Swift’s most ambitious, most accessible, and most enduring literary work – Gulliver’s Travels – first appeared on October 28, 1726, just over a month before his fifty-ninth birthday. Its actual title was Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, and it appeared anonymously, or rather pseudonymously, as by “Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships.” Swift had gone to elaborate lengths to disguise his authorship and create a sense of mystery about the book’s origins,1 but “Gulliver” quickly became the talk of the town and Swift’s authorship soon was an open secret. The first printing sold out in a matter of days, and within five weeks two more printings were issued. We do not know the size of the print runs, but it is a safe guess that more than 20,000 copies of Gulliver’s Travels were circulating among London’s half-million people by the end of December – almost seven times the number of copies of The Spectator that Addison claimed would reach 60,000 readers – and the book’s fame spread quickly throughout both England and Ireland.2
Swift was already famous, of course – for both literary and political reasons – but Gulliver’s Travels extended that fame considerably, and readers spent hours puzzling out references, allusions, and possible coded meanings in the text.3 Swift and his friends amused themselves in their letters by imagining readers coming to terms with the book’s slippery relationship of fact to fiction; Swift himself, for example, pretended that readers got out maps to try to trace Gulliver’s voyages; he claimed that an “Irish bishop” believed that the “Book was full of improbable lies, and for his part, he hardly believed a word of it” (C III: 189). And his friend John Gay suggested that Swift return to London (he had gone to Dublin immediately after arranging surreptitiously for the publication) so that trendy readers could explain contemporary political meanings to him. Gulliver’s Travels quickly became a conversation piece, and soon it was a classic, rivaling Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe as the best-selling text written in English for almost three centuries.
But from the beginning, Gulliver’s Travels did have detractors, mostly on political grounds, for Swift’s views stirred powerful reactions, resentments, and suspicions. Literary doubts surfaced early as well. Even Swift’s best friends confessed to reservations about parts of Book III4 (Book III has also fared less well with modern critics), and there have always been complaints about both the simplistic metaphorics of Books I and II and (contrariwise) the asymmetries of Books III and IV. Too, religious, philosophical, and moral objections arose early and often: charges of misanthropy and misogyny have repeatedly swirled around the text, especially calling into dispute the definitions of humanity in Book IV and Gulliver’s revulsion with (and ultimate retreat from) family and human society more generally. Even Pope, although more gently than most contemporaries, pointedly teased Swift in a poetic complaint lodged in the name of Gulliver’s neglected wife, Mary:
Welcome, thrice welcome to thy native Place!What, touch me not? what, shun a Wife’s Embrace?Have I for this thy tedious Absence born,And wak’d and wish’d whole Nights for thy Return?In five long years I took no second Spouse;What Redriff Wife so long hath kept her Vows?Your Eyes, your Nose, Inconstancy betray;Your Nose you stop, your Eyes you turn away.. . .My Bed, (the Scene of all our former Joys,Witness two lovely Girls, two lovely Boys)Alone I press; in Dreams I call my Dear,I stretch my Hand, no Gulliver is there!I wake, I rise, and shiv’ring with the Frost,Search all the House; my Gulliver is lost!Forth in the Street I rush with frantic Cries:The Windows open; all the Neighbours rise:Where sleeps my Gulliver? O tell me where?The Neighbours answer, With the Sorrel Mare.5
This substantial and incisive poem (110 lines long) is usually thought a mere bauble, but it represents serious literary, philosophical, and psychological criticism and stands as a summary of some of the most thoughtful and lingering objections to Swift’s outlook.
Most famously, perhaps, Samuel Johnson openly disparaged the creative imagination behind Gulliver’s Travels: “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.”6 Voltaire, too, was unimpressed: “Nothing unnatural may please long,” he wrote in a 1727 letter.7 Some later famous commentators also went against the popular grain. Macaulay thought that Swift had “a heart burning with hatred against the whole human race, a mind richly stored with images from the dunghill and the lazar house,” and Thackeray charged that Swift “enters the nursery with the tread and gaiety of an ogre . . . as for the moral, I think it horrible, shameful, unmanly, blasphemous.” He reserved his strongest venom for Book IV, which he described as “gibbering shrieks and gnashing imprecations against mankind – tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.”8
The extraordinary popularity, then, from the beginning existed within a context of lively controversy and disagreement, and, ever since, a series of issues – literary, political, philosophical, social, and moral – have generated continuous debate. Gulliver’s Travels has been read many different ways – in support of, and against, a host of ideologies and opinions on such issues as human nature, the ethics of social practices, scientific method, and the process of reading itself. Its critical heritage illustrates nearly every direction in criticism and critical theory over the past three centuries, and here we can only sample the rich, contested interpretative directions. My first aim is to situate Gulliver’s Travels in its cultural, intellectual, and literary moment, and then I will discuss briefly issues of genre, rhetoric, authority and perspective, structure, and philosophical assumptions, before turning at the end to Swift’s gloomy, frustrated, and dark final years.
The 1726 appearance of Gulliver’s Travels inaugurated an unprecedented thirty-month burst of important London print activity in which literary issues and political ones were almost impossible to separate. These were the golden days for the “Augustan” writers Swift associated with; besides Swift, both Pope and Gay produced their single most powerful and ambitious achievement – The Dunciad and The Beggar’s Opera – in this glittering literary moment, and London writers of the late 1720s arguably assembled the most reaching, most cogent, and most articulate cultural critique ever articulated. But the accomplishment was not without personal, cultural, and even literary cost.9
The public prominence of literature in debates about cultural values and social direction – fed by the powerful coffee-house and periodicals phenomena and the more general rise of urban and cosmopolitan consciousness and conversation – had been escalating for more than two decades. In one sense, this perceived importance of literature in everyday public life was a triumph for the republic of letters, for important new works were virtually guaranteed public attention and prominence in conversation. But in another sense – perhaps the more important one, practically speaking – it was a cultural disaster with long-term literary fallout: nearly any published text of any significance was immediately identified with some party or ideology and quickly both praised and denounced for whatever its loyalties and implications were perceived to be. Veiled hints and secret meanings were everywhere suspected, and just about any major publication was followed by a parody, a “key” (connecting and coding the text to current public, usually political events), an “answer” (which in turn often spurred a “rejoinder,” which might lead to a long chain of interactive pamphlets), or some other parodic, inverting, explanatory, or argumentative response. Among writers, both individually and in groups, there was virtual war, and among rivals much personal unpleasantness. The now much-discussed development of a “public sphere,”10 however admirable its long-term consequences, was thus achieved at the expense of often ugly public debate and through downright personal nastiness in the political and writing communities, and public attacks on individuals – usually in print but sometimes in violent and debasing physical confrontation as well – were often conducted with little dignity or personal respect.11
To the modern reader, the fact that public figures (such as the first minister, Sir Robert Walpole, or even the king and queen) were treated roughly in the press is not very surprising, but the deep embroilment of men (and a few women) of letters is. Politics is, by definition, oppositional, and the give-and-take of everyday politics in the early years of what was becoming a deeply imbedded party system made for rugged and repeated struggles for power, or even survival. Power, then as now, meant influence, prestige, and often wealth. Loss of place could easily mean ostracism, legal prosecution, or even banishment – as it did in the 1710s and early 1720s for several members or close friends of the Swift–Pope group. What is distinctive, however, about the early eighteenth century in England is the way the leading writers became caught up in – and sucked into the center of – the public fray. Just about every major literary figure of the first third of the century – Swift, Pope, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Delariviere Manley, Sir Richard Steele, John Dennis, Eliza Haywood, Colley Cibber, and Henry Fielding – and a host of lesser lights became deeply enough involved (or implicated) politically that simply to name them called up strong positions and associations in the public mind. No matter how they struggled to free themselves of party taint, writers found that their values and opinions (or presumed values and opinions) preceded them.
