanthropy to run away with him in his characterization of the Yahoos, but it is crucial to see that the satire of Book 4 is double-edged. The Yahoos are certainly smelly, cruel, capricious, mendacious and treacherous, but the reader’s disgust for them is counterbalanced by a realization of what Houyhnhnmism actually means. Yes, it is a brave new world, a theoretical paradise of goodness and rationality; but in practice it is antiseptic, joyless and loveless, and no one in their right mind would ever want to live there. When Gulliver returns at last to England, he is very much not in his right mind himself. He is in fact what we would now see as a full-blown victim of Stockholm Syndrome. Quite unable to shed the revulsion against Yahoos that had been indoctrinated in him by the Houyhnhnms, he finds the company of his ‘Yahoo’ wife, children and neighbours unbearable. He therefore spends his time in the stable conversing with the ‘two young Stone-horses’ – stallions – that he has bought especially for the purpose. The only human being he can bear anywhere near him is the groom, ‘for I feel my Spirits revived by the Smell he contracts in the Stable’. Another satirist might have crafted an ending, as Orwell did for Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the hero, his resistance broken, settles down into lobotomized acceptance. Or he might have shown him overcoming the dark irrationality of his nature, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. But the ending Swift gives us lacks any kind of finality, providing instead a glum, lonely and ultimately pathetic absurdity, with which Swift’s fellow Protestant Irishman Samuel Beckett might have been quite pleased. The absurdity of Gulliver’s insane devotion to reason is self-evident, while the pathos lies in his wish to escape from the moral prison into which Houyhnhnmn brainwashing has locked him. ‘I am not’, he says, ‘altogether out of Hopes in some time to suffer a Neighbour Yahoo in my Company without the Apprehensions I am yet under of his Teeth or his Claws.’ As the book ends, this wish is a long way from being fulfilled.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 50 © Robin Blake 2016


About the contributor

Robin Blake is now writing the fifth of his historical mystery novels set in 1740s Preston. In this story his hero, the bookish coroner Titus Cragg, is reading Gulliver’s Travels.

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