Perspective in Gulliver\'s Travels PDF

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‘Nothing is more common, than to have two Men tell the same Story quite differing one from another, yet both of them Eye-witnesses to the fact related.’ (DANIEL DEFOE) How do two or more works from this period negotiate differences of perspective?

Defoe’s statement is particularly interesting with regards to ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ as it is not always so much the differing perspectives of “men” – as we know them, at least, - that Swif explores, but those of the Lilliputians, the Brobdingnagians, Laputans and Houyhnhmns. However, it is not just the different physical perspectives that Swif explores – (for example, the Brobdingnagians, being much larger than humans, seeing everything on a smaller scale) – but also differences in opinion. These differences range from views on ways to deal with the problems in Ireland – which Swif explores in his essays ‘A Modest Proposal’ and ‘An Answer to The Craftsman’ – to views on modern science and the work of the Royal Society, as is explored in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. The way Swif negotiates these differing perspectives is invariably through satire; by subtly mocking perspectives that Swif disagrees with, he manages ofentimes to reconcile the reader to his own perspective. Indeed, Swif’s satire is so acute that the reader may ofen fail to see that they ever agreed with the opposing perspective in the first place – as Swif himself points out in the preface to ‘The Battle of the Books’: “Satyr is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for the kind reception it meets in the world and that so very few are offended with it.” In examining differences in perspective, one obvious facet to discuss in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is the difference in physical perspective between Gulliver and the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians. This difference serves to have comedic effect, while also giving interesting social commentary. One of the earliest places the reader sees this is in Lilliput, when the Lilliputians are examining Gulliver’s objects . Even with Gulliver’s explanations, these everyday objects become unrecognisable to the reader when looked at from a different perspective; his watch, for example, becomes “a globe, half silver, and half of some transparent metal”. Particularly humorous is the Lilliputians misunderstanding of the watch as “the God that [Gulliver] worships” as he “seldom did anything without consulting it” – a mistake one cannot, perhaps, blame them for making. In introducing the Brobdingnagians, Swif creates the opposite effect; both Gulliver and the human race suddenly appear much smaller, and so do the issues concerning them, as Gulliver explains his conversation with the King: Afer I had been a little too copious in talking of my own beloved Country […] that he could not forbear taking me up in his right hand, and stroaking me gently with the other afer an hearty fit of laughing, asked me whether I were a Whig or a Tory. From a broader perspective, in looking at ‘the bigger picture’, the issues facing Gulliver and his country seem – at least to the Brobdingnagian King – to verge on the ridiculous. Further, his “stroaking” Gulliver “gently” suggests that the King looks at him as a sort of endearing pet, rather than a being of equal intellect and understanding. But if Gulliver is defensive of the human race in Book II, the ultimate irony for the reader is that by Book IV he fails to recognise that the Yahoos have any likeness to man, and further, as Lawlor puts it, “the tour

de force that Swif contrives is that Gulliver is drawn to love the Houyhnhmn race”. Thus Gulliver, who previously defended and pined for his own race, turns against them when meeting the Houyhnhmns and condemns “that animal called man”. But though he loves the Houyhnhmns, Gulliver cannot stay with them, for he realises that he is differentiated from the “wild Yahoo” by having “some rudiments of reason […] added to the natural pravity of those animals”, and, significantly, that this is what makes him more dangerous. It is in this that the reader cannot help but to see themselves, and feel somewhat as Gulliver does when: I happened to behold the reflection of my own form in a lake or fountain, I turned away my face in horror and detestation of myself, and could better endure the sight of a common Yahoo than of my own person. Though Gulliver still differentiates himself from the Yahoos, it becomes obvious that he believes that all humans – (except himself) -, or all Yahoos, are exactly the same. As we see when he is reunited with his family: My wife and family received me with great surprise and joy […] but I must freely confess, the sight of them filled me only with Hatred, Disgust and Contempt; and the more, by reflecting on the near alliance I had to them […] and when I began to consider, that by copulating with one of the Yahoo species, I had become a parent of more; it struck me with the utmost Shame, Confusion and Horror. As soon as I entered the House, my wife took me in her Arms, and kissed me, at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell a swoon for almost an hour. This mental absolutism highlights Gulliver’s failure to see, firstly, that he is a Yahoo himself and secondly, that not all people are the same. His wife treats him with kindness and love, and yet he still views her as the Houyhnhmns view the Yahoos. Throughout the novel, there are those who treat Gulliver kindly, and who differentiate themselves to others in their race; Glumdalclitch, the Sorrel Nag and, most significantly, Don Pedro, who shows the reason and kindness that the human race is able to hold. The final irony, then, is Gulliver’s complete failure to learn the lessons available from his travels, and serves as a warning against the reader making the same mistake.