One reason was that literature then was so aggressively devoted to present events and issues. Despite traditional labels for the literary period that associate its values mainly with the past (“neoclassical period,” “Augustan age”) and despite constant attempts by the writers themselves to evoke honored moments in the classical or Christian past, the texts regularly and aggressively addressed themselves to present events, ideas, and crises of some public kind. The writers saw themselves as performing a crucial cultural, social, and political role. By interpreting current events in some coherent way (often with direct comparison to past values and patterns), they could influence the now enlarged reading public significantly, according to their own individual (or group) lights. Their loyalties might be to party, class, religion, gender, or a host of other identity groups, but whatever their convictions and prejudices, each saw him- or herself as helping to define a new national tradition of identity, ideas, values, and literature. And beyond the large, popular audience that nearly everyone sought (although some pretended to address only the elite, the powerful, the educated, and the informed), writers felt themselves to be near the actual seats of power and personally influential with policy-makers and trendsetters. Most of the writers I have mentioned (and many others) were on personal terms with major figures in government, leading members of the aristocracy, and even members of the royal family, and (although they often complained that their societal role was diminished from that of writers past) they regarded themselves not only as arbiters of taste and morals, but as cultural and political watchdogs and as philosophical and political guides. And so they found themselves increasingly embroiled in quarrels both mighty and petty – and increasingly tarred by the brushes of opponents who (however inaccurate or inept they might be) often succeeded in their broad strokes that grouped people, events, and ideas into very simplistic categories and divided the world neatly into the sheep and the goats, the chosen and the rejected, the readable and the unread: good and evil.
By 1726 the vehemence and cruelty of public rhetoric had reached brutal proportions, and although just about every writer of note claimed to rise above politics and petty personal quarrels (and some actually tried), the truth is that no one, no matter how high-minded, could long remain aloof from what was genuinely a battle for cultural respect, supremacy, and survival. One indicator of how widespread and vicious the battles became was the colorful array of nicknames, caricatures, and slanderous anecdotes that individual writers attracted. Pope, for example, repeatedly drew enemy fire directed more at his person and personality than his poetry; he was regularly described as a devil, monster, or animal of some kind – a toad, a serpent, a wasp, and especially an ape – and he was standardly referred to in pamphlet prose as “A. P-E.” Such “code” was ostensibly an abbreviation of his name but pointedly a reference to his gnarled body (he had been a hunchback since his teenage years when tuberculosis of the spine permanently disfigured him) and to the way he was bestially represented in pictorial caricatures. Swift was treated similarly: one published response to Gulliver’s Travels offered this biographical “account” of its author:
[T]he first Instance he gave of his Genius and Spirit, was sh–g in his School-Master’s Slippers . . . [H]e proceeded to other Exploits; stole the Neighbours Hens; poison’d their House-Dogs, and was at last whipp’d, and turn’d out of School, for pinning the Cook-Maid’s Petticoats about her Ears, as she lay sleeping by the Kitchen-Fire . . . [He] grew intolerably insolent and vain on account of his Writings; insomuch that he turned light-headed, and in his mad Fits, abused Every Body that came in his Way, sometimes spit, and sometimes piss’d in their Faces, and kick’d all the Dogs that he met.12
Such battles of “wit” continued to deteriorate through the 1720s, and if Gulliver’s Travels itself is relatively free of pointed references to literary – political feuds and public representations of them, its appearance had the effect of letting loose the fury and venom that turned the late 1720s into the most explosive and most vicious period of literary vilification in modern history, though it was also one of the most concentrated periods of literary brilliance.
Only a few scattered parts of Gulliver’s Travels need to be glossed directly in the light of the literary quarrels of the time. The most significant passages, perhaps, are the prefatory “Letter from . . . Gulliver to . . . Cousin Sympson” – with its disclaimers (and anxieties) about the impotence of satiric art,13 and the pointed account in Book IV of the lack of a textual, written tradition among the Houyhynhnms.14 But the whole thrust of Gulliver’s Travels (and its direct relationship to other writings of the time, a topic to which I turn next) needs to be seen in terms of the established literary – political contexts of suspicion and attack and the calculated decision of the Pope–Swift group to launch a major counter-offensive, thus escalating the gratuitous personal attacks on them as individuals and a group into a full-scale culture war with personalities cum politics as the central thrust. If Swift’s basic literary program as engaged in Gulliver’s Travels means to “vex” the world where it then stood, an important aspect of his challenge involves the way that readers presume to know the political underpinnings of texts, and the process of reading that Gulliver’s Travels proposes (and perhaps dictates) involves negotiating the assumptions of his time in a direct and demanding way. Whether the textual details allegorize history or only allude more generally to contemporary cultural practice, every reader of the late 1720s would inevitably have been drawn into a swirl of political interpretation and debate. Even later readers who are thoroughly disengaged from those issues often wonder about possible local and historical referents and look for resonant applications. Who is Flimnap, we wonder, and what cultural models lie behind Laputa? The central issues have worn well historically and still seem to have considerable relevance, but they also seem very particular to Europe in 1726.
Gulliver’s Travels is a very bookish book, highly self-conscious of its relationship to other texts both new and old. Its contemporary readers would have recognized more fully than we do its dependence on classical and Christian myth and tradition, its invocation of conventions characteristic of contemporary genres and modes, its spare (but distinctive) references to individual texts and authors, and also its several more sweeping allusions.15 Beyond its important but somewhat reluctant place in contemporary debate about the place of writing in English culture, the relationship of Gulliver’s Travels to other books can be usefully approached in at least two other ways: (1) generically, as a kind of demonstration of what can be done with varieties of contemporary writing which provide signposts and expectations for readers familiar with their habits; and (2) as echoes of specific contemporary authors and books. The fabric of literary reference and allusion implicitly recommends a “comparative” reading strategy, so that reading the book responsively with other texts is an active, work-intensive process for a reader who has to remain alert to rapidly changing textual signals. In the opening pages of the book, Swift invites us to think both generically and allusively and sometimes to mix the two procedures creatively for ourselves.
