Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Swift as a Great Satirist of his Time

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift 

Swift occupies a very distinguishing place among his contemporaries for highlighting the pungent and poignant realities of his time which regarded him as a master of corrosive satire. “Gulliver’s Travels” is a hall-mark of his satirical approach which labelled Swift a neurotic and insane in the eyes of many critics after his book was published. No doubt, on apparent level Swift seems to be indigestible but if we go through the book with deep concern and magnifying glasses, we feel bound to assert that Swift is an every inch a moralist despite his morbid attitude towards man and society. He says that the chief end of all his labour is “to vex the world rather than divert it”.

“Gulliver’s Travels´ abound with different modes of satire. As the story progresses from voyage to voyage, the form of satire transits from comic to bitter and finally corrosive which is almost intolerable for man. But every writer is the product of his age and Swift belongs to an age of smugcomplacency. Corruption was rampart and people were seeking pleasure in doing any evil without having any least compunction on their side. Thus Jonathan Swift tears the veil of smug complacency off to expose the realities for which people had blinded themselves. In Gulliver’s travels” from voyage to voyage, there is a satire on politics, human physiognomy, intellect and on moral shortcomings.

Social satire 

In the first voyage to Lilliput, Swift satirizes on politics and political tactics practised in England through the picture of Liliput. Swift mocks the manner in which political offices were awarded by English king in his time. Flimnap, the treasurer, represents Sir Robert Walpole, the prime Minister of England. Dancing on tight ropes symbolizes Walpole’s skill in parliamentary tactics and political intrigues. Reldresal represents Lord Carteret who was ingratiated by Walpole to become Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The ancient temple in which Gulliver was housed might be an oblique reference to Westminister Hall where Charles-I had been condemned to death, Swift mocks at the English king’s conferment of three fine silk threads to his political favourites. Swift is also pithy on his detail of the annoyance of the empress of Lilliput on extinguishing the fire of her palace is a reference to queen Anne’s annoyance with him on writing “A Tale of a Tub” in which Swift had attacked religious abuses but queen misinterpreted the book and got annoyed. Swift’s satire becomes amusing when Gulliver speaks of the conflict that highlights the theological disputes, between the big-Endians and the little-Endians in Lilliput. Thus Swift is ridiculing the conflict between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants. The rift between High Heel and Low Heel highlights the conflict between Whig and Tory ¾ the two political parties in England.

In the second voyage to Brobdingnag, Swift satires on the coarseness and ugliness of the human body. Here Swift looks at mankind with different lenses. The people in Brobdingnag are sixty to eighty feet high. Not only men and women are huge in size but every object of life is of enormous size which gives a sheer contrast image than that of Lilliput. Gulliver here is an object of curiosity due to his micro size. Gulliver gives an account, to the king of Brobdingnag of the life of his own country, the trade, the wars, the conflicts in religion, the rift between the political parties ¾ the king mocks and observes how contemptible is human grandeur which is being mimicked by such diminutive insects as Gulliver. The king remarks that the history of Gulliver country seems to him to be only a series of conspiracies, rebellions, murders revolutions and banishments etc. The king condemns the fatal use of gunpowder and the books written on the act of governing. The king mocks at the human race of which Gulliver is the representative. “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth”. Swift satirizes the ugly sights of human physionomy. There is a man with a huge tumour in his neck; another beggar has wooden legs, each about twenty feet high. But the most hateful sight is that of the lice crawling on their clothes. This description reinforces Swift’s views of the ugliness and foulness of the human body.

In the third voyage to various islands, there is a satire on human intellect, misuse of his sagacity on science. Here though Swifts satire is not very bitter yet it envelopes the follies and absurdities made by man on the name of scientific progress. We are greatly amused by the useless experiments and researches which were going on at the academy of projectors in Lagado. Science seems to be moved topsy-turry when the scientists want to extract sunbeams out of cucumbers, to convert human excretion into its original food, to build houses from the roof to downward the foundation, to obtain silk from cobwebs and to produce books on various subjects by the use of machine without having to exert one’s brain.

“Their hands were inclined either to the right or to the left, one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to Zenith”.

Here Swift mocks at the diverted intellect of scientists, academics, planners and all those who only precede theories and are practically nil. Swift also satirizes historians and literary critics through Gulliver’s interviews with the ghosts of famous dead.

In the Fourth voyage to Houyhnhnms there is a sharp and poignant satire on human moral short comings. This voyage contains the most corrosive and offensive satire on mankind. Here horses are ruling over man. The description of Yahoos (who represent human beings) given to us by Gulliver is pathetic.

“Yet I confess I never saw any sensitive being so detestable on all accounts; and the more I came near them the more hateful they grew.”

By contrast, the Houyhnhnms are noble and benevolent animals who are governed by reason and who lead an ordered life. So it was a lethal attack on the human race to be represented inferior to houyhnhnms mentally and morally. Gulliver tells master houyhnhnm of all the evils and vices that were prevailing in European countries. Gulliver also tells about the numerous deadly weapons and the wars in western countries which were fought sometimes due to the ambitions of kings and sometimes due to corruption of the ministers. Then master houyhnhnms opens the accounts of the habits and ways of life of the Yahoos. He speaks of their gluttony and love for shining stones. Gulliver remarks about the land of Houyhnhnms,

“Here was neither physician to destroy my body, not lawyer to ruin my fortune; no informers to watch my words and actions….. here were no¾¾ backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, housebreakers ¾¾politicians, wits, murderers, robbers…. No cheating shop-keepers or mechanics, no pride, vanity or affection.”

In Houyhnhnms’ life “everything is calculated as Plato’s Utopian land in “The Republican”. That’s why Gulliver’s reaction to Houyhnhnms fills with him so much admiration for them and on the other side he develops so much hatred and disgust for human beings that he does not even wish to return to his country.

Finally we conclude that “Gulliver Travels” is a great piece of art containing social satire in it. Every satirist is at heart a reformist. Swift also wants to reform the society by pinpointing the vices and shortcomings in it. So he has been very successful in accomplishing his self-imposed duty.

Points to Remember:

Gulliver's Travels was 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 original Gulliver's Travels was 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. The Travels that proper Victorians bought for the family library was Bowdler's version, not Swift's. What irony that Bowdler would have laundered the Travels in 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 Travels was 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 of Gulliver's Travels in 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.