In his preface to ‘Tale of Tub’, Swif explicates his views on satire: I have observed some satirists that use the public much at the rate that pedants do a naughty boy, ready horsed for discipline: first, expostulate the case, then plead the necessity of the rod from great provocations, and conclude every period with a lash. Now, if I know anything of mankind, these gentlemen might very well spare their reproof and correction: for there is not, through all nature, another so callous and insensible a member of the world’s posteriors, whether you apply it to a toe or birch. Like many satirists, he must navigate these differences of perspective by using the main speaker of his work, Gulliver himself, as his vehicle of satire. However, in order for this to land with any impact, Swif realises that Gulliver must not chastise the audience, but rather to appear to them as a friend. Gulliver functions to break down the defensive reaction of the reader through winning their respect with his ardour and objectivity; as Lawlor asserts, “Swif’s intention to deepen the character of his principle figure [is] an integral part of his

main design.” Swif creates this trust in a number of ways. Though many have called Gulliver an ‘everyman’ (Ewald, 1954), on the contrary we see that he is an individual of significance and specific skill. The objects he has when he arrives in Lilliput, his skills of inventing in Brobdingnag, his language – (“[Hopewell is in] the latitude of 46 N and of longitude 183”) – all point towards Gulliver being a professional seaman, serving to impress the reader. His views on tyranny, too – in declining to “be an instrument of bringing a free and brave people into slavery” – create an image of a principled man, especially to the modern reader, and may remind readers of Swif’s ideals, or at least those of his peers, Oxford and Bollingbroke, who opposed the Whig demand for the subjugation of France in the War of the Spanish Succession (Fabricant, 1982). Yet Gulliver is not Swif, and though he seems at times to voice or represent Swif’s moral attitude, at others he shows definite limitations in his ethical views. He later offers the secret of gunpowder to the King of Brobdingnag so that he can destroy cities, and is surprised when the King declines in horror, confused as to why a “nice unnecessary scruple” should keep him from being “absolute master of the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of his people.” Even his love for travel and the sea becomes an object of mild satire, as Gulliver laments how he is “condemned by nature and fortune to an active and restless life”. Gulliver also becomes something of an unreliable narrator; he ofen lies to others around him, and admits this. For example, he hides his third pocket from the Lilliputians for which he thinks himself not “bound in honour” to reveal; he pretends to be more ill than he is in Brobdingnag to escape; and when the King asks him, he eludes many embarrassing questions about human nature and gives “to every point a more favourable turn by many degrees than the strictness of truth will allow”. This dubiousness brings into question his truthfulness and his consistency as a narrator. There are also instances of dramatic irony – for example, Gulliver’s misapplication of Latin quotations; in Glubbdubdrib when discussing European nobility he quotes what he, mistakenly, believes to be Polydore Vergil – “Nec vir fortive, nec femina casta”. Thus Swif at first creates a level of trust for Gulliver, but then subtly breaks this down, allowing him to become a more relatable object of satire, in being a figure whose perspectives can be understood, rather than be defensibly disregarded by the reader.