The title page places the text firmly in the wake of more than a century of popular travel writings. Here is a promise of knowledge of “Remote Nations” and a recital of the author’s informational authority: Gulliver the author has been both a ship’s surgeon and a captain of ships, and here is his reliable eyewitness account. Swift’s text, of course, provides anything but factual geographical and anthropological data in the usual sense, and the cartographical claims are ludicrous. If readers were for an instant taken in by the claims of authenticity, neither the maps nor Gulliver’s detailed “facts” remain useful to anyone for long. Quite beyond setting up its own plot or fable (which it does at the same time), the highly circumstantial narrative has the effect of raising questions about the authority of the genre – as well it might, since a high percentage of the books of exploration and discovery were written in London by authors who had never left home and whose facts were often wildly inaccurate.16 Readerly curiosity about faraway places and exotic people had been building for more than a century: travel books, unreliable as they often were, addressed an important cultural hunger, implicitly challenging English notions of normativity and offering a glittering array of possibilities about otherness in all its forms. Swift’s formal choice to cast his satire as a travel book had a lot to do with the popularity of travel and adventure narratives – and with the difficulty of discriminating factual narratives from their fictional counterparts – but travel is not just a convenience. Travel – movement through space in a way that involves accumulation of facts towards a coherent narrative about place, culture, and humanity – recapitulates a mode of education characteristic of Swift’s time and replicates the rhetorical and epistemological mode of many characteristic contemporary genres, including conduct books, autobiographies, memoirs, and novels.
What travel and travel writing stands for is a particular kind of intellectual curiosity. Having spent most of his life in a land whose people, customs, and thinking habits were foreign to him, Swift was himself fascinated by cultural difference and became something of a student of it. But he knew that curiosity’s satisfaction involved more than lists of flora and fauna and a description of local manners, habits, and rites. Some famous travel writers he invokes directly – the famous voyager William Dampier, for example, whom he refers to as “Cousin Dampier” – and he adopts the extreme detail and circumstantiality of the form, in one case (Book II, chapter 1) copying virtually word for word a jargon-laden passage from Samuel Sturmy’s Mariner’s Magazine:
Finding it was like to overblow, we took in our Sprit-sail, and stood by to hand the Fore-sail; but making foul Weather, we looked the Guns were all fast, and handed the Missen. The Ship lay very broad off, so we thought it better spooning before the Sea, than trying or hulling. We reeft the Foresail and set him, we hawled aft the Fore-sheet.
(PW I: 84)
Such burlesque plagiarism continues for nearly a page, and every Book contains, suggestively, maritime or anthropological details just as space-wasting and irrelevant, long after readers have given up any hope of gathering factual information. Swift does not say that all travel books are lies and cheats, but his book illustrates, by absurd parody, how it is done. And in the process of destroying authoritative confidence in the mode of presentation he both undermines belief in that mode’s assumptions and creates (almost in spite of himself) a persuasive, comparative account of what characterizes the cultural life of Gulliver’s (and Swift’s – and the reader’s) homeland. Travel turns out, in this fictional inversion, not to produce knowledge of alterity but of home. Imagining foreignness returns one to native, English issues and ultimately to the self.
Sometimes Gulliver’s Travels is infuriating in its insistence on detail, especially when Gulliver is between countries and the circumstances of his movement are not very interesting in themselves. Once we know that the voyage framework is just a convenience rather than a geographical guide – and once we no longer care about Gulliver’s authenticity and veracity – why does each succeeding voyage go through the same motions and keep reminding us of the travel genre framework? One reason, I think, is that each voyage needs to stand by itself for individual or successive readings. We can, as readers have often done, refuse the book-dictated order and read each voyage as an independent text, and the repeated frames not only permit but almost encourage us to do so, providing a “sufficient” relationship between readers and text in every individual voyage or book.17 Another reason is that the repetition of structure drums home the fact that the voyages do not involve learning or improvement or progress in the teleological way implied by travel narratives and the travel motif itself. Gulliver does not learn from his previous mistakes, or indeed from anything he experiences. Only at the end of Book IV (and then disastrously) does he try to take any lessons home. Otherwise, the voyages just accumulate, without adding up. Even Gulliver’s in-book observers do not learn; Gulliver’s record at sea is not exactly inspiring for its evidence of either navigational or leadership skills, but by the beginning of Book IV he has risen despite his seafaring failures from surgeon to captain. Earlier, at the beginning of Book III, he had been unaccountably recruited by a captain who was evidently even less observant than Gulliver himself: William Robinson offers twice “the usual Pay,” and “having experienced my Knowledge in Sea-Affairs” offers to “enter into any Engagement to follow my Advice” (PW I: 153). The human refusal or inability to learn anything from past experience is a central issue for Swift, and the repetition of frame narratives (with all their details about ships and directions and how many children he produced on his latest visit home) are an important device in driving home the point.
There are also good reasons, though somewhat contrary ones, for thinking about Gulliver’s Travels in relation to the novel18 and perhaps especially to one book that took the market by storm at about the time Swift began working on what in his letters he called “my Travels.” That book is The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York. Mariner, by Daniel Defoe. Swift found Defoe unspeakable in many religious and political and perhaps artistic ways: even though he for some years worked alongside him in the Harley administration, he once referred to him as “the Fellow that was pilloryed, I have forgot his Name” (PW II: 113). The introductory paragraphs of Gulliver’s Travels seem almost a parody of (or answer to) Defoe and his hero Crusoe.19 Whether or not Swift had Defoe (and Crusoe) consciously in mind when he constructed Gulliver’s background, character, and career – and there is persuasive textual evidence that he did20 – much of what Swift does generically amounts to a revisionary corrective to the developing novelistic mode that was then beginning to codify modern urban patterns of subjectivity and quotidian particularity. Quite a few features of Gulliver’s Travels, including the conception of Gulliver himself as a narrator (see below, p. 226), make emphatic anti-novelistic statements, usually via parody: the episodic structure and lack of narrative development, the gross exaggeration of subjectivity and character inconsistency, the excessive recounting of irrelevant “realistic” details (including Gulliver’s obsessive retailing of maritime locations and business arrangements and his insistence on telling us about his various bodily evacuations), the sour and bathetic ending in which Gulliver, unlike the buoyant Crusoe, finds it impossible to rejoin humanity after his alienating experiences abroad. I am on record as believing that Defoe’s narrative is a brilliant, original, and satisfying early example of the novel form, but it does depend on a series of artistic and philosophical assumptions – about subjectivity and human nature, for example – that Swift (and the whole Augustan circle) found laughable, repugnant, and even dangerous.21
Swift undercuts novelistic practices and assumptions repeatedly and systematically, but nowhere so fully as in the outcome of Book IV when Gulliver comes home to his family and his stable. Here the disillusioned hero resembles some of the real-life prototypes of Robinson Crusoe (Alexander Selkirk, for instance) more than Defoe’s adaptable Crusoe, who after twenty-eight years of isolation – most of it without speech or human companionship – readjusts quickly and easily to human society. Selkirk, on the other hand, who had spent only four years on a similar solitary island, never did return to ordinary life, spending (according to contemporary accounts) his final years gloomily in solitude in Scotland, some said in a cave. Swift clearly thinks that the pretended ordinariness and “realism” in the new novelistic narratives is not merely a misleading literary convention but a life ruse as well. His engagement with genre is not merely a convenience but a searching critique of contemporary books and habits that represents an extension of the Augustan critique of publishing and reading practices more generally.
So what kind of book, then, is Gulliver’s Travels itself? Its broad invocation of many traditional or contemporary kinds and modes (philosophical voyages, utopias, memoirs, and autobiographies, for example, in addition to travel books and novels) – and its occasional imitative and comparative uses of them for purposes of its own clarification – implies that it is many things at once. This multiplicity seems appropriate to its satiric aims, for satire is more of a literary mode than a kind or genre in itself, and often it finds its form by invading and inhabiting one or more existing genres and thus making encroachment, infiltration, possession, and subversion its central way of life. The very promiscuity of the text’s allegiances suggests its complex, protean nature and makes it not so surprising that readers have turned to it for so many different uses, and critics for so many kinds of argument.
Lemuel Gulliver’s exact role in the Travels is not easy to describe. On the one hand he is everything – participant, observer, narrator, commentator, at once hero and interpreter – and without him the book does not exist. We as readers know nothing that does not come filtered through him; his eyes and voice are all we have. Yet he is a pathetic thing, not nearly the keen observer and judicious analyst he believes himself to be, and he has trouble keeping his opinions consistent and his facts straight. Proud of his navigational skills, he never gets to where he wants to go and always ends up lost, shipwrecked, captured, or deluded. Arrogant about his knowledge of languages and his rhetorical abilities, he does not fathom what “Laputa” means (in Spanish, “the whore”) and makes up instead an absurd etymology. And he loses almost every debate in every place he visits. Boastful about his judgment and ability to make careful distinctions, he cannot tell a Houyhnhnm from an ordinary horse, abroad or at home. He is very much an enigma if we try to take him seriously as a person – even a fictional person – for he does not operate in a lifelike, “realistic,” or probable way. It is not just that he is mercurial, contradictory, and inconsistent, but that he seems to function in different ways at different moments in the book. Trying to sort out what ontological state Gulliver occupies – and exactly how he functions in the book to clarify things he himself is not clear about – is central to coming to terms with Swift’s satire. “Unreliable” is a good word to describe the kind of narrator Gulliver is – for his naive gullibility along with his blustering self-confidence make us leery of his reportage from the first – but it is not an adequate word. Lots of narrators in fiction are limited, biased, or confused, but in the kinds of representational narratives that comprise most modern reading, narrators usually have a certain human credibility and are at least consistently inconsistent. Gulliver, on the other hand, is all over the place – sometimes a trustworthy reporter and commentator, sometimes a sophisticated ironist, sometimes an innocent or a fool or just a stick figure.
How we respond to the role of Lemuel Gulliver as narrative voice pretty well determines – even more than in most narratives – how we read the text. Gulliver is not a character, or even a narrator, in the usual sense – certainly not in the way a character operates in a typical novel. He does not grow, develop, change, or “learn” from his experiences (except for his at-home response to his last voyage), and he displays no consistency of attitude or, despite his protests, integrity of character. He is pretty much whatever Swift wants or needs him to be at any given point in the narration; he is more of a rhetorical figure than a human one. Sometimes he says sensible things and operates more or less as a spokesman for Swift, but often he is obtuse, misleading, or just wrong. Sometimes he vociferously defends empire and chauvinistic ideas about his native land; sometimes he is ashamed of home habits and sees virtue only in otherness of some kind. He is, in Swift’s own terms, a “personation” (PW I: 3) – someone who can put on different acts and faces at various moments when a particular stance or effect is needed – but he does not himself add up to anything coherent, cogent, or plausible. He is given a family background and a series of characteristics as if he were a representational or realistic character, but once he is set in motion he operates in a completely different mode, seemingly a denizen of a textual world that makes up its own laws as it goes.
Nearly all readers from the beginning experience Gulliver as unreliable and, if usually comic, almost always infuriating, whether he is pompously interpreting the obvious, totally missing the point of an experience, or staunchly defending English stereotypical positions that we (to our embarrassment) may discover that we too hold. He is the kind of gull who can only exist as an extreme stereotype, and that is why he can move blithely through such a variety of places, and customs, and experiences without having anything permanently rub off on him. But the fact that, in Book IV, he finally does respond to something and modify his behavior – that is, become a fictional character whose responses seem humanly representational (even if extreme and bizarre) – means that we have to confront his early role or roles more fully in order to comprehend the nature of his narration and his contribution to the satire.
Much of the undercutting of Gulliver is subtle, almost buried in a text that seems to be striving to do something else than keep track of its facts. Gulliver’s early account of himself when he comes ashore in Lilliput suggests how he – and the narrative – are going to work. Early in Book Xi, for example, he offers a bizarre account of his passage to shore (after a shipwreck) carrying virtually a shipload of goods on his person. Here is what Gulliver – presumably desperate against overpowering seas – lugs with him as he struggles against the waves: a large sword, a set of pistols, a snuffbox, a diary, a comb, a razor, a set of eating utensils, a watch, a handkerchief, a pouch of gunpowder and another of bullets, silver and copper money and several pieces of gold, a pair of spectacles, a pocket perspective, a full set of clothes including a hat, and “several other little Conveniences” (PW I: 37). These items become, one by one, useful to the narrative as Gulliver tries to account for European customs and history, and it is easy to ignore their presence (as Gulliver apparently does) when he first strives for the gently sloped and finely nuanced shores of Lilliput (which he also notices only dimly). But once the items are enumerated, the picture of Gulliver that emerges is ludicrous.22 Does he not know that – hat, sword, pistols, and all – his excess baggage impedes his progress and threatens his survival? Is the narrative inconsistent, are facts being forgotten, or is the narrative out of his control? Gulliver the traveler and Gulliver the narrator are not one here, and we either have to conclude that Swift is forgetful or that the absent-minded and absurd Gulliver is a function of Swift’s calculated art.