Ewald’s book, The Masks of Jonathan Swift explores what he calls the different “masks” Swif wears to promote satire. In ‘An Answer to the Crafsman’, Swif wears rather a different mask to the one he does in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. Once again, the author of ‘An Answer’ is no uneducated person, but an Englishman living in Ireland with knowledge of the Irish people, as Patey puts it, “the author is made as credible as possible, in order to give the real problems he discusses aching intensity.” However, even his intelligence is satirised, the essay beginning with: I detest reading your papers, because I am not of your principles, and because I cannot endure to be convinced. His blindness becomes increasingly clear throughout – he describes the Irish diet of mixing cattle blood with buttermilk under the assumption that this diet is enjoyable and by choice, and communicates his view that England should dominate Ireland since Henry II conquered “amicably” and “without bloodshed”. As in the case of Gulliver, the feeling of satire and the obvious problems with the author’s perspective hold all the more gravitas because Swif has set him up to the reader as somebody they can trust. In ‘A Modest Proposal’, Swif once again draws the reader onto the side of the author, in a rather more bitter ironical satire on

Ireland. Swif could, it is clear, be straightforward in his active dislike of the views of certain economists, for example: Were you ever out of Ireland? Or were you ever in it till of late? You may probably have a good employment, and are saving all you can to purchase a good estate in England. But […] it is plain you are either naturally or affectedly ignorant of our present condition. (An Answer to a Paper, called ‘A Memorial of the poor Inhabitants, Tradesmen, and Labourers of the Kingdom of Ireland.’) But Swif takes a different tack in ‘A Modest Proposal’ – similar to the one he has taken with Gulliver and ‘An Answer’ – but this time taken further, and the effect is all the more biting. Again, the reader is lulled into a sense of security at the beginning, when the author states his noble aim to “humbly offer [his ideas] to public consideration”, on an issue which he views “of the highest importance”, though he foresees no objection to his plans. Further, with incredible irony, the author insists that “cruelty […] hath always been with me the strongest objection against any project, however so well intended.” With this in mind, the author’s proposal, when he eventually does set it out, is all the more striking in its satire on political arithmeticians and economists, viewing the Irish people in a way that is reminiscent to the Houyhnhmns view of the Yahoos: A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for Friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth Day, especially in Winter. Though Leavis argues that the intensity of this irony produces no positive result, with any positive ideas appearing only as “a kind of skeletal presence, rigid enough, but without life or body”, it is important that one does, as Fabricant asserts, “acknowledge its inextricably links to what was, for Swif, economic and political reality.” Swif forces the reader to question whether the horrific - albeit satirical ideas – the author sets out are really such a far extension of “those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children”, or whether it is so much more monstrous than “that vast number of poor people, who are aged, diseased, or maimed”, who are “every day dying and rotting”. Either way, the piece is governed by a central metaphor that displays the idea that Ireland’s selfdestructive tendencies are inextricably linked with England’s oppressions, and the response created in the reader is so visceral that it is difficult not to have sympathy for Swif’s point of view.

Another differing perspective Swif explores are his views on science. Though some critics have chosen to see Swif as a Luddite-esque figure (Patey, 1991), opposed to the advancement of science, it is evident in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ that he is not absolutely opposed to science itself. Gulliver’s friend, Dampier, presents his works to the Royal Society, and Gulliver himself presents three Brobdingnagian wasp stings to Gresham College. However, in other places the perspective of the newly founded Royal Society (1660) is clearly satirised in Book III. It is not new knowledge or new science that Swif is against, but speculative knowledge without any practical applications – for example, the famed Royal Society experiment of trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers (Lynall). Again, Gulliver serves as the vehicle through which to satirise these efforts. Apart from registering brief disgust at the man turning excrement into food, Gulliver reacts to most of the Laputans’ work with (perhaps too much) admiration, explaining how “we saw there such new strange and