The point is repeated time and time again. When, for example, later in Lilliput, he is accused of having an inappropriate relationship with Flimnap’s wife, Gulliver offers a deadpan defense with a mixture of obtuseness, arrogance, and absurdity, as if the charge that he – 1,728 times as large – could have a sexual relationship with a Lilliputian woman was plausible. Swift milks Gulliver’s lengthy defense for all it is worth here, playing naiveté against sexual braggadocio. Implicitly Gulliver once more celebrates his sexual gigantism (as he had done earlier, in Book XI, chapter three when he had assumed the spread-legs posture of a Colossus and reported the “Laughter and Admiration” of the uplooking soldiers who marched under his torn breeches [PW I: 42]), but Swift also has him underscore his popularity with all the ladies:
I am here obliged to vindicate the Reputation of an excellent Lady, who was an Innocent Sufferer on my Account. The Treasurer took a Fancy to be jealous of his Wife, from the Malice of some evil Tongues, who informed him that her Grace had taken a violent Affection for my Person; and the Court-Scandal ran for some Time that she once came privately to my Lodging. This I solemnly swear to be a most infamous Falshood, without any Grounds, farther than that her Grace was pleased to treat me with all innocent Marks of Freedom and Friendship. I own she came often to my House, but always publickly, nor ever without three more in the Coach, who were usually her Sister, and young Daughter, and some particular Acquaintance; but this was common to many other Ladies of the Court . . . And I have often had four Coaches and Horses at once on my Table full of Company, while I sat in my Chair leaning my Face towards them; and when I was engaged with one Sett, the Coachmen would gently drive the others round my Table. I have passed many an Afternoon very agreeably in these Conversations . . . I should not have dwelt so long upon this Particular, if it had not been a Point wherein the Reputation of a great Lady is so nearly concerned; to say nothing of my own; although I had the Honour to be a Nardac, which the Treasurer himself is not; for all the World knows he is only a Clumglum, a Title inferior by one Degree.
(PW I: 65–66)
There is so much twisting and turning and intertwining of satirical objects here that a reader hardly knows where to begin in sorting out the effects; here is satire on (among other things) Gulliver’s own pretensions and pride, on male fantasy and credulity more generally, on female lechery that exceeds the physics of the possible, on political and marital intrigue, on the trivial bases of human ceremony and custom, and on the pettiness of ambition, jealousy, envy, lust, and pride. One of the most appealing things about Gulliver is that we can repeatedly feel superior to him even as we too are allowed fantasies of size, recognition, relationship, and control.
It is not hard to “get” the central issues of perspective in Books I and II, as the reputation of the book as a children’s classic readily suggests. Gulliver’s experience of himself relative to others is almost exactly inverted in these books, and a major effect of reading them – especially in the order in which Swift arranges them – involves the radical shift in perspective that they embody. Children (and most adults reading Gulliver’s Travels for the first time) seem almost instinctively to understand what it is like to be larger than life and to have the feeling that huge possibilities of power and effectiveness are open for them. Perhaps the desire suddenly to dwarf everyone else – and all human limitations and predicaments – is a common human tendency. Certainly the naval heroics of Gulliver in saving his host nation (and his wondrous Herculean feats in building things and in transforming national space, not to mention in consuming and defecating) resonated for Swift’s contemporaries. They would readily have recognized the little allegory involving the incessant wars with France and persistent references to common cultural, religious, and social practices. Here is a calculation (on several different levels at once) to elevate physical exploit to the highest imaginable level; no wonder children, longing to be bigger, love it, along with adults conditioned to confront every day their humiliating limitations. And then, in Book II, the abrupt reversal undoes the reader as well as Gulliver, so that our humiliating smallness seems smaller still. His (and our) experiences in Books I and II are almost perfect mirror images of one another, and there is a sense in which Dr. Johnson’s famous remark about big and little people is almost adequate to describe how perception works in Books I and II.
Science was hardly an idol for Swift (as the several satirized nations in Book III quickly show); he knew very little about scientific procedure and even less about theory, and his yearning for clear authority (combined with his persistent distrust of human knowledge and judgment) meant that he had little respect for intellectual ambition. Even more strongly, he distrusted the hubristic desire to understand the physical nature of a universe in both its small details and its huge cosmic dimensions (which he interpreted in orthodox Christian terms as a legacy of the Fall, caused by intellectual overreaching). And he did not believe in the doctrine of progress that underlay such organizations as the Royal Society and scientific exploration more generally. But he was aware of modern scientific developments (and researched some details for Book III carefully), and he was not above using the findings as well as the manners and habits of contemporary science when they were of use to him – as they were in the issue of proportion and perspective. The microscopic and telescopic views (based on the recent invention, development, and increasingly common use of those instruments) provided Swift with extremes of seeing and being seen, virtually all of his conceptual frame for the first two books. It was a device especially useful for elevating the observer and observed into satiric prominence, for it gave the narrative point-of-view device a built-in sense of justified – because constantly used – exaggeration.
Seeing and perceiving are crucial issues throughout Gulliver’s Travels, especially when sight and insight fail its hero-reporter, the safety of whose eyes and spectacles obsess him wherever he goes.23 Because he has at his disposal both long and short views, Swift can readily offer a “perspective” on the magnitude of England’s national ambitions and international relations as well as the gross physical details calculated to disgust us out of lust and the satisfaction of human desire more generally. Here deformity, defecation, and sexuality become repugnant reminders of our absurd and grimly limited physical selves, and (whatever they tell us about Swift’s psychological fears, prejudices, and personal hang-ups) the exaggerated physical features of the narrative’s human population ground our tendencies to elevate our belief in ourselves as above it all.24 Exaggeration is the coin of satire, of course, but the physical (and especially scatological) heightening Swift adored was especially effective as olfactory suggestion in a time when travelers toward London consistently reported that they could smell it before they could see it – not because of the industrialization which historically lay just ahead but because of the primitive plumbing and open sewers that could only inadequately serve the physical needs of the teeming city.
The order of the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag is crucial. Because we experience the proportions of things through Gulliver, we can in the beginning imagine ourselves very large and grand in our relation to common places and things (not to mention other people), and, when the proportions are reversed, the shock of our smallness, ineptitude, and helplessness is all the greater, just like Gulliver’s. Swift tells us that the Lilliputians are one-twelfth as tall as humans and otherwise proportionate, which means that (because we are three-dimensional) ordinary humans are 1,728 times as large – and which means that Gulliver’s adjustment (and ours) from Book XI to Book II involves a proportional reduction factor of 152,064. And so it is with our powers – and thus the effect on our accustomed pride. There are many thematic concerns in the book, but one of the most insistent involves human pride,25 and the size metaphor (and all it represents) makes the point powerfully. When, for example, Gulliver in a giddy mood in Brobdingnag decides he has to leap over a pile of cow dung to prove his physical prowess, his falling short demonstrates his limits rather dramatically and humbles his pride filthily. Such reminders follow easily from the aggrandizement and then diminution of Gulliver’s status in his world, and the order of things in the world (as Swift asks us to see it) is rhetorically produced by the order of Gulliver’s visits to little and then big societies. The humiliation of pride (both Gulliver’s and ours) goes hand in hand with the dashing of our hopes for heroism, greatness, and grandeur. Lands that seem at first wildly foreign in their smallness if not their pettiness – and then just as alien in their magnitude and sometime magnanimity – rhetorically reduce our inflated sense of ourselves in a spectacular way. The shape of Books I and II is both rhetorically effective for Swift’s purposes and aesthetically satisfying in its strategies of parallelism, symmetry, mirroring, and reflection.
The shape of the rest of Gulliver’s Travels is more problematic, and critical tradition has never entirely come to terms with the formal issues the text raises, perhaps because traditional aesthetic theory has been uncomfortable with variant principles in the same work. The second half of the book clearly works very differently from the first half. Nothing like simple inversion or an easy contrast of perceptions holds Books III and IV together, and in fact the movement from I and II to III and IV is neither logical nor symmetrical: Gulliver simply continues to go to new places, and the kinds of places he goes to vary considerably in their analogous relation to any known lands and cultures: we are no longer dependent on the single differentiation of size. There is a powerful internal coherence in Book IV – with its sharp contrast between Houyhynhnms and Yahoos and its careful revision of originary myths and the sorting processes of history – and as an individual voyage it seems almost complete in itself, more like a modern novel (even if controlled by allegory), for here Gulliver (like a novelistic character) takes away a lesson (however misunderstood or misapplied) and tries to live it out once he returns home. But Book IV does not parallel or match up with Book III in any direct or obvious way, and Book III itself is primarily additive, with visits to many kinds of lands (including, in fact, one actual land, Japan) all crammed into a single continuous narrative.
What Swift’s formal plan (if any) may have been we do not know: he said very little, beyond reporting his desire to “vex” the world, about his intentions in Gulliver’s Travels (C III: 102). And we know little about the composition process itself, for in his letters as they have come down to us he mentions his work on the book only occasionally and sparingly. It does seem probable that Swift wrote Book III last, and its episodic structure – with new cultures, visits, and people simply accumulating one after another – seems almost to suggest that Swift was dropping all his fugitive targets and leftovers into the text at that point, without much thought for form or aesthetics or even for the rhetorical and psychological effects that seemed to govern the Travels in its first half. But Gulliver’s Travels obviously “works” for most readers; the history of satisfaction and popularity is an impressive one, and if we are not too rigid and doctrinaire about a single “governing” plan – or insistent on some single standard of form – it is possible to construct a plausible account of how it works within Swift’s intention to challenge and unnerve us. For it is precisely in giving us a firm sense of direction and shape, and then startling us with different directions and probabilities, that the book proceeds from beginning to end – first giving us one principle of relationship (diminution) in Book XI, then reversing it (magnification) in Book II, then wildly shifting principles one after another in Book III (where the particular grotesqueries involve mental as well as physical distortions), then returning to a single distinction which embodies an otherness that replicates shape distinctions back home but here transforms them into mental (and perhaps spiritual) ones. It is the book’s final aesthetic irony that Gulliver here comes to believe in the last distinction as the only true one and – believing in its stability – tries to take it home and literalize it as a governing principle.26 The ultimate vexation of our sense of our expectation and discovery – and I think of Swift’s sense of balance – comes in Book IV, chapter 11 when our hero, now at home in his stable, finds it impossible to reestablish communion with his family:
During the first Year I could not endure my Wife or Children in my Presence, the very Smell of them was intolerable; much less could I suffer them to eat in the same Room. To this Hour they dare not presume to touch my Bread, or drink out of the same Cup.
(PW I: 289–90)
Many readers, most extensively Howard Erskine-Hill in his fine analysis of the subject, have noted how little direct theology and religion there is in Gulliver’s Travels,27 but for a moment the Anglican priest does here triumph in the text as Gulliver is held to a standard of human communion he does not comprehend. Gulliver does not know the humanity he is missing, but the allusion, expectation, and pacing of the text allows readers one final time to read the body of the narrator better than he himself can.
The critical history of Gulliver’s Travels is fraught with battles of interpretation over many other issues that I have mentioned only briefly or not touched on at all. Central to most of them – including the most pressing issues at the moment, issues of gender on the one hand and of nationalism, empire, and colonialism on the other – is the pervasive and enduring question of Swift’s attitude toward human nature and human perfectability. At one time, for almost an entire academic generation, debate about this issue focused intensely on the viability of the Houyhnhnms as a human ideal and on Gulliver’s reverence for them. Do we as readers admire the Houyhnhnms, find them funny or disgusting, or regard them as some kind of inhuman, and humanly unattainable, ideal? That debate now seems rather dated (as do all critical and theoretical disagreements sooner or later), and it is now chiefly interesting for its various special pleadings and selective readings of portions of the text, but once it threatened to divide the whole of scholarly interpretation about eighteenth-century literature and intellectual history. Was Swift – and perhaps the eighteenth century more generally – utopian in desires, or pragmatic, suspicious, and dystopian about ideals beyond human reach? The debate developed its own specialist vocabulary – the “hard” school read the Houyhynhmns as human paradigms and the “soft” interpreters saw them as false ideals28 – and interpreters were seldom allowed compromise or deviation from the established party lines. The energy of the debate has considerably subsided, and historical reinterpretation of the eighteenth century more generally has made it easier to “place” Swift more subtly and accurately within complex intellectual currents of his time. But the “modeling” issue is still a crucial one for this text as it is for the procedures of satire more generally. Does satire always have to incorporate some viable ideal, as earlier, twentieth-century formalists insisted, or can it accomplish its purposes by a succession of graded distortions and possibilities?29
And so it goes. Or rather went. In post-World War II debate, utopian issues and questions of perfectability were crucial issues, and frets about scatology and satiric decorum and outreach were frequent. Every age, in rethinking old books, takes its own most pressing concerns to their interpretation. Today, the most vigorous debates involve gender (see especially Ruth Salvaggio and Felicity Nussbaum), nationalism (Carole Fabricant and Howard Weinbrot), imperialism (Laura Brown), and (once again) politics more generally.30 It is one kind of tribute to Swift that he continues to vex us philosophically and ideologically now in quite a different world, and it is another to notice how his clear style and tough prose continue to please and perplex our sense of art.
Like Swift, Gulliver was not a young man when he embarked on his “Travels.” By conservative calculation from the early years chronicled in the opening paragraphs, he is at least thirty-nine when he embarks on his voyage to Lilliput, and so – after a lifetime of experience and many years at sea – he is nearly Swift’s age when he takes to reflecting, reminiscing, pronouncing, reforming, and writing his memoirs. Swift has a great deal of fun with Gulliver’s experience and maturity – his half-learned truths and pretensions to wisdom – and it would be pointless to make much of the precise biographical parallels between the author and his narrator: Gulliver is like a parody of Swift, or an emblem of late middle age going wrong, much as Defoe’s life and writings were for Swift a grotesque version of his own career and values (Defoe too had produced his epic narrative voyage at almost exactly the same age).31 But Swift was highly cognizant of his age and frailty, anxious in his fears about mental (as well as physical) deterioration when he abandoned the orphanlike manuscript of Travels to booksellers and printers in 1726. Three years earlier – citing the ancients for authority – he had speculated, perhaps facetiously, that mental powers deteriorated at a certain age, and that writers produced no major work beyond that point. The age he chose as pivotal was forty-nine, and although Swift when he finished Gulliver was nearly a decade older – and plainly not yet diminished – he was highly conscious of the miseries of physical and mental loss.