wonderful things that I am still ravished in admiration every time I think on’t”. The man building a house from the roof down is “most ingenious”, despite the many people living in poverty in Laputa, as Gulliver goes on to explain, and it is here in which the satire lies – in the impracticability of the Laputans’ science and its failure to improve society. A further satire is in Brobdingnag, when “three great scholars” seek to provide some account for Gulliver’s existence. They find he “could not be produced according to the regular laws of Nature”, and afer much debate, conclude he must be: Only Remplum Scalcath, which is interpreted literally to Lusus Naturae, a determination exactly agreeable to the modern philosophy of Europe; whose professors, disdaining the old Evasion of occult causes, whereby the Followers of Aristotle endeavour in vain to disguise their ignorance; have invented this wonderful solution to all difficulties, to the unspeakable advancement of human knowledge. This biting satire aims to show that in the mouths of these great Brobdingnagian scholars, there is no explanation. Though the new Royal Society portrayed themselves as opposed to what Hobbes called “insignificant speech”, Swif saw that, as Patey puts it, the “new scientists… [were] as guilty as the old in using insignificant speech to frame explanations that do not explain”. It is this that Moliere famously parodies in ‘The Imaginary Invalid’: “Why does opium produce sleep? Because of its vis dormitiva (dormitive power).” Swif parodies this non-explanation again in Book III, when Gulliver reports the Laputans’ theories as to why their island cannot rise above four miles: “the magnetick virtue does not extend beyond the distance of four miles, and that the mineral which acts upon the stone […] is not diffused through the whole globe”; “magnetick virtue” being somewhat reminiscent of Moliere’s “dormitive power”. However, the highest satire of the Royal Society is in Swif’s assertion that, in the long run, the findings of their work, however useful, will be meaningless, as the ghosts tell Gulliver in book III: New systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age and even those who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles, would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of Vogue when that was determined. Here, Swif portrays his nihilism with bitter irony, and the reader is drawn into his perspective – especially when comparing the scientific impracticalities of Laputa with the very real problems facing many of their citizens who are described as living in poverty.

In ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, Swif creates a satire which ensures that the reader must inescapably see themselves, while at the same time not feeling reprimanded– as was Swif’s aim. His essays, ‘A Modest Proposal’ and ‘An Answer to The Crafstman’ are more biting, but then, they discuss what was a more serious topic at the time, and one closer to Swif’s own heart (he was born and lived in Ireland). In both, however, he draws the reader in by creating an atmosphere of trust and comradery with the speaker, before taking their ideas further than would be expected, making them all the more shocking. Herein, then, lies the genius of Swif’s satire and his method of reconciling the reader, whatever their original views, to his own perspectives in making the opposite seem so ridiculous that it is difficult to agree with them.

Primary References: Swif, Jonathan, A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland, from Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, 1997 [accessed 9 October 2018] Swif, Jonathan, An Answer to a Paper, Called a Memorial of the Poor Inhabitants, Tradesmen and Labourers of the Kingdom of Ireland. By the Author of The Short View of the State of Ireland. (Gale ECCO, Print Editions, 2010) Swif, Jonathan, ‘An Answer to the Craftsman’, in The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 9, ed. by John Nichols, 1801 Swif, Jonathan, Doreen Roberts, and Dr Keith Carabine, Gulliver’s Travels, Reprint edition (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1992)

Secondary References: Elliott, Robert C., ‘Swif’s Satire: Rules of the Game’, ELH, 41 (1974), 413–28

Erskine-Hill, Howard, Jonathan Swift : Gulliver’s Travels (Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1993) [accessed 9 October 2018] Ewald, William B., The Masks of Jonathan Swift (Basil Blackwell, 1954) Fabricant, Carole, Swift’s Landscape (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) Higgins, Ian, Jonathan Swift (Northcote House, 2004) Higgitt, Rebekah, ‘Gulliver’s Travels in Science and Satire’, The Guardian, 14 March 2013, section Science [accessed 9 October 2018] Lawlor, John, Radical Satire and the Realistic Novel, 1955 Patey, Douglas Lane, ‘Swif’s Satire on “Science” and the Structure of Gulliver’s Travels’, ELH, 58 (1991), 809–39

Supervision notes The rationality of the honymns – no marriage naturalness of death = Gulliver rehects his own kind, and his own humanity. But they are also not human – so Gulliver can never be one of them.

Children pamphlet – there is a metaphorical truth in that the Irish children are being consumed. F.R. Leavis: “Swif’s irony works off a matter of fact tone, telling horrific things” (check quote). - the apparent coolness of his writing is what gives it the most force. In a Modest Proposal, he purports It to be a pamphlet for the betterment of society – this was very common at the time. To the end he continues to purport this; that he is a caring citizen. - Swif never breaks character. NOT nihilism – more Christian pessimism, ...