The painfully long story of the Struldbruggs in Book III, chapter 10 – they seem to be the only reason for a sojourn in Luggnugg – poignantly suggests Swift’s fear of old age and the dire outcomes of physical and mental decay. Into this account Swift piles virtually every mortal anxiety except the fear of mortality itself; rather than being freed of mortal limits when death is no threat, the Struldbruggs continue haunted (and devastated) by the ravages of time. Their memory disappears (they remember only the events and responses of their youth), and they combine nostalgia with rigidity and intolerance. Gulliver, as usual, tries to admire and defend them but ultimately has to admit “the dreadful Prospect of never dying” and summarizes them devastatingly: they are “opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative . . . uncapable of Friendship, and dead to all natural Affection . . . Envy and impotent Desires, are their prevailing Passions” (PW I: 212). These feelings were hardly abstract to Swift at this point in his life, and he details the implications ruthlessly. His fears would prove all too realistic and personal.
Swift lived almost twenty years after fathering Gulliver – and he produced several other significant writings, most notably A Modest Proposal (at age sixty-two), Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (a “prophecy” written fourteen years before the actual event), the lively Directions to Servants and Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, and quite a few of his best poems, most notably many of the “lady” poems (including “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” and “Cassinus and Peter”) that once contributed to his misogynous reputation but that now have become crucial to his rehabilitation among feminist critics because of their shrewd analysis of what social custom and traditional gender roles do to women’s identity and self-conception. The poems written by Swift in his early sixties are especially worth reading to see the older Swift, more angry than bemused, contemplating absurdities legislated by habitual English and European practice. For all of his authoritarian habits and traditional prejudices, the older, more reflective Swift found much of human absurdity to be more dependent on custom, habit, and construction than on human nature per se. His human definition of rationale capax and its consequences (meaning that human beings are capable of reason rather than reasonable creatures) suggested that postlapsarian history was largely a record of failure, a matter of custom rejecting and dragging down divine plan.
Even though Swift had begun worrying about the decay of his imaginative powers much earlier, the evidence of A Modest Proposal suggests that Swift was still at the top of his form, both intellectually and rhetorically, into his early sixties. There the force of his irony is at its most powerful – issues of Ireland always seemed to focus or even heighten his considerable linguistic and imaginative skills – and the poems written at about the same time show him near the peak of his stylistic and tonal control. His irony and comic sense are clearly undiminished in the Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift where he imagines the responses of his contemporaries, including his best friends, to his own death:
Poor Pope will grieve a month; and GayA week, and Arbuthnot a day.(Poems 491)
There are moments of nostalgia and stifled ambition in the poem, but hardly a hint of self-pity or even sadness about the world’s failures. The high spirits that allowed Swift’s imagination to soar at the very thought of human frailties and stupidities is very much on display throughout the poem.
But as the 1720s dwindled into the 1730s – and with the thirty-month Augustan moment of 1726–29 having ended with the thud of Colley Cibber’s new appointment to the laureateship – the celebratory consciousness that the Pope–Swift circle developed to combat their depression waned notably. Here was a new era that Swift – unlike his friend Pope who characteristically continued to turn his bitter fruit into a commercial palliative – would never be comfortable in. His health was deteriorating and his creative, intellectual, and mnemonic powers beginning to slip, or at least wobble. The Ménière’s Syndrome which had begun to affect his balance (and which produced a disconcerting hum in his ears that became virtually constant) began to take larger tolls, and Swift’s later life was one of increasing discomfort, discontent, disillusion, and (ultimately) madness or something close to it. If he never became Gulliver, naysaying inappropriately in his isolation, he did become a sad old man, increasingly friendless and alone in a land that was always alien to him, even though the land of his birth. The winter years confirmed and extended Swift’s characteristic crustiness, eccentricity, crotchetiness, and pessimism, and gradually he slipped more and more into solitude and emotional isolation. He could hear and understand less and less, and the voices of those he communed with must have more and more become, in his ears, the kind of blunted bestial sounds that only distantly reminded him of rational discourse and sustaining friendships. By 1738 his correspondence with Pope ceased, and by 1740 his memory was gone. The later Dublin years – while perhaps sustained somewhat by his clerical duties and the rage he continued to feel for Ireland’s plight – deteriorated into increasing vertigo, anger, acrimony, frustration, dementia, and (ultimately) textual silence. He had, in a manner of speaking, become the old Lemuel Gulliver after all.
Swift’s powerful textual accomplishments, impressive as they still are after three centuries, never quite obscured for him the pain and disappointments of mortality and an emotional consciousness that, whatever male and female friendships it enjoyed, never realized the hungry desire for community, belonging, satisfaction, and love. His love affair with print – whose vulgar manifestations he hated with all his being – long kept him sane but ultimately failed him too. It was only, perhaps, his human affection for Ireland (a failed land with human problems that could not be wished, reasoned, or negotiated away), his passion for justice and truth (and especially the refusals of self-delusion), and his love of the wonders and betrayals of language that kept him sane as long as it did. Besides his own writings, the most telling memorials of him are the words of Pope when he dedicated The Dunciad to him, and the Latin inscription (which he wrote for himself) on his tomb at St. Patrick’s elucidating his love of liberty and savage indignation (saeva indignatio) with the world. In Yeats’ memorable translation,
SWIFT has sailed into his rest;Savage indignation thereCannot lacerate his breast.Imitate him if you dare,World-besotted traveller; heServed human liberty.32
1. Swift’s negotiation with the bookseller Benjamin Motte was a cloak-and-dagger affair, conducted under the name of a fictional cousin of the fictional Gulliver, and when the published book appeared – with the type set by four different printers so as to meet Swift’s demands of speedy publication – Swift complained loudly about printing errors and editorial modification. It is hard to know where jesting leaves off here and anxiety begins; Swift may genuinely have feared prosecution or retribution for his contemporary satiric jabs, or he may have believed that the bookseller failed him out of his own fears of legal prosecution or physical harm, but Swift can hardly have imagined that his authorship would remain unknown indefinitely (and likely would have been disappointed had it been so). Swift actually arranged to have the manuscript dropped off in Motte’s garden under cover of night, and quite possibly Motte had no idea.
2. Gulliver’s Travels did not, of course, circulate as easily among readers as did The Spectator, which consisted of a single broadsheet easily passed from hand to hand in company. But volumes circulated much more readily and informally in those years of high-priced books, few libraries, and common lending and sharing practices among readers.
3. Alexander Pope himself had published A Key to the Lock shortly after The Rape of the Lock in order to preempt a “decoding” by others, and scores of such “keys” to eighteenth-century works were published.
4. For other contemporary criticisms, see C: III: 189.
5. The Poems Of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. 486–87.
6. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, revised L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), vol. II, p. 319.
7. From a March 1727 letter, in English, to Thierot. See Letter 34, Correspondance de Voltaire, ed. Lucien Foulet (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1913), p. 90.
8. Macaulay, as cited in Michael Foote’s introduction to Gulliver’s Travels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 12–13; W. M. Thackeray, English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1853), p. 40.
9. The reception of Gulliver’s Travels – a combination of exhilarating celebrity and rancorous puzzlement about hermeneutic and cultural issues – in many ways stands for the Augustan moment of both triumph and frustration. The most important and most lasting work of each member of the Pope–Swift “Augustan” group was published in the two and a half year period between late 1726 and 1729; John Gay’s sensationally successful play, The Beggar’s Opera was produced in 1728, and Pope’s Dunciad was published in 1728, with the Variorum to follow in 1729; the four volumes of Pope–Swift Miscellanies also reprinted, starting in 1727, much of the earlier work the group wished to be remembered for, including John Arbuthnot’s History of John Bull. Shortly thereafter Henry Fielding’s theatrical career began with early Augustan-like plays such as The Tragedy of Tragedies. The run of so many similar artistic triumphs in so short a space of time was perhaps unprecedented in literary history.
10. On this, see especially Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
11. John Dryden, an older contemporary of Swift and poet laureate in the late seventeenth century, was at the height of his writing career actually beaten up in an alley, presumably by political enemies. For Pope’s fanciful account of a wished-for attack on a piratical publisher, see A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge By Poison On the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll (1716). Pope’s enemies repeatedly fantasized attacks on his deformed and vulnerable body.
12. Jonathan Smedley, Gulliveriana (London, for J. Roberts, 1728), pp. 4–8.
13. The letter was not in the first edition; it was apparently written about the time it claims to have been, in 1727, and first appeared in the 1735 edition which most modern editions use as copy text. An exception is Albert Rivero’s new Norton Critical edition (New York and London: Norton, 2001) which boldly returns to the first edition.
14. See Terry Castle, “Why the Houyhynhynms Don’t Write: Swift, Satire, and the Fear of the Text,” Essays in Literature 7 (1980), 31–44, reprinted in Christopher Fox’s edition of Gulliver’s Travels (Boston and New York, Bedford; London, Macmillan, 1995), pp. 379–95.
15. See the chapter on title pages in Janine Barchas’ Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chapter 3.
16. Percy G. Adams, Travellers and Travel Liars: 1660–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962).
17. There are of course major structural and aesthetic losses in such procedure, a matter I take up later (p. 229).
18. What I am here calling “the novel” is a distinctive (and then quite innovative) kind of prose fiction – featuring a concern with subjectivity and the consciousness of ordinary people, ordinary language, and everyday contemporary events – that emerged in Europe at various points in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that began to dominate the popular market in England in the early eighteenth century, shortly before Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels; it then governed taste in continental Europe for the next two centuries. Sometimes the term “novel” is used more broadly (and I think confusingly) to describe all prose fiction dating back to the Greeks (or perhaps the mind of God) and even to include longer narratives in verse. But whatever we label this new, popular kind of new subject-centered narrative, it included a number of formal features – the exploration of individual consciousness, for example, usually through a first-person, more-or-less autobiographical narrator – that were extremely repugnant to Swift. Accounts differentiating Gulliver’s Travels from the novelistic tradition are legion; see, for example, my “Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel,” in Frederik N. Smith (ed.) The Genres of Gulliver’s Travels (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 56–74.
19. Swift criticism traditionally has been reluctant to pursue the parallels seriously. Nigel Dennis, for example in Jonathan Swift: A Short Character (New York: Macmillan, and London: Collier-Macmillan, 1964) offers a wonderful detailed account of textual parallels and philosophical differences but thinks it unwarranted to think of Gulliver as a deliberate response to Defoe (pp. 123–33). More recent criticism has, usually implicitly but sometimes directly, assumed a more conscious rebuttal.
20. It is quite possible that the verbal pun on Master Bates – withheld three times in the first three paragraphs and then finally sprung – is a jab at Defoe and a reference to contemporary jokes about Defoe’s refusal to raise the issue of sexuality during Robinson Crusoe’s solitary twenty-eight-year exile on a desert island. See especially the textual analysis of Christopher Fox, “The Myth of Narcissus in Swift’s Travels,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 20 (1986–87), 17–33. It may be, too, that Gulliver’s compulsive descriptions of his excremental habits owe something to Crusoe’s total omission of such issues in his otherwise insistently circumstantial account (although, of course, Swift elsewhere needed no prompt to dwell on similar details). It is also possible to think of Gulliver’s final refusal of human company as a similar objection to Robinson Crusoe’s happy ending – with no “realistic” indication that all those years of non-human association might take a non-reversible psychological toll.
21. See J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966) and, more generally, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1990).
22. The primary butt of the joke here may again be Defoe and the “circumstantial realism” of Robinson Crusoe. Charles Gildon had made elaborate fun of Defoe’s sea knowledge in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Daniel Defoe, Hosier (London, 1719), noting that when Crusoe stuffs his seaman’s pockets with biscuits during his rescue of cargo from a shipwreck, Defoe seems not to know that seamen’s britches have no pockets. The London Journal in 1724 reiterates the joke as a common topic of London conversation. See my “Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel,” pp. 67–68.
23. See Pat Rogers, “Gulliver’s Glasses,” in Clive T. Probyn (ed.) The Art of Jonathan Swift (London: Vision Press, 1978), pp. 179–88.
24. Norman O. Brown’s powerful essay, “The Excremental Vision,” (reprinted in Ernest Lee Tuveson [ed.], Swift: A Collection of Critical Essays [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964], pp. 31–54), offers a famous corrective to the rather speculative psychoanalytic tradition of mid-century.
25. Samuel Holt Monk, “The Pride of Lemuel Gulliver,” reprinted in Robert A. Greenberg and William B. Piper (eds.) The Writings of Jonathan Swift (New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 631–47; originally published in Sewanee Review in 1955.
26. Swift is especially fond of literalizing metaphors and turning them into narrative events; he has, for example, courtiers walk tightropes, dance before the king, etc.; he has Gulliver urinate on the royal palace and land in excrement when he tries too ambitious a leap; and the government of Laputa oppresses its subjects by hovering over them or physically crushing their rebellion. The stable society at the end of Gulliver seems to me to have a similar status.
27. See Howard Erskine-Hill, Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially pp. 19–21.
28. For a good example of the “hard” school, see Edward W. Rosenheim, Jr., Swift and the Satirist’s Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963; for the “soft,” see Monk, “The Pride of Lemuel Gulliver” (note 24 above). C. J. Rawson, Gulliver and the Gentle Reader (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 1–32, offers an especially sensible account of the issues.
29. On the basis of this formal assumption, see Alvin Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965). For a different sense of satire’s norms, see Robert C. Elliot, The Power of Satire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), and Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994).
30. See for example Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Ruth Salvaggio, Enlightened Absence: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; 2nd rev. edn. Notre Dame, IN and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993).
31. The date of Defoe’s birth is unknown, but if he was born in 1660 (as most scholarship now assumes) he was fifty-nine when Robinson Crusoe came into the world. It too is a late-in-life, retrospective narrative or memoir (that is, Crusoe supposedly writes it after he returns to England in old age). In sending Gulliver on several futile voyages Swift may be glancing at Defoe’s insistence on providing Farther Adventures.
32. See “Swift’s Epitaph” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 277. The original Latin epitaph can be found in Denis Johnston’s In Search of Swift (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis and Company, 1959), opposite p. 